Who will be the next best prime minister we never had? Every generation has at least one: a figure who gathers more admirers the longer they fail to wear the crown. The less popular the actual leader, the more beguiling the idea of the one who might be. “If only we weren’t stuck with Gordon,” echoes the cry in new Labour. Any party bearing the burden of a recession and long incumbency would be ill-loved. No denying it though, Brown invites such passion from the ABG (anyone but Gordon) camp.
An “effing disaster,” as former defence secretary John Hutton daintily put it. Labour’s centre-left has a pantheon of leaders-manqué, from Hugh Gaitskell and Aneurin Bevan onwards. It is often far warmer to them than to those who have held power. Environment secretary Ed Miliband’s emotional commemoration of Tony Crosland last year reminded me how rising Tories tend to venerate ex-leaders, while Labour devotes its worship to those unsullied by top office. So Denis Healey is lauded as the man who could have averted the disaster of 1979, when a vote of no confidence triggered the election that put Margaret Thatcher in No 10—though as a political loner he could never construct a convincing case for his own bid. Pro-Europeans, electoral reformers and SDP veterans still worship at the shrine of Roy Jenkins.
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