UK:GORDON BROWN should "stand down with honour" unless able to "establish his authority and set a clear leadership direction" in the next few months, former home secretary Charles Clarke said yesterday, reports Frank Millar, London Editor.
In his second intervention in as many days Mr Clarke, a long-standing critic of Mr Brown, acknowledged that he himself would not have the support to launch a leadership challenge.
However, he insisted that many people inside the Labour Party shared his concern - first outlined in an article for the New Statesman magazine - that without a change of direction Labour is facing "utter destruction at the next general election".
Mr Clarke's article included the assertion that there were those like himself who would "not permit that to happen".
Yesterday, however, he conceded it would turn on a decision of members of the cabinet should Mr Brown decline to go of his own accord.
In an interview on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Mr Clarke maintained it was still "entirely possible" for Mr Brown to "turn it around". But he admitted he was "a sceptic" and suggested Mr Brown now had only a matter of months in which to establish "a sense of decisiveness and clarity".
Labour faced only two options, suggested Mr Clarke, who again denied the existence of any "Blairite" plot against Brown. "The first is for the performance of the government to improve significantly . . . the second is for Gordon Brown to stand down as prime minister with honour and have a proper leadership election."
Ahead of a party conference in Manchester in just over a fortnight, Mr Clarke suggested it was "a question of months really . . . a question of seeing . . . whether he can deal with the situation". What was not acceptable, he argued, was for MPs to decide Labour was going to lose the next election and that there was nothing they could do about it. That kind of "fatalism" was "very damaging indeed".
Asked what should happen if Mr Brown failed to recover the position, Mr Clarke said: "The best for the country would be if Gordon made his own mind up, that is, after all, what a whole string of national leaders and party leaders have done in past decades - decided that there came a point where it was better for them to go with honour . . . In the event that didn't happen, I think it would be down principally to the cabinet to decide how to proceed."
Mr Clarke accepted there was no disposition within the cabinet for such a course of action, while deputy party leader Harriet Harman said she did not believe there would be a leadership challenge. However, even Lord O'Neill, a Brown ally, accepted that the leadership issue could be thrown open again should Labour fare badly in next summer's local and European elections.