Charlie is still Brown’s darling

Does the Mole detect the hand of Gordon Brown's old friend and spin-doctor Charlie Whelan in the goings-on at Brighton this week? Answer: yes.

Union leaders and ordinary delegates at the TUC conference have lined up to denounce Labour for its distorted priorities. They have damned the Brown administration for failing to hammer the profiteering utilities with a windfall tax and for the parallel failure to come up with help for hard-pressed gas and electricity consumers.

And an organisation that mainly represents public sector workers is outraged by the Chancellor Alistair Darling's insistence that economic stability depends on such workers getting an effective pay cut with below-inflation pay rises.

So it's easy to understand why the brothers and sisters have lost patience with Brown and why he might have expected to hear demands for him to go when he turned up for dinner last night with trade union leaders. Instead it was smiles all round when the PM was welcomed to the Grand Hotel by TUC boss Brendan Barber and Brown even cracked jokes in a relaxed 'off the cuff' speech.

Why? Because while he may long ago have lost the trust and support of ordinary voters - including the brothers and sisters in Brighton - the trade union leaders themselves, most of whom will be at the Labour Party conference in Manchester in 10 day's time because their unions are affiliated to the party, act as his Praetorian Guard.

Which is where Charlie Whelan comes in.

Whelan was with Brown in opposition but only worked for him for two years in government, before his career imploded as part of the long-running feud with Blairites Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell. He then exiled himself in the Spey Valley in the Cairngorms, indulging his passion for fishing and keeping himself going with occasional journalism.

But at last year's Labour conference, when Brown was still riding high, excitable Brownites proclaimed: "Charlie is back". He had taken a job as the national political director of the newly created super union, Unite. He was put in charge of its political messages and maintaining Labour party and government contacts.

The idea was that Whelan would help ensure that his old boss took up policies dear to the unions. There's scant evidence of that happening, but Whelan's loyalty to his old boss is undiminished. Working behind the scenes and in union gatherings, his blokish charm has been much employed rubbishing anyone who suggests a change of leader would help Labour avoid disaster at the next general election disaster.

Whelan denies involvement in the intemperate attack in the Observer on Foreign Secretary David Miliband by Unite's co-leader Derek Simpson. But the fact is that Simpson's criticism of the "smug" and "arrogant" young pretender will have been music to Whelan's - and Brown's - ears.

The key thing is that Whelan has helped line up the union bosses to ensure Brown survives the Labour conference. The real danger for Brown will comes when MPs return to Westminster in October and looks into the vacant eyes of the scores of Labour backbenchers with marginal seats, whose parliamentary careers have been put in jeopardy by his lacklustre leadership.

Charlie Whelan has been trying to do something about that, too. Working with Douglas Alexander, Brown's election supremo, he's been working to get union money into the marginals to counter the well-funded Tory machine. Up against Conservative Party deputy chairman Michael Ashcroft's millions, it's a tall order.

THE MOLE: TUC CONFERENCE

FIRST POSTED SEPTEMBER 10, 2008