My Life, Our Times

by Gordon Brown

  As the summer holidays approached, I called the Cabinet together for a strategy session. I had often ruminated, even sometimes lectured, on the theme of Cabinet government. When I was a student at Edinburgh my professor, John Mackintosh, whom I had known well when he served as a Scottish MP, had argued in his lectures that real power in British government lay with the prime minister, not the Cabinet. This represented a major departure from the Victorian ideal, which held that the prime minister was simply primus inter pares – first amongst equals. While some had described the position in grander terms – Viscount Harcourt, the chancellor under Gladstone, described the prime minister as luna inter stellas minores, ‘a moon amongst lesser stars’ – most concurred with the assessment of the Liberal statesman John Morley, that the prime minister was no more than ‘the keystone of the Cabinet arch’.

  This was not how it looked by the middle of the twentieth century. In his foreword to the new 1963 edition of Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution, Richard Crossman famously argued that ‘the post-war epoch has seen the final transformation of Cabinet government into prime-ministerial government’. Not long afterwards, George Brown resigned as Foreign Secretary claiming that Harold Wilson was ‘introducing a “presidential” system’ that was ‘wholly alien to the British constitutional system’. Even without the authority that comes to the president of the United States from direct election by the people, Mackintosh pointed out the prime minister’s powers in areas like appointments elevated him above his colleagues. But later the Scottish MP Tam Dalyell was considered to have gone too far when he compared No. 10 under Tony to the court of Louis XIV.

  Having been in government for ten years, I wanted to avoid accusations of running a ‘cabal’ or the kind of ‘court government’ which people alleged had replaced Cabinet government. As I knew well, senior ministers could, and did, exercise a high degree of autonomy. But I wanted to empower them with more authority and establish a more collegial approach. I had empowered Jacqui Smith to lead our response to the terrorist incidents. Similarly, when I met George Bush, I was to surprise the Americans by taking our Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, with me. I did not want the focus for all major announcements to be on the prime minister: I wanted individual Cabinet ministers to play a far bigger role. I wanted the Cabinet itself to be more than a rubber stamp; more than just the sounding board it had often seemed – I wanted to see a rejuvenation of a more collective form of decision-making.

  All in all, I felt confident in the abilities of those around me and ambitious for what we could achieve together. Even though the months ahead would turn out to be more challenging than any of us could have anticipated, I told Sarah during a few days back home in Scotland over the summer that I loved the job.

  CHAPTER 11

  THE BEST-LAID PLANS …

  Most of us in politics assume that the higher we rise, the more likely it is that we can acquire the power that enables us to deliver what we went into politics to achieve. This is true only up to a point. At the level of highest office, the array of unanticipated factors that can constrain your ability to exercise power dramatically increases. Even having the responsibility for a large department – with the Treasury as a good example – cannot fully prepare you for all the complex challenges ahead. For some leaders that may not be a problem – particularly if their main concern is to dominate the news cycle, for it is often those with the best-laid plans who are most at the mercy of events. As the previous chapters relate, I had a clear sense of what I wanted to deliver as prime minister, and this meant I had to fight even harder not to be thrown off course when the unexpected occurred. A leader’s time in office should never be defined by such things, and although in some instances you can shape events to your designs, in others they shape you. If my first few days in No. 10 were dominated by security concerns, in the weeks and months that followed we were hit by one domestic crisis after another.

  In July, Britain suffered some of the worst floods for years, with Hull and Gloucestershire particularly badly hit; in August, an outbreak of foot and mouth in Surrey; in September, we saw the collapse of Northern Rock and an outbreak of bluetongue disease in sheep and cattle; and in November the extent of avian flu became apparent, eventually leading to a mass cull. My hope that we might be able to shift attention from security to our agenda for reform would not be fulfilled as Harold Macmillan’s famous comment – ‘events, dear boy, events’ – often sprang to mind over these months and beyond. Although there was welcome praise for our competence in handling the various crises, all talk of a new start would vanish from popular discourse by the time we entered the autumn. But even before all this, there were other pressing concerns to be dealt with.

  Northern Ireland seemed to be in permanent crisis. There was a danger that, if we could not get all parties to agree a timetable for a second round of devolution, the Northern Ireland Assembly would collapse. At Stormont on 16 July, with the First and Deputy First Ministers, along with Bertie Ahern, I announced what I had spent months preparing at the Treasury – a new financial package worth £50 billion over ten years. The idea was to link the financial priorities of the competing parties to progress on issues like the transfer of responsibility for policing to Belfast. But, even with this on offer, it would take months of late-night meetings in Downing Street, discussions at Stormont and visits to Dublin to get the job done.

  Russia was a rising international concern. After the meetings at Stormont I flew from Belfast to Berlin to confer with Chancellor Merkel who shared my worries about Vladimir Putin’s increasingly assertive behaviour. We were in dispute with him over the murder of the Russian former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko in London in November 2006, and I told her of our belief that the orders for the assassination had come from the top. The Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Ken Macdonald, had already asked for the arrest of the main suspect, Andrei Lugovoi, who fled London for Moscow. When the Russian Prosecutor General ruled out extraditing Lugovoi, we responded by expelling four Russian diplomats on the very day I met Merkel. The next day’s newspapers headlined a new Cold War.

  There was approval, even on the right, for taking a firm line with Russia in what was seen as the first foreign policy test of my time in office, but Putin remained a constant source of provocation. I had met him twice when I was chancellor. On the second occasion, he spoke at a lunch of G8 finance ministers in the Kremlin. He threatened that if the West would not deal with Russia on his terms, he would no longer sell oil and gas to Europe and redirect exports to the East. When I looked into Putin’s eyes, I did not see a good man; but I could understand his appeal to Russians who wanted to cast off what they saw as years of humiliation following the Cold War. He was prepared to go to any lengths to destroy any opposition – as we were soon to learn. Only months after the Litvinenko assassination, a second Kremlin plot seemed to be hatching – to murder yet another Russian citizen on British soil. Relations between Putin and me never recovered.

  At this stage, Putin was prime minister while waiting to seize another term as president, so all my formal relationships went through his Potemkin president, Dmitry Medvedev. At his first meeting of the G8, Medvedev agreed to an initiative on Zimbabwe – only to find himself overruled the next morning by a Putin diktat. Later that year, when George Bush was leaving office, the wives of the G8 leaders toasted his wife Laura. In a further round of toasts, Medvedev’s wife raised her glass in a toast not to her husband but to Putin: ‘Once a president, always a president,’ she said. The only other direct encounter I had with Putin was a frosty exchange at the joint NATO–Russia Summit in 2008. We merely shook hands and moved on.

  When Parliament went into recess in July 2007, I headed to America for my first meetings as prime minister with President Bush. My destination was not the White House, as I would have preferred, but the presidential country retreat Camp David. George Bush told me he preferred an air of informality. But I wanted the public to see us working through detailed policy issues l
ike Iraq, rather than appearing as though we were just exchanging pleasantries. The president was anxious to press me to keep British troops in Iraq. This evolved over our private dinner into a friendly but pointed exchange about numbers and timing.

  Beyond Iraq there was another issue I had to raise – and I did so the next morning. Two of our ministers, Douglas Alexander and Mark Malloch Brown, had been widely reported as implying that the special relationship between Britain and the USA now mattered less than it once had. Douglas had given a speech in Washington emphasising the need for ‘new alliances, based on common values’, which was widely interpreted by journalists as a coded criticism of Bush’s policies. A few days later, Malloch Brown said the UK and US were ‘not joined at the hip’ on foreign policy. I reassured Bush, satisfying him of Britain’s commitment to our alliance, a point I reinforced in a session with the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, and David Miliband, who I had invited to attend the visit.

  That morning the president drove me on a golf cart to our open-air press conference. Among the press corps was Nick Robinson, the political editor of the BBC. Six months earlier, Bush and Robinson had had a fiery exchange when Robinson asked him if he was in denial about Iraq. As our uneventful press conference ended, Bush asked Robinson: ‘You still hanging around?’ Referring to the fact that it was a hot and sunny day, Bush then suggested to him, ‘Next time you should cover your bald head.’ As Bush walked away, Robinson replied, ‘I didn’t know you cared,’ to which Bush retorted, ‘I don’t.’ This was yet another example of the storyteller becoming the story.

  I was then helicoptered to Andrews Air Force Base and driven to Capitol Hill. Conscious that an American election was looming, I was anxious to cement our links not just with the Republicans but also the Democrats. Indeed, later that day in New York, I met with Bill Clinton. But I wanted my first few weeks in No. 10 to signal something more: so, my American visit ended with a speech at the United Nations. I promised to step up our aid efforts with the poorest countries, though my more urgent call was for joint action to end the conflict in Darfur and civil war in Sudan. I was sending a message to the Bush administration which, given all its troubles over Iraq, was reluctant to act: I saw the genocide in Darfur, like that in Rwanda, as a stain on the conscience of the world. I wish I could have done more.

  Arriving back from my US trip, I had a private event in my diary: I took my young son John to the Hayward Gallery to see an Antony Gormley exhibition, the centrepiece of which was his room-sized installation Blind Light, a luminous glass box filled with mist. John was enchanted: even more than I did, he seemed to grasp what the shifting shapes and sizes conveyed. The apparent chaos reminded me of the Labour Party of old.

  That same day, I welcomed to Downing Street the hero of the Glasgow terrorist attack, John Smeaton, a baggage handler who had helped police tackle the terrorist suspects, and after a planning session for my upcoming speeches to the TUC and Labour conferences in September, Sarah, the two boys and I left for a holiday. It would not go according to plan.

  I had made a promise to stay in the UK in an effort to promote British tourism. Indeed, we would not travel abroad for any of our holidays when I was prime minister, deciding instead to vacation in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. That first year our summer break was to be in the West Country near Sarah’s parents, Pauline and Patrick. I arrived at their home around half past two in the afternoon, having stopped off en route to visit the Weymouth Sailing Academy that was to be a venue for the Olympic Games. But just four hours after arriving, I was told a phone call had come in from Bruce Mann, Director of the Civil Contingencies Secretariat, who reported an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Surrey. Within a few minutes, I was talking to Hilary Benn, our Secretary of State for the Environment, and Debby Reynolds, the Chief Veterinary Officer. Damian McBride, who was with me as the duty press officer, had to brief newspapers and TV that we were doing everything in our power to identify the source of the outbreak and contain its spread.

  The 2001 outbreak was still fresh in my mind; I recalled how slow the government’s response had seemed and how much it had come under fire. This time we had to be proactive and swift to avert panic. I did not know the science of foot and mouth, although in the next few weeks I would be immersed in the details of the disease and its transmission. What I did know was that my holiday was ending before it had barely begun.

  The next morning I left early for London, spending the car journey further reviewing the reports on the last outbreak, and thinking about how many animals we might have to slaughter, what would have to be done on footpaths and bridle paths, the impacts for horse racing, farm exports and tourism, and the potential return of exclusion and buffer zones.

  When I arrived at No. 10, I chaired an emergency meeting of COBRA. By midday, I was doing a round of media interviews pledging that we would get to the bottom of the problem. On the phone, I updated the Opposition parties and devolved administrations. I had a further COBRA meeting at 5 p.m. and then discussions with officials and experts. Hilary was a tower of strength, particularly in reaching out to the farming community. A Surrey laboratory was quickly identified as the likely source of the outbreak. I found it strange that some in the press were blaming me for deserting my wife and children, leaving them with their buckets and spades on the beach. In any event, Sarah and I had decided to move our holiday from the south-west to Chequers, allowing me to stay with them over the break but travel each day into London as need be.

  The next few days followed the pattern of the first: early morning updates to be read during the hour-long trip into London, then COBRA meetings and sessions with experts, followed by interviews with journalists and reports to the British people. While we might have expected all-party support for our swift action, bipartisanship went only so far: I briefed David Cameron, who went on TV to attack me, misusing the information I had passed to him in confidence.

  By mid-August, with the epidemic being brought under control, I travelled to Scotland for a few days’ actual break, visiting Alistair and Maggie Darling at their home in Edinburgh, as well as meeting up with J. K. Rowling, her husband Neil and their family. Sarah and I had known Jo and Neil for years, even before she had become the global icon she now is. I got to know her well after we both spoke at the National Council for Single Parents in 2000, and Neil had known my father years before that. In Scotland, I also found ninety minutes to watch a winning Raith Rovers team score three goals against Berwick Rangers, and after the match I made a presentation to the players, before we took John and Fraser to the local Chinese restaurant in Kirkcaldy.

  In fact, I went to one more football match shortly afterwards – but this one was official business. Back in London, I took Angela Merkel to the opening of the new Wembley Stadium to watch Germany vs England. As part of her visit, we agreed a joint initiative to strengthen the financing of global health, a cause she was deeply committed to. But she may remember the visit more for the game, which Germany won 2–1.

  There were two more ceremonial occasions before the end of the summer. The first, at the end of August, was the unveiling of a statue of Nelson Mandela in Parliament Square, with Mandela himself in attendance. Talking to vast crowds and with his wife Graça Machel at his side, Mandela said with great poignancy: ‘Though this statue is of one man, it should in actual fact symbolise all of those who have resisted oppression, especially in my country.’ As I later told the House of Commons, Mandela had visited London a few years before his arrest and imprisonment in June 1964. Touring Parliament Square, standing in front of the familiar statues of Gladstone and Disraeli, Peel and Palmerston, Lincoln and Smuts, he had turned to his friend Oliver Tambo and asked if someone who was black would ever be represented there. So, it was a very special honour for me to speak at that ceremony and say, ‘Here Nelson Mandela now stands, forever, his hands outstretched, his finger pointing, as he did his whole life, upwards towards the heights … this statue is a beacon of hope. It sends
around the world the most powerful of messages: that no injustice can last forever, that suffering in the cause of freedom will never be in vain.’

  Soon after there was a more traditional event: a visit to the Queen’s Scottish holiday home, Balmoral, where you had to hope your children would behave. This was the annual visit of the prime minister and his family – arriving on Saturday afternoon and leaving on Sunday after lunch. The practice of prime ministers visiting Balmoral dates back to Queen Victoria. Not all of them have enjoyed the privilege. Disraeli complained that ‘carrying on the government of the country six hundred miles from the metropolis doubles the labour’, while Lord Salisbury referred to Balmoral Castle as ‘Siberia’. In modern times, Harold Macmillan was as unsure as I was about whether the weekend should be treated as a social occasion, with discussion of business off limits, or as an extended version of the weekly audiences at Buckingham Palace. His successor, Alec Douglas-Home, was surprised to be woken by the Queen’s official bagpiper early in the morning. It is said that Margaret Thatcher initially regarded trips to Balmoral as akin to ‘purgatory’. In contrast, Harold Wilson enjoyed the informality of helping the monarch with the washing-up. Mrs Thatcher was so shocked that the Queen ‘did the dishes’ that she is said to have sent her a pair of rubber gloves as a present for Christmas.

  The Queen was, of course, a gracious hostess. I was told that she personally checks her guests’ rooms and selects books likely to be of interest to the prime minister and his wife, which are taken from the library and left by the bedside. Once we arrived, we travelled to Birkhall, the Prince of Wales’s private residence in Scotland, for afternoon tea with Prince Charles. By 6 p.m., I was sitting down with the Queen to bring her up to date on events, in advance of the barbecue she had kindly organised for us. On the Sunday morning we joined the royal family for the service at Crathie Kirk, during which four-year-old John and two-year-old Fraser made a lot of noise, and after a lunch we introduced them to the Queen. She was surrounded by her corgis and the boys were delighted and shocked in equal measure when she told one of her dogs to ‘shut up’.