Gordon Brown: how calls for the prime minister to resign built up
Updated on 04 September 2008
Charles Clarke has called for Gordon Brown to resign "within months" if he doesn't improve his leadership. Is he the first MP to do so?
May 11 2008: Former welfare minister Frank Field launches an attack on the PM in the heat of the battle over the scrapping of the 10p tax rate, which left many of the poorest worse off.
"I'm sure next election will be two years, two weeks away - the last moment we could legitimately hold it - and I would be very surprised if he's still leader of the Labour party then," he told the World Service.
"If he asked my advice, I would say to him, talk to the people who you most love and who most love you, and see what they say and act on their advice."
Two days later, however, he apologised for the comments after the chancellor announced an emergency compensation package.
"As the Prime Minister is in his place, may I add that over the weekend I allowed my campaign to become personal," he told parliament. "I much regret that, and I apologise without reservation.
25 July 2008: Labour MP Graham Stringer speaks out after the party loses the previously safe seat of Glasgow East to the SNP.
The cabinet should have a "closed and honest discussion with Gordon Brown," he is quoted as saying in The Times. "We need a new start and that can only come from a debate around the leadership."
28 July 2008: Another back bencher - Labour MP Gordon Prentice - ups the ante, calling for a new leader.
"I told my Pendle management committee last week that I didn't think Gordon was the man who could take us into the next election and win it," he told Radio 4's The World at One.
"I think you need a different set of skills to be PM than you do as the chancellor of the exchequer - that's the reality.
"You've got to be able to paint a picture, you've got to motivate people, you've got to enthuse people and you've got to lead. That's just not happening.
"I just think we need a new leader."
29 July 2008: Foreign secretary David Miliband pens a Guardian article calling for change, but not mentioning Gordon Brown by name.
Although not an explicit call for the PM to go, but spawns frenzied speculation about Miliband's leadership ambitions at a time when public politics is cooling down for the summer break.
"New Labour won three elections by offering real change, not just in policy but in the way we do politics," Miliband concluded. "We must do so again. So let's stop feeling sorry for ourselves, enjoy a break, and then find the confidence to make our case afresh."
3 September 2008: Charles Clarke is a known Brown agitator - but, just as Brown unrolls his economic relaunch plan, the former home secretary makes the most damning decapitation call yet.
Blow one - an article in the New Statesman - warns the party is "destined for disaster" if it continues as it is.
He dismisses allegations of a "Blairite plot", saying instead that: "There is, however, a deep and widely shared concern - which does not derive from ideology - that Labour is destined to disaster if we go on as we are, combined with a determination that we will not permit that to happen."
Blow two hits even harder in media interviews the next day, when he calls for Brown to quit in a matter of months unless he can turn things around.
"There are many, many people now who are concerned about our direction and our capacity to win the next election. That is an almost universal feeling," he tells Radio 4's Today - although he acknowledges there is no "clarity about a particular course of action.
"The first [option] is for the performance of the government to improve significantly which is what I think many people are hoping for, the second is for Gordon Brown to stand down as prime minister with honour and have a proper leadership election to address the proper issues. Both of those are perfectly reputable courses of action."
When asked how long he gave Brown, Clarke said: "It's a question of months really, it's whether he can deal with the situation. I am personally a sceptic, I always have been, but I also think it is entirely possible he could turn it around".
But if he fails to turn it around Clarke says it would be "best for the country and the party would be if Gordon made his own mind up, and decided it had come to a point where it's better to go with honour, and that would be the best".
