Estelle Morris thought it inevitable that they would get to ‘a point where a set of things happened that put the tensions within the Government out into the public domain. That is what happened in the autumn of 2006. A number of things happened which literally lifted the lid and it was all there waiting to come out.’15
‘There is shelf time for everybody,’ says Geoffrey Robinson, long-time adherent of Gordon Brown. It was ‘entirely misconceived’ for Blair to think that he could ‘go on and on’.16
The Times interview appeared on Friday, 1 September. The following day, the Blairs left for the traditional annual weekend with the Queen at Balmoral. Gordon Brown was at his home in Fife. He was infuriated by the interview, interpreting it as meaning that Blair had no intention of leaving. Yet the public response from the heart of the Chancellor’s camp was deceptively muted. Ed Balls wrote a piece for the Observer dismissing the idea that they needed a debate about how to renew the party as ‘internal navel-gazing’ and demanding a ‘stable and orderly transition’ to a new leader.17 This was Brownite code for saying that Blair should hand over to his Chancellor without argument. From the pages of the Sunday Times, Alan Milburn fired back that Blair was ‘right to resist pressure’ for a timetable and ‘a new leader is not a political panacea.’ He concluded: ‘Forget the date. It’s the debate that matters.’18 Debate was the Blairite code for saying that Brown would face rivals for the succession.
The Chancellor was convulsed by rage when he saw Milburn’s article. Brown interrupted Blair’s Balmoral visit by ringing the Prime Minister on Sunday morning. The Chancellor’s fury was titanically demented even by his standards. ‘You put fucking Milburn up to it,’ Brown raged down the phone. ‘This is factionalism! This is Trotskyism! It’s fucking Trotskyism!’ Blair was nonplussed. He had not even seen the article. After the call, he then read it and phoned Milburn to say it was excellent. They laughed about Brown’s hysterical reaction.19
There were people in both camps scared that the struggle was about to spiral out of control. Charlie Falconer, close friend of the Prime Minister, got in touch with Alistair Darling, ally of the Chancellor, to suggest that there should be peace talks before the party became polarised from top to bottom over the leadership question. Darling put the idea to Brown, but the Chancellor dismissed it out of hand. He would settle for nothing less than an irrevocable, inescapable public promise from Blair to step down.20
Brown agonised about how far to push it. Though he craved the crown, ‘Gordon is absolutely gripped by the idea that if there is not an agreed transition and there is a bloody bust up, it will be the end for the party and the Government,’ says one of the hawks in his camp, who were furious with Brown when he did not strike in the spring. Brown was also ‘very worried’ that Rupert Murdoch’s titles, the Sun and The Times, would be ‘very hostile to Gordon making a direct personal attack on Tony’.21 The hawks feared that he would yet again pass up the opportunity to strike. Chief among them was Ed Balls, who for years had lambasted Brown for being timid and tried to ‘guilt trip’ him into action. ‘Why are you being so weak?’ Balls had repeatedly challenged Brown behind closed doors. ‘Why aren’t you forcing him out?’ As another member of his inner circle puts it:
Ed was vehement that Gordon had been too weak for too long. There is no question that Ed thought Gordon had acted insufficiently strongly in the spring and felt he had to take things into his own hands. The coup was not run by Gordon. It was run by Ed. Gordon was almost horrified when he realised how far it had gone.22
It was important to Balls and fellow conspirators to try to keep Brownite fingerprints off the plot. Ian Austin, Brown’s former press spokesman, was now MP for Dudley North in the Midlands. He had been cultivating relationships with two Labour MPs known as Blairites who had become disaffected with the Prime Minister. One of them was Siôn Simon, the MP for Birmingham Erdington. Simon had savagely satirised Brown in the past and voted for many of Blair’s most contentious policies, including the Iraq war, student top-up fees and anti-terror laws. This made Simon an ideal assassin. He could not be dismissed by Number 10 as one of the usual Brownite suspects. Simon was ‘a clean skin’. Another was Chris Bryant, the MP for the Rhondda, a former vicar whose main claim to fame was posing in his underpants on a gay dating internet site. Bryant, like Simon, was a formerly ardent Blairite who failed to secure advancement from Blair. Their first outing on behalf of Brown was at the end of August, when they attacked the Blairite Stephen Byers for having the temerity to suggest that the Chancellor might need to respond to discontent about inheritance tax.23
Simon became an MP in 2001. That Friday and into the weekend he began a ring-round to gather support among his intake to Parliament for sending a letter to Blair with a demand for his departure. Rumour of this letter plot reached Ben Wegg-Prosser, who had been close to Simon for years. When he phoned the MP, Wegg-Prosser was stunned to learn that this former ally had decisively moved into the ‘Blair must go’ camp.
‘We warned you he couldn’t carry on like this, but you wouldn’t listen,’ Simon told Wegg-Prosser. ‘New Labour is about more than one man. The game’s up. He’s got to go.’
Wegg-Prosser then asked the big question: ‘Do you think Gordon is prepared to stick the knife in this time?’ Simon’s reply was ominous: ‘In the past, I’ve always assumed he wouldn’t. Now I think he might.’24 On Saturday morning, Blair had a conference call from Balmoral with his senior aides. Wegg-Prosser reported his ‘chilling’ conversation with Simon. There was ‘a collective gulp’ at this development, but ‘there was nothing we could do.’25 Blair and his team still didn’t know quite what they were dealing with. ‘Tony took a bit of convincing that it was serious,’ says Jonathan Powell. ‘We’d been so used to being attacked and not retaliating that we didn’t take action.’26
By Sunday, Simon had the letter primed. He met Tom Watson, MP for West Bromwich East. Watson was a junior Defence Minister, acolyte of the Chancellor and fixer. He had helped Simon and Austin get their seats in Parliament. Burly and a former engineering union official, he had been an enforcer for Brown as the Treasury whip. Watson was the archetypal Brownite soldier. Simon and Watson met, with six other people believed to be fellow plotters, at the Bilash Tandoori in Wolverhampton on Sunday night. On the menu was chicken vindaloo, diced lamb in yoghurt and skewering the Prime Minister.27 The mood was ‘very angry with Blair’.28
They needed a signal from their master to put the plot into motion. Gordon Brown had just had a second son, Fraser. It was the perfect excuse to maintain an invisible public profile up in Scotland at his clifftop home in North Queensferry. On Monday, he received a visitor there. It was Watson, hot from his curry dinner with other conspirators, who went up to Scotland and booked himself into the St Andrew’s Bay Golf Resort and Spa, a luxury hotel just forty-five miles from Brown’s home.29
When his visit to Brown became public knowledge the following weekend, it was claimed that this was purely a social call so that Watson and his wife, Siobhan, could deliver a present for the Browns’ baby boy. Westminster was asked to suspend its disbelief and accept that they ‘watched Postman Pat on a DVD and played with their babies’.30
‘Everyone laughed at that,’ says Wegg-Prosser. ‘If I was the acolyte of a politician and I was planning a coup to bring down his greatest rival, I think I would mention it.’31
Even some veteran Brownites raise their eyebrows at the idea that the letter was never mentioned. George Mudie says: ‘The big question is whether Gordon gave him the nod.’32 It is hard to see how that question can be sensibly answered entirely in the negative. Brown had nothing in common with Watson except politics.
There is a question about what Brown thought he was giving the nod to: the full-blown coup which was about to be triggered by his lieutenants or just another of his guerrilla campaigns of destabilisation against Blair. One person at the heart of Brown’s inner circle believes: ‘He would have given the plotters the green light to cause trouble.
’33
By Monday morning, Keith Hill, Blair’s Parliamentary Private Secretary and his eyes and ears among backbenchers, was alert to the existence of the Simon letter. He’d been tipped off by ‘a secret squirrel’, an MP friendly to the Prime Minister whom the plotters were trying to recruit.34 Hill rushed into the Number 10 office shared by Matthew Taylor and Ruth Turner and broke the news. Alarm turned into total fright when they heard that there also appeared to be ‘go now’ letters circulating among the 1997 and 2005 intakes. According to the intelligence gathered by Hill, these letters would be delivered over the next forty-eight hours in ‘a rolling programme of confrontation’. If Blair didn’t capitulate, then a delegation of MPs and ministers would follow. Hill’s informant told him that Jack Straw stood at the head of a faction of alienated and opportunistic Cabinet ministers who were poised to tell Blair to go.35 This sounded plausible to them. Straw was now clearly in Brown’s camp and had publicly predicted in July that ‘Tony will go well before the next election.’36
Shortly before noon, Hill received a call from Chris Bryant, who said the plotters had sent their letter to Number 10 by fax that morning and were worried that it had not arrived because they had received no response. They appear to have sent it to the wrong fax machine. Even in moments of high drama, there is always room for some farce. Bryant now emailed the letter to Hill.37
Number 10 was stunned by the brutality of the letter. It offered one pat on the back – ‘we believe that you have been an exceptional Labour Prime Minister’ – before the stab in the front. ‘Sadly it is clear to us – as it is to almost the entire party and the entire country – that without an urgent change in the leadership of the party it becomes less likely that we will win the next election. That is the brutal truth. It gives us no pleasure to say it. But it has to be said. And understood. We therefore ask you to stand aside.’38
Keith Hill was shocked by the signatories who were ‘for the most part, absolutely mainstream figures, solid citizens, respectable people that would be taken seriously by other people in the Parliamentary Labour Party. It seemed to me that the rebellion was at the heart of the PLP.’ When he talked to the Prime Minister, Hill had a grave message: ‘These are serious names. It’s a terrific threat.’ Blair sounded fatalistic: ‘If they want me to go, I’ll go.’39
The Prime Minister was out of London on a two-day tour of the north of England designed to show his commitment to core Labour issues. Now he was in a fight for his premiership. Among the aides with Blair, there was ‘an immediate sense of deep crisis. Shit. This is it.’40
His senior staff back at Number 10 gathered in Taylor’s office for a conference call with the Prime Minister. This was clearly the beginning of a putsch, but its true shape and scale were still foggy to them. The one possible bright side was that the letter appeared to have been signed by just seventeen Labour MPs. Only one of them was a Government minister. His name: Tom Watson.
That signature put some Brownite dabs on the operation. Rumours began to reach Number 10 that Ed Balls had been ‘spotted around the House of Commons’ having booked himself out of the Treasury so that he could machinate without civil servants listening in.41 The involvement of Ian Austin and Nick Brown was also assumed. Some in Number 10 later concluded that ‘Ed and Nick decided they were going to precipitate this by forcing the indecisive Gordon into decisive action.’42 It fitted with ‘a pattern of behaviour over thirteen years’.43 Blair himself was ‘absolutely totally convinced that they were all over it. If Gordon wasn’t pulling the strings, he knew about it. He could have stopped it. He didn’t.’44
Towards the end of the day, Jonathan Powell finally got hold of Watson on the phone and demanded to know whether it was true that he had signed the letter. Watson confirmed that he had. ‘Are you going to resign from the Government?’ asked Powell. ‘No,’ replied Watson to Powell’s amazement. ‘Are you sacking me?’45
By Monday evening, there was a consensus among Blair’s closest advisers that he was in mortal danger. Calls to the Cabinet established that most of them were solid, but it was hard to read the mood of Labour MPs who were still in their constituencies for the summer recess. Up in Yorkshire, the Prime Minister oscillated between fury, defiance and resignation. That evening, he had dinner in his hotel with David Hill, Jo Gibbons, Phil Collins and Hilary Coffman, the small entourage who were accompanying him on the regional tour. There was a long silence before anyone spoke. Then Blair sighed: ‘If they don’t want me any more, then I’ll have to go.’46 Later, to other allies, he said: ‘I’m not going to beg for the job.’47 When he spoke on the phone to Philip Gould, he was ‘very pensive’ and sounded like he felt ‘that it could all be up’.48 Some of his allies, who had warned him for years what Brown was capable of, could not restrain themselves from saying: ‘We told you so.’49
Blair and his entourage felt ‘cut off and a long way from the action’ in York. He was ‘desperate to get back to London’. After a short debate, it was concluded that he couldn’t abandon his regional tour because ‘it would look like a panic.’50
Back at Number 10, his senior staff were scrambling together a plan to try to save him. They concluded that he would have to make a strategic retreat by clearly signalling that he would not try to stay on beyond the summer of 2007. Blair did not want to say this himself. The compromise was to put up David Miliband to say it for him. The Environment Secretary was reliable, he was well-liked, he represented the younger generation and a statement from him would be taken as bearing the imprimatur of Downing Street. Matthew Taylor rang Miliband on Monday evening. ‘We’re on the skids,’ Taylor told Miliband, who readily agreed to help.51 Blair was absent from the dinner with his staff for long periods to make several lengthy calls to Peter Mandelson and other close allies.52 After consulting them, he accepted the plan. Just before midnight, Wegg-Prosser rang Miliband to confirm that he was booked on the next morning’s Today programme.
The Environment Secretary delivered the formula: ‘The conventional wisdom is that the Prime Minister sees himself carrying on for about another twelve months. It seems to me that the conventional wisdom is reasonable.’53
Blair’s aides called up Labour MPs and contacted journalists to ensure it was understood that the Prime Minister was in agreement with this. By now, though, message management was escaping their control. News of the plot was getting out. Tuesday’s Guardian splashed with an exclusive from its well-connected and respected Political Editor, Patrick Wintour, who had learnt about the Simon letter calling for Blair to go.54
Kevin Maguire, the Political Editor of the Mirror and a long-standing Brown sympathiser, secured another scoop. He had been leaked a memo written by Wegg-Prosser five months previously which described how Blair should choreograph the last chapter of his premiership. ‘As TB enters his final phase, he needs to be focusing way beyond the finishing line. He needs to go with the crowd wanting more. He should be the star who won’t even play that last encore.’ Maguire reported this as evidence that Blair was consumed by hubris and ego. Labour MPs, he wrote, ‘will be stunned to learn from the memo that the main thing on the PM’s mind is the PM himself’. He mocked Wegg-Prosser’s suggestion that Blair should go on Songs of Praise as evidence that he wanted ‘a celestial choir’ to hymn ‘the most drawn-out exit in British political history’.55 Blair hated the leak of the memo, which he had never previously seen, ‘because it made him look mad’.56
The senior staff at Number 10 gathered in Matthew Taylor’s office at eight that morning to assess the state of play. They feared that more than half the backbenches, and an unknown number of ministers, were involved. That would be lethal. ‘We knew that one letter was on its way,’ says Taylor. ‘If there was going to be two or three letters calling for him to go, and an ever-growing number of MPs, then, you know, it felt like that was it. The Labour Party, almost by default, was going to get rid of him.’57
Jonathan Powell agrees that it looked frightening because ‘the momentum appeared to be
full pelt against us.’58 It didn’t look like Blair was going to fulfil the farewell tour plan as ‘the star’ who goes ‘with the crowds wanting more’. The band was knocking hell out of each other, the stage was on fire, and the lead vocalist was being strangled from behind by the Scottish bass guitarist.
‘This is a fucking coup!’ one of Blair’s closest aides raged to me that night. ‘This is a coup attempt organised by one man for the benefit of one man. Brown is behind it all.’59
Blair was also deprived of key allies in the Cabinet who were abroad. Tessa Jowell ran up a £999 mobile phone bill ringing London from China. Sitting on the edge of a pavement in Shanghai, she told Blair: ‘You’re not going anywhere.’ He put a larky face on his predicament: ‘Of course I’m not, darling.’60 But his allies could sense that he felt very vulnerable. He sounded ‘in a pretty worried mood’ to Sally Morgan.61 Charlie Falconer told him to stand firm: ‘This is all froth.’ Blair replied to his old flatmate: ‘You don’t understand the Labour Party like I do. This has got to be managed.’62
He arrived back in Number 10 that evening and was briefed by his aides that they were having some success with the attempt to mount a fightback. A rival, loyalist letter was published with sixty signatures from backbench Labour MPs and eventually attracted the backing of 115.63 This letter took the line that Blair should be given until 2007. It was organised, at the urging of Matthew Taylor, by the MP Karen Buck, a plausible figure with mainstream backbenchers. She warned her colleagues not to turn an ‘orderly transition into a crisis of regicide’.64 Keith Hill was encouraged when he found ‘high levels of antipathy towards Simon and Bryant among colleagues who didn’t like them as people’.65 Tony Wright, an independent-minded Labour select committee chairman, rallied to Blair’s defence. He warned the plotters that they:
The End of the Party Page 57