The pressure on Gordon Brown was significantly increased today by the unlikely figure of Frank Field, who has written a blog post of such acute and bitter intensity as to penetrate even the thick carapace of denial with which the Prime Minister has girded himself.
Under the title Darkness at the Heart of the Labour Party, Field bemoans the emptiness of a once-great political movement, a moral crusade that has become a nothingness. The Government, he declares, has ceased to govern and has failed to seize the opportunity to use the last year of its term to show the electorate why it should stay in office.
Instead, says Field, it is concentrating its attention, in the dying months of this Parliament, on nothing loftier than smearing the opposition:
It is this contrast between how we should be behaving, and what has been exposed, that is the real killer. A necessary government information machine has been corrupted by a spin that seeks not to inform but control and, if needs be, destroy. And it has been in existence for over a decade.
This is terrible stuff for the Prime Minister: a sorrowful, regretful condemnation of his own party from a serious man who carries huge respect on both sides of the House.
Field would never write such a piece thoughtlessly, lightly, or out of spite. It is not in his nature.
And that is why it is so devastating.
It’s difficult now to avoid the growing sense that the Labour Party is on the cusp of one of its periodic three-term peregrinations to the political wilderness. If an all-consuming economic cataclysm, which, if Gordon Brown didn’t exactly create, he certainly didn’t anticipate or tackle adequately, and a still lingering anger over Iraq wasn’t enough, then the latest glimpse into the dark heart of New-Labour’s smear machine, will almost certainly consign them to as long a spell in dismal Opposition as the Conservative party have just endured.