John Rentoul: Clarke should have kept it in the family

Charles Clarke's warning that Labour is "destined to disaster if we go on as we are" was presumably not intended to strengthen Gordon Brown's hold on office. Paradoxically, though, it may have had that effect. The lack of any echo from the soundless walls of the Cabinet means that his urgency and frustration were left hanging in the air. Clarke's article in the New Statesman and ensuing interviews made little sense outside Westminster. The reaction of any normal person would have been: if Brown is so useless, why don't they do something about it?

Labour MPs I spoke to last week were very much in touch with this "normal" view, usually with added expletives. Some of them want to get rid of Brown but were furious with Clarke for calling for it to happen without having the means at his disposal. Strong supporters of Tony Blair agree with Clarke that Brown is leading Labour to "utter destruction", but think that it would make matters even worse to change leader. Which just goes to prove Clarke right that the word "Blairite" is "lazy and inaccurate shorthand". Another MP told me that, if a Blairite was someone who thought Brown had not been an improvement on his predecessor, there were now an awful lot of Blairites in the Parliamentary Labour Party.

In this respect, too, Labour MPs are in touch with public opinion. Yesterday's ComRes poll for The Independent suggested that only Tony Blair as leader would cut the Conservative lead.

The curiosity of Clarke's article was that it attracted so much attention for an assessment of Labour's prospects that would have appeared ordinary had a newspaper columnist made it. No wonder Alastair Campbell got his prism out. He was showing it off to Kirsty Wark on Newsnight. All current politics, he said, from Alistair Darling's croft-based prophecies to the housing and fuel measures, is reported through the "prism" of speculation about Gordon Brown's leadership. Everything that fits that story is pumped up; anything that does not fit is played down.

He has a point. Charles Clarke's opinion of the Prime Minister is well known, while the interesting part of the article – an intelligent critique of the policy legacy of the Blair Government – was completely ignored. Campbell diagnosed Clarke's error with his usual brutal simplicity. It was that the former Home Secretary seemed to think that he was a commentator rather than a politician.

Polly Toynbee made Campbell's point for him yesterday by declaring: "Unseating a prime minister is very high risk – but a dying party should be ready to take dangerous medicine if that's the last chance left." At least Clarke refused to nominate Brown for the leadership last year, in contrast to Brown's pom-pom wavers in The Guardian, Toynbee and Jackie Ashley, who have now turned against him. Clarke's mistake, therefore, was to give expression to the truth. Has he not heard the phrase "organised hypocrisy" as a description of the essential principle of a party system in a democracy?

Campbell's TV appearance was not, however, entirely congenial to Brown. He also reminded the "Brownites" – admittedly an equally "lazy and inaccurate" term – of the need to "defend the record". If Clarke should be expected to be hypocritical enough to pretend that he cares about party unity, then the Brownites should pretend that they stand by the main points of Blair's record. As Blair himself pointed out, in the email leaked last month, Brown's big mistake was that he "dissed our own record".

Simply by appearing on a programme that all MPs watch when they are not on it, Campbell also made the point that his absence from the centre of government, or the absence of someone like him, is a large part of Gordon Brown's problem. Time and again, Brown's No 10 operation has allowed journalists to spend days speculating on things like snap elections and windfall taxes that should have been squashed emphatically within hours.

In other words, what this government needs is more hypocrisy, and more spin.

Meanwhile, however, we commentators are obliged to report what we believe is going on behind the scenes and what is likely to happen next. As a commentator, Clarke did not even tell the half of it. The overwhelming opinion among Labour MPs is that the Brown premiership is in effect over. The only question is how it will end. Hence the raised voices behind closed doors in Westminster in the last few weeks. Some MPs, I am told, reacted badly on being told by Nick Brown, the deputy chief whip: "If GB goes down, he's going to take everybody with him."

I should say that I doubt if Nick Brown said it in the tone of voice that was reported to me. I have never found him to be the "bit of a political thug" that Cherie Blair called him in her memoir. It is possible that he was simply expressing the same view put to me by the pessimistic "Blairite" MP, that changing leader would only make matters worse for the party.

That was not how his words were received, however. It is the confusion between commentary and politics again: was he merely describing what he thought would happen, or was he warning the comrades to stay in line?

Whatever it was, it goes to the heart of the debate among MPs – of all parties – at the moment. They wonder what Gordon Brown will do if Labour fails to show any sign of life in the opinion polls. There are two schools of thought: one is that he would stand down to save the party he loves. The other is that he will try to stay on until the bitter end, regardless of how certain defeat may seem.

One Labour MP told me: "If the party is against him and the country is against him, he'll step down." He thinks that Brown – unlike some of those around him – does care what happens to the party.

A senior Liberal Democrat MP observed last week that politics is speeding up. Labour is now the only major party that has not ditched a leader without allowing him to fight an election. The Tories did it with Iain Duncan Smith; the Lib Dems got rid of Sir Menzies Campbell.

Of course, it is different if a party is in government. The best parallel is with the end of the Major government, which was staring defeat in the face for three years. Why didn't the Tories dump John Major and get Michael Heseltine in, who might at least have limited the Tory losses?

The main reason was that the Conservative Party was riven by ideological war. Heseltine and Kenneth Clarke were on the wrong side of the European argument, which meant that the threat to Major's leadership came from the anti-European wing. It was cauterised by the Prime Minister's invitation to critics to stand against him: Michael Portillo put in the phone lines, but only John Redwood stood.

Labour does not have the same level of ideological conflict. The mild differences between Blairites and those that favour more traditional Labour emphases are important, but they are not what is keeping the plotters in check.

More important are the perceived weaknesses of David Miliband, the most likely successor (given that Alan Johnson does not want the top job), and the fact that the last date for the election is still 21 months away.

And, yes, this is to view politics through Alastair Campbell's "prism" of Brown's leadership. But that is how MPs see it, in private. Clarke's only mistake was to go public.