‘Did you hear that?!’ Rayner said, as he shook his slumbering partner, Julie. ‘Brown’s finished! He can’t carry on now, surely?’
After a hasty breakfast, Rayner set off for the office, stopping off at a petrol station to pick up a copy of the Guardian. The newspaper contained a devastating full-page attack on Brown which tore into not only his political failings but also faults in his character.
‘The Prime Minister demands the right to carry on, even as the Cabinet implodes around him,’ it said.
The Home Secretary, the Chancellor, and perhaps even the Foreign Secretary may go, and Labour faces its worst defeat in history on Thursday, but the Prime Minister does not recognise his direct responsibility for the mayhem.
The truth is that there is no vision from him, no plan, no argument for the future and no support. The public sees it. His party sees it. The Cabinet must see it too, although they are not yet bold enough to say so …
Flaws in his character that drove his party close to revolt last summer now dominate again. He is not obviously able to lead. He blames others for failures and allows them insufficient credit for successes, as the current dismembering of Alistair Darling’s reputation shows …
His timidity in the face of the expenses crisis has been painful. The blunt reality is that, even if he set out a grand programme of reform now, his association with it would doom its prospects … Labour has a year left before an election; its current leader would waste it. It is time to cut him loose.
As character assassinations go, it wasn’t so much a sniper’s bullet as a cruise missile programmed to explode on the Prime Minister’s breakfast table.
‘Seen the Guardian?’ Rayner breathlessly asked the other reporters as he arrived in the bunker.
‘Yeah,’ said Rosa Prince. ‘It couldn’t be worse for Brown.’
‘I’m starting to think he might go, you know,’ Rayner replied.
‘It’s unbelievable,’ Christopher Hope said, shaking his head. ‘This whole thing might just end up bringing down the Prime Minister.’
There was still plenty of work to be done, with more expenses stories to be written, but the bunker team found it hard to concentrate during the course of the day, with one eye always straying to the television news for any further signs that Brown might be about to go.
By now, the Prime Minister’s plight was starting to draw comparisons with a Shakespearean tragedy, though Julius Caesar never had to deal with anyone quite so poisonous as Hazel Blears. Few doubted she had been the source of the ‘Jacqui Smith quits’ leak, but now, not content with stabbing her boss in the back, on Wednesday Blears got up and decided to stab him in the front for good measure.
At 9.30 a.m. she held a blistering meeting with Brown at No. 10, during which Brown expressed his displeasure over her expenses claims. Blears responded by telling her boss she was going to quit the Cabinet for ‘personal reasons’. At 10 a.m., less than twenty-four hours before polling stations opened for the European and local council elections, Blears went public with the announcement.
She timed it to have the maximum possible impact. Brown was due at the dispatch box in Parliament just two hours later to face David Cameron at Prime Minister’s Questions. Instead of preparing for the broadside he would inevitably be getting from the opposition leader, Brown watched with horror as news channels carried Blears’s resignation letter, in which she offered no praise or support for Brown but instead talked of the need for Labour to ‘reconnect with the British people’. It said:
Today I have told the Prime Minister that I am resigning from the Government.
My politics have always been rooted in the belief that ordinary people are capable of extraordinary things given the right support and encouragement.
The role of a progressive government should be to pass power to the people. I’ve never sought high office for the sake of it, or for what I can gain, but for what I can achieve for the people I represent and serve.
In this next phase of my political life, I am redoubling my efforts to speak up for the people of Salford as their member of parliament. I am returning to the grassroots, where I began, to political activism, to the cut and thrust of political debate.
Most of all, I want to help the Labour party to reconnect with the British people, to remind them that our values are their values, that their hopes and dreams are ours too.
I am glad to be going home to the people who matter the most to me – the people of Salford.
Finally, there’s an important set of elections tomorrow. My message is simple: get out and vote Labour.
Having delivered this statement, the tiny MP then strutted out of her office wearing a brooch inscribed with the words ‘rocking the boat’. No one could accuse her of being subtle.
Some of Westminster’s most respected commentators began to write the Prime Minister’s political obituary. Chris Moncrieff, the Press Association’s 77-year-old parliamentary reporter (who is such an institution after fifty years’ service that he even has a bar named after him in Parliament), said he had ‘never seen anything like this at all’ and believed it was ‘extremely doubtful that [Brown] can carry on’. He described him as ‘a dead man’ who ‘can’t even trust his own Cabinet colleagues’.
Blears had become the fourth female MP to announce her resignation in the space of twenty-four hours, prompting fears in Downing Street that the Prime Minister was facing a mass walkout of senior Labour women, dubbed the WAGs (Women Against Gordon).
Brown had little time to brood on this latest act of treachery before he had to be in the Commons. Cameron seized the opportunity at Prime Minister’s Questions to suggest that Brown’s authority over the Cabinet had ‘simply disappeared’; he accused the Prime Minister of being ‘in denial’ and challenged him to go to the country. Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, suggested: ‘The Prime Minister just doesn’t get it … the country doesn’t have a government. It has a void. Labour is finished.’
It was brutal stuff, but Cameron failed to land a knockout blow on the Prime Minister. Downing Street aides thought this was proof that the Tory leader lacked the ‘killer instinct’, but many Conservative MPs were privately hoping that Brown would limp on as Prime Minister and speculated that Cameron might deliberately have gone easier than he might. The last thing they wanted was a new, more popular, Labour leader.
Brown returned to Downing Street after Prime Minister’s Questions in a foul mood. And there was plenty more bad news to come. As he retired to his office that night, he was updated on the progress of an email being discussed by Labour backbenchers attempting to gather seventy-one signatures – the number needed, under Labour Party rules, to trigger a vote on a leadership election. The email, in the form of a letter to Brown, said:
Over the last 12 years in Government, and before, you have made an enormous contribution to this country and to the Labour Party and this is very widely acknowledged.
However, we are writing now because we believe that in the current political circumstances you can best serve the interests of the Labour Party by stepping down as Prime Minister and so allowing the party to choose a new leader to take us in to the next election.
The plan was that the letter would be published the day after the local and European elections, provided that at least fifty Labour MPs had agreed to sign it. Nick Brown, the chief whip, suggested the plot had been organized by Alan Milburn and Stephen Byers, two arch-Blairite former ministers who had done their darnedest to block Brown’s unopposed takeover from Tony Blair two years earlier (only to find they had no alternative candidate to put forward). Nick Brown later had to apologize to the pair, admitting he had no evidence that they were involved.
With each passing minute, Brown’s chances of surviving as Prime Minister appeared to be diminishing. Alan Johnson, the health secretary, was installed by bookmakers as 6–4 favourite to be the next Labour leader, with Harriet Harman at 5–1 and David Miliband at 8–1. Lord Mandelson, the calmest head in the gather
ing crisis, toured television studios to plead with Labour MPs not to ‘make it worse’ for the party by signing the email.
Brown went to bed on Wednesday night as Prime Minister, but could he survive another day?
Thursday, 4 June was polling day in the European and local elections, a day which had for weeks been pencilled in as a crisis point. Brown would be left to gnaw on what was left of his stubby fingernails until 10 p.m., when the polling stations closed and exit polls would give him the first impression of just how bad a defeat his party had suffered. That was the moment when the knives would surely start coming out for Brown, and the Prime Minister and his aides began working on a survival plan.
It soon became apparent from local Labour activists that their voters were staying away from the polling stations in droves. The picture was pretty dismal, though not quite as bad as it could have been. The Liberal Democrats were not prospering either, and people were not defecting in large numbers to the Conservatives. The big winners appeared to be the smaller, minority parties that are not even represented in Westminster.
Unusually, the results from the elections would not be announced that evening. The local election votes for councils across England and Wales would be counted the following day. The counting for the European elections would be on Sunday, after polls across the entire continent had closed. This was a mixed blessing for Downing Street strategists. On the one hand, they had some breathing space to finesse the survival strategy; but on the other, the poor election results would be spread over three days. Would this lead to pressure building or subsiding?
Back at the Telegraph, another day of expenses coverage was being planned. Spurred on by the success of re-examining the expenses claims of Alistair Darling earlier in the week, the team had been studying Brown’s claims once again.
The Prime Minister’s expenses were a mess. Holly Watt and Gordon Rayner discovered that Brown, like Darling, had submitted bills for council tax, utilities and service charges for one property which covered a period when he was claiming on another. In particular, Brown had claimed for council tax and service charge bills for his London flat over a period when his second home was in Scotland, following his decision to flip second homes. He also submitted an estimated electricity bill for his home in Fife which partly covered a period when his London flat was his designated second home. In total, Brown appeared to have made claims totalling £512 for the ‘wrong’ properties.
During previous discussions with Downing Street over the handling of the newspaper’s investigation, William Lewis had decided to offer one concession to Gordon Brown out of respect for the office of Prime Minister. Lewis had given Brown a promise that if the Telegraph intended to run any more stories about his expenses, Lewis would personally inform Downing Street staff himself, enabling Brown to deal with the editor directly. Now, honouring his earlier promise to the Prime Minister, Lewis called Brown’s aide Michael Dugher to warn him that Rayner would be contacting him with some queries over the PM’s expenses.
After the questions arrived asking about the apparent discrepancies in Brown’s claims, Downing Street instructed the House of Commons fees office to conduct an urgent investigation into the Prime Minister’s expenses claims. The fees office discovered that there had been some improper claims, albeit on a minor scale. Brown immediately agreed to repay money wrongly claimed, and at 7.48 p.m. Lewis received a lengthy statement explaining Brown’s expenses.
However, on reading the response Lewis remained unconvinced of the seriousness of the Prime Minister’s conduct and therefore the merit of the story. Although interesting, it was not the silver bullet that everyone had now come to expect from the Telegraph. With the deadline rapidly approaching, as a precaution the production team had prepared two versions of the next day’s front page. But Lewis had already made up his mind and he rejected the version containing the Brown story. The editor called in Winnett to explain the decision.
‘It just didn’t feel quite right,’ Lewis told him. ‘The one thing any editor will tell you is that you’ve got to follow your instincts, and I’m just not sure about this one. Let’s regroup tomorrow.’
In the event, the story was published later that week.
Meanwhile, within an hour the week’s biggest bombshell of all was about to sweep every other story off the next day’s front pages.
With half an hour to go until the polls closed, Brown was in the Downing Street ‘war room’ with Lord Mandelson and key advisers. A side room leading off it had been cordoned off since that morning with a ‘no entry’ sign on the door. Inside was a whiteboard which had on it the names of everyone in government. This was where the reshuffle was being planned. But at 9.30 p.m. the war room was disturbed by a call from the Downing Street switchboard. James Purnell was on the line. The work and pensions secretary wanted to inform the Prime Minister that he had decided to resign.
Both Brown and Mandelson were taken aback. Only the previous day, they had discussed promoting Purnell to schools secretary (replacing Ed Balls, who was pencilled in as the new Chancellor once Darling had been forced out), and he had given them cause to believe he was interested in the job. Each in turn now spoke to the young minister, who had himself been tipped as a future Prime Minister, to try to persuade him to change his mind. He replied that he had made his decision and would be sticking to it. Unbeknown to Brown and Mandelson, Purnell had already written his resignation letter and sent it to several newspapers which were being printed as they spoke.
As the call ended, both men were perplexed; then, at 9.53 p.m. Purnell’s resignation letter arrived by email. The mood in the room quickly turned to anger as Brown and Mandelson read it. It said:
Dear Gordon,
We both love the Labour Party. I have worked for it for twenty years and you for far longer. We know we owe it everything and it owes us nothing.
I owe it to our Party to say what I believe, no matter how hard that may be. I now believe your continued leadership makes a Conservative victory more, not less, likely.
That would be disastrous for our country. This moment calls for stronger regulation, an active state, better public services, an open democracy. It calls for a government that measures itself by how it treats the poorest in society. Those are our values, not David Cameron’s.
We therefore owe it to our country to give it a real choice. We need to show that we are prepared to fight to be a credible government and have the courage to offer an alternative future.
I am therefore calling on you to stand aside to give our party a fighting chance of winning.
The party was here long before us, and we want it to be here long after we have gone. We must do the right thing by it.
I am not seeking the leadership, nor acting with anyone else. My actions are my own considered view, nothing more. If the consensus is that you should continue, then I will support the government loyally from the backbenches. But I do believe that this question now needs to be put.
Thank you for giving me the privilege of serving,
Yours
James Purnell
Disastrously for Brown, Purnell had become the first Cabinet minister to call for him to go. And before the Prime Minister and Mandelson had had time to discuss the implications of the full-frontal attack in the letter, the BBC Ten O’Clock News began, and its main story was Purnell’s resignation, including the damning letter which Brown had received only minutes earlier. It was the ultimate act of betrayal.
Television and radio stations cleared their schedules for a frenzy of speculation about Brown’s future. Pundits and politicians were virtually unanimous in their predictions of the Prime Minister’s demise. Mike Smithson, editor of the website politicalbetting.com, told BBC Radio Five Live he was offering odds of 5–1 against Brown surviving another two months. ‘I think Gordon Brown is now dead,’ he said. ‘Once someone has put their head above the parapet others will follow and it’s going to be a bloody ending.’
Winnett was in the Thistle Hotel
next to the office, having a much-needed pint, when his BlackBerry buzzed in his pocket with a text message from Andrew Porter telling him the news. Production chief Richard Oliver was standing next to him as he read it.
‘Shit. Purnell’s resigned!’ Winnett gasped. ‘This is it. There’s no way Brown can survive now. We’d better get back to the office.’
Winnett, Oliver and Telegraph design guru Himesh Patel downed their drinks and rushed back, with Winnett’s BlackBerry constantly receiving texts and emails.
‘Jesus! This is it, surely,’ texted Rosa Prince.
‘Got to be,’ Winnett typed, as he walked across the Telegraph’s main newsroom, where he was quickly joined by Tony Gallagher, who had been halfway home when he heard the news and had promptly turned around and come back. Andrew Porter, still in Westminster, began writing a new splash, while political correspondent James Kirkup started working up a profile piece on Purnell.
In Downing Street, Brown, Mandelson and Balls began hitting the phones. One of Mandelson’s first calls was to David Miliband, one of the major potential leadership contenders. Word had reached Downing Street that Purnell had told Miliband of his intentions several hours before. The plans for a reshuffle were abandoned as Brown and his team set about finding out if Purnell’s resignation was part of a coordinated coup attempt. If Miliband intended to follow his close friend out of the Cabinet, Brown could safely assume he was about to face a leadership challenge which he would be unable to survive.
To his immense relief, Brown was told that Miliband was not intending to resign. The foreign secretary was effectively promised he could keep his job in return for a pledge of loyalty to the Prime Minister. He agreed. But there were other potential leaders who still needed to be contacted. Panic began to set in when Brown, Mandelson and Balls could not get hold of Alan Johnson, the health secretary and bookies’ favourite to be the next leader. His phone was switched off. He eventually called back and also pledged his loyalty.
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