A Tale of Two Resignations
A Tale of Two Resignations
Paul Thompson: A Tale of Two Resignations
Last week when Andy Coulson, David Cameron?s Director of Communications, resigned, there were suspicions that the timing echoed a famous rationale from New Labour??a good day to bury bad news.? Not only was it the day when Tony Blair was back before the Chilcot (Iraq) Inquiry to defend the indefensible, the previous day had seen Labour?s Shadow Chancellor Alan Johnson resign for ?personal reasons.? Politicians often claim that they have resigned in order to spend more time with their families. In this case, it appears that Johnson?s new family includes the policeman detailed to protect him when he was a Minister, now suspended for allegedly having an affair with Johnson?s wife.
The twin resignations fed the news cycle for a few days, but do they matter? Coulson had to resign when the story of illegal phone-tapping under his editorship of the News of the World would not go away. Right-wing commentators have bemoaned the loss of someone who understood what the ordinary buyers of the tabloids thought, unlike the posh boys around Cameron and Clegg. Well, maybe, but if anyone thinks that most voters want what the Coalition has been doing (with Coulson?s enthusiastic backing), they would be mistaken. The Coulson connection is about Rupert Murdoch and his desire for political influence in general and ownership of British Sky Broadcasting in particular. The New York Times pretty much nailed this some months ago when observing that ?the Tories also got someone with inside connections to Rupert Murdoch?s influential media empire, whose support the Tories were trying to wrest from Labour.?
Cameron will get a new spin doctor, and Murdoch will carry on trying to get his political and commercial way. The phone-tapping scandal has plenty of mileage in it yet, and any continuing bad odor from goings-on at News International (the UK subsidiary of Murdoch’s News Corporation) will swirl around the Tories too. But it won?t change the political weather.
Johnson?s resignation might. Alan Johnson is a nice man, but he was not good at being Shadow Chancellor. With Johnson unsure of his economic expertise and the right line to take in critiquing the deficit program, the Coalition has been allowed to get away with disseminating a narrative in which Labour gets all the blame for the ?mess we?ve been landed in.? It is a testament to how unpopular the Coalition?s message and measures are that large numbers of voters have rejected them, despite the relative absence of an alternative. Polls indicate that Labour enjoys a 3 to 5 percent lead (in the latest polls, 10 percent) less than twelve months after their drubbing in the general election, and Coalition net approval rating has fallen to a remarkable minus 25 percent during the last few weeks. That trend should now accelerate. Johnson?s replacement, Ed Balls, is a serious economist and seriously scares the opposition (to say nothing of some people in his own party). More importantly, he has a consistent line on the causes and consequences of the economic crisis that puts more emphasis on stimulating growth than drastically cutting the deficit.
Balls will take that approach aggressively to the opposition and to the electorate. It is true that he?ll have to put up with a lot of sniping about ?deficit denial? and his role in the Brown administration, and will need to adjust his line to fit with the other Ed?s slightly more cautious policy of balance between deficit reduction and growth. But there is every sign that he and Labour are capable of deflecting the barbs and moving on. Of course, it hasn?t done any harm that a few days after his appointment, last quarter figures for the British economy showed that the country has crashed back into a 0.5 percent contraction. The Tories blamed the snow, but unemployment and inflation are rising and real wages declining, even before the cuts have really started. The resignations are a reminder that it is often difficult to predict political events a few weeks, let alone months, away. But this is a very favorable conjuncture for the two Eds and Labour to provide a policy narrative that stimulates and underpins both public disenchantment with the Coalition and the emergent anti-cuts campaign, which will climax in a mass union-led demonstration in London on March 26.
