by Gordon Brown
When an administration changes hands in the United States, up to 5,000 staff come and go; in the United Kingdom, new appointees – political advisers as well as ministers – number at most around 200. In fact, as I moved in and Tony moved out, only forty or so new people would come into No. 10 – a team of the best policy researchers and advisers I could ever hope to work with and whom I mention by name in the Acknowledgements of this book. They were supported by our head of communications, first Mike Ellam and then Simon Lewis, both of whose sage media advice and unflappability I relied on, and by a Labour Party team expertly led by Fiona Gordon and later Joe Irvin and Jonathan Ashworth. But continuity in staffing was also the name of the game, and I asked some of Tony’s younger advisers to stay on. Kate Gross – a wonderful civil servant, equally at home advising on UK social policy and international development, and who was to die all too young at thirty-six in 2014 – generously remained in her post to help me through the transition.
In addition to Tom Scholar, my new principal private secretary and later head of the Treasury, I was joined by a highly effective and popular economist, James Bowler, my principal private secretary as chancellor, and by Beth Russell, who was named speechwriter, but whose considerable talents, which extended far beyond speech-making, were of great value.
Simon McDonald, who was my foreign policy adviser, was on his way to becoming permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office. He was joined by the brightest young diplomat of the day, Tom Fletcher. Tom became a highly effective ambassador to Lebanon at a critical time in the Syrian civil war and coordinated the education of more than 200,000 Syrian refugees in Lebanon. In his book The Naked Diplomat, he showed how technology can transform old ‘behind closed doors’ diplomacy into a modern two-way communication with ordinary members of the public. Tom was later joined by another excellent foreign policy adviser, Nick Catsaras.
In January 2008, Jeremy Heywood – who in 2012 became Cabinet Secretary, and in 2014 head of the Civil Service – returned to lead on policy as principal private secretary and later took up a new position as permanent secretary to No. 10. Like Tony before me and two prime ministers since, I was able to draw on the support of Sue Gray, a senior official in the Cabinet Office, who was always there with wise advice when – as all too regularly happened – mini-crises and crises befell.
The Cabinet had to be announced within twenty-four hours; and, as far as possible, I was determined to avoid the increasingly common practice of issuing the names of appointees one by one just to feed the news cycle. Unbeknown to the media, I had decided to do my Cabinet-making in the Commons, rather than Downing Street. I did not want ministers who were resigning or being sacked to endure the glare of cameras as they walked along the street to and from No. 10. In my Commons office, I sat down in turn with Charlie Falconer, Patricia Hewitt and Margaret Beckett who would be leaving the Cabinet. I held meetings in the House of Commons until nearly midnight and in between made further courtesy calls to other Opposition party leaders – Alex Salmond, Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness.
The next morning, 28 June, I made my way back to the Commons for further discussions – again, away from the cameras that were still outside No. 10, lying in wait for prospective ministers – and only then, once the Cabinet had been finalised, did I invite the new members to come to Downing Street to be appointed formally.
I replaced almost half of the Cabinet, with ten members departing. The average age had dropped to below fifty. Though none were as young as Harold Wilson, who joined Attlee’s Cabinet at the age of thirty-one, the Cabinet as a whole was the youngest of the post-war period.
James Purnell and Ed Miliband, our new Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport and minister for the Cabinet Office respectively, were both thirty-seven; Douglas Alexander and Ed Balls, International Development Secretary and Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families respectively, were forty; and David Miliband, at forty-one, became the youngest Foreign Secretary since David Owen in 1977, while Jacqui Smith was one of the youngest MPs – and first woman – to become Home Secretary. Yet all these younger appointees had been at the centre of government, whether in No. 10, the Treasury or Cabinet Office, often since 1997. David and Ed Miliband became the first brothers to sit in Cabinet together since Austen and Neville Chamberlain nearly eighty years before.
I chose a young Cabinet that I hoped would mature and grow over the next three years. In it, I believed, was sitting one of the men or women who would be my successor. In that sense, the Cabinet was what my friend the author Doris Kearns Goodwin – sometimes called America’s historian-in-chief – termed ‘a team of rivals’. But not, at least for most of my time, did I see them as rivals to me. They were already competing with each other in a race for the succession; and, to be frank, they were sometimes distracted because of this.
Only Jack Straw, our Lord Chancellor, was over sixty. He would work with a new constitution minister, Michael Wills, who had been unfairly overlooked in the past and now brought fresh ideas to the debate about Britishness and our constitutional future. Harriet Harman was not only deputy leader of the party but became chair of the party, Leader of the House of Commons and minister for women and equality, in which post she was to pioneer the most ambitious equalities legislation in the world.
The full Cabinet was announced at lunchtime. At 2 p.m. we started what was to be a three-hour meeting. I glanced at Alistair Darling and said: ‘It’s very odd sitting across from the chancellor. I’m no longer the one who has to say “no”.’ This was to be the last Cabinet meeting on a Thursday: I moved our meetings to Tuesday because I wanted the Cabinet to prepare for the week ahead, not just review the week that had gone by.
Picking a Cabinet is even more complicated than it might seem. You have to focus on the jobs in hand, choosing the best person to deal with, say, education or health, and you also have to be aware of the overall balance – of ages, backgrounds, personalities and factions within the party – that needs to be struck. And, of course, there are the inexorable pressures of ambition: in the UK, unlike in America, if you are not a member of the government, you can hardly ever shape a piece of legislation, and so for most MPs the test of success is not achievement as a backbencher but whether they make it into the ministerial ranks.
I wanted a strong Cabinet, and I was happy to be surrounded by members who would challenge me with their own ideas. I recalled the words of Lord Curzon claiming that Lloyd George treated him as if he were a ‘valet’. Instead, I admired Abraham Lincoln for his team of rivals. I would have wanted Robin Cook back in Cabinet and indeed had talked to him about a possible return to office before his untimely death in 2005. I considered bringing back David Blunkett, Charles Clarke and Alan Milburn too, but I saw no great desire on their part to come in.
To match Cabinet’s youth with experience, I also brought talented men and women from outside politics into government. This had been tried in the past, with mixed success. On the one hand, there was Lord Chalfont, a lieutenant colonel who had fought in Malaya in the 1950s and later became a defence correspondent, who was not a notable success as minister for disarmament; C. P. Snow, the celebrated writer, lasted only two years as minister of technology; and Frank Cousins, who had been general secretary of Britain’s biggest union, left within months. On the other hand, David Sainsbury was one of many successes under Tony and showed what could be done. He was a spectacularly effective minister for science – his work promoting innovation, science and technology deserves a book in itself.
I thought we could make outside appointments work by casting them in a new way. I singled out Ara Darzi, a brilliant surgeon whose work in reorganising the London hospital system was widely acknowledged to be path-breaking, as the man to speed reform of the NHS and complement the Health Secretary Alan Johnson’s political acumen. Within a year, Ara was to complete a thorough review of staff practices and patient experiences, recommending important reforms that have lasted to this day.
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also asked Mark Malloch Brown, former head of the United Nations Development Programme, to join David Miliband at the Foreign Office. Though their relationship did not get off to the best start – Mark gave an interview saying he would be ‘the wise eminence behind the young Foreign Secretary’ – the government, and David, greatly benefited from his exceptional knowledge of Africa and the developing world. The former head of the CBI, Digby Jones, with whom I had worked closely during my years at the Treasury, and Paul Drayson, a successful businessman in his own right, joined John Hutton and Pat McFadden at the new Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. Because Digby had made the transition from boardroom to the halls of a Labour government he was soon nicknamed Comrade Digby. Sir Alan West, the recently retired First Sea Lord, came in as minister of security, working with Jacqui Smith. He gave invaluable service by helping to produce Britain’s first ever National Security Strategy and Cyber Security Strategy. However, it did not help that he was wrongly accused in the newspapers of having an affair with one of the female members of Abba. I also considered Paddy Ashdown. Would he be willing to serve as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland – a job that I felt he could do on a non-partisan basis? Nothing came of it. But Alan Sugar, whom I appointed as Enterprise Czar in 2009 – and who became Lord Sugar – did brilliant and inspirational work encouraging young people to enter business.
In one further innovation, I appointed new regional ministers to act as champions within Whitehall and Westminster for each region of England. I wanted English regions to go some way towards matching the power that the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland Secretaries and the devolved institutions enjoyed. We appointed high-calibre ministers – like Nick Brown in the north-east – who worked with regional development agencies and local authorities to strengthen the profile of – and resources available to – their areas. I saw this reform as the first step towards the much more extensive devolution of power within England that was my ultimate goal.
For the same reason, the Cabinet began a regular cycle of meeting outside London in the regions. I felt that we had to answer the charge from the rest of the country that no one in London listened. Prior to my becoming prime minister, only two Cabinet meetings in history had been held outside the capital. Lloyd George, who would not leave his holiday in Wester Ross, had summoned his ministers to Inverness Town House in September 1921 after Ireland renounced the British monarchy, and Harold Wilson held a full Cabinet meeting about his prices and incomes policy in the banqueting room of the Grand Hotel during the 1966 Labour Party conference in Brighton. In total, I would chair nine Cabinet meetings outside of London from Exeter in the south-west to Glasgow in Scotland.
On the morning of Friday 29 June, we had scheduled a Cabinet session to discuss our constitutional reforms, which were to be announced on the following Monday. These had been thought through largely by Michael Wills, who combined an understanding of what it was to be British with a strong sense of what a modern constitution should look like. He was to be the architect of the main reforms and many initiatives, like a new British Bill of Rights and citizens’ juries, that were killed stone dead after we left power.
However, on that day, an unexploded bomb, packed with petrol, nails and gas cylinders, was discovered in an abandoned car at 2 a.m. in the West End. I was woken up at 4 a.m. and informed. The picture was unclear: we had yet to detain anyone and did not know whether there were other bombs in the area. I asked Jacqui Smith to make the initial public statement, and just after 10.30 a.m. I convened a meeting of the government’s crisis-response committee, COBRA – named after Cabinet Office Briefing Room A, in which its sessions are held.
After the meeting, we briefed the full Cabinet, and Jacqui again went on TV to warn of a ‘serious and sustained threat’, urging the public to ‘remain vigilant’. While I went ahead with the appointments and meetings of the day, including my planned visit to a London school, we had another COBRA meeting later that afternoon, following confirmation that Park Lane had been closed off as police investigated a second suspect car. After the COBRA meeting, at 8 p.m., I spoke to the cameras from just outside the Cabinet Room, praising the fortitude and resilience of the British people. Later on Friday evening, police confirmed that a second car containing bomb material had been found.
A further COBRA meeting was held at midday on Saturday. Then, at around 3 p.m., a third incident – later confirmed as a terror attack – was reported from Glasgow. Two men crashed a burning Jeep into the entrance hallway of Glasgow airport. It was the first time Scotland had suffered a terrorist incident since the Lockerbie bombing of 1988. We invited Alex Salmond, the Scottish First Minister, to join the subsequent COBRA meeting on a video link but his initial statement was downright unhelpful – he wanted us to know that no Scot was involved in any terrorist act. Although no lives had been lost, we immediately moved Britain to the highest state of security alert, ‘critical’, meaning a terrorist attack was expected ‘imminently’. It took four days until we were able to reduce the threat level back to ‘severe’, meaning an attack is ‘likely’.
These were fearful but proud days for Britain, once again showing resilience in the face of a terrorist attack. One side effect of the attack was that it disrupted our careful planning for a series of ambitious announcements to herald the start of a new government. We had a raft of changes in train on the constitution, the NHS, student finance, drugs, welfare and gambling. Each of these announcements was designed to send a message about a new agenda in tune with the needs and aspirations of the people. Understandably that message was muted in the aftermath of the terrorist incidents when the focus became how we were responding to them.
In the days leading up to the summer break, I was intent on reinforcing the new government’s commitment to the young. I had always opposed tuition fees but at this point we did not have sufficient resources to uproot and replace them with a graduate tax; which, even if it had been instituted in 2004, would still not have been yielding revenues by this time. Instead, we raised grant levels for poorer students. This was to be followed a few months later with an even more radical set of proposals to raise the minimum education leaving age to eighteen and bring into force the key findings of the Leitch Review, which recommended that training or education should be compulsory for all teenagers. Our aim was to ensure that the overwhelming majority of young people would have basic numeracy and literacy skills.
Another key signal I wanted to send in my first days as prime minister was about our democracy – and restoring trust in it, not least because it had been eroded over Iraq. I wanted our democracy strengthened by an extensive devolution of power from the executive to Parliament and the people. We announced that we would not invoke the ancient and outdated Royal Prerogative, relying instead on Parliament to declare on matters of war and peace. We simultaneously initiated a national debate on the case for a full British Bill of Rights and opened up public appointments and major policy decisions to greater scrutiny by the House of Commons. This included hearings on appointments to the Bank of England, hitherto the chancellor’s prerogative, and greater parliamentary oversight of the intelligence services. The prime minister would also no longer play any role in selecting the Archbishop of Canterbury or other senior ecclesiastics. We would, too, relinquish our residual role in the appointment of judges who would henceforth be selected entirely by a non-partisan committee of experts. The rules governing the Civil Service were no longer to be set at the discretion of ministers but legislated by MPs. The executive would also give up its authority to grant pardons. We created citizens’ juries to provide feedback on public policy, and new rights for people to scrutinise and improve the delivery of local services and vote on spending decisions in areas like neighbourhood and youth budgets. I had always thought we could extend the principle that underlay the jury system – that a group of ordinary citizens could be entrusted to make decisions – on aspects of policy wider than the criminal law. ‘Power to the people’ was the theme
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But there was a limit to that power. We were to later ban super-alcoholic drinks and toughen the classification of so-called recreational drugs that could harm mental health. Indeed, this measure is more remembered for the press’s ensuing scurry to find out which ministers had smoked cannabis in their student days. Eventually nearly half the Cabinet admitted to it – not a great start to try to reduce its use; I never asked them whether they inhaled or not. Meanwhile, James Purnell, our Culture Secretary, announced that 1,000 online gambling sites based overseas would be banned from advertising in the UK. At Prime Minister’s Questions, I told the House we would not go ahead with the proposed super-casino in Manchester. Perhaps my instincts were those of a son of the manse.
For over 150 years, what was called the annual Gracious Address, delivered in the Lords by the monarch, had been drafted inside government in private, far from the public eye, and then sent on to the Palace to be delivered unchanged. But in a statement to the House in July, I proposed to open up the government’s legislative programme to nationwide consultation in advance of the Queen’s Speech.
In total, I announced twenty-three bills and draft bills. One of the most consequential was the first ever Climate Change Bill which put Britain ahead of every other country in the world in enforcing tough anti-pollution standards. Our Counter-Terrorism Bill, meanwhile, proposed to give the government the power to impose travel bans on convicted terrorists and allow for post-charge questioning of terrorism suspects. At this point, suspects could be detained for only twenty-eight days. Tony had proposed a limit of ninety days, but I thought Parliament could be persuaded to accept a maximum of forty-two days in cases where there were genuine reasons to believe the detainee might be a terrorist. This incurred the wrath of civil-liberties groups and ultimately the Tories, Liberal Democrats and dissident Labour members blocked the bill. Our fallback was that in the event of another serious terrorist incident we would reintroduce the legislation.