Alan Watkins: Mr Brown could hazard a dance-off

Acouple of years ago, I was in the fortunate position of being presented with a journalistic award by Mr John Sergeant. We both managed to get through the brief event without falling over. He was, as it happens, substituting for somebody else.

Mr Sergeant had been a very good political correspondent on television, immortalised by being roughly pushed aside by the combined might of Margaret Thatcher and Sir Bernard Ingham immediately after the Paris summit of 1990, and just before the lady's great fall of that autumn. Subsequently he was in the process of establishing himself as a public figure in what was then a small way of business (in his youth he had been a cabaret performer). The story of Mr Sergeant provides, I am sure, a lesson for all politicians.

It is less certain what that lesson is. Probably it is, as Mr Sergeant himself indicated after surviving the first rounds of the competition in question, that we should not always trust the experts. In the present state of politics, the experts are surely backing Mr Gordon Brown, combined with Mr Alistair Darling.

The judges in the competition have gone off Mr David Cameron, as they have dismissed Mr George Osborne. Indeed, it is a wonder that Mr Osborne is any longer in the competition at all. There have been calls for Mr Kenneth Clarke to get his white tie and tails out of the mothballs and take a turn on the floor himself.

The great difference between Mr Osborne and Mr Clarke is one of likeability – just as it is between Mr Osborne and Mr Sergeant. There is a squirearchical villain's curl to Mr Osborne's lip. The evictions of widows and orphans, he contrives to suggest, are not what they were. Even so, Mr Osborne has done his party some service in the short time he has been near the top. He was at his leader's side through their comparatively brief march through the party's institutions.

The voters would almost certainly prefer to have Mr Clarke back. He would provide a reassuring presence in these troubled times. Mr Brown and even Mr Darling are now thought to comfort the citizens similarly: with what justification, who can say? The voters are certainly less obsessional about Europe than the noisy minority of Tory MPs who made John Major's life such a misery after 1992. My own feeling is that their successors would put up with the return of Mr Clarke because they would have little choice in the matter.

But my guess is that Mr Osborne will be kept where he is. He and Mr Cameron are friends. There might still be trouble in the party if he were moved somewhere else. And Mr Osborne might turn out to be right after all.

A few weeks ago I wrote here that, if Mr Brown saw his chance – it would have to be in the spring or early summer next year – he would have been through the window like a thief in the night. The simile is not, I grant you, specially original, but it is forceful enough. In the period of the financial crisis what has been most surprising is not how much speculation there has been about an early election but how little. There have, I think, been two reasons for this reticence.

One was that, as a former general secretary of the TUC put it in one of those homely phrases favoured in former times, you did not send a lad to do a man's work. Mr Brown,

at the Labour conference, preferred to talk about novices rather than about lads. No matter. The Prime Minister's message was clear enough, such as it was. He has kept hammering away at it like nobody's business and, it must be admitted, to good effect as far as both opposition parties are concerned.

If the country's fragile fortunes are supposed to be in such experienced hands, how can Mr Brown possibly contemplate exchanging them for a less certain grip? That is one argument against an election.

The other reason is that Mr Brown has been there before, something over a year previously. It would be tedious to rehearse the comings and goings in Mr Brown's entourage in the weeks leading up to the election that was never called. It is enough for me to remember that I predicted that he would not call it and also that he would lose it if he did. But the last is a minority view. The upshot was that he had a nasty experience, redeemed finally by the collapse of capitalism and his final emergence to set the world to rights.

Harold Wilson thought he was going to win in 1970. He did not have a snap election exactly. The choice was between the summer and the autumn. He was determined not to go on into 1971 because decimal currency was to be introduced in February of that year. Wilson was sure the change would prove inflationary. Roy Jenkins refused to produce a giveaway Budget (not that Wilson tried to place any great pressure on him). Edward Heath was thought to be a hopeless candidate, but, to most people's surprise, he won.

Heath made a similar mistake in 1974. He lasted for three years, eight months. He went to the country over the miners' strike and asked the electorate: "Who governs Britain?" The voters replied: "Not you, mate." Previously he had announced the three-day week. The great England batsman Denis Compton, by then retired, said: "I'm not working an extra day for anybody."

Even in the last year of James Callaghan's government, he was a dominating figure. Mrs Thatcher had not succeeded in establishing her predominance. Callaghan gave up towards the end in despair but, for most of the preceding period, the political classes had favoured Labour.

The tendency is for experts to favour sitting prime ministers. There were upsets in 1970 and February 1974. There was less of one in 1979, though the experts had preferred Callaghan before 1978. In 1980 or thereabouts, what with the recession, negative equity and the rest of it, political opinion moved to Labour. Neil Kinnock was going to be the next prime minister. It did not happen, whether because of the apparent qualities of Lord Kinnock (as he was to become), or the tax proposals of the then shadow chancellor John Smith.

Today, the experts are behind the Government once more. There is no objectivity in this. The measures which Mr Brown and Mr Darling announced some weeks ago now have produced little observable effect.

The banks have not resumed lending to anything like their previous, pre-crisis extent. And, it may be asked, why on earth should they? It was lending on the previous scale that helped get them into this trouble in the first place. In any case, ministers have been engaged in a largely cosmetic exercise, creating levers that are not attached to anything and engines that are made of balsa wood, cardboard, string, glue and sticking plaster, all painted a steely battleship grey.

If I were Mr Brown (which thank the Lord I'm not, sir) I should be feeling quite pleased with myself. If the polls were to tighten up only slightly, I might even be prepared to take the risk of a spring election.

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