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Gor­don Brown, Labour’s leader-in-waiting, can’t win the next elec­tion. This week’s address to the Labour Party Con­fer­ence might as well have been his speech con­ced­ing vic­tory to David Cameron.

Why is Gordie such a lia­bil­ity? Not because of the dis­dain­ful ver­dict of dodgy News­night focus groups, or his recent impa­tient unleash­ing of political-suicide bombers on Num­ber 10, or even because his Con­fer­ence speech with its lib­eral use of the word ‘aspi­ra­tions’ sounded like that of an ambi­tious TUC chief, but because he’s such a bad liar.

The proof? The most embar­rass­ing, excru­ci­at­ing lie from that speech – “It has been a priv­i­lege for me to work with and for the most suc­cess­ful ever leader and Labour prime min­is­ter” – has dom­i­nated the cov­er­age of it.

That it should have been Cherie Blair, wife of the most suc­cess­ful ever lying Prime Min­is­ters in British his­tory who pointed this out to the world is entirely appro­pri­ate. After all, she must, by now, be some­thing of an expert. She was though entirely right when she claimed she was mis­heard: she didn’t say, ‘Well, that’s a lie.’, you see. What she actu­ally said was, ‘God, you’re such a bad liar’.

Cer­tainly, we all squirmed and tut­ted when we heard him. It may or may not have been an endorse­ment that was wrung out of Gor­don by the appli­ca­tion of a hot poker to the Chancellor’s red box, but it was def­i­nitely tor­ture for the rest of us. Even though Tony has yet to relin­quish the reigns of power, and despite the fact that we’re all, in one way or another, as tired of him as he now looks, it was dif­fi­cult watch­ing Brown’s near-autistic deliv­ery not to feel like we were miss­ing Tone already. A feel­ing only enhanced by Blair’s Hol­ly­wood per­for­mance the fol­low­ing day, com­plete with his trade­mark, quavery-voiced sin­cere insin­cer­ity and impres­sively shame­less use of the word ‘truth’ in the first few sec­onds of his final speech to Conference.

Those who com­plained that ‘Blair lied to us!’ after it emerged that there those Weapons of Mass Destruc­tion in Iraq were so fiendishly well-hidden that they, er, actu­ally didn’t exist at all, slightly miss the point. It’s his job. Tone has been so suc­cess­ful and so pop­u­lar for so long pre­cisely because he lies, and lies so well. Even after he has been caught lying in Lying Town, as with Iraq, he comes up with other lies that are equally if not more per­sua­sive, or at least momen­tar­ily divert­ing. He was, if you remem­ber, re-elected with another thump­ing major­ity after the crim­i­nal Iraq debacle.

Iraq aside, Tone usu­ally tells us the lies we want to hear – and he tells them extremely con­vinc­ingly. That’s what a politician’s job is. That’s what we elect them for. That’s what ‘aspi­ra­tions’, the things Brown kept refer­ring to in his speech, really are. Oth­er­wise known as ‘illu­sions’. It’s the basis of most rela­tion­ships. Like most suf­fer­ing wives, how­ever, what we don’t like and will not tol­er­ate is hav­ing our faces rubbed in it . This is why the Hun­gar­ian PM and Blair pal Fer­enc Gyurcsany got into such a pickle. Not because he lied but because he admit­ted – even behind closed doors – that he lied.

Admit­ting he lied is not a mis­take Blair is likely to ever make. Blair’s spe­cial tal­ent, the thing that puts him ahead of most other politi­cians, cer­tainly in British polit­i­cal his­tory, is that he can con­vince him­self his lies are lit­er­ally the god’s hon­est truth, at least for as long as he’s telling us them. And – truth be told – in his mind, he never actu­ally ‘lies’ to us at all. He’s an actor – an actor of the Stan­lislavsky school: the emo­tion he shows us is ‘true’, it’s just usu­ally attached to some­thing that is not. This is why he’s such a great per­former and politi­cian – we appre­ci­ate and are flat­tered by the energy and the psy­chosis he puts into his per­for­mances. He is a great manip­u­la­tor. (His final tear-jerking address to the Labour faith­ful demon­strated that.)

Brown on the other hand is a great oper­a­tor. And oper­a­tors, unlike manip­u­la­tors, are painful to watch. They resent hav­ing to manip­u­late us and we resent hav­ing to watch them resent­ing hav­ing to manip­u­late us. Tony is Princess Di to Brown’s Prince Charles. Brown, who tells us he is ‘quite pri­vate’ and who prefers ‘sub­stance over celebrity’ as if these were rea­sons why we should be inter­ested in him, clearly wants power but he doesn’t really want to become the thing that power is in this medi­ated day and age: an actor. He won’t be for­given for that by the electorate/audience. Clearly he will lie and lie to get the top job and to keep it – he has already proved this to us by care­fully par­rot­ing Tony’s lies about Iraq, for exam­ple – but unlike Tony he won’t do us the cour­tesy of lying con­vinc­ingly, let alone entertainingly.

The deliv­ery of his speech yes­ter­day was full of visual proof of this. I have no idea what Brown is like in the flesh, but on telly – i.e. the real world – Brown looks like a loser. Dead, hooded eyes which offer no con­tact with the audi­ence or the cam­era, chore­o­graphed but strangely ill-timed, claw­ing hand move­ments and weird goldfish-like gulps at the end of each line. After nine years of Tony’s glam­orous drag queen charisma, he looks like a par­tic­u­larly deluded punter audi­tion­ing for X-Factor while Simon Cow­ell pulls faces.

Brown may well, as he says, ‘rel­ish’ the oppor­tu­nity to ‘take on Cameron’, but Cameron looks increas­ingly likely to sim­ply sweep him aside. After a cou­ple of years of Brown-ness the elec­torate will stam­pede to elect the smooth, mois­turised, green-ish manip­u­la­tor Cameron, some­one who knows exactly what we want to hear and how to coo those sweet noth­ings in our ears. By then he’ll be seen as Tony Blair with­out Iraq. Tony Blair with­out the TUC. Tony Blair with­out the hag­gard face.

Tony Blair with­out Gor­don Brown.
© Mark Simp­son 2006