Quick practice political timeline

Thande

Donor
btw didn't Maine split its electoral college vote according to proportional representation?

Yes, and Nebraska, but as in OTL all of the separate districts in those states went for Kerry and Bush respectively so it makes no difference.
 
Considering that one of Brown's OTL's conditions of his 2005 detente with Blair was that Milburn be excluded from the campaign, isn't retaining Milburn a bit out of character?

Excellent writing otherwise; can't help feeling sorry for poor David Miliband...
 
Knowing your personal view of Brown's incompetence I cannot imagine things are going to go well for Labour under Brown's leadership and your penmanship ;) :)

Brown had a fair few ideas he'll want to get stuck into which were put on the back burner in 2007 due to the financial disaster. He also won't have the time to iron out all the bugs with the first Brown cabinet (which to put it kindly had a few bumps in it).

My recommendations: go to the country in a general election now, iron out all the bugs after if he wins, introduce the most important Brown reforms* once things settle down, and the respond to the economic crisis the same as OTL (which was one of the few things Brown did absolutely right).

* Work on NEETS who are young people Not in Education, Employment, or Training. There was much discussion of an overhaul on education qualifications and apprenticeships and helping people out of long term unemployment.
Work on welfare reform which Labour finally got round to at the end would certainly be started earlier.

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Overall I'm loving the humour and style! Keep it up! And remember; Brown wasn't that incompetent, just mildly so.
 
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Thande

Donor
Do you have any opinions on my choices for Brown's 2004 cabinet Kvasir?

My view of Brown's competence is that he was sorely lacking in a particular type of it, which is hard to define: charisma is part of it but not all. Basically it's the sense of reassuring the public that a crisis is being dealt with, which really is 90% of solving it. There are different kinds of this. Some leaders deal with it by being likeable, so the public tends to forgive them for crises and accept them firing an underling over it. Ronald Reagan is an example of this. Other leaders deal with it by exhibiting a cold, decisive competence which means few people really like them but they will entrust them with handling a crisis over others. Margaret Thatcher is an example of this. And it is just an image--you can't picture Thatcher dithering over a choice or making a U-turn, but she did do just that several times. The important part is that her public image was never allowed to reflect it.

Tony Blair was probably the absolute best example of this quality (in recent years at least) and his aspect of it is a mixture of those two extremes. There was no problem so serious that Blair could not convince the public that it was being dealt with and could be buried by tomorrow's news. Even Iraq failed to kill him. If Labour had had him in the years 2007-2010 (assuming you ignore people being fed up with him being PM for so long) they could have done the exact same policy decisions as Brown and yet decisively won the 2010 election, because Blair was the one communicating things effectively to the voters and Brown seemed scared of them.

Brown faces a much easier premiership than his OTL one, at least at first, because the economy is still rosy. The biggest issue is therefore gone. But his inability to connect with the public or to convince them that issues are being handled is going to rear its ugly head sooner or later. (Notably Brown was much better at convincing other leaders that problems were being dealt with, hence the odd disconnect between how Brown was viewed at home and overseas--although Blair was also more popular in some other countries than at home). The question is whether that's a decisive enough factor to cause Brown's premiership to blow up the way it did in OTL--the answer is probably no although I wouldn't rule it out.
 
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