Steve Richards: Labour has become an ungovernable party

The name of Gordon Brown's game is now only survival, argues Steve Richards, and his effective deputy is Peter Mandelson

Labour's crisis deepens. This weekend Gordon Brown presides precariously over a new Cabinet. Its composition and the haste in which the changes were made reflect his newly weakened position. The mood of expedient resolution in No 10 is countered by MPs and senior activists surfacing to call for him to go. For Labour, the local election results were as bleak as predicted. The outcome of the European elections is expected to be bleaker still. No wonder at his press conference yesterday afternoon Brown sought to look ahead.

The immediate past has been a nightmare. James Purnell might not go down in history for killing off a Prime Minister, but he can claim to have made a dramatic impact on a prime ministerial reshuffle. Purnell's departure meant Brown was forced to bring forward the changes and drop his plans to make Ed Balls his Chancellor. As late as Thursday afternoon, Balls was preparing to deal with the firestorm that would have greeted his promotion. By the end of Thursday evening, Brown was too weak to face the firestorm himself.

It could have been worse. In the end, Purnell acted alone. If his friend David Miliband had followed suit Brown would have been finished. Until the early hours of yesterday morning, Brown, Peter Mandelson and Ed Balls were in the so called war room in No 10, the open-plan office at the heart of the Downing Street operation in effect carrying out an emergency reshuffle of the Cabinet. I am told Mandelson, in particular, played a pivotal role, calmly contacting Cabinet ministers, especially those close to Purnell, making sure they were not tempted to jump ship too. In one of the great twists of the New Labour years, Mandelson is effectively the Deputy Prime Minister, the key to Brown's survival and steadying the nerve of Blairites who privately share Purnell's disdain.

In the light of the drama on Thursday night, the reshuffle is neat, but fragile. Several of those on the Purnell wing of the party were promoted and are now hemmed in to Brown's cause. It was a good reshuffle for Blairites. Expect Cabinet newcomers Ben Bradshaw, Lord Adonis and others close to Purnell to be out and about on the airwaves over the next few days, saying their old friend was wrong and Labour MPs should rally around the Prime Minister. The message is more powerful coming from them than from Brown's allies who were bound to proclaim their support.

This can be only of limited comfort to the Prime Minister. Earlier in the week, he had hoped to convey a sense of a fresh start with a sparkling new Cabinet. Now he narrows his ambition to one of survival. The reshuffle conveys a single limited message: "I am still here". If somebody had told Brown a few years ago that, as Prime Minister, he would be too weak to make Balls his Chancellor, and yet be forced to promote some of those who are internal critics, perhaps even his famously insatiable hunger for the top job would have subsided a little.

Now he is there, he clearly intends to stay. Earlier in the week, I had assumed that if he managed to reshuffle his Cabinet he would be through the immediate drama. He still might be. There cannot now be a Cabinet mutiny as there was when Margaret Thatcher fell in 1990; at least there cannot be in the immediate future. Ministers will not be the trigger. But that does not mean a trigger will not be pulled. I get the impression that Mandelson has taken the decision to do all he can to shore up Brown's position. But if the strategy fails he will probably declare and believe "I and others tried our best; sadly, it hasn't worked and now we must move on". Obviously, in those circumstances, others in the Cabinet could become leadership contenders. After all in 1990 John Major and Douglas Hurd signed Margaret Thatcher's nomination papers as she fought to remain Prime Minister. A few days later both were candidates in a contest to replace her. In such febrile times anything can happen.

How have Brown and his party got to such a desperate position in a relatively short period of time? In 2005, the party won a third successive election victory and the Conservatives secured fewer seats than Labour managed to win in 1983. Less than two years ago, Brown was riding high as a newly installed Prime Minister and it was the Conservative Party asking questions of David Cameron's seemingly precarious leadership. This has been a speedy decline.

Three obvious factors play their part. The party's ratings in the opinion polls are terrible. Gloomy polls feed on themselves, undermining the confidence of a leader and his party. Most Labour MPs are certain they cannot win under Brown. A small group of Blairites has always loathed Brown and was only going to lie low if he had been a soaring success as Prime Minister. Instead, Brown's leadership has been chaotically error strewn from the early autumn of 2007, when he openly contemplated an election and then did not call one: a fatal sequence.

There is also a less obvious factor, the most important one of the lot as MPs decide whether to make a move against him. Labour has become an almost impossible party to lead, as it used to be. Fleetingly after its successive election defeats in the 1980s and early 1990s, Labour became more willing to be led. Indeed, up until around 2001, it became a disciplined vote winning machine. The hunger to win obscured and, to some extent, replaced the normal noisy disparate, contradictory voices that form what Harold Wilson used to call euphemistically a "broad church".

Now the voices surface loudly. In truth, they have been loud for a long time. That is why this is Labour's crisis and not just one about Brown's leadership. The signs of a restlessly dysfunctional party have been evident for years. Let us not forget that immediately after Tony Blair had won a third election victory, some Labour MPs called on him to resign, an unprecedented and bizarre contortion: "He's won a big majority! He should go!" A year or so later, there was the famous "September coup" against Blair which forced the then Prime Minister to declare he was staying and going simultaneously. Brown was the discreet of architect of that semi-successful insurrection. He has been on both sides of attempted coups. These were early symptoms of a party at war with itself, in the same way that the Conservatives' regular and eccentric leadership contests after 1997 highlighted an underlying crisis that could not be solved by a change of leader. Remember some of the whacky manifestations of the Tories' turmoil, the Ken Clarke/John Redwood "dream ticket" in one leadership contest, the election of Iain Duncan Smith in 2001, the coronation of Michael Howard shortly afterwards. MPs made their moves, but their party continued to lose elections.

Labour's current confused shapelessness is vividly highlighted by the disparate rebels seeking to oust Brown. Beyond their fuming disillusionment with the Prime Minister and their understandable fear he is leading them towards a calamitous defeat, they cannot agree on why they are rebelling. The backbencher, Barry Sheerman complains of Brown's treatment of Labour MPs over the expenses affair and the departure of the Speaker. Some Blairites want a leader to take them back to their promised land of choice in public services, tax cuts and a smaller state. The left-of-centre pressure group, Compass, is opposed to the part-privatisation of the Post Office, a move passionately supported by Blairite dissenters. Compass also campaigns for sweeping constitutional reform, a move that is not supported by some of the other backbench rebels. The former Cabinet minister, Charles Clarke, has a distinct agenda that includes electoral reform and opposition to Trident, but he is not an orthodox Blairite and has never presented himself as such. There are a lot of internal divisions and that's just in relation to the rebels.

The existing Labour Prime Minister or a new one has the task of keeping all of them happy, along with the rest of the Labour party made up of trade unionists, middle class progressives, egalitarians, meritocrats, pro-Europeans, Eurosceptics and the rest. In addition, if he or she wants to have any chance of holding on to power unifying the demoralised and dwindling Labour party is only the start of the challenge. A leader must seek to appease right-wing newspapers. Business leaders have to be addressed sympathetically. Above all, the voters are angry and frightened as a result of the separate constitutional and economic crises. They will not be easily reassured.

In other words, being a Labour Prime Minister now, as it used to be in the 1960s and 1970s, is a mammoth task. Leaders are despatched more ruthlessly these days, but there is an almost casual approach to speculating about successors, as if the job under consideration is the equivalent of taking over a corner shop. "Maybe X, Y or Z could do it" is a phrase uttered often in relation to prospective Prime Ministers even though little is known about their qualities.

Brown's leadership has been marked by one crisis after another and endless speculation about whether he should be removed. Some of this is entirely his responsibility, for reasons that are well chronicled. One reason is overlooked. From becoming Prime Minister, he has taken upon himself the impossibly convoluted task of trying to keep all the disparate voices on board, a task made more urgently necessary because of his previous sometimes reckless battles with Blair and the Blairites. As a result, he has had no clear voice of his own.

From my conversations with Brown, I do not believe he lacks vision but his caution and above all his desire to keep everyone happy from right-wing newspapers to Labour activists means that he opts for opaque statements that are often vacuous. As a result, those he has sought assiduously to please now wonder disdainfully why he wanted the job with such destructive hunger for so long.

One of Brown's most perceptive advisers provides an illuminating insight into the calamity of the non-election in the autumn of 2007. He tells me it was not just the polls that worried the new Prime Minister when he called off the election. There was a deeper issue. Brown could not make up his mind whether to break with "Blairism". He would have had to justify calling an early election by making his own distinctive pitch. But the aide sensed Brown did not dare to do so, partly because he feared disunity, especially an onslaught from Blairites and their supporters in the newspapers. So he chose to be the equivocator instead.

This has had disastrous consequences, not only in terms of the way Brown is perceived but in the incoherent policy agenda he has chosen to pursue, making clumsy fruitless attempts to revive the explosive issue of detaining suspects without charge and, at the same time, seeking to reassure liberals with a timid series of reforms, cutting the basic rate of income tax in a crude attempt to please his critics on the right and disastrously scrapping the 10p tax rate in order to do it, putting up the top rate for high earners in a way that pleased some on the left, but rushing to part-privatise the Post Office that has alienated those who were delighted by the tax rise.

Partly because of his own expedient, too-clever-by-half instincts but also because of the impossible external circumstances, Brown's position has parallels with one of his predecessors, Harold Wilson, who in the end regarded survival and party unity almost as his sole objective. During one of Wilson's many crises, he told his friend Barbara Castle: "I have waded through shit to keep this party together and I am getting fed up with it." Labour was incomparably more divided then than now over all the big issues of the day. But even today's challenges require the energy, guile and principled convictions of a titan. Labour has no titan. Amid a leadership crisis, it is not even clear it has an alternative candidate who wants to become leader before the election. If Alan Johnson were to become Prime Minister, he would have pulled it off while giving the impression he would prefer to be playing in a rock band at Wembley – admittedly a potentially attractive posture compared with the overt ambition displayed by Brown after Blair became leader in 1994.

Labour MPs face a complex choice. Brown was a wounded figure before the events of the last few days; he is more so now. The dissenters have spoken and more will speak this weekend. Words cannot be unsaid. The Conservatives have enough critical quotes about Brown from Purnell downwards to fill a poster campaign for an entire general election. He had already lost the media and yesterday was not in a position to appoint the Cabinet of his choosing. Inevitably, if he carries on there will be more trouble to come. How does he handle the vote in the Commons on the part-privatisation of the Post Office? What if the polls continue to be terrible? Every media appearance will be judged through an unremittingly harsh prism.

But the alternative route is also fraught with danger, not least because the route is far from clear. An act of regicide will in itself be traumatic; they always are. The Blairites have never forgiven Brown and his allies for the "September coup", even though Blair remained in office for another year. The Conservative Party suffered a collective nervous breakdown soon after the removal of Margaret Thatcher, one which arguably they have still not fully recovered from. Already, I sniff highly-charged anger and admiration of James Purnell in almost equal measure, and he has failed to make the killer blow. The enforced removal of a Prime Minister is a massive move to make, and then what will happen? There are now quotes galore from Brown's supporters saying a new leader would have to call an immediate election in order to secure legitimacy. Even if that were not to happen, what would the new leader have to say after a self-absorbed leadership contest as he gave his opening interviews? There is not much he could say that would please Alan Milburn, and the left-wing MP Mark Fisher, both of whom want Brown out. In their current mood, it is also possible that voters would view the change as a cynical act by a few greedy MPs desperate to keep their seats.

Of course, there are some obvious advantages too of making a change, ones that become more compelling in the light of the past few days. If Johnson were to become Prime Minister, the Government would feel fresh and new. When John Major became Prime Minister in 1990, it felt as if there had been a change of administration with the removal of a leader who had dominated politics for so long. For a time, it is possible the same mood would prevail as the largely unknown Johnson graced the public stage with his good humoured and laidback style. He would not be able to address the underlying divisions that are the fundamental cause of the crises that are afflicting his party, but he might be able to keep them repressed and, in doing so, have the chance to expose the weaknesses in the Conservative Party that have escaped virtually all scrutiny. I do not believe he would be obliged to hold an immediate election, especially if he announced a date in the autumn or next spring.

We leap several hurdles to get to the point where Johnson is deciding the date of an election. Before we got to such a point, MPs would have to make a leap into the unknown where more or less anything could happen. In contrast, they could opt for the Brown/Mandelson axis and hope two of the most experienced figures in British politics over the last 20 years can guide them away from the edge of the cliff, clinging to signs of economic recovery as vindication of their battered leader's approach.

MPs are scattered around the country this weekend. They return to Westminster on Monday, a pivotal day. Yesterday's changes have the feel of a holding operation. But if I were a Labour MP in the midst of the current frenzy, I would step back and look at other recent examples when leaders were removed against their volition. The fundamental causes of the crisis were heightened and never resolved.

s.richards@independent.co.uk