Prognosis - "Johnno"

A couple of days later than intended, but before giroscope gets on to the Tory conference I had to round off the fall-out from the Labour conference by saying a few words on the leadership chances of Alan Johnson, who I think is the only serious contender to Gordon Brown for the job.

That's not to say I think "Johnno" stands a good chance at this stage. Brown may have been a bit flat and uninspiring at Conference but he wasn't useless, and he still has a huge power base in the party. So if Tony Blair were to step down tomorrow it would be an incredible risk for Johnson to throw his hat into the ring, and he would have a lot of ground to make up. Johnno's Conference speech was good but stuck fairly rigidly to his education portfolio and wasn't an obvious grab for the leadership, unlike John Reid, who really was trying to whip the assembled hordes into a frenzy.

Anyone standing for the leadership needs 44 nominations from fellow Labour MPs. Brown will secure this easily from anyone who wants to be a minister in the new government. The hard-left candidate, John McDonnell, will also easily get 44 nominations. Beyond that there is room for probably only one candidate on an anti-Brown platform - which might be a "Blairite" platform but might be something else entirely. So who will that candidate be?

Let's discount Alan Milburn, who no-one takes seriously apart from himself and the three or so other people who regularly read Progress. Dr John Reid appears to be in the strongest position at the moment but what is this really based on? He offers a policy stance somewhere around the region of what Dr Liam Fox was offering in the Tory party leadership contest last year (what is it about these doctors?) - flag waving, pompous gibberish and a grab for the BNP white working class vote. The Tories did not fall for this sub- Norman Tebbit guff last year and Labour is even less likely to fall for it next year. If Reid does stand, then he will get stomped by Brown, and rightly so.

I think that if he can get a campaign up and running at the right time, Alan Johnson has the edge on any other anti-Brown candidate, for several reasons. First, he does not have to run as the "Blairite" candidate - in fact, it would be suicidal to do so. That doesn't mean he wouldn't get votes from Blairites, but the message must be party unity on a new platform - "neither Blair nor Brown", to coin a phrase. Milburn and Reid are in their own way setting themselves up as "uber-Blairites" - but Blairism (if there is such a thing) is going to look very tired when Tony eventually quits, and there will be a hunger for something new. I don't see how Gordon Brown, as the architect of huge swathes of government policy for the past decade, can deliver something new - whereas Alan Johnson can.

Second, I think Johnson will play better with the electorate than Brown. He looks more comfortable on TV, is a more relaxed interviewee, and seems more approachable. He is from the John Major school of likeable poliitican, which seems a ludicrous compliment, given what eventually happened to Major, but his election win in 1992 was probably the most remarkable win in post-war British politics. You are unlikely to find George Osborne saying that Alan Johnson is "autistic" (more on this in a later post.)

Finally, Johnson has a union background, which may help in the union section of the electoral college for the leadership. Following John Smith's 1993 reforms, trade union members now cast their votes individually for leader, rather than the old block vote system. Many of these trade unionists will not be Labour activists, or even Labour voters, and thus they may be less tied in to the whole Gordon Brown mythology than the Labour party membership will be.

All this is highly speculative and depends on two crucial condition. One is that Johnno puts a credible campaign together when the time comes. This, at least, is in his hands. (I could put an absolute killer campaign together for him, but he is unlikely to ask me to... but Alan, if you are reading this, do get in touch asap, if only to correct any factual errors.) The other prerequisite is that Gordon Brown's credibility deteriorates, for whatever reason, over the next few months. This is anybody's guess and will depend on a whole range of factors including the degree of infighting in the party, the performance of the economy, Labour's opinion poll showing, continuing problems with Gordon's hairstyle and weight, and many other things.

But anyway that's enough of Labour for a little while... now we turn our attention to the PR love-in that is the Conservative conference in Bournemouth. Coming soon...