The Times Guide to the House of Commons

For all the tributes he received for the way he led the country, and to a lesser extent the world, during the financial crisis, the public took against him. David Cameron based his whole election campaign on a slogan warning of “five more years of Gordon Brown” because Conservative focus groups, like Labour’s, told them that Mr Brown’s personal position was irretrievable.

For those who know him well, the other tragedy of the outgoing Prime Minister is that the clunky, ill-at-ease, irascible man the public perceives is not the same person that Mr Brown, at his best, can be. That Mr Brown is a man utterly devoted to his family and friends, warm in his dealings with the public when the cameras are out of sight, funny when relaxing, as wellread as anyone could be, a sporting facts-and-figures nerd. His wife, Sarah, and sons, John and Fraser, quite obviously mean so much to Mr Brown, who married in his forties, and he has often told friends that the one consolation of being out of office would be being able to spend more time with them. Sadly, as even his closest friends admit, the public perception is not an accident and is justified by Mr Brown’s behaviour over the years. His image as a bully is not accurate but he did get angry with himself, and with others, when things went wrong or they failed to meet his expectations.

It was, however, another personality trait that condemned Mr Brown to a political career that was to end without him winning a general election. During his long spell at the Treasury, and more crucially during those early weeks after he succeeded Mr Blair in 2007, Mr Brown acquired a reputation for dithering over big decisions. The habit was to cost him dear. As he almost announced on becoming leader, it had always been his intention on taking over to go to the country in 2008, but in the honeymoon period after he became Prime Minister, his popularity and that of Labour soared. The public liked the way he handled a run of national emergencies, including the floods and an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. So much so that Cabinet ministers were, by August, taking an autumn election for granted. Mr Brown, as a non-elected Prime Minister, could have rightfully asked for his mandate that September, ensuring that the party conferences were cancelled.

His inherent caution held sway. He needed more evidence that he was on a winner. He held the election threat over the Tory conference, believing that it would destabilise them. It was a disastrous miscalculation. He made the mistake of visiting British troops in Iraq on the day of the defence debate at the Conservative gathering, and a Tory charge of using the Forces as pawns got home. George Osborne’s announcement that he was slashing liability to inheritance tax shook the Labour high command. Even so, as the conference season ended Mr Brown was still being urged by his closest allies to take the plunge and finish off Mr Cameron. But Mr Brown’s pollsters, Deborah Mattinson and Stan Greenberg, who only weeks before had told him that he would win an election, began to back off. On the Thursday night figures such as Ed Balls went off to their constituencies certain that an election would be announced within days.

The next day Mr Brown digested with his advisers the results of a poll of marginal constituencies taken after the conference. It suggested that the Tory conference had gone down well, particularly the inheritance tax cut. Mr Greenberg insisted that Mr Brown could still win, but he might not win well. For Mr Brown, whose only reason for going early was to increase his majority, that was devastating news and he went cold on the idea. Ministers who had been keen on a poll suddenly retreated. Having allowed his team to stoke speculation, a humiliated Mr Brown finally bottled it and called off the election the next day. His only real chance of winning in his own right had gone and his tight group of advisers, who had been with him throughout his Treasury days, were torn apart by the episode. Long friendships ended, never to be repaired, and loyal workers such as Spencer Livermore found themselves taking the blame.

In the years that followed it is the decision that Mr Brown and his allies most regret. Most believe it is certain that he would have won then against the inexperienced Mr Cameron. It was only months into the Brown premiership but, viewed today, it was the beginning of the end. Britain was to have more than two further years of financial crisis and Mr Brown was to survive three serious attempts to oust him from office but something happened during that period that caused the country and some of his friends, however reluctantly, to doubt Mr Brown’s capacity to win. For the band of Brownites who had stuck by the former Chancellor throughout his long period in office it was never to be the same.

Mr Brown was pitched into a series of financial earthquakes that brought out the best in him. History may judge his decision to nationalise Northern Rock early in 2008 to have been a success. His rescue of banks including Royal Bank of Scotland through taking a massive taxpayer stake in them may ultimately be seen to have saved the whole industry, with the taxpayer eventually making a profit. His handling of the G20 world summit over the banking crisis won plaudits from around the world. But at home Mr Brown was on a permanently downward spiral and it was a tribute to his prodigious resilience that he staggered on.

It was one of his last decisions as Chancellor, the abolition of the 10p rate of tax, that came back to haunt him. That part of his last Budget was largely ignored at the time because, with a typical Brown flourish, he had announced a cut in income tax, but the move hit millions of low-paid workers and, confronted by a mass backbench uprising, Brown had to ask his Treasury successor Alistair Darling to come forward with a mini-Budget to put it right.

In the summer of 2008, after dismal by-election defeats, Mr Brown faced his first serious coup attempt. MPs, many of them former Blair supporters, took to the airwaves to call for a leadership contest but no Cabinet ministers joined the rebellion and he survived. He was, though, was skating on thin ice and even his closest advisers realised that he badly needed to shore up his position. He did it in the most surprising way. For some months he had been talking to Peter Mandelson again. Mr Mandelson, in Brussels serving a stint as a commissioner, was worried about the survival of his new Labour project. The Prime Minister shocked him by asking him to come back to the Cabinet for the third time. He bit off Brown’s hand and came back as a peer, Business Secretary and a host of other things. He was to be with Mr Brown to the end, finally running the election for him. The move was a masterstroke, virtually killing any chance that a Blairite would stand against Brown.

In June 2009, after terrible local elections, James Purnell, the Work and Pensions Secretary, resigned with an attack on the Prime Minister. Crucially David Miliband, as he had the previous year, failed to follow him over the top with Lord Mandelson warning him it would be disastrous. Again Mr Brown pulled through, but with more and more Labour MPs admitting privately that an election could not be won under him. Finally, in January 2010 Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt, both former Cabinet ministers, mounted yet another unsuccessful putsch. No one who mattered followed them but the delay as ministers laboured to voice support spoke volumes. Somehow, Mr Brown made it through to the general election. He fought a strangely subdued campaign that he brought to life only with passionate speeches towards the end. The result was better than most in Labour had expected but it was a defeat for which Mr Brown took responsibility.

Mr Brown’s allies had always confided that if he felt at any time that his party would benefit from his departure he would go. His and their judgment was always that Labour would not be helped at all by the spectacle of a leader being forced out so close to an election. But on the night of the second television debate during the election campaign, Mr Brown told his closest political ally and friend, Ed Balls, that he would resign if Labour failed to get the highest number of seats and his continued presence was a block to a power-sharing deal.

As the results came in on Thursday night and Friday morning perhaps the biggest surprise was how well Labour had done. Topping 250 seats exceeded the expectations of most party strategists, the pollsters and the bookmakers. The better-than-expected showing followed a campaign in which Mr Brown was himself the reason massive numbers of voters gave to Labour candidates for not voting for their party. He was “cyanide on the doorstep”, in the words of one unkind Labour minister. After the election, many Labour figures pondered whether if any other leader had been at the top of the party Labour would now be in its fourth term in a row.

Among Labour people it was a weekend of “if onlys”. If only Mr Blair had taken on Mr Brown in a contest in 1994 after John Smith died and beaten him. Mr Blair would never then have had that sense of obligation to Mr Brown that in the end made him give way to him. If only Mr Blair had called Mr Brown’s bluff and demoted him from the Treasury in the second term. If only Mr Blair had not announced before the 2005 election that it would be his last as leader. If only in 2006 Mr Blair had changed his mind, seen off the Brownite plot against him, and stood again in 2010.

On that dramatic Monday after the election Mr Brown announced plans to quit, as he had told friends he would. He called the cameras to Downing Street and said that he would stand down within months. He first told Nick Clegg. In so doing he removed the biggest obstacle to Mr Clegg doing a deal with Labour, if his attempts to wring further concessions from the Conservatives bore no fruit. As it happened, it was a final throw of the dice for Mr Brown and Labour and it did not work. Mr Clegg went with the Conservatives, even though he tried to keep open the prospect of a deal with Labour to the last. Mr Brown’s Monday gambit was designed to give Labour its only chance of staying in power and it meant that when he finally resigned the next day he could go with dignity.

Exactly 1,048 days after he first kissed hands, Mr Brown was on his way back to the Palace to tender his resignation to the Queen, the eleventh prime minister to have done so. As he did so he could have been forgiven for wondering if his own and Labour’s fortunes would have been better served if he had contained his ambitions. With Sarah by his side he left the stage saying that he had learnt about the very best in human nature and “a fair amount too about its frailties, including my own”. The words spoke volumes. In those long years at the Treasury, getting Mr Brown to admit to mistakes, or even to human fallibility, was an impossible task. During his much shorter term as Prime Minister, Mr Brown seemed to learn much more about himself. He left the front line believing that Britain had become a better place during the Labour years. But no one is tougher on himself than Mr Brown. He will agree with the verdict that his years in No 10 did not live up to what had gone before. Philip Webster was Political Editor of The Times throughout the new Labour years

Names of the dead were read to a silent Commons

Deborah Haynes

Defence Editor

British deaths on the front line were greater during the last Parliament than in any other since the Korean War. The toll, 369 service personnel, coupled with public anger over a lack of helicopters and armoured vehicles for troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, helped to draw the military into the political debate in a way not seen for a generation.

It did not happen straight away. Britain was a country at war on two fronts for most of the five years, but servicemen and women returning home would find themselves bemused at how little attention their efforts received. There was an underlying sense of disconnect between the politicians in Whitehall and the soldiers, sailors and airmen fighting and dying on their behalf in Helmand province and across southern Iraq. The sight of Tony Blair and after him Gordon Brown sporting flak jackets, helmets, sand-coloured boots and wide smiles on fleeting visits to fortified bases in both warzones did little to change this impression.

The political-military divide was further hindered by the rotation of four different defence secretaries in five years. Des Browne, who held the post from May 2006 until October 2008, was simultaneously made Secretary of State for Scotland when Mr Brown became Prime Minister, an appointment that many in the military saw as an insult, confirming their suspicion that the Government had failed to attach sufficient importance to its Armed Forces.

Mounting questions about the legality of the Iraq campaign, however, coupled with revelations in the media about the state of medical care for wounded troops, inadequate equipment on the front line and a litany of other shortfalls, began to create awkward political questions for ministers to answer. Driving home this sense of unhappiness, General Sir Richard Dannatt, then the head of the Army, broke with a tradition that frowns upon serving officers criticising the government and gave warning in September 2007 that the presence of British Forces in Iraq was worsening local militia attacks. He also spoke out on other emotive topics, such as inadequate accommodation for soldiers, unfair pay and the need for more boots on the ground in Afghanistan. Retired military chiefs added their voices to the chorus of complaints, with high-profile figures such as General Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank, a former chief of the defence staff, becoming a regular critic of Mr Brown, who was accused of cutting the defence budget during a time of war.

The mood of blame and betrayal differed sharply to the plaudits that Margaret Thatcher earned when she took Britain to war in 1982 to recover the Falkland Islands from Argentina. That successful campaign, despite the loss of 255 British lives, helped her to secure a landslide victory in a general election the following year. In contrast, the invasion of Iraq and its bloody aftermath, while defended by military commanders and politicians at the time, cast a shadow over the 2005-10 Parliament that did not disappear when Tony Blair stepped down. Instead, the Government’s conduct in siding with the United States over Iraq began to be scrutinised in the Chilcot inquiry, set up to learn lessons from the Iraq campaign.

The previous Parliament also oversaw the deployment of British Forces into southern Afghanistan on a mission that was supposed to be about reconstruction but evolved into the bloodiest combat operation for the British military in decades. The punishing toll of casualties in Helmand over four summers belatedly captured people’s attention back in Britain. Every week at Prime Minister’s Questions the names of the dead were read out to a silent Commons, while television screens across the country tuned in to watch crowds line the street of a town called Wootton Bassett as convoys carrying the bodies of repatriated service members were escorted from a nearby military airbase. The reality of soldiers with missing limbs, horrific scars and the less obvious but equally debilitating problem of mental disorders also awoke a sense that Britain was at war and more needed to be done to help the Armed Forces. The Government came under increased scrutiny.

Public outrage at the continued use of Snatch Land Rovers, dubbed “mobile coffins” by the soldiers who used them because of their inability to protect against roadside bombs, was one of the emotive issues that changed the relationship between the military and the politicians. So, too, did anger at an inadequate pool of Chinook helicopters, which was forcing British troops to move by road, making them more vulnerable to improvised explosive devices, the biggest killer of British Forces in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The criticism added to a growing perception that the Government had tried to fight “Blair’s wars” on a peacetime budget. Even coroners were calling into question how frontline soldiers were being kitted and trained. To their credit, ministers responded to urgent requests from commanders on the ground, with the Treasury signing off on new, improved armoured vehicles and helicopters in record time. The damage, however, had already been done and repeated assurances that no request had been turned down rang hollow amid the belief that the military had never been properly funded in the first place.

The issue became hugely sensitive, with the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats keen to knock Labour’s record, while the Government was anxious to demonstrate that it was doing everything possible to improve the situation. Highlighting the politicisation of what should be a military matter, a decision to replace the Snatch Land Rover with 200 new vehicles was revealed while Mr Brown was on a trip to Afghanistan. He embarked on the March visit immediately after giving evidence at the Chilcot inquiry in which he delivered a strong defence of his military spending record. He was, however, later forced to make an embarrassing correction to his evidence.

As well as requiring more of the Government, the growing political awareness and appreciation of defence also prompted the politicians to look more closely at how the Ministry of Defence conducted itself. The Defence Select Committee and the National Audit Office produced damning reports on its procurement record, with billions of pounds wasted on delayed projects.

Under Bob Ainsworth, Labour’s final Defence Secretary, the MoD published a Green Paper that set the scene for a long-overdue Strategic Defence Review, although it was left to the Lib-Con coalition to implement. The failure to conduct a review sooner – the last one was in 1998, before the world-changing terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – was regarded as another legacy of Labour’s inability to understand the military and, arguably, a failure of commanders to push for it. As a result, many of the long-term programmes to which the MoD was committed, such as two new aircraft carriers, planes to fly off them, and scores of additional fast-jets, were seen as out-dated and no longer suited to equip Britain for the wars of the future with only limited resources available.

Separately, a realisation of cash shortages in MoD coffers to look after wounded personnel and veterans prompted the creation of a number of new military charities on top of the established organisations to raise extra money for serving and former members of the Armed Forces. They moved quickly to capitalise on the sudden, public appreciation of the military, with The Sun newspaper backing a charity called “Help for Heroes” that ran a hugely successful campaign selling blue and red wrist bands as well as a host of other money-raising events that further boosted the profile of the military.

Joanna Lumley added an unlikely dimension to the relationship between MPs and the military when she fronted a bid to secure Gurkha veterans with at least four years’ service in the British Army the right to resettle in Britain.

It was not just the Armed Forces that were in focus. The Times ran a campaign in 2007 to urge the Government to help hundreds of Iraqi interpreters who were facing death at the hands of militiamen in Iraq because of their association with the British military. In response, Mr Brown created a scheme to relocate the interpreters and their families in Britain or give them a cash payment.

Another unfortunate legacy was a growing pile of lawsuits against the Ministry of Defence ranging from allegations of torture and abuse by Iraqi detainees to claims of negligence by the families of soldiers who died in Snatch Land Rovers. This costly process will take a long time to resolve.

The increased awareness of the military among the public and politicians during the last Parliament failed to translate into a heightened interest in the general election. Military insiders had hoped that a debate would take place about what sort of country Britain aspires to be: does the nation want to maintain its costly but influential place on the top table as a nuclear power alongside the United States or is it happy to downgrade to a less-significant player?

This fundamental question was left to be answered in the Strategic Defence Review. Aligned to this will be the extent of expected cuts in the defence budget, which will affect the scope of future operations, from the size of the Armed Forces to the weapons at their disposal. Unlike the first half of the previous century, the number of MPs with military experience remained low, although the new Parliament has the highest tally in at least the past two decades – 19 Conservative MPs and one from Labour, according to Byron Criddle, of the University of Aberdeen. Despite a shortage of hands-on experience, MPs look set to retain their rekindled appreciation of the military, at least for as long as British troops are deployed in Afghanistan.

Armed Forces Day, created by Mr Brown in June 2007, created an annual programme of events to celebrate all three services nationwide. The real test of Britain’s relationship with its military, however, will occur in the decades ahead.

Hail and a fond farewell to the dearly departed

Ann Treneman

Sketch writer

So farewell, then, Manure Parliament. A solemn wave to those who are gone but not, as yet, forgotten. All in all, 147 MPs stood down before the election, some with honour and others not, exhausted, disillusioned, angry and shamed. On the night, many more joined them. Surely it is symbolic that, on a night when the overall swing to the Conservatives was 5 per cent, Mr Manure himself, David Heathcote-Amory, lost his seat in Wells, Somerset. Mr Manure, who had to pay back almost £30,000 in exes and submitted bills for dozens of sacks of manure for his garden, said: “Expenses damaged all incumbents and perhaps me particularly.” I especially like that “perhaps”.

His was not the only whiffy result. Many were surprised that Jacqui Smith, the first woman home secretary, stood for re-election in Redditch. Ms Smith, notorious for her claim for two porn videos for her husband, not to mention 88p for a bathplug, had fought a bizarre, almost guerrilla, campaign in which she did her best to avoid the press. Her best-known booster was Tony Blair, who popped in for tea one day. I am not sure if that helped or hindered: she lost with a 9.21 per cent swing to the Tories. She can now spend more time with her (second) home.

It was a bad night for former home secretaries. Charles Clarke lost his Norwich South seat by 310 votes to the Lib Dems. I shall miss Mr Clarke, a big beast of the Westminster village in every way, who fought a long and wonderfully personal campaign against Gordon Brown as Prime Minister. How sad for him that, in the end, he went before Gordo. Another Labour defeat was the minister Jim Knight, more talented than most, in the marginal Dorset South. I was not surprised to see that he was promptly made a peer.

I find it hard to imagine politics without Lembit Öpik, the celebrity-crazed Lib Dem just as well known for dating a Cheeky Girl whose big hit was called The Cheeky Song (Touch My Bum) and for believing that Earth could be destroyed by a meteorite. In the end, his career was wrecked by something much more mundane: a 13 per cent swing to the Tories. Hours after losing, Lembit popped up on the TV quiz show Have I Got News for You urging his fellow contestants to hurry up: “Can we get on with it? I’ve actually got an appointment at the JobCentre in about half an hour.” Paul Merton responded: “They phoned earlier, they cancelled.” Lembit loved this. He is a glutton for publicity.

Another shocker was Peter Robinson, Northern Ireland’s First Minister and DUP leader, who lost his East Belfast seat. His defeat came after damaging revelations about himself and his wife, Iris, nicknamed the Swish Family Robinson after reports that they claimed more than £500,000 a year in salary and expenses. Iris, who always used to do a fine line in morality when she spoke in the Commons, had already stood down after it became known that she had obtained £50,000 for her teenage lover to fund his business. It is a sad tale but not without its moral.