Brown Shakes Up Cabinet in Effort to Shore Up Support
The Source: www.nytimes.com - 05/06/2009
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Moving to outflank
Labor party mutineers urging him to resign, Prime Minister Gordon Brown reshuffled his cabinet on Friday to fill vacancies created by defectors and to bind the wavering loyalties of others to his crippled leadership.
Acting with the stealth and speed of a man running out of political options and time, Mr. Brown accelerated the announcement of his new line-up so as to lock in any other cabinet doubters before the full extent of Labor’s crushing defeat in Thursday’s local elections became known.The British leader’s strategy for political survival rested on three crucial cabinet choices. Most importantly, Alan Johnson, the 59-year-old former union leader who is favored by many in Labor to succeed Mr. Brown, was promoted to the top post of home secretary, from his previous post as health minister.Two other cabinet heavyweights whose positions were in doubt were reconfirmed in their jobs, Alistair Darling as chancellor of the exchequer and David Miliband as foreign secretary. Those decisions, like Mr. Johnson’s promotion, appeared for now to have broken the momentum of the cabinet meltdown that threatened to force Mr. Brown out.Other promotions and shifts seemed to be a matter of political housekeeping, and awaited formal confirmation in a late afternoon news conference scheduled by Mr. Brown. The early morning cabinet shake-up was so hurried that details were made known by Mr. Brown’s aides, and confirmed in broadcast interviews by some of those involved, instead of the normal pattern of making the changes known in a formal, written statement.The reshuffle’s urgency was heightened on Thursday night when James Purnell, the 39-year-old work and pensions minister, became the third cabinet minister to resign in 72 hours, after Home Secretary Jacqui Smith and Communities Secretary Hazel Blears. But unlike Ms. Smith and Ms. Blears, both of whom were caught in the parliamentary expenses scandal that has overwhelmed British politics in the past month, Mr. Purnell used his resignation to issue a blunt demand for Mr. Brown to step down.In his resignation letter he demanded that the prime minister quit “to give our party a fighting chance of winning” a general election that must be held before Labor’s five-year parliamentary mandate expires next June.Mr. Purnell’s resignation letter appeared to signal a broader revolt by cabinet members who, like Mr. Purnell, belong to what is known as Labor’s “Blairite” wing. Wedded to the moderate, centrist policies associated with the former prime minister, Tony Blair, the Blairites have bridled under Mr. Brown, who mounted his own party revolt against Mr. Blair in June 2007.But after pondering his options through the night, with lights burning until dawn at 10 Downing Street, Mr. Brown delivered his counterpunch in the form of the accelerated reshuffle. Crucially, he secured the loyalty not only of Mr. Johnson, who had said previously that he would not challenge Mr. Brown, but of Mr. Miliband, 43, a close friend of Mr. Purnell’s.British political commentators had forecast that Mr. Brown would be doomed if he precipitated more resignations. But by limiting the reshuffle, he appeared to have avoided the worst, at least for the moment.Mr. Miliband, approached earlier in the week by Downing Street with the suggestion that he quit the foreign office to make way for Mr. Darling or Mr. Johnson, refused. When Mr. Brown’s aides began touting a Brown ultra-loyalist, the schools and children’s secretary Ed Balls, to take over from Mr. Darling at the treasury, he, too, threatened to resign.As Friday dawned, Mr. Brown was hit with another cabinet resignation, this time by the defense minister, John Hutton. But Mr. Hutton defused the impact of his departure by saying that he had long planned to quit politics and that “it’s absolutely right” that Mr. Brown should have a cabinet of his own choosing to lead Labor into the general election. Mr. Miliband, too, shuttled into line, saying that he was “dismayed” by Mr. Purnell’s resignation and adding, with reference to the demand for Mr. Brown to quit, “I don’t share his judgment.”But whether the prime minister had done more than buy time in the face of the Labor revolt was unsure. An initial test was likely within hours, as Labor absorbed the depth of its rejection in Thursday’s voting for local and county councils across England. Early returns showed the party losing heavily in two areas where Labor had been strong, Bedfordshire and Staffordshire, and trailing badly elsewhere to the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats.Mr. Brown and Labor are all but certain to sustain considerable political damage when the results are in — most of the local returns were expected to be known by Friday night, with the outcome of Thursday’s voting for the European parliament to follow on Sunday. The depth of the wounds, however, may depend on how effective Labor spin doctors prove in presenting the anti-Labor vote as a short-term aberration rather than an indicator of how Labor will do in a general election that must be held within 12 months.Currently, Labor spokesmen are making the argument that as the governing party, Labor is bearing the brunt of the public’s disillusionment with all the major parties as a result of the parliamentary expenses scandal, and that it was Labor’s ill luck that the abuses revealed by the scandal had coincided with Britain’s worst recession in 70 years.Taking their lead from Mr. Brown, the Labor loyalists said most people in the party — and in the country — believed Mr. Brown should carry on as prime minister, concentrating on cleaning up the expense abuses and pulling Britain out of the economic slump. They said the lesson they took from voters during the last month’s campaigning was that people did not want the distraction of a change at 10 Downing Street, much less the early general election opposition parties have demanded.But opposition leaders dismissed this as further evidence that Mr. Brown, desperate to hang onto a job that he has held for barely two years, cared less for his party and the country than for his own position. William Hague, the Conservative party’s frontbench spokesman on foreign affairs, said that what people saw was “a government consumed by its own internal divisions,” when what the country needed was a confident, united cabinet capable of tackling the economic crisis. Mr. Brown, he said, “doesn’t have the courage or the honor to call an election”, or to quit
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