Time For Gordon's Eden Project?

By now, the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has seen his political honeymoon well and truly over.

Indeed, one joke is that his ambition is to serve longer than Alec Douglas-Home! Douglas-Home was the Conservative Prime Minister who had 364 days in office, becoming Prime Minister upon Harold Macmillan's resignation in October 1963 before leading the Conservatives to defeat in October 1964.

And now, several papers suggest that Labour will try to remove Brown if there is a disastrous election result on 1 May- which sees local elections across all of England (outside of London) and elections for Mayor of London and to the Greater London Assembly.

It is quite difficult to remove a Labour leader- it needs a special party conference- but a Prime Minister could be ousted by Cabinet pressure, e.g a mass resignation by Cabinet members.

And I read that a couple of Labour MPs have compared Brown to Anthony Eden.

Eden was the Conservative Prime Minister from April 1955 to January 1957, succeedng his wife's uncle, Winston Churchill. Now, it is wrong to say, as one paper does, that Brown could, like Eden, never fight a general election as Prime Minister. Eden's big, overlooked, achievement was in May 1955, when he led the Conservatives to an election victory, with the highest share of the vote scored by any party in the post-war era.

But, in his earlier political experience, Eden had three spells as Foreign Secretary- December 1935 to February 1938 (resigning over the then Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain's, attempts to appease Germany and Italy), December 1940 to July 1945 (when Churchill's Government fell) and October 1951 to April 1955 (Churchill's second time as Prime Minister).

And, despite being the foreign affairs expert, Eden was brought down as Prime Minister over a foreign policy- attempts to defend the Suez Canal from invasion. Although, to be fair, and this influenced a generation of British politicians, a major factor in defeat over Suez was the disgraceful decision by Dwight Eisenhower to betray Britain (and betray Israel at the same time). Note that Britain owned the canal through a treaty signed between us and Egypt in 1936, which in 1951 Egypt decided it would not honour, at the same time getting weapons from the Soviet bloc to prepare to attack Israel. It all went wrong when Eisenhower blackmailed Eden by threatening a run on the pound if we didn't surrender (despite the massive propaganda victory Eisenhower's strange behaviour over Suez gave the Soviet Union).

And Brown's crisis is over financial policy- bearing in mind that he spent 10 years as Chancellor of the Exchequer- fulled by the collapse of Northern Rock, is notdue to any external force, or another nation, but due to no more and no less than the Government being incompetent in financial matters.

So, it is unfair to compare Brown to Eden. The difference is because Eden was not responsible for the things that forced him from office.