Human till she talks: a portrait of Yvette Cooper

One of the standard jokes at the start of the current Labour leadership election was that Yvette Cooper's judgement has to be suspect: after all, she did marry Ed Balls. Not very funny, I know, and also deeply unfair, because on the plus side they chose Eastbourne for their wedding, she wore Vivienne Westwood for the ceremony, and they went to Euro-Disney for their honeymoon. Which deals with the lack of judgement charge.

In general, of course, it's unfair to reflect on a politician's partner, but in the case of the first husband and wife team to serve in a British cabinet, it's kind of inevitable. For nearly two decades, they've been seen as a single force. As a magazine pointed out in 1998, Cooper and Balls were 'New Labour's It Couple, the zenith of everything it stands for.' A Daily Telegraph profile of the pair the same year was headlined: 'Will this couple make it to Number 10?' Or, as the Guardian put it, they were 'the Posh and Becks of the Labour Party'.

Born in 1969, Yvette Cooper studied PPE at Oxford and went on to become an adviser to John Smith and to Harriet Harman. (My apologies for the repetitions in this series of portraits, but there really is a shocking lack of variation in the backgrounds of the candidates.)

She also worked for a while in journalism, as a leader writer and as the economics correspondent for the Independent. She was perfectly okay, and occasionally wandered out of her field. This is her on the supposed crisis in masculinity that was such a big media deal in the 1990s:

The only thing these men really have to adjust to is change itself. No, they can't have a job for life anymore. But so what? Few women ever had one. And no, they can't invest their entire identity in the firm they work for: the company might not be there in two years. And if they are too frit to visit their GPs they had better reconcile themselves to early avoidable death.

No tolerance for the nanny state here, then; you sink or swim according to your own efforts.

Her articles tended to be broadly supportive of the Labour Party in opposition, but even she struggled to put a positive gloss on Tony Blair at times, and had to concede that his borrowing of Will Hutton's 'stakeholding' concept was little more than, in her word, 'waffly'.

Her ambitions, however, lay in Parliament not Fleet Street. Under the patronage of Gordon Brown, she attempted to become the candidate for the safe seat of Don Valley, where she lost out to Caroline Flint, before securing the nomination for the even safer Pontefract & Castleford, where she beat both Hilary Benn and Derek Scott (Tony Blair's economic adviser, who later wrote Off Whitehall).

She was one of ten Labour MPs elected in the 1997 landslide who were still in their twenties, and was clearly marked out for early advancement.

When Brown announced that he was handing over control of interest rates to the Bank of England, it was Cooper - just four days into her parliamentary career - who was sent onto Newsnight to defend the move to Jeremy Paxman. 'With that one step,' she wrote, 'the government has done more to achieve economic stability than anything any British government has done for years.' She brushed aside suggestions that the move was an affront to democracy: in characteristic New Labour style, managerialism was more important than politics.

Shortly after the election, Cooper and Balls - the archetypal North London couple - moved from Hackney to the New Labour heartland of Islington, though they later moved again, this time to upwardly mobile Stoke Newington. For expenses purposes, this was, of course, their second home, entitling them to a subsidised mortgage. When such things began to provoke outrage, it was reported that between them they had 'racked up more than £300,000 in expenses' in 2006-07, considerably above the national average for MPs.

From a whip's perspective, her behaviour in Parliament was exemplary, largely - one suspects - because she was a genuine believer in the Blair-Brown 'project'. The Demon Ears column in the Observer concluded that she 'isn't that bad for a New Labour MP, even though she does dream on message'.

By October 1998 she was being offered a minor government post, though she turned it down in favour of remaining a member of the intelligence and security committee. It proved to be only a short delay: the following year she took on the public health portfolio, becoming the youngest minister in Blair's administration. She then went on to become the first minister to say she'd once smoked pot and, admirably, didn't claim not to have liked it: 'I did try cannabis while at university, like a lot of students at that time, and it is something that I have left behind.'

In her new role she was partly responsible for the cross-departmental project Sure Start, widely seen as one of the better initiatives of New Labour. Its fanbase was wide enough to include, slightly oddly, a children's TV favourite: 'Peppa Pig is a well-known fan of Sure Start children's centres,' it was revealed in 2010.

Less successful was the idea of a crusade against teenage pregnancies under the slogan 'It's OK to be a virgin'. Cooper had sufficient political nous to reject that in favour of 'a straightforward campaign which gives teenagers the facts and is aimed as much at boys as at girls'.

She moved to the Lord Chancellor's department in 2002, then to environment, transport and the regions, where she became minister of state for housing and planning.

The latter portfolio did not count among New Labour's great achievements: during Blair and Brown's period in office, an average of 562 council homes were built each year, compared to the annual average of 41,343 during Margaret Thatcher's premiership.

Cooper did little to improve this woeful record, but she did do some things. She relaxed the regulations on householders installing small windmills and solar panels, and she piloted the chaotic introduction of Home Information Packs. She also faced criticism for allowing more house-building on flood plains. And she suggested that middle-aged couples in social housing should be encouraged to move out of cities when their children left home, to free up housing stock. Her concern here was over 'underoccupied' social housing, an issue later addressed - in somewhat more heavy-handed manner - by the Coalition government's bedroom tax.

When Gordon Brown became prime minister, she remained as housing minister but was given a new right to attend cabinet meetings, and then, in 2008, she made the cabinet proper as chief secretary to the Treasury. Just in time for the credit crunch, though happily she didn't stay very long. As Brown's government descended into a farce of resignations, her loyalty was rewarded with a further promotion, and she served out the rest of the New Labour years as work and pensions secretary, inheriting the agenda set by her predecessor James Purnell.

She spent most of the Ed Miliband era as shadow home secretary, one of the easiest jobs in politics, since there's always something going wrong in the Home Office to provide you with ammunition. This was, famously, where Tony Blair had made his name in 1992-94 in his 'tough on crime' days. But Cooper failed completely to make the same kind of impact and was largely invisible. 'Home secretary Theresa May was fighting for her political life last night as she was engulfed by the border checks scandal,' read the papers in 2011, but Cooper failed to exploit the situation, and of the two you'd probably bet on May being the one to make it to prime minister.

Perhaps, though, that job was a waste of her talent, which is much more obviously focussed on the economy. As shadow chancellor, she would have made a trickier opponent for George Osborne than did her husband.

Beyond economic matters, there has been much talk of women's issues, though sometimes this has been seen as being somewhat narrow in scope. Arguing, for example, in support of cuts to single-parent benefits in 1997, she displayed little interest in those who wished to concentrate on parenthood: 'It's a question of priorities. If we put resources into childcare and helping people back to work, we will raise the standard of living for the poorest.'

Similarly, she has repeatedly claimed over the last few years that 'David Cameron has a real problem with women'. This is an over-simplification, seeming to imply that women can be seen as a homogenous, metropolitan, professional block, somewhat in the image of Cooper herself.

The reality is that age is as big a factor as gender. At the election this year, according to Ipsos-Mori, Labour had a 20-percentage-point lead over the Conservatives among women aged 18-24, but trailed by 18 points among women over the age of 55. Unfortunately for Labour, which clearly has a real problem with older women, there are considerably more of them, and they're more likely to vote.

Cooper considered standing for the leadership in 2010, and Balls said that if she did so, he wouldn't stand himself. She decided against it, however, because she wanted to spend more time with her children. Five years on, and it was inevitable that she would be a candidate. By any normal standards, she really ought to be the front-runner, the one that the others have to beat. But that's not how it's worked out.

In 1997 she condemned - with complete justification - the Conservatives for their remoteness: 'They took politics far away from normal people's lives.' She points, with some justification, to Sure Start as her contribution to changing that, but as a politician, she herself doesn't seem to connect. There's something that isn't quite right. Perhaps Simon Hattenstone put his finger on it in the Guardian in 2010. 'It's funny that Cooper seems so human till she starts to talk,' he wrote, 'while Balls seems so monstrous till he starts.'

This is the third in a series of profiles of the four candidates in the Labour Party leadership election. Yesterday: Liz Kendall. Tomorrow: Jeremy Corbyn.

Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition

The word that keeps coming up in the profiles I'm writing of the Labour candidates is 'loyal'. Of the nine candidates for the leadership and deputy leadership, eight have repeatedly been described as loyal. And in this context, loyalty means voting as the whips tell you. By contrast, the ninth candidate is Jeremy Corbyn, best known for ignoring the party whip on hundreds of occasions, and therefore being disloyal.

But this is a very limited version of loyalty. Traditionally, it was loyalty to the party that was cherished, rather than simply walking into the right lobby at Westminster. And, traditionally, it's been the political right that has been far less loyal than has the left or the trade unions.

The clearest example was the creation of the SDP in 1981, led by Roy Jenkins (who'd previously led the great parliamentary rebellion to ensure British entry into the European Community). When the right had control of the party, the left went along with it, even if they did grumble and moan. As soon as the left seemed to be in the ascendancy, the intellectual right split from Labour altogether.

The arrival of the New Labour right added a new dimension. Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson simply plotted endlessly. Blair tried to get John Smith to stage a leadership coup against Neil Kinnock. Then, when Smith did become leader, Blair and Mandelson schemed against him as well. And eventually, they all descended into plotting against each other. Despite the supposed iron discipline of New Labour, there was no loyalty at all to individuals, leaders or the party.

Jeremy Corbyn, on the other hand, has been an MP for thirty-two years, for perhaps thirty of which he has been in a beleaguered minority. He may not have always done what he was told, but he never threatened to leave if he didn't get his own way, and he has never (as far as I'm aware) plotted to stage a coup against the leadership.

This is relevant, of course, in terms of the current leadership election. Should anyone but Corbyn win, there will be demands for unity, discipline and loyalty. Should Corbyn win, don't expect the right to display any loyalty whatsoever.

A football man: a portrait of Andy Burnham

'Have you never felt the lure of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll?' Mary Whitehouse was asked. To which she replied: 'It depends on what you mean by sex; otherwise not.'

Back in 1993-94 the Observer used to run a feature called Any Questions, in which they told us who their interviewee would be next week and invited readers to send in their queries. And, as far as I can tell, this represented Andy Burnham's first appearances in the national press, with questions to Ian Botham, Graham Gooch and indeed to the ever fascinating Mary Whitehouse.

Sadly the names weren't attached to specific queries, so we'll never know whether Burnham was the one who asked Whitehouse about sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll. Probably not. Given his love of sport, he's more likely to have been the one who asked her: 'Do you regret not having had a professional tennis career?'

Born in 1970, Andy Burnham studied English at Cambridge University and followed what was rapidly becoming the conventional path into Labour Party politics: he worked as a researcher for Tessa Jowell and as parliamentary officer for the NHS confederation, before getting a nice job administering the Football Task Force that had been set up by Tony Banks, minister of sport in Tony Blair's first government.

The aims of the Task Force were to combat racism in football, to encourage disabled access, to help 'players to act as role models in terms of behaviour and sportsmanship', and to give fans a voice, particularly in terms of 'ticketing and pricing policies that reflect the need of all on an equitable basis'. As the new Premier League season gets into its stride, you can judge their successes for yourself.

From there, it was but a short step to becoming a political adviser to Chris Smith, the culture secretary, and thence a safe seat in Leigh, though his parachuted arrival was not to the taste of everyone in the local party. 'This is jobs for the boys,' one member complained. 'It stinks to high heaven.'

Duly elected in 2001, he became known as one of the most loyal of new Labour MPs and was swiftly rewarded with promotion into the lower tiers of government. Not that he agreed with the leadership on everything, of course; it's just that he didn't like to advertise the fact. 'I'm not someone who has aired my differences with the party in public,' he says. 'I'm a football man. I do that in the changing room. On the pitch I tend to play the team game.'

In 2006, as Blair began the process of winding up his leadership of the party, Burnham's was one of the names he cited as the future of Labour, alongside those of Douglas Alexander, Ed Balls, David Miliband, Ed Miliband, James Purnell and Pat McFadden. Of those seven, four have now departed from the House of Commons, while another has already had his chance at leadership and blown it: the future isn't working out as planned.

By that stage, Burnham was making his way through the ranks, spending a while as a health minister, where he described his first week as one of mixed blessings: 'It's probably my worst nightmare to find out that my first parliamentary appearance would be winding up on a debate on deficits in the NHS,' he observed, though on a positive note: 'my week had begun on a high with Everton winning.' (He's rather partial to football, in case it had escaped anyone's attention.)

Following time spent in other jobs - Europe minister, chief secretary to the Treasury and culture secretary - he returned to the health department as secretary of state in 2009, and subsequently made the portfolio his own, serving as shadow health spokesperson during Ed Miliband's leadership.

In 2007 he called for the launch of an NHS constitution to spell out the institution's core values and 'to settle a new consensus around the NHS as the right model for Britain's healthcare needs for at least the medium term, if not for the longer term'.

He has also been campaigning for many years for the integration of health and care provision, proposing the creation of a National Health and Care Service. For a politician who claims to like 'doing things that are bold, important, setting a big agenda,' this has been his big idea. It hasn't, though, really sparked into life, and no one discusses its implications: what it means, how it would work. It's quite possibly a very policy indeed, but it sounds dull the way he tells it, and it hasn't caught the public imagination.

His bland, if not blind, loyalty in government led him into some more controversial areas. He was a keen advocate for the issuing of compulsory identity cards, he defended the PFI schemes for the building of new hospitals, and he suggested that the government might need to act to prevent alcohol being sold too cheaply. He was also called upon to implement the decision to scrap the plans for a so-called super-casino in Manchester, Gordon Brown's one distinctive repudiation of the Blair years.

And then there was the Stafford Hospital scandal. He set up the official enquiry into problems at Stafford immediately he became health secretary, but some still felt that there were outstanding questions, and that, in the words of The Spectator, 'he'll never be able to win a Labour leadership contest until he has a proper answer to those questions'.

Elsewhere, he has been dismissive of 'the educated, articulate, letter-writing people' who 'have no idea of what it is like to bring up a kid on a very low income and the pressure that creates and the difficulties that occur'. And he has been keen to stress the value of competitive sport: 'Competitiveness teaches good life values, winning and losing and taking in your stride, teamwork, discipline and a sense of obligation.'

In his time as secretary of state for culture, media and sport, he trumpeted his love of The Royle Family, professed himself - like Stella Creasy - to be a fan of the Wedding Present (particularly, and predictably, their 1987 album George Best), and claimed that 'Jeff Stelling epitomises standards in broadcasting'. He also mounted a robust defence of printed newspapers, arguing that that their 'heritage means something and can help people navigate a world where there is an ocean of shite on the internet'.

The great mystery about Burnham is why he's been talked up for so long and promoted so young. He gives the impression of being competent and personable, but largely uninspiring; an able lieutenant, perhaps, but no commander. He is the only leadership candidate this time who also went for the job in 2010. On that occasion, he finished fourth in a field of five, which was a little unkind - he was probably the third best option.

Above all, though, as he never ceases to remind us, he's a football fan. 'The Burnham family are a close-knit mob and there are three organisations that matter to us,' he once remarked: 'Everton Football Club, the Labour Party and the Catholic church - in that order.'

This is the first in a series of profiles of the four candidates in the Labour Party leadership election. Like the pieces I posted about the candidates for deputy leader, these are drawn entirely from the media, so they could be riddled with errors. Tomorrow: Liz Kendall

One of the disappointed: a portrait of Angela Eagle

PLEASE NOTE: A fuller and much better version of this can be found here on the Lion & Unicorn site, where I now post.

I've long thought that one of the most clear-cut illustrations of Britain's lack of democracy was the case of Lynda Chalker. She was the minister for overseas development in John Major's government until she lost her seat as MP for Wallasey in the 1992 general election. At which point, she was promptly given a peerage, so that she could continue in the same job, where she remained until the government fell in 1997.

Just to be clear: Chalker was a perfectly competent minister. But really, what's the point in democracy if you can't actually vote someone out of office?

But this isn't about Chalker. The important figure here is the Labour Party candidate who took Wallasey in that 1992 election.

Born in 1961, Angela Eagle studied PPE at Oxford, after which she worked first for the CBI and then COHSE (a health service union, now part of Unison). Whilst in the latter post, she co-authored a Fabian Society pamphlet which called for all-women shortlists when selecting candidates for safe Labour seats.

Her own selection for Wallasey was not dependent on such an arrangement, though it did attract some controversy. The existing Labour candidate was Lol Duffy, a shop steward in Birkenhead who'd come within 300 votes of winning in 1987. But he was deemed to be a supporter of the Trotskyist group Socialist Organiser, so the National Executive Committee intervened and deselected him for the 1992 election.

Seizing the opportunity, Eagle navigated the ensuing selection process with ease, beating into second place Mike Groves, a former member of Liverpool folk group the Spinners. (If you don't remember them, you're too young to have watched light entertainment television in the 1970s.) On a swing that matched the national average, she then took the seat from Chalker and entered Parliament at the age of thirty-one as, in the words of the Guardian, 'a potential bright youngish Labour thing'.

In the ensuing Labour leadership election she nominated Bryan Gould, against the winning candidate John Smith, though she was critical of the expense and length of the contest. 'If we carry on like this,' she argued, 'we will become the party of the perpetual ballot, frantically spending our time and money organising elections for everything under the sun. We will have no money left to campaign except in our own internal elections. And the Tories, who have no internal democracy, will laugh all the way to Downing Street.'

Eagle served her parliamentary apprenticeship during the slow-motion suicide of John Major's government. She attracted some attention for her fierce attacks on the likes of Cedric Brown, the 'fat cat' head of British Gas, and Neil Hamilton, the Tory MP who came to epitomize sleaze, but still found time to vote in support of a deeply controversial pay rise for MPs in 1996.

Early on she attracted the attention of Tony Blair and, following the Labour landslide of 1997, she became a junior minister, at thirty-six the youngest member of his government. By the time the party left office thirteen years later, she had risen to become pensions minister under Gordon Brown.

In public perception, however, her political career counted for very little. Much more interesting were her inclusion in the Commons cricket team (a former member of the Lancashire Schoolgirls XI, she was said to be a useful bowler), and the fact that her twin sister, Maria, was also elected to Parliament in 1997.

Even better was the interview she gave later that year to the Independent, in which she announced that she was in 'a long-term and very happy relationship' with a woman. As reported in the Daily Express, and elsewhere, this made her 'the first woman politician to publicly admit she is gay'.

She wasn't - that would have been Maureen Colquhoun, the Labour MP for Northampton North, back in the 1970s - but even so, it was a big deal at a time when there were vanishingly few lesbians in public life. But this was the late 1990s and the tide was turning. 'Attitudes have changed,' Eagle said. 'I think people are a lot more sensible than we sometimes give them credit for.'

Coming out was a ground-breaking move that saw her receive a message of support from, inter alia, Chrissie Hynde, a note she later cited as her most treasured possession (she's a big Pretenders fan). It also saw her ranked #7 in the Independent on Sunday's list of Women of the Year, two places behind Ann Widdecombe, and only one place behind Dolly the Sheep.

Little since then has excited the same level of media interest. Which is unfortunate, because Eagle was no New Labour robot. She was critical of the mishandling of Ken Livingstone's bid to be the London mayoral candidate in 1999, she heckled Blair when he was explaining to the Commons why we needed to invade Iraq, and in 2003 she co-founded the New Wave Labour group, arguing that the party was on the wrong political track. 'The third way has failed to present any genuine alternative,' she said, pointing out that markets make 'good servants, but poor masters.'

This was no way to make progress in her career, and may explain why she never built on her early promotion to the extent that might have been expected. Or possibly it was because she had already been sacked from the government in a reshuffle in 2002, and it took her some time to clamber back. 'I take Angela with a pinch of salt,' noted Chris Mullin in his diary the following year, 'since she is one of the Disappointed.'

The facts of that dismissal remain a little murky. At the time, the Guardian's Simon Hoggart reported that 'she was sacked because [David] Blunkett finally agreed with his civil servants and decided that she was not up to the job'. A decade later, though, Damian McBride claimed that: 'Tony forgot Home Office minister Angela Eagle existed, gave someone else her job and effectively sacked her from the government by mistake.'

In any event, she's back now. She's been shadow leader of the house for the last four years and is standing for election as deputy leader of the Labour Party. Even if she doesn't win, her centre-left politics should ensure that she becomes a key figure in the coming years. Depending, of course, on where the party chooses to go.

And on that note: 'The Labour Party has changed,' she declared in 2007. 'Our members are pragmatic and they want us to be in government.' We'll soon see how true that remains.

This is the third in a series of posts in which - God willing - 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.

Window dressing: a portrait of Caroline Flint

One of Caroline Flint's earliest appearances in the national press came in a piece by Peter Tory of the Daily Express. Writing about the 1990 Labour Party conference, he cited her as an example of there being 'so little wit in today's politics'.

Twenty-five years on, she is now a candidate for the deputy leadership of the party, but in all that time there has been little to dispel that initial impression.

Born in 1961, Caroline Flint studied American Literature and History at the University of East Anglia. While there, she later revealed, she smoked a cannabis joint, but, as the papers reported: 'she didn't like the taste and the fact that it was illegal acted "as a brake", she told journalists over drinks at the Home Office.' (This, it appears, is the one infallible sign of a politician of the future: they're the students who only tried cannabis once and found that it brought them no pleasure.)

Her early jobs included stints as head of the women's unit of the National Union of Students, as an equal opportunities officer with Lambeth council, and as a senior researcher for the GMB union, before being elected to Parliament to represent the ultra-safe Labour seat of Don Valley in 1997.

This was the era, of course, of 'Blair's Babes': the disparaging term used to refer to the 101 women who became Labour MPs in the landslide victory. Of the new members in this company, Flint was soon talked of as one of the future high-fliers, along with Yvette Cooper, Charlotte Atkins, Valerie Davey, Judy Mallaber and Candy Atherton.

Perhaps a clue to the conduct of her career could be found when she was asked, along with the other women MPs, to contribute some inspiring lines for a book that was to raise money for a breast cancer charity. Flint chose lyrics from the Bruce Springsteen song 'The Ghost of Tom Joad':

Wherever there's somebody fightin' for a place to stand
or decent job or helpin' hand,
wherever somebody's strugglin' to be free,
look in their eyes Mom, you'll see me.

(One of her current rivals for the deputy leadership, Angela Eagle, incidentally, went with a Barbara Castle quote: 'In politics, guts is everything.')

Or perhaps a clue could be found in the photo-shoot she did for Elle magazine, declaring that it was 'time to get some glamour into politics'.

Inside Parliament she became known for her almost obsequious loyalty to the leadership. The ghost of Tom Joad might not have been impressed, for example, to see her dutifully lined up to support the cuts in benefits to single parents in December 1997, the first great controversy of Tony Blair's government. She was, wrote Nick Cohen, 'a thoroughly New Labour MP', while Simon Hoggart thought she was 'the most egregiously greasy Labour backbencher'.

By the end of 1998 she was to be heard proudly proclaiming: 'Of course New Labour's radical. Tony Blair is the first Labour prime minister to declare war!'

Re-elected in 2001, she remained loyal, while also displaying the most progressive of attitudes, coming together with David Miliband, Jim Murphy and other Labour MPs to form a group campaigning for Britain to adopt the euro.

In 2003 she did finally vote against Tony Blair's expressed wishes, but it was only on the subject of fox-hunting. She was one of more than three hundred Labour MPs who voted for a complete ban on the sport, and since seven members of the cabinet were in that number, it was perhaps not as great a risk as it might have been.

Promoted into government, she was the home office minister responsible for drugs policy when cannabis was downgraded from class B to class C in 2004, and steered through Parliament the Drugs Bill that made magic mushrooms illegal. Both those were controversial moves, though controversial in different quarters.

Primarily associated with the Blairite camp in the petty wars of New Labour, she was nonetheless promoted by Gordon Brown when he became prime minister.

As housing minister in 2008, she attracted enormous criticism with a suggestion that unemployed people should have to sign 'commitment contracts', whereby they promised to seek work before they could become social housing tenants. 'The link between social housing and worklessness is stark,' she said, and she was prepared to break it.

Her proposals were promptly attacked by charities such as Crisis, the National Housing Association and Shelter. 'The government wants to return Britain's unemployed to the workhouse by throwing them onto the streets,' commented the chief executive of the latter, perhaps a little histrionically, while Labour MP Austin Mitchell remarked: 'She must have flipped.' In fact, everyone attacked the plans, said the Morning Star, 'even the Tory Party, whose housing spokesman Grant Shapps showed a better understanding of councils' legal obligations to the homeless than Flint did.'

Clearly disturbed by the hostile response, Gordon Brown refused to come out in public to support the idea. His spokesperson said only that the prime minister thought 'in principle it's a good idea to be debated'.

The incident didn't impede her career, however, and her enthusiasm for the European Union saw her promoted to minister for Europe in October 2008. She was not quite in the cabinet, yet somehow not quite outside it either, since she was allowed to attend some meetings.

Hew new role came at a time when the whispering campaign against Brown was growing in volume, and Flint - as a Blairite - was assumed to be part of the conspiracy to force him out of office. The crunch moment came in June 2009 when James Purnell became the third cabinet minister in a week to resign, following Hazel Blears and Jacqui Smith. His resignation statement said in public what everyone already knew: that the party stood no chance of being re-elected while Brown remained leader.

(This, it will be remembered, was the occasion when David Miliband was expected to lead a coup, but proved not to have the bottle for the job.)

Flint responded immediately to Purnell's resignation, issuing an unequivocal statement to say that she would not be following her colleague's lead. 'I am very proud to be a member of Gordon Brown's government,' she insisted.

This display of loyalty came as a surprise to some, including perhaps to her. For within twenty-four hours, she had handed in her own resignation letter to Brown, denouncing his 'two-tier government', and adding: 'several of the women attending cabinet - myself included - have been treated by you as little more than female window dressing. I am not willing to attend cabinet in a peripheral capacity any longer.'

That phrase - 'female window dressing' - became her best known utterance, though another line was perhaps more accurate: 'I am a natural party loyalist.'

In 2010 there was some half-hearted speculation in the press that she might herself run for the leadership, but she chose not to do so. Instead she followed her Blairite instincts and voted for David Miliband. Even so, she was given a senior job in Ed Miliband's shadow cabinet. 'Ed,' she declared, 'will have my full backing.'

This is the second in 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.

He won't harsh your buzz: a portrait of Tom Watson

PLEASE NOTE: A fuller and much better version of this piece can be found here on the Lion & Unicorn site where I now do most of my posting.

It's hard to ignore Tom Watson, the current front-runner to become deputy leader of the Labour Party. He's no shrinking violet.

Born in 1967 - midway between the two Miliband brothers - he shared with other New Labour MPs an early commitment to a political career, progressing to Westminster in 2001 from the National Union of Students, via a stint as political officer to the Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union (AEEU, now part of Unite). Despite the orthodox credentials on his c.v., however, he didn't look as smooth and sleek as most of his contemporaries. And he wasn't averse to employing much more overtly class-conscious rhetoric.

During Blair's first term he had the wit to see - earlier than many others - that a sharp decline in voter turnout needed addressing. Together with Mark Tami, another official at the AEEU who was also elected in 2001, he wrote a Fabian Society pamphlet calling for the introduction of compulsory voting. It was hardly an original proposal, but noteworthy because there was something about the tone that didn't fit with the bland vocabulary of New Labour.

'When the British electorate speaks, we only hear upper and middle class accents,' said Watson. 'Compulsory voting would challenge the elite and give real power to working people.' This, it's worth remembering, was at a time when the Labour Party had 418 MPs.

There was also a note of slightly aggressive sneering as Watson and Tami dismissed the idea that, were the policy to be introduced, there might be protests: 'Some retired colonel from Hampshire would be bound to make a stand against what he saw as the intrusion of the state,' they mocked, 'and no doubt the BBC would film him wearing all his medals whilst he ripped up his polling card.'

Watson was elected to represent West Bromwich East as part of Tony Blair's second landslide victory and began immediately to crop up in news stories, ready to give an opinion on attention-grabbing, if easy, issues.

In 2001, for example, it was reported that Gary Glitter - recently released from jail, following his conviction for possession of child pornography - had recorded a new album. Watson thundered into action, 'It is disgraceful that this convicted paedophile should be allowed to peddle his wares,' he told the media. 'Obviously, young children are the biggest buyers of pop music and they are bound to come into contact with this new recording.' He wanted David Blunkett, the home secretary, to ban the record, and also called for the website of Glitter's official fan club to be closed down.

This, of course, was arrant nonsense. Glitter had served his time, and the idea of preventing him from resuming his life was an insult to justice. Anyway, a man of Watson's age should have known better than to claim that Glitter's thirty-year-old music was now aimed at 'young children'. But it got him in the papers and it established him as a rent-a-quote politician.

He kept himself busy in those early parliamentary years commenting on a wide range of such stories: demanding that Margaret Thatcher's statue shouldn't be placed in the Commons lobby, that foxhunting should be banned, and that Prince Charles should buy British cars. He also set up one of the first blogs by an MP, and was highly praised for it, though if the following quote from his website (reported in the Herald in 2003) is accurate, the acclaim may have been misplaced:

Teens! The BBC politics for kids/teens site is, like, totally whacked! Ditto for the parliament education site, which even has a section for younger yoof. Fanta-stick! So, cut it with the bling bling and do something for the community, man. Join in and take action with any of the groovy sites we've listed, or just drop Tom a line for a quiet rap by the electronic e-mail. He won't harsh your buzz or diss you down the line.

Tom Watson was then thirty-six years old.*

Meanwhile he was keeping his political nose clean as an ultra-loyal MP, on the Brownite side of the party. (Gordon Brown's camp did tend to attract the heavier-set male MP.) He showed no sign of dissent, and most importantly he was dutiful in backing Tony Blair's decision to invade Iraq. 'Voting against the government harms it and harms the party,' he declared. Having done absolutely nothing at all to upset the whips, he was brought into government in 2004 as a junior defence minister.

In September 2006, however, he finally broke from his position of loyal support and abruptly resigned from his government job, writing to Blair to explain why: 'It is with the greatest sadness that I have to say that I no longer believe that your remaining in office is in the interest of either the party or the country.'

It was apparently an attempt to force Blair himself to resign, so that Brown could inherit the office of prime minister. And it worked. Blair responded by announcing that he would step down the following May.

Watson was rewarded by being brought back into government under Brown's premiership, but he resigned again in 2009, in the midst of the expenses scandal, from which he emerged with no great moral credit.

More recently he has made a name for himself by attacking Rupert Murdoch's news empire over phone hacking and by alleging the existence of 'a powerful paedophile network linked to Parliament and Number 10'. Worthy campaigns, no doubt, but happily they're also sufficiently high-profile to ensure that he's still courted by the media (except, obviously, for those outlets owned by Murdoch).

* Added note: When I tweeted a link to this post, Tom Watson tweeted back: 'did you scroll down the page of the "teens" section?' Yes, I did scroll down to the bit where it says that this was 'designed as a parody of how some politicians "connect" to young people.' I'm not sure, however, that he scrolled down my post to the bit where it says that these portraits 'are drawn entirely from their media coverage'. This is about the public perceptions of politicians. Which is why the quote is attributed to the Herald not to his site directly.

This is the first of a series of posts in which - unless I lose all will to live - 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.

It's so strange the way he's talking

I think I should record the fact that I'm really, really enjoying the Labour Party leadership election.

Which is a bit odd. Because so far there has been not a single memorable moment, and because the candidates are so poor. I've written elsewhere about the best slate of candidates in a Labour leadership election, but this is surely the worst; there was more talent on display in 2007, and there was only one name on the ballot paper then.

But the whole thing's been transformed by the arrival in the spotlight - reluctant, blinking, bewildered - of Jeremy Corbyn, the longest serving member of the Left's chorus-line. Unheralded by the critics, never even an understudy, he's somehow turned a school nativity play into a hit show.

Or, more accurately, into part of a hit series, one more episode in a longer running story about the public's dislike of the political establishment.

If we were to date the start of this story, I think we'd go back to the elections of Martin Bell in 1997 and of Richard Taylor in 2001 as independent MPs. Bell was ably assisted by the Labour machine, so perhaps he doesn't really count, but certainly Taylor - who took the safe Wyre Forest seat from Labour on a Health Concern ticket - was a shot across the bows of the establishment. As I wrote in A Classless Society: 'At a time when political parties were losing support at an unprecedented rate, they could not afford to ignore the spectacular success of a genuine independent.'

Then there was the election of Respect's George Galloway as the member for Bethnal Green and Bow in 2005 and Bradford West in 2012. This year, of course, Galloway emulated Shirley Williams's unenviable record of losing a seat at two successive general elections, but meanwhile the Scottish National Party was gleefully sweeping the board in Westminster.

In between, there was the brief flurry of Clegg-mania in 2010 and, more significantly, the spectacular rise of Ukip. It may only have one MP, but the vote Ukip achieved in the general election was substantial: 3.9 million people turned out to support the party, more than the Liberal Democrats and the SNP put together. I think it's reasonable to point out that many of those people were voting in anger at the failings of the other parties, rather than to express their total support for Ukip's platform.

And now we have the Corbyn insurgency. Napoleon once said that every corporal carried a field-marshal's baton in his knapsack, but no one realised that his comments should be taken literally.

Every one of these developments since Wyre Forest seems to have come as a complete shock to the Westminster commentators. And partly this is because the new political class and the media have become as one.

There's always been an overlap between politics and media, but since the 1990s it has reached absurd proportions. Michael Gove, Boris Johnson, Ed Balls, Yvette Cooper - all of them journalists or ex-journalists. It feels as though the two groups have interbred to the point of imbecility, and are now apparently unaware of anything happening outside the Strangers' Bar and a handful of decent restaurants within earshot of the division bell.

With some honourable (sometimes very honourable) exceptions, political commentary has descended into a kiddies' Kremlinology, with little titbits about whether George Osborne has the tactical upper-hand over Theresa May in the race for the Tory succession.

The Blairite-Brownite saga was the model, a dispute that was rooted entirely in ego. 'There is but a cigarette paper between the politics of Brown and Blair,' Polly Toynbee wrote in 1996, but 'most of politics is far more about personal rivalry, jealousy and suspicion than usually gets reported.' Now that's pretty much all that gets reported.

And then, from time to time, the cosy consensus is disrupted by the public demanding that their voice be heard as well. And those interruptions to business seem to be turning up with every greater frequency.

So we have the hugely entertaining spectacle of columnists trying to work out why anyone would take Corbyn seriously. He's not part of the inner circles. He's not a player. He is, on the other hand, a man who's been on virtually every demonstration for the last thirty-five years (or on the counter-demonstration if the original one wasn't appropriate). He may not have figured in the media very much, but his long service is known and admired by a great many of those who will vote in the leadership election.

Corbyn represents the outsider at a time when insiders are deeply unpopular. A vote for him is a vote against the establishment (however loosely or widely that is defined). Just for the record, I still don't think he's going to win the leadership, but then the SNP didn't win the independence referendum last year and it didn't seem to do them much harm.

And talking of referendums, that's the next episode waiting to be written in the story of Britain's disillusionment with Westminster. At some point in the next two years (sooner rather than later, if the reports are to be believed), the political class is going to have to put itself up for approval by the population of the country. The ostensible issue is our membership of the European Union, but it'll be surprising if that's the sole item on the agenda.

Now that one's going to be really enjoyable.

Chummy

One day someone should get Pete Frame to do a family tree of the New Labour spadocracy. This is an early attempt to make sense of the connections by the excellent Dan Atkinson, writing in the Guardian on 6 April 1995, long before they all became household names:

We know communitarianism is the vogue, but the Blair and Brown bunnies may be taking things too far. Ed Balls, he of endogenous growth and adviser to Mr Brown, is seeing Yvette Cooper, who has worked for Harriet Harman and is now on Gordon's payroll, too. Yvette is chummy with the fragrant Liz Lloyd, a researcher in Tony Blair's office. Liz's main squeeze is another Ed - the younger Miliband. He has also just started working for Gordon (if you want to rile the office, just ring and ask for 'Ed'). and his brother, David Miliband, is Liz's boss. The office politics must be worse than the real sort.

Labour leadership and the Magna Carta

The Labour government of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown was not noted for its liberal tendencies. During Blair's premiership, this was symbolised by the attempt in 2006 to allow the state to detain 'terror suspects' for up to ninety days without charge. Just like in apartheid South Africa.

That attempt failed, but two years later - with Brown now prime minister - a new Counter-Terrorism Act plucked another figure out of the air, and sought to increase the maximum period of detention without charge from twenty-eight to forty-two days.

Thirty-six Labour MPs rebelled against this in a Commons vote, but it sneaked through when the Democratic Unionist Party ('the political wing of the 17th century, according to Owen Jones) was bribed by the Labour government to support the measure. It was not until the House of Lords voted against that the government dropped the proposal.

This occurs to me today for two reasons. One is that it's the 800th anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta, which brings to mind Tony Benn's response to that Commons vote: 'I never thought I would be in the House of Commons on the day the Magna Carta was repealed.'

And the other reason is that today is the day that nominations close for the leadership of the Labour Party. Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall already have enough to ensure that their names go on the ballot paper; at the time of writing, the support for Jeremy Corbyn's campaign is unsure.

Kendall was not a member of parliament in 2008, so didn't have a chance to express her opinion, but no one will be surprised that Burnham and Cooper happily trotted through the lobbies to support the forty-two days rule - this simply wasn't something worth risking their political careers on. Corbyn, equally unsurprising, was one of the rebels.

The mystery of the three million

One of the central concerns about Britain leaving the European Union is that it will put British jobs at risk. How many jobs, precisely? Or, if not precisely, then at least roughly?

For clarification on this burning issue of our time, naturally I turned to the acknowledged expert on economics in modern politics, the man who spent ten years as chancellor of the exchequer before becoming prime minister.

During the 1997 election campaign, Gordon Brown warned that divisions and uncertainty in the Conservative Party threatened 'the three-and-a-half million jobs that relied on Europe'. But that seems to have been an over-estimate, because four years later he was arguing that 'over three quarters of a million UK companies trade with the rest of the European Union - half our total trade - with three million jobs affected'.

So it's three million? Yes, that must be right. Because that was the figure Brown was still citing in 2005, and then again in the 2010 election campaign: 'Three million jobs depend on our membership of the European Union.'

And in March this year, Brown made the same point: 'We must tell the truth about the three million jobs, 25,000 companies, £200 billion of annual exports and the £450 billion of inward investment linked to Europe.'

(Incidentally, that '25,000 companies' is a bit worrying, don't you think? In 2001 it was 'over three quarters of a million companies'. What on earth has happened to our economy?)

Coming back to those three million jobs, though. It's not just Gordon Brown who quotes this figure. It's bandied around all the time by those who support British membership of the EU. It was quoted, for example, by Tim Farron on Question Time last night.

But I'm no economist, and there's something I don't fully understand. We had, we were told, the longest period of uninterrupted growth in our history, followed by the worst recession in living memory, and then a recovery that's either the envy of the developed world or a fragile property-fuelled bubble (depending on taste).

Things have changed so much. Back in 1997 we had around 26 million people employed in Britain. Now it's over 30 million.

And yet somehow, inexplicably, the number of jobs dependent on the EU doesn't seem to have moved an inch in all that time. It didn't go up in the good times; it hasn't come down with all the problems in the Euro-zone.

It just sits there, unchanging and - perhaps more to the point - unchallenged. Puzzling, isn't it?

David Cameron: chillaxing to victory

In 2005, following a third successive election defeat, the Conservative Party staged a beauty contest for those who wished to succeed Michael Howard as leader. Up until that morning, the front-runner had been David Davis, but by the time all five candidates had made their 20-minute speeches, he'd been overtaken by David Cameron.

Amongst those who had their minds changed was me. I rated Davis highly at this stage, largely on the strength of a gig he did with Tony Benn at the Royal Albert Hall in 2002. Benn was then at the peak of his popularity as a lovable elder statesman, and for a Conservative to have the nerve to go head-to-head with him in front of an audience that was guaranteed to be 99 per cent anti-Tory showed, I thought, considerable bottle and self-confidence. He was also very good on the night.

Unfortunately he wasn't very good at that 2005 conference, while Cameron was brilliant. Maybe - I've often had cause to think in the last ten years - I was dazzled by a smoke-and-mirrors act, but my immediate response was to predict to the person with whom I was watching on TV that Cameron would win the leadership and would go on to win the next two general elections.

As I say, maybe I was caught up in the heat of the moment. In the final poll, the party members voted for Cameron over Davis in a ratio of two to one, but come 2010 the country did not. He failed to win the election, despite facing only a badly wounded Gordon Brown, a man whose most noteworthy contribution to the campaign was to insult a supporter for her alleged bigotry.

Now, however, Cameron has actually won an election, and I feel my original judgement was sort of vindicated.

This has been a spectacular victory, though not quite as wondrous as some are claiming. The Conservatives' share of the vote went up, but turnout was still poor and Cameron persuaded just 24.4 per cent of the registered electorate to vote for him. This was, however, better than the 23.5 per cent he achieved last time round (itself an improvement on Labour's 21.6 per cent in 2005).

So I wanted to make a couple of points about Cameron.

The first is something that I explored at greater length in an article on the twenty-first anniversary of Black Wednesday. This is a photograph of Norman Lamont, then chancellor of the exchequer, announcing Britain's humiliating withdrawal from the exchange rate mechanism in September 1992:

And there, off to one side, is his 25-year-old adviser and speech writer, David Cameron.

Cameron, I wrote, 'witnessed at close quarters the spectacular implosion of a party that once believed it was predestined to power'. I suggested that this is perhaps why he always seems so relaxed in a crisis. Similarly George Osborne, who was at Douglas Hogg's side in the BSE disaster of 1996. These people had experienced such dreadful political depths in their early years that very little was going to faze them.

Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, on the other hand were New Labour advisers in the 1990s, at a time when the party was already coasting into government. They had no such baptism of fire.

When Cameron became leader in 2005, it was clear that his job was, in the cliché of the time, to 'decontaminate the Tory brand'. The early efforts were clumsy and gimmicky: hugging hoodies and huskies, demonstrating his green credentials by installing a windmill on his roof and cycling to work (followed by a car, carrying his papers).

Then he got blown off course by the bankers' recession. No longer, it appeared, was sunshine going to win the day. The concept of the Big Society withered on the vine (though it's actually very good and the Labour Party should take it back).

Instead, the attempt to modernise the party seemed to consist of little more than the sudden, unpromised introduction of same-sex marriages. It didn't seem like very much - essentially a new name for civil partnerships - but actually it turned out to do the job really rather well.

Because the success of same-sex marriages lay not in the legislation itself, but in the way that it provoked a mass exodus from the party. Some constituency organisations claimed to have lost up to half their members as a result of the policy.

This was, most commentators agreed, disastrous for Cameron. But it wasn't. In one fell blow he'd cleared out large numbers of the 'fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists', as he'd described Ukip back in 2006. Many of them, of course, went straight over to Ukip, giving that party a huge boost in membership and popularity.

Less noticed was the effect on the Conservative Party itself, now smaller but - from Cameron's perspective - much better looking. It has become difficult to denounce the Tories as racist, sexist, homophobic and still retain any credibility as a political observer. The party that embraced economic liberalism in the 1980s has accepted the social liberalism that spread across Britain in the 1990s.

The election results this week saw Cameron increase the Conservative share of the vote, largely at the expense of the Liberal Democrats. All those right-wing commentators like Simon Heffer and Charles Moore who had insisted that the Cameron project was misguided, that he shouldn't be trying to appeal to the liberal vote (sometimes even suggesting he form an electoral pact with Ukip) - they turned out to be completely wrong.

There are many other commentators for whom the Tory brand cannot ever be sufficiently decontaminated, but it turns out that he's done enough. Not enough for those in the long-derided 'metropolitan elite' of course, those who follow in the pioneering footsteps of the delegate to the 1982 SDP conference, excitedly proclaiming: 'There may be minorities we have not yet discovered.' But enough for the rest of the country.

The achievement of Tony Blair in the mid-1990s was to make the Labour Party a safe home for ex-Tory voters. If Cameron hasn't quite reciprocated that achievement, he has gone some way towards it. There were many disillusioned Liberal Democrats, and even some lifelong Labour supporters, who simply couldn't countenance Ed Miliband and who felt just about safe enough to turn to vote Conservative for the first time ever, despite grave reservations over Tory policy.

As all the polls showed, Cameron's ratings outstripped his party's; Miliband's trailed his.

The Left need to get used to the idea that Cameron and Osborne have changed the Conservative Party for good. A new line of attack is needed.

One final thought. There is much talk of this election resembling 1992 when John Major won a slender majority and then ran into trouble with his own party over Europe. And look what's coming next, say the columnists: it's a European referendum and history could repeat itself.

I think this unlikely. If Ukip had got, say, five MPs they might have formed a rival pole of attraction for Eurosceptic Tory members, and there might have been defections over the referendum arrangements. Then Cameron would have had trouble. That might still happen if there are a few by-elections that allow Ukip to boost their numbers, but I doubt it. And Douglas Carswell does not in himself constitute a rival pole of attraction.

In any event, Cameron is much more in tune with the mood of his party than Major was. He remembers all too well the damage that Europe did to the Tories in the 1990s. Most importantly, he doesn't face the same problem that afflicted his predecessor.

Because Major's real grief over Europe was not to be found amongst the 'bastards' on his own backbenches; it lay in the House of Lords. There lurked the malign influence of Margaret Thatcher, the deposed but still powerful ex-leader, constitutionally unable to keep herself from interfering, from stirring up trouble, from seeking to undermine her successor as he tried to get the Maastricht Treaty through Parliament.

As I wrote in my book A Classless Society:

Thatcher's behaviour during Major's premiership was even worse than that of Edward Heath during her own time in office. Heath had been unstinting in his disapproval as he remained stubbornly on the backbenches ('like a sulk made flesh,' in the words of journalist Edward Pearce), but he hadn't actively engaged in plotting against her. But then, as a minister told the BBC's John Cole: 'She was always criticising the government when she led it, so why expect her to change now?'

The EU referendum won't all be smooth sailing, but it'll be less choppy than Major's trip back from Maastricht. And easier than Cameron's rite of passage on Black Wednesday.

Those we have loved: Labour leavers

It's at this stage of a election campaign that my thoughts turn to the dear departed. There are two categories of MPs who don't return to the Commons after a general election: those who have decided to step down, and those who've been kicked out on their ear by the electorate.

We'll have to wait to see who falls into the latter category, but looking through the list of the voluntary redundancies, it is striking how many big (or biggish) names are leaving from the Parliamentary Labour Party.

At the top of the list is obviously Gordon Brown, accompanied by a clutch of former cabinet ministers: David Blunkett, Alistair Darling, Jack Straw, Tessa Jowell, Hazel Blears, Frank Dobson and Peter Hain. (The latter was the man on whom I once placed a bet that he would become Labour leader.)

Oh yes, and there's Bob Ainsworth, remembered as the defence secretary who was humiliated by Joanna Lumley into treating retired Gurkhas a little bit better. (Many would pay good money to be humiliated by Joanna Lumley.)

Then there some less elevated but still significant figures - Glenda Jackson (my original choice for London mayor), 'Red' Dawn Primarolo, Nick Raynsford, Joan Ruddock and my own favourite Austin Mitchell, whose book Four Years in the Death of the Labour Party is still the best account of the 1983 election campaign.

This is a hell of a lot of experience that's being lost, particularly in the event that Labour form the next government. Not that any of these would have served in such an administration, but it doesn't do any harm to have some people in the vicinity who've knocked around a bit. And, more widely, there's a loss to the Commons more generally.

That's in the world of politics, of course. Outside, the truth is that hardly anyone has noticed any of this lot, as a 2013 episode of Pointless made clear; asked to name cabinet ministers who served under Tony Blair or Gordon Brown, only seven in a hundred people named Straw, seven Darling and four Blunkett.

But mostly I wanted to take this opportunity to note the passing of Shaun Woodward, sometime secretary of state for Northern Ireland and one of the oddities of modern politics.

He was the Conservative Party's director of communications during the shock election victory of 1992, and was briefly a Tory MP for Witney, though he was sacked from the frontbench for supporting the repeal of Section 28. He then re-emerged as a Labour MP for the safe seat of St Helens South, despite attracting much mockery when the story got out that he retained the services of a butler.

His successor as MP for Witney was David Cameron who paid tribute to his predecessor in his maiden speech in 2001. 'He remains a constituent and a most significant local employer, not least in the area of domestic service,' Cameron said on that occasion. 'We are in fact quite close neighbours and on a clear day, from the hill behind my cottage, I can almost see some of the glittering spires of his great house.'

I think this makes Woodward the only Labour MP to be derided by Cameron for being too posh. We may not see his like again.

...like the leaving of it

Seven days from now, we may well be getting the first resignation of a party leader. Presumably the Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru and the Green Party of England and Wales will stick with their incumbent leaders, but for the others, nothing is certain. Quite possibly Nigel Farage and/or Nick Clegg will fail to be elected in the first place, while either David Cameron or Ed Miliband - whichever doesn't get to be prime minister - won't be long for the leadership.

As an object lesson in how not to leave the job of party leader, you'd have to go a long way to beat Gordon Brown.

Following the indecisive result of the general election in 2010, he hung around in Downing Street for a few days - as he was constitutionally bound to do, since he was still prime minister - but then abruptly walked out, a few hours before the deal between Cameron and Clegg was concluded: and on that he was constitutionally wrong.

The real problem, though, was what followed. Brown resigned the Labour leadership and sulked off to Scotland, leaving Harriet Harman to mind the shop for the next few months while the long process of choosing a new leader played itself out. It was during that period that the narrative of the financial crash and crisis was firmly fixed in the public consciousness by the coalition government.

Brown was badly damaged by then, but he should still have been capable of articulating an alternative view, of defending the economic growth figures bequeathed to the new government. He didn't do so. And the legacy of Brown's self-indulgence could be seen on Question Time last night, as Ed Miliband squirmed in the face of questions on Labour's economic record. The ground lost in 2010 has never been recovered.

Compare and contrast Michael Howard departure from the Conservative Party leadership in 2005. He announced immediately after losing the election that he would be standing down, but not for another six months, not till a new leader had been chosen. He then reshuffled his front-bench team and promoted George Osborne to shadow chancellor and David Cameron to shadow education secretary, thereby setting up the new generation to inherit the leadership. It worked perfectly (though Howard would probably have preferred Osborne).

It is possible in retrospect to conclude that Howard didn't ultimately do his party any favours in the short term, that David Davis would have been a sounder choice in 2005 and might well have won a majority in 2010. But even if one accepted this, Howard was at least doing what he genuinely believed was in his party's interests. Unlike Brown, who simply abandoned his party.

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)

I.F.S. Express

It seems that it's now part of the British constitution that all election manifesto launches should be accompanied by the comments of the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. So I thought I'd look back I'd look back at how the IFS has greeted previous manifestos, to see if there are any lines of continuity:

'"We've had thirteen years of people at the top getting preferential treatment," said [John] Smith. "We are starting to speak up for the ordinary taxpayer and the average family." Labour believes that the endorsement of its arithmetic by the Institute for Fiscal Studies makes it "game, set and match".' - Sunday Times 22 March 1992

'[The IFS document] will criticise Gordon Brown's pledge to stick to the existing government spending totals for the first two years of a Labour government. Andrew Dilnot, the IFS's director, has made no secret of his view that the sharp slowdown in real-terms spending implied by the existing plans will be catastrophic for the provision of some public services.' - Independent 9 April 1997

'Howard Reed of the IFS said there was a limit to what to what could be saved [under a Conservative government] without having to make cuts in "real" services on the ground. If there were easy ways to save money without such cuts then other parties would be doing so too, he added.' - Daily Telegraph 16 May 2001

'Robert Chote of the Institute for Fiscal Studies said: "Will taxes have to go up if the Tories win? No, as long as they can deliver the spending cuts they have promised. Will taxes have to go up if Labour wins? Yes, if we are right that revenues will be weaker than the Treasury hopes and if Gordon Brown sticks to his Budget goals for the public finances."' - Evening Standard 7 April 2005

'The independent Institute for Fiscal Studies said the manifesto gave no certainty on the size and combination of tax rises and spending cuts envisaged to meet Labour's pledge to halve Britain's £167 billion deficit within four years. "The party listed plenty of new things it would like to do, but was no clearer about where the spending cuts will fall," said the IFS. "It listed a few tax increases that it promised not to implement, but left the door wide open to many others."' - Independent 13 April 2010