Gordon Brown: Prime Minister

TOM BOWER

GORDON BROWN

PRIME MINISTER

DEDICATION

To Sophie, with love

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

1 Ghosts and Dreams

2 Metamorphosis

3 Turbulence

4 Retreat

5 Seduction

6 ‘Do You Want Me to Write a Thank-You Letter?’

7 Fevered Honeymoon

8 Demons and Grudges

9 Enjoying Antagonism

10 Turmoil and Tragedy

11 Revolt

12 Aftermath

13 Bloodshed

14 Coup

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Source Notes

Praise

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

Their laughter was raucous. Seated in the Club section of the British Airways aircraft, the ten men were bonded by their love of football and their anticipation of a laddish weekend in Rome. Five months after the general election, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer was laughing with his intimate gang. There was much to celebrate.

On Saturday, 11 October 1997, England was playing Italy in a qualifying match for the World Cup. The valuable tickets for the game had been obtained for the group by Geoffrey Robinson, the paymaster general, as a favour to Gordon Brown, who was seated in the front of the jet. The prospect of football, beer and banter in Rome appealed to the former schoolboy footballer. The game was a male’s world, an emotionally satisfying conclave excluding women. The weekend would also be an opportunity to develop relationships with journalists, whose sympathetic reports about his successes would enhance his reputation and help his dream to become Britain’s prime minister. Brown, the host of many noisy parties during and after his student days in Edinburgh, enjoyed the mixture of politics and sport.

The invitations to the journalists had been issued by Charlie Whelan, the chancellor’s sparky press spokesman, who was seated near Brown. Over the previous years Whelan had regularly offered friendly journalists tickets to special football matches and issued invitations to memorable parties before international fixtures in Robinson’s flat at the Grosvenor House Hotel in Park Lane. ‘Oh, Geoffrey,’ quipped Brown as they flew over Tuscany, ‘your villa is down there. We should have a campaign: one villa one vote.’ The reference to the villa controversially loaned to Tony Blair and his family during the summer triggered more laughter. Brown had been in good form ever since they assembled at Heathrow. ‘What’s the difference,’ he had asked as they waited for the plane, ‘between Jim Farry [the chief executive of the Scottish Football Association] and Saddam Hussein? One is an evil dictator who will stop at nothing, and the other is the leader of Iraq.’ The banter was joined by Ed Balls, the chancellor’s personable and intelligent adviser, and the fourth of the quartet – Brown, Robinson, Balls and Whelan. Balls’s eminence in the Treasury was resented only by the envious and the defeated. The thirty-year-old was the intellectual guide of the chancellor’s conversion from a traditional socialist to the mastermind of New Labour’s appeal to the middle classes. Since Labour’s landslide victory Balls had become guru, gatekeeper and ‘deputy chancellor’ in the Treasury.

The four had unashamedly fashioned their capture of the Treasury as storm troopers assailing a conservative bastion, revolutionaries expelling the old guard. Over more than a decade Gordon Brown had plotted and agonised to achieve that coup. Disputes and distress had marred the route to 11 Downing Street, and five months after his victory the new, unconventional inhabitants of Whitehall incited malicious gossip about the introduction of bull market tactics into Westminster politics, prompting Blairites to accuse Brown of behaving like a Mafia godfather, an accusation he resented.

The only unease among the six journalists was caused by their Club class tickets, each costing £742. Geoffrey Robinson had privately settled the account, leaving a suspicion that the journalists would not be pressed to repay. His guests briefly considered the millionaire’s motives. Robinson’s ebullience made the trip feel like one of those louche jamborees organised by public relations companies for anxious clients. His fortune, earned in suspicious circumstances and concealed in offshore banks, had financed Brown’s private office before the election. For any politician to be associated with Robinson provoked questions. The journalists judged that the chancellor was not suspicious about the motives of their host, whose generosity had relieved the Scotsman’s social isolation in London. Nevertheless, before the jet landed, some resolved that regardless of Charlie Whelan’s inevitable scoffs, their fares would be reimbursed, with a request for a receipt.

The laughter halted. Gordon Brown, dressed in his customary dark suit, white shirt and red tie, fumed, ‘Do you know they’ve sold the Scotland match against Latvia to Channel 5, and only half of Scotland has Channel 5?’ The admirer of Jock Stein had travelled to see Scotland play in Spain during the 1982 World Cup, and was dogged by a grievance about the day’s other qualifying match. The gripe erupted again after the landing at Rome airport.

The privileges of political office had been snatched by the chancellor’s party. On the instructions of Sir Thomas Richardson, the British ambassador, the embassy’s economic secretary, Rob Fenn, welcomed the group at the airport. But rather than drive direct to the embassy, Brown asked Fenn whether he knew anyone in Rome who subscribed to Channel 5. ‘I’ve got to see the Scotland – Latvia match,’ he said. After frantic telephone calls, Peter Waterworth, a first secretary, was unearthed. ‘His mother gave him a Sky subscription for his birthday,’ reported Fenn with relief. ‘Channel 5 comes with the card.’ ‘Well done,’ gushed Brown. Robinson beamed. A brief diplomatic chore over lunchtime had been arranged with Carlo Azeglio Chamoi, the Italian finance minister, to justify the trip. After that, the pleasure could start.

‘Latvia, we love you,’ chanted a group of England fans, spotting Brown step from the ambassador’s car in the centre of Rome. Brown smiled back. Public recognition elated the congenitally clandestine bachelor. Football’s tribalism was a bond, and he assumed that Waterworth, a Manchester United fan from Belfast, would welcome a Scottish fan in his living room. ‘Hello, I’m Gordon Brown,’ smiled the chancellor as Cathy Waterworth opened the door. ‘I’m so grateful that you’ll have us,’ he said, leading thirteen people into the flat before his putative hosts could have second thoughts. Geoffrey Robinson immediately assumed the role of waiter, ferrying bottles of Peroni beer from the fridge at the far end of the flat to the chancellor, already hunched up close to the television, revealing the handicap of his single eye. Preoccupied, Brown uttered only a few comments throughout the match. At half-time he disappeared to be interviewed by a journalist for Monday’s newspaper. Robinson used the opportunity to look at Waterworth’s oil paintings. ‘My father’s the artist,’ explained the host. ‘Would you sell me that one?’ asked the paymaster general. The doorbell rang. A journalist returned with a bunch of flowers for Cathy. When the second half started, Robinson resumed his duties as waiter, and as Scotland’s 2–0 victory seemed assured, the atmosphere became light-hearted. ‘Great,’ announced Brown at the end. After more jokes, he bade farewell. He looked forward to the live match later that night.

The next stop was the British embassy. ‘I wonder how much we’d get if we flogged this lot,’ chortled Whelan in his south London accent as they walked into the marbled, ornately furnished building. The chancellor smiled at the joke directed at Robin Cook, the foreign secretary, one of Labour’s tribe whom Brown, during his fraught journey up the party’s hierarchy, had grown to loathe. They were joined by Stuart Higgins, the editor of the Sun, Tony Banks, the minister for sport, and Jack Cunningham, the minister of agriculture. Neither of the politicians was a ‘Brownite’, and their politeness towards the chancellor was noticeably diplomatic. Standing in the corner was Sir Nigel Wicks, the Treasury’s second permanent secretary. ‘Are you going to the match?’ Wicks was asked. ‘No,’ he replied hesitantly. ‘Why?’ ‘Prudence.’ ‘What?’ ‘I’m here on business, and I would not want my presence in Rome to be misinterpreted.’ The Treasury, some speculated, had contrived the visit to the Italian finance minister as a fig leaf to justify the junket. The final guest, the genial former Manchester United star Bobby Charlton, was uniquely guaranteed Brown’s affection.

Relationships were important to Gordon Brown. His unswerving loyalty to family and friends had marked him as a clan chieftain. The admiration and love he attracted was contrasted with his ferocious hatred of others. ‘Peter Mandelson is in Rome,’ the ambassador told Brown while the champagne was poured. ‘But he returned to London rather than watch the match.’ The chancellor’s relief was unconcealed. His fraught relationship with his former friend was a source of widespread gossip.

The brief visit to the embassy mirrored the conflicts of interest, personalities and policies swirling around every nuance of the chancellor’s hectic life. Just as renowned as his intelligence, education and shrewdness were his vendettas. ‘Never hate your enemies,’ said Michael Corleone, the son of Mario Puzo’s Godfather. ‘It affects your judgement.’ Gordon Brown ignored that advice, but did embrace Corleone’s confession to his lawyer: ‘I don’t feel I have to wipe everybody out, Tom. Just my enemies.’ Surrounded by his intimates, the Godfather expected loyalty and obedience towards himself. Those who thwarted his ambitions were despised and occasionally destroyed. His justification was faultless: his beloved party and his ambition required submission to his agenda. In return for his trust, his ‘family’ honoured his requirements.

Driving in a minibus from the embassy past the Colosseum, the home of bloody gladiatorial contests, towards Rome’s Olympic stadium for the football match, the chancellor might have reflected upon the ancient building’s symbolism. Two thousand years earlier, only the fittest survived, and even at the moment of glory, the bloodied victor could be ravaged by the spectators’ dissatisfaction. His party’s antics back home resembled ancient Rome’s lack of generosity. The pernicious undercurrents in Westminster often turned friend into foe. Over the years, Gordon Brown had accumulated many enemies. To win the ultimate prize required a new strategy. Inviting the journalists to Rome was another step to win favour for his inheritance of the premiership.

At the stadium, Brown was seated with Carlo Azeglio Chamoi. The match was enjoyable but by the end at 10.45 p.m., both were disappointed by the goalless draw. Gazing down from the directors’ box, Brown watched as Italy’s supporters and some of the 16,000 England fans began fighting. With drawn batons the police were charging the Britons. Patiently, Brown waited for two hours in the minibus until the six journalists could leave the stadium. Robinson had fretted that his reservation at Harry’s Bar for a lobster and champagne dinner would be cancelled, but the famous restaurant loyally waited for the party, as did the soprano hired to sing for them. The bill for the enjoyable dinner was paid by Robinson.

After the group’s return to London, the trip attracted some curiosity. For a time the presence of the journalists with the chancellor was suppressed by some newspapers, and when, seven weeks later, Geoffrey Robinson became embroiled in a scandal about his financial dependence on an offshore tax haven, some of those journalists who had accepted his hospitality were inclined to vouch for his probity. Consumed by self-righteousness, Gordon Brown disparaged those criticising his paymaster, and steadfastly resisted any public admission of Robinson’s wrongdoing. Concessions, he knew, signalled weakness. Thanks to Brown’s support, Robinson would survive the first accusations of sleaze. But the lifebelt caused many to puzzle about the chancellor’s psychology. His defiance was forged, some suggested, during his Scottish childhood in order to camouflage his spiritual torment. Others speculated why one character simultaneously aroused extremes of sympathy and outrage. Gordon Brown himself volunteered few clues. Incapable of self-analysis, he zealously sought to prevent outsiders from penetrating the origins of and reasons for his emotions. An unmentioned spirituality certainly lurked among the foundations of his life. The possibility of entering the priesthood had never featured among his ambitions, yet the conflict between good and evil had dominated his formative years. The mystery was his journey from his childhood credo of God and love to the less forgiving characteristics that would dominate his adulthood. His ostensible compassion for humanity confused the search for clues about that transition yet bequeathed the riddle: Gordon Brown, saint or sinner?

ONE Ghosts and Dreams

The stench of linseed oil and coal drifting up the hill obliterated the salty odour of the cold sea waves crashing just four hundred yards from his family’s large stone house. Two linoleum factories were part of Kirkcaldy’s lifeblood, just as the small town’s financial survival relied upon the local coalmines. Both were dying industries, threatening new unemployment in the neighbourhood. The men of Fife profess to be self-contained, but are vulnerable to their environment. Kirkcaldy’s stench, grime and decay shaped Gordon Brown’s attitude towards the world.

Kirkcaldy in the 1950s could have been a thousand miles from Edinburgh, although the elegant capital lay just across the Firth of Forth. Gordon Brown’s home town was shabby, and the townspeople were not a particularly united community. John Brown, his father, the minister at St Brycedale Presbyterian church, struggled unsuccessfully to retain his congregation. Some had permanently renounced the Church, while others had moved to the suburbs, abandoning the less fortunate in the town. Outsiders would have discovered nothing exceptional about John Brown’s ministry in Kirkcaldy’s largest church. His status was principally attractive to those at the bottom of the heap, who called regularly at Brown’s rectory – or manse – for help. The preacher of the virtues of charity was willing to feed the hungry, give money to those pleading poverty, and tend the sick. Some would smile that John Brown was an unworldly soft touch, giving to the undeserving, but his generosity contrasted favourably with Fife’s local leaders. There was little to commend about the councillors’ failure to build an adequate sea wall to protect the town from the spring tides of 1957 and 1958. During the floods, young Gordon Brown helped his father and his two brothers distribute blankets and food to the victims, proud that his father became renowned as a dedicated, social priest. ‘Father,’ he later said, ‘was a generous person and made us aware of poverty and illness.’ The dozens of regular callers at the house pleading for help persuaded Brown of the virtues of Christian socialism, meaning service to the community and helping people realise their potential. Living in a manse, he related, ‘You find out quickly about life and death and the meaning of poverty, injustice and unemployment.’ The result was a schoolboy bursting to assuage his moral indignation.

Friends and critics of Gordon Brown still seek to explain the brooding, passionate and perplexing politician by the phrase ‘a son of the manse’. To non-believers, unaware of daily life in a Scottish priest’s home, the five words are practically meaningless. Only an eyewitness to the infusion of Scotland’s culture by Presbyterianism’s uncompromising righteousness can understand the mystery of the faith. Life in the manse bequeathed an osmotic understanding of the Bible. Under his father’s aegis, Gordon Brown mastered intellectual discipline and a critique of conventional beliefs. In a Presbyterian household, the term ‘morality’ was dismissed as an English concept, shunned in favour of emphasising ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. Even the expression ‘socialism’ was rejected in favour of ‘egalitarianism’. At its purest, Presbyterianism is a questioning tradition, encouraging a lack of certainty, with a consequent insecurity among true believers brought up to believe in perpetual self-improvement. ‘Lord, I believe,’ is the pertinent prayer. ‘Help Thou my unbelief.’ Moulded by his father’s creed, not least because he admired and loved the modest man, the young Gordon Brown was taught to be respectful towards strangers. ‘My father was,’ he recalled, ‘more of a social Christian than a fundamentalist … I was very impressed with my father. First, for speaking without notes in front of so many people in that vast church. But mostly, I have learned a great deal from what my father managed to do for other people. He taught me to treat everyone equally and that is something I have not forgotten.’

In his sermons, quoting not only the scriptures but also poets, politicians and Greek and Latin philosophers, the Reverend John Brown urged ‘the importance of the inner world – what kind of world have we chosen for our inner self? Does it live in the midst of the noblest thoughts and aspirations?’ He cautioned his congregation and sons against ‘those who hasten across the sea to change their sky but not their mind’. Happiness, he preached, is not a matter of miles but of mental attitude, not of distance but of direction. ‘The question which each of us must ask, if we are not as happy as we would wish to be, is this: Are we making the most of the opportunities that are ours?’ The young Gordon Brown was urged to understand the challenge to improve his own destiny. ‘So let us not trifle,’ preached his father, condemning wasted time and opportunities, ‘because we think we have plenty of time ahead of us. We do not know what time we have. We cannot be sure about the length of life … Therefore use your time wisely. Live as those who are answerable for every moment and every hour.’

John Brown’s ancestry was as modest as his lifestyle. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Browns were tenant farmers, first at Inchgall Mill near Dunfermline, and later at Brigghills farm near Lochgelly, in the midst of the Fife coalfields. Ebenezer Brown, Gordon Brown’s grandfather, the fourth of eight children, became a farmer at Peatieshill in New Gilston, and on 26 October 1914 Gordon’s father was born in the farmhouse. Eventually Ebenezer gave up farming and became a shepherd, encouraging his only child to excel at school and to break out of the mould. At eighteen, John Brown’s efforts were rewarded by a place at St Andrews University to read divinity. After graduating in 1935, he studied for an MA in theology until 1938. Unfit for military service, he spent the war as a minister in the Govan area, along the Clyde, living among the slums and destitution of the factory and shipyard workers. Only the heartless could emerge from that poverty without some anger about society’s inequalities.

Soon after the war John Brown met Jessie Elizabeth Souter, the daughter of a builder and ironmonger in Insch, west Aberdeenshire. She was four years younger than him. Until 1940 Jessie had worked for the family business. She then joined the WRAF, working first on the Isle of Man and then in Whitehall. They married in Govan in July 1947. Their first child, John, was born in 1948. James Gordon, their second son, was born in Glasgow on 20 February 1951. Three years later John Brown was appointed the minister at the St Brycedale church. Kirkcaldy was then an unknown backwater, except to historians. In the eighteenth century Adam Smith, arguably one of the world’s greatest economists and the architect of free trade, the foundation of Britain’s prosperity, lived in the town. A monument to the enemy of socialism was erected exactly opposite St Brycedale church. The juxtaposition was pertinent to Gordon Brown’s life. Not until forty years after his birth did he begin to sympathise with his fellow townsman’s philosophy. By then his reputation as an irascible intellectual was frustrating his ambitions. His inner conflict, pitting his quest for power against his scholarship, his mastery of machine politics in conflict with the protection of his privacy, had been infused by the influence of his beloved father.

‘Ill pairted’, the principal doctrine bequeathed by the teetotal father to his sons in the manse, condemned the unfair distribution of wealth in the world and stirred up his family’s obligation to seek greater equality, not least by good works and charity. The collapse of the textile and coal industries, casting hundreds in the town onto the dole, imbued a gut distaste for capitalist society in Gordon Brown, not least because his father taught that work was a moral duty. ‘Being brought up as the son of a minister,’ he recalled, ‘made me aware of community responsibilities that any decent society ought to accept. And strong communities remain the essential bedrock for individual prosperity.’ Unspoken was the Scottish belief in superiority over the English, and the Presbyterian’s sense of pre-eminent differences with Anglicans – both compensations for surviving as a minority.

Helped by Elizabeth Brown’s inheritance of some small legacies, the Browns were middle class. Their financial advantages over the local miners and factory workers spurred the father to encourage his children to conduct their lives with a sense of mission, duty and benign austerity. Any personal ambition was to be concealed, because the individual, in John Brown’s world, was of little interest, and personal glory was, history showed, short-lived. Rather than bask in the prestige accorded to his office, he preached that his children should be more concerned by the legacy they bequeathed to society. The son of the manse was expected to suppress his ego. That exhortation, repeated constantly throughout his childhood (he attended his father’s church twice on Sundays), imposed upon Gordon Brown a lifelong obligation to answer to his father’s ghost.

Any austerity was, however, tempered by love. Elizabeth Brown was not as strong an influence as her husband, but she was a true friend. ‘She was always supportive,’ Brown insisted, ‘even when I made mistakes.’ At the age of thirty-seven, he was to say: ‘I don’t think either of my parents pushed me. It was a very free and open family. There were no huge pressures.’ His comment was either self-delusion or obfuscation. Quite emphatically, from his youngest years, Brown was under exceptional pressure to excel, and infused with an obsession to work hard, to disappoint no one and to win. ‘What is started, must be finished,’ was a constant parental admonition to the Brown brothers. Failure was inconceivable. From the pulpit the Reverend John Brown preached that many of the young ‘are failing to think life through and are living carelessly and irresponsibly’. They forgot, he said, that regardless of any remarkable achievements on earth, ‘after death we must appear before the judgement seat of Christ’. He admonished ‘the multitudes’ who gave ‘little thought of accountability for their conduct and way of life’. Gordon Brown was warned about a day of reckoning: ‘With many, judgement begins and ends with themselves and they reckon not on any judgement from elsewhere. Such live to please themselves and not to please others, even God.’ John Brown urged his congregation to look forward to His commendation: ‘Well done, good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of thy Lord.’