Charles Clarke sends mixed messages to PM

Charles Clarke, the former Home Secretary, appears to be developing something of a schizophrenic obsession with Gordon Brown. Only last week he gave an interview to the New Statesman saying that Tony Blair had wanted Clarke, not Brown, to be leader of the Labour Party, only to tell the Daily Telegraph a few days later, in an apparent act of contrition, that he regretted his past pronouncements on Brown, which have included calling him a "control freak" and a practitioner of "dog-whistle politics".

Now, in an interview with Politick magazine, Clarke is at it again. While he begins the interview by telling Politick's editor, Laura-Jane Foley, that he doesn't want to talk about Brown, she writes that he does just the opposite. "Clarke happily keeps talking about the Prime Minister throughout the interview," says Foley. "It's just he keeps interspersing his comments with declarations that he doesn't want to talk about him anymore. The funny thing is Clarke appears to have a lot of respect and praise for Brown, so his refusenik attitude is very odd."

Clarke, who has expressed his desire to re-enter government, then immediately tells Foley that the greatest Labour leader "has to be Tony Blair". He says: "The spade work for his victory was done by Neil Kinnock during his leadership of the Labour party. But actually the achievement of ultimately winning power for Labour has to go to Tony".

He then explains why he shut down his 2020 Vision web initiative, which he launched last year as a forum for open debate about the future of the Labour Party, saying that "it was seen as an anti Gordon Brown organisation  -  wrongly -  and I thought it wasn't helpful to have that tension."

What can it all mean? One thing he is clear about is his own legacy. Clarke concludes the interview by saying: "I'd like to be remembered as somebody who helped reform the Labour party in its recovery from the worst depths of despair that we've had in our history to a point at which we could first win power and then carry through changes. I feel proud of my own record in that regard."
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