Don't stab Clarke in the back

Mo Mowlam, Ken Livingstone, ousted Cabinet minister David Clark, sacked parliamentary commissioner for standards Elizabeth Filkin: they all have one thing in common. Their final destruction or isolation was in each case presaged by a New Labour-inspired whispering campaign. Whispering campaigns are something that New Labour does really well. Better by far than reforming public services or bringing down crime.

New Labour brings real professional expertise and ruthless passion to whispering campaigns. Where it really excels is the silent assassination by a stab in the back.

And now, as was the case with Mowlam, they are turning on one of their own. Any attentive reader of the newspapers over the past six weeks will have noticed a steady drip-drop of venom aimed against Charles Clarke, the Labour Party chairman. Nothing explicit. Nothing substantial. Just a drip-drop of insinuation about his heavy drinking, his gluttony, his seedy physical appearance, his incompetence and his indiscretion.

Last week I spent two days at the Trades Union Congress in Blackpool. I served my time in the bars and smoke-filled meeting rooms. Again and again, a silent assassin's knife was slipped into the back of the Labour chairman.

Nor was I alone. The press was sent the message that Clarke was not up to it, that he was out of control, that he had missed his opportunity and could not do business with the "brothers".

In two weeks time the comrades will be back in Blackpool for Labour Conference, and this whispering will spread and deepen. Make no mistake: there are men and women right at the top of the Labour movement who are out to get Charles Clarke. Clarke has become that familiar phenomenon: the political air raid shelter. Those whose real target is Tony Blair, but dare not acknowledge the fact, turn on Clarke instead.

Clarke's enemies know that he was the Prime Minister's personal appointment as Labour Party chairman. They know that he was put there for two reasons. First, to repair the damaged relationship with the political party in the country. And second, to stand as a shield for the Prime Minister against his deadly ambitious Chancellor Gordon Brown.

Charles Clarke, in short, is fulfilling the same function for Tony Blair as poor doomed Norman Lamont did for John Major in the months following sterling's expulsion from the Exchange Rate Mechanism. He is there to absorb in person the abuse and hatred that is really intended for the Prime Minister himself.

The primary source of the poison being aimed at Clarke is the Brownite faction. Charles Clarke has never made the faintest secret of his suspicion of the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

He has even made known his opinion that it would have been better that Gordon Brown had stood for the Labour leadership after John Smith's death and been "humiliated", rather than stepping aside for Tony Blair and allowing a festering resentment to be harboured thereafter.

There is shrewdness in Clarke's analysis. But the Brownites have never forgiven his audacity, and in any case they know that by destroying Clarke they weaken Tony Blair and bring forward Gordon Brown's arrival at Number 10. The secondary source is the allies of John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister. John Prescott has one remaining driving motive in politics. He wants to play midwife to a Gordon Brown premiership.

Not for nothing do Gordon and Sarah Brown make the long, tedious trek to the palatial Prescott home in Hull at weekends. This is an important new alliance, and Prescott's bitter enmity against Charles Clarke is given a personal twist by an ugly suspicion that Charles Clarke is after his own job as deputy prime minister.

But it would be wrong to create the impression that hostility to beleaguered Charles Clarke is only felt among enemies of the Prime Minister. What makes the party chairman's position extremely precarious, and lends real credenceto talk that he will soon be moved, is the fact that some within Downing Street itself want Clarke out. Alastair Campbell, for instance, who bears the title of Downing Street director of communications. But Campbell's real job, as everybody knows, is Downing Street enforcer. And some say that Clarke has irritated Campbell by expropriating some of that role for himself.

The sharks smell blood and are beginning to circle. David Triesman, secretary general of the Labour Party, was the personal choice of Charles Clarke. There are now reports that even Triesman, out of an instinct for self-preservation, is distancing himself by a tiny fraction from his friend.

It should not be forgotten that by far Clarke's worst ally is himself. There is no more abusive and foul-mouthed man in modern politics. It used to be said that the Tory Chancellor Clarke would cross a road to start a fight.

His namesake Charles would travel across a continent. I have known him on and off for a decade, and only rarely has he passed a civil word. When we last met, at a party engineered by the hostess Carole Stone, he lambasted me with something close to personal hatred. It is no surprise that Clarke has collected a fair share of enemies.

But in politics it is the men and women with the courage to make enemies, and to speak their mind, who deserve respect. It is the ones that smarm and creep up to you who merit contempt. Clarke is not merely rude behind your back: he has the integrity to be rude to your face. I have been at the receiving end of much of this, and owe him nothing. But what a relief he is in an age when politicians are afraid to say anything at all, let alone cause offence.

The emblematic figure in the current Cabinet is Alistair Darling, the dull and cautious transport secretary. The Darlings of this world play a percentage game. They regard Charles Clarke, with his puce red face, his three-day beard, his great belly hanging, as an affront.

There is no question that, for those who regard politics and life itself as a subsidiary branch of the accountancy profession, Charles Clarke is very bad news indeed.

They are the sort of people who snigger about Clarke's liking for a drink. But most substantial politicians - Churchill, Thatcher, Asquith - have enjoyed a glass.

It is the teetotallers, the ones who never utter an incautious word and whose every move is calculated, who merit suspicion. To adapt the phrase used by Lord Rees-Mogg about George Brown in the 1970s - better Charles Clarke drunk than Alistair Darling sober.