Whatever it Takes: The Real Story of Gordon Brown and New Labour

WHATEVER IT TAKES

The Real Story

of Gordon Brown

and New Labour

STEVE RICHARDS

Copyright

First published in Great Britain in 2010 by

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF www.4thestate.co.uk

Copyright © Steve Richards 2010

The right of Steve Richards to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007320325

Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2010 ISBN: 9780007352272

Version: 2018-06-18

To Barbara, Amy and Jake

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

ONE: Trust

TWO: Dangerous Assumptions

THREE: Cautiously Bold

FOUR: Personalities and Policies

FIVE: Second Term

SIX: Ambition

SEVEN: Coup

EIGHT: Prime Minister

NINE: Election Fever

TEN: A Vacuum

ELEVEN: Summer Holidays

TWELVE: Revolts and Recovery

THIRTEEN: Whatever It Takes

FOURTEEN: New Labour to New Politics

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

About the Author

About the Publisher

PREFACE

From the beginning the New Labour project was deliberately evasive. The term ‘new’, first used by Tony Blair on the day he became leader, was both an early clue to what was to follow and a red herring. Who could oppose a force that was new compared with one that was old? Most of us would prefer a new set of clothes to the older ones, at least until we find out more about what the clothes are like. But beyond a superficial attraction, where did the evasive adjective lead? The term was apolitical, like so many of the adjectives that were applied with such misleadingly feverish energy in the years that followed the emergence of New Labour.

The clue was the act of depoliticization. Newness was neither a quality on the left nor the right. The red herring was the notion that the adjective paraded with such a flourish conveyed clear direction, a party moving away from its past towards a ‘new’ future, forward not back, as the party put it in a slogan for the 2005 election. Blair relished the meaningless metaphor more than any other. ‘I do not have a reverse gear,’ he told his party conference in 2004. Actually he used that particular gear quite a lot, as all leaders do. But the image tells us nothing about the values of an individual or the party they lead.

The apolitical adjectives were not alone. Most of the rows that attracted so much intense attention for more than a decade were over issues relating to ‘integrity’, eruptions of ‘temper’ and personal rivalries. These were appropriately apolitical rows for the depoliticized decade. Debates about integrity can be staged about any public figure. They do not take us very far in discovering where these figures come from and are trying to get to, beyond an uneasy sense that their adoption of an apolitical adjective in the first place was partly because they were not entirely sure where they were going as a political force either.

The subsequent internal divide within New Labour blurred further the original evasion. Suddenly in the mid-1990s there were Blairites and Brownites springing up from nowhere in large numbers. The noun became an adjective, the adjective a noun. I would not have been surprised if I had heard a cue on an interview programme along the lines of: ‘Joining me now is the Blairite, Tony Blair.’ Both adjectives were applied a thousand a times a day in attempts to shed light. Most of the time they obscured while purporting to clarify. Was a Blairite someone who was merely loyal to Tony Blair? Was a Brownite someone who was personally loyal to Gordon Brown? Did a Blairite espouse a set of values and policies distinct from a Brownite’s? If so, what were they?

The lack of clarification enabled the creators of New Labour to build up a big tent of support in the early years, as David Cameron and Nick Clegg sought to do when they formed their coalition after the election in 2010. Cameron and Clegg proclaimed a ‘new politics’, the ubiquitous fresh-faced adjective in place once more. New Labour. New Politics. The coalition was not a break with the past, but its echo.

Anyone could read more or less what he or she wished to into a project that claimed vaguely to be in the ‘radical centre’. When New Labour was popular, support came from the right and left. But when it became unpopular there were unavoidably a thousand contradictory interpretations as to what had gone wrong. These post mortems were as foggy as the intentions of the original political project. As a result, the New Labour era remains one of the most misunderstood in modern times. Millions of words have been written on the subject already and yet the myths persist.

The role of Gordon Brown in the New Labour years is especially hazy and elusive. Like a central character in a whodunnit, his role and character seem obvious until we step back to question the assumptions that shape our perceptions. In spite of the mountain of words written about him there are many unresolved questions. Here are some of them, although others surface in the coming pages:

Why was Brown so seemingly poorly prepared for his period as Prime Minister when he had planned for his tenure at the Treasury like a military campaign?

Why did someone singled out by the highly demanding Peter Mandelson as ‘media friendly’ in the 1980s come to be regarded as a hopeless communicator by the time he became Prime Minister?

Why would some of Brown’s staff have died for him, while other colleagues loathed him?

Why was Brown, so gripped by the need to address poverty and poor public services, the best friend of bankers and an ardent supporter of a light regulatory regime for the City?

Why did a Chancellor who made a fetish of being prudent and reducing borrowing take huge risks with the level of public debt towards the end of his tenure at the Treasury?

Why did Brown react quite so badly in 1994 to Blair securing the leadership, a reaction that determined so much that followed? After all, other highly ambitious politicians have failed to become leader and reacted more calmly.

Were the differences with Blair beyond fuming ambition and if so what were they?

What are the lessons for a party, any party, when two figures and their closest advisers seize total control?

How significant was the role of the media as Blair and Brown played out their dance?

How to explain a figure that claimed his Presbyterian father was his model and spoke of his moral compass yet presided over a paranoid court with close colleagues in fear of being briefed against and one of his oldest friends, Alistair Darling, claiming the ‘forces of hell’ were unleashed against him in the early autumn of 2008?

How was such a devoted bibliophile so contorted, dense and plodding when he wrote and spoke in public?

The questions accumulate and feed on themselves. One prompts another. The answers shed light not only on Brown’s long career at the top of British politics, but on the entire New Labour project and on the challenges for the coalition government formed in the summer of 2010. In order to make sense of Brown’s stormy premiership and the New Labour years that preceded it I begin where the seeds were sown, the summer of 1992.

For nearly two decades political journalism became largely defined by whether a writer was sympathetic to Tony Blair or Gordon Brown: ‘Ah, that story about Brown dyeing his hair purple was written by Matthew Nice. That means it must have come from the Blair camp. Nice is a Blairite.’ If a flattering story about Brown appeared, written by Kevin Nasty, there was a similar response: ‘Ah, Nasty is a Brownite. It will have come from the Brown camp.’

The duopoly ruled the government, and although the duo was never as good at manipulating the media as it thought or had hoped, it came to determine the dynamics of political writing too. The result was a stifling form of journalism. Journalists are trained to detect relevance. Virtually all other institutions and individuals in politics had become irrelevant.

After Peter Mandelson’s first resignation, or sacking, from the cabinet at the end of 1998 the journalist John Lloyd went for coffee at his house in Notting Hill. In effect Mandelson had been forced out of the government by Gordon Brown’s close allies. A mournful Mandelson asked Lloyd whether he was close to Blair or Brown. Lloyd replied innocently that he knew and respected them both. Mandelson paused, looked up and declared: ‘That’s impossible. You’re either on one side or the other.’

In spite of Mandelson’s largely accurate declaration I remained in close contact with key figures in both the Blairite and Brownite courts. I also saw Blair and Brown regularly. The degree and range of contact was unusual. In most cases if a writer had access to one court there was little or no contact with the other. Throughout the era I kept closely in touch with both sides. This book reflects a range of conversations with Blair, Brown and other key figures from the early 1990s until the election in May 2010. The section on Brown’s premiership also includes retrospective insights from those who worked with Brown, based on a series of interviews I conducted for a BBC Radio 4 series, broadcast in September 2010.

Over the New Labour years, and to my surprise, Brown came to interest me more than Blair. I am drawn to political performers, and from the early 1990s no one could perform like Blair, but gradually I came to realize that Brown was embarked on an enterprise of awkward, cautious, pragmatic nobility as well as a self-centred egotistical one in his hunger to become leader. I also discovered there was a marked ideological contrast between the two of them, one that has still not been properly explored and yet was at the heart of their inflammable reign.

In his rows over policy with Brown, Blair tended to take the kind of view that David Cameron and Nick Clegg would have done, which is one reason why their disputes are still highly relevant. They were big rows too, and the policy questions are still unresolved. Perhaps they are beyond resolution. What is the precise role of the state? How to deliver modern public services? What is the relationship between the state and markets? How much does a modern government need to tax and spend? What is Britain’s relationship with Europe and the Euro? How best to respond to an epoch-changing global financial crisis? Is it possible to address the level of poverty in Britain in a way that does not in the end alienate affluent voters? The attempts to answer these questions will define the fate of governments and the main opposition parties too for decades to come. The coalition government asked all these questions again soon after its formation in 2010.

As they sought to address these questions, perceptions of Blair and Brown changed radically but in very different ways. Blair was idolized and then loathed by large parts of the media and the voters. Both were irrational responses. Views of Brown changed wildly over his career.

In 1992 Brown was on a high, appointed a youthful shadow chancellor, topping shadow cabinet elections and winning rave reviews in the media. By the summer of 1994 he was so unpopular that Tony Blair became leader and Brown did not even dare to stand. When Labour won power in 1997 he was seen widely as a great reforming Chancellor, the chief executive of the government. After 11 September 2001, when Blair became a global superstar, Brown seemed doomed to play only a supporting role. Many influential columnists wrote off his chances of becoming leader. After his budget in 2003 he was hailed as a defining radical, almost single-handedly conducting a social democratic revolution. In 2004 his fortunes were at such a low ebb he was excluded even from the team planning the general election. At the beginning of 2005 he was so popular that Blair had to bring him back to the heart of the election campaign and promise that he would remain Chancellor after the election. Following the election victory his popularity slumped so low that polls suggested Labour would be even more unpopular when he became leader. In 2007 when he did become Prime Minister he was so highly rated that he was tempted to hold an early election. His decision not to do so touched off a sequence in which he became the least regarded prime minister since polls began. In the autumn of 2008 he bounced back as the country slid into recession. At the start of 2009 he became deeply unpopular again as the recession took hold. During the 2010 election, polls suggested that Labour would be slaughtered, coming third in terms of the votes cast. It came second easily, and for a few days afterwards there was a faint possibility that Brown would remain as Prime Minister. The oscillating perceptions are linked to the unanswered questions relating to Brown’s wider career. Compared with Margaret Thatcher, John Major and, to some extent, Tony Blair, he was a more complex and elusive figure. Although he served as a Prime Minister for a shorter period than all three he was as significant because of the unique power he wielded in the Labour party when it became a formidable election-winning machine, an era in which he had almost complete control over economic policy.

This is how I saw them, the New Labour years. I focus on the under-reported policy developments as well as the soap opera. Both were significant and became connected. I do not believe that Blair was ‘pro-reform’ and Brown was ‘anti-reform’. It was much more complicated and more interesting than that. By the end of his leadership, and arguably at the beginning, Blair was a social and economic liberal, in many ways closer to the Conservatives, leading a centre-left party that he knew was in a different place from him. Brown was a timidly cautious social democrat seeking to run a country that he feared was in thrall to economic liberalism and instinctively Conservative. These are the contortions that confused and distorted everything.

I look at the years through the prism of Brown’s career because there are more unanswered questions and mysteries than there are in the extensively chronicled life of Blair. In my view both were misunderstood, but Brown more so. Two early books on Brown by Paul Routledge and Robert Peston were part of the battle at the time with Blair, acts of war. They became episodes in the story rather than attempts at explanation. Elsewhere Brown’s epic flaws have generated a thousand headlines and several books, while his remarkably long period in which he was virtually alone responsible for economic policy is too easily dismissed or taken for granted. And yet if he, rather than Blair, had left British politics in 2007, the Labour government would have been left with a much bigger hole as it tried to come to terms with the economy.

In the end Brown left five days after the 2010 election. But his exit was not the predicted humiliation, and fleetingly he did what he had done so many times before: he sought to do whatever it took to retain power. For once he did not succeed, but the fact that he had the space to try was in itself an appropriately epic coda to an extraordinary career.

INTRODUCTION

Smiling determinedly and with transparent effort, Gordon Brown arrived at the election count in Kirkcaldy’s Adam Smith College just after 12.15 a.m. on 7 May 2010. This was the day he was supposed to lose power for ever. Virtually every commentator in the land, as well as a host of cabinet ministers, had assumed for months and in some cases years that Brown would be gone on the Friday after the election, a leader burdened for the rest of his life by a terrible defeat.

As with virtually every episode in Brown’s long career at the top of politics, assumptions formed with unswerving confidence proved to be wrong. Brown was not going anywhere other than Downing Street on Friday 7 May, and Labour was still more or less alive as a national force, suffering some terrible losses but also making a few unforeseen advances. The denouement of Brown’s career was appropriately complex and ambiguous. Unquestionably Labour had been defeated at the election, yet no other party had won. Far from becoming immediately irrelevant in the early hours of Friday morning, Brown and his party were still clinging to power.

The days that followed were a compressed version of his highly charged, nerve-racking career, one marked by dashed hopes and moments of soaring optimism, fuelled by self-interest and altruistic ambition. As the votes were being counted Brown was a player again in the midst of historic turmoil. Typically his control over the levers of power was far from straightforward. For many years Tony Blair had stood in Brown’s way. When Brown finally became Prime Minister he was for much of the time too unpopular and unsure of himself to take full control. Now David Cameron and Nick Clegg were preparing to pull levers too. Brown was used to this, always operating in a tiny amount of space and seizing moments when they arose. Politicians quite often act in the way they do because they have no choice. Great ones make the most of the tiny spaces.

To rapturous applause from supporters, Brown and his wife Sarah shook hands and embraced old friends as they awaited the declaration in his constituency. Here at least was mutually uncomplicated affection, local friendships arising from a shared passion for politics but not ruptured by rivalry and ambition at the very top.

Defeated leaders, or leaders on the verge of defeat, are brought to life by visits to their constituencies. Harold Wilson became less paranoid when he felt the affection of voters in Huyton, his seat in the North West of England. John Major was at once more relaxed when he headed for the comforting safety of his Cambridgeshire seat with one of the biggest majorities in the country. From the more troubling terrain of opposition Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock felt the same about their seats in Wales, where intense loyalty to them was at such odds with the raging disdain expressed elsewhere.

Brown always seemed to function on frighteningly narrow political terrain and he was already feverishly thinking through the likely outcome of the election result and considering his options. Behind his sincere and yet forced smile as he greeted old friends, he was calculating. Even now, as the votes were being counted in an election he had lost, he had options, or appeared to have them.

The Prime Minister had delayed his arrival long enough to contemplate the TV channels’ exit poll and the inconclusive early declarations. He was exhausted after the campaign and the long, contentious years at the top, but was also energized, having slept in the late afternoon and eaten lamb stew for his dinner in an almost relaxed frame of mind.

The lull had not lasted for very long. Lulls never did in his career. Both the exit poll and the actual results pointed to a hung parliament. Although in the confused early hours there was unjustified scepticism about the exit poll, there was no doubt even then that, in terms of the share of the vote, the Conservatives had come first and Labour second. The Liberal Democrats were well behind in third place.

Brown had come second, but was still breathing as a leader and the Conservative leader, David Cameron, was in no position to claim victory. Brown had lost and won. A hung parliament presented possibilities. He had spent much of the campaign fearing that Labour would come third, a historic defeat and bleak personal humiliation. After the first televised debate when ‘Cleggmania’ erupted, Brown had told his closest ally, Ed Balls, that he would resign at once if the Liberal Democrats overtook Labour.

His speech at the count reflected the uncertainty. Normally he prepared speeches too thoroughly. This one was compiled speedily after brief telephone conversations with Peter Mandelson and Ed Balls once the exit poll had been broadcast at ten o’clock. The speech had a valedictory air and yet was not quite a farewell. Even now, seemingly doomed, Brown delivered words that had more than one purpose, as he had done for nearly two decades.

To a packed hall, Brown reflected the grey fuzziness of the results:

The outcome of this country’s vote is not yet known. But my duty to the country, coming out of this election, is to play my part in Britain having a strong, stable and principled government, able to lead Britain into sustained economic recovery and able to implement our commitments to far-reaching reform to our political system – upon which there is a growing consensus in our country.

Sarah Brown, tall and berry red in a bright coat, stuck like glue to her husband’s side during the count, as she had done for much of the campaign. Standing on stage, nervously adjusting his jacket, Brown looked like a man desperate to fight on, even though the results were suggesting his career as a leader may be over.

Indeed the early part of his speech sounded as if he was taking his bow from the national stage:

Let me say to the people of this great constituency, there is no greater privilege than to serve in Parliament the people you have grown up with. Men and women you have gone to school with, whose children have also grown up here.

A few yards from here is the home in which I grew up as I was young. Immediately across the road from here is the church where my father preached and where I first began to learn about social justice.

And decades ago I learned here in Kirkcaldy something that has never left me – I learned what true friendship is.

And so many of us who meet first at school have been friends for life, and many of them are here tonight and I thank you for your unwavering support for me. For me personally, and also for your support for our cause.

This was Brown the human being making authentic references to his father and childhood friends. Both had sustained him through the years. Brown then turned to defend his record:

I’m proud of much that the Labour Government has achieved, the minimum wage, the child tax credit, the NHS renewed, more police officers, half a million children out of poverty, two million more jobs than in 1997.

Brown went on to offer more extensive thanks and a defence of his long period in power. No leader with a future ahead of him would focus so much on friendship and the past, but Brown left the door ajar.