 | 'Few voters in Britain know Mr Brown as well as the people of Fife, many of whom he has represented for 26 years. They know his strengths and his tricks - and can smell humbug a mile away. They felt ignored and wanted a change.' Fraser Nelson in Scotland on Sunday, 12 th February 2006. |  |
LAST week's Dunfermline intifada was anticipated by no-one in Westminster. A quiet town which voted Labour for decades delivered a thunderbolt at 12.38am - such a surprise that, at first, no-one could work out who to blame for losing so safe a seat.
Was it Tony Blair? A few London newspapers concluded that the Prime Minister is visibly losing his Commons authority so the electorate of Dunfermline and West Fife sent him a "go and go now" message by voting Liberal Democrat.
Or was the loser David Cameron? After all the hype over a Tory revival, its vote fell - taking it from a weak fourth place to a helpless fourth place. A sign, it was whispered, that the Cameron phenomenon is confined to Westminster.
Alistair Darling, in his role as Scottish Secretary, gallantly identified himself as the culprit by accepting "entire responsibility for the conduct of this election campaign" - and, ergo, its abject failure. But the real guilt lay in Russia.
Sitting at the G8 finance ministers meeting in Moscow, Gordon Brown said nothing about the campaign he had led to disaster. He had chosen the candidate, trod the turf, pressed the flesh and personalised events wherever possible.
Anyone who has followed the campaign knows that the Chancellor's fingerprints were all over it. He chaired press conferences, decided campaign themes. Tony Blair was not going to set foot in the constituency: Mr Brown sensed victory, and wanted it to be his.
Catherine Stihler, the candidate, was made to regurgitate Brownite statistical babble. "The £200 winter fuel allowance has warmed 13,000 pensioner homes," ran her statements. "7,000 families are benefiting from the child tax credit" and so on.
Press releases would begin "Gordon Brown announces" - and detail schemes like "plans to create 10,000 new jobs". This turned out to be vague aspirations to grow the Fife economy. The electorate were being taken for idiots.
The Lexmark factory closure, and the loss of 700 jobs, rang more true - and resonated with the national trend of rising unemployment. For perhaps the first time since Labour came to power, the Brown fiction was demonstrably clashing with the UK reality.
Add to this Scotland's propensity to swing away from Labour in by-elections and the result was one of its most humiliating defeats. This left Labour delegates with a sobering thought as they gathered in Blackpool for the spring conference.
If Brown cannot win in his own backyard, what chance does he have of winning England? If his own Fife brethren are capable of uniting to deliver him such a slap in the face, then what kind of reception will he enjoy from the British suburbs?
It is unlikely Labour MPs will be daft enough to believe the official line that poor Mr Darling was to blame. Enough of them were dispatched off to campaign in Dunfermline to know who was calling the shots, writing the lines.
The Blairites certainly grasp it. They see the Prime Minister as the best election-winning machine in the party's history, and have long feared that the Chancellor's woeful communication skills will backfire on election day.
And the Dunfermline result fits a pattern. Last week, the CBI released a survey showing its members shiver at the thought of a Brown-led government: four in five believe the reform agenda will stop as soon as he takes charge.
Mr Darling grumbles that Dunfermline was fought on "local issues", which is a polite way of saying that no-one cared about Mr Brown's statistics. The Lib Dems, by contrast, spoke fluent human - and campaigned locally.
They also campaigned cleverly. They were making calls to voters even before Rachel Squire died from cancer - her illness was well-known. Their literature was high quality and posted daily. Their telephone campaigning was assiduous. They took it seriously.
If Mr Darling is right, and "local issues" beat Labour, then this is even greater cause for alarm. It indicates a backlash against a centralising, remote government - which is embodied by Mr Brown and his endless volley of UK-wide schemes.
The Chancellor came to Dunfermline and tried to localise his initiatives by counting how many constituents were on welfare (this, apparently, is a good thing) and warning that his derisory £200 bung to pensioners would be "put at risk" by voting for another party.
Dunfermline is fast becoming a boom town, where people aspire to more than being on benefits. Pensioners would like to be taxed less and given better facilities - not told that hospital facilities will close because it fits a centralising Labour grand plan.
Dunfermline's IQ seems to have been higher than Labour's election planners bargained for. It was an massive, anti-Labour protest vote: the Lib Dems latterly campaigned as "the only party to beat Labour" and that is exactly why they were elected.
The vote topped off a dire week for Mr Cameron. He faced, for the first time, a full attack from Tony Blair who denounced him as a "flip-flopper" because he switched so many policies.
This is the exact phrase George W Bush used to defeat John Kerry in November 2004. "You may not like me, but you know what I stand for," said the president. Mr Brown, who has a few ideas which he flogs to death, can say the same.
But last week, the Conservatives have seen how Mr Brown can be beaten: the Chancellor cannot flip-flop and uses the same tired phrases and figures again and again. Left to his own devices, he is capable of boring even his own core voters into open revolt.
And no matter how much he may tell voters that the economy is booming and we've never had it so good, it is getting harder to hide the truth: the rising unemployment, the soaring bankruptcies and economic growth at its worst for more than a decade.
Few voters in Britain know Mr Brown as well as the people of Fife, many of whom he has represented for 26 years. They know his strengths and his tricks - and can smell humbug a mile away. They felt ignored and wanted a change.
What is worse: a flip-flopper, or a bore? Labour last week witnessed the template for its own defeat. The Dunfermline intifada is a memory which should haunt the party as it comes to choose its next leader.
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