The End of the Party

by Andrew Rawnsley

  were taking self-indulgence to the point of self-destruction. People are living in a kind of fantasy land. What do they think is going to happen the day after Tony Blair has gone? The problems are going to be the same, the solutions are going to be the same, and nothing much is going to happen to the opinion polls.66

  Over at the Treasury, the Chancellor convened a council of war with the two Eds, Sue Nye and Spencer Livermore. Brown asked apprehensively: ‘Where are we going with this?’ Balls argued: ‘We have to push this. Blair is never going to go. He has to be pushed. You mustn’t be weak. You’ve been weak for too long.’ Brown was still wary: ‘I’m not going to go somewhere when I can’t see where it will end.’ Balls was aggressive: ‘It never goes anywhere, because you’re never willing to do anything.’67

  Wednesday morning’s press reported this as the final showdown for Blair. At a quarter to eight that morning, Prime Minister and Chancellor had a face-to-face confrontation in Number 10. Blair ‘just knew it was Gordon behind it. It was all Gordon’s people.’68 The two-hour encounter was one of the rawest of the many vicious struggles over the years. Blair expressed fury about the coup and Brown’s failure to condemn it. He had already told him he was going next summer. Why was that not good enough? It was not good enough, responded Brown, because Blair had broken so many promises before. When Blair directly accused him of being behind the plot, Brown denied it. But he also made it clear he would not lift a finger to stop it unless a list of demands was met. He wanted a public declaration by Blair that he would hand over power. He sought to be effective co-premier in the interim. He wanted a gag put on Byers and Milburn. ‘I don’t control them,’ said Blair. ‘I can’t stop them speaking.’

  Brown added a further demand: a guarantee that Blair would arrange ‘a clear run’ by preventing anyone else from the Cabinet competing for the leadership. Blair protested that he couldn’t stop other people standing and this sort of behaviour made a contest more likely. Angrily, Brown asked: ‘Who do you think is better than me? Do you think there is anyone who is better than me?’ John Reid was ‘far too right-wing’. Alan Johnson was ‘a lightweight’. David Miliband was much too young. Was Blair saying, Brown demanded, that any of them was better qualified to become Prime Minister? This face-off came to an end without resolving anything. Talking about it afterwards to close allies, Blair described this confrontation with Brown as ‘ghastly’ and ‘terrible’ and told them that ‘he kept shouting at me that I’d ruined his life.’

  Though the Chancellor denied any involvement in the coup, the confidence and belligerence with which he behaved suggested to Blair that Brown knew that further attacks were planned. On both sides of the divide, it is agreed that ‘Gordon said something that was interpreted as a threat.’69

  Brown returned to the Treasury and gathered his inner circle in his private lounge area, known as ‘the sofa room’. Spencer Livermore, Ed Miliband and Sue Nye discussed what had passed between him and Blair. Ed Balls then came in looking excited. In his hand was a resignation letter he had drafted for Tom Watson. Brown asked: ‘What is this? What are you doing?’ Balls responded: ‘Why would I not be doing this? It’s the obvious thing to do.’ Ed Miliband was taken aback. ‘Where’s this going?’ he asked, unconvinced that it would end well. ‘What is your next move?’ He turned to Brown: ‘We have to be very careful.’

  Brown was, as ever, torn between his craving to bring down Blair and his fear of the consequences of being seen with the dagger in his hand. He said he needed time to think. Balls replied bluntly: ‘It’s too late. It’s all in place. It’s all going to happen.’70

  Tom Watson quit the Government at 11.12 that morning. The resignation letter said: ‘It is with the greatest sadness that I have to say that your remaining in office is no longer in the interests of the party and the country.’ Within minutes, Doug Henderson, a veteran Brown camp follower, was on TV from the garden of his constituency home to demand Blair’s departure, another indicator to Number 10 that it was all being masterminded from the Treasury. Blair responded at two minutes to noon with a letter of his own which said he had been ‘intending to dismiss’ Watson anyway. ‘To sign a round-robin letter which was then leaked to the press was disloyal, discourteous and wrong.’71 Watson was followed by the staggered resignations over the day of seven Parliamentary Private Secretaries. In the early afternoon, the plotters were confidently briefing: ‘Tony is going to be told it is moving time. He’s got hours left.’72

  In the middle of the day, Blair went into the Cabinet Room for a meeting with the parliamentary committee on anti-Semitism, who were surprised that their engagement had not been cancelled at this moment of high crisis for his premiership. One of the delegation was Iain Duncan Smith. When he was toppled as Tory leader, Blair sent him a handwritten note of commiseration: ‘Why do our parties do these things to us?’ When Blair looked up and noticed that Duncan Smith was coming into the Cabinet Room, he gave a weak smile: ‘I suppose you’re laughing, Iain.’ ‘No,’ the former Tory leader replied. ‘I know only too well what can go on.’ Blair just nodded.73

  A more cheering visitor to Number 10 was Frank Field, who came round to plead with Blair not to quit. ‘You can’t go yet. You can’t leave us without an alternative,’ protested Field. ‘You can’t let Mrs Rochester out of the attic.’ Blair, who had listened to this without saying a word, roared with uncontrolled laughter at Field’s description of Brown as Mrs Rochester.74

  Ben Wegg-Prosser asked the Prime Minister how they should be briefing the press. ‘People need to understand exactly what these people are doing,’ responded Blair. ‘It’s blackmail isn’t it?’ said his aide. ‘Yes,’ replied Blair. Wegg-Prosser took that as a green light to start telling selected journalists that this was not a spontaneous uprising by backbenchers but an attempt by Brown to blackmail Blair out of office. Phil Collins enthusiastically joined the briefing operation.75

  Blair went for a walk in the garden. When he came back in, he had essentially decided to semi-capitulate. This took aback some of the Brownites. ‘What surprised me was how Tony panicked,’ says George Mudie. ‘There was no weight to the revolt.’76 Keith Hill believes ‘we’d beaten the buggers pretty comprehensively’ by Wednesday.77 Blair still had the support of a majority of the Cabinet. Only one of the threatened letters had materialised. Just eight unknown members of the Government had resigned. Tom Watson was a junior minister. The PPSs were of even slighter rank. They amounted to one Brownite and seven dwarves. Why did that seem so menacing that Blair felt compelled to cave in?

  First, because Brown had led Blair to fear that they merely represented the first of ‘wave after wave of attacks’.78 Brown had implied as much during their earlier conversation, saying that the trouble would not stop until Blair publicly declared a resignation date.79

  Jacqui Smith, the Chief Whip and a close ally of the Prime Minister, told him that it looked ‘extremely well-orchestrated’ and that she could no longer be confident that he commanded the support of the majority of Labour MPs. She later wondered if her advice had been too pessimistic.80 The general atmosphere inside Number 10 was ‘a bit hysterical’.81 Blair ‘was frightened of what was coming next and he didn’t think he was giving that much in the end’.82

  The prospect of being overwhelmed by mutiny scratched on his fear of going the same way as Margaret Thatcher. ‘I don’t want to be another Thatcher,’ he had frequently said. How he went was in the end more important to him than exactly when. He would rather depart with dignity than fight in the last ditch.

  At lunchtime, Number 10 rang the Treasury to say the Prime Minister wanted to see the Chancellor again. Brown arrived at 2 p.m. for a ninety-minute meeting which was still sulphurous but not quite as shouty as the earlier encounter. Brown was in a less confidently aggressive mind-set than in the morning. Over lunchtime, his camp started to worry that the mood was turning against them.83 The full extent of their involvement in the coup remained masked, but Wegg-Prosser’s briefing about Brown�
�s blackmail was encouraging journalists to ask questions. Only a minority of the Cabinet favoured Brown and the Blairites among them were threatening terrible vengeance on him if it was taken any further. Many Labour MPs, even ones highly critical of Blair, could not see the point of tearing him down for the sake of a few months. John Prescott, who believed all this was unnecessary because of his July ultimatum to Blair, was furious about what he called ‘the corporals’ coup’. He warned Brown not to push it.84 Peter Hain was in his Neath constituency in the early part of the week. He rang Brown to warn him that the sentiment among his activists was switching from disaffection with Blair to fury with the plotters. ‘You must be very careful, Gordon,’ he cautioned. ‘It’s turning completely against you.’85

  Middle-ground Labour MPs were beginning to rally to Blair now it was clear that he would be gone by 2007. As Matthew Taylor puts it: ‘Most Labour MPs wanted clarification about Tony’s intentions, but they did not want a bloody coup to take place immediately.’86

  Senior Conservatives were watching with wry amusement, not least William Hague: ‘There was a moment when the tanks were nosing out of the barracks, the troops were about to take to the streets in the coup and then they went back in. Gordon’s boys were called off at the last minute.’87

  When previously explaining his hesitancy about striking to his inner circle, Brown would often cite Michael Heseltine as an example of ‘he who wields the dagger doesn’t inherit the throne.’88 Brown did not want to be caught with his hand on the knife.

  That afternoon, Blair and Brown went into the back garden of Number 10 and sat in the wicker chairs on the patio. Blair told Brown that he still wasn’t going to buckle to the other man’s demand for a Christmas handover. ‘I’m not prepared to be bundled out.’ One of his arguments was that he wanted to stay on until May to try to bring the Northern Ireland peace process to a resolution. What he was prepared to concede was a public statement that he would leave Number 10 by the next summer. This was a considerable shift in Blair’s position since the Times interview of less than a week before. Blair refused to give Brown a promise that he would endorse his succession and work to prevent anyone else standing. From his perspective, he had conceded quite enough for one day.

  Brown decided that he had pushed things as far as he dared. At that meeting, and in subsequent phone calls that evening and early the next morning, they got down to the business of discussing the content and timing of the statements that they would make.89

  Brown had been trying to stay entirely invisible to the media throughout the coup. He slipped out of Number 10 via a back entrance and into his limousine. He was surprised by photographers, who captured him with a shark-like grin on his face, as if he had just swallowed the Prime Minister whole and was now digesting what remained of his rival. The pictures would be on front pages of the papers the next day, depicting him as an assassin relishing a kill. He later claimed he was talking to Sue Nye about Fraser, deploying his baby son as his alibi once again. In truth, Brown had come out of the latest meeting with Blair in a foul mood and the grin on his face was a back-firing attempt to cover it up. ‘Gordon saw the photographers, thought: “I must not look grumpy”, and put on a smile.’90

  He had finally got what he had agitated, bullied, plotted, dreamed and schemed to secure for so long. The messy coup orchestrated by Ed Balls had finally forced Blair to give a public leaving date. Yet Brown still wasn’t content. He had to contemplate waiting nearly another year for the succession that he had yearned after for more than a decade.

  On Thursday, Tony Blair used a visit to a north London school to announce that he would serve not a full term, but about half of one, a dramatic truncation of his original ambition. A group called School Students Against War were waiting for him. ‘Tony! Tony! Tony!’ they shouted. ‘Out! Out! Out!’ He took along with him the Education Secretary, Alan Johnson. ‘You’ve got to have a friend,’ the Prime Minister said lightly. ‘At least I’ve got one.’

  He gave a masterclass in how to put a graceful face on humiliation. ‘The first thing I would like to do is apologise on behalf of the Labour Party for the last week,’ he said. ‘It has not been our finest hour, to be frank.’

  Then he made the statement that he had long resisted. ‘I would have preferred to do this in my own way,’ he said, but he was now confirming that the next party conference would be his last as Prime Minister. In a strong indication that this meant he intended to go the next summer, he said the forthcoming TUC would also be his last speech to the trades unions – ‘probably to the relief of both of us’. He then delivered a rebuke to the plotters. ‘It’s the country that matters, and we can’t treat the public as bystanders in a subject as important as who is their Prime Minister.’91 He was not going to ‘set a precise date now’ for his departure. Blair was hanging on to one of the remaining cards in his hand.

  The deftness with which Blair dealt with his enforced retreat made a striking contrast with the clunking and opaque statement that Gordon Brown delivered from a Glasgow sports centre an hour earlier. He gave an account of his conversations with Blair the day before which was risibly distant from the truth. ‘I said to him, it is for him to make the decision.’ Brown then went on to make the even more incredible claim: ‘I said also to him that I will support him in the decision he takes.’92

  Some of the plotters continued to agitate. Chris Bryant declared that it would be better for Blair to be gone ‘sooner rather than later’.93 But the pressure now eased on Blair as the coup rebounded on Brown. He was hurt by the picture that made him look like the grinning assassin. Cherie exchanged e-mails with the Blairs’ friend Barry Cox. She confided that they had been frightened at the beginning, but ‘Gordon was much more damaged by the end of the week.’94 The Chancellor was panicked by the fingers pointing at him. He frantically called up Cabinet ministers and other leading party figures to try to convince them that he had nothing to do with the plot. Some pretended to take his word for it. ‘I believe you, Gordon,’ said Philip Gould, but he warned that others did not. John Prescott scorned Brown’s protestations of innocence. ‘Tom Watson is one of your people. They’re all your fucking people,’ Prescott said to Brown. ‘There’s not a fucking one who is not your people.’95

  Though a semblance of unity was now being projected in public, the two men had only come to a half-deal on Wednesday afternoon. Brown was still not satisfied with the terms of surrender that he had extracted from Blair. On Friday, the Chancellor opened another bout of arm-wrestling for the crown. He was again pressing for a public endorsement from Blair at the forthcoming party conference, which he coupled with renewed demands that Stephen Byers, Alan Milburn and other prominent Blairites should be silenced. Blair refused. Even if his supporters were biddable, which they were not, he was in no mood to make any further concessions.

  Foes of the Chancellor started to take revenge. Frank Field said his behaviour had raised ‘serious questions’ about his fitness to be Prime Minister.96 Alan Milburn issued a barely coded attack on Brown for ‘strong-arm, boss-style, plot-filled politics’.97 He and other allies would have gone even further in suggesting that Brown was unfit to be Prime Minister if Blair had not restrained them.98 Nick Robinson, the Political Editor of the BBC, reported the view of an unnamed Cabinet minister that Brown would be ‘an effing disaster’ as Prime Minster.99 This was, in fact, John Hutton, the Work and Pensions Secretary.

  Brown was on the defensive by the weekend and forced to issue a series of implausible denials. ‘There is no truth in the suggestion that there was an attempted coup,’ he said torturing the truth. ‘The situation was sad, regrettable and has caused us a great deal of grief.’100

  The former Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, detonated with a denunciation of Brown for his ‘absolutely stupid behaviour’ and the ‘complete madness’ of the putsch, which he could have stopped ‘with a click of his fingers’.101

  Brown was a ‘deluded control freak’, ‘totally, totally uncollegiate’ in the
way he sought ‘to control everything’. He ‘lacks confidence’ and didn’t have ‘the bottle’ to be Prime Minister. Most piercingly, Clarke said Brown had ‘psychological’ issues, echoing the old charge that Brown suffered from ‘psychological flaws’.102

  This was a brutally direct onslaught on one colleague by another which spelt out in public many of the behavioural and character traits of Brown that ministers had privately complained about for years. The Chancellor affected to have a thick skin, saying that: ‘I’m not going to hold it against him.’103

  Brown rang up Clarke that weekend, but not to shout at him. In a tone more of sorrow than anger, Brown asked Clarke to desist on the grounds that ‘it will make it more difficult to bring you back.’104 At the same time, his attack dogs were unleashed to brief the press that the former Home Secretary was a ‘bloated suicide bomber’.105

  Number 10 hadn’t put Clarke up to it, but Downing Street spokesmen were conspicuously reluctant to criticise him. The longer Blair dwelt on the events of that week, the more angry the Prime Minister became as he concluded that the Chancellor had knifed him. Blair was ‘very hurt’ by the coup, says Nick Ryden, who had been a friend since they were teenagers.106 ‘It is dire for Tony,’ sighed someone who had been close to him for more than a decade.107 He became increasingly vituperative about Brown. ‘After all this, he’s brought it forward by a few months,’ Blair said to one aide.108