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Indian peers join leadership row

LONDON: Two senior Indian Labour peers, Swraj Paul and Meghnad Desai, on Sunday stepped into the row over the leadership crisis as pressure grew on Prime Minister Gordon Brown to quit after the party’s humiliating defeat in a crucial parliamentary bye-election last week.

While Lord Desai echoed calls for a leadership change, Lord Paul, a close friend of Mr. Brown, was more cautious, saying although he was still the “best man for the job” he needed to be much “tougher” to push the party’s agenda. Acknowledging that he was “depressed” over the state of the Labour Party, which is facing its worst crisis since Michael Foot led it to political oblivion in the eighties, Lord Paul said Mr. Brown had been “too gentle.”

“When a new person comes in he has to establish himself. Gordon doesn’t like to put his authority on people too quickly and this [the current crisis] is a signal for him that he has to put his foot down, be a bit firmer,” he told The Sunday Telegraph.

Lord Desai was more critical of Mr. Brown’s 11-month-old leadership, which has seen the party lurch from one crisis to another. He said if Mr. Brown’s performance did not improve, he should be told to go. “Either we require a changed, improved Gordon Brown to lead us, and we still hope for that, or somebody has to say, ‘Please, for the sake of the party that you love, move over,’ but I don’t think it’s going to happen,” he told the BBC.

Lord Desai said Mr. Brown still had good ideas, but needed to change his style if the party was to win the next election in under his leadership.

Recently, he drew an unflattering comparison between Tony Blair and Mr. Brown, likening the former to “champagne and caviar” and the latter to “haggis,” a Scottish dish not particularly favoured outside Scotland.

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