The End of the Party

by Andrew Rawnsley

  That Brown did when he presented the Budget in mid-March. It was not a lavish giveaway, but he unashamedly targeted segments of the electorate by raising the threshold on stamp duty for first-time buyers and giving pensioners free bus travel and a discount on their council tax bills.

  There were two main sources of economic growth in the second term. One engine was the large increase in public spending in part financed by a rise in government debt. The other was the low cost of borrowing, which fuelled a consumer boom on the back of rising house prices. A small number of voices suggested this was not ultimately sustainable, but they went unheeded. Brown used the occasion of his Budget to boast that he was presiding over ‘the longest period of sustained growth since records began in 1701’.27 It was a reminder to the country and his party that the strong performance of the economy was the bedrock of support for New Labour. Even a Blairite foe like Stephen Byers acknowledged that, in terms of tactics, ‘Gordon played a blinder.’28

  The economy was the Government’s strongest suit in all the polling, and the Chancellor’s ratings bettered those of the war-tainted Prime Minister. A typical poll found that 49 per cent of respondents considered Brown to be doing a better job as Chancellor than Blair was as Prime Minister. Just 19 per cent thought the opposite.29

  It would not be possible to maximise the advantage on the economy so long as Brown was in exile from the campaign.

  ‘The gung-ho “fuck Gordon” position, most strongly held by Peter [Mandelson], wasn’t possible,’ argues one of the inner circle who was now desperate to engineer a reconciliation.30

  The impasse between Blair and Brown was of mounting anxiety to everyone else who had a stake in Labour winning. Philip Gould talked it over with Alastair Campbell, a presence again having returned to help with the election campaign. Whatever they thought about Brown’s behaviour, their first loyalty was to the Labour tribe. Both were being kept awake at night by the fear that the publicly visible estrangement between Blair and Brown was jeopardising an election which was now less than six weeks away. Gould explains: ‘To go into the election campaign at such a dangerous time with the two main protagonists at each other’s throats was a huge risk. It could have cost us a lot of seats. Alastair was more nervous than me that we might lose our majority.’31

  Campbell was alarmed: ‘We couldn’t build an argument about the economy when the backdrop was all TB-GB. Unless it was sorted, it was going to be a disaster. Even though Howard and the Tories were pretty useless, I worried that, if this was not sorted, it was possible we could lose.’32

  They both repeatedly said to Blair: ‘You’ve got to work with Gordon.’ Campbell took Spencer Livermore aside after a meeting. ‘What does Gordon want?’ Campbell asked Brown’s senior aide. ‘Does he want Alan hung from a lamp post?’ Livermore replied: ‘Gordon just wants to be asked back by Tony.’33

  Neither man wanted to make the first move. Forced into each other’s company to unveil a poster claiming that the Tories planned ‘£35 billion in cuts’, they made a poor job of either defending the claim or looking as though they were on speaking terms.

  Blair was now panicked by the opinion polls and weakened in his resolve to try to win without owing anything to Brown. ‘He’d never done an election campaign without Gordon absolutely centrally involved,’ notes Sally Morgan.34 Always a pragmatist when it came to the electoral crunch, the Prime Minister knew it would be insane to enter the campaign openly at war with his Chancellor.35 ‘Maybe we could have won without him,’ says Jonathan Powell. ‘We could have left him sulking in the tent, but it wasn’t worth the risk of losing.’36

  After weeks in which they barely exchanged a sentence, the two men were thrown together at the conference of the Scottish Labour Party. When Blair returned to London, he sighed: ‘It was such a relief to speak to Gordon again.’37

  On Tuesday, 29 March, Campbell went up to Scotland to see Brown at the Chancellor’s home in Fife. There were years of mutual suspicion in their relationship but also a wary respect for each other as strong personalities with a total commitment to the Labour cause. Campbell visited Brown with a warning and an offer. The warning was that carrying on like this was putting at risk both Labour’s chances of retaining a majority and his own hopes of the premiership. The offer was that Blair was now ready for a rapprochement. Campbell returned from Scotland with the outlines of what became known in Whitehall as ‘the peace treaty of North Queensferry’.38

  Prime Minister and Chancellor talked soon afterwards. Both had a huge incentive to bury their differences to get them through the campaign. Blair would be an enfeebled Prime Minister if Labour’s majority was devastated and perhaps not Prime Minister at all if things went really badly. As for Brown, it would not serve him and his ambitions if Labour suffered a major reverse. And what if Blair managed to pull off a decent third victory without him? Then Number 10 would have Brown exactly where they wanted him. An aggressive start to Tory campaigning was a reminder to them and everyone else at the apex of Labour that their enemy was supposed to be the Conservatives not each other. ‘An election campaign concentrates the mind wonderfully,’ noted Bruce Grocott, Blair’s former PPS, who was on the campaign team.39

  Brown demanded a high price for ending his strategic sulk. He wanted full consultation about the content of the manifesto, policy-making in the third term and future Cabinet reshuffles. In effect, he was seeking Granita II.

  Blair did not give Brown all he asked for, but he did concede most of it. Brown was restored to his role as campaign supremo, shafting Milburn. He also wanted an absolute guarantee that he would not be moved from the Treasury after the election and he wanted that promise made publicly so that Blair couldn’t wriggle out of it.

  The Prime Minister paid that price on 6 April, when he made a statement describing Brown as ‘the most successful Chancellor in a hundred years. We would be crazy to put that at risk.’40

  The next day they did a photo opportunity together to unveil two posters. One had giant pictures of Blair and Howard with the question: ‘Who do you want to run the country?’ The other had mugshots of Brown and Oliver Letwin, the Shadow Chancellor, with the slogan: ‘Who do you want to run the economy?’ That made it near impossible for Blair to fire Brown after the election.

  Blair could not live with Brown, but yet again he found he could not live without him either.

  The ultra-Blairites despaired that the Prime Minister had once again caved in to the Chancellor. The secret plan to reduce the power of the Treasury after the election was a non-starter once Blair effectively guaranteed that Brown would be staying there. The Cabinet Secretary was correct to regard the Birt plan ‘as now no more than an interesting intellectual exercise’.41

  John Reid and other Blairite ministers were furious. They believed Labour was going to win anyway and Brown had been allowed to project himself as the hero striding in at the eleventh hour to save the campaign. Reflecting on it later, one senior Blairite asks: ‘Did Tony ever once stand up to Gordon on anything important?’42 In their view, he had buckled yet again in the face of the Chancellor’s outrageous behaviour. Alan Milburn was humiliated. Just as his friends had warned, and he had feared, he’d been sacrificed by Blair when it came to the crunch with Brown. ‘Alan was very good at keeping up appearances and being very active,’ says one of the campaign team. ‘But in the laws of the jungle – who’s up and who’s down – it was very bruising for him.’43 Philip Gould and Alastair Campbell were ragged as ‘appeasers’. Gould would later sometimes have doubts about whether they had done the right thing.44

  Blair was not going to fulfil his ambition to win on his own and escape from the chains that bound him to Brown. As a result of the latest tortured deal, Government would continue to be double-headed into the third term.

  Yet there was something inevitable about it. For all the hideous aspects of the Blair–Brown relationship, one of its underlying strengths was that they never allowed it to become so evil between them that they went over
the brink. They agreed on one thing at least: it was better to fight in government than to be impotent in Opposition. They were often on the edge; they always pulled back just before they went over it.

  The Chancellor’s people – Douglas Alexander, Ed Balls, Ed Miliband and Spencer Livermore – moved into campaign headquarters with central roles. The realists around Blair, such as David Hill, were not that surprised at the turn of events. ‘There was a sense that it had to happen. It was inevitable. Realpolitik prevailed.’45

  It boosted spirits at Labour headquarters when Brown finally returned from his moody exile and brought the New Labour family back together again. ‘It helped lift morale to have everyone working together,’ says Huw Evans.46

  Watching Brown and Blair discuss election tactics with each other, one close associate of the Chancellor was impressed by their ability to suppress all the bitterness of the past eight years and ‘get it together again. You’d hear them talking and it was a bit like the good days.’47

  From Blair’s side of the fence, one of his senior aides noted: ‘Something seemed to happen. They switched back to how they’d once been. Some of that old spark was rekindled.’48

  But it was merely a truce, and an uneasy one. The divide was physically manifest at Labour’s campaign headquarters in Victoria Street. Campbell, Milburn and the Blairites sat on one side of the war room; Brown’s team on the other.

  Another of the Chancellor’s prices was co-star status with the Prime Minister in the campaign. The Cabinet Secretary watched these developments with the wry detachment of the professionally impartial civil servant: ‘To start with it is Blair alone, then you go to the other extreme – you have a campaign in which they get double-billing.’49

  The two men were brought together in the Prime Minister’s room at the Commons to film a party political broadcast shot by Anthony Minghella, the Oscar-winning movie maker whose canon included The English Patient, a film about a doomed relationship. Aides on both sides were highly nervous about what might transpire given the poison still seething just below the surface. Expertly edited by a man of Minghella’s skill, to the casual viewer the broadcast successfully presented his co-stars as two long-standing friends reflecting on their achievements and setting out their shared vision for the future. Philip Gould’s focus groups responded positively.50 The sharp eye noticed that Blair seemed fairly relaxed but Brown, never anything like as accomplished as a thespian, looked twisted with tension.

  ‘It’s all about working as a team,’ Brown was recorded saying to the Prime Minister he wanted rid of. ‘It’s a partnership that has worked,’ said Blair of the Chancellor he had planned to sack.51

  Before the filming began, Minghella did a warm-up exercise with his subjects to get them into the mood for some acting. The director gave each of them a notepad on which they were to write down the greatest achievement of the other man. On his notepad, Blair’s looping handwriting paid tribute to Brown for: ‘A strong economy’.

  On his notepad, Brown wrote in his cramped script: ‘A strong economy’. The Chancellor could think of no achievement that he wished to credit to Blair so he wrote down a tribute to himself instead.52

  After the ritual call on Buckingham Palace to ask the Queen formally for her permission, at just after noon on Tuesday, 5 April, Tony Blair launched his third campaign as leader. Standing outside Number 10, he did not mention Iraq, placing the stress on ‘hard-won economic stability’ and ‘investment in our public services’, the Government’s two strongest cards. ‘It is a big choice. It is a big decision. The British people are the boss and they are the ones who will make it.’53

  During equally ritual exchanges the next day at the final Prime Minister’s Questions, Michael Howard jeeringly invited Labour MPs to raise their hands if they had put Tony Blair’s face on their election addresses. A dozen or so suckers on the Labour benches fell into the Tory leader’s trap by putting their hands up.

  This set the tone for a nasty and brutish campaign. In 1997 against John Major and in 2001 against William Hague, Blair was a young, charismatic and popular leader cruising to landslide victories against opponents who were weak, unpopular and widely ridiculed. They were not so much contests as coronations. His third election was an assault course. He entered the 2005 campaign as a battered and distrusted leader often most reviled on the left among those who ought to be Labour’s natural supporters. The Tories had a lot of money to spend on mail shots and target constituencies. For his chief strategist, Howard imported Lynton Crosby who had run four ruthlessly successful campaigns for Australia’s right-wing party. After a slick start that worried Labour, the heavy emphasis the Tories put on immigration made them look opportunistic, monomaniac and unattractive to centrist and floating voters. In a well-timed speech in Dover, Blair charged his opponents with seeking ‘to exploit people’s fears’ and skilfully punctured Howard’s posturing on the issue. ‘The Tory party have gone from being a One Nation party to being a one-issue party.’54 The leadership of Howard exemplified the Tories’ struggle to find fresh personalities and winning strategies. Fifteen years after they had ditched Margaret Thatcher, the Conservatives were going into a fourth election still led by one of her protégés.

  Blair’s principal opponent was not really the Tory leader with his widely satirised slogan: ‘Are You Thinking What We’re Thinking?’ The person whom Blair was running against was himself. To secure the sort of majority he required to give himself a fresh start and to contain Gordon Brown, he needed to answer the intense anger aroused by the Iraq war and the corrosive distrust towards him personally.

  Labour’s election War Book, its campaign bible, put it this way: ‘TB must connect with the electorate … and make it clear that he has not abandoned them.’55

  Connecting with voters was his strength in the past. He was the first premier to understand the 24/7 media age. Those who worked with him said he was often ahead of the aides paid to plan events in thinking about presentational details. He became supremely accomplished at making himself comfortable and conversational in the nation’s living rooms. Blair’s response to celebrity culture was to turn himself into the first celebrity Prime Minister. In pursuit of popularity, and to show himself attuned to mass culture, Blair had gone where no Prime Minister had gone before. He recorded dialogue for an episode of The Simpsons and was a regular on the soft sofas of daytime TV, where he would adopt a Mockney accent that they hadn’t taught him at Fettes.

  One of his early campaign appearances was with Richard and Judy, who extracted an admission that he never sent flowers to Cherie. He also agreed to do a turn for Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway. The appeal of this fixture was that it had a massive audience. The Blair team calculated that it would give them access to 8 million viewers who would rarely watch any news or current affairs programmes.56

  ‘Little Ant and Dec’, pint-sized versions of the show’s hosts who specialised in faux-naif interviews with the famous, showed up at Number 10 wearing little black suits and oiled hair. The crew set up in one of the drawing rooms. It was obvious the moment the cameras turned over that this was a lunge too far downmarket. ‘My Dad says you’re mad’ was a typical line of interrogation from one of the ten-year-old inquisitors. ‘Are you mad?’ They went on to ask a startled Blair: ‘If you make an ugly smell do people pretend not to notice it because you are Prime Minister?’57

  To make the encounter even more surreal it was witnessed in all its toe-curling horror by the editor of the New Yorker, who had come to do a deep piece about Blair for the readers of that liberal and cerebral organ. ‘It’s always a battle, isn’t it, between the modern world in which people expect their leaders to be more accessible and the dignity of the office?’ Blair tried to explain. ‘And you’ve got to be careful that you don’t compromise the one in the attempt to enter into the other.’58 Quite. It is impossible to imagine any earlier Prime Minister abasing himself like this.

  At the end of an hour of torture at the hands of the diminutive
duo, Little Ant and Little Dec presented a ‘gobsmacked’ Prime Minister with some souvenir tat from the show and a pair of Union Jack panties for Cherie. ‘I don’t believe this,’ gasped Blair. He looked at his aides with murder in his eyes. ‘How much of this will they use?’ ‘About half,’ replied David Hill, to which Blair said: ‘I can think of some things to cut out.’59

  The cheesiest campaign interview for a newspaper was with the Sun. After the formal sit-down with Blair, the paper’s Political Editor, Trevor Kavanagh, and its editor, Rebekah Wade, went out into the back garden of Number 10 to watch the Blairs having their pictures taken. Cherie joked with the photographer that her husband should show them his ‘fit body’ and suggested he was up for it ‘five times a night’.60 Wade’s face lit up: ‘That’s your story, Trevor.’ Kavanagh ‘looked like a man in shock’.61

  On Wednesday, 13 April, Labour launched its manifesto at the Mermaid Theatre in the City of London. ‘I have said I will serve a full term,’ Blair declared under questioning. ‘That’s what people are electing if they elect this Government. When I say a full third term, that’s exactly what I mean.’62 Brown looked as though he was passing a gallstone. They were flanked by five other Cabinet ministers, each brandishing their copies of Britain Forward, Not Back, a 112-page booklet reminiscent of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book in style – if obviously not in content. The economic sections were written by Brown. The rest was principally authored by Matthew Taylor. It was more policy-rich and better argued than the manifestos of 1997 and 2001. Blair had finally grasped what a mistake it was to run on bland manifestos which did not provide enough of a mandate for reform. It was his regular private refrain that ‘the third term will be what my second term was supposed to have been’ before it was diverted by 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq.63 This manifesto was designed to be the springboard. It promised to get to ‘maximum waits of 18 weeks in the NHS’ and to have opened 3,500 children’s centres for the under-fives: pledges that would have once been regarded as crazily unrealistic. Blair was right to say it was ‘far more ambitious’ than eight years earlier.64