Is Gordon Brown Labour’s Lloyd George?
There’s a fascinating article in today’s Financial Times by Peter Clarke, drawing the comparisons between Asquith/Tony Blair and Lloyd George/Gordon Brown – two Prime Minister and Chancellor ‘political couples’ separated by a century, who helped their parties back into government after a couple of decades in the wilderness, dominating the political landscape, but whose personal rivalry triggered their parties’ decline. Here’s an excerpt: It was when the Liberals’ failure of leadership left them divided that Labour saw its chance, and opted to fight for and by itself. The split between Asquith and Lloyd George thus had consequences that neither man could have imagined, as they surveyed the wreckage of a party for whose leadership they had so unforgivingly contended. Why should Labour be immune to such a fate? The fact it survived a crisis in the 1980s, when the Social Democratic party split away, may comfort some who rely on the solidity of Labour’s natural constituency. But the SDP-Lib
