Gordon Brown: Prime Minister

The succession of rows instigated by Brown among Labour apparatchiks was costly. Repeatedly he lost his temper, screaming obscenities at those he damned as dishonourable or incompetent. Losing the sympathy of potential allies was undermining his status. His admonition that ‘The policies are unpopular with the party but we have to stick with them,’ combined with his refusal to smile while delivering his television soundbites, suggested a dour man. ‘He loves mankind,’ Voltaire is said to have written, ‘therefore he does not need to love his neighbour.’ To outsiders, Brown appeared a tough man, determined to carve out and control his empire; but in the privacy of his office, surrounded by the chaotic debris of books and papers, he violently chewed his fingernails and festered about his predicament. He was oblivious that his terseness, his seeming lack of human warmth, alienated others. Many could not identify with a rumpled, unusually driven man with limited small talk. Trying to understand his Jekyll and Hyde qualities tested the patience of too many. Brown’s passion to transform Labour was understood, but the personal cost was not appreciated. A contemporary profile in the Sunday Telegraph described him, with his ‘smouldering Celtic looks, dry humour and deep Scottish burr’ as ‘the natural heart-throb of the Labour Party’. That exaggeration was accompanied by the more accurate assessment that his qualities of laughter, wit and lightness ‘shine in small company’. The mystery was why a man who could be warm and amusing among friends was so austere in public.

Any prospects of marriage had now receded. Brown’s recent move from Kennington to a flat in Great Smith Street, Westminster, formerly owned by Robert Maxwell’s company, had brought him physically even closer to his work. His relationship with Marion Caldwell had foundered, and at the instigation of a friend he was reunited with Sheena McDonald, who by then had become a well-known TV presenter about national politics. There was good reason for her to believe that as they had so much in common their friendship would develop into a permanent relationship, if not marriage. Fearing that any public appearance with Brown would compromise her independence as a journalist, she preferred the relationship to remain secret, which suited Brown, but did not help his image.

In early May 1993, in an attempt to recover the party’s favour, Brown presented ‘Labour’s New Economic Approach’, a policy paper proposing a radical assault on the free market and the City’s vested interests. He had performed a half-reverse somersault from his new gospel. Labour, he promised, would attack bank charges, the business battalions, the fat cats, the monopolies and the shortages of choice, training and opportunity. To reinforce his credentials he launched a campaign against multi-millionaires residing in the UK but claiming to be domiciled overseas in order to avoid British taxation. ‘The Tory Party,’ he wrote, ‘does not have the will to close the loophole, but Labour does.’ The only ‘modernisation’ theme remaining was his rejection of the ‘old battles’ between the state and the private market. To the left, Brown appeared to have been trounced. Influenced by John Smith’s supporters, Tribune celebrated the ‘public hammering’ of the modernisers and their ‘pals’ who, eighteen months after Kinnock’s defeat, had failed to have ‘Labour’s future sewn up’. The ‘sub-Thatcherite, euro-dreamland’ and ‘Clintonite supply-siders’ had been defeated by ‘Labourism’.

In July 1993, Brown and Blair were flummoxed. ‘John’s letting us hang out to dry,’ Brown complained. In particular, Smith’s negotiations to break trade union power within the party were proceeding with excruciating slowness. Introducing ‘one man, one vote’ (OMOV) to replace the unions’ block vote was important if Labour was to capture the confidence of the middle classes. Smith, it appeared to Brown, was not supporting that change. Brown told Blair that Smith was even refusing to see him. ‘Well,’ replied Blair, ‘just walk past his secretary, shout “I’ve got a meeting,” and walk in.’ That might work for Blair, Brown knew, but he lacked the audacity.

As Brown was tortured by Smith’s obduracy, the weakness of his character emerged. While he could confidently withstand intellectual arguments, he lacked the resilience to cope with excessive emotional pressure. Unable to manage his rejection, Brown became depressed by the OMOV disagreement, and edged towards a nervous breakdown. ‘We won’t carry the party with that,’ he repeated endlessly, fearful of risks and contemplating defeat. The contrast between Brown and Blair at this time was revealing. As Oliver Wendell Holmes, the US supreme court judge, commented about Franklin Roosevelt, ‘A second-rate brain and a first-rate temperament is OK, because you can buy in first-rate brains.’ Equally furious as Brown that Smith was not enthusiastically supporting modernisation, Blair coolly took risks to challenge Smith, and then considered retiring from politics. But his supporters urged him to be resolute. ‘You’ve got to realise that you must stand as the next leader,’ he was told while staying with friends in the country. ‘But Gordon wants it so much more than me,’ replied Blair. Until then, the two may have been known as ‘the twins’ or ‘the blood brothers’. In summer 1993, the description ‘Brown – Blair’ shifted to ‘Blair – Brown’.

Those gloating during that summer about the humbling of ‘the king of soundbites’ were premature. In the weeks before the party conference, after listening to the advice of Ed Balls, Gavyn Davies, Michael Wills and others, Brown regained his self-confidence and composed a seminal speech to re-establish the modernisers’ gospel and purposely retreat from a commitment of wealth redistribution. Enthused by a slogan used by George Bush, he would replace ‘tax and spend’ with ‘invest and grow’. The breakout on 28 July 1993 was a public renunciation of the 1992 manifesto. With gusto, Brown announced that Labour was not against wealth, and would jettison the commitment to levy a 50 per cent inheritance tax. He would no longer insist that managing exchange rates was ‘absolutely necessary’. The counterattack was immediate. Angry trade union leaders and left-wingers telephoned journalists to condemn Brown’s ‘unfashionable’ appeal to the wealthy. Brown retaliated in August. In inflammatory language, he pledged in ‘The New Economic Agenda’, a party pamphlet, to cut taxes and drop all specific spending plans. Labour, he reaffirmed, would never again ‘tax for taxation’s own sake’. ‘From now on,’ he wrote, ‘Labour believes in creating the necessary wealth to fund the social benefits we demand.’

Without doubt he was inspired by his father’s sermons about Christians triumphing over weakness, pain and misfortune not only courageously, but cheerfully. And, although not immune from misfortune and discouragement, he was urged to join those ‘going forward with a smile … when all seems so dark … more than conquerors, helping us not just to scrape our way to victory but to gain victory very comfortably and successfully’. As the Reverend John Brown had exulted, ‘Let no one go away saying: “I can’t; I can’t; it’s not for me.”’ John Brown’s inspirations were Winston Churchill and Ernest Bevin for being ‘determined on set objectives’. He extolled his congregation, including his sons, ‘Should not all of us, like these two statesmen, have set objectives which we are determined to attain?’ That was Gordon Brown’s Herculean task.

Over the following weeks, Brown was battered by the left. On 26 September he arrived at a meeting of the National Executive Committee prepared for a stormy confrontation. Snide remarks about his competence were still being made about a stunt in which he had posed with Harriet Harman in front of a huge poster with the legend ‘Tory Tax Bombshell’. The event had misfired when he floundered about the size of the proposed tax increases, with estimates ranging from £59 to £226. At the meeting, the anger towards him was worse than Brown had anticipated. He was puzzled. As a child, he had grown up understanding poverty. There were decaying shipyards and coalmines down the road, worn boots shuffling on the street and endless sermons from his father about the deprived. He had worked passionately to help the poor, but now, despite his commitment, he was being attacked. ‘Don’t the bastards understand?’ he shouted in the privacy of his room. Then he surrendered. The Conservatives’ tax reductions during the 1980s, he said, had been indefensible, and he supported higher taxes. The Mirror’s headline the following morning – ‘Brown Demands Higher Tax Rates for Wealthy’ – signalled his retreat, but during that day, 27 September 1993, he began to reverse his recantation. The choice the party faced was between John Prescott’s ‘traditional values in a modern setting’ and Brown’s socially refined Thatcherism. Proud to be a man of conviction without any doubts, he could be insensitive to the qualities of those who showed a hint of human weakness.

The trade unions wanted a pledge from Brown to borrow and spend £15 billion in order to reduce unemployment. Brown became obdurate. The trade unions, he believed, were the biggest single obstacle to Labour’s election victory. Nye Bevan, the giant of Labour’s left, was quoted in Brown’s biography of James Maxton castigating Scottish rebels: ‘I will tell you what the epitaph on you Scottish dissenters will be – pure but impotent. Yes, you will be pure all right. But remember at the price of impotency. You will not influence the course of British politics by as much as a hair’s breadth.’ Brown would not repeat that mistake and damage Labour’s election chances. Defiantly, he was prepared to bring the whole house down to crush the opposition. Unpopularity was the price for performing his duty. As he stepped into the corridor, he was asked, ‘Does Labour still believe in the redistribution of wealth?’ Impulsively, he replied, ‘Yes.’ Those were his principles. Later that night, reflecting upon his strategy for Labour’s election victory, he said to those in the bars and corridors: ‘I am not against wealth. I just want everyone to be richer.’ Standing at other bars, Peter Hain and John Edmonds remorselessly disparaged Brown. ‘We should not replace the Red Flag with the White Flag,’ said Edmonds. Shedding Labour’s traditional socialist image, agreed Hain, would destroy all hope of the party ever regaining power. Their animosity was personal.

Brown and Blair arrived at the 1993 party conference with Smith’s reluctant agreement to curb the trade unions’ control of the party and impose ‘one man, one vote’. The union leaders were incensed. While they would expect Tony Blair to be anti-union, the transformation of Brown grated among the traditionalists. ‘This is a phoney battle,’ John Edmonds challenged Brown, ‘to show Labour is not in thrall to the unions. This is all about Mandelson positioning you and Blair as acceptable, and is against John Smith.’ The battle for OMOV, Edmonds believed, was a figleaf for Brown’s sympathy with Thatcherism. ‘You won’t carry Labour support on these policies,’ he told Brown. ‘I don’t believe in promising full employment any more,’ Brown replied. ‘It gives the impression of a government creating worthless jobs at great cost.’ To hear that from Brown’s mouth surprised the socialist.

That year’s shadow cabinet elections, Brown knew, would be an uncomfortable test. The party man who had spent a lifetime attending committee meetings could no longer expect the unions’ automatic support. Their antagonism caused him real pain. By contrast, Blair operated with a fresh and uncluttered style as shadow home secretary, showing affectionate curiosity about people. Unlike Brown, he had developed the technique of telling people what they wanted to hear, flattering potential critics and cultivating bores whom others would ignore. There was freshness to his soundbites, which were exquisitely delivered. ‘Tough on crime, and tough on the causes of crime’ had won plaudits which, as Brown never ceased to remind people, was a debt owed to him, who had conceived the slogan. But there was more to Blair than mere soundbites. His appeal was to the whole country rather than to a particular tribe or a class. His ambivalence – by refusing to feign sentimental links with the trade unions or to posture as a radical egalitarian – proved his chameleon appeal. Those qualities brought him limited favour in the elections to the shadow cabinet in autumn 1993. Robin Cook came top, Brown fell to fourth, while Blair was sixth.

Brown and Blair were driven back to London from the party conference by Derek Draper, Peter Mandelson’s special adviser. Their conversation was dominated by their comparatively poor performances in the poll. Brown was worried about losing his seat on the shadow cabinet the following year. The solution, he suggested, was to employ a researcher to bolster their support. One week later Saul Billingsley was hired on a salary of £10,000, two thirds of which was paid by Brown, and one third by Blair. Blair’s contribution was a calculated attempt to pacify Brown rather than confirmation of his own anxiety. Brown paid Billingsley from the income he earned from the Daily Record, but occasionally he ran out of money. ‘Don’t cash that cheque,’ Sue Nye told Derek Draper on one occasion. ‘Gordon is temporarily overdrawn.’ Based in Brown’s office in Millbank, Billingsley analysed each constituency’s local issues. He sent fact sheets to the constituencies showing the policies which Brown believed would cure their particular problems, and with a message from Brown. If there was an indication that a constituency might be persuaded to shift in Brown’s favour, Billingsley would invite the local party leaders to meet Brown in Westminster. The tactic worked. Several constituency activists praised Brown as ‘active and committed’, an important asset in his fight against enemies like Peter Hain.

Hain had published another pamphlet demanding that £20 billion be spent on investment and training. This indiscipline outraged the shadow chancellor. Hain, Brown decided, was to be decapitated. With the help of Derek Foster, Labour’s chief whip, a large posse of born-again Tribunites marched unannounced into the group’s annual general meeting and voted against Hain’s re-election as general secretary. The coup was smooth, and tax and spend was suppressed as an issue in Labour’s debates. Brown received little credit for neutralising Hain; instead, he faced resentment.

Once again, to prove his credibility, his language against the Tories became vehement. He accused them outright of dishonesty: ‘The Tories lied about taxation,’ became a recurring theme. ‘They’re incapable in my view,’ he said in a speech on 1 December 1993, ‘of telling the difference now between truth and falsehood; incapable and unable to tell the truth, or even recognise it.’ Carefully honed phrases like ‘thousands of pensioners will have to choose between heating and eating’ failed to excite his party, although the opinion polls steadfastly predicted a Labour election victory. To win trust, Brown constantly repeated, ‘Unlike the Tories, there will be honest disclosure. We will be straight with the British people … There will be no sleight of hand. What you see on taxes will be what you get.’ Opinion polls suggested that while the Tories were unpopular with the public because of their tax increases, Labour had still failed to convince them that they had a coherent economic strategy.

Over Christmas 1993, Brown pondered his fate. He had been the star pupil of Kirkcaldy, the star of Edinburgh University, and ever since his memorable maiden speech there had been expectations that one day he would be in Downing Street. Yet he appeared to be stymied. His jokes may have been memorable – ‘John Major went to Pittsburgh and discovered he had no past. He came back to Britain and discovered he had no future’ – but his critics questioned whether there was any more to him than cracking jokes and dissecting statistics. His sulks and his negative politics raised the questions of whether he was simply destructive or could ever inspire uncertain voters. Some of his personal traits were off-putting. He reluctantly posed for photographs in a pullover, and when asked to remove his tie replied, ‘I never take off my tie.’ He was also gauche, describing formal dinners as a waste of time. He lacked taste not only in art, furniture and wine, but also in food. He gobbled down whatever was offered without comment, suggesting an indifference to life’s refinements. His impatience extended to parliament. ‘During prime minister’s questions,’ he explained, ‘I often have to sit in the chamber for an hour and may speak for only thirty seconds. The place is geared towards eloquence rather than the pursuit of excellence.’ He was puzzled that some of his characteristics could irritate others.

Peter Mandelson offered help. Brown suffered, Mandelson calculated, from ‘press mania’. His reliance on Ed Richards, an unremarkable apparatchik, had spawned a compulsion to seek appearances on news bulletins and current affairs programmes. Brown erupted in uncontrolled rages even if a rival Labour politician featured on a news bulletin at 5.15 on a Saturday afternoon. ‘They’re trying to do me down,’ he shouted at Mandelson after watching one MP deliver a nine-second soundbite. Everyone, he claimed, was trying to ‘do him down’. He was prepared to travel from Scotland to London early on a Sunday morning to broadcast for a few fleeting seconds.

This hunger for influence was not accompanied by personal vanity. Repeatedly, he refused the opportunity to watch the playbacks of his party political broadcasts. Seemingly irked by his own face, his unfashionable opinion about politics was that the message rather than the image was important. Although assured by Barry Delaney, the producer of Labour’s political broadcasts, that women found him attractive, he was ambivalent about American talkshow host Jay Leno’s opinion that ‘Politics is show biz for ugly people.’

Brown’s mixture of frenzy and shyness prompted Peter Mandelson to suggest in late 1993 that he hire Charlie Whelan as his press spokesman. Mandelson had known Whelan since the 1992 election, and had been impressed by his abilities at the recent party conference while discussing OMOV. Brown knew him from the regular Tuesday lunches hosted by Gavin Laird, the general secretary of the AEUW. Laird had praised Whelan, his spokesman, as having ‘real flair’. Whelan’s particular talent, reinforced by his natural energy and bonhomie, was to spot opportunities for an AEUW representative to speak on TV news programmes. While his officials appeared in front of the cameras, rival trade unionists were ignored. That expertise was precisely Brown’s requirement.

Born in Peckham in 1955, Whelan would above all be obedient and loyal to Brown’s cause. ‘Able but very lazy,’ was his headmaster’s conclusion after the young Whelan failed one examination. In the hope of solving the problem, his parents sent him to a fee-paying boarding school in Surrey. He secured an unimpressive degree in politics at the City of London Polytechnic. When he started his first job as a foreign exchange dealer in the City, he spoke in a Home Counties accent. One year later, employed as a researcher by the AEUW, he spoke like a Cockney. Influenced by Jimmy Airlie, the forceful trade union leader renowned for his campaign to save the Upper Clyde shipbuilders, Whelan demonstrated his lack of political judgement when he joined the Communist Party in 1975. Whether he understood the reasons for the Party’s dramatic decline since the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 is uncertain. Probably the oppression of East Europeans was less important to him than loyalty to Jimmy Airlie. He only resigned from the Party in 1990, after the final collapse of communism.

The contrast between Charlie Whelan and Gordon Brown, the reserved, puritan non-smoker, could not have been greater – and that was the mutual attraction. During his fifteen years in the thuggish world of trade union politics Whelan had adopted a laddish style to promote his wheeler-dealer expertise. The clan chief spotted the chain-smoking, beer-drinking bruiser who shared a love of football as his man of business. Although Whelan was markedly unconscientious about detail, he would in some ways be an ideal soulmate. For his part, Whelan was flattered to be so close to the centre of attention. Whelan joined Ed Balls and Sue Nye within Brown’s inner cabinet. He welcomed the responsibility of solving Brown’s problems, delighted if the shadow chancellor telephoned six times in a day to seek consolation over an irritating news item. By then both had noticed that Peter Mandelson was less involved in Brown’s daily activities. Eight years after his appointment, Whelan was asked whether he had felt any loyalty towards Mandelson. ‘Yes,’ he smirked, ‘for about five minutes.’ That retrospective sarcasm reflected Whelan’s dislike for a man he called ‘Trousers’.

On Monday, 9 May 1994, Roy Hattersley was chatting with John Smith in Westminster. Their conversation drifted towards the shadow chancellor. ‘Gordon’s doing very badly,’ said Smith. ‘He’d have no chance to be leader if there was an election now. Blair would get it.’ There was no pleasure in Smith’s judgement. He did not disguise his dislike for Brown’s rival. ‘But fortunately,’ he added, ‘there won’t be an election tomorrow, so it will eventually be Gordon.’ As if he had a premonition of his fate, Smith repeated this to David Ward, his chief of staff. Gordon Brown was unaware of Smith’s opinion, but the disagreements between them had become insurmountable.

FOUR Retreat

The telephone call soon after 9.30 on the morning of Thursday, 12 May 1994 was shattering. Saul Billingsley, Gordon Brown’s assistant, reported that Murray Elder needed to speak to him very urgently. Brown was in his flat in Great Smith Street as he listened to his childhood friend’s trembling voice. At 9.15, said Elder, John Smith had died after another heart attack. Brown was thunderstruck. His grief was genuine.

The night before, Brown and Smith had attended a fundraising dinner at the Park Lane Hotel. The party had been jolly. Many rich men, former contributors to the Tories, had pledged their new loyalty to Labour. Success in politics, Smith knew, is the talent to exploit unexpected opportunities. John Smith’s misfortune was Gordon Brown’s chance.

During those first hours, Brown was not wholly in mourning. Instinctively, he considered his tactics. He had dedicated his life to becoming number one. The prospect of failure was intolerable. Those close friends whom he telephoned noticed that his voice was sombre but not distraught. Nothing, he urged his confidants, should be said or done. The son of the manse understood human suffering and respect for proprieties. Decency demanded delay, if he was to avoid accusations of opportunism. Sue Nye, Ed Balls and Charlie Whelan arrived. Their conversation was short, and they departed. In the era before the widespread use of mobile telephones, communications would be slow.

Among Gordon Brown’s telephone calls was one to Tony Blair, who had just arrived at Dyce airport in Aberdeen to start a campaign tour. So many words had already been exchanged about John Smith that they got straight down to practicalities. They agreed to meet later that day, after Blair had cut short his journey and returned to London. Brown assumed that Blair would wait until after they had met before making any decisions.

After eleven o’clock, Peter Mandelson arrived in the flat. Whatever his faults, Mandelson was a serious politician who had dedicated himself to the party’s election success. He was also an astute judge of people’s strengths and weaknesses. Gordon Brown, he noted, did not regard Smith’s death just as a tragedy, but also as an opportunity which he was willing to grasp. There were few words of mourning. Mandelson spoke to Brown only about the succession. The Scotsman was emphatic that he would stand. When Mandelson did not comment, Brown misread his neutrality as support. Shortly afterwards, Nick Brown joined them.

Sheena McDonald arrived at lunchtime. The three men’s discussions had reached stalemate. Mandelson was endlessly on the telephone, Nick Brown was sitting silently on a chair, while Gordon Brown paced quietly around the room listening to Mandelson’s conversations. McDonald departed, leaving Brown to write an obituary for the next day’s Independent which would be notable for its hyperbole. John Smith, he repeatedly emphasised, was witty and good company. His premature death deprived ‘the country as a whole of something irreplaceable’, because Smith was ‘uniquely equipped … to bind this nation together and to heal the deep wounds of the past fifteen years’. He lamented that Smith had been standing ‘at the brink of his greatest achievement’, victory in the next election. In truth, Brown knew, Smith was singularly ill-equipped for that challenge.