Gordon Brown: Prime Minister

In November 1972 Brown proposed that he should be elected as rector of the university, a ceremonial office usually awarded to honour Establishment personalities. A precedent had been set the previous year with the election of Jonathan Wills, the editor of the student newspaper. To Swann’s relief Wills had resigned, but to his irritation Brown launched his first successful election campaign, a rousing operation supported by ‘Brown Sugars’, miniskirt-clad students posing as dolly girls. No one of that era would ever label Brown a puritanical Scot with a humourless, wooden face and a grating habit of repetitiously uttering identical slogans. On the contrary, he was regarded as an amusing, sincere idealist with a ‘little boy lost’ approach who articulately galvanised supporters to translate his ambitions into a convincing victory over Swann’s candidate.

With the new rector’s election came the right to chair meetings of the University Court, the ultimate authority. Excitedly, Brown exercised this power, with the intention of agitating against the university’s administrators and governors. The battle lines were drawn in a row that engulfed the campus. Outraged by the usurper, Swann sought to remove Brown as chairman. Brown responded with an appeal to the Court of Session, Edinburgh’s High Court, for a judgement against the vice-chancellor. Brown won. Swann tried one more legal ruse, but was outgunned when the Duke of Edinburgh, the university’s chancellor, influenced the University Court in Brown’s favour. Brown had appealed to Prince Philip for help through Margarita – his goddaughter.

The experience, Brown later acknowledged, was a baptism of fire. Delighting in the scandal, he sought to avoid pitfalls and to succeed by exhaustive preparation. Every event was treated as a serious occasion. His speeches could be made more effective, he learnt, by rehearsing them to his flatmates and asking them to suggest jokes. He advanced his arguments by carefully placing pertinent stories in newspapers. Patiently, he sat through tedious meetings with a pleasant, laid-back manner, displaying a high boredom threshold until he had worn down his opposition. Glorious successes were followed by miserable setbacks, but through it all the rector discovered the mechanics of power-broking and mobilising support. ‘It was quite a revelation to me to see that politics was less about ideals and more about manoeuvres,’ he reflected twenty years later. His cruder assessment was: ‘The experience persuaded me that the Establishment could be taken on.’ Both conclusions conceal a deep injury. At the end of his three-year rectorship Brown had changed the University Court, but was nevertheless ambivalent about an achievement which was so blatantly irrelevant to the outside world. The cost was the accumulation of many vengeful enemies who frustrated his attempts, despite his qualifications, to be appointed a permanent lecturer at the university. In later years he would condemn those who rejected his promotion from his part-time lectureship as plotters rather than fair judges of his abilities. ‘They forced me out,’ he complained in a surprised voice, ignoring all the trouble he had caused. Student politics had roused his appetite for parliamentary politics but would provide barely any preparation for his struggle to win the Labour Party’s nomination for a Westminster constituency.

Among the Scottish Labour Party’s many divisions was one between the graduates of Glasgow University and those of other universities. Brown suffered a double deficiency. His humiliation of Edinburgh’s establishment denied him one source of support, while Glasgow’s clique, which included John Smith, Derry Irvine, Donald Dewar and Helen Liddell, shunned him as unworthy to join a group convinced of its right to govern the country. In the last months of 1973 many of those activists were searching for nominations to parliamentary constituencies in time for the next general election.

Edward Heath called an election for February 1974 in an attempt to turn the nation against the coalminers, who were engaged in a strike which the Conservatives interpreted as politically motivated. Dwindling coal supplies forced Heath to impose power cuts and to reduce British industry to a three-day week. That crisis hit particularly hard in Scotland, the home of many miners led by either communist or left-wing trade union officials. The miners’ cause was emotional as well as political. The communities whose menfolk dug coal in appalling conditions were part of the backbone of the country’s working-class culture, and their suffering evoked widespread sympathy. There was every reason for Brown to forge relationships with Mick McGahey, the engaging communist miners’ leader, and Lawrence Daly, a committed national official and a Labour Party member. Both particularly welcomed support from ambitious activists. Their endorsement, Brown knew, would help his chances of nomination as a Labour parliamentary candidate.

Another qualification for nomination was to have worked as a footsoldier for an existing candidate. Brown volunteered to help Robin Cook, a tutor at the Workers’ Education Offices Association and a leading member of Edinburgh council who was standing as the Labour candidate for Edinburgh Central. Their relationship, forged at the university, was built upon Cook’s acknowledged seniority. There was good reason for Brown to respect Cook, the son of a headmaster and grandson of a miner blacklisted for his activities during the General Strike of 1926. Cook, six years older than Brown, displayed forensic intelligence and remarkable debating skills. He had also secured Brown a teaching post at the WEA after Edinburgh University rejected his application.

Every night during the election campaign Brown recruited twenty friends, including his tenants, to knock on the doors of a working-class area in Edinburgh Central, a marginal constituency, urging support for the Labour candidate. On 28 February 1974, thanks to an unusually high swing, Cook won the seat with a small majority which many credited to Brown’s efforts. Yet, returning from the election night celebrations, Brown, Margarita and their friends expressed their surprise that Cook had not shown more gratitude for their hard work. Too often he had drunk whisky alone at one end of the Abbotsford’s bar while they drank beer at the other.

In the country as a whole Edward Heath won more votes than Labour, but not an overall majority of seats, and resigned. Few doubted that Harold Wilson, after forming a minority government, would call another election in the autumn. That was Brown’s opportunity. Edinburgh South, a marginal Conservative seat, was ideal territory. Securing the nomination required cut-throat tactics to elbow aside other applicants. ‘I was almost a candidate,’ he said years later. ‘I was invited by people to stand, but it just didn’t work out. It would probably have been better had I done that.’ The impression is of a man facing a critical test of courage and bloody-mindedness who meekly withdrew. In reality, he faced a selection conference against the favoured candidate, Martin O’Neill, a friend from the student movement, and was beaten. In the election of October 1974 O’Neill lost the seat by 3,226 votes, leaving Brown ruefully to reflect that more aggressive campaigning might have tipped the balance.

Labour’s overall majority in the new parliament was three seats. Recognising that the government, with the Liberals’ help, could survive for some years, Brown reconciled himself to establishing his own life while he waited for the next opportunity. For the first months he suffered a personal crisis. He entered hospital for an operation on his right eye, uncertain whether he would emerge completely blind. Other than Margarita, few were aware of his true feelings. Some of those sharing his house say that he emerged from hospital crying, and unexpectedly began smoking twenty cigarettes a day. Some suspected that his hectic schedule of teaching at the WEA, researching his PhD, writing a book on James Maxton based on the politician’s private papers, and his Labour Party activities placed him under unusual pressure. Others accepted his explanation that his tears were for the Labour Party.

The party’s internal affairs had become ugly. North Sea oil had increased the demand for Scotland’s independence, and in the October election the Scottish Nationalists had won seven seats, campaigning on the slogan ‘It’s Scotland’s oil’. The shock of the SNP’s success, and the crisis in Scotland’s shipyards, coalmines and manufacturing industries, posed a threat in Labour’s heartlands. Labour’s Scottish leaders decided to end their dialogue with the Nationalists. In that battle, there would be no help from Harold Wilson and the party’s headquarters in London. Brown joined the campaign, attempting to discredit the Nationalists’ call for independence by compiling an account of socialist policies to rebuild Scotland.

The ‘Red Paper on Scotland’ was proposed by Brown as twenty individual essays bound in a slim 180-page volume. Among those invited to contribute were journalists including Tom Nairn, the playwright John McGrath, lecturer in politics John Foster, and two MPs, Jim Sillars and Robin Cook. After eighteen essays had been commissioned, Brown decided his idea was too good to waste. At parties, meetings and in pubs, he invited eighteen other contributions about Scotland’s economy and politics, devolution, the ownership of the country’s land and oil. ‘We’ll have to increase the price from £1.20 to £1.80,’ his flatmate John Forsythe, who was responsible for the publication through the Edinburgh University board, announced. ‘Or could we reduce the number of commissions?’ ‘No,’ replied Brown, ‘and it’s got to be £1.20.’

Unwilling to offend any contributors, he fled to the Meadow Bar to meet Owen Dudley Edwards, his genial tutor. ‘A great bubbly baby,’ was how Dudley Edwards described Brown. ‘One of the sweetest people I know, with a wonderful smile. He knows how to say “Thank you,” and his body language is reproachful if someone declines his request.’ ‘All right,’ Brown announced to Forsythe on his return from the pub. ‘£1.80, but no reduction in the contributions.’ The book’s print was reduced to the minuscule size of a Biblical dictionary’s footnotes, but it was still a success, heading the Scottish bestseller list for two weeks, although few readers can have ploughed through all the tiny script.

In microscopic print, Brown’s well-written introduction, ‘The Socialist Challenge’, criticised the puerile debate indulged in by the country’s politicians, who ignored ‘Scotland’s real problems – our economy and unacceptable level of unemployment, chronic inequalities of wealth and power and inadequate social services’. He offered a rigid solution to the contradiction of managing a capitalist economy while providing the requirements of society, rejecting ‘incentives and local entrepreneurship’, and supporting state planning to orchestrate a national economic revival. He advocated more nationalisation of Britain’s industry, a planned economy and the destruction of the ruling classes. Scottish socialists, he wrote, could not support independence, but should control more of their own lives. Because capitalism had failed, and the private ownership of industry was hindering ‘the further unfolding of the social forces of production’, Brown’s cure was neo-Marxism. Young Labour activists were now hailing Brown as a celebrity. His dramatic appearance and good oratory, enhanced by his immersion in the history and tradition of Scottish Labour, won admirers for his vision of ‘Ethical Socialism’. He could have been destroyed by his early success, but his upbringing reined in any temptation to boast. Privately, he nevertheless hoped that his achievement would ease the path to a nomination for a safe parliamentary seat.

Securing that nomination depended upon a successful apprenticeship. The party recognised Brown’s ability but wanted evidence of more than a commitment to the community and worship of the Bible, Burns and Keir Hardie. To prove his understanding of liberating working people, he was required to intone the religious code of the Scottish Labour movement – ‘socialism’ and ‘social justice’ – with suitable references to the fundamental morality established during the Scottish movement’s history. By 1976 he had established those ideological credentials, regurgitating endless facts to prove that Harold Wilson’s government and its technological revolution would create thousands of new businessmen and enterprises, revolutionising the nation’s wealth. As a party loyalist he qualified for nomination; but among many of Labour’s older generation his image grated. While the party faithful admired the impassioned man, some griped that he was too fast, too clever, and too interested in courting popularity. The picture of a disorganised twenty-three-year-old, wearing a dirty Burberry coat, carrying a plastic bag stuffed with newspaper clippings, pamphlets and notes, flitting between speeches and committee meetings, invariably late because he had forgotten his watch, hardly appealed to working-class stalwarts. They joked that while he held the plastic bag under his arm, the information seeped into Brown’s brain by osmosis through a sensor in his armpit.

Occasionally Brown returned to Marchmont Road close to tears. At political meetings he was shouted down by critics angry that he had acknowledged the SNP, a ghost the Labour Party preferred to ignore. The policies pursued by Harold Wilson’s Labour government antagonised many in Scotland, and Brown was among the casualties, blamed for deviation from true socialism. Some members of the Scottish Executive, especially Jimmy Allison, the party’s organiser, treated him roughly. In 1974 the party had opposed devolution, but subsequently, after receiving a report from the ‘Devolution Committee’ chaired by Brown, it supported partial home rule. The disagreements excited anger. ‘The older people hated him,’ Henry Drucker, a writer and friend, recalled. John Forsythe listened to his long-haired friend’s lament that the representatives of the working class criticised him as soft, self-indulgent and a dilettante. Brown was frustrated that those he consulted for advice were not as clever as himself, and could not offer better insights into Labour’s problems in Scotland. His family life had not equipped him to deal with calculated ruthlessness. Any achievement would have to be the result of unglamorous hard graft.

Eventually his perseverance was rewarded. In 1976 he was nominated as the prospective candidate for Edinburgh South, a Conservative seat. Considering the growing antagonism towards the Labour government his election to the Commons was doubtful, but the breakthrough was critical. After a good speech in favour of devolution at the Scottish party’s conference in 1977 Brown was elected to Labour’s Scottish Executive. Full of excitement, he telephoned Donald Dewar, a solicitor and an MP since 1966 with whom he watched football matches, to share his excitement. The older politician instinctively replied, ‘I can assure you it will be awful.’ John Smith, the thirty-nine-year-old minister responsible for devolution in Westminster, was more supportive. Brown had been flattered to be invited to Smith’s home shortly after Smith’s appointment as a cabinet minister, and had been surprised to find that Smith was more interested in listening than in talking. Smith, Brown would appreciate, ‘genuinely believed people were equal’. Like Donald Dewar, John Smith became another ‘friend and mentor’. Brown was content to have established himself close to the party’s possible future leaders.

His election to the party’s executive coincided with the earlier appointment of Helen Liddell, a bus driver’s daughter who would later be known as ‘Stalin’s Granny’, as the Scottish party’s general secretary, and George Robertson as chairman. His encounters with both did not improve his popularity. As BBC Scotland’s economics correspondent, Liddell had a high public profile, and was an attractive face for Labour. Her appointment did not interrupt her frequent appearances on television news. Self-promotion, carped her critics, seemed more important to Liddell than engaging in the grind of party work and leadership. Her supporters countered that her value was in forging good relations with people. That was no consolation for Brown. Generally he did not handle women well, and he particularly lacked affection for Liddell. At executive meetings he was humiliated as she launched criticisms of him, especially of the ‘Red Paper on Scotland’, whose neo-Marxism she regarded as a threat to the party, regularly beginning with the phrase ‘The national leadership says … ’ Those seemingly innocuous words could be fatal to Brown’s ambitions. His energy and politics were creating rivals and occasionally enemies, just as his need for friends and benevolent advisers had become greatest.

In 1978 his impatience to become an MP was damaging his relationship with Margarita. Repeatedly, planned visits to the cinema and parties were abandoned as he responded to a telephone call and rushed to yet another meeting. In desperation, one night she had telephoned Owen Dudley Edwards with a ruse, asking, ‘Can you come down? Gordon wants you.’ Dudley Edwards arrived to discover that Brown was still drinking in a pub with two friends. Leaving Margarita alone had caused him no concern. The three friends eventually returned, slightly merry. Normally Brown’s companions would crash out on the floor while he flopped in an armchair to read a serious book. But on this occasion, while Margarita loudly reproached him, he picked her up and laughingly carried her to their bedroom. ‘You can see how in love they are,’ sang Dudley Edwards.

In an attempt to restore their faltering relationship, Margarita organised a weekend trip to a country cottage, and disconnected the telephone. Brown exploded in a rage. Relationships with women were sideshows in his life. He had become disturbed by the uneasy contrast of living with a sophisticated woman who enjoyed good food and elegant clothes, and the plight of Scottish workers, striking in large numbers across the country. While the party was immersed in strife as it tried to resolve the turmoil, Margarita seemed merely to tolerate Scottish provincialism, being principally concerned about the arrangements to visit her family in Geneva and her royal friends in their palatial homes across Europe. After five years, she also wanted evidence that the relationship had a future. Regardless of his affection, Brown was uncertain whether he could commit himself to a woman who was not a socialist, or could risk appearing with a princess before a constituency committee.

This crossroads in his personal life coincided with a remarkable political opportunity. Alexander Wilson, the Labour MP for Hamilton, a town south of Glasgow, died, and the constituency was looking for a candidate for the by-election on 31 May 1978. Hamilton had many attractions for Brown. The seat was a Labour stronghold, several senior party members had offered him their support, and his parents had moved to a church in the town. The obstacles were the other aspiring candidates. Alf Young, a journalist, was among them, although his chance of success was nil. Brown telephoned Young and asked whether he would stand aside. Young politely refused, adding that George Robertson, the Scottish party’s former chairman, who was supported by a major trade union, appeared certain of success. Brown aggressively challenged Young’s obstinacy, but failed to persuade him to surrender. A decisive voice, Brown knew, would be Jimmy Allison’s, the party’s organiser and a mini-Godfather. ‘It’s tight,’ said Allison, who knew the area well, ‘but you can win if you fight.’ Crucially, Allison pledged his support if Brown mounted a challenge. There might be blood, warned Allison, but that was acceptable among brothers. Even George Robertson, the favourite, acknowledged that there would be ‘a big fight’ if Brown stood, and the outcome would be uncertain.

‘I don’t know,’ Brown told Allison a few days later. ‘I think I should be loyal to the people in Edinburgh South. I don’t want to be seen as a carpetbagger and offend the good people who have helped me.’ Allison dismissed that as an irrelevance. Brown grunted and agreed to contact the party activists in Hamilton. But they, Allison heard, were unimpressed by his eagerness to avoid a fight with Robertson. Brown spoke about not being disloyal to the electors of Edinburgh South, but in truth he lacked the courage to work the system with a killer instinct. His caution was unexpected. Six years earlier he had confidently challenged Michael Swann. Outsiders were puzzled why the same determination now seemed to be lacking. They failed to understand Brown’s insecurity. He was still shocked by the consequences of his university protest for his academic career. His judgement, he believed, had been faulty. While he could confidently repudiate intellectual arguments, he lacked the resilience to withstand emotional pressure. He needed reassurance, but he had no one he could rely on. Some of his friends would dispute that he lacked courage. Others would say he feared failure. His consolation was hard work. Diligence, he believed, merited reward, and without hard work there should be no reward. That credo may be commendable for normal life, but not for ambitious politicians. Brown withdrew. Without a serious challenger, Robertson was nominated, and won the by-election by a margin of more than 6,000 votes. If Brown had arrived in Westminster in 1978, his own life, and possibly the Labour Party’s, would have been markedly different.

Similar indecisiveness plagued Brown’s relationship with Margarita. For weeks he hardly spent any time in Marchmont Road. James Callaghan had succeeded Harold Wilson as Labour prime minister, and increasingly Brown was preoccupied by the erosion of Callaghan’s authority – the government’s dependence on other parties at Westminster for a parliamentary majority had become unreliable – and the slide towards industrial chaos. In Scotland the party’s problems were compounded by disagreement about devolution. A referendum was to be held in March 1979, and the party was divided.

Excluded from those preoccupations, Margarita decided to end the relationship and leave Marchmont Road. ‘I never stopped loving him,’ she said in 1992, ‘but one day it didn’t seem right any more. It was politics, politics, politics, and I needed nurturing.’ Brown’s friends would say that he terminated the relationship. ‘She took it badly,’ they said, ‘that she was less important than meetings.’ But in truth Margarita simply was fed up, and walked out. A few weeks later she met Jim Keddie, a handsome fireman, with whom she started an affair that would last for six years. During the first months Brown telephoned her frequently to arrange meetings, but despite his entreaties that she return, she refused. Over a long session of drinks with Owen Dudley Edwards, Brown repeatedly said, ‘It’s the greatest mistake of my life. I should have married Margarita.’ If he had been elected to Westminster in 1974 or 1978 they might have married, but the uncertainty created irreconcilable pressures. Jim Keddie was convinced that Brown remained haunted by Margarita. Although Margarita never mentioned any regret about leaving Brown, for several months after her departure she would turn up without Keddie at parties in Marchmont Road, or would see Brown at dinner parties held by Wilf Stevenson, a man convinced of his own glorious destiny. Keddie sensed that she hoped the relationship might be rekindled, but there was no reunion. ‘It just hasn’t happened,’ Brown would say thereafter about love and marriage. In the space of a few months he had lost the chance of both an early arrival in Westminster and marriage to a woman he loved. Whether he was influenced by his research into James Maxton’s life, with all its failures and disappointments, to avoid similar distress himself is possible, but he had failed to overcome his caution and indecisiveness.

Beyond a tight circle of friends, Brown concealed his emotions and re-immersed himself in politics. For an aspiring realist, the prognosis could not have been worse. The trade unions were organising constant strikes, public services were disintegrating and inflation was soaring. The ‘winter of discontent’ began. Rubbish lay uncollected on the streets, the dead remained unburied and hospital porters refused to push the sick into operating theatres. The middle classes and many working-class Labour voters switched to the Conservatives to save them from what they felt had become a socialist hell. The opinion polls predicted Margaret Thatcher’s victory whenever James Callaghan dared to call the election. Brown’s prospects in Edinburgh South looked dismal, but once again he was offered an attractive alternative.