THE FEUDS THAT FUEL POLITICS !

The feuds that fuel politics
By Patrick Jackson BBC News.

As the post-Orange Revolution "War of the Viktors" in Ukraine takes a new twist, we look at some of the world's other great political feuds.

In pictures: Famous feuds

"He is his own worst enemy," somebody in politics once remarked. "Not while I'm alive he ain't," came the reply.
The dry wit here was British Labour politician Ernest Bevin and the worst enemy Herbert Morrison, his fellow Labour minister in the 1945-1951 government.
Winston Churchill, who as Conservative leader was the two men's natural political foe, famously compared another political system, that of the USSR, to bulldogs fighting under the carpet.
This Soviet tradition of keeping face while waging political war appears to be still alive in Ukraine's conflict between Viktor Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovych, locked in a disastrous cohabitation as president and prime minister respectively.
[UK Prime Minister] Tony Blair and [Chancellor] Gordon Blair obviously were close chums at one point but for the various reasons we all know about, when you cease to be a close chum you can easily turn into a worst enemy
Correlli Barnett British historian
"They are doing their best to create the impression that they are operating on an equal basis, that they are almost friends," Sergey Kudryashov, editor-in-chief of Russian historical magazine Istochnik, told the BBC News website.
"They do not show in public their attitudes toward each other, but there is definitely personal animosity."
With four elections called in less than three years, the Viktors are clearly waging their war through the ballot-box.
Notable past political feuds in the ex-USSR were resolved by other means.
Humiliation and murder
Tank fire blackened the white facade of the Russian parliament and bloody gun battles erupted on the streets of Moscow when Boris Yeltsin brought to a violent end his confrontation in 1993 with the Russian parliament, which had tried to dismiss him.

Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev found their roles dramatically reversed
A few years earlier, Mr Yeltsin had grappled with a more subtle foe when he rudely wrested power as leader of a resurgent Russia from the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev.
Mr Gorbachev had initially helped Mr Yeltsin in his career but demoted him when he lashed out at the slow pace of perestroika in 1987.
"Nobody made a secret of their mutual dislike," says Mr Kudryashov.
"Immediately after the failed 1991 coup attempt, Yeltsin wrote a resolution saying he had disbanded the Communist Party and he forced Gorbachev to read it out in public. That was a humiliation for the party's former secretary-general."
Stalin was not a man for public politics, he lacked education, but he wanted to be Number One and the way to do that was to control the state apparatus
Sergey KudryashovRussian historian
The Soviet state which died under Mr Gorbachev had also been marked by an intense internal feud in its formative years, between Stalin and Trotsky.
"The hatred between them was an established fact," says the editor of Istochnik.
"Stalin was not a man for public politics, he lacked education, but he wanted to be Number One and the way to do that was to control the state apparatus.
"Trotsky had a lot of influence among many revolutionaries and the younger population. His popularity in the Soviet Union was genuine but he was a public figure, not a bureaucrat, and Stalin outplayed him."
Trotsky's great mistake, Sergey Kudryashov believes, was to underestimate the real power of the party's first secretary, thinking that at some point he could gain control over him.
Instead, Trotsky was driven into exile and ultimately assassinated with an ice pick on Stalin's orders.
Six years of silence
"Any political rivalry, whether it is within a party or between parties, is almost always rooted in mutual personal dislike," British historian Correlli Barnett believes.
Whenever their paths cross, it becomes a major news event because journalists report what they did, how they avoided looking at each other and not smiling
Mahmud AliBBC South Asia analyst
In Victorian Britain, rival prime ministers Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone "loathed each other's guts", the Churchill College Cambridge Fellow told the BBC News website.
"They were of totally different temperaments. Disraeli was cosmopolitan, charming, colourful, slightly eccentric while Gladstone was the dreariest of all possible pious Victorian politicians."
For years, politics in Bangladesh was fuelled by animosity between Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina, who also alternated as prime ministers and whose chief policy difference appears to be over the extent of their families' role in the struggle for independence from Pakistan.

Gordon Brown is widely expected to succeed Tony Blair as PM this summer
"They have not spoken to each other for about six years in parliament or outside," BBC South Asia analyst Mahmud Ali says.
"They avoid each other, they do not receive each other's invitations or telephone calls.
"Whenever their paths cross, it becomes a major news event because journalists report what they did, how they avoided looking at each other."
According to Mr Barnett, "immense personal rivalries and antipathies" are the very stuff of politics even when they are "dressed up as ideological differences".
In Britain, he says, both Labour and the Conservatives have had "violent political rivalries on their front benches" but there is no political opponent like a "former chum".
"Probably the bitterest of these feelings is within a party because it is more intimate, more related to personal careers, personal feelings - even whether the spouses get on," Mr Barnett says.
"[UK Prime Minister] Tony Blair and [Chancellor] Gordon Blair obviously were close chums at one point but for the various reasons we all know about, when you cease to be a close chum you can easily turn into a worst enemy."

BBC NEWS REPORT.