Gerri Peev: Time for Gentlemen's Club to open its doors

Published on Tuesday 2 June 2009 22:01

WHEN Gordon Brown asked the judges of Britain's Got Talent about Susan Boyle's wellbeing, it may well have been a covert attempt to find out how to get a speedy referral to the Priory.

With an electoral holocaust on the cards for Labour at this Thursday's elections, who could blame the Prime Minister for seeking to beat a hasty retreat?

To cure the sickness of the expenses debacle, the Prime Minister's preferred prescription seems to be a dose of deckchair shuffling.

But he needs to be careful that the anticipated cull does not result in an even more macho gang than currently sits around the table.

At the time when he can least afford it, Brown needs a rest. His confusion was apparent on the Andrew Marr Show last Sunday, when, asked about Lords reform, he immediately spluttered: "I'm not interested in going to the House of Lords!" betraying the fact that enforced early retirement is clearly plaguing his thoughts.

No wonder, then, that switching his top lieutenants is the general's plan to keep him in charge of the war.

Alistair Darling, whose luck as Chancellor is almost as thin as Brown's is as Prime Minister, appears to be on his way out of Number 11. After being given a hospital pass by Brown, Darling has quietly and calmly in the middle of the biggest recession in living memory, managed to steer the country's finances. The fact that he run them more or less into the ground is not his fault. Actually to describe him as the driver would be wrong, he was more akin to a passenger being asked to reach out and pull the emergency brake, when the mechanic who last gave the vehicle its MOT removed it.

But it is for his expenses transgressions that Darling is now being asked to move over. On the face of it, the home flipping, overcharging for the service charge on his flat and billing taxpayers for accountancy fees to navigate a complex system that his own department inflicts on millions of innocents seems unforgivable.

But the idea of Darling purposely fiddling anything other than the cuffs on his Marks & Spencer shirt is ludicrous to even his biggest detractors.

This is precisely why his opposite numbers are calling for his blood. He is just too boring to hate or attack.

Expect very different levels of hostility towards Ed Balls however. The only question will be, whether the vitriol is more venomous from Labour's benches or the Tories.

Known as a vicious thug on the football field, Balls is spoiling for a fight off the pitch. At a press briefing last week, he seemed genuinely anguished that the expenses fiasco had detracted the press from questioning the Tories' spending cuts for schools. He is itching to get back to the Treasury, where he and the likes of Damian McBride cut their sharp teeth in anticipation for the long road to Number 10.

While Balls is one of the few economic literates in the Cabinet, he is the nuclear option for many of his colleagues. As one Labour source said, "If Balls is the answer, you are asking the wrong question."

On the other hand, he could lash out at the Tories with the dexterity that anyone else in Cabinet would lack, while making himself an equally legitimate target.

Brown could then serve to indulge or punish his potential challengers: David Miliband and Alan Johnson, with difficult posts such as the Home Office that have foiled almost every minister who is ever parachuted into them.

With Jacqui Smith to go as Home Secretary and the anticipated axing of Hazel Blears, over her initial failure to pay capital gains tax, Brown will be left with few women in the top ranks.

Caroline Flint, sidelined last time as Europe minister, could come under more pressure.

Margaret Beckett is tipped for a comeback to the top table. But her experience, and slightly high-handed manner, are the very qualities that could serve to irk voters, if a recent appearance on Question Time are anything to go by.

But Brown needs to beware of finding himself in a even more testosterone-fuelled Cabinet than the current line up.

With many academics and business analysts now admitting that the world economy was plunged into crisis by male egos, Brown's style of government is more conclusively guilty of the same. Not listening, a reluctance to say sorry and

And yet one minister who has defied her critics and has played a high risk but defiantly brave strategy is Harriet Harman. She emerged from nowhere to win the deputy leadership of the party in 2007, to the bafflement and chagrin of many MPs and media commentators. But she has confounded expectations (OK, they were pretty low to be honest but nevertheless) with some impressive performances in the Chamber, including against the formidable debator/stand-up comic William Hague.

As Commons Leader, she also manages to turn her slip ups in the House into a charming and innocent mistake at her own expense. Once thought of as humourless, she has learned to laugh at herself before everyone else does. She has also been unafraid to speak out without creating an insurrection, when she needed to. This has been decoded as a leadership bid by the most suspicious minds hovering around Brown. Perhaps it is with good reason. Harman's ardent feminism may have been distasteful to some middle class women at the height of the boom times. But with a recession and the government dropping its pledge to make men just as unemployable as women by giving them near equal parental leave, a backlash is looming.

If Brown is serious about purging the gentleman's club culture, he must start with the backroom boys in his own gang.

Now is not the time for more Balls at the top table. A woman's touch, rather than a clunking fist, is badly needed near Number 10.