Esther Rantzen’s overtures towards the voters of Luton started something of a trend, with a whole host of well-known names considering taking a tilt at vulnerable expenses claimants. They included the author Robert Harris, who was eyeing up Alan Duncan’s seat; the consumer journalist Lynn Faulds Wood; and David Van Day, the former singer with Dollar, who hatched an unlikely plot to oust the Tory maverick Nadine Dorries. Even the Daily Telegraph’s own Simon Heffer threatened to enter the fray, warning his own local MP, Sir Alan Haselhurst, that if he didn’t pay back £12,000 worth of gardening claims for his country house in Essex he would have ‘The Heff’ to deal with come the next general election.
The voters, meanwhile, had had enough of the endless talk of reforming ‘the system’. They wanted to reform the MPs themselves – by getting rid of them. Six out of ten voters questioned in a YouGov poll for the Daily Telegraph said they wanted an early general election. The electorate knew Gordon Brown was presiding over a lame duck parliament which was likely to remain in a state of paralysis for almost a year, until Brown was finally forced to go to the polls by the expiry of the five-year maximum term.
The opinion polls certainly weren’t encouraging him to go earlier. As the expenses investigation entered its fourth week, Gordon Brown’s approval rating was down to 17 per cent, making him even more unpopular than Michael Foot, who led Labour to a disastrous general election defeat in 1983. Politicians, of course, always dismiss opinion polls as meaningless when they contain bad news, but on this occasion Brown couldn’t bat away the numbers so easily. Ominously for Labour, the country was just days away from getting a chance to deliver its verdict on Labour’s performance by voting in the European and local council elections. Thursday, 4 June would be election day, but for Gordon Brown it was looking increasingly like Doomsday.
The most alarming number to come out of the opinion polls was one which placed Labour virtually neck and neck with the Lib Dems and the UK Independence Party (UKIP) in a three-way tie for a distant second place behind the Tories in the Euro elections. That meant there was a very real prospect that the governing party could come fourth. The polls also suggested Labour councillors would become virtually extinct across swathes of England by the time the votes were counted.
For the first time since the expenses story had first broken, there were dark murmurings that the Prime Minister’s own position might not be safe. When he was interviewed on Andrew Marr’s television show on Sunday, 31 May, he faced questioning about whether he would stand down if senior Labour figures told him the party would be better off without him. He said he would not. At the time, the question was more an attempt to make mischief than a serious suggestion that Brown’s time might be up, but within a matter of days events would take such a sudden and unpredictable turn that Brown would be in the fight of his political life.
The first week in June would begin, as the previous week had begun, with a front-page story in the Daily Telegraph about Alistair Darling’s expenses. The bunker team had decided to go through the Cabinet’s second-home expenses claims for a second time, conscious that they had been checked at such speed the first time around that things might have been missed. The team had also gained a huge amount of experience in the intervening weeks and had become aware of yet more scams to look out for. Holly Watt, tasked with going through Alistair Darling’s second-home allowance claims, discovered that Darling had claimed expenses for a flat that he let to tenants while he was also claiming living allowances for his grace and favour home in Downing Street. In July 2007, ten days after he became Chancellor, he had submitted a £1,004 invoice for a service charge on his south London flat. It covered the six-month period to the end of December 2007; but Darling had, in the meantime, switched the designation of his second home to Downing Street, where he was also making claims.
Holly Watt set out the allegations about Darling’s expenses in an email to the Chancellor’s special adviser, Catherine MacLeod, at three o’clock on Sunday afternoon. By now Darling’s forbearance was starting to wear thin. Instead of resorting to the usual ‘all within the rules’ explanation, Darling went on the attack, authorizing MacLeod to brief broadcasters that the Telegraph was intending to print a story which was ‘wrong’. At 9.30 p.m. MacLeod sent Watt a formal reply, denying that the Chancellor had claimed the allowance for his private flat while designating Downing Street as his second home. At 11 p.m. that same night a ‘spokesman for the Chancellor’ denied any breach of the rules in an official announcement.
But Watt, and the Telegraph, were sure of the story.
‘Darling billed us for two homes at the same time,’ pronounced the front page the next day.
Gordon Brown began Monday morning by backing his Chancellor, telling listeners of the Today programme: ‘I don’t think there is any substance in these allegations.’ Among those listening was Holly Watt, who began to feel sick as she lay in bed listening to the Prime Minister’s denials. Surely the Downing Street press operation would have checked Darling’s version of events before allowing the Prime Minister to deny the Telegraph’s story to millions of listeners?
By the time she got into work, Watt was feeling so nervous that if she had been asked her own name she would have checked before answering. Winnett was already at his desk when she arrived, and welcomed her with a smile – but both were privately thinking how catastrophic it would be for the Telegraph to have to correct a front-page story at this point.
News editor Matthew Bayley was also in the bunker. ‘You’re sure your maths is better than the Chancellor’s?’ Bayley asked before she sat down.
Watt was close to panicking. ‘Yes, absolutely,’ she said, but it was only when she checked the figures for a fifth time that she felt completely able to relax.
At around the same time Darling returned to his office, double-checked his claims, and realized that the Telegraph knew more about his expenses than he did. At 10 a.m. he performed the perfect U-turn, announcing he would be repaying £350 to the taxpayer to avoid ‘ambiguity’ (he later had to admit he had got even that sum wrong and would actually be repaying £668).
The Chancellor, just like his expenses claims, was all over the place. Brown was furious. Less than two hours after he had publicly backed his fellow Scot, he was being made to look a fool. He had supported Darling over his home flipping, and over his accountancy bills, but now the Prime Minister’s patience had finally run out. In an interview with Sky News at 2 p.m., he said that ‘where a mistake was pointed out to him, and I think it was inadvertent, he acted immediately’. It was what Brown didn’t say, however, that appeared to seal Darling’s fate. Asked three times if Darling would still be Chancellor in ten days’ time, Brown refused to back his friend. On three occasions he spoke of Darling’s job in the past tense, saying: ‘Alistair Darling has been a great Chancellor.’
Darling’s punishment, in traditional New Labour style, was to be wheeled out in front of a succession of television cameras to say that he wanted to apologize ‘unreservedly’ for his actions. Not for the first time, the bunker team watched transfixed as a politician was forced to appear on live TV to admit the Telegraph had got its facts right and they were in the wrong. Darling looked like a man who had given up the ghost. Asked if he was about to lose his job, he replied: ‘It’s up to the Prime Minister. He’s got to decide the team he wants to be the next government. Gordon and I work very, very closely together, but at the end of the day it’s his call.’
‘God. He looks like he’s given up,’ said Rosa Prince. ‘Where’s all this going to end up?’
One thing seemed certain: Darling was finished as Chancellor. Parliamentary journalists were being briefed that Gordon Brown’s closest ally, the schools secretary and former Treasury adviser Ed Balls, was being lined up to replace him, with Baroness Vadera, another former member of Brown’s Treasury team, playing a prominent role by his side.
The subject of Darling’s future dominated the next day’s headlines, relegating to the inside pages t
he news of the previous day’s Air France tragedy, in which five Britons had been among 228 lives lost when Flight 447 crashed into the Atlantic en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.
With the European and local elections looming, and Alistair Darling’s career seemingly over, Westminster was preparing itself for what was clearly going to be the biggest test of Gordon Brown’s premiership.
Brown on the Brink
Thursday, 4 June
CHAPTER 23
LESS THAN TWO hours after Alistair Darling made his humiliating apology on live television, Labour MPs made their way to the second-floor committee corridor of the Houses of Parliament, overlooking the River Thames, and gathered in Committee Room 15 for what promised to be one of the most fraught gatherings since Labour had come to power more than twelve years previously.
Members had returned to Westminster following a week’s break in their constituencies, where they had become all too aware of the depth of public anger over their expenses claims. Many had hoped that by removing the Speaker they might have lanced the boil, but they had quickly discovered that fury was still raging on the doorsteps. There was a growing realization that huge numbers of Labour MPs would be for the chop at the next general election, and now, instead of just blaming the Daily Telegraph for their perilous position, the politicians were pointing their fingers at the hopeless response of the party’s leaders, and in particular at Gordon Brown.
Many Labour MPs felt that Brown was still failing to grasp the magnitude of the events unfolding around him. On Monday morning, at the time he was, briefly, defending Alistair Darling, he had revealed during an interview on GMTV that he had found time over the weekend to ring Simon Cowell, the omnipresent music industry Svengali, to enquire about the well-being of Susan Boyle, the Britain’s Got Talent runner-up whose eccentric behaviour in the show’s final had led to concerns for her state of mind. Many observers were staggered that the PM had had time to worry about such trivia when he was under such pressure.
The Parliamentary Labour Party meets every week on a Monday evening when the Commons is sitting. The meetings, which are held behind closed doors, are often brief, anodyne affairs. Not this time. The 150-plus MPs crowding into the room wanted their chance to put the Prime Minister on the spot. They also hoped their leader might calm their nerves with a morale-boosting speech as they prepared for what was certain to be a difficult week with the European and local council elections just days away.
They were to be sorely disappointed. Brown didn’t turn up. Instead, it was his deputy Harriet Harman who once again had to step into the breach. Harman urged the backbenchers to have ‘iron in their souls’, telling them: ‘We can get through this,’ though ‘it is going to be tough,’ but her bracing words had little effect. Barry Sheerman, who was later to become one of Brown’s chief critics, complained about the way Michael Martin had been driven out of the Speaker’s chair, saying it was a sign of how the Labour leadership had failed to stand up for MPs during the expenses scandal. David Hamilton, the MP for Midlothian, accused ministers of ‘making policy on the hoof’. Ian Davidson, the Glasgow South West MP, drew hoots of laughter when he mischievously, and ironically, suggested: ‘This is not the time to panic.’ Dennis Skinner, the veteran left-wing MP known as ‘the beast of Bolsover’, shouted a lot.
One of the most pressing questions debated by the MPs was whether they should voluntarily publish their expenses claims, to spike the Telegraph’s guns, or do everything they could to keep them secret. The majority were against publication, particularly so close to the elections. Virtually all those present were expecting the party to be annihilated at the polls, and many of them, particularly those who had prospered under Tony Blair, had had enough. As they left the meeting, some were already preparing to turn their backs on Parliament for good.
The following morning, Patricia Hewitt, a former health secretary, unexpectedly announced that she would be stepping down at the next election, diplomatically citing a desire to spend more time with her family as her reason. The decision came as a surprise to many Westminster-watchers, but before they had time to digest the news Beverley Hughes, the children’s minister, announced she, too, would be quitting Parliament at the next election, and would step aside from her government position when the next reshuffle came. Then Tom Watson, a Cabinet Office minister and one of Brown’s key allies, said he would be leaving the front bench. His resignation drew gasps in Westminster, as Watson had been one of the key players in the ‘coup’ to replace Tony Blair with Gordon Brown and had only recently joined the government. But Watson, it seemed, had seen the writing on the wall. With Labour living on borrowed time, he was said to have become disillusioned with politics, and he, too, wanted to spend more time with his family.
Now came the biggest shock. The 24-hour news channels began reporting that Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, had told the Prime Minister she wished to leave government and return to the back benches. All of a sudden, the public could see that Labour’s ship was sinking, and its once-loyal crew were rushing to jump overboard before they were dragged down with it. In Downing Street, Gordon Brown’s aides convinced themselves that a coordinated attempt to undermine the Prime Minister had been launched. Spin doctors hit the phones to tell journalists that Smith had told Brown several months previously that she wished to leave the government at the next reshuffle. If that were so, the obvious question was: why had news of her decision leaked now? It had not come from Smith herself, so who had it come from? Was there a traitor in the Cabinet who had opportunistically told the broadcasters about the home secretary’s plans in order to fan the flames?
Suspicion quickly fell on ‘friends’ of Hazel Blears, the communities secretary, who had already become a loose cannon on the deck following her criticism of the Prime Minister’s YouTube performance. She was one of the few people who was both in a position to know of Smith’s secret decision and sufficiently disloyal to make it public knowledge.
Smith later backed the Prime Minister, saying he ‘can and should’ stay on as leader of the Labour Party, and that he still had her ‘utmost respect’. It did little to steady the ship, however, as a reshuffle was now inevitable. Cabinet ministers began to jockey for position, eyeing up each other’s jobs. Lord Mandelson, the increasingly influential business secretary, was reported to covet a move to foreign secretary. David Miliband was touted as a possible home secretary to replace Smith. The schools secretary Ed Balls, Brown’s closest colleague, was openly being talked about as the next Chancellor, as the Prime Minister prepared to make Alistair Darling walk the plank.
But as the evening wore on, it became increasingly clear that Brown was facing a mutiny. David Miliband said publicly that he had no intention of leaving the foreign office. It was rumoured that he had even persuaded Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, to call Brown and urge him to keep the young Blairite in his post. Worse still, Alistair Darling started to dig his heels in. Emboldened by the day’s dramatic resignations, and seeing the Prime Minister’s authority waning by the hour, Darling defiantly faced down his leader, telling him he was not prepared to go quietly.
What a mess. Harriet Harman (who else?) dutifully gave the broadcasters a target to aim at that evening as she tried to persuade the public Brown was still in control. ‘It is not the wheels falling off the government,’ she was forced to say in one interview that evening, but the ground seemed to be opening up beneath Brown’s feet. For the first time, the country began to get a real sense that the Prime Minister could be just days away from being forced from office.
Although few people knew it at the time, Brown held a private meeting that night with John Reid, the combative former home secretary, who has never been a man to mince his words. Officially, Reid was in Downing Street to have a conversation about football (an odd choice of topic by the Prime Minister, as his government collapsed around him). But reports would later suggest that Brown, in desperation, was pleading with Reid to return to his old job at the home offic
e. One account of the conversation, later published in several newspapers, ran like this:
Brown: ‘Will you be my home secretary?’
Reid: ‘No.’
Brown: ‘You have to support me.’
Reid: ‘No, I don’t. I have to support my country and my party, and that means you have to stand down.’
Although Reid later described the transcript as ‘inaccurate’, he pointedly failed to deny the substance of the reports.
A few miles further west, a rather different sort of drama was taking place. Matthew Bayley’s wife Liz had warned him that morning that she felt as though the birth of the couple’s second child might be imminent, but Bayley, knowing that details of the last of the 646 MPs’ expenses were to be published that day, decided to risk going in to work anyway. After writing up that day’s newslist, which included Jacqui Smith’s resignation, he dashed home and took his wife to hospital: baby Nye was born at five thirty that evening.
Gordon Rayner was woken at 6 a.m. the following day by his radio alarm clock switching on to the headlines on the Today programme. Never at his best in the mornings, Rayner had found the early starts in the bunker tough going, with a 50-mile commute to London every day from his home in rural Berkshire, where he lived with his partner and three children. But on this occasion he was wide awake within seconds, scarcely able to believe what he was hearing. The programme was reporting that the Guardian, New Labour’s most slavishly loyal ally in the media, had printed a front-page editorial calling on the Prime Minister to resign.
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