Gordon Brown: Prime Minister

In a rare attempt to humanise his image and attract support, he agreed to co-operate with Fiona Millar, a young Labour supporter employed by the Sunday Express, on a newspaper profile. The overt reason was Brown’s candidacy to be the party’s next leader. Naturally, he told Millar that he was ‘cool towards the notion’. He did however admit that his personality and policies irritated many Labour MPs. ‘It’s the old story,’ he confessed, ‘that your opponents are across from you in the House of Commons and your enemies are next to you. There are a number of people who resent me, but all I have done is get on with my job, and I don’t think anyone would accuse me of not being a team player.’ The profile’s first public description of his home was not encouraging. The austerity of a new floral three-piece suite in the living room, and the undisguised sparseness of the other rooms with their bare walls and a solitary piano, a present from his mother, were not mitigated by his exclamation, ‘Moving here has changed my life,’ or the disclosure that he played golf and tennis, watched football and ‘many films’, and read detective novels. Piles of books were scattered around the house, most of them about political theory and ideology. Only a few looked unread. The humanisation of Gordon Brown required something to fill the glaring gap – a woman in his life. Coyly, he explained, ‘Marriage is something that hasn’t happened yet. I’ve been too busy working, but everything is possible.’ He admitted to a ‘girlfriend who is a lawyer’, but stipulated that Caldwell should not be named, to which Millar agreed. To compensate for that self-censorship, she conjured the colourful depiction of Brown as ‘the thinking woman’s crumpet’, apparently known as ‘the awayday favourite’ by female staff on BBC’s Question Time because he was their choice of companion when travelling outside London.

The interview, however, was a failure. Brown’s resistance to introspection and reluctance to admit to any ambitions beyond politics left the reader baffled about the real man. There were no clues about his personal life, his ambition, his inner turmoil or even any mention of his unusual habit of always wearing dark blue suits, bought in bulk, and red ties. Unanswered was the question of whether Brown was merely a product of his era, or a man who might one day shape the nation’s destiny. Some would say that he was not so much unwilling to reveal himself as incapable of self-analysis or even self-deprecation. Outside politics, he was unable to define himself. While there was no doubt that following his progress would be worthwhile, his destination was unresolved.

The only real consequence of the interview was to encourage Neil Kinnock to suspect plots. In the fevered atmosphere, he believed that Donald Dewar, with John Smith’s support, was seeking to mount a coup against him in favour of Smith, an accusation Dewar’s confidants laughingly derided. For his part, Smith was convinced that Brown was plotting against himself, and asked the GMB trade union leader John Edmonds to warn Brown off. Edmonds telephoned Mandelson at his home in Hartlepool on a Friday night. ‘I gather the mice are playing,’ he said. ‘What are you talking about?’ replied Mandelson. ‘People say you’re plotting for Gordon and against John.’ Mandelson denied the allegation. Brown, Edmonds continued, should cease manoeuvring to become the leader after the 1992 election. In Edmonds’s opinion, the party would not skip a generation. John Smith was the party’s candidate. Brown heard about the threat within minutes. Frustrated by Kinnock and irritated by Smith, he pondered whether he should strike. His opportunity was short-lived.

Smith complained to Kinnock about Brown’s ‘precociousness’. Kinnock appreciated Brown as a ‘bright spark’, and since Smith was a year older than himself, half-favoured Brown as the next leader; but Smith refused to countenance the jump of a generation. Kinnock made no attempt to reconcile the two, except to bark, ‘Grow up.’ To reinforce his position, Smith summoned Brown and demanded a personal assurance that he would not stand in the next leadership election. Instead of outrightly refusing to commit himself, Brown mumbled some inconsequential platitudes. At the crucial moment, calculating the compromises and betrayals that would be necessary for success, he lacked the courage to accept the challenge. ‘You won’t stand in my way after the next election?’ asked Smith directly. ‘No,’ Brown meekly replied. He would tell his staff that he had refused to join any plot because he feared that rumours of division could cost Labour the election. The self-discipline of the machine politicians protected Kinnock from newspapers reporting disenchantment among the parliamentary party.

Gordon Brown had harmed his own cause. He emerged from the foothills of a botched coup neurotic about the whispers. ‘Who’s saying things about me?’ he asked Mandelson. Doubts and distrust became embedded in his relationships. In self-protection he began minutely controlling every aspect of his life. At private meetings he became irascible, although in public his carefully written and rehearsed speeches, liberally sprinkled with original jokes, concealed his anxieties. His self-discipline suggested an assured future. At the 1991 party conference in Brighton he taunted the Tories about their grubby relationship with City ‘fat cats’: ‘First a privatisation write-off, then a City sell-off – and then a Tory party pay-off.’ The Conservatives, he mocked, depended on financial support from mysterious foreign billionaires, including a tainted Greek shipping owner. ‘Most shamefully of all, [they take donations from] a Greek billionaire moving his money out of colonels into Majors.’ The cheers temporarily reinforced his self-confidence.

Brown’s contribution to the party’s manifesto for the 1992 election – ‘It’s Time to Get Britain Working Again’ and ‘Looking to the Future’ – reflected the next stage of his journey away from the Tribunites. He favoured regulation and competition rather than nationalisation, private business rather than state intervention, and supported seeking private venture capital on ‘strictly commercial lines’ for investment in public services. The flipside was his regurgitation of Harold Wilson’s thirty-year-old mantra of the ‘white heat of technology’ in a ‘new agenda for investment’. Using Wilsonian buzz words – technology, innovation, revolution, investment, modernisation – he castigated the Tories’ ‘trust in simplistic market answers’, especially to create a skilled workforce.

Even Brown was frustrated by the lack of originality in relying on Wilsonian vocabulary. He blamed Neil Kinnock personally, and the coterie around him including Charles Clarke and Patricia Hewitt, who professed to understand ‘modernisation’ and ‘the Project’ but who in his opinion were an albatross around the neck of the party as it prepared for the election. His revenge was to take pleasure in irritating Clarke by arranging meetings with Kinnock without telling his chief of staff. The consequence was uncoupling during the weeks before election day, 9 April 1992. Working from an office near Waterloo station, Brown barely spoke to John Smith, and fumed about the self-indulgence and lack of professionalism among the ‘London losers’, the wild and woolly left in the London Labour Party who were organising the hopeless campaign. He cursed the fact that Smith was approving policies without asking, ‘Can we win with this?’, and speaking to Donald Dewar about policy while ignoring himself. He cursed the party’s refusal to promote him as a spokesman on television, although he himself was partly to blame for that. Unlike every other shadow minister, he refused to appoint a liaison official at Walworth Road as a point of contact while he toured the country. Charles Clarke urged him to do so, but was rebuffed. Geoff Mulgan, his senior aide, never discussed Brown’s personal campaign with David Ward, Smith’s campaign manager. ‘You’re not a team player,’ Smith raged at Brown. ‘The problem is that you want to be the team leader.’

Smith was right, but was too stubborn to understand the reason. Convinced that tax increases were vote-winners, he had arranged a dramatic unveiling of his proposals on the Treasury’s steps in Whitehall just days before the election. As Smith stood in Whitehall surrounded by his smiling Treasury team, Brown seethed. Two years later he would praise Smith’s passion for equality, but at that moment he knew the folly of honesty. As they walked to their cars from the Treasury steps, Brown sniped at Smith, ‘You’ve lost us the election.’ Smith was visibly shocked, more by the disloyalty than by the prediction. Even Kinnock, under pressure from Brown, had confessed over dinner with friendly journalists at Luigi’s restaurant that Smith’s shadow budget was ‘wrong’, and had pledged to row back. Smith was unperturbed. A telephone call on Monday, 6 April, three days before election day, from Terry Burns, the Treasury’s permanent secretary, reinforced Smith’s conviction. Burns invited Smith to visit the Treasury to discuss Labour’s intentions if elected. There had been several previous conversations about Labour’s plans, which included possible withdrawal from the ERM. As Smith confidently drove to Whitehall carrying some papers prepared by Brown, he was convinced of victory. Left behind, his assistant Helen Liddell said quietly, ‘We’ve lost. Taxation has lost us the election.’

On advertising billboards across England, Smith’s tax increases were exploited by the Conservatives as Labour’s ‘double whammy’ of ‘more taxes’ and ‘higher prices’. John Major, parading as the victor of the Gulf War, exploited Kinnock’s waltz into the Tory trap of Labour’s reputation for economic incompetence. Although in Labour’s folklore the polls rose in their favour after Smith presented his shadow budget, nothing could save the party after Kinnock’s disastrous performance at a premature victory rally in Sheffield. Middle England decided that Labour could not be trusted. Tax and his own personal image, Kinnock was told, had extinguished their chance of victory. Five years later Brown would say, ‘I was always loyal to John Smith in public, but in private I had disagreements about the 1992 proposals.’

Just before election day, Tony Blair invited Robert Harris, an intelligent journalist and friend of Peter Mandelson, to lunch at L’Escargot in Soho. ‘Do you think Labour will win?’ asked Blair. ‘Yes,’ replied Harris. ‘I don’t think so,’ said Blair. ‘We’re going to lose.’ Labour had failed to break its dependence on the trade unions, and failed to understand the aspirations of hard-working English people of all classes. After the defeat, continued Blair, Gordon Brown would run against John Smith for the leadership, and Blair would stand for deputy. That scenario would require Brown to be courageous, and Blair appeared convinced that he would be. In fact Blair’s conjecture was either naïve or provocative. Over the previous twelve months, he knew, the trade unions had vetoed a challenge to Smith, and the parliamentary party was divided. He was deftly promoting his own interests. Brown was close to Smith, while Blair’s impatience with the Glaswegian was well known. Blair’s influence in a shadow cabinet led by Smith would be less than Brown’s. A Brown coup was the best option for Blair’s future.

Watching from Scotland as the election result was announced for Basildon in Essex, Brown exploded in anger. The sitting Tory MP had held on to a seat that Labour had to win if it was to have any chance of gaining power. ‘Basildon man’, cursed Brown, was ‘selfish’. Labour’s defeat was humiliating. The Tory majority fell from 102 to twenty-one, but it was their fourth successive election victory. Although there was a 2 per cent swing to the Tories in his constituency, Brown personally achieved a massive majority of 17,444. At that desperate moment Brown could not understand why England’s aspiring working class seemed to hate Scotland’s passion for collectivism and government interference. Both he and Blair were in despair.

THREE Turbulence

The curtains of the Kinnocks’ house in Ealing, west London, were tightly drawn on the bright morning of 10 April 1992. Inside, the occupants were crying. Neil Kinnock was shocked that Labour had not won the election. In the west of Scotland, John Smith was similarly distraught, but robustly rejected any responsibility for the defeat. On the banks of the River Forth, Gordon Brown was considering the consequences of Kinnock’s resignation.

In his telephone conversations with close friends including Nigel Griffiths, Nick Brown, Martin O’Neill, Gavyn Davies and Doug Henderson, Brown alternated between bafflement and explosions of despair. Only Tony Blair aggressively argued in favour of Brown taking the risk of standing for the leadership. He invited Brown to meet at his home in Trimdon, in his Sedgefield constituency, with Nick Brown. As they walked in the countryside, Blair urged him to stand as the modernising candidate. Labour’s English MPs, he said, would support him against Smith who they agreed was incapable of appealing to aspiring English people. Three times Brown had placed first in the elections for the shadow cabinet, and his continuing popularity guaranteed him a fourth victory in the autumn.

At this decisive moment, Brown was paralysed by his emotions. The trade unions, he was told, favoured Smith; many MPs were against a divisive vote so soon after the party had been through hell to unite itself; and he had been assured that he would inherit the crown after Smith. In meetings over the following two days at Nick Brown’s home in Heaton in Newcastle, and then at County Hall, Durham, with Mandelson, Brown repeated all those reasons for not challenging Smith. The judgement of the Scottish establishment, he told Blair, could not be ignored. All were united by a near-blood oath to the clan chief. The middle-class minister’s son hated the thought of bloodshed. Listening to Brown, Blair was unimpressed by what he later dubbed a masquerade. In the opinion of those associated with ‘The Project’, Brown lacked courage to seize the opportunity and break the mould. He was a woolly apparatchik, eloquent about the party’s ideal philosophy, but unable, like a star pupil politely waiting for the offer of a prize, to elbow his way brutally past those he despised. The conversations ended with Blair losing his temper. Brown, he said, lacked the resilience to withstand personal criticism from his peers, and feared failure. He was a coward. The scales, Blair would tell Anji Hunter, had fallen from his eyes. In the future he would be less deferential towards Brown, less obedient. ‘He chickened out, taking the easy option,’ judged Blair. Others were less critical. ‘Gordon won kudos for not standing,’ said Tam Dalyell.

Five years later, Brown presented his faint-heartedness as loyalty. ‘I felt I owed a debt of gratitude to John Smith,’ he told Paul Routledge. ‘I felt I had to be loyal. It was for no other reason. I had worked with him for almost eight years on the front bench, and it was right for me to be loyal. I thought the Labour Party was more ready for change than people imagined, but I never thought for a minute of standing against John Smith.’ He considered standing for the deputy leadership, but was turned down by Smith, who felt that two Scotsmen would be electorally unattractive. In turn, Blair rejected Smith’s offer to be his deputy. Revealing his prejudices, Smith chose Margaret Beckett, a left-wing trade unionist certain to antagonise middle England. To minimise their embarrassment and pose as ‘agents of influence’, both Brown and Blair telephoned journalists to explain why they were not standing for the deputy leadership. Few were convinced.

Brown, previously tipped as the leader-in-waiting, was further deflated when, on 26 July 1992, the day after John Smith’s election victory, the Sunday Times devoted five pages to a profile of Tony Blair as the party’s next leader. Two days later Charles Reiss, the London Evening Standard’s political editor, published a percipient prediction under the headline ‘Coming War Between Brown and Blair’. The whispers in Westminster, reported Reiss, revealed a depth of unhappiness among English Labour MPs about Smith’s appearance as a ‘smiling uncle’. Compared to Blair, who looked approachable and urbane, the newly crowned leader was from the wrong generation. Even the cautious and rhetorical Brown, he wrote, offended some as old-fashioned. Some observers wondered whether the rivalry between Brown and Blair would mirror the similar battle twenty years earlier between Roy Jenkins and Tony Crosland, whose long friendship was corroded by their acrimonious contest for the Labour leadership during the 1970s. The speculation was short-lived. The party was preoccupied by yet another autopsy about its failure to overturn a Tory government responsible for a major recession. The debate identified several culprits, including Gordon Brown.

Shortly after his appointment as John Smith’s shadow chancellor, Brown hosted a drinks party in his office. In the sombre atmosphere, Peter Mandelson, the newly elected MP for Hartlepool, was openly rebellious. ‘The party,’ he said loudly, ‘has to modernise, and John Smith is not up to it.’ Mandelson’s disloyalty caused no surprise. The dissent was not directed towards Smith alone. Mandelson’s audience knew that in other rooms Brown was under attack for having approved Smith’s discredited shadow budget. Brown’s silence was deemed to be incriminating. He dismissed the criticism as irrelevant. In 1997 he would claim that his new position as shadow chancellor had bestowed on him the power to challenge Smith ‘to change our whole economic policy’. That was undoubtedly the Herculean challenge he set himself in 1992, but at the time many doubted whether he could overcome Smith’s conservatism, and whether the party could change sufficiently to avoid a fifth election defeat.

The hunger for victory persuaded Brown finally to acknowledge the achievements of Thatcherism. He jettisoned any affection for Neil Kinnock’s ‘Red Rose’. That misty-eyed, superficial change of image had not neutralised the public’s perception that Labour would restrict options, dampen ambitions and nationalise fitted kitchens. On the contrary, Kinnock had reinforced ‘Basildon man’s’ perception of Labour as an enemy, keen to impose shackles on behalf of society. Until the Attlee legacy was repudiated, the new shadow chancellor knew, Labour could not pose as a party offering people opportunities. ‘We’ve got to work from first principles towards policies,’ he again told his advisers including Michael Wills, Geoff Mulgan and John Eatwell. The path back to power, he accepted, was for Labour to appeal to the middle class by changing its image and policies. The first obstacle was the party members, including himself.

In July 1992 the party faithful were still cursing the ‘culture of contentment’. Gordon Brown hated ‘Basildon man’, the motivated working-class aspirant whom he damned as ‘a selfish, indeed self-centred individual’. To win ‘Basildon man’s’ allegiance, he decided to conceal his disgust and promote the new credo that ‘There is no clash between individual freedom and the advancement of the common good.’ In the frenzy of his writing and speeches, he appeared to abandon his attachment to the idea of the state ‘that all too easily assumes that where there is a public interest there must always be a centralised public bureaucracy’. The state itself, he acknowledged, could itself be a damaging vested interest. In his rush during the summer to compose a new ideology, there were inevitably contradictions. He abandoned pure socialism but espoused collectivism, arguing that individuals should group together for the common good. He abandoned state controls but wanted the markets to operate subject to such controls in the public interest. The new gospel was to revolutionise the Labour Party’s image, but only partially its substance. Gordon Brown could not break away from his life’s attachment to socialism. He urged the faithful not to despair, because ‘The truth is that our natural constituency is the majority who benefit from a just society.’

In the new House of Commons, the Tories were soft targets. During the election campaign John Major had pledged, ‘Vote Conservative on Thursday and the recovery will continue on Friday.’ Instead, the recession had worsened. Unemployment was rising back towards three million, interest rates were increasing, property prices were falling, car workers were working short time, and the government was poised to announce massive spending cuts. Norman Lamont, the chancellor, was regularly lambasted for misleading the country that taxes would be cut, when in fact they were going up. Inexorably, an old-fashioned sterling crisis was about to explode. Devaluation from the exchange rate of DM 2.95 to the pound was the best cure, but Britain’s membership of the ERM rendered that remedy unavailable. Lamont sought help from the German central bank, but was snubbed. Germany’s economy was expanding while Britain’s was shrinking. Unusually, Lamont’s crisis was also Brown’s. He had supported entry into the ERM, and he rejected unilaterally devaluing sterling.

The unfolding disaster fulfilled the predictions of Bryan Gould and other Labour opponents of joining the ERM. Their criticism was inflamed by Brown’s aggressive dismissal of their opinions. Robin Cook, supported by Peter Hain, Ken Livingstone and other anti-Europeans, wanted devaluation. Even John Smith supported ‘realignment’. ‘Labour,’ warned Smith, ‘should know the dangers of fixed exchange rates. Harold Wilson’s greatest mistake was to hold sterling against the dollar between 1964 and 1967.’ Gordon Brown disagreed, and insisted that Labour could never again be the party of devaluation. The party, he warned, would lose credibility by following such a policy. Tough on the new orthodoxy, he was sticking to the ERM; forgetting the modernisation gospel he had preached just days earlier, he promoted Old Labour policies of cutting interest rates and greater government investment. Using the identical lexicon as Harold Wilson twenty-five years earlier, he regularly lashed out at the ‘handful of shirt-sleeved speculators’ and City whiz kids dictating the lives of millions and the destinies of national economies. The outbreak of warfare in the party became focused on Brown, who appeared a confused ideologue.

In early September 1992 the economic crisis escalated. The government’s defence of the pound was faltering. Brown’s support for remaining in the ERM was emphatic. ‘There are those like Lady Thatcher who believe that Britain should devalue,’ he wrote in the Sunday Express on 6 September, ‘and turn its back on Europe and the exchange rate mechanism with all the harsh consequences that would ensue.’ Brown’s alternatives to devaluation were state subsidies and increased taxes. Throughout that week, as the crisis intensified, he was telephoned by journalists and asked why the pound should not be devalued. ‘I can’t afford to think it’s overvalued,’ Brown replied, ‘because it would seem as if Labour believed in devaluation.’ Those who pushed him to promote Britain’s exit from the ERM were met by a solid wall. He refused to consider the possibility that he was wrong. His inconsistency gave the impression that he did not understand economics. In 1997 he would tell Paul Routledge that he had anticipated the crisis. Considering his statements at the time, this appears to be untrue.

Late in the afternoon of Wednesday, 16 September 1992, Brown was in his office in 1 Parliament Street, overlooking the Treasury building. That morning he had still been convinced that the government would remain in the ERM, helped by Germany’s revaluation of its own currency. He would be vindicated, he reassured John Smith, despite his critics including Ken Livingstone, who again had advocated devaluation. Around Brown were his advisers Neal Lawson, Michael Wills, Lord Eatwell and Geoff Mulgan. The tension was high. The constantly updated television news bulletins reporting Norman Lamont’s battle to save sterling were unnerving. If Labour had won the election in April, Brown would have been the focus of the TV cameras outside the Treasury, and the target of baying Tory MPs inside the Commons. His plight was better than Lamont’s, but the politician whose talent was to ridicule his opponents knew that he was vulnerable to mockery. He had allied himself to a policy which, to his amazement, was collapsing – and worse, he did not understand the reason.