Jim Murphy: strategist or opportunist?

Peter Mandelson was often characterised a Machiavellian operator. He was the Prince of Darkness: sinister, scheming, in speech gyroscopic, eyebrows demonic, intent cynical and manipulative. One of the great Florentine's best known axioms is that it is better for the prince to be feared than loved. But the overwhelming mistrust attaching to Blair's sleek New Labour accomplice - and Mandelson's seeming pleasure in being mistrusted as a pantomime villain - reveals the former spinner as a poor student of Machiavelli. Richard III he ain't. 

The Machiavellian prince must always conspire to appear "merciful, faithful, humane, religious, upright" - even, or perhaps especially - if he's rotted through by connivance, malevolence and low animal cunning. Unlike the former MP for Hartlepool, the talented Machiavel will always "seem a saint, when most they play the devil." The trick is to prosper as a scheming bastard, while conspiring not to appear like one.

In this respect, Labour's new Scottish leader Jim Murphy seems a far more calculated adherent of the school. Despite a career littered with backstabbing, scheming and steel-toed internal partisanship - and a leadership position secured by lodging whispering knives in the back of his inept predecessor - Murphy's public persona is one of heavy - even exhausting - good fellowship; lugubrious, patient, wholesome. 

That isn't to say that he entirely pulls off the performance. Many folk regard him with profound mistrust in the light of the referendum campaign, his reputation for ideological slipperiness and the marches and countermarches of his party career - mistrust which blew up this week in an internal party stooshie. Murphy has a health policy for 2016. He's already earmarked the Barnet consequentials (and then some) of increased Labour health spending, if the party regains office in 2015. Bully for him. 

But it is the embroidery which matters here. For Jim felt it was expedient explicitly to conjure up the image of stripping southern English mansions to fund a new phalanx of doughty Scottish nurses. This was on any account a gratuitous annotation, and one with obvious political consequences. The right wing press have gone ballistic, feeding the beast of English disgruntlement and the victimology of a put-upon wealthy England being taken for a ride by pick-pocketing Scotch footpads - with Mr Murphy as the unrepentant robbing bastard in chief. "Labour, the party which doesn't care about getting a good deal for England" - and other self-serving humbug.

Poor Ed presumably surveyed these front pages over his morning egg - mouth agape like a clobbered monkfish - with Murphy's colleagues from the capital took to the airwaves to denounce the new Scottish leader's attempt to "buy Scottish votes with money expropriated from London." And for the cynic, keeping one eye on the Machiavellian antics of Labour's new comptroller, an ungenerous suspicion begins to buzz in the back of the mind. Is this a confected row, connived at, plausibly deniable, but quite intentionally generated? 

In truth, the odd bust up wouldn't be a terrible idea for a branch manager determined to be seen to be a plucky, independent start-up, but would you really pick a subject so potentially inflammatory, predictably generating hostile and damaging headlines for Ed Miliband in the rightwing papers? Even if you calculated that you were weakest at the northern frontier, would you really shove your south eastern colleagues under a bus and pass the Tories and UKIP a hardy stick with which to beat your comrades? Would you insist on making your stand on a topic, doomed to promote a narrative already enervating your party's chances in England?

The Machiavellian might consider it, careful, mind you, to don the mantle of calm guilelessness. It may of course, not be strategy at all, but sheer opportunism. A loose phrase thoughtlessly dropped in echo of the "pooling and sharing" rhetoric which dominated Murphy's referendum campaign - but an opportunity to score points against his colleagues when the entirely predictable counterblasts blow in. 

Whether it is an egg, or a quietly inflammatory aside in announcing a policy, Mr Murphy does appear to have a considerable talent for casting himself as a victim, patiently enduring the slings and arrows, putting folk firmly but respectful in their place, more in sorrow than in anger. Johann Lamont was a disaster, evoking sympathy. Given this week's antics, Jim Murphy will have to be careful that he doesn't share in Mandelson's fate.

Machiavellian doubleness is difficult to maintain. The supposed spontaneity spoils. The projected authenticity tarnishes. Reputations eventually crack, as the discrepancies between the self represented and your busy mischief becomes too striking. To "seem a saint" and "play the devil" is beyond the acting chops of most political operators. Such is the gulf between the artless persona Jim cultivates, and the suspicions he provokes, he'll need all of Sir Larry's talents to reconcile the two.