by Gordon Brown
But that lay in the future. The Sun notwithstanding, there was in the summer of 2005 good reason for Tony and me to come back together in pursuit of a bigger cause that excited and challenged both of us. We worked closely together in June and early July that year as we persuaded the G8 countries to back our Commission for Africa and the doubling of aid to the continent.
In the run-up to the Gleneagles G8 meeting, I had risked a breach with President George W. Bush by pushing hard for an early decision on our ambitious programme to write off what was then a figure of $55 billion of unpayable debt – it was to rise closer to $100 billion by 2017 – owed by the world’s thirty-eight poorest countries. It was a cause I had championed across two decades. To stress the urgency of acting, I asked to meet with the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, though she clearly felt I was putting unfair pressure on America. In the event, John Snow, the American Treasury Secretary, did not turn up for the all-important finance ministers’ decision-making meeting in London, sending a deputy who said he had no powers to agree anything. The German and Japanese representatives, equally opposed to our bold plan to write off debt, threatened to walk out. But after days of telephone diplomacy, we secured a deal that included using IMF reserves to fund 100 per cent debt relief where it was most needed.
And while the Gleneagles conference was overshadowed by the 7/7 terrorist tragedy in London, we did create the momentum that spurred African economic development. In the next few months, I focused on our plans to raise £5 billion for the immunisation of 500 million children, and highlighted the neglected area of global education. I persuaded Nelson Mandela and his wife, the inspirational children’s rights campaigner Graça Machel, to launch Britain’s plan to get millions of children in Africa and Asia out of child labour. I visited them at their home in Mozambique, and with the Mandelas present at the announcement we promised the UK would spend $15 billion over ten years to ensure that 4 million children currently denied education would go to school. The visit brought some much-needed light relief: at the outset of his own speech, Mandela announced he was coming out of retirement in aid of this noble global cause and at the end of it he reannounced his retirement.
The next few months were consumed by our response to the tragic deaths of 7 July and our new measures to deal with the terrorist threat; and, as we worked though this agenda, my relations with Tony improved. Thankfully, he had made a complete recovery from his heart operation and the only noticeable sign of any difference in his health was that he now regularly came to No. 11 to ask for a cup of coffee – something that had been banned from No. 10. And so, we talked more. Nevertheless, in spite of Tony’s energetic push for a new deregulatory direction in public sector reform, the two years that followed were more about him cementing his legacy and dealing with the fallout from Iraq. I still wanted a consensual transition; so when, without my knowledge, a group of ministers resigned from their posts because of their impatience to see a change, I helped put the rebellion down.
My preference had always been a Labour leadership election in 2004 or 2005 and a handover before what would have been a general election in 2005 or 2006. I was not expecting a coronation: I was happy to fight it out with any candidate when the time came. By 2004 Tony had already been Labour leader for ten years and prime minister for seven. He could, with my support, have stretched it to eight and a half by going to the second half of 2005 with an election in 2006. That would have been a longer period in office than any US president and he would have honoured his promise to me to stand down in a second term.
What’s more, I felt I was running out of time. I wanted office not for the title but for the power to move forward progressive goals for the country. But I was very much aware that the public get fed up with politicians who have been in the public eye – and direct line of fire – for too long. ‘I’ve already had seven years. Once you’ve had seven years, the public start getting sick of you,’ I recall saying to friends in 2004. ‘You’ve got seven years, but after that, you’re on the down slope. I’ve tried not to be too exposed, but it’s still seven years. Every year that goes by, the public are going to say: “Not that guy Brown, we’re tired of him – give us someone new.”’ I had given my all to win in 2005 but I thought it should have been the last general election I fought.
I had also built a team for a handover in 2004 or 2005 – men and women experienced enough for government at the highest level, yet young enough to spend some time in No. 10 before planning glittering parliamentary or other careers in their own right. But they would not hang around forever. By the time I arrived at No. 10 in June 2007, I had lost a few of them and some would immediately become Cabinet ministers with their own portfolios. If we had changed over in 2004 or 2005, Afghanistan, as I will show, would almost certainly have worked out differently; so too perhaps the next stage of our relationship with Iraq. Some of the mistakes I made, like abolishing the 10p tax rate in my last Budget of 2007, would not have happened. And I had decided and told Sarah that if I became prime minister in 2005, and then fought and won an election, I would pass over to someone new by 2010. I knew the shelf life of leaders would be much shorter in the future than they had been in the past.
But that was not to be and I was realistic about what lay ahead. In 2007, I could still try to persuade the electorate that I was fresh and awash with ideas, but much of the political capital I had was expended in the difficult last weeks of the 2005 campaign. Roy Jenkins, who knew a lot from more than fifty years of Labour handovers, said that the worst time to become prime minister was in what he called the ‘fag end’ of a period in government. It is the moment when the decisions of the years before are coming back to haunt you and people simply crave change. This would turn out to be even truer than I ever wanted to believe at the time.
CHAPTER 10
FIRST DAYS IN NO. 10
As I was driven at speed out of the Buckingham Palace courtyard at 2.45 p.m. on 27 June 2007, I thought less about the fact I had just become prime minister than of the speech I was about to deliver on the steps of Downing Street. The day had started early with one final meeting with Tony Blair to discuss the handover. While generous with his time and advice, he was understandably focused on preparing for his final Prime Minister’s Questions at midday. I then returned to the Treasury, making my way through hordes of assembled journalists and television cameras. There I had breakfast and turned to some final unfinished Treasury work before making my way to the Chamber. I sat next to Tony during Questions and, in a break with convention, he was given a standing ovation by all sides of the House at its end. It was there that I said goodbye to him as prime minister and he set out for Buckingham Place.
Back at the Treasury, I took a quick lunch in the staff canteen. And in my last act as chancellor, I signed the official papers that enabled Tony to step down as an MP. Under a procedure dating from the seventeenth century, MPs are not allowed to resign but must seek permission from the chancellor to be appointed to the temporary post of Steward and Bailiff of the Chiltern Hundreds, which is an ‘office of profit under the Crown’ and thus disqualifies them from sitting in Parliament. With this complete, I thanked the officials and staff I had worked with as chancellor over the last ten years. By then Sarah had joined me and we departed to applause from a large crowd of civil servants on all four landings of the Treasury building.
My path to No. 10, as I have described, had been anything other than smooth, but a few days earlier, on the Sunday, I had been elected unanimously as Labour Party leader at a special conference in Manchester. I had long championed women’s equality and I was pleased that we had a woman deputy leader in Harriet Harman. Harriet was a popular choice, narrowly beating off a strong challenge from a very able and likeable opponent in Alan Johnson.
I had never thought I would ascend to the leadership uncontested; and for many of the previous ten years never believed I would be there at all. No post-war leader had ever won without a contest. When Tony told me in 1994 he thought he coul
d win the leadership without a contest, I had not believed him. Of course, I had been challenged – by John McDonnell, later the shadow chancellor – but he could not secure the necessary nominations. At the conference, I set out my agenda: widening opportunity in education, employment, enterprise and making our public services – the NHS, schools, policing – personal services too. As we left Manchester, with two hungry young children in the back of the car, we celebrated with takeaway chicken nuggets and chips from a motorway café.
Before becoming prime minister, I had read Churchill’s account of the day he entered No. 10 in 1940. ‘I felt that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour,’ he said with gravitas, before adding with a solemnity matched only by a sense of destiny: ‘As I went to bed about 3 a.m., I was conscious of a profound sense of relief. At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene.’ I had also read the historian A. J. P. Taylor’s famous account of Lloyd George taking over from Asquith in 1916: ‘He seized power,’ Taylor wrote, quoting Churchill, ‘perhaps the power was his to take.’
Others had been less sure than Churchill or Lloyd George about becoming prime minister. ‘I think it a damned bore,’ Lord Melbourne said upon being informed that he had been called to the Palace in 1834. He was, he told his secretary, ‘in many minds what to do’. Others approached the position with foreboding: Harold Macmillan, when he took over from Anthony Eden after Suez, warned the Queen that he could not guarantee the new government would last six weeks – something she reminded him of six years later when he resigned. For a few, becoming prime minister failed to live up to their high expectations. Lord Rosebery, who had the unenviable task of replacing Gladstone as prime minister, remarked that there were ‘two supreme pleasures in life. One is ideal, the other is real. The ideal is when a man receives the Seals of Office from his sovereign. The real is when he hands them back.’ He later wrote that the greatest thing that ever happened to him was his horse winning the Derby. For my part, I was keen to get started in what I believe is the most important job in the country.
I knew too of Clement Attlee’s matter-of-fact account that going to Buckingham Palace – arriving to meet the king in the little Hillman car, which his wife Violet had driven as he toured the country during the 1945 general election campaign – was not dissimilar to going to a business meeting at someone else’s office. The encounter between Attlee and the king, both shy men, was perfunctory because neither knew what to say to the other. Apparently, the silence was only broken by Attlee observing, ‘I won the election …’ and the king replying, ‘I know, I heard it on the six o’clock news.’
Contrary to myth, the Queen and her prime minister do not ‘kiss hands’: they shake hands. In a departure from past tradition, Sarah joined us at the end of my audience with her. The Queen and I had a congenial and businesslike conversation about the work that lay ahead, and I warned her that we were appointing quite a few new and young Cabinet members whom she would have to swear into her Privy Council during the next few days, this being the usual requirement for sitting in the Cabinet.
However busy they may be, those who are sworn into the Privy Council must first attend its offices for a rehearsal, where they are taught how to kneel on a stool, how to raise the right hand with the Bible in it and take their oath, how to proceed forward three steps to kneel on another stool before the Queen, and then how to perform the difficult task of walking backwards without falling over either of the stools. Richard Crossman, who served as Lord President of the Council under Harold Wilson, wrote of the ceremony: ‘I don’t suppose anything more dull, pretentious, or plain silly has ever been invented.’
There had been nothing dull about the Saturday evening in May 1997 when I had visited Buckingham Palace with my new Cabinet colleagues, who were being sworn into the Privy Council, and I received the seals of office as chancellor. I remember well how my colleague and friend, Nick Brown, our new chief whip, was preparing to kneel on the first stool to take his oath when the Queen interrupted, saying: ‘Not yet.’ There followed what seemed an eternity. Was she, as Nick thought, about to refuse him membership? To his relief, the Queen explained that he had to wait until one of his colleagues had finished being sworn in.
Having arrived at the Palace in one car, the chancellor’s Vauxhall, Sarah and I left in another, the prime minister’s Jaguar, to give my speech on the steps of No. 10. I was determined to give my remarks without notes or a lectern. I wanted to speak directly to the British people. But with helicopters above, waiting press and TV cameras, and an expected posse of anti-Iraq War demonstrators only yards away outside the gates at the end of the street, we had anticipated that it would not be easy to be heard. So, somewhat farcically, I had rehearsed my speech in a Treasury anteroom while Damian McBride, my press officer, and Sue Nye hurled abuse in my direction, trying to distract me and shout me down.
In preparing my speech, I had the benefit of advice from Lucy Parker, a gifted author and highly successful social entrepreneur, who was to join us in No. 10 and lead our efforts to build bridges with business, as I tried to get the balance right between communicating my appreciation of the privilege that had been bestowed and my commitment to the work ahead. I ended my short remarks by reminding people of my school’s Latin motto, Usque conabor, which I translated as ‘I will try my utmost’. That, I said, was my pledge to the whole country. (The next day the newspapers were full of commentary about the relevance of school mottos. I was happy to have inspired such a debate.)
I then entered No. 10 for the first time as prime minister, to applause from civil servants who had lined up along the entrance hall to greet me. Less than an hour earlier, the same No. 10 staff had said goodbye to Tony, Cherie and their children after ten years of working together. I thought it must be a difficult day for them, as the departure of one prime minister whom they know well, and the arrival of a new one whom they have to get to know, happens so quickly. I walked to the end of the line shaking hands all round and found, to my surprise, my two young sons waiting for me. To our great joy Fraser had been born only eleven months before; John would be four in October. That moment they fell into my arms is one I will never forget.
A few minutes later, I was down to work. I began by announcing a set of changes that I was determined would send out a clear message as to what kind of prime minister I would be. I would immediately rescind the ten-year-old Order in Council that had given Tony’s political advisers, Alastair Campbell and Jonathan Powell, the power to give civil servants instructions, restoring the constitutional practice that only elected ministers were entitled to do so. I also made a point of appointing a civil servant, Tom Scholar, as both my chief of staff and principal private secretary, ending the division of the two roles between a political appointee and an official. I was sending a clear signal that ‘sofa government’ was over and that a more formal process of decision-making was now in place, that while political appointees had their place, the Civil Service line of command would be restored.
Next came phone calls to world leaders. My first call was to US President George W. Bush, whom I spoke to for ten minutes, mainly about Iraq and Afghanistan. I then talked to the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, whom I had known well since the time we were finance ministers together. We joked how few finance ministers had ever made it to the top spot. I phoned Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, to confirm arrangements already made to meet in Berlin on my first overseas visit as prime minister. During these latter two calls, I was sensitive to the fact that I had to get the right balance in our relationships with Germany and France – both were equally important to our European policy. I called the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, and we discussed the moves we would have to make within days to advance the next stage of Northern Irish devolution. Then I spoke to Romano Prodi, former president of the European Commission and now Italian prime minister. I also made courtesy calls to David Cameron and the Liberal Democrat leader, Menzies Campbell. Over the next few hours and days, I would
have a succession of conversations with Commonwealth leaders – Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, Stephen Harper of Canada, John Howard of Australia, Helen Clark of New Zealand and Manmohan Singh of India – as well as with the Chinese leader, Wen Jiabao, and the heads of international organisations including president of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso, secretary general of the UN Ban Ki-moon, and director general of the World Trade Organization, Pascal Lamy.
In the early evening, before travelling to the House of Commons to appoint my first Cabinet, I brought together, at Sue Nye’s suggestion, the Downing Street staff – ranging from the No. 10 secretarial staff, still referred to by some in antiquated terms as the ‘Garden Room Girls’, up to the most senior officials – in the Pillared Room. I was now meeting the staff who would work hours far beyond the call of duty and with a strong sense of public service, all representing the best of what I had come to admire in the British home and diplomatic services. I told them that it had been an emotional day and they had said goodbye to a great leader and great family. I thanked them for the welcome they had given me and my family, and ended by saying: ‘It’s not every day you meet the Queen at 1.30 p.m., become the prime minister at 2.45 p.m., speak to the president of the United States at 4 p.m., and get told by Sarah to put the kids to bed at 7 p.m.’