No previous Prime Minister of modern times moved into Number 10 better qualified or prepared for the role – on paper at least. He had more than a decade to think about what he wanted to do with the premiership, nearly a year’s notice that there would be a vacancy, and six weeks of formal transition to plan his arrival. Sir Gus O’Donnell had organised a series of briefings by senior civil servants, defence chiefs, intelligence chiefs and public service professionals.9 Some of that time was well spent. The choreography of his first twenty-four hours was pretty immaculate. The new Cabinet was announced on Thursday without a visible ripple of dissent. Margaret Beckett’s tears when she was sacked as Foreign Secretary were shed in private and prominent Blairites like John Reid had already announced that they were going. It looked like a generous and inclusive gesture to award the Foreign Office to David Miliband, giving the promotion to his predecessor’s protégé that Blair himself had not. Jacqui Smith was an even more Blairite minister destined for a big leap up the ladder. With ‘a twinkle in his eye’, Brown said to her: ‘I think this might be a bit of a shock.’ He then told a ‘very surprised’ Smith where he was putting her, an appointment which generated positive headlines about the first female Home Secretary.10
After the shambles of some Blair reshuffles, Brown’s first looked unusually well-organised.
The slickness of the presentation on the day disguised the long period beforehand which Brown spent brooding over his first Cabinet. Weeks before he moved into Number 10, in his room at the Treasury a board was set up with all the ministerial slots to be filled. Brown also had a piece of paper with a sketch of the Cabinet table. ‘He was careful to use a pencil so he could erase names.’11 He agonised most over who to make Chancellor. His original intent was to reward Ed Balls and make absolute their control over Government by putting his closest ally in charge of the Treasury. So great was Brown’s reputation for being tyrannical that even Balls made jokes about it. ‘What is the difference between Gordon Brown and Stalin?’ Balls asked in a speech at the Fabian Society’s summer party. ‘One is a ruthless and determined dictator who brooks no opposition. And the other was the leader of the Soviet Union.’
It was Balls’s ambitions that fell victim to Brown’s reputation. One day not long before Brown moved into Number 10, an aide came into his room at the Treasury to find Brown at his Cabinet diagram ‘furiously rubbing out the name of Balls as Chancellor’.12 He had been thwarted by the objections of other Cabinet ministers, the loathing for Balls by many of the Blairites, and the fear of looking authoritarian and cronyistic.13
The Exchequer went instead to Alistair Darling, another long-term ally but a less intimate one and a less factional personality. Darling was an unostentatious Edinburgh lawyer with a decent heart who had almost made a Cabinet career out of cultivating his anonymity. His reputation was built on keeping himself and whichever department he was running out of the headlines. A wittier man than he usually appeared on the media, in his early weeks at the Treasury it was Darling’s private joke that he was ‘trying to find out where Gordon has hidden all the money’.14 He would soon discover that there was nothing down the back of the Treasury’s sofa: the money had all been spent.
An unacknowledged, but hugely important, influence on the creation of Brown’s first Government was focus groups and opinion polls. Deborah Mattinson, the managing director of Opinion Leader Research, was his personal pollster. Before the handover, she did weeks of research to identify Brown’s positives and negatives in the eyes of the voters. On the plus side, her work told Brown that voters thought of him as a large and serious figure. ‘Our whole political positioning was around strength,’ says one of Brown’s strategists.15 On the minus side, voters suspected him of being scheming, bullying and to the left of Blair and themselves. One thing he felt he had to address was ‘the concern that he was slightly Old Labour’. Brown’s early days were a ‘very systematic’ attempt to address ‘the concerns the public had about him when he came into office’.16
The emphasis was on changes of style rather than content. He made a show of giving Alastair Campbell’s old office at Number 12 back to the Chief Whip, a gesture supposed to illustrate his claim that he would put substance before spin and value Parliament rather than media manipulation. Within months, the room was re-colonised by Brown’s own spin doctors. Knowing that he was regarded, not least by Cabinet colleagues, as secretive, cliqueish and vengeful, Brown reached out to supporters of his predecessor. John Hutton, the author of a prediction that Brown would be ‘a fucking awful Prime Minister’, was not sacked but made Business Secretary. James Purnell, who was in his teens when he first worked for Tony Blair, was promoted into the Cabinet as Culture Secretary. While publicly inclusive of the Blairites, privately Brown remained intensely suspicious. When Tessa Jowell was summoned to see him, she assumed that she was getting the sack. ‘That’s it. I’m out,’ she told a friend. Brown regarded her warily when they met at Number 10. ‘You were very loyal to Tony,’ he said in an accusatory tone. ‘How do I know you will be loyal to me?’ Jowell responded that she would be loyal to him because he was now the Prime Minister. ‘It’s your fault,’ growled Brown, still gnawed by resentment that he had to wait so long. ‘You persuaded Tony to stay when he’d promised me he was going.’ He left Jowell in charge of the Olympics, but she lost the rank of Secretary of State. Brown struggled as badly as Blair when it came to being direct with colleagues about sackings and demotions. Rather than straightforwardly tell Jowell that she was no longer a full member of the Cabinet, he tried to blame his officials for capping the numbers. ‘They won’t let me’ was his excuse for reducing her to visiting rights.17
The desire to seem magnanimous to old enemies did not stretch to a reconciliation with Peter Mandelson, who was ‘still in the outer darkness from a Gordon perspective’.18 Nor did it extend to bringing back to the Cabinet either Alan Milburn or Charles Clarke. The former Home Secretary was made offers that he could refuse. One untempting suggestion was to go to Iraq to sort out the Port Authority in Basra. Brown then followed up with a bizarre offer to send Clarke as a special envoy to the Caribbean during the winter months, a posting that might have been good for a suntan, but not for a political reputation.19
Once the new Cabinet was announced, early on Thursday afternoon its members began to arrive at Number 10, walking up Downing Street mostly in twos, like the animals boarding the Ark. Brown, enthroned at last in the chair with the arms, cracked a faintly menacing joke: ‘It’s very interesting to look across at the Chancellor and to think I’m no longer the man who says “no”. I’m looking forward to my first battles with him.’20 How they all laughed, carefully.
He wanted the world to see him as the acme of congeniality and collegiality, telling me: ‘I think it’s important to show that the executive is accountable to Parliament and equally I think it’s important that the Cabinet and the role of individual ministers is properly respected.’21 At meetings of the Cabinet early in his reign, he made a point of inviting every minister to make a contribution in order to strike a contrast with both the brevity of their meetings under his predecessor and his own reputation as a man intolerant of debate. At their second meeting on Friday, the Cabinet ran on for two hours, a length unheard of when Blair occupied the top chair. There was a ‘huge discussion’ about constitutional reform by the end of which Ministers were ‘getting a little tired’.22 Jack Straw, who was now Justice Secretary, joked that ‘younger members of the Cabinet will not realise that this is not how it was.’ He contended in an interview that Cabinet ‘is now more collegial’.23 Harriet Harman, who had become Leader of the House, also found that ‘Cabinets take much longer because everybody has their say on just about every issue.’24 Peter Hain was struck that ‘Cabinet meetings suddenly involved a lot of listening by the Prime Minister, which was not always Tony’s biggest forte. And Gordon would scribble things down in his inimitable way if something particularly struck him.’25 The Big Clunking Fist presented himself as The
Huge Listening Ear.
Their discussions were longer, but this was a veneer on Brown’s controlling temper and compulsion to micro-manage. He remained cliqueish. Ed Miliband was given charge of the Cabinet Office and manifesto preparations. Douglas Alexander combined the roles of International Development Secretary and election campaign co-ordinator. Ed Balls’s consolation prize for not getting the Treasury was a magnified empire called the Department for Children, Schools and Families. His wife, Yvette Cooper, got visiting rights to the Cabinet as Housing Minister and would soon after be promoted to full membership. This was the first Cabinet in British history to contain two brothers plus a husband and wife. Straw gained the chairmanship of key Cabinet committees and was delighted if people regarded him as the Deputy Prime Minister, though he was privately discontented that Brown wouldn’t give him the actual title. Geoff Hoon was made Chief Whip, but correctly suspected that he was ‘cover’. Giving the job immediately to Nick Brown, who was his namesake’s true enforcer, would be seen as too factional.26 The Newcastle MP became deputy head of a whips’ office packed with acolytes of the Prime Minister, including some of the key plotters in the coup against Tony Blair.
Only two ministers other than Brown had been in the Cabinet continuously since 1997.27 During an awkward encounter with George Bush at Camp David at the end of July, Brown boasted: ‘Six of my Cabinet are under forty.’ ‘Are they?’ responded Bush sarcastically. ‘You must be feeling damned old then.’28 It was a top table with a paucity of big reputations. The stifling dominance of Blair and Brown for the past decade had made it hard for other figures to grow in stature. The Cabinets of Major, Thatcher, Callaghan, Wilson, Heath, Douglas-Home, Macmillan, Eden and Attlee all contained figures with large reputations and power bases independent of the Prime Minister. Even Tony Blair’s Cabinets had some personalities of sufficient stature and character to argue with him and even thwart the Prime Minister. There was no-one with the weight to challenge Brown in this Cabinet. There was no David Blunkett, Charles Clarke, Alan Milburn, John Prescott or John Reid. When it was Blair and Brown, New Labour was a bipolar government. Now it was just Gordon, a unipolar regime. Brown had the potential to be one of the most hegemonic Prime Ministers of all time providing he knew how to use that domination wisely and well. It gave him all the power and no alibis.
His version of Big Tent politics was not truly evidence that the old control freak was being reborn as a new pluralist. He was following a blueprint provided by Blair’s Operation Hoover during New Labour’s early years in office29 and more recently by Nicolas Sarkozy when he became President of France. It was not a good indicator of the character of his premiership, but it was a preliminary tactical success. He wanted a Tory scalp as a pre-emptive strike against David Cameron and got a surprising one when Quentin Davies, the Conservative MP for Grantham and Stamford, defected to Labour. A farmer who once lost a lot of his sheep, he was used to being greeted by Labour MPs with cries of ‘Baaaa!’ Now they welcomed him to their benches as their newest colleague and the first Labour MP ever to be called Quentin. Brown seduced other Opposition MPs alienated from their leadership by recruiting them as advisers. This created the impression that Tory MPs were so dispirited by their own party’s prospects that they’d rather cosy up to Gordon in his Big Kilt. It was a gimmicky but effective ruse which looked generous to opponents, destabilised the Conservatives, and surrendered nothing in terms of real power.
To some on the left, this was disturbing early evidence that Brown would not be so different to Blair. Jon Cruddas, the strong contender in the deputy leadership campaign who turned down a job in Government, later complained:
The trouble is that the tent was only half-filled and wasn’t complemented by some of the more radical elements we could have brought in to cement a coalition of interest that should be the modern Labour Party. We’ve tilted only one way and that is to the right.30
Paddy Ashdown once predicted that a Blair handover to Brown would be ‘Camelot converted into Gormenghast. Owls will hoot as you go up Downing Street.’31 Brown nevertheless offered him the job of Northern Ireland Secretary. Ashdown turned it down, but the manoeuvre successfully spread confusion among the Liberal Democrats.
Brown felt he needed to show he was friendly to business. Digby Jones, the ebullient former Director-General of the CBI, was induced to give up his other jobs to become Trade Minister. When he made the invitation, Brown asked: ‘Do you want to phone your wife?’ Jones laughed: ‘No, I want to phone my bank manager.’ Brown was desperate enough to get him on board that Lord Jones, as he became, successfully resisted several attempts by Brown to get him to agree to join the Labour Party.32 The outside recruits became known as GOATS – the acronym for ‘Government of All the Talents’. Another of these non-party animals was Professor Sir Ara Darzi. The renowned surgeon became a Health Minister in the Lords, where he would prove his worth to fellow peers by saving the life of one of them. Brown wanted protection from the accusation that he was unfriendly to the armed forces. He fixed on Sir Alan West, the former First Sea Lord. For ‘a whole raft of reasons’ West initially said no. Brown was relentless in pursuit of the admiral, even getting Sarah to invite West’s wife round to Downing Street. Brown argued with him: ‘I really do believe that you can do something for the nation.’ Bombarded with such appeals to his sense of patriotic duty, West found it ‘impossible not to accept’ the job of Security Minister.33 Another recruit, this time to the Foreign Office, was Sir Mark Malloch-Brown, a former Deputy Secretary-General of the UN and fierce critic of George Bush, who declared soon after his appointment that Britain and America were no longer ‘joined at the hip’. The Prime Minister ‘knew remarkably little about Mark Malloch-Brown before he appointed him’, says a Number 10 official.34 The point was to signal that the long nightmare of Iraq and the relationship with Bush were drawing to a close.
Many of these GOATS would have short lives. Digby Jones quit after just sixteen months and subsequently complained that being a junior minister was ‘one of the most dehumanising and depersonalising experiences a human being can have’, because Government was designed to squeeze them dry of ‘personality, drive and initiative’. He further claimed that half the civil service could be sacked and no-one would notice the difference.35 He and the other GOATS served their presentational purpose in the early days. By recruiting people of all parties and no party, Brown projected himself as a presidential figure creating something akin to a national government.
This avoided making a strategic choice about the Government’s direction. The fundamental questions facing Labour after Blair were how to renew their policies, refresh their communications and reconnect with voters. How you answered depended on your analysis of the root causes of Labour’s unpopularity. Those in the party who only ever tolerated New Labour as a necessary evil to win power now wanted a swing leftwards to recover the party’s standing among traditional supporters. The primary challenge from a Blairite perspective was to remain centrist and appealing to aspirational voters. The shrewdest thinkers saw that the Government needed to locate ways of attracting both constituencies in order to rebuild the coalition which put them into power in 1997.
Gordon Brown’s answer to these strategic questions was opaque in the months before his coronation as Prime Minister. In the absence of a challenge, he had not been under serious pressure to reveal a plan. Civil servants were surprised to find that the man who had come from the Treasury with a reputation as a grand strategist arrived at Number 10 apparently without one. ‘They had a three-week plan up to the summer recess. Beyond that, you looked at the pad and it was blank.’36 There was a conflict of expectations about his premiership. Among left-wing Labour MPs like Frank Cook, ‘everybody felt that we were destined for a period of more traditional Labour.’37 A Blairite Cabinet minister like Hazel Blears could equally believe that there would be ‘a significant change of tone’ but not ‘a massive change of policy direction’.38 Brown had been Chancellor for a decade and yet ev
en his Cabinet were unsure what he would make of the top job. In the words of Peter Hain: ‘None of us really knew what sort of Prime Minister he would be.’39
Gordon Brown retired to bed on the second night of his premiership with the transfer of power having gone as smoothly as he could have hoped. As he slept, in the early hours of Friday morning two car bombs were discovered, one outside a popular West End nightspot in the Haymarket and the other in nearby Cockspur Street. The new Home Secretary, less than twenty-four hours into the job, was woken up to be told that she had her first terrorist incident on her hands.40 Over at Number 10, Brown’s officials decided to leave the Prime Minister in his bed. The plot having been foiled, they saw little point in disturbing the new boss. He got up at around five thirty that morning, turned on the radio in the flat and rapidly learnt from the news about the night’s events. Brown stomped downstairs in a dark temper and demanded: ‘Why wasn’t I told?’41 For those on the staff who were only just getting to know the new Prime Minister, this was their first experience of Gordon Brown in a bad mood. It was also an early warning of his neuroticism about always being in control.
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