by Gordon Brown
It was time to return to London – and the various challenges that the autumn had in store for us.
I had decided that we would start the season with a major appeal for a ‘new politics’. I saw this as essential if we were to tackle successfully the big challenges that we faced as a country: security, global competition, climate change, rising aspirations. I began the appeal with an interview in the Daily Telegraph, an attempt to reach beyond Labour’s traditional base. Over the summer I had also talked at length to the Liberal Democrat leader, Menzies Campbell, inviting him to join us in a political arrangement that would see through the next stage of reform. My point to him was that the divisions between Labour and the Liberal Democrats over Iraq would soon be behind us – I told him we were about to leave.
My subsequent speech at the National Council for Voluntary Organisations called for a politics that drew on the widest range of talents and expertise, not the narrow circles of party or power. This was, I said, the politics of mainstream Britain and it was here that a new progressive consensus could be built. The day after my speech I showed up at a citizens’ jury event at Bristol Brunel Academy, and at the press conference afterwards reaffirmed that Labour had to reach out to those who might not be thought of as our traditional supporters.
To his credit, Ming was enthusiastic about working together. The problem, I found, was the Liberal Democrats were a very individualistic and splintered group. Ming and I found plenty of common ground with each other but the two parties could not forge an alliance for common action. As a result, politics would continue to be dominated by the usual Tory–Labour fist fight.
Terrorism, floods, foot and mouth, and, as I recall in Chapter 15, the run on Northern Rock: the crises kept coming. And I was told in mid-September – just after I’d chaired a COBRA meeting on foot and mouth and before I left for the Labour Party conference – that we now had an outbreak of bluetongue, a viral disease spread by midges that had affected sheep and cows in Suffolk. New to the UK, it had been killing livestock across Europe where infected animals had been destroyed. I feared at that stage we were set for another controversial cull. However, following a conference call with Hilary Benn and the Chief Vet, it was confirmed that because the disease was not passed animal to animal, the mass slaughter was not needed.
Immersed in the business of governing, I had never wanted an early general election. So, prior to September, I had given no thought at all to calling an early election despite the gains we were seeing in the polls, and the apparently desperate state of the Conservative Party searching for direction under David Cameron. In early August as I left for holiday, Spencer Livermore, who oversaw strategy, had left a private note on my desk urging me to consider an early election, but I had put it aside and did not read it until September, by which time others would also be pressing me to take this path. Of course, I would have preferred my own mandate, but even as party conference season approached I had not looked at any internal polling figures, nor discussed the prospect of an election with any of my Cabinet colleagues. When we met as a political Cabinet at Chequers before the summer the issue had not even been raised.
After all the intensity of August, though, and with so many crises to deal with, I made an important error. As the party conference season got under way, I wrongly drew the conclusion that no damage would be caused by not explicitly ruling out an election, and I mistakenly allowed the speculation to mount. I was handed some polling but because I was not planning an election did not bother to study it in any detail. Things soon got out of hand: my mistake allowed MPs, delegates and, of course, ministers to begin to talk up the idea, and soon it was the talk of the conference. In a Sunday morning pre-conference interview with Andrew Marr, I ducked his insistent questioning by saying that whenever the time came for a decision the issues would be clear. And then, in an unguarded moment during a Q&A on the Labour conference floor, the journalist Mariella Frostrup asked: ‘So when will the general election be, then?’ I replied: ‘Charming as you are, Mariella, the first person I would have to talk to is the Queen.’ This offhand remark seemed to strengthen an already gathering wave of media speculation.
This conference, my first as leader, saw us announce major new policies: a more personalised health service, a reformed exam system in schools, and new employment opportunities for the disabled. After starting my speech with a tribute to the British people for the way they came through the crises we faced in the summer, I ventured into the personal by turning to what lay behind my commitment to public service. I would never forget, I told the audience, my father’s words: ‘we must be givers as well as getters’. ‘Put something back,’ he had said, ‘and by doing so make a difference … this is my moral compass.’ The phrase ‘moral compass’ led to a stand-up row with The Times who suggested I had stolen it from the American senator John Kerry, who had used it in his presidential campaign three years earlier. The link, they claimed, came via my friend Bob Shrum, who had assisted with the speech and worked as Kerry’s campaign strategist. In truth, it was a phrase I had used repeatedly when talking about my father; indeed, when he died in 1998, I had invoked it in writing his eulogy. The article attacking me had been written by a well-known Conservative who also assailed my use of the words ‘I will never you let down’ – a sufficiently commonplace phrase that Donald Trump would later use it in his inauguration speech and no one alleged plagiarism. I was angry, as I told the editor of The Times, that his paper had chosen to make unfounded claims without first checking with me. But I spent far more time on what now seems a trivial issue than I should. A few days earlier The Times’s stablemate the Sun had launched a campaign against us demanding that we hold a referendum on the draft EU Treaty. These were the first two indications that even in areas where our approach would be the same as Tony Blair’s, the Murdoch press would be my adversary whereas they had long been his friend.
I returned to No. 10 confident that the party was in good shape. We could afford just one billboard campaign at the time, but its slogan ‘Not Flash, Just Gordon’ seemed to have some resonance. Nevertheless, I was still not focused on the prospect of an election. As prime minister, though, you have got both power and responsibility. Your power is that you alone make a decision about matters like elections. The responsibility is to listen to advice.
On Sunday 30 September, Sarah and I had lunch at Chequers with the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan and his wife, the NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell, and with Bob Shrum and his wife Marylouise. After lunch, I had a meeting with my key advisers – Ed Balls, Ed Miliband, Damian McBride, Spencer Livermore, Ian Austin, Gavin Kelly, Sue Nye, Douglas Alexander and Bob. This was the first time we had come together as a group to seriously examine the possibility of an early election. And for most of them it was the first time they had visited Chequers.
When we sat down, my question was: why not run the full term? This was my preference: with a guarantee of three years in power, there was no point in risking our already secure majority. Ed Balls said he would be the devil’s advocate and set out the arguments against a snap poll – most, at this stage, were in favour. The American pollster Stan Greenberg, who had worked on Labour campaigns since 1997, had given us a poll that looked good but no one yet had the results of a poll that he was now undertaking that concentrated on marginal seats.
As we were meeting, the Conservatives were already briefing a pre-election, or perhaps an anti-election, ploy – one that would subsequently be dropped when they were in government – which was the abolition of inheritance tax for all but millionaires. Reforms in inheritance tax were certainly possible. We had contemplated reforming it the year before, but the Conservatives’ proposal would give away £1 billion to the top 1.5 per cent in the country. We were too slow off the mark in deflecting what was an opportunistic move and the announcement gave the Conservatives a polling boost.
I had other things on my mind. The summer’s foot-and-mouth outbreak had delayed my long-planned first
visit as prime minister to Iraq. When I chose one of the few days available to me before Parliament resumed to make the trip, my decision was labelled a ‘stunt’ because it would coincide with the Tory conference. Even John Major was trotted out to complain about the ‘cynical timing’. I was due to make my first statement as prime minister on the situation in Iraq the following Monday in Parliament. It would have been very strange if I had given such an important statement without having visited the country in person as prime minister.
In the event, on 1 October, I flew overnight to Kuwait, arriving at 6 a.m. and I was in Baghdad by 9.30 a.m. In rapid succession, I conferred with leaders of the different and divided factions; met with US General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, who reported on the results of the surge around Baghdad; flew to meet our troops in Basra, where I went around shaking hands individually, and then, after an operational update from Brigade Operations Staff, I addressed them as a group. In interviews, I said that I expected 1,000 of our troops to be home by Christmas. By the evening I was on the way home, arriving back at Heathrow just after midnight.
On my return, I continued business as usual – visiting the Institute of Biochemical Engineering at Imperial College London, in advance of our launch of the Sainsbury Review of Science and the announcement of our intention to invest £1 billion over the next three years to boost business innovation and technology; holding meetings on the Pre-Budget Report at which we decided to proceed with the sensible reform of inheritance tax that we had postponed the year before; opening a new cardiac centre at a Basildon hospital ahead of the Darzi Review on the NHS; agreeing with the London mayor, Ken Livingstone, that the Crossrail project connecting London from east to west would now have the funding to go ahead. But all of this was portrayed as Labour gearing up for an election.
I cannot write about the events of 5 and 6 October 2007 without regret. Knowing that a Conservative election campaign would return to some of the anti-immigration themes of 2005, I spent the early morning of 5 October making notes for a speech on immigration, a speech that would recognise the issue as important, yet not brush it under the carpet as Labour had been accused of doing in the past.
However, within a few hours any idea of an early election was finally over. At 8.30 a.m., I convened a meeting in Downing Street. All my closest advisers were present, except Ed Balls, who was away in Yorkshire. Douglas Alexander, who from an early age had masterfully coordinated election campaigns in Scotland and the UK, had discovered that the party did not have the resources that were needed for an election. I now found, to my dismay, that I had inherited a party organisation where the parlous state of our finances put us one step away from insolvency: Labour owed £30 million in bank loans, overdrafts and in repayable loans given to us for the 2005 election by a small number of donors – and many were now pressing their contractual rights to be repaid. I had recruited Nigel Doughty, the highly successful head of Doughty Hanson & Co. who had doggedly stood by Labour through thick and thin, and my friend of many years, John Mendelsohn – now Lord Mendelsohn – to devise a strategy to stave off insolvency. A year later, J. K. Rowling and her husband Neil came to Labour’s aid with a generous £1 million donation. But the rescuing of a near-bankrupt party was in its early stages. There was no chance that we could match previous election spending or even afford the advertising and staffing we would require. The final bill for the 2005 general election campaign had been £16 million: we had a third of that available in 2007.
I was also given the latest polling figures – which showed we were close or even behind in key marginal seats currently held by Labour in the south-east. This, the most comprehensive polling we had done, suggested we would win the election but only with a slender majority. ‘Does anyone have anything else they want to say?’ I asked near the end of the discussion. No one spoke, though Bob Shrum – who had changed his mind on the desirability of an election – said: ‘Well, if the worst comes to the worst and you only have three years, there’s a lot you can do. John Kennedy only had three years.’ I then confirmed in telephone calls to each member of the Cabinet that there would be no election.
That day, I had agreed to entertain neighbouring residents at Chequers in the evening and allow local members of the community to visit for the first time. It was Sarah’s idea: we were staying, at least for some days of the year, in what was, in effect, public property and it was right that the neighbours should have a chance to see it. I gave them a guided tour. They were keen to look at some of the historical artefacts, including those in its famous ‘long room’, which contains Oliver Cromwell’s death mask and a journal kept by Lord Nelson. The next day, Saturday 6 October, I travelled back to Downing Street to plan how we would tell the country of the decision.
What followed was nothing short of a political catastrophe. Every Sunday paper was poised to cover our firing the starting gun of an election, so standing it down was going to come as a complete surprise. Conscious of this, I arranged for an interview with Andrew Marr at 4.30 p.m. on Saturday. We also needed to brief the political editors to enable them to hold their pages. This plan quickly fell apart amidst a leak. By the time Marr arrived for his interview, a vast media scrum was crowded outside Downing Street. The result was that we annoyed the entire media by giving an exclusive interview to the BBC while at the same time being unable to convey our message – a difficult one to deliver in any event – as the Tories would now be able to appear on television to blast me even before the interview was broadcast.
To Marr, and at the subsequent press conference, I said that there was too much work to be done to divert our attention to an early election. That had been my view all along. My instinct was always to get on with the job. But I went too far when, in the face of hostile questioning, I refused to concede that I had seen the public polling that lay behind the final decision. That was a mistake and much of the criticism was valid: I had mishandled decisions about an election that I had never wanted to hold in the first place. Harold Wilson said ‘a week was a long time in politics’. I had gone from near-hero to near-zero in a day. Though I read the scorching criticism in the papers, I didn’t have a lot of time for turning over the past.
I found that once things begin to go wrong, any mishap is blown out of all proportion and then a succession of mini-crises follows. Among them in the next three months were the loss of two computer discs containing personal details of 25 million individuals and 7 million families receiving child benefit; my late attendance at the signing of the Lisbon Treaty because of my appearance before the House of Commons Liaison Committee; the resignation of a very good Labour Party general secretary, Peter Watt, as a result of a party donor illegally contributing under a false name; and embarrassing Home Office leaks to the Conservatives about illegal immigrants – which allowed the Conservative leader to score points at Prime Minister’s Questions using information he had but I did not. On top of all that there was a series of crises abroad, not just in Iraq and Afghanistan but inside the Commonwealth – with the expulsion of Pakistan before our November conference in Uganda, then the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, and at the turn of the year murderous violence in Kenya because of their disputed presidential election – in each of which Britain was called in to mediate.
I had tried to signal – and deliver – a fresh start, while realising how difficult that would be after ten years of the same party in government. I wanted to build a new coalition for change with a new focus on public service. I had widened our circle of advisers, bringing in former Tories Johan Eliasch and Quentin Davies as well as the Liberal Democrat MP Matthew Taylor. The idea of ministers who were part of a ‘government of all the talents’, or GOATS, was much talked (and joked) about. To that end, Mervyn Davies, the head of the bank Standard Chartered, was an invaluable addition as trade minister, and the well-respected financer Paul Myners came on board to strengthen the Treasury. But there were obstacles that stood between me and the new kind of politics I had in mind that I could not rem
ove, and my outreach to the wider public never really got off the ground. Old and intractable issues such as Iraq and Afghanistan obscured the new. The array of mini- and full-blown crises that dominated the first few months cast a long shadow. It was these, rather than the initiatives which we had carefully planned, that would be remembered.
And in all candour, my attempts to move on from ‘sofa’ government perhaps inevitably fell short. As I explained in the previous chapter, I encouraged ministers to take full charge; wanted them, not the prime minister, to make major announcements; tried to promote less well-known ministers to the wider world as important decision-makers in their own right; and, to signal this, started my term with full strategy sessions designed to empower the Cabinet as a whole. At the same time, I had tried to revert to a more traditional No. 10 in which ministers alone made the formal decisions, and I held to a rule that all policy announcements were to be made by ministers to the House of Commons. But public expectations of the prime minister were different from what they had been even a decade or two earlier, and those expectations proved impossible to shift. When governmental responses were demanded to terrorism, floods, foot and mouth, avian flu or Northern Rock, it was the prime minister, not the responsible minister, who was the media’s main port of call. In just about every area of central government, in fact, the media’s questions landed on the doorstep of No. 10, no matter what the issue and which department was formally responsible.
So, when I now look back at the decisions we made in these first few months and how we made them, and compare this with the decision-making process of my predecessors and successors, I can see how and why the role of prime minister has kept expanding and that of the Cabinet has diminished.