Gordon Brown: Prime Minister

Brown’s combination of intellect, sophistication, ambition and popularism appealed to Mandelson. Standing on the steps of the party’s headquarters in Walworth Road, he told Andy McSmith, a Labour press officer, ‘Gordon will one day be the party’s leader.’ Mandelson’s prediction surprised McSmith. Brown was still largely unknown. Mandelson acknowledged that obstacle, but had repeatedly promised Brown that it would be overcome. During their frequent meetings Brown constantly complained, ‘I’m not getting enough mention in the papers. My name’s only in a couple of them.’ Mandelson reassured him that his hard work would be rewarded. Both were grappling with the party’s ideology, and belatedly welcomed the opportunities of the 1987 defeat. With the support of the party’s left wing and the endorsement of Neil Kinnock, Brown believed he would eventually succeed the Welshman as the party’s leader. He dismissed the chances of his rivals, except possibly John Smith, who was handicapped by his poor relationship with Kinnock. Brown’s quandary was how to develop an alternative to Thatcherism. Marooned among orthodox Scottish socialists, he was still estranged from the consequences of ‘Big Bang’.

Nigel Lawson’s boom had visible fault-lines, but Thatcherism appeared irreversible. Relying on people and markets rather than Whitehall civil servants to manage the economy was attractive to electors. Mandelson, alert to the new ideas, understood the dilemma. ‘I think you should go to Gordon,’ he told Michael Wills, a television producer at LWT’s Weekend World who drafted policy documents and speeches for him. ‘Help him become prime minister.’

Interested in the failings of British industry, Wills had just completed a series of documentaries revealing the limitations and frustrations of British managers. In particular he had been struck by an interview with a supplier of car components who volunteered that he had resisted borrowing money from the banks in order to build a new production line to manufacture gearboxes for Honda. His reason was depressing. In the early 1980s he had borrowed for a similar venture, but interest rates had soared and he had been financially crippled. Ever since, he had decided to remain small and safe by not borrowing. He spoke eloquently and authoritatively about the Conservative government’s failure to help industry. This was fertile ground for Labour to exploit, Wills told Brown. Wills introduced Brown to the experts consulted by Weekend World, with whom he discussed the essence of Thatcherism and its American counterpart, Reaganism. Reluctantly, he began to recognise the strength of some Tory policies and the disadvantage of Labour’s adherence to Attlee’s consensus. There was reason to acknowledge that the growth of Europe’s and America’s successful economies was not the result of state intervention. Listening and brooding, he agonised over how to balance incentives to entrepreneurs, the restriction of public spending and the financing of social justice. ‘We need a fairer Britain,’ he repeated as he learnt to sympathise with the market economy. ‘We’ve got to work from first principles towards policies,’ he told his confidants, irritated by Kinnock’s ignorance of economics and John Smith’s resistance to change. Under Smith as shadow chancellor, Labour’s economic policies remained rigidly anti-market, against joining the ERM and in favour of controlling exchange rates. ‘We must persuade the rich of the need for fairness,’ Smith had said, apparently without realising the inherent contradiction. Wealth creators, by definition, are not social philanthropists, but ruthlessly ambitious to earn money for themselves.

Three successive election defeats had convinced Brown that simply damning the Tories’ sympathy for the rich would not reverse Labour’s political decline. The party needed new ideas. That summer he spent three weeks in Harvard’s library, studying industrial policy and discussing the cause of America’s economic success with local academics. He returned to Westminster emboldened by his intellectual rejuvenation. His task was to find a compromise between old Labour’s philosophies and Thatcherism. There were many false starts. Essentially, he was searching for ideas to help him write a new Labour epic that could rank with Anthony Crosland’s Future of Socialism, a 500-page analysis of how to create an egalitarian, socialist Britain, published in 1956. Throughout, Brown asserted with evangelical sincerity that social Christianity could provide greater fairness and prosperity through a more efficient economy, all in the cause of socialism.

Nigel Lawson’s budget in 1988 was another ideological challenge. Treasury statistics showed that the reduction in the top rate of tax – from 83 per cent under Labour in 1979 to 60 per cent nine years later – had actually increased the amount of money received by the Treasury, as the rich had less reason to evade and avoid taxes. In his penultimate budget, Lawson announced that the top rate of tax would be reduced from 60 per cent to 40 per cent, and the basic rate cut to 25 per cent from 33 per cent. The Labour benches erupted in uncontrolled protest. The Commons was suspended for ten minutes. Brown joined in the protest. He rejected Lawson’s argument that encouraging enterprise would benefit the poor. Too many millionaires, he raged, were enriching themselves from tax loopholes, not least from share options. Lawson’s budget allowed company directors to buy shares at 1984 prices and take the profits in 1988, paying capital gains tax of 30 per cent rather than 60 per cent. ‘Britain is fast becoming a paradise for top-rate tax dodgers,’ Brown protested, demanding that the ‘share option millionaires’ should be penalised. Instead of rewarding the rich, the government should invest in education and training. Brown was echoing the mantra voiced by Harold Wilson twenty years earlier, although six years of Wilson’s government had ended, at best, in economic paralysis. His unoriginal accusations did not dent Lawson’s claim to have achieved a hat trick – higher spending on public services, lower tax rates and a budget surplus.

Overshadowing Lawson’s self-congratulation was the rising value of sterling and his bitter row with Thatcher about whether Britain should join the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM). The growing strain between Lawson and Thatcher, and the prospect of rising inflation and an implosion of the boom, encouraged Brown’s belief that the government’s economic policy was doomed. Neil Kinnock’s misfortune was that his alternative policies were unattractive to Labour’s far left. Their representative, Tony Benn, launched a bid for the leadership, and the old internecine war erupted once again. Benn’s bid was trounced at the 1988 autumn party conference in Blackpool, but all the percentage points gained from the Tories shown by the opinion polls evaporated. Labour remained a party of protest, and not an alternative government.

At the end of the party conference Brown returned to Edinburgh with John Smith. Over the previous week the shadow chancellor had as usual enjoyed himself, living up to his reputation at many parties as a heavy drinker, and smoking cigars after big meals. On reaching home he felt unwell, and was examined in a hospital. While getting dressed afterwards, he suffered a heart attack. Smith’s misfortune was Brown’s opportunity. For twenty years he had prepared himself for the spotlight, and now his chance had arisen at the most favourable moment as, during Smith’s convalescence, he took his place on Labour’s front bench. Nigel Lawson’s strategy appeared to be crumbling. The Tories were becoming the victims of their own mistakes. There were widespread protests in Scotland against the new poll tax, inflation was climbing above 4 per cent, interest rates were rising towards 14 per cent, unemployment was stuck at three million and, with a worsening balance of payments, there was a run on sterling. Lawson’s boast about his ‘sound management of the economy’ was an easy target.

‘This is a boom based on credit,’ mocked Brown, eager to prove his skills during the debate on the autumn financial statement on 1 November 1988. Standing at the dispatch box in a crowded chamber, glancing at a speech printed out in huge letters to compensate for his poor eyesight, Brown relished the occasion. Countless speeches in dank Scottish assembly halls had primed his self-confident, exquisitely timed flourishes, mixing statistics and oratory while displaying his mastery of the dialectic, the rapier of eloquent Marxists. He deployed artful mockery to rile an arrogant chancellor for allowing consumption to spiral out of control and for making consistently wrong forecasts. ‘Most of us would say,’ scoffed Brown at his crestfallen target, ‘that the proper answer is to keep the forecasts and discard the chancellor.’ Each cutting jibe, accompanied by whoops of derision from the Labour benches, rattled Lawson’s pomposity. The chancellor had not anticipated the humiliation or the lukewarm support from the Tory benches. His pained expression was Brown’s reward. The result, Brown would later say, was ‘an unequal dialogue between a chancellor who had not yet made up his mind when to retire and a prime minister who had not yet made up her mind when to sack him’. During those magical minutes, Labour MPs felt a surge of hope. Here, perhaps, was the new hero they had sought so desperately. Brown sat down to roars of approval.

Walking through the arched corridors of Westminster later that afternoon, he was suitably modest, feeling an inner calm about his good fortune. In just two days, Labour MPs would vote for the shadow cabinet. The combination of his Commons performance with his astute handling of a series of leaks had earned him an irreproachable reputation. Once again, he sought the help of Nick Brown to lobby for votes. The result, late on 6 November, was electrifying. As he rushed from Committee Room 14, Brown was laughing. He was top of the poll. Following him out of the room, Tony Blair was seen telephoning his wife Cherie to report his own first appearance on the list, his reward for humiliating Lord Young, the secretary of state for trade and industry, about the government’s misconduct of supervising Barlow Clowes, an investment company which collapsed as a result of dishonesty. The next morning’s newspapers praised Brown as ‘high flying’ and ‘a horse for early investment’. One sage wrote, ‘He appears to possess the ultimate political quality of luck.’ A few, aggressively briefed by Mandelson, speculated that Brown had become a future contender for the party’s leadership. Willie Whitelaw, the Tory elder statesman and former home secretary, said that both Brown and Blair were ‘improved and becoming a little dangerous’. Another observer noted that even at that moment Brown appeared affected by self-doubt: ‘He is very ambitious, but he seems to lack the nerve to go right to the very top.’ Brown’s image among the agnostics was not of a leader but of the Scottish engineer on the ocean liner, toiling away below decks in the engine room, polishing the pistons and removing the grease.

An opportunity to shed that reputation was again provided by Lawson. After journalists briefed by the chancellor reported that he intended to target the poor and pensioners with benefits while withholding the money from the rich, Lawson complained that he had been misquoted. The furore allowed Brown to parade his Christian conscience. ‘The government’s real objective,’ he taunted the tarnished chancellor in the Commons, ‘is to move from a regime of universal benefits to a regime of universal means testing, jeopardising for millions of pensioners security in ill-health and dignity in old age.’ Means testing pensions, said Brown, was ‘the most serious government assault so far mounted on the basic principles of Britain’s postwar welfare state’. His reputation harmed by scathing headlines whose implication – ‘Veteran Chancellor Bloodied by Upstart’ – was clear, Lawson’s misfortunes resulted in rich kudos for Brown. The Commons was the perfect platform from which to parade his loathing for complacent Tories feigning to help the poor. They were men, he sniped, who cared for power and money rather than principle. Lawson and Nicholas Ridley, the secretary of state for the environment and High Thatcherite minor aristocrat, ranked among the worst. Ridley’s aspiration was to deregulate, to withdraw subsidies, and to delight in not pulling the levers of power. Ridley sneered at Brown’s ‘supply-side socialism’. Standing in the crowded chamber, Brown reacted with genuine anger to the chain-smoking minister who appeared to care more about his ashtray than his departmental in-tray. Above all, Brown reviled Thatcher’s affection for photo-opportunities: one day she was seen promoting science, the next day campaigning against litter, then advancing the cause of women and later urging the regeneration of the inner cities. ‘Today a photo-opportunity,’ he wrote, ridiculing the ‘Maggie Acts’ headlines, ‘tomorrow a new issue, the last one all but forgotten. The government’s main new investment in these vital concerns has been in its own publicity.’ His incandescence at the rising cost of official advertising, from £20 million to £100 million, seemed genuine. Four years later he would adopt the same tactics as virtuous ploys to help win an election.

Brown’s pertinent strength in 1988 was his patent sincerity. Like a machine-gun, around the clock, seven days a week, he worked to capture the headlines, firing off press releases on every subject, with newsworthy coups offering leaks of confidential Whitehall information. One day he publicised a government memorandum about civil servants not encouraging grants for high-technology research; another day he produced secret government statistics showing that the poorest four million homes were worse off than they had been ten years earlier; another day he trumpeted a report by Peter Levene, the personal adviser to Michael Heseltine at the ministry of defence, recommending that, to save money, Royal Navy ships should be refitted by private contractors. Levene’s discovery that the efficiency of the naval dockyards could not be assessed because their accounting systems were ‘entirely meaningless’ was derided by Brown’s assertion, to cheers, that ‘this is the most devious government we’ve had this century’.

Success fuelled his passion: at 7.30 on Boxing Day morning he telephoned Alistair Darling, a lawyer and Scottish activist educated at Loretto, a private school outside Edinburgh. ‘Have you seen the story in today’s Daily Telegraph?’ he asked. ‘No,’ replied Darling. ‘I’m still asleep.’ Deprived of a personal family life, Brown had become preoccupied by politics. Gradually, his passion distorted his perspective on life. Some accused him of hyperactivity, of becoming over-exposed as a rent-a-quote politician, robotically spouting One True Faith. He confessed his awareness that ‘rising can turn into falling pretty quickly’, and blamed his irrepressible desire to lead Labour away from its past and towards new policies. His fervour would brook no opposition, especially from other members of his party.

Among the most difficult were his fellow Scots. His old foe George Galloway and John Reid, previously a sociable partner, had become argumentative and occasionally unreasonable. Reid and his group, Brown suspected, were quintessentially sectarian west Scotland left-wing hardmen, meeting as a caucus before general meetings to agree their arguments and votes. ‘He’s a music hall artist,’ Brown said of one agitator whom he castigated as ‘a prisoner of his upbringing’, perhaps failing to recognise that he too was a hostage to his own past.

Among the shackles of that past was the feud with Robin Cook. ‘It’s chemical between those two,’ John Smith told friends, concerned about the sour relationship. Cook was himself renowned as a good hater and not a team player. ‘A bombastic pain when I first met him,’ was Jimmy Allison’s judgement about a man accused of flip-flopping on major policies – the euro, nuclear weapons and Britain’s relationship with the United States. While Cook spoke impromptu on those issues, alternating between vehement opposition and support, Brown avoided extremes, courteously delivering written speeches based upon intellectual reasoning, only rarely being wrong-footed. His success increased Cook’s tetchiness. In turn, Brown became convinced that Cook, as he told friends, was ‘trying to destroy me’. No one regarded this apparent paranoia as serious, but there was a less attractive personality beginning to emerge. Success and publicity had transformed Brown into a man with an unqualified belief in himself, convinced that he was the best socialist, the best thinker, the best persuader, the best media performer and the best at everything else. The political truth was gradually defined as what suited Gordon Brown at that moment, and socialism was defined as those ideas that best served his interests. If his black-and-white judgement about Cook was challenged, a grim mood enveloped a man now increasingly consumed by hatreds. Only occasionally could he restrain his monochrome ambition.

To help John Smith’s recovery, Brown accompanied him in regular ascents of Scotland’s mountains over 3,000 feet in height – known as Munro-bagging – occasionally with Chris Smith, the MP for Islington, and Martin O’Neill. Those walks inspired Brown to write a pamphlet, ‘Where is the Greed?: Margaret Thatcher and the Betrayal of Britain’s Future’. At heart, the pamphlet revealed an old-fashioned Christian socialist concerned to alleviate suffering, seeking a modern way to vent his spleen against the Thatcherite conviction that state interference was a principal cause of society’s faults. Only the state, he claimed, could redress the growth of poverty and inequality since 1979. Eager to win the next election, the ‘new realist’ despaired about the past decade of Labour history and the danger of following John Maxton into oblivion. His solution, using new words to promote old ideas, was a rehashed attack on ‘free market dogma’.

John Smith sympathised, but was alarmed by his friend’s hyperactivity. During his convalescence he regularly telephoned Roy Hattersley, the deputy leader, and asked, ‘What’s Gordon up to?’ ‘Nothing,’ replied Hattersley, ‘but being loyal.’ To certify his reassurance, Hattersley invited Brown to lunch the week before Smith’s return. ‘What job would you like to do?’ he asked. ‘I think I’ll remain as shadow chief secretary,’ replied Brown, ‘to help John back to health.’ Brown’s restlessness for change and personal success did not appear to endanger Smith.

In early summer 1989, Margaret Thatcher became personally vulnerable. The poll tax had provoked violent protests, and her antagonism towards the ERM was dividing her from Nigel Lawson and Geoffrey Howe, the foreign secretary. To reinforce her position, Howe was demoted to leader of the House and Sir Alan Walters, an enemy of Lawson, was recalled as her personal economic adviser, based in 10 Downing Street. Lawson was incandescent. The disarray among the Tory leadership was oxygen for an accomplished political debater blessed with sharp wit, and Brown deployed his invective in a masterful Commons performance. ‘Many lonely, sad and embattled people,’ he said, mocking Lawson across the dispatch box, ‘labour under the delusion that their thoughts are being influenced by the Moonies next door … I assure the right honourable gentleman that he is not paranoid. They really are out to get him.’ Lawson sat stony-faced as Labour MPs jeered, ‘Go on, smile,’ and roared their approval as Brown recited the wretched statistics about inflation at 6 per cent, interest rates at 15 per cent and a growing trade deficit which undermined the chancellor’s reputation. No Labour politician wanted to hear that unemployment had fallen to 1.7 million and that manufacturing output had increased every year between 1983 to 1989 by an average of 4.75 per cent. Brown feigned deafness to Lawson’s assertion that Britain’s managers had finally been liberated to earn profits because of real competition, the destruction of protectionism and the strangulation of the trade unions’ restrictive practices. Devotion to socialism, retorted Lawson, was restricted to Albania, Cuba and Walworth Road. Not so, replied Brown spurred on by a party cheered by their discovery of a potential leader; there was socialism in Sweden, France and Spain. And soon, they hoped, in Britain. Lawson’s misery fuelled his opponent’s morale. As the chamber emptied, the crowd followed Brown and John Smith to the Commons bar. Endless hands smacked the dark-suited back of the man who fellow MPs were convinced was the star of the new generation, the future leader who would expunge the miserable memories of Wilson, Callaghan and Foot.

That evening, Brown was congratulated by Neil Kinnock. Confirming Brown’s potential to inherit the leadership, the Welshman offered two pieces of advice: ‘For credibility, you need to vote against the whip. And secondly, you’ve got to learn to fall in love faster and get married.’ Brown laughed. He had introduced Kinnock to Marion Caldwell, but had no intention of proposing marriage, despite her fervour. ‘Oh, there’s lots of time for that,’ he replied. Kinnock’s advice may not have been followed, but an unlikely source would possibly be more influential.

Just before the summer recess, Brown was travelling with Michael Howard, the secretary of state for employment, on a train from Swansea to London. Howard recognised Brown as a fellow intellectual. Flushed by the Conservatives’ continuing supremacy despite their difficulties, Howard settled back in his seat and presented a detailed critique of Labour’s unresolved electoral weaknesses. The party, he said, would never win another election until it ceased alienating the ‘margins’. Brown listened silently as Howard lectured him about appealing to voters’ personal interests in taxation, schools and health. To overcome middle-class antagonism, concluded Howard, Labour needed to address the details of those individual issues rather than blankly preach socialism. On arrival in London, the opponents bade each other farewell. In later years Howard would wonder whether his free advice had helped Labour finally to defeat his own party.

Brown was certainly anxious to learn during that summer. Americans had become his inspiration. The previous year he had met Bill Clinton in Baden-Baden, in Germany. Clinton was touring the world to meet other politicians before declaring his bid for the presidency. His big idea to roll back ‘Reaganomics’, with its greed and debts, was to introduce a ‘New Covenant’, reasserting the existence of a ‘society’ in America and declaring that citizenship involved responsibilities as well as rights. Brown found Clinton engaging, although intellectually muddled. There was nevertheless scope for a partnership between Clinton’s advisers and Labour’s ‘modernisers’, including Peter Mandelson and Geoff Mulgan, a policy adviser. One year later, Brown would spend the summer in Cape Cod, reading through a suitcase of books on which the airline had levied an excess weight charge, and seeking out Democrats to hear about their new ideas.

He returned to Westminster anticipating excitement, but not the earthquake of 26 October 1989. Margaret Thatcher’s refusal to join the ERM and her protection of Alan Walters had humiliated Nigel Lawson. Insensitive to the danger, she allowed Lawson to resign, and then dismissed Walters. The prime minister’s relationship with Walters was an easy target for Brown’s derision: ‘It was the most damaging appointment of an adviser by a head of government since – I was going to say, since Caligula’s horse, but at least the horse stayed in Rome and worked full-time.’ Turning to the choice of John Major to replace Lawson as chancellor, Brown jeered, to the unrestrained acclaim of the Labour backbenches, ‘He has had the right training for the job over the past few weeks when he was foreign secretary – private humiliation, public repudiation and instant promotion.’ In the shadow cabinet elections in autumn 1989 he again topped the poll, and was appointed shadow spokesman for trade and industry.

For the modernisers, especially Blair and Mandelson, Brown embodied their best hopes for Labour’s eventual success. Suggestions that he was a candidate for the leadership inevitably roused his personal enemies and political critics on the left to question the essence of the man. The sceptics sensed a lack of ruthlessness, judged his charm as weakness, and doubted his willingness to grasp the jugular in order to advance his cause. Perhaps, they speculated, he lacked a game plan eventually to win the leadership. Their doubts were reinforced by Brown’s notorious disorganisation, persistently arriving late for, or completely missing, meetings. He was known to be irked by the practical details of life. Frequently he arranged a meeting in a restaurant but forgot to book a table, or even found the doors locked. His sometimes uneasy relationship to reality led to gossip concerning his uncertain commitment to others. His obsessive privacy, suggesting a fear of embarrassing revelations, also fuelled rumours, while his provincial rough edges suggested foreignness to the metropolitan media. ‘I think most Scots are pretty reserved about their ambitions or personal lives. I think I am,’ he told an interviewer in 1989 who asked why he so rarely smiled. His friendship with Nigel Griffiths, a confirmed bachelor and the MP for Edinburgh South since 1987 who worked devotedly for him, excited unjustified gossip, not least after Owen Dudley Edwards said the two were like ‘Christopher Robin and Pooh Bear in an enchanted place in the forest’.