Power Trip

by McBride, Damian

  For football, we’d drive out to Summers Restaurant and Sports Bar in Arlington on Saturday mornings, Sunday lunchtimes and weekday afternoons to catch any live Premiership or Champions League games. Gordon wouldn’t drink, obviously, but it was a rare chance for him to enjoy the atmosphere of watching a game in the pub. And him being there meant the rest of us didn’t go too mad.

  It was a different story at the end of our spring 2004 trip. I went off to Summers by myself mid-morning to watch Arsenal win the league at Spurs – enjoying several beers and a bottle of champagne; then came back and had farewell drinks with all the journalists heading to the airport; and then holed up in a bar for several hours with my great friend Sumeet Desai from Reuters for more beers, tequila shots and banana daiquiris.

  That was all standard fare for a title-winning day, until Mark Bowman called me and said Gordon was expecting me to join him and Sarah for dinner. I could barely speak by that stage, let alone make polite conversation with the Browns. I managed to hold it together until the end of the meal when I did what all good drunk men do, and insisted on trying to pay the bill, physically wrestling it out of Gordon’s hands, raising my voice (‘I’M getting it, I’M getting it!’), and making a bit of a scene. At least Sarah seemed amused.

  Our next trip to Washington, later that same year, made up for all the good days there.

  Gordon met us at Heathrow fresh and full of beans from the Labour conference in Brighton, a relatively harmonious occasion compared to normal, despite my Sunday Times splash about the spin-doctors’ summit appearing that weekend.

  Gordon had made huge play in his speech about our obligations to the poorest in the world and was now determined to deliver progress at the IMF. This suited me. He’d spend the flight talking to Shriti Vadera, Jon Cunliffe and his other international and economics experts about negotiating strategy in Washington. I could spend it watching films.

  Scattered throughout the plane were the various economics editors of the national broadsheets, and up in business class with us were the legendary Alex Brummer from the Daily Mail and Sumeet from Reuters. We landed in bright sunshine at Dulles and, as usual, I had my two phones out and switched on as we were descending, ready for Gordon to ask: ‘What’s the news?’

  I looked at my phones. Thirty-six messages, eighteen voicemails. I went through the texts. Ed Balls: ‘Ring as soon as you land.’ Ian Austin: ‘Ring asap.’ Trevor Kavanagh: ‘Are you in Washington with GB? A word when you can.’ Ian Austin: ‘If there are press on that plane, get them well away from GB.’ Ed Balls: ‘Ensure total discipline.’ It’s at these moments that three thoughts go through your head: 1. Oh shit; 2. Why does no one take the time to send you a text which just helpfully and succinctly explains what the hell is going on?; and 3. Oh shit.

  As we were taxiing down the runway, I rang Ian, who said: ‘No. 10 had to announce that Blair’s having a heart operation tomorrow and explain why he’s bought a new house, so they’ve tried to get on top of it by saying he’ll serve a full third term. It’s all being done as a devastating blow to Brown – kills his chances of ever becoming PM. It’s total carnage.’ I called Ed, who was as forceful as I’d ever known him: ‘You’ve got one job – one job – Gordon and everyone around him needs to be totally disciplined about this. Total discipline.’

  The plane door opened and we walked down into the shuttle bus. Gordon approached: ‘What’s the news?’ ‘Hold on,’ I replied. ‘What’s wrong?’ he rasped. ‘What’s happening?’ ‘I need to tell you something, but you mustn’t react badly. Brummer’s watching you.’ ‘What is it?!’ ‘You need to relax. Brummer’s watching to see if you’re angry or upset, so you need to calm down.’

  When I relayed the news, his head started to drop, but he then put on his famous fixed grin for Alex’s benefit and started talking about what matches were on that weekend. ‘Get me Ed Balls,’ he whispered. I called Ed and handed my phone to Gordon. A big mistake. He took my phone with him right the way through fast-track security and passport control, and out into his waiting limousine.

  I borrowed someone else’s phone in our officials’ minibus and – with difficulty, not having all the numbers – started ringing round and texting all the officials and advisers with us impressing the need for ‘total discipline’. It was already too late. Somewhere, somehow, between the plane landing and Gordon’s entourage going into the IMF building, the Guardian’s incomparable economics editor Larry Elliott had managed to get a cracking quote out of one of our number: ‘It’s like an African coup – they waited ’til he was out of the country.’

  Once inside the UK delegation office at the IMF – then occupied by Gordon’s former Principal Private Secretary Tom Scholar – the mood was pitch black. Gordon had a series of meetings scheduled, but couldn’t be prised away from Tom’s sofa, where he sat staring out of the window at the street below. Having retrieved my phone, I called round all the political journalists who had requested a reaction, sounding as bright and relaxed as I could, explaining that Gordon was busy with his IMF agenda and had no problem with Tony’s statement, Gordon occasionally looking darkly at me from the sofa as if I was chiding him.

  That evening, as usual in Washington, the media monitoring unit at No. 10 faxed me through the front pages of all the papers. As the Guardian splash rolled off the fax machine with its ‘African coup’ headline, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Others at home were having the same reaction, and my phone started to explode again. Ian: ‘Have you seen Guardian? Who the hell said that?’ Ed: ‘What happened to discipline?!’ Trevor Kavanagh: ‘Just seen Guardian. An urgent word please.’

  I decided not to show Gordon any of the papers that evening, blaming problems with the hotel’s fax machine. Instead, we sat at the hotel bar, and watched the first presidential debate between John Kerry and George W. Bush.

  That night was the blackest I ever saw Gordon’s mood. Within ten minutes of the debate starting, he was rasping criticism at his good friend Kerry. ‘Look what Bush is doing – security, security, security. He’s defining the election and, instead of challenging him, Kerry’s going along with it. He’s trying to win on security – he’ll never win on security. Where’s the economy? Where’s jobs? Madness. Madness. He’s losing the election here.’

  As each question was asked by the debate moderator, Gordon would thump the bar and deliver a word-perfect response for Kerry to deliver, and then thump the bar again and shake his head as Kerry made his own response. ‘No, no! Rubbish. You’ve lost, man. You’ve lost.’ It was a remarkable thing to watch, Gordon gripped by anger and frustration, projecting his own feelings onto Kerry, but still the consummate political genius.

  Later that night, a few of us tried to cheer Gordon up over several glasses of wine. I said: ‘Look, Blair was forced into making that statement. He didn’t want to make it, and he probably doesn’t believe it. He had to say it or else he’d have to quit before the election. Nothing’s really changed – he’s not going to serve another five years.’ Gordon just shook his head.

  ‘I’ve already had seven years. Once you’ve had seven years in one of the big jobs, the public start getting sick of you. You’ve got seven years to get people on board, but after that, you’re on the down slope. I’ve tried not to be too exposed, but it’s still seven years. The only chance was getting in next year before the election. Tony knows that. Every year that goes by, the public are going to say: “Not that guy Brown, we’re tired of him – give us someone new.”’

  Gordon went through politician after politician – American and British – justifying his ‘seven years’ theory. I understood his mindset far better after that conversation. I believe he only ever wanted to fight and win one election, serve four years and hand over to the next generation. He believed 2005 was his one chance to do that and Tony’s statement had robbed him of that chance.

  The next morning, Gordon did his usual briefing for the UK economics editors at the IMF building. As he prepared to go in, he asked what he should
say if anyone asked him about Tony’s operation. Sue Nye said No. 10 were due to text her when they knew it had been a success and he was recovering, but she’d heard nothing yet. Gordon was only half-listening and, when he sat down with the journalists, he began his briefing by saying: ‘I’m sure you’ll all be glad to hear that Tony Blair’s heart operation has been successful and he’s recovering well, and we all wish him the very best.’

  Sumeet was hovering at the back of the room, and raised his eyebrows at me as if to say: ‘Can I go and snap that?’ Having only half-heard what Sue said myself, I gave him a nod. He slipped out and, five minutes later, as Adam Boulton, Nick Robinson and the world’s press stood outside No. 10 saying that there was no news yet from No. 10 or the hospital on the PM’s condition, the ‘Breaking News’ flashed up: ‘Reuters: Brown says Blair operation “successful”’; ‘PM “recovering well”’, much to the confusion of Tony’s staff given he was still under anaesthetic at the time.

  As for the ‘African coup’ quote, we never did find out who said it. For a while – albeit very unfairly – Shriti Vadera was the prime suspect given her closeness to Larry, her fierce loyalty to Gordon, and her penchant for over-the-top phraseology. When Ed Miliband arrived in Washington that weekend to help boost Gordon’s morale, he was given the unenviable job of getting the truth out of her.

  As Michael Ellam, Ed, Shriti and I walked along the street for lunch the next day, Michael and I hung back to let Ed do his interrogation. There was an agonising silence before he finally jabbed a finger towards her and yelled: ‘SHRITI-DID-YOU-TELL-LARRY-IT-WAS-AN-AFRICAN-COUP?’ ‘NO!’ she yelled back. Ed turned back to us and said calmly: ‘It wasn’t Shriti.’ He was almost certainly right, but the detective work wasn’t up there with Poirot.

  As for Gordon’s seven years theory, it was ten years until he finally got the top job, and – while you could argue he bucked the trend by initially seeing his popularity rise – it would be hard to dispute that he was on a long-term downward slope. From that point of view, it’s worth noting that – by the time of the next election – David Cameron will have been leader of the Conservative Party for almost ten years himself and – thanks to 24-hour news – one of the most over-exposed politicians Britain has ever seen. By comparison, Hercule Miliband will have had just four-and-a-half years in the public eye.

  20

  LEAD IN THE PENCIL

  If Gordon loved Washington, he hated Brussels in equal measure.

  Which isn’t to say he hated the European Union – perish the thought – but he loathed each and every thing about its manifestation in the Belgian capital: the soulless Justus Lipsius building; the self-important commissioners; the endless meetings with their pointless ‘tours de table’; the lunches of soggy salami and rubbery Emmental; and, worst of all, the press conferences with foreign journalists.

  He couldn’t wait to get out, and he’d wait as long as he could to get in. We’d catch the Royal Flight to Brussels at 5 a.m. on the day of a meeting simply to avoid him having to stay the night before.

  Ultimately, Brussels epitomised Gordon’s two general hatreds: bastards who wasted your time and bastards who were up to no good. And in Brussels, you found plenty of both.

  Take the commissioner for the internal market, Frits Bolkestein, as warm and cuddly a figure as his name suggests. Frits was determined to cause Gordon as much trouble as he could. Every summer and Christmas for years, he tried to curry favour with the UK media by warning the Treasury that it should not infringe the legitimate rights of British citizens to buy as much booze and fags as they wanted from Belgium and France for their own ‘personal use’.

  We’d retort with accusations that Frits was legitimising the same alcohol and tobacco smuggling gangs who were behind organised crime, people-trafficking and child pornography in Britain, but that was a losing battle. It was the only issue on which The Sun, Mail and Telegraph used routinely to praise the European Commission and call on them to overrule the British government. But it was bitter stuff; during one round of the conflict in the Justus Lipsius building, I had to be pulled apart from Frits’s English press spokesman, Jonathan Todd, after he took objection to one of my briefings.

  Frits gave us the opportunity for revenge when he launched an inquiry into the cross-border impact of differential rates of VAT on EU competitiveness – in other words, whether Britain’s zero rates of VAT were damaging firms on the continent. The big game for Frits was always VAT harmonisation: that is having one rate of VAT all across Europe, applying equally to all goods and services. It makes perfect sense if your goal is making the ‘internal market’ work more efficiently, and it would also increase the slice of each country’s VAT revenues that goes to Brussels.

  Nevertheless, we slaughtered him, persuading the British papers that Frits was hell-bent on taxing Britain’s books, bus fares, food and children’s clothes, and that Gordon alone was standing up to his evil master plan. Even The Sun told me to tone it down when I gave them a quote vowing that ‘Brown will never let Brussels tax a British baby’s bonnet’.

  Of course, whenever Gordon ‘stood up’ to Brussels’ plans to harmonise taxes – and went up against all fourteen other member states in an EU negotiation, even on the most obscure issues – it was his proxy for telling the British media and public what he could never say out loud: ‘I’m the only one keeping us out of the euro. I’m the only one with the strength to say “No” to Blair on Europe.’

  The battle over the single currency had just been fought and won by the time I became Gordon’s spokesman in 2003, albeit at the price of him ducking out of the simultaneous internal policy discussions on EU enlargement, feeling he had to let Blair have his way on at least one European issue. It was something Gordon bitterly regretted later on, as the backlash grew against immigration from eastern Europe. ‘I had too much going on,’ he’d say, ‘I couldn’t cover anything.’

  The next great proxy battle came over the EU budget, where – good European that he was – Tony Blair was inclined to do a deal to increase the budget to pay for the costs of enlargement, even if this meant scaling back the UK’s rebate from Brussels. Gordon was naturally dead set against this, because it would cost both money and, more worryingly, votes.

  We did our best to scupper the process at Gordon’s level. As we arrived for one EU finance ministers’ meeting, when he was due to speak out against EU waste, we were told that one of the UK’s officials in Brussels had been leaked an early draft of the commission’s new budget proposals, containing all kinds of ridiculous spending plans.

  After the official talked us through the draft, Gordon took me aside in the corridor and said: ‘Do you think that will leak to the press before I speak later?’ ‘Possibly,’ I said. ‘Hmm,’ he replied with a warning look. ‘Be careful – don’t do it with any British guys.’

  When I asked the official holding the draft proposals if he could give me a copy, he point-blank refused. ‘If this gets out, the person who gave it to us could lose their job. I’m not going to do that.’ ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I lied through my teeth, ‘but you’ve got nothing to worry about. If it leaks at all, it’ll be one of the other delegations that leaks it.’

  ‘I’m not giving it to you,’ he said, holding it to his chest. ‘Come on, don’t be difficult,’ I said, grabbing the bottom of the document. ‘Please don’t,’ he said. ‘Please don’t make me do this.’ ‘I’m not making you do anything, and it’s going to be OK, I promise.’ He started to cry, which was a bit of an excessive reaction and made me wonder if he was friends with the source. It also made me feel like a total shit, but he loosened his grip and I took the document away to photocopy.

  Half an hour later, it appeared on one of the international newswires, datelined from their Madrid bureau. This was a common tactic: if we ever wanted to leak OECD forecasts or IMF reports, we’d always tend to do so via an overseas bureau of an international newswire to make it look like another country had done the leak
ing, and then just point the UK press towards the story. And, as in this case, it meant the person feeding us the documents went undetected.

  Gordon was able to make merry hay with the material at his usual briefing for the Brussels-based UK correspondents, and almost took the unprecedented step of volunteering to do a press conference for foreign hacks as well. There was a reason Gordon didn’t like doing these: he has very big ears. No, really. He could never get the translation earpieces to fit on him, so would end up throwing them to one side, giving the journalists no option but to ask him questions in English instead.

  With most of them, he could never understand a thing and would be reduced to peering at the journalist, trying to decipher some of their words and guess the issue they were asking about, then beginning each answer with: ‘I think what you’re asking is…’. When he literally didn’t have a clue, the answer would begin: ‘That is indeed a very important issue, but I would argue the more important one is…’

  I was sometimes obliged to stand next to Gordon and pick out the journalists to ask questions at an overseas press conference. This was one of the more thankless of many thankless tasks, as Gordon would turn sideways from the instant a reporter started asking a question, and mutter loudly: ‘What’s she saying? I don’t know what she’s saying. You’re going to have to tell me what she’s saying’, all while I was trying to understand the question myself.

  The EU budget negotiations were all originally expected to come to a head at a European Council meeting which Tony Blair was due to attend on 16 June 2005, the day after my thirty-first birthday.

  I had some bad birthdays during my time working in government, most notably my twenty-fifth. The National Crime Squad had sought a judicial review of the Treasury’s decision to deny them the same VAT treatment as police authorities. I had to appear in the Royal Courts of Justice as the nominal defendant; being the resident VAT expert sometimes had its downsides. I arrived at my desk at 6 a.m. and left it twenty hours later – with nary a sip of beer or slice of cake – having spent all day reviewing the case files, and writing an urgent submission for Gordon as he contemplated conceding the case.