The Third Man: Life at the Heart of New Labour

‘You’re a better Prime Minister than people think,’ I told him. I meant it, just as I genuinely felt that a Cameron government would be no better, and very likely worse, for Britain.

We spoke for well over an hour. It was not so much about what Gordon should do next. As I’d said in Brussels, the solution to that seemed to be straightforward, if not necessarily easy to achieve. It came down to developing the strong policy programme, and coherent message, his government seemed to lack. Mostly, however, we talked about how he had ended up where he was. ‘A lot of your problems,’ I said, ‘stem from not calling the election when you led everyone to think you were going to do so. It has meant everything you do is viewed through that negative lens.’ Gordon said he now realised he should have gone ahead. The political timing had been right, and with the economic crisis worsening, the opportunity was now gone. But he had been unsettled by last-minute poll figures in marginal constituencies. ‘They showed a very different picture from the national polls,’ he said. ‘They hadn’t presented it properly to me before.’ And the Tory inheritance-tax initiative had scared him off, too. He now saw that his copying of Osborne’s idea, and even more so his visit to the troops in Iraq, had made things worse.

But he had started so well in Downing Street that he had felt the run would never end. ‘I thought, because of my first few months, I was being seen as above politics,’ he said. ‘You inhaled your own propaganda,’ I replied. The image his media team had created around him at the start was bound to unravel. ‘All that stuff about single-handedly turning back the biblical plagues, the floods, the cattle disease and the terror bombers. Your people went around saying how strong you were, what a great, statesmanlike Prime Minister. They took their eye off what was happening in the real world.’ I felt almost cruel saying it.

Gordon was quiet for a few moments, and so was I. Finally, I said, with what I am sure he sensed was a genuine desire to help: ‘If you could start all over again, you would do things differently. You need a different way of working, a different rhythm, a different approach.’ I was not absolutely sure what that approach would be, but I was sure that the problem was not simply a matter of Gordon lacking the communications skills for modern politics, although that was what he always came back to. ‘I’m good at what politics used to be, about policies,’ he said. ‘But now people want celebrity, and theatre.’

‘Only up to a point,’ I replied. ‘Actually, it’s a lot simpler than that: they just want someone to make their lives better, someone they can believe, and believe in. If you can do that, they can dispense with celebrity.’

Gordon nodded. Then, after another period of silence, he turned to me quietly with the same four words with which he had begun. ‘Can you help me?’

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘We can try and work it out together.’ At that moment, I could feel my old sense of commitment to him welling up inside me. Suddenly it was nice to feel wanted, needed again.

The question was how to help. I think I had forgotten, over the years of estrangement, how extraordinarily complex a man Gordon was. He had huge strengths, and sometimes debilitating weaknesses. That was simply to say that, like the rest of us, he was human. With Gordon, however, the balance on both sides of the ledger had never quite been captured in the public image which ossified around him. Some bits of the caricature were accurate. Yes, he was bright. He was intensely, obsessively, political. He was fiercely ambitious – for himself, certainly, as his single-minded pursuit of Tony’s job had made clear, but also for the people of Britain. Yet all that was only part of the picture. At the height of the Brown–Blair civil war, I used to laugh at the media’s contrast between Blair as the headline-driven tactician and Brown as the ‘big-picture’ man, the strategist who looked beyond day-to-day trivialities and spin and focused on the issues that counted. As those who knew Gordon best and had worked with him closest could attest – and I had done both for as long as anyone in active politics – the truth was much more nuanced than that. Gordon did see the big picture, but he tended to create tactical opportunities, rather than a strategy to advance it. Tony, by contrast would conceive his strategy at the outset, and then paint a big picture in order to carry people with him.

It is true that Tony cared about the media. Both of us came to realise, the longer he was in power, that we had probably cared too much about what the daily papers and the TV news bulletins were saying. But even – indeed, particularly – in times of crisis, he never lost sight of the issues that mattered. He kept in mind the longer-term goal. Gordon, from the time I first started working with him in the 1980s, was transfixed by the media. He was also transfixed by the Tories. Tony, of course, also took on the Conservatives. The difference was that Gordon wanted to pulverise them, whereas Tony was more often content to outmanoeuvre them. Gordon’s life revolved too keenly around looking for opportunities to grab a front-page headline or top billing on the evening news with some carefully calibrated announcement or initiative. In some ways, he was a more innate politician than Tony. But he was also a more old-style politician. He had grown up in machine politics, in Scottish Labour. For him, politics was always a battle. He plotted a probing advance here, a flanking operation there. It was all planned to weaken rivals or enemies – sometimes in his own ranks, but ultimately the enemy that mattered most to him, and still did, was the Tories.

Yet it was Gordon the person, not Gordon the politician, who would matter most if he, our party and the government were to be pulled out of their tailspin. Despite my closeness to Tony, I had been much closer, much earlier, to Gordon when the three of us began the reforming crusade that would lead to New Labour. Gordon was the older of the two. He had deeper roots in Labour. He was the more driven political operator, the more obviously ambitious. He was the natural leader. That was one reason why Tony’s later ascendancy so hurt him, and so damaged the relationship between all three of us. On a human level, however, Gordon was buttoned up, less sure of himself – not of his political views, but of how he should handle himself in public. Tony was never clubbable in party-political terms. But he had a natural ease about him, a charm, an enjoyment of human contact. Gordon did not possess this easy manner.

I think Gordon’s uneasiness and vulnerability was part of what was now drawing me back to his side, part of what made me genuinely want to keep my word to him and to do what I could to help. It was not out of pity, though it did pain me to see him so bruised. Nor was it merely out of loyalty to New Labour, or my conviction that if Gordon and the government crashed to defeat it would be bad for Britain, although I felt both of these things. It was a sense of fellow-feeling. I had taken my share of knocks along the way as well.

Unlike Gordon, and much more like Tony, I was comfortable in social situations. I enjoyed other people’s company. I was at ease with most of them. Most of the time I was at ease with myself. I had interests and a life outside politics, especially now that I was in Brussels. But I too had had my periods of private doubt and private pain. I had endured, and only very slowly recovered from, the humiliation of being forced to leave the cabinet table not just once, but twice. The second exile had been particularly hard, because I had felt let down by colleagues, by Tony in particular. There had been other tough times as well. Over the years, I had become more thick-skinned. But what I had been through gave me an insight into Gordon’s crisis. He had reached out for help. The truth was that I had no idea whether that was something I, or anyone, could deliver.

When we met again in Downing Street the next day, I tried to get him to focus on the one area where the country clearly needed new policy certainty, and new leadership, and where he was well-placed to deliver. ‘It’s the world economy, stupid,’ I said, borrowing the Clinton campaign quip. ‘Your message has to be that we are steering through the worst and equipping people to benefit from the upturn, to make sure they, and the country as a whole, are not the losers.’

Almost as if a switch had been tripped, Gordon’s mood brightened. He spoke non-stop for five minutes, reeling off the challenges posed by the economic crisis, and the range of programmes – job creation, infrastructure, energy, education, science – needed to make Britain stronger when we got to the other side. He spoke of a redefined, less dominant role for government, providing a safety net for those in need, but above all encouraging aspiration and providing the skills and the conditions for all who worked hard to succeed. An empowering government. This was the Gordon I remembered from the 1980s, full of ideas, full of passion. It was also, I couldn’t help noting, remarkably similar to Tony’s policy agenda, which because of his deep frustration at his wait to take over, Gordon had done much to undermine, and had spent his early months in Number 10 distancing himself from.

‘You could have done all of this without dumping on the government of which you were a member for the last ten years,’ I said.

‘I never did that,’ he insisted.

‘Yes, you did. You couldn’t resist it. It was all that neurosis and pent-up anger about Tony, fanned by the people around you.’

He insisted that he had moved beyond all that now. I think we both knew, and Tony too, that some of the scars would always remain. But I sensed that he was right. The terrible political knocks he had taken, and the crisis facing the party to which all three of us had devoted our lives, made the old battles seem somehow irrelevant. As I left, Gordon put his hand on my shoulder. ‘The main thing,’ he said, ‘is that I want us to work together. I want to rebuild our friendship.’

Still not quite sure where all this was leading, I agreed to have dinner the following week with three of Gordon’s aides: his Europe adviser Stewart Wood, the long-standing Number 10 business policy adviser Geoffrey Norris, and his trusted former Treasury adviser Shriti Vadera, who had now become a minister. Knowing that Gordon wanted me to provide input from Brussels as their recovery project began, they urged me to do all I could to help. By the end of the evening I felt there was a real understanding of the problems Gordon faced, and a commitment to help turn things round, at least amongst some of those around him. He had changed, they insisted. ‘He realises how bad things are. He realises it’s personal, that he is the problem,’ one of them said. ‘He’s calmer than you would have expected. He’s mellowed a lot – maybe because of the children.’ They felt that Gordon’s strengths had yet to come through, above all his grasp of the economic crisis and his understanding of what had to be done. ‘But he doesn’t communicate easily, and the public aren’t responding.’ That may be, I said. ‘But if he hopes to get people to like him, or even listen, he has to speak in a language people understand, and to be seen as acting for the national interest, not party or political interest. He has to lead.’

With Parliament breaking up for the summer, Gordon’s first real shot to show that kind of leadership would come in the run-up to the party conference in the autumn, and that was what I urged him to focus on, especially as his problems steadily increased. The economy continued to worsen. Unemployment was rising. The property market was heading south. The political picture was, if anything, more discouraging. The ill-health and subsequent resignation of the Labour MP for Glasgow East, David Marshall, presented Gordon with a nightmare scenario: an end-of-July by-election not only in a safe Labour seat, but a Scottish Labour seat, in his own political back yard. Labour initially struggled even to find a candidate. When the votes were counted, we lost, on a massive 22 per cent swing, to the Scottish Nationalists.

Gordon was by then ostensibly on holiday by the Suffolk seaside. In fact, he was in nearly constant contact with aides, and increasingly with me. His mood was bleak. That was nothing compared to the rest of the party. A few days after the by-election defeat, Foreign Secretary David Miliband wrote a piece in the Guardian. The party must not succumb to ‘fatalism’, he said. Yes, we were down. We had made mistakes. We had waited too long to reform the NHS. We had won the war but lost the peace in Iraq. We had held power too tightly in Westminster, rather than devolving it to the people affected by what we decided. But we had accomplished much as well, and should not be shy of saying so. The next election was winnable, if we embarked on a new stage of New Labour to confront challenges that were different from those we had faced when we had first come to power. We had to deal with the economic crisis and equip people to emerge stronger when recovery came. We had, David argued, to give more control over the public services to those who used them. We had to build a sense of local empowerment and local society. David Cameron, he said, ‘may be likeable and sometimes hard to disagree with’, but he had no competing vision. He was ‘empty’.

On the face of it, the article was simply an elegantly argued rallying cry. It did not directly criticise Gordon, but it did something that was immediately over-interpreted: it did not mention him at all. When one front-page headline screamed ‘Labour at War’, David had himself photographed with a copy of the paper, on which he had scribbled the word ‘not’. His article was not, he insisted, the start of a leadership challenge.

Inevitably, however, with Labour’s poll ratings so low, media speculation began to build about Gordon’s prospects for hanging on as leader. The subject was becoming not just a source of speculation within the party, but a national talking point. When I next spoke to Tony, he was sombre about the chances for a political recovery. ‘It’s all very sad,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to help him, but without letting him lead us to disaster.’ He also left me with a request to keep in touch with David Miliband. I texted David. ‘How are you?’ I asked. He replied: ‘Large mountain ahead. Orienteering/climbing/planning skills much needed.’ I texted back: ‘Guides, sherpas available.’

David was aware how difficult it would be for the government to recover public support, and I wanted to lend my experience in helping to achieve this. But both of us were in difficult positions: David because, before deciding not to stand, he had been the one credible challenger to Gordon as leader when Tony left Number 10; and I because although I still had my taste for domestic politics, I wanted to tread very carefully, and not to interfere.

I was close to David, having first worked with him when he was a very young, and fearfully bright, policy adviser in the run-up to the 1997 election. I was certain that his newspaper article was at most an attempt to put down a marker, to open up a debate and inject new purpose into the government. I shared his hope that this would happen – it was what I had been talking to Gordon about. David and I shared something else, as well: alarm at the drift and decline since Gordon’s first few months in Downing Street. In this, he was reflecting a wider concern, in the party and in cabinet, over whether Gordon could lead a recovery. He told me he feared the Guardian piece had made him look divisive, but he still felt it had been the right thing to do. He had provided a ‘coherent message’ that many ministers felt was sorely lacking. He said there was no move to push Gordon out, but there was a lot of unease in the cabinet.

Tony was getting the same message. When we next spoke, he said his sense was of a fatalism enveloping Labour MPs: some thought Gordon was unsalvageable and should go, while others thought he was unsalvageable, but that they just had to accept it. I couldn’t help replying that if that was true, history might be tough on Tony: ‘You saved your own skin by constantly stringing Gordon along, and then landed him on the rest of us when you went.’ He said he was afraid that might be true. When he added that his real fear was that the British public had simply given up on Gordon, and that the party would sooner or later follow suit, I pointed out that he’d been there too. ‘The same would have been true of you after Iraq. The people stuck with you, but only just. That saved you. Otherwise, it would have been curtains.’ He replied: ‘I know.’

But I think both of us felt a desire, a duty, to help Gordon if we could. The key would be the party conference in September. Tony felt his chances of pulling through were not high, and that if he failed, a leadership change would become inevitable. I thought this judgement was right. ‘It’s not about loyalty to one man,’ he said. ‘It’s about loyalty to the Labour Party. It’s about saving the Labour Party. He has to completely rethink and reconnect. If he fails, it’s hopeless. He cannot stagger on. The public aren’t going to elect him for another five years.’ If Gordon failed, there was at least David. ‘He’s not perfect,’ Tony said, ‘but he has matured. He’s humble enough to listen. He has to keep going, be strong, show decisive leadership.’

Tony and David talked several times as the summer wore on. Tony became ever more impressed by David’s strength and political instincts. Gordon, he believed, had about a 20 per cent chance of pulling off an escape act and leading a real recovery in the autumn. Both of us had a duty to help him take that one last shot, but if he stumbled, Tony felt, there would have to be a leadership challenge.

In contrast to the last time David had been in the frame for a leadership challenge, when Tony stepped down, I had no intention of publicly expressing a view. When he phoned me in mid-August, I said that he appeared to be in a very different state of mind from the year before. ‘Not quite,’ he said. ‘I didn’t bottle it in 2007. I never intended to stand.’ What about other members of the cabinet, I asked. He said no one seemed in the mood to speak out unless they were sure others were going to join in: ‘There’s a lot of “After you, Claude” going on.’ David said there was no way of knowing how things would develop. He was anticipating the main argument Gordon and his allies would make to forestall a move: that the public wouldn’t wear a second unelected Labour Prime Minister. ‘If we do replace Gordon,’ he said, ‘we have to go for an election four to six months later. The moment you appear frightened of the voters, you’re finished.’

Whatever Gordon’s chances, I knew that he faced a steep climb, and that only by clearing his head and investing all his energies in an autumn recovery would he have any real chance of success. He was frustrated. He felt wronged. He was also obviously unsettled by the newspaper chatter about coups and conspiracies, and about David Miliband too. I tried to get him to put all that out of his mind. I was about to go on holiday myself, departing by easyJet for Naples to join Italian friends whose company I had enjoyed on Capri every summer since my first years in Brussels. When I called Gordon before leaving, to try to lift his spirits a bit, he was preoccupied with the party conference, above all with what we both knew could be his make-or-break speech. Though we spoke only in general terms at first, I told him the key was that it had to contain a personal appeal, to connect emotionally in a way he had so far been failing to do. It would have to provide the definition he had failed to offer when he moved into Number 10. I also urged him to seize the moment before conference by giving a few interviews in which he could set up his relaunch. He had to explain the lessons he had learned over the past few months, how his approach to the job would change, and how he would lead the government and the country forward. In other words, there had to be a genuine sense of reflecting and learning, almost of starting again.

During August, he became more and more anxious. He began to include me in daily, hour-long conference calls involving a tightly-selected group. How my participation did not become public, I will never know. I am also not sure how much help these calls were. Every morning on Capri I would sit in the shade, mobile pinned to my ear, and run through an array of ideas and themes for Gordon to put in his conference speech, and an accompanying policy document that would be published at the conference. As I later discovered, whatever we agreed in the morning would often be unravelled by further conference calls, with different participants, during the course of the day. So when we spoke again the next morning, we would often go back to square one and cover the same ground all over again. It was a cycle with which I became more and more frustrated, with nobody taking charge of the process on his behalf.

Gordon became jittery when I said that in his pre-conference interviews he would have to explain to people how his views of government, and his approach to it, had changed as a result of the difficulties he found himself in. ‘You mean Mea culpa?’ he asked, something we both knew would not come easily to him. No, I said. Just be honest. Give an account of why things had gone wrong. His message should be: ‘I have been able to reflect about what the country is going through, and about our response. These are real challenges, and I think we have to strengthen how we cope with them. This is what the government is going to do about it – this is where I was, and this is where I am now going.’

I also tried to steer him away from falling back on an urge to build the speech around a nuclear assault on David Cameron and the Tories – the ‘dividing-line’ approach he had first drummed into both me and Tony in the 1980s in his ceaseless quest for the killer opportunity to wrong-foot the Conservatives. ‘Dividing lines with the Tories can’t be your priority now,’ I said. ‘If you have any dividing line, it’s between the easier, simpler, original politics of New Labour when first elected, and the new politics of the economic crisis that we have to deal with now, and where the Tories offer nothing.’ He also had to be personal. Not soppy, not apologetic, but he had to reach out to the public, draw them in, and help them understand him better. Gordon warmed to that. He even drew a comparison between his past ‘struggles’ and those of Barack Obama – a parallel that I hoped, for his sake, would end up on the cutting-room floor.

Still, he was right to believe he had a compelling story to tell. He had struggled. With the loss of his eye. With the death of his and Sarah’s first child, Jennifer, in January 2002, ten days after her birth. And four years later, with the news that their youngest son, Fraser, had cystic fibrosis. ‘I have overcome setbacks and tests which I’ve had to struggle with,’ Gordon said. ‘My health, and my daughter, and my son.’ I sensed that this might indeed provide the emotional connection Gordon had so often lacked. It would ring true, because it was.

Gordon also called me separately at times to share his fears that moves were afoot to drive him out. During one call, he said he had heard that the former Blair cabinet heavyweight Charles Clarke was ‘putting pressure’ on David to ‘reveal his hand, be a candidate – saying he must do so or be discounted. They’re getting a letter together to say there must be change. They’re getting signatures for a coup.’ ‘Sounds familiar,’ I teased him, thinking back to previous attempts by Gordon’s own supporters to drive Tony from office. I told him there were no plots for a coup as far as I could tell, and there wouldn’t be as long as he focused on September and the conference, and got everything right.

He agonised, too, about his staff – and they about him. Now that I was in fairly regular contact with Gordon and his aides, I got both sides of the story. Gordon felt alone. He felt he needed to do too much – and very often, all – of the policy-making himself. He said, surprisingly, that was partly why it had occurred to him to bring me back into the mix, and that he had even toyed with contacting me much earlier, in May 2007, the month before he moved into Number 10, but had concluded that it would not have worked. Now he wished he had done.