The Labour deputy leadership

Where do we stand in the Labour Party deputy leadership election? Having spent some time wandering through the newspapers and around the internet, looking at the careers of the candidates, I now have to decide who to vote for.

These are the runners, pictured from left to right: Caroline Flint (age 53), Angela Eagle (54), Ben Bradshaw (54), Tom Watson (48) and Stella Creasy (38).

So what can we say about these five? Well, first, that they don't actually make for a bad field, and second, that they do have a great deal in common.

In particular, they're all unashamedly professional politicians, with only Bradshaw's previous incarnation as a radio reporter departing from the normal career path. (And that wasn't straying too far: the separation between media and politics was barely discernible in the 1990s.) Their time in Parliament has mostly been characterised by loyalty, though Watson and Flint did separately resign from government, seemingly in would-be coups aimed against, respectively, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. And all are, insofar as such distinctions mean anything any more, on what would have been see as the right of the party in the 1980s. At least, though, they were all educated at different universities.

Given that the deputy leadership position is not of the greatest significance - Denis Healey once said it was worth only 'a pitcherful of warm spit' - perhaps one shouldn't spend too long deliberating. Apart from anything else, it's hard to see the final choice really attracting much attention, given the Jeremy Corbyn story that'll be breaking one way or another at the same time.

But still, it does matter. At the very least, it 'sends a signal', as politicians like to say. And in the context of the Corbyn story, the signal might actually mean a little more than usual this time.

A victory for Bradshaw or Flint would indicate that the smooth operators are still with us. And I don't think that's where the Labour Party should be heading. They're the kind of politicians who remind me of a great line in one of Hugh Trevor-Roper's letters: 'In general, actors have no minds, only memories and poses.'

Elsewhere, I struggle to see Watson as anything other than a burly bruiser with authoritarian tendencies. Again, he seems to me to represent a politics that Labour should be leaving behind.

But both Eagle and Creasy are good, strong candidates. Electing either one would send a strong signal that Labour is a serious, radical party.

Judging entirely by media coverage (which is all I have), I'm impressed by Eagle's consistency, commitment and decency. I know she studied PPE at Oxford, and Lord knows we've had more than enough of them in recent times, but sometimes we have to overlook youthful mistakes. More importantly, she's retained an unusual degree of individuality for someone who navigated the New Labour years more or less successfully. Maybe it's the early role models standing her in good stead; when asked her favourite book, she rather splendidly nominated Mae West's autobiography Goodness Had Nothing to Do With It.

It's hard to resist that, and I hope Eagle gets a very senior position in the new shadow cabinet. But as my first choice for deputy leader, I think I've concluded that Stella Creasy is the better option, for the following reason.

One of the great myths peddled by Blair was that the Labour Party could achieve nothing unless it were in government. He was wrong. And since the Labour Party has spent most of its existence in opposition, and there's a good chance that the next decade will add to that record, it's important to recognise that he was wrong.

At its best, the Labour Party has been able to transform people's lives at the grassroots, even when it hasn't occupied Downing Street. It was built on a sense of mutuality and community self-help, the sense that, in Harold Wilson's words: 'The Labour Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing.' Many of the old traditions have died, of course, victims of affluence and neglect. But if the party is to have any hope of rebuilding, it needs to do so from the ground up, rediscovering the fact that power is not the preserve of Westminster.

Creasy seems to me to be the one who sees that most clearly, and has thought most carefully about the future. And, talking of signals, I like the fact that she is one of only twenty-four Labour and Co-operative MPs, having been endorsed by both parties.

She is, of course, absurdly young, and has little experience of life or parliament and none whatsoever of government. But she does at least look as though she's ready for the long haul, and will still be there on the other side.

This concludes my look at the deputy leadership candidates. Next week I shall go through the leadership hopefuls to try to work out who to vote for in that election.

Little Goody Two-Shoes: a portrait of Ben Bradshaw

Denis Healey once said of David Owen: 'The good fairies gave the young doctor almost everything: thick dark locks, matinee idol features, a lightning intelligence. Unfortunately the bad fairy also made him a shit.' Much the same could be said of Ben Bradshaw, except for the doctor bit. And, of course, the bit about him being a shit.

Bradshaw was born in London in 1960 and studied German at Sussex University. Following a brief time in print media, he moved into radio broadcasting, where he became the BBC correspondent in Berlin at the end of the 1980s, just as the Wall came tumbling down. He was very good and he was clearly seen as a rising star of Radio 4; by the mid-1990s he had started to get slots as the stand-in presenter on shows like PM and Weekend World.

Seeking a constituency for the forthcoming election, he was adopted by the Exeter Labour Party, despite telling the selection committee that he was gay. This was at a time when attitudes were noticeably changing, but culturally there was still a long way to go before homosexuality was widely accepted. Legally, the situation was worse: civil partnerships, let alone same-sex marriages, were a pipe-dream, and the age of consent for male homosexuals was eighteen.

And politically it was all very risky - both for Bradshaw to tell the local party and for them to choose him anyway. No candidate who had previously declared their homosexuality had ever been elected to Parliament. 'It is not something I am going to make an issue of,' Bradshaw told the press, 'but I am not so naive that I do not think others may do so.'

He was right. The local Conservative Party chairman greeted his selection with a sorrowful shake of the head: 'It would be a sad day for Exeter if it ever elected an active homosexual as its MP.' The Tory candidate, Dr Adrian Rogers, was a Christian GP who had already made his position clear, denouncing homosexuality as 'a sterile, disease-ridden and God-forsaken occupation'.

Bradshaw's sexuality was therefore a big local issue as the election approached. So too was the fact that the BBC gave him five months paid leave from his job on The World at One to campaign, though the criticism this attracted was somewhat derailed by Rogers's comments on the corporation: 'there are far too many homosexuals in the BBC'.

The slightly unpleasant tenor of the campaign meant there was considerable rejoicing when, in the great Labour victory of 1997, Bradshaw recorded a 12.5 per cent swing to take Exeter from the Tories with a substantial 11,000 majority. That margin has since fallen a little, but the city remains a safe Labour seat in a part of the country where the party is not naturally strong.

Bradshaw demonstrated a commitment to gay rights that ran ahead of the party leadership, so that in 2000 - when it seemed as though the government was backing out of its commitment to repeal Section 28 - he spoke out, saying 'that he had never seen so much anger in the Parliamentary Labour Party'. He might even have been ahead of the curve in other areas as well: 'Cyclists have a right to be pious,' he declared, somewhat piously. 'They cut congestion, cut pollution and cut costs to the NHS by staying fit.'

There were also less obvious positions, such as the issue of repatriation of art treasures. When Labour MP Bernie Grant asked Exeter's museum to return objects that came originally from the African kingdom of Benin (now in Nigeria), Bradshaw was forthright in his response: 'We are not going to send these treasures back - particularly not to a country governed by such an odious dictatorship as Nigeria. Their human rights record is appalling.'

Mostly, though, he became known in Parliament for not rocking the boat. He was allegedly referred to by Alastair Campbell as 'Little Goody Two-Shoes', while the Guardian called him a 'Hugh Grant lookalike turned ultra-loyal Blairite'. He had, wrote Edward Pearce in the Express, 'the distinct look of a teenage seraph on the make'.

In July 2001, following Tony Blair's second victory, Bradshaw was given a ministerial job in the Foreign Office, again raising some eyebrows, since he would be dealing with the Middle East, not a region noted for its enthusiastic embrace of homosexuality. In fact, though, the most contentious issue turned out to be his robust defence in 2002 of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, insisting that conditions there were perfectly humane, and saying of the suspects who were being detained without trial: 'we are talking about some of the most dangerous men in the world'.

He was similarly bullish the following year when he joined the government's assault on his old employers at BBC Radio 4. The station had covered Dr David Kelly's revelations about the abuse of intelligence reports in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, and had brought the wrath of the government down upon its head. Bradshaw was a minor, though notable, player in the campaign to re-position the story, making it about insignificant detail rather than the broad picture.

He went on to become deputy leader of the House of Commons, and then minister for, successively, the environment, the South-West and health, before ending up as secretary of state for culture, media and sport for the final year of Gordon Brown's premiership.

On taking up the latter position, he was asked to list his favourite cultural works. He selected Casablanca (for some reason it's the most cliched film choice for a politician), Bob Marley's Kaya (that's the non-political one), Michelangelo's David and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbevilles (well, it was the Western Morning News who were asking).

During his time in government, there were some difficult issues to be faced: Britain's involvement in the arms trade, the badger cull, bird flu, the BBC licence fee, the fact that Jeremy Hunt, as the Tory shadow culture spokesperson, got a better press than he did. There were also some odd moments of his own making, such as the time when, during a shortage of NHS dentists, he suggested going to see your GP about your teeth instead.

But none of this seemed to cause him any great harm or even discomfort. Indeed, nothing ever seems to do so.

His public persona is one of apparently relentless good humour and absurd optimism, a determination to accentuate the positive that sometimes veers towards Pollyanna-ism. He even found a silver lining to the credit crunch; he wasn't arguing, he said, 'that a recession is good for people's health, but on issues like mental health, more men go and see their GPs if they are unemployed'.

Similarly, when Labour lost the safe of Norwich North in a 2009 by-election on a 16.5 per cent swing to the Tories, Bradshaw admitted that it was 'disappointing', but also 'said that the result did not appear to be as disastrous as Labour's loss of Crewe & Nantwich to the Tories and Glasgow East to the SNP last year'. (Just for the record: Labour did manage to regain Glasgow East in 2010, but has since lost it again, while the others have remained Tory through two subsequent elections.)

It's hard sometimes to identify quite what it is that Bradshaw stands for or what he has done, and equally hard to see that his career has been better spent in Parliament than it would have been on Radio 4. But he always seems very personable and, in some undefined way, quite important.

In 2000 the Independent on Sunday launched its Pink List, listing alphabetically the fifty most influential gay and lesbian people in Britain, and Bradshaw was included (as was his deputy leadership rival Angela Eagle). In later years, the names were ranked in order of significance, so that we could track his rising significance: in 2005 he stood at #69, moving up every year till he hit the top ten in 2009, the same year he was named Stonewall Politician of the Year. But political fortunes are never secure, and after Labour lost power he found himself plunging down to a lowly #82 in 2011.

Perhaps the highest accolade of his career thus far, however, came earlier this year, when this blog suggested he should go for the leadership of the Labour Party. The reasoning was simple: 'he's by far the best dressed MP of any party.'

This is the fourth of a series of posts in which - unless I fall by the wayside - I shall be looking at each of the candidates in the current Labour Party elections for leader and deputy leader, with portraits drawn entirely from their media coverage. Tomorrow: Stella Creasy.

Yesterday once more

There's a lot of talk about the 1980s, all of a sudden. Particularly about the 1983 general election, when Labour went down to a crushing defeat. And since it's been a long time since I put a graph on this blog, I thought I'd remedy that with a chart showing the opinion polls conducted by Gallup on a monthly basis right through the 1979-83 Parliament.

There are, as Sherlock would say, a couple of points of interest.

When James Callaghan relinquished the Labour leadership in November 1980, he left the party on a 47 per cent share of the vote, more than 10 points ahead of Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives. Michael Foot maintained that position for a few weeks, but then it all went catastrophically wrong.

In January 1981, Labour stood at 46.5 per cent. By December of that year, support had crashed to half that level, on 23.5 per cent. It still stands, I believe, as an all-time calendar-year record. And this was the year, of course, that Tony Benn challenged Denis Healey for the deputy leadership of the party, a particularly nasty and divisive contest.

So spectacular was Labour's decline that it tended to eclipse, then and afterwards, the appalling performance by the Conservatives in the same year of 1981. They started in January on 33 per cent, and ended in December on 23 per cent.

To present the figures like this, however, is not entirely honest. Because, as you can see on the graph, December 1981 was something of a rogue poll, showing a massive spike in support for the newly formed Liberal-SDP Alliance. The existence of a third force was the main cause of the decline in support for both major parties that year, but the Alliance was never to get anywhere near those dizzying heights again.

If we go to the poll published in April 1982 - the last one conducted before the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands - the figures stand at: Alliance 37 per cent, Conservatives 31.5 per cent, Labour 29 per cent. In other words, the Tories had remained fairly constant, and the Alliance had primarily taken its support from Labour.

Victory in the Falklands, combined with an economic recovery, saw the Tories end the Parliament back on track: they won 42.4 per cent of the vote in the 1983 general election, just 1.5 points down on the 1979 election. And behind them, virtually neck-and-neck, came Labour and the Alliance.

The standard explanation on the Left, obviously, was that the SDP had split the anti-Tory vote, gifting Thatcher a landslide that was simply not supported by her share of the vote. The bitterness - and lord, was there bitterness - was directed primarily at Roy Jenkins and David Owen for having led the breakaway from Labour.

My own interpretation is to lay the blame entirely at the feet of Labour MPs, who chose Michael Foot rather than Denis Healey as leader. With Healey as leader, life in the party would have been chaotic and vicious for a while (as it turned out to be anyway), but the SDP would not have come into being. At least not in that potent form, though Jenkins may have tried to start a new (unsuccessful) party. And Thatcher would probably not have won in 1983.

Because leadership is important. Tony Benn's constant refrain was that issues not personalities are what's important in politics. But he was wrong. People vote on personality, as we've just seen in this year's general election.

Labour lost because the electorate, having given Ed Miliband a cursory glance, didn't believe he was up to being prime minister. Just as, in 1981-83 the electorate didn't think that Foot was up to the job. It's not primarily about the policies, it's about character.

Lost Labour leaders

The post-War history of the Labour Party is littered with the best leaders it never had. In the context of a Labour leadership campaign, I thought I'd re-post this list that I wrote on another blog back in 2012. Note that the names are in chronological order.

1. Aneurin Bevan (1955)

After Clement Attlee led Labour to a second successive general election, he stepped down as leader. In a three-way poll, Hugh Gaitskell won an outright majority on the first ballot, defeating Peter Mandelson’s granddad, Herbert Morrison, and Nye Bevan. In terms of previous jobs, Bevan was the least experienced – Gaitskell had been chancellor, and Morrison had been both home and foreign secretary – but he had created the NHS, which gave him a certain weight. He’d also written In Place of Fear, one of the great works of British socialism and still a source of inspiration. But he was seen then, as leaders of the left so often are, as a divisive figure and his failure to carry his fellow MPs with him set a pattern that was repeated over the years.

2. Roy Jenkins (1971)
In the debate over British entry into the Common Market (as we used to call the future European Union), Jenkins led a dissident group of Labour rebels into the ‘yes’ lobby, defying a three-line whip even though he was the party’s deputy leader. Labour was then in opposition and its leader, Harold Wilson, was far from secure. The possibility existed for Jenkins to resign on the European issue and challenge directly for the leadership. He would have been good at it as well, and would have done far better at the subsequent election. Mind you, Britain would have been much more engaged in Europe, which may or may not be a good thing, depending on your views.

3. Tony Crosland (1976)
What a field of candidates there was in the election to replace Wilson as leader and therefore as prime minister. Jim Callaghan won eventually, but first he had to see off Michael Foot, Roy Jenkins, Tony Benn and Denis Healey. And the future foreign secretary Tony Crosland, who got barely five per cent of the MPs’ votes. Given that he died less than a year later, it was probably not too catastrophic for Labour that Crosland didn’t make it, but he would have been a decent choice: a social democrat intellectual who was capable of adjusting and evolving his thought in the light of circumstance.

4. Denis Healey (1980)
The choice of who should replace Callaghan after the disastrous election defeat of 1979 was so obvious and so stark – Denis Healey versus Michael Foot – that only the Labour Party could screw it up. So they did, rejecting the most popular politician they had, the one man almost guaranteed to beat Margaret Thatcher. Choosing Healy as leader would have caused major problems in the party, but since those problems came anyway, it’s hard to see how much worse it could have been. Most importantly, the SDP would never have been born.

5. Tony Benn (1981)
Largely thanks to Benn’s efforts, the franchise was widened for the election of party leader, allowing affiliated trades unions and constituency parties a say. So Benn stood for the deputy leadership, to try out the new system, he said. It was a bit of a cop-out, and a direct challenge for the leader’s job would have been more engaging. He would have lost, of course, but had he won, he might well have done better in the 1983 election than Foot managed; the press abuse could hardly have been more vitriolic, and Benn did genuinely inspire some of the people some of the time in a way that Foot simply didn’t.

6. Peter Shore (1983)
The inevitable defeat of Labour in 1983 saw the equally inevitable replacement of Foot by his protégé Neil Kinnock. Trailing a very poor fourth in the election (beaten even by Eric Heffer, embarrassingly enough) was Peter Shore, an intriguing figure who no one could ever quite place within the left-right spectrum. He campaigned against membership of the EEC, argued against restrictive practices in the trade unions and, as shadow chancellor, was one of the few successes during Foot’s doomed leadership. I always rather liked him as a politician: he was thoughtful, intelligent and courteous. He also had very messy hair, though it was nowhere near the chaotic state achieved by...

7. Shirley Williams (1987)
This is pure fantasy time, since Our Shirl was already long gone from Labour, having left to co-found the SDP in 1981. But if she had still been around when Kinnock failed to win the 1987 general election, she would have made the perfect replacement. And a perfect foil for Margaret Thatcher. In the words of a Times leader: ‘Mrs Williams talks to the British people in their own accents, sometimes muddled, often courageous, always human and always kind.’

8. Bryan Gould (1992)
In a straight fight between John Smith and Bryan Gould to replace Neil Kinnock as leader, the Labour Party once again got it wrong. On the single most important issue of the day – British membership of the European exchange rate mechanism – Smith made the wrong call and, had there been any such thing as natural justice, would have been as discredited as John Major when Britain got kicked out of the ERM on Black Wednesday. Gould, on the other hand, had always stood against the tide, arguing for policies based on the real economy rather than monetarist dogma. He was a true moderniser with a sound grasp of economics that shamed the young turks Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. And, of course, he didn’t die in 1994, as Smith did, so that Blair might have been kept in his box.

9. Robin Cook (1994)
After Smith’s death, there were just three candidates for the leadership: Tony Blair, John Prescott and Margaret Beckett. Unsurprisingly Blair won at a canter, since the other runners were clearly so implausible. The man who didn’t stand was Labour’s strongest performer in the Commons, Robin Cook, a brilliant and principled politician with twenty years as an MP. He decided against going for the leadership on the grounds that he was ‘too ugly’ to be prime minister, but he was wrong: there was far too much character in his face for him to be unattractive. And anyway, given the state of the Tories by 1997, a monkey on a stick could have won that general election.

10. David Miliband (2007)
Why, oh why, were the Labour Party so stupid that they chose Gordon Brown to replace Tony Blair? More to the point, why were they so craven that they didn’t even have an election? Brown clearly stood no chance up against David Cameron, but his fatal flaw – his indecisiveness – was sadly echoed in the person of David Miliband, his most plausible challenger. By the time Miliband had screwed his courage to the sticking-plate, it was three years too late and Ed came through as the ‘Stop David’ candidate. 

Now that's what I call a Labour leadership election

Final nominations are due in tomorrow for candidates wishing to stand for the Labour leadership. Which inevitably brings comparison with the best slate of candidates who ever stood for the job, back in 1976 when Harold Wilson unexpectedly resigned as prime minister. The following is an extract from my book Crisis? What Crisis?...

The three principal candidates of the right in the election were Roy Jenkins, Denis Healey and Anthony Crosland, who had respectively voted for, voted against and abstained in the crucial 1971 Commons debate on entry into Europe. The rivalry between them ensured that there was no single figure around whom the right could comfortably coalesce, though the election did go some way towards resolving the issue for the future.

In the first ballot Crosland was decisively beaten into last place with barely 5 per cent of the 314 votes cast by Labour MPs (who then made up the entire constituency), and was therefore automatically knocked out.

Jenkins came third in a field of six but, distraught at having got only fifty-six votes, withdrew from the race, to the undisguised glee of his arch-enemy: ‘When I think of the fantastic press that man has had, year in year out, and all the banging I’ve had, it is gratifying that he should have only got eighteen votes more than me,’ exulted Tony Benn, who had already announced his own withdrawal.

It was indeed a disastrous performance by Jenkins; ninety Labour MPs were considered at the time to be strongly pro-European and yet the man who had risked his career by defying the party whip on the issue, and should therefore by rights have been the leader of that group, attracted little more than half of them.

Healey, however, coming second to last, with a paltry thirty votes to his name, refused even to consider withdrawing, and thereby enhanced his position for the future. Where Jenkins looked like a beaten man, Healey was revealed as a born fighter, determined to stay in the ring until forcibly ejected from it – next time round, it was clear, he would be the champion of the right and would probably be the favourite to win.

Crosland’s analysis of the contest summed up the shifting fortunes of the also-rans: it was, he said, ‘A year too soon for Denis. Four years too late for Roy. Five years too soon for Tony. Two years and one job too soon for me.’

The left was also split, despite the performance of Michael Foot. He came top in the first ballot, getting three times as many votes as Benn, but Benn was able to take comfort from a Sunday Times poll that showed him as the second-placed candidate among Labour voters, clearly ahead of Foot. Amongst Labour activists it is to be assumed that his support was stronger still, such was the growing gap between the old left in Parliament and the younger, more radical factions in the party outside, who looked to Benn as their tribune.

Foot had only joined the front bench in 1974, after many years on the backbenches, and though he brought with him a history as the conscience of the left and as the passionate defender of the memory of the sainted Nye Bevan, whose constituency he had inherited, he was starting to seem like something of a relic, a platform orator in a world shaped by the mass media. Moreover he was a man whose fierce loyalty to the party ensured that he would always side with the leadership in moments of crisis, a fact that was anathema to the idealist Jerusalem-builders two generations below him.

For it wasn’t just the attitudes that were looking elderly; now approaching his sixty-third birthday, Foot was older than Wilson himself. Even so, he was still younger than the man who beat him in the third and final ballot. (Healey had been knocked out in the interim round, gaining just one vote more than Benn had on the first ballot, which again gave the latter ‘great pleasure’.)

James Callaghan, the ultimate victor in the contest, was in many ways an outsider in the race, overcoming the handicaps of birth and circumstance. ‘Prime minister, and I never even went to university,’ he marvelled in his moment of triumph, revelling in his defeat of five Oxford graduates.

He had succeeded largely by remaining outside the fray; aligned with the factions of neither left nor right, but instead establishing himself as the master of the party machine, he carried no ideological baggage, just a reputation as a safe, if unadventurous, pair of hands. By these means he had already occupied the other three great offices of state – chancellor, home secretary and foreign secretary – before ascending to the highest position of all.

As Claudius put it in the recently screened BBC adaptation of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, when he finally became emperor and was accused of being half-witted: ‘I have survived to middle age with half my wits, while thousands have died with all theirs intact. Evidently quality of wits is more important than quantity.’

A Voice from History: Gordon Brown

In memory of the political career of Gordon Brown, who has now left the Commons at the ripe old age of 64, here are some of my favourite quotes from the former prime minister:

1) 'No chancellor until this one has come to the House and said that because he has money available to him, the rich will get the benefits and the poor will make the sacrifices.' (1988)

2) 'I see Labour as the party of small businesses and the self-employed.' (1995)

3) 'They [the Liberal Democrats] are not fit to make their presence felt in this House. They should go back to their constituencies and prepare to adapt to reality.' (1997)

4) 'I want this generation to be remembered as the first generation in history that truly made prosperity possible for the world and its people.' (2001)

5) 'Tony Blair is the best friend I have in politics. We have worked together for many, many years.' (2001)

6) 'I did maths at school and for one year at university, but I don't think I was ever very good at it.' (2007)

7) 'I could never compare myself to Gandhi and all the other heroes of mine, but I do take inspiration from the way they dealt with the challenges they found.' (2007)

8) 'I admire the fact that she [Margaret Thatcher] is a conviction politician. I am a conviction politician like her.' (2007)

9) 'When things go well, people call me Gordon. When they're bad, they call me Mr Brown. At the moment they are calling me Gordon.' (2008)

10) 'She was just a sort of bigoted woman who said she used to be Labour.' (2010)

And now some words about Brown by his friends and admirers:

1) 'He is a happiness Hoover.' - Michael Howard (1993)

2) 'Gordon Brown talks about no return to boom and bust. He is not going to have a boom, but he might have a bust.' - Kenneth Clarke (1998)

3) 'He is silly and I shall keep at him.' - Barbara Castle (2000)

4) 'I'm convinced Gordon Brown bores 99 per cent of any audience. I once interviewed him for thirty-eight minutes and he gave the same answer to every question. And he doesn't care that everyone finds him so boring.' - John Humphreys (2000)

5) 'The sooner he becomes prime minister the better. In the last couple of years, Tony Blair has been a disaster.' - Denis Healey (2005)

6) 'He is somebody I'm liking very much and I think he will certainly do more and more good things if he has a chance.' - Angelina Jolie (2006)

7) 'Allowing Gordon Brown into No.10 would be like letting Mrs Rochester out of the attic.' - Frank Field (2007)

8) 'He has the charisma of a coffin lid.' - Michael Portillo (2007)

9) 'He is like some sherry-crazed old dowager who has lost the family silver at roulette, and who now decides to double-up by betting the house as well.' - Boris Johnson (2008)

10) 'He could be a miserable bugger, Gordon.' - John Prescott (2011)