Power Trip

by McBride, Damian

  The Eds confronted Campbell and Gould with this at their next meeting, and Campbell replied that the problem was that Blair was ‘not psychologically ready’ to quit Downing Street. It was a dynamite quote, totally in line with my sniper activity since the 2005 election, and evocative of the ‘psychologically flawed’ description of Gordon supposedly given by Campbell to Andrew Rawnsley in 1998.

  After I had a rather long lunch with Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Dobbie a few days later, the ‘not psychologically ready’ quote found its way into that weekend’s paper, although not attributed to Campbell. That one column by Dobbie was enough to bring all the talks to a halt, and while I was apologetic about what I’d done, the response I got from Balls and others was a shrug. The meetings had become pointless anyway, so it didn’t ultimately matter how they ended, and at least a passing, anonymised mention in a column didn’t look as overtly aggressive as the splash that quote probably merited.

  Relations went back into the freezer until the Tom Watson ‘coup’ of summer 2006 and after that had been resolved, we were back to the phoney peace until the day Blair left, with the occasional outbreak of border sniping between the camps, out of either boredom, habit or personal animus.

  Looking at that whole period and all that went before, we’re left with the ultimate question: how did Gordon and Tony both put up with each other for so long; and why – given all the torment and tumult of their thirteen years together at the top – did one of them not terminate the relationship?

  After all, there were any number of fraught occasions when one of them could have cut the rope at a time when the other was dangling from the precipice: if, for example, Gordon had resigned over the Iraq War alongside Robin Cook, or if Tony had backed himself and stuck to his decision to exclude Gordon from the 2005 election campaign.

  Some will say it was about some residual personal loyalty and kinship built up over two decades; a marriage they couldn’t walk away from. Others will say neither man could have felt secure enough about maintaining control of party donors, the media and the party if he destroyed the other.

  And perhaps there’s something else: the mystery – very possibly a myth – of what we used to call Tony and Gordon’s ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’, the idea that they possessed information which would turn any attempted fratricide into guaranteed suicide, once the wounded party – with nothing left to lose – allowed what he knew about the other man to become public.

  I never heard any open reference to this from Gordon and, among his advisers, it was something we didn’t openly discuss, or perhaps didn’t want to given it left you feeling that you were playing cards without a full deck. It will probably always remain a mystery, and rightly so.

  However, and acknowledging the element of post-hoc rationalisation in this analysis, I would also argue that the reason neither man ever pressed the nuclear button was because ultimately their Cold War was good for the Labour Party. Yes, I’m serious.

  Of course there is a common view that all the feuding I’ve described above and elsewhere, both the genuine disagreements between the two men and the constant sniper fire between their aides and allies, was a disaster for the Labour Party and a dysfunctional mess for the country.

  Either they should have learned to work together in harmony, the theory goes, or – if they couldn’t – Gordon should have had the guts to challenge Tony or Tony the guts to sack Gordon, rather than letting things fester on for thirteen years. To that theory, I say, with all due respect: bollocks.

  The angry, bitter, soap-opera style rivalry between the two men was, I believe, a huge positive for the Labour Party, helping it to win three consecutive terms in office. And if you also believe, as I do, that Labour changed Britain for the better and improved many people’s lives during that period, then it follows that the Blair–Brown wars were good for the country too.

  My rationale for that is simple. As long as their feud continued, it was the only political story that mattered. No one else, least of all the Conservative Party, could get a look in. And as long as that feud erupted on issues of policy – the euro, NHS spending, tax, foundation hospitals, academies, tuition fees, pensions and so on – it guaranteed that the only debate that mattered in British politics from 1997 to 2007 was Blair versus Brown, and all on issues around the economy and public services too, where Labour wanted that debate to be.

  A relatively dry policy issue which would barely rate a mention by the newspapers in normal circumstances could be turned into a front-page story and debated for a week afterwards simply by injecting a bit of No. 11 fury or No. 10 irritation.

  Shortly before Tony Blair left office, Andy Burnham – then a rising star minister at the Department of Health – was due to publish a pamphlet setting out the argument for a written NHS constitution. With Andy’s agreement, we told The Guardian that this would be a key plank of Gordon’s reform agenda when he became PM, and by the way, he’s a huge admirer of Andy; code for ‘Gordon’s going to be an even more radical reformer of public services than Tony, and he’s going to promote the best young talent to his Cabinet’. A guaranteed splash.

  That same afternoon, The Guardian also took a call from No. 10 saying Tony Blair had given the green light to Andy’s plans as a key plank of his legacy; code for ‘This is stuff Tony needs to do now ’cos he can’t trust Gordon to carry on the reform agenda’. Another guaranteed splash! For an hour, standing in Great Smith Street, I argued over the phone with The Guardian’s political editor, Patrick Wintour, about which interpretation was correct, presumably with my opposite number in Downing Street in his other ear doing the same.

  And there was no middle ground: a political story in that era had to be a triumph for one man and a blow for the other. The idea of Gordon and Tony agreeing on something was obviously not impossible, but it wasn’t a story. When I saw the Guardian front page that night, and realised the Blairite interpretation had won out, I was incandescent. I had lost out to No. 10, and they knew it. The Guardian had sided with them even when they were on their way out; I unleashed a text message tirade against Patrick, and fumed for weeks afterwards.

  Yet, in retrospect, it’s amazing that a pamphlet written by a junior minister at the Department of Health was able to splash a national newspaper, not because of its contents by themselves, but because of its perceived significance – one way or another – within the Blair–Brown feud. That is what you call dominating the political debate.

  And this is why I came to think of the whole feud as akin to the Cola Wars, the long-standing marketing rivalry between Coke and Pepsi. Whatever the heated nature of that rivalry, and the shifting success of one brand over another, the real significance of the Cola Wars is that – for well over a century – they have maintained the position of Coke, Pepsi and their diet equivalents at the top of the American soft drinks market. Coke vs Pepsi remains the only real choice there is, despite being – to the undiscerning palate – essentially the same product.

  If one of those brands simply didn’t exist, it’s unlikely that Americans would just switch wholesale over to the other. People want a choice. It’s more likely that – over time – other non-cola drinks would significantly increase their market share, and, as the accepted ‘choice’ became between one cola drink and some other, very different-tasting beverages, that market share would only increase as more people sampled the alternative.

  Similar to Coke and Pepsi, from 1997 to 2007, Gordon and Tony dominated the political market, to the exclusion of the Tory Party and to any other internal rivals for the Labour leadership (the Virgin Cola candidates if you like). They achieved this not only by achieving personal success in their respective roles, but – albeit not consciously – by ensuring that the story of their rivalry and their policy rows was the only show in town for a decade.

  As soon as that rivalry disappeared, and in the absence of any other compelling internal soap opera to replace it, Labour was exposed for the first time to viable competition from the Tory alte
rnative and left without the vital grist to make splash headlines out of policy changes. A major reform like the raising of the education leaving age from sixteen to eighteen, guaranteed to create headlines for a week if there had been any Blair vs Brown angle, passed almost unnoticed in 2007 when announced by Brown alone.

  Could Brown have done anything about this? Perhaps if David Miliband had been his Deputy PM or Ed Balls his Chancellor, the recipe for soap opera storylines would have been there – the young pretender left in charge over the summer, or the young protégé defying his mentor on economic policy. But it’s a brave politician who will willingly sow the seeds of trouble to reap the rewards of media dominance.

  I always imagine that, once a year, the CEOs of Coca-Cola and PepsiCo come together at a secret location, drink a can of each other’s product and raise a toast to keeping all the others in a distant third place. Maybe one day I’ll do the same with the mob I used to fight with in No. 10, and we’ll raise a suitable toast to a decade of market dominance and three Tory leaders who could never get anyone to try their product.

  Maybe the Tories should have gone down the Dr Pepper route in their election slogans: ‘Michael Howard … what’s the worst that could happen?’

  26

  TAKING ON THE TORIES

  ‘Have you got any Tory friends?’

  That, right there, is the single best interview question you can ask any Labour politician, whether it’s an aspiring MP at a selection meeting or a Prime Minister running for re-election.

  Why? Because for many of them – at whatever level – it makes them pause and wonder: ‘What’s the right answer?’ even before they get onto the more difficult point, which is: ‘Oh shit, what is the answer? Do I have any? What if they ask me who?’ Watch for those one or two little pauses, and you know you’ve got someone uncertain or calculating in front of you, neither an appealing trait.

  Apart from telling the instinctive truth, whatever it is, there’s only one correct answer to that question, which works for all audiences: ‘Probably.’

  But there’s another reason that question is difficult and revealing. Many Labour people, but certainly not all, can find it difficult to warm to a self-professed Tory because – in their minds – it suggests there’s something fundamentally wrong with their values or the sort of life they’ve lived that’s allowed them to choose that path.

  Particularly for that generation whose formative years were in the 1980s and early 1990s, if they think: ‘Brought up the way I was, seeing life as it was when I was young, how could I be anything but Labour?’, then it follows in their minds that anyone who isn’t either had a sheltered upbringing or – even worse – had the same formative experiences, but decided to become a Tory.

  And that matters because the four main players on the Tory and Labour front benches had their teenage years in that period: Cameron, Balls, Miliband and Osborne, in descending order of age, as well as most of the rising stars and behind-the-scenes heavyweights on either side. Even the hope of a new generation, Chuka Umunna, was a teenager during the Black Wednesday debacle.

  Compare Ed Miliband and George Osborne. While the young Ed Miliband would join in his father’s dinner party debates about how the left should respond to Thatcher’s war against the unions, George Osborne has said on the record – to Guardian writer Decca Aitkenhead – that he can’t really remember the miners’ strike. He was thirteen at the time.

  If there’s currently more animus than we’ve been used to seeing over the years between the respective front benches, that gulf between their formative experiences is part of the reason why. The next election will be a fantastic tag team death match between the two Eds, Cameron and Osborne. I can’t wait.

  I personally have never hated Tories or thought it was inexplicable to be one. My beloved Uncles Bill and John, both sadly gone, were the funniest, kindest men I’ve ever met. John was a staunch socialist who always explained his beliefs by asking how it was fair for the first son of the Duke of Westminster to be born a billionaire. Bill, by contrast, was Tory to his toes. Having spent a life on the railways, he was contracted to the Communist government of Mozambique, and his first act on taking over his office was to replace the portrait of Karl Marx with one of Margaret Thatcher.

  Hating Tories would have meant hating Bill, or my great university pals Chris Spink and Rod Bryce, or my close friend and the 2005 candidate for Sunderland North, Stephen Daughton. So, compared to most people working for the Labour Party in that era, Gordon more than anyone, I didn’t feel particularly tribal.

  But, to the extent that the Tories represented any threat to Gordon’s ambitions, that was where my killer instincts would kick in, not least because Gordon liked to keep a tally of the number of shadow Chancellors he had seen off over the years, and was always itching to take another scalp.

  From the moment we saw the emergence of David Cameron at the Tories’ 2005 leadership conference, George Osborne at his side, we were worried. If they were serious about modernising the Tory Party; if they could succeed in neutralising the economy and public services as dividing line issues by agreeing with us on our tax and spending plans; and if – as was evident – they had the image and freshness to go with it, then they represented a real threat to Gordon’s chances of succeeding Tony, and then of winning any subsequent election.

  This was where Gordon’s seven-year rule kicked in. If he was right that his public appeal was on the wane, and Cameron and Osborne were determined to turn British politics from a choice of policies to a choice of personalities, then it would become a dangerous time. I made a half-hearted attempt to persuade the press that we were relieved David Davis had performed badly at the Tory conference, and the man we were really worried about was Ken Clarke, but they weren’t buying it.

  So we were left with Cameron and Osborne, and taking them on became the priority. But while the main Labour attack lines focused on their posh backgrounds, their tendency to say one thing and do another, and their remoteness from ordinary life, that wasn’t really my priority. My task was to show they were incompetent and weak, didn’t know what they were doing and weren’t up to the job.

  Why? Because it was important to cement that image with the public for the long-term, but – more immediately – we needed to show Labour MPs and Labour members that this was what happens when you put kids in charge; that there was a reason for favouring experience and solidity over youth and style. We were attacking David Cameron, but at the same time sending a not-so-subtle message to those on our own side who were giving David Miliband the glad eye.

  And just as we later found with David Miliband, our job in depicting the inexperience and naivety of Cameron and Osborne was made easier because in those early days they so frequently helped us out, hugely prone as they were to errors and gaffes.

  For example, we discovered that whichever junior monkey at Tory HQ was responsible for managing their online operation had a bad habit of doing test uploads of key documents before they formally went on the website. When we knew something big was coming, the genius Labour officials who led attack operations and opposition research – Patrick Loughran, Steve Van Riel and Theo Bertram – would sit working away in their Victoria Street offices but refreshing the Tory website every ten minutes to see whether anything new had come up.

  Every so often, they’d hit the mother lode, as happened in October 2006 when the Tories gave a test upload to the conclusions of the policy report Cameron and Osborne had commissioned from John Redwood into building a more competitive economy. I scanned through it and it was pretty much the dynamite you might expect if you allowed someone like John Redwood to write what he liked about the economy: abolishing regulation of the pensions industry, introducing a flat rate of income tax and so on.

  I ran round to Ed Balls’s ministerial office. I was told he was in a meeting but very politely told the office to ‘fuck that’. I marched in and talked him through the document. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘let’s go and have some fun.’ We
ran off down the street to Millbank, me ringing ahead to all the broadcasters telling them we had a massive leak and they’d need to put Ed straight on air. The BBC were cautious as always, so I just said: ‘Well, wait ’til you see him on Sky, then see if you want him.’

  There was no hint of Ed’s stammer as he charged round the studios. He was speaking so spontaneously he didn’t have to worry whether the words would come out because even he had no idea what he was going to say next. It was great; one of those days when you know your opponents just have their heads in their hands.

  If the Tories learned a rather valuable lesson from that – don’t let Labour release your documents for you – they learned another a few months later, on a George Osborne venture to Japan: don’t make announcements abroad unless you’ve got a captive audience.

  Osborne hadn’t taken a press entourage to Japan, and had instead just given an overnight exclusive to the Financial Times that he wanted to build a UK version of Japan’s ultra-high-speed magnetic levitating train. He and his team may have gone to bed eight hours ahead in Tokyo thinking the FT story was a job well done, but I was just waking up with a whole day in front of me to kill it.

  And I did: I spent the morning online researching and distributing to journalists the history of accidents and fires on mag-lev trains, and established the fact it wouldn’t even have time to get up to top speed on the route Osborne was proposing. One journalist told me that Osborne texted him and said: ‘What’s going on with this story? Why has everyone got so down on it?’ The journalist replied: ‘You’ve just met the Dog.’