Brown got himself in front of the cameras as soon as possible after breakfast on Friday. He interrupted a trip to a pre-school centre in north London – his first official engagement as Prime Minister – to warn that there was a ‘serious and continuous threat’ and urge the public ‘to be vigilant at all times’.42 At a meeting in the Cabinet Room with the Prime Minister and Jacqui Smith, Brown’s new Security Minister, Alan West, found him calm but also nervous. ‘He didn’t know what was going to happen next.’ West counselled against ‘mad knee-jerk reactions’ and tried to reassure Brown that he could ‘rely very heavily on the agencies’. He was impressed that the new Prime Minister ‘listened to advice and was willing to let people get on with things’.43 COBRA was convened under Smith’s chairmanship and the Cabinet meeting that day was extended so that the Home Secretary could brief ministers about the level of the threat.
On Saturday, a blazing Jeep was driven at high speed at the main terminal building of Glasgow Airport. This attempt to explode a car bomb was also thwarted. Early that evening, COBRA was convened again – this time Brown decided he wanted to take the chair. It was agreed that the threat level should be raised to ‘critical’. Alan West was mildly amused that ‘he does have a passion for COBRA. It’s not some magic place. It’s just a room really.’44
COBRA does weave a certain spell on the media. It conveys the impression that the Prime Minister is gripping a crisis. Addressing the public, Brown reached for a Churchillian tone: ‘We will not yield, we will not be intimidated’, and used Blairish language about ‘an act of evil’.45
In comparison with 7/7, these were relatively minor incidents which mercifully took no innocent lives. The episode nevertheless sent a shiver of fear down the spine of Government. In the words of Jacqui Smith: ‘It did involve multiple attacks, and thank goodness nobody was injured, but you don’t know that at the time that you’re dealing with it.’46
Blair was famously adept at finding the right language and putting himself visibly in charge during a crisis. Brown was especially anxious that he should not look poor in comparison. As one senior aide puts it: ‘There was always Tony’s voice in Gordon’s ear: “If you want to be successful, you’ve got to be like me.” ’47
To his satisfaction, it was the almost universal verdict of the media that his solid performance during this early emergency redounded to his credit.
Behind the scenes, the new Prime Minister was living hand to mouth. ‘He came in with a weak team,’ says one long-serving official.48 ‘They were under-prepared and arrogant,’ remarks a very senior civil servant.49 Another experienced official thought ‘they were grievously under-manned.’50 There had been an almost total purge of the political staff at Number 10, which deprived the building of a lot of experience. Only two political aides, Justyn Forsyth and Geoff Norris, survived the handover to be present at both the clapping out of Blair and the clapping in of Brown. Brown had brought with him to Number 10 some of the small coterie that he relied on at the Treasury. Spencer Livermore, an adviser for nine years, became the Director of Political Strategy at Number 10. In one of those lists beloved of newspapers, he was named that summer as the seventh most powerful gay man in Britain.51
The chief propagandist was Damian McBride, the former civil servant who had become Brown’s most infamous spinner. McBride was a graduate of Cambridge who could brief intelligently about policy. But Brown mostly valued this spin doctor for his apparent talent for understanding the appetites of the tabloids and how best to feed them to keep those beasts content. One of McBride’s fatal flaws was a very reckless streak. His spinning against other members of the Government could be as brazen as it was vicious. He often left a trail by using e-mails and texts. He also sent rashly rude messages to journalists who displeased his master. He liked a drink. Those who knew McBride would never confuse him with a teetotaller.
His friends called him ‘Mad Dog’ and his foes ‘McPoison’, a soubriquet invented by Peter Mandelson. McBride did not then enjoy the public notoriety that he was to later acquire, but his reputation in Whitehall and among the Cabinet preceded him into Number 10. At the Treasury, Gus O’Donnell had insisted that McBride cease to be a civil servant and become a political adviser because he had gone so far over the line into partisanship. O’Donnell was very against McBride coming to Number 10. The Cabinet Secretary tried to warn Brown that it would be a bad idea because of his spin doctor’s brutal briefings and the fear and loathing he aroused among ministers. ‘You need to build bridges,’ argued O’Donnell to Brown. The Cabinet Secretary’s protests were ignored by the Prime Minister, who saw McBride’s aggression as a sign of his loyalty.52
Shriti Vadera was an investment banker before joining Brown at the Treasury. She was so devoted to him that she would fly to Scotland at weekends and take a hotel room near his home in Queensferry to be instantly on hand if he needed her. He valued her passionate commitment to tackling global poverty, her toughness and her intellect. She had a steely brain and a sharp tongue, which made her too abrasively demanding for some civil servants, who nicknamed her ‘Shriti the Shriek’. To admirers, she was ‘a brilliant ideas person for Gordon’.53 Given the lack of ideas people at Number 10, Brown might have been better served had he brought her into Downing Street. She was instead given a ministerial job at International Development. With Vadera and Sarah Brown, Sue Nye was the third woman of influence in an otherwise masculine gang. Nye had known him longest of all. The veteran and intensely loyal Political Secretary had years of experience of managing his diary and his moods. ‘Sue looks after him, but she doesn’t look after politics,’ observes one Number 10 official. ‘She’s not a political fixer. She’s not a Sally Morgan.’54
That was one of several significant gaps in essential personnel. It was not visibly apparent to the voters nor noted by the media at the time, but Brown’s Number 10 had major structural flaws from the start. He arrived without a Chief of Staff. Tom Scholar, Brown’s former Private Secretary at the Treasury, ‘pitched up as Chief of Staff after they’d settled in’.55 Scholar was a highly able and personable civil servant, but this was not a role which he really wanted nor one to which he was suited. The Cabinet Secretary told other officials that he was strongly against the appointment ‘because Tom is not cut out for it.’56 Gavin Kelly, the Deputy Chief of Staff, ‘had no experience of dealing with Gordon’.57 Brown did not have a proper speech-writer. Nor did he have an experienced Director of Communications with a strategic grasp of handling the media and tested experience of dealing with the huge demands on Number 10 from broadcasters. McBride’s speciality was doing backstairs deals on stories with a small clientele of writing journalists. Brown lacked a strong body of close advisers to fill the roles which had been performed for Blair by the likes of Jonathan Powell. ‘The core group was too small.’58 As early as July, in the Cabinet ‘there was a feeling this doesn’t work. When you wanted decisions made, who did you go to? Who did you speak to? It wasn’t at all clear.’59 There was a dissonance in the early weeks between the glowing media that Brown was enjoying and the chaotic reality behind the scenes.
He had for years relied on a trio of younger allies who reflected back to him dimensions of his own personality. Ed Miliband, son of the Marxist thinker Ralph and younger brother of David, most expressed the academic element of Brown. Douglas Alexander was, like Brown, the son of a Church of Scotland minister and mirrored his high-minded self. Ed Balls remained, as he had been for years, the single most powerful confidant. Of the troika, Balls was the one who shared and amplified the side of Brown that saw politics as a perpetual trial of strength. In the words of one Brown aide: ‘Ed’s instinct was always to be brutally tribal.’60
This triad, his praetorian guard during the long march to Downing Street, was now dispersed around Whitehall. While Miliband was trying to make sense of the Cabinet Office, Balls and Alexander had departments to run. Brown felt naked without his old coterie and was soon summoning them back to his side. Alexander spent at le
ast a third of his time at Number 10 and more of it answering calls and e-mails from the Prime Minister. The same was even truer of Balls. Witnesses report that half of his ministerial meetings at the Department for Children would be interrupted by an official poking his head round the door to say to Balls: ‘Number 10 wants you to ring urgently.’61 The Chief Whip was ‘amazed how often I’d go to meetings at Number 10 and find Ed there’.62
Balls had taken primary responsibility during the handover for the organisation of Brown’s Number 10. Several observers, both political aides to the Prime Minister and neutral civil servants, came to the conclusion that he left Brown exposed. One official believes: ‘Ed picked a deliberately weak team to ensure his own continuing influence as the most powerful voice in Gordon’s ear.’63 A long-standing Brown aide agrees: ‘Ed’s objective was always to prevent any rival powerful figure emerging.’64
These unsound foundations were initially masked because Brown’s early weeks were cosmetically successful.
One costless, symbolic announcement was to scrap the plan to try to re-create Las Vegas in Britain. At Prime Minister’s Questions, Brown announced that there would be no super-casino. In typical style, he had only told the relevant minister, James Purnell, earlier that morning. The abandonment of the super-casino was popular, says Jack Straw, with ‘a lot of us’ in the Cabinet who felt ‘uneasy about the super-casino’ because it was ‘too big, too in-your-face for many people’.65 Another early move was to retighten the law on cannabis. These acts, a combination of the moralistic and the populist, won cheers from commentators of both left and right. A flurry of policy reviews was announced on everything from citizenship to binge drinking to internet porn. None of this resolved the question about the Government’s strategic direction, but it did answer Brown’s need for immediate hits in the headlines.
Matthew Taylor, who had become Chief Executive of the Royal Society of Arts after serving as a senior strategist to Tony Blair, thought:
the early period was extremely impressive. He reassured people that he wasn’t going to throw out the New Labour centrist politics, but he also suggested to people that they were going to get something which they had lost with Tony: a leader that they could trust, a leader who was going to be more answerable, a leader who was less about spin and more about substance.66
That was rather deceptive: Brown had always been as much of a spinner as his predecessor, if not more of one. ‘All the polling’ from Deborah Mattinson told Brown that the way to beat David Cameron was by playing ‘strength versus inexperience’.67 So he got his greatest boost that summer from appearing to respond in a masterful fashion as one emergency was succeeded by another. The terrorist incidents were followed by the flooding of large parts of Britain. On Tuesday, 24 July, Brown again convened COBRA. The COBRA compulsion ‘started for genuine reasons’, says one civil servant. ‘They then very quickly learnt that they could get an easy headline on the Sky news banner from “PM chairs COBRA.” ’68 Hilary Benn, the Environment Secretary, and his officials outlined their departmental response before the discussion quickly turned to media handling. ‘I must do another clip,’ said Brown before leaving the basement to address the TV cameras.
‘I have just come from a meeting of the emergency committee, COBRA, where we have heard first hand of the heroic efforts of the emergency services, our armed forces and communities who are battling the flood waters,’ he declared.69
One dismayed civil servant concluded:
That’s all he cared about – doing a clip for TV every two hours. I’d always bought the line that Gordon was the great strategist, the thinker, and Tony was the one obsessed with the media. The scales fell from my eyes. With Gordon, it was all about the headlines.70
Most of the practical leadership and real work to cope with the floods came from the Environment Agency and senior police officers on the ground, working with the fire service and the army. But the constant convening of COBRA projected the image that the Prime Minister was in charge.
After some adverse comment that he was slow to visit the flood zones, Brown got travelling. On a visit to an inundated area in the west of England:
he came straight in on the helicopter, shook a few hands in front of the cameras and then got the hell out again. That had all the character of a press stunt. But nobody in the media wanted to have a bad word to say about Gordon Brown in that period and he got away with it. If Tony Blair had done that, he would have been crucified.71
Still enjoying the benefit of a media honeymoon, Brown was hailed as a demi-god for striding around in wellies. ‘The coverage was absolutely fantastic, amazing. But Gordon was never happy. He was stomping around Number 10. He seemed in a permanently foul mood. People were asking: “If he’s like this when things are going well, what’s he going to be like when things are going badly?” ’72 He was obsessive about his image in the media. ‘There was an incredible barrage of phone calls from Downing Street,’ recalls an official at the Department of the Environment. ‘They would be ringing up to complain about something on page 17 of the Guardian. You’d then look at it and the headline would be something like “Gordon Brown walks on water”.’73
The situation in Gloucestershire became critical when they nearly lost a power station to the floods and the army had to be called in to distribute water to 300,000 people. Number 10 insisted that Brown should visit the scene even when the authorities sent a clear message that they had too much on their hands to cope with receiving the Prime Minister. Officials were taken aback by the Brown team’s desperation to divert any criticism of the response to the floods. ‘There was a day of blaming Severn Water,’ says one official. ‘They briefed against the water companies, they briefed against the Environment Agency, they briefed against Gold Command. It was all about shifting the blame. Anyone must get the blame except Gordon.’74
On one of his visits to Gloucestershire, Brown learnt that there was a grave danger of conditions becoming insanitary. The chairman of the civil contingencies unit back in London got a phone call from the Prime Minister directly ordering him to rush 900 Portaloos to Tewkesbury.75 Brown became ‘very, very hands on’, thought one Number 10 official.76 This was commendable, but it was also seeding what would grow into a huge problem in the future. In the words of one of his closest aides: ‘You could see the early signs of Gordon trying to micro-manage everything.’77 That included the media operation. He would suddenly turn up in the Number 10 press office, point to the headline running on the BBC or Sky twenty-four-hour news and bark an order: ‘That headline has got to be changed.’78
In the early hours of the morning, the night-time security shift at Number 10 was alerted to an intruder on the ground floor. Someone was trying to break into the Prime Minister’s office. They arrived on the scene to find that it was Gordon Brown. He had come down from the flat before sunrise to start work and made the frustrating discovery that he couldn’t get through the locked door.
His nocturnal habits were already legendary among those who knew him well. Murray Elder, one of Brown’s closest friends, was used to being ‘got out of my bed by an early-morning phone call’ and was accustomed to finding e-mails from Brown timed at six o’clock in the morning.79 Others reported calls and in-boxes filling up with long messages at even smaller hours. The habit of ringing up at all times of day and night sometimes exhausted the patience of even his most devoted followers. Ed Miliband became so worn down by the demands for twenty-four-hour attention that he once took Brown’s mobile when the boss wasn’t looking and erased his number from the phone’s memory.80
The Prime Minister’s flat at Downing Street, home now to two young boys, was ‘like a giant creche’.81 Brown was genuinely indifferent to the trappings of power, though he and Sarah soon fell for Chequers. So did Fraser and John, who loved its fantastic swimming pool.82
Brown began his time at Number 10 by using the same office as his predecessor, the small study by the Cabinet Room where they had had some of their most explosive co
nfrontations. Tony’s den became Gordon’s lair. Soon after Brown’s arrival, a large plasma television was fixed to the wall. The new Prime Minister would tell visitors that he had it installed so that he could watch football, but it was as likely, if not more so, to be tuned to the twenty-four-hour news.83 Blair, for all his rhetoric about modernising Britain, was phobic about technology. He never mastered e-mail or text messaging as Prime Minister and wrote his speeches in longhand using a fountain pen and then had them typed up by secretaries. Brown’s way of speech-writing was to thump his thoughts into the keyboard of a computer using two fingers and block capitals because of his poor eyesight.84 A new computer was installed in the study for this purpose with the font set to a very big size to help him read the text. A kick to the head on the rugby pitch had left Brown blind in his left eye since he was sixteen. His right eye was only saved by experimental and painful surgery. He spent almost a year in complete darkness and underwent five operations which might have resulted in total loss of sight. That ordeal, which he once described as ‘living torture’, was a terrible blow to a teenager who loved sport and was a voracious reader. This dark trauma profoundly shaped his character. One of his intimates once told me: ‘You can’t understand Gordon unless you understand his fear that he could go blind.’85 Some elements of his behaviour – appearing to not recognise or to rudely blank people, the awkward scrunching of his face when reading a speech and his generally unrelaxed public appearance – were partly explained by his lack of peripheral vision and his need to look to the side in order to focus. ‘You’re always so nervous around Gordon,’ says one of his colleagues. ‘You always think he’s going to fall over something because his sight is so poor.’86 Sympathetic members of his staff thought his volcanic temper was rooted in his frustration with his disability.
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