As Life President of the ‘Be Yourself’ contingent, I’d rail against the pressure that Gordon was put under by the ‘Image Problem’ collective, for example when he’d suddenly remember at the most inopportune times in interviews that he’d been told to smile more. But, to be fair, my opponents would simply counter that you couldn’t cheat the evidence from the polls and we weren’t going to beat Cameron in a personality-driven election unless Gordon made changes.
That tension was never resolved, and one of the reasons it continued was that Gordon himself could never settle on what he thought the basis of his ‘appeal’ should be: he was happy to take and try to meld all sorts of contradictory advice, but he never cared enough about what he called ‘that image stuff’ to actually work out what he thought was best. And stick to it.
During the pre-leadership period, the nadir of this tension came when Gordon was due to give an interview to New Woman magazine, leading to the famous Arctic Monkeys fiasco. The worst aspect was that they’d given us the ‘quick fire Q&A’ in advance so we could veto any questions he refused to answer. Compared to most of the questions, ‘James Blunt or Arctic Monkeys?’ was pretty innocuous.
‘Who’s James Blunt?’ he said to the four of us in his room, receiving the simultaneous answers ‘Twat’, ‘Fucking Tory’, ‘He’s shit’, and ‘Oh, I quite like him’. Gordon heard only one word: ‘He’s a Tory?! I’ll say the other lot. At least I’ve heard of them. Are they Tories?’ ‘No!’ times four.
Cometh the interview, cometh the question. Gordon said: ‘Ah, I’m not a fan of either really, but the Arctic guys.’ The New Woman editor was gently amused: ‘Why? I thought you’d be more of a James Blunt man!’ He didn’t explain why he wasn’t, but said: ‘I usually listen to music just to wake me up in the morning, so I need loud music. At least the Arctic Monkeys would wake you up.’
Much as I was down on the whole interview, I thought that was pretty well handled. But no. The introduction to the New Woman profile was all about what a surprising man Gordon was, and concluded – not even in quotes – with: ‘And he wakes up to Arctic Monkeys!’ Cue the ridicule of an entire nation.
And that’s how myths are born; the fact he never said it didn’t make a difference. But you could argue he got his fair comeuppance. If he’d just been himself, he’d have said: ‘Neither, I listen to Bach’, but the fact that he was actively trying (or being told to try) to project a more modern, relaxed image had led him down that path.
At least the leadership campaign was back to Gordon’s comfort zone: trooping round meeting halls and university campuses; opening schools and hospitals wherever we went; and holding a series of fairly desultory hustings sessions against the would-be challenger from the left, John McDonnell MP. We were in two minds whether we wanted John to get the required nominations to go to a formal ballot, just so Gordon could look as centrist as possible, but given Leon Trotsky would have looked fairly moderate next to John, there wasn’t much to be gained from it.
We were all on a train coming back from another long day-trip when Sue Nye got the call that the deadline for nominations had closed, Gordon was the only candidate and was therefore leader-elect of the party without the need for a ballot. She came off her mobile with a huge beaming smile, filled Gordon’s wine glass, raised it to him and said: ‘Gordon Brown, it is my pleasure to tell you that you are the new leader of the Labour Party.’
There was a joy and exhilaration on the train at that moment, and at the campaign headquarters when we got back, which was never quite there when Gordon was installed as Prime Minister a few weeks later. Maybe that was because of the formality, pressure and importance of the latter occasion; or maybe I was right after all when I told young Rebecca from Customs back in 2002 that it was the leadership he craved most of all.
Either way, I felt the same exhilaration myself. Gordon had done it. He’d seen off every other contender – Milburn, Reid, Clarke, Johnson, Miliband and dozens of others whose ambition had fizzled out on the back benches or in the junior ministerial ranks.
He had survived thirteen years, ten of them in government, as the main contender – and consistently the public’s favoured choice – to succeed Tony Blair as Labour leader. It was an astonishing feat of personal discipline, political resilience and total commitment to the cause, and to have been there and done my bit in the crucial last years was my own greatest achievement.
36
WHAT WE LOST THE DAY WE WON
There are only four people alive who know what it feels like to walk over the threshold of 10 Downing Street for the first time as Prime Minister. Only eleven men and one woman have known that feeling at all in the past seventy-five years, and – remarkably – only five of those as a result of winning a general election outright.
But I can almost guarantee none of those individuals had a stranger start to the day than facing the wall in a near-empty room and booming out their old school motto: ‘I WILL DO MY UTMOST’, while a rotund, red-faced spin-doctor yelled back: ‘SOD OFF, YOU SCOTTISH GIT!’
Sue Nye and I had joined Gordon and Sarah in the large ceremonial room between his office and mine on the Treasury’s second floor where he was rehearsing the first speech he’d make outside Downing Street as Prime Minister. The speech had been weeks in preparation, and the final draft had been given a double thumbs-up from the various focus groups who’d been shown it, particularly the school motto. I hated the use of focus groups at the best of times but, on this occasion, it really got under my skin.
Obviously it helped to know that a representative sample of swing voters liked the speech but it still meant that a dozen individuals, their friends and families would hear Gordon supposedly speaking from the heart about the most important moment of his working life, and think that he was just some shyster who’d asked them to decide what he should say. It was the opposite of the principle drummed into me by Congressman Sawyer’s office in Washington that you win elections one person at a time.
Nevertheless, it meant Gordon was in confident mood about the speech. Now he just needed to deliver it properly in front of the vast bank of cameras waiting outside No. 10 to see Tony Blair’s exit and his arrival. Given that – as well as the cameras – Iraq War protestors were gathering outside Downing Street, and news and police helicopters were constantly circling overhead, we suggested Gordon try the speech a few times with us heckling him and generally making a racket so he could get used to the distractions he’d experience later.
Sue’s heckles were straight out of children’s panto: ‘Booo!’, ‘Hiss!’, ‘You’re a very bad man, Gordon!’, but I tried to inject a bit of realism: ‘You stole my pension, Brown!’, ‘You’re a bigger bastard than Blair!’, ‘Tell us about Bilderberg!’ and so on.
Every so often, I shouted something that would get under his skin (‘Where’s the gold, Brown?’), and he would stop and give me a long, deathly stare. On occasion, he even shouted back. ‘Why’s there blood on my hands?’ he demanded, in response to one traditional heckle. ‘You signed the cheques, Brown!’ I boomed back in my protester voice, albeit with a bit of feeling as a veteran of the 2003 Hyde Park march against the Iraq War.
Sue stepped in and told Gordon forcefully: ‘Excuse me! You can’t stop and have a debate with one of the hecklers if you don’t like what he says. That’s the whole point of this’, and we carried on.
It was all useful preparation, and we were kicking ourselves over the coming weeks that we didn’t do the same to prepare Gordon for his first Prime Minister’s Questions.
He was used to speaking to a packed House of Commons for his Budget speeches, but they were generally heard in total silence. And while he was used to an occasionally raucous atmosphere for sessions of Treasury Questions, there were usually a maximum of 200 MPs present and he had no difficulty dominating the chamber.
So, despite his twenty-four years of parliamentary experience, Gordon was totally unprepared for the first time he faced a wall of noise from packed opposition b
enches and couldn’t hear himself speak, developing an elongated version of Foghorn Leghorn’s stammer as he repeated the first phrase of each sentence again and again, waiting in vain for some quiet.
It’s no coincidence that, more than three years later, Ed Miliband prepared for his first ever Prime Minister’s Questions simply by having his aides scream and shout at the top of their voices as he delivered his questions. Good thinking on his part, although it says something pretty dismal about the culture in the House of Commons that he had to do so.
Nevertheless, Gordon’s unhappy afternoons in Prime Minister’s Questions all lay before us on the much happier Wednesday of 27 June 2007, as he left the Treasury for the last time, every single official filling the corridors, stairwells and the reception area downstairs, to shake his hand, wish him luck, applaud him out and shed some tears. I was told that, on the way to Buckingham Palace, Gordon did too.
There was a lot of crying in the Treasury in those last few days before Gordon left. For the few civil servants making the transition to Downing Street, like Jon Cunliffe, Leeanne Johnston and Helen Etheridge, it was a case of painful goodbyes. For others, who’d expected to go across, the tears were of disappointment – and no little anger – that the move which their effort, brilliance and many sacrifices had helped deliver for Gordon was being denied to them.
To my huge irritation, Balshen was one of those told she’d have to wait and see what opportunities emerged. The subtext was that, as essential as she’d been in managing Gordon’s events, visits and media appearances, it might look as though I’d pulled strings for my girlfriend if a No. 10 civil service job was immediately created for her. And I couldn’t kick up too much of a fuss, or else – in some minds – it would have proved the point. As it was, Ed Balls took advantage of the indecision and snapped her up for a more senior role at his new Children, Schools and Families department.
As well as the civil servants left in limbo, some of Gordon’s Treasury special advisers were rather cruelly left to wait and see how many vacant slots would be available once he had finished trying in vain to persuade some of Blair’s key No. 10 advisers to stay and support the succession.
Rightly or wrongly, Gordon was desperate to show unreconciled Blairites that he was not going to trash Tony’s legacy, and was indeed willing to pick up his torch. Having lost ministers like John Reid who’d decided to step down with Blair, trying to get Tony’s advisers to stay on was the next best thing, but it was a huge and rather humiliating waste of time, and caused unnecessary angst for some of Gordon’s longest-serving aides.
As for me – even though dozens of people claimed in April 2009, either on the record or anonymously, that they’d warned Gordon not to take me with him to No. 10 – my position there was never in doubt, and the view was that Michael Ellam and I would complement each other perfectly, he as Prime Minister’s official spokesman and me remaining as the political press adviser.
Nevertheless, when the day came, I couldn’t drag myself away from the Treasury. I left a good luck card and a bottle of whiskey on my desk for my successor, Alistair Darling’s excellent special adviser Sam White, who unfortunately didn’t do the press job for long. I put half my possessions and old papers in moving crates to go to No. 10, and half in bin bags to go on the skip.
But then I just sat in my empty office, watching the TV and waiting for Gordon to arrive at No. 10, sending my usual abusive texts to fellow Brown press officers and advisers who kept opening the door or appearing on screen. What made it worse was that I knew some of them were trying their best to get ‘in the shot’, either to make themselves look important or just to show off to their families, but either way making us look like rank amateurs to our new No. 10 colleagues.
Gordon eventually arrived from the Palace and delivered his speech flawlessly, despite all the noise from the helicopters, hecklers and flashing cameras. Once inside, he summoned all the staff to one of the large state rooms and arguably made a more impressive speech.
Given that a lot of the civil service staff wore their loyalty to Tony Blair on their sleeves, it was a sceptical audience, but he said he knew this was a day of great sadness for them, having to say goodbye to Tony, Cherie, Euan, Nicky, Kathryn and especially Leo, whom many of them had known since he was a baby, and he knew also that they’d had to say goodbye to a great many friends among Tony’s advisers and that they too would be sorely missed.
When David Cameron made a similar speech to No. 10 staff on the day he became Prime Minister, his only reference to his two predecessors was to joke that a civil servant had told him he and Nick Clegg were already getting on better than Blair and Brown, and he hoped to set the bar a bit higher than that. While some officials laughed, many others thought it deeply crass, given that they had worked hard for both men over the years, knew more of the realities of their working relationship than Cameron ever would, and didn’t like to see them dismissed in such an offhand way.
By contrast, Gordon’s speech transformed attitudes to him among the No. 10 staff, not just in terms of what he’d said, but the amount of thought and care he’d put into it. Although, as they all soon discovered and not entirely to their pleasure, one of his best or worst habits was putting huge amounts of thought and care into every single speech he made; a luxury that the demands of life in No. 10 simply didn’t afford.
As Gordon settled in at No. 10, his two big speeches for the day complete, I continued sitting alone in my Treasury office into the early evening, taking calls from hacks about everything from the impending reshuffle to what Gordon would be eating for dinner that evening. Eventually Sue called me and asked where I was in the familiar tone she used when I was clearly not where she thought I should be. ‘I’m still in the Treasury,’ I said. She sighed: ‘Well, you know you work here now, don’t you? And there are No. 10 people rather anxious about meeting you.’
After all that work trying to get Gordon into No. 10, I felt a real aversion to going there myself, not because I was scared or daunted, but because it meant leaving the Treasury, a place I genuinely loved and had come to regard as home, to the extent that, afternoons at Arsenal aside, I preferred to spend my weekends there.
I called Balshen and told her I had to leave shortly, and couldn’t face walking through the press office to say goodbye. She came round, and burst into tears as soon as she saw the empty office, which set me off too. We had a good cuddle and told each other it would be OK. I left after that, but I had to go and sit on a bench in St James’s Park for half an hour before I felt composed enough to go in the back door of Downing Street. I didn’t want to disappoint my old foes turned new colleagues in the No. 10 press office by not looking like the ‘Mad Dog’ they were expecting.
There’s no getting around the fact that, by this point, many of the No. 10 civil servants who’d worked under Tony regarded me with something between distrust and hatred, given how many nights and weekends they’d had ruined as a result of my activities and lots more where they probably felt I was to blame, even if I wasn’t. In particular, there was always a sense that the Brown camp had played a role in escalating the Lord Levy cash-for-honours scandal, which we definitely didn’t. But when your colleagues and friends are having their homes raided at 6 a.m., you tend to want someone to blame.
Nevertheless, all the staff I met that first evening were totally professional and friendly when greeting me. I was looked after by the exceptional Head of News, Emily Hands; introduced to the press office brains trust of Brendan O’Grady, James Roscoe and Ruth McAllister; and put in an office with old Alastair Campbell acolytes Paul Brown and Martin Sheehan, two lovely chaps, both effortlessly superb at their jobs planning the government’s grid of announcements and speeches.
Paul had on his wall the Mail on Sunday splash denouncing the fact that the ‘chief burier of bad news’ was to be awarded an OBE, that honour proving ‘how debauched and discredited this government has become’, according to rent-a-quote Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker. I eventuall
y owned up to Paul that I was responsible for that story and he thanked me, saying it was one of his proudest moments – both receiving the gong and there being a front-page story about it.
As my tour continued, I was shown the ‘stand-alone computer’ through which No. 10 staff could use personal email accounts which were otherwise blocked by the Downing Street servers to avoid foreign intelligence services using them to access the No. 10 network. ‘We don’t discuss this publicly,’ I was told; ‘we don’t want people going on about “second Downing Street email systems”’, the existence of which had been hotly disputed during the cash-for-honours scandal.
What I wasn’t shown that day was the secret underground tunnel to the Whitehall nuclear bunker. It was only after a series of staff departures in 2008 that I was told I’d finally made it onto the list of key officials and advisers who would be bundled off to safety along with the Cabinet and the monarchy when the bombs dropped so that we could restore good government and repopulate the country once the smoke cleared. By that stage, I’m afraid my reaction was: ‘Do I have to be?’
The other consequence of the mass exodus of the Blair family and advisers from No. 10 was the sheer volume of material that they’d left piled up to go in the skip: files, letters, lanyards, chipped mugs, stained ties and other detritus. I had a good root around in the rubbish to recover any serviceable books, stationery and memorabilia. My prize find was Tony Blair’s GQ Politician of the Year Award from September 2003, a lovely piece of slate and glass, which now sits on my mantelpiece at home.
Power Trip Page 28