Why did nobody stop Gordon Brown?

If you read only one article day read John Rentoul's piece in todays Independent, here's an extract:

'The third reaction on reading Alistair Darling's memoir, after enjoying the quality of the writing and the nicely understated humour, is to wonder again how Gordon Brown was ever allowed to be Prime Minister.

Of course, we knew the main points of the story at the time. It was no secret that Brown resented Tony Blair's seizure of the Labour leadership in 1994, or that Brown was impatient to succeed him from 2004, or that towards the end there were policy differences between them. It became known, especially during Brown's three years as Prime Minister, that he could be rude, difficult and bad-tempered.
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With each successive diary and memoir, though, our knowledge of Brown's unreasonableness advanced another notch. Each advance was surprising, but small, and produced diminishing returns of outrage, so it was easy to lose sight of how far we had come. Now we have to look back and conclude that his behaviour should have ruled him out of high office.

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The third volume of Campbell's "complete" Diaries, published in July, recounted one appalling example of Brown's conduct after another – and still only took us to 2001, four years into Blair's 10-year stint at the top. Because there were so many,and because we had already got the basic idea – Brown was a monster – much of it went unreported. Some of the accounts of Brown being monosyllabic or childishly unhelpful when asked direct questions in meetings are pure John Cleese: so embarrassing they are not funny. Campbell tells of a discussion about Europe in 2000, when Peter Mandelson said that "we had to be more positive" and "Gordon literally turned away to look at the wall".

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Then there are the questions for others in the Labour Party: How did Brown succeed unopposed to the leadership? And why did the party not change leader before the 2010 election? We do not need Darling's book to tell us that the hopes many in the party had that Brown would operate differently once he was in the top job were quickly dashed – although this weekend's revelations add brushstroke detail and depth to the picture.

John McTernan, who had been Blair's political adviser and who worked at the Scotland Office until last year, tells how Brown replicated his own broken relationship with Blair in his dealings with his own Chancellor. Brown wanted the 2010 election to be about "cuts versus investment". In one meeting of advisers from Nos 10 and 11, McTernan asked: "Surely the real choice is between our cuts and theirs?" He wrote in The Scotsman last week: "This was dismissed, but later No 10 issued an edict to Darling's staff. While they hadn't supported my line, they had rolled their eyes while No 10 staffers were talking."

Darling, too, managed to replicate one important feature of the dysfunctional relationship with No 10 of his predecessor, which was that he made it hard for the Prime Minister to sack him. Thus he was able to see off Brown's feeble attempt to appoint Ed Balls as chancellor, which has already been recounted by Peter Mandelson in his memoir – Brown asked Mandelson to find out how Darling would react to the possibility.

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The portrait of Gordon Brown that emerges from the memoirs and diaries is so bad that it can't all be his fault. Blair, Campbell, Mandelson and Darling stopped short of doing something to stop Brown when they had the chance. David Miliband and Alan Johnson, who never said a bad word about Brown but who could have sought the top job, chose not to do so. In my view, either or both should have done.

No doubt Alistair Darling thinks he could have done better as Labour leader at the last election, and I would agree with that too. But none of them did what had to be done, so it is not much use arguing now over who was right and who was wrong.'

The Labour party was full of cowards who feared Gordon Brown and his attack dogs more than they feared what he could do to the Labour party and the Country. Well cowards; thanks a lot!