‘Don’t base it on who you’re close to,’ Gordon said. ‘Base it on who you believe in.’
Looking back, I think it was a mistake for Gordon to say to me or anyone else that we’d one day have to choose between the Eds. People like me who’d always seen them as an indivisible double act began seeing them as separate entities, and – over time – people who were closer to one or the other began identifying themselves as belonging in different camps, with the inevitable rivalry, distrust and sniping that followed.
The team around Gordon, which had always been remarkable for its unity of purpose and single sense of mission, suddenly developed fissures, even before the election that never was, and definitely afterwards. The fact that Ed Miliband zealots later used my forced departure as an opportunity to give anonymous and aggressive briefings against Ed Balls to newspapers and biographers – despite the damage that would do to Gordon as well – was a sign of how bad things had got, and how much some people were planning for a future in opposition even then.
It would not have been unreasonable for Gordon to say – much as the Milibands’ mother did during their contest – that he would never take sides between the two Eds, and he didn’t expect any of the officials and advisers who owed their careers to him to do so either. Of course some of them would have defied that ordinance, but they couldn’t have done so while Gordon was still in office.
And why didn’t Gordon do that? Because deep down, he knew one day he’d probably have to choose himself. If James Purnell or David Miliband emerged as a front-runner for the leadership, determined – as Gordon would see it – to take the party down routes that he had successfully resisted for more than a decade – creeping privatisation and divisive provision of public services, closer political and economic integration with Europe, increasing erosion of constitutional freedoms in the name of security, and so on – then he would have to try and stop that happening.
That would mean backing the candidate that he felt was best able to set out an alternative, positive, Brownite vision and ultimately the candidate most likely to win, whether that was Ed Balls, Ed Miliband or indeed Yvette Cooper. When that contest materialised almost as exactly as feared in 2010, Gordon – however uncomfortable it felt – was forced to pick a favoured candidate between the Eds, and use whatever influence he had to try and secure them votes.
By that stage, I was long gone from Downing Street, but people try everything and everyone when the leadership is on the line.
In September 2010, rumours began to circulate that Ed Balls might cut a late deal with David Miliband, where David would accept Ed’s position on the pace of deficit reduction and proclaim his attributes as a potential shadow Chancellor, in return for which Ed would withdraw from the race and urge those MPs and members backing him to switch allegiance to David.
My mobile – usually silent those days – started to ring again: Gordon and others close to him urged me that – if I had any influence over Ed Balls or his team (a reference to my girlfriend Balshen, who was helping to run his campaign) – I should tell him he had to reject any deal offered by David, and instead pursue the same deal with Ed Miliband. ‘What kind of madness is this,’ they asked, ‘if he backs David to be leader, not Ed?’ I made clear that I wasn’t in a position to help even if I wanted to.
As it was, Balls made clear in public he wasn’t interested in any deals, and neither Miliband brother was inclined to offer one. So it came to nothing, but did very clearly expose where Gordon had his colours nailed. And just as Ed Miliband can very cogently justify why he felt compelled to challenge his brother, I’m sure Gordon could equally well explain why he felt obliged privately to back Ed Miliband over Ed Balls, while remaining publicly neutral.
Both saw their decisions as means to the most important end – victory in the battle for the direction and soul of the Labour Party. That was all that mattered, even if it meant Ed Balls limping away from the field afterwards feeling just as bruised as David Miliband, something compounded by Ed Miliband’s initial decision not to make him shadow Chancellor.
If Labour is in power after the 2015 election, either in its own right or in coalition, with Ed Miliband installed as Prime Minister and Ed Balls as Chancellor, I’m sure they’ll invite Gordon to the first Downing Street Christmas party, and get him to tell his ‘Japanese Admiral’ joke for old time’s sake, and perhaps the three will reflect on how far they’ve come and how much has changed for all of them since they first started working together in Gordon’s opposition office twenty-one years before.
And perhaps they can all shake hands then, and let all the fissures of the past be healed, and every bygone be bygone. It would be a shame if they didn’t.
22
THE POLITICS OF POVERTY
Shriti Vadera, Gordon’s top adviser on international development issues, phoned me up, near-hysterical: ‘Well, I want you to know, I’ve just come off a conference call with Bono, Bob Geldof and Robbie Williams, and they all agreed that you are a total … well, I won’t say the word, I hate that word – but anyway, they all agreed that you are one.’
It was summer 2004, and George Pascoe-Watson had just splashed The Sun with the news that there was going to be a ‘Live Aid II’ concert the following summer, twenty years on from the first, as part of a new charity campaign on world poverty, backed by Blair and Brown. Reading the story, you’d never guess it had come from the Treasury, but Shriti took it upon herself to own up to the three rock stars on my behalf, and they agreed that I was definitely a …. whatever word she wouldn’t tell me.
The story was probably a bit premature on my part, but it did no harm, and Bono soon stood it up in an interview with Sky’s Kay Burley. For many people in the media, politics and the celebrity world, that story marked the start of a rare year of intense focus on the issues of poverty. For Gordon, just as much as most of the charities in that sector, it was merely the high point of their engagement.
If there was one thing – other than the obvious drivers of personal ambition – that clearly motivated Gordon, one thing that always instantly made him fired up, it wasn’t necessarily poverty itself, or unemployment, or lack of education, it was when he looked at young people and thought they’d been given no chances. That dated back to the divisive testing and streaming of his Scottish schooldays.
And his passion for international development issues was not some affectation to soften his image, or part of some grand economic plan to create new markets in the developing world, or even a way of demonstrating to the Labour Party what his foreign policy priorities would be, unlike that bloody warmonger next door.
No, Gordon had a genuine, burning sense of injustice at the idea that some children are born into the world with no chance of ever achieving their potential as human beings, either because they or their mother do not survive the birth for lack of basic equipment, because they don’t get the vaccines to survive infancy or the food to make their bodies grow properly, or – above all – because even if they make it to school age, there are no schools to go to, no books or no teachers.
This was a largely theoretical passion before he visited Africa for a week in January 2005 but, by the end of the visit, after spending hours in packed primary school classrooms in Tanzania, seeing teenage girls in the Kibera slum in Nairobi chanting their demands for ‘free education’, and meeting a shy twelve-year-old girl who was living with HIV and looked blank when he asked what she wanted to do when she was older, it became something much more heartfelt and personal.
Most of all, as our convoy drove away from a giant sugar plantation in Mozambique – a visit designed to demonstrate the economic potential of the continent if an improved trade deal could be agreed – we passed truck-loads of female plantation workers being taken home after their long day’s work. Our press bus belatedly realised Gordon had stopped to talk to the women and we screeched to a halt, the poor cameramen having to run a hundred yards in the heat back to film the encounter.
The women were
insistently waving their pay cheques at Gordon and asking how they were meant to get food, clothes, medicine and schoolbooks for their children with the little they were paid for a full day’s back-breaking work. It made a huge impact on him.
Ed Miliband was similarly affected, and it was interesting to see him leading the group on that trip in the absence of Ed Balls: he was a calming influence on Gordon and Shriti whenever they got into a flap; a Godsend for me in terms of getting scripts and press briefings quickly signed off; and a playful presence on nights in the bar, including dubbing me Inspector McBride after I told him I thought something was going on between two of the civil servants in our group, and it turned out they’d been secretly living together for six months.
At the end of one particularly long night in Dar es Salaam, I told the press entourage that we’d be starting at 6 a.m. the next day for a wreath-laying at the local Commonwealth war cemetery. There was a collective groan, a fair bit of swearing, and most of them said they would give it a miss. As Benedict Brogan, then of the Daily Mail, passed me by, I said: ‘Surely you wouldn’t miss a wreath-laying, Ben?’
He caught my look, narrowed his eyes and, sure enough, he was the only newspaper reporter there in the morning, along with a BBC crew doing a Newsnight profile of Gordon. Ben listened in to Gordon’s interview with Martha Kearney at the cemetery, and splashed the Mail the next day with Gordon saying it was time to focus on the future and stop apologising for the British Empire.
The other journalists weren’t happy, but it was the definition of ‘you snooze, you lose’. It wasn’t an exclusive; Ben was just the only one who turned up. The week ended in South Africa, with Gordon due to visit Nelson Mandela at his family compound in the Transkei. It was touch and go whether the visit would take place: Mandela was suffering from tuberculosis and one of his sons had just died of AIDS. But a small plane-load of us set off, with the press entourage left behind, and only the BBC’s Mark Mardell and his cameraman accompanying us.
In those circumstances, Mark and I would be expected to give the others a ‘fill’ on the trip on our return, so they could file stories as if they’d been there, but as we approached the compound in our convoy of jeeps, Shriti texted me that we hadn’t yet had explicit permission from Mandela’s press advisers to bring cameras into the compound so Mark would have to wait at the gate.
Regardless of the diplomatic niceties, there was no way I was telling Mark he’d travelled all that way to stand out in the sun at the bottom of the road. We were first in the convoy so I asked our driver to speed up and get us there ahead of time. He said the convoy had to stay together, but I said: ‘No, we have to be there first to film the arrival.’ When we got to the gate perhaps a minute ahead of the rest, arriving at speed, the guards – all carrying machine guns – looked understandably alarmed.
I jumped out and thought I’d just brazen it out: ‘Quick, officers, we need to get up to the house; it’s the BBC – they need to set up the camera before Mr Brown arrives.’ They looked a bit uncertain but opened the gate, and we were able to zip up the last bit of road and clamber out before the other jeeps arrived.
Shriti got out of the lead jeep giving me a stare that could have stripped paint. I mouthed: ‘What? They let us through.’ She mouthed back: ‘I’ll fucking kill you’, but then smiled as Mandela and his wife Graça emerged to greet her and Gordon, waving happily towards the camera.
We stood in the sun outside while the talks went on for hours, Gordon’s protection officers idly comparing notes with Mandela’s guards on their choice of weaponry. ‘You ever use shotguns?’ Gordon’s man asked. ‘Lot of damage,’ Mandela’s man beamed back.
When the group emerged, Mark asked how the discussions had gone. Shriti started to shoot lasers at me again, but Mandela was in effusive mood, talking at length about how great Gordon was, but also speaking sadly about the recent loss of his son. It could simply not have been better, and – as we parted – Mark, his cameraman and even the ultra-professional protection officers reached forward to shake Mandela’s hand.
I didn’t, and while I regret that now, at the time I just thought: Nope, you’re here for Gordon, not yourself, and I always wanted to retain the high ground when castigating any Treasury or No. 10 colleagues at my level for ‘mixing with the talent’ or ‘acting like star-fuckers’, as I used to say when feeling less polite. I even applied that self-denying ordinance on handshakes the two occasions I met Arsène Wenger for goodness’ sake!
And the reality was that, while working on Gordon’s international development agenda enabled us to see extreme poverty in its very starkest forms in Africa, China, India, Palestine and Latin America, it also – more than any other issue we worked on – gave opportunities to mix with some of the richest and most famous people in the world because of their own commitment to those causes, and because Gordon was one of the prime targets for their lobbying.
And if the connections with, or support from, those celebrities enabled Gordon to bring the issues he and they both cared about to a mass audience in Britain, then he would have been a fool to turn those chances down, and – from a PR point of view – I’d have been a fool to let him.
My favourite example came on a conference call Gordon did in 2006 with Angelina Jolie and a handful of journalists from the US and the UK. I was asked to pick two journalists from our side to ask questions. I could have been pious and picked only The Guardian and The Independent development correspondents to keep things on topic, but I had to remember why I was doing it.
So I called on Andy Porter, then deputy to George Pascoe-Watson at The Sun, who said: ‘Ms Jolie, you’re clearly very impressed by the work that Mr Brown has done on these issues. Would you like to see him become Britain’s Prime Minister so that he can pursue these goals at a higher level?’ While sounding slightly confused, she gave enough of a positive answer to make the story work, and although the headline and top line may not have advanced our international development agenda with The Sun’s readers, the rest of the story did.
But Gordon himself was sometimes torn by this. For all the famous people like Angelina Jolie, Bill Gates, Shakira and George Clooney who genuinely impressed him with their understanding of and passion for the issues, he’d occasionally be appalled – just as he was with many politicians and media people – at the crassness of others.
In Davos one year, he made an impassioned speech calling for people to stop thinking about what could be achieved with the millions resulting from one day of fundraising, but about what could be achieved with the billions resulting from a year of campaigning on debt and aid. To his bewilderment and irritation, Sharon Stone leapt up from the front row, whooping, and said: ‘Come on, you heard the man. Get your wallets and purses out. I want to see those cheques. I want to see those IOUs. I want to see who’s going to pledge the most in this room.’
When he was asked by Simon Cowell to record a video message for a special edition of the US version of Pop Idol, called Idol Gives Back, I was the one whooping Sharon Stone-style at the opportunity. But Gordon was distinctly uneasy: ‘They’re all about bednets. You’re not going to solve malaria with bednets. They’ve got this chance to talk to millions of Americans about poverty, and they’re going to bring it all down to bednets.’
That said, he wasn’t averse to some reflected glory when it suited him. In 2009, the celebrities who’d climbed Mount Kilimanjaro for Comic Relief were invited to a No. 10 reception with local schoolchildren and, while there was a great cast list due to attend, the real star was Cheryl Cole.
There was an art to timing Gordon’s arrival at these things. We’d keep all the celebrities who arrived early in a holding room and tell them they’d be going into the main reception just as soon as Gordon had finished his phone call with the Israeli Prime Minister – always our default excuse when we wanted to say he was busy.
What we’d really be doing was waiting for the biggest star to arrive so he could walk into the reception alongside them for the benefit
of the cameras, not to mention the screaming children. But obviously, you couldn’t say that to the other celebrities: ‘Sorry, guys, just waiting for the A-lister to arrive and then we can go in’, or they might be a tad put out.
On this occasion, Cheryl and Girls Aloud bandmate Kimberley Walsh were very late, Gordon was waiting to be summoned from his flat, and the various other stars in the holding room – especially Gary Barlow – were beginning to get a bit peeved at waiting. Eventually, the back gates of Downing Street swung open, a swanky car pulled in and one of the guards gave a thumbs up.
We got Gordon down straight away and he marched into the holding room, apologising profusely to the other celebrities for the wait. He said: ‘We better go and see these kids’, but first worked his way round shaking hands and introducing himself, just giving time for Cheryl magically to arrive right on cue behind him.
Except she didn’t. He finished shaking hands, everyone started trooping out the door and there was still no Cheryl. ‘Can we just hold on, everyone,’ I said. ‘We just need to warn the kids upstairs that you’re coming up.’ We really didn’t. They were getting almost as bored of waiting as the celebrities, but we needed some excuse to wait.
Colleagues went running all round the building looking for where Cheryl and Kimberley had got to, and one eventually rushed up and whispered that they were on their way; one of our most star-fucking special advisers had intercepted them at the back door and taken them for a quick look round the Cabinet room. I mentally started revving up my chainsaw, but said calmly: ‘Oh Gordon, apparently two other guests have just arrived, so let’s just hold on for them.’
The eventual moment of Gordon walking in with Cheryl to the screams of the kids was great, all apart from Gary Barlow scowling in the background. It came as little surprise to me when he came out for the Tories at the 2010 election.
Power Trip Page 16