The End of the Party

by Andrew Rawnsley

  Jack Straw argues: ‘It’s hard to see, in retrospect, how that much speculation could have been avoided given the fact that there was active consideration being given.’38

  Gordon Brown opened his speech to the conference with a jab at humour. ‘People say to me: “Would you recommend this job to anyone else?” I say: “Not yet.” ’39

  He continued with the projection of himself as a ‘father of the nation’. ‘Tested again and again,’ he said of the summer terror plots, floods and outbreaks of animal diseases. ‘The resilience of the British people has been powerful proof of the character of our country.’40 What he hoped to suggest was that his handling of them was powerful proof of why he should remain as Prime Minister. He disdained to make a single direct reference to the Conservatives or their leader. David Cameron was as much an unperson in the speech as Tony Blair, who was privately wounded and annoyed that he rated just one reference. Yet sentence after sentence had a partisan purpose designed to leave the Conservatives naked before the electorate by appropriating their clothes. Brown spoke against a blue backdrop on which the word ‘Labour’ was nowhere to be seen. He used tropes such as ‘our island story’ and pressed right-wing buttons about bringing back matron and encouraging have-a-go heroes. For lengthy passages, the speech was an echo chamber of sound-bites which had been pre-tested on sample voters. ‘It was very focus-grouped,’ says one of Brown’s team. ‘There was no over-arching narrative.’41 In the most shameless section, he implied that immigrants were the main cause of drug dealing and gun crime. They would be ‘thrown out’. For that excursion into Tebbitry, he was rewarded with the endorsement of the retired Tory polecat. In an ugly phrase that would come back to haunt Brown, he talked of ‘British jobs for British workers’.42 This was a slogan of the BNP and a promise that he could not keep unless Britain left the European Union. ‘That made me wince,’ says Jon Cruddas, a Labour MP battling with the BNP in his Dagenham constituency, because it sounded like ‘a dog whistle to the far right’.43

  The speech was neither a programme for government nor the exposition of a coherent ideology. It was a let-down to the more cerebral members of the speech-writing team like Ed Miliband. Their attempts to craft something more inspirational were overwhelmed by Brown’s insistence on lumping in long laundry lists of initiatives.

  The speech was nevertheless rewarded with a prolonged standing ovation from a Labour Party currently happy to worship the man who had put them back ahead in the polls. The overall media conclusion was that Brown was a leader in command of his party and ruthlessly preparing the ground for an election.

  ‘Brown’s winning ways will take some beating,’ swooned the Daily Telegraph. ‘Everything points to a snap poll.’ It quoted Hilaire Belloc. ‘The stocks are sold, the press is squared, the middle class is quite prepared.’44

  Rupert Murdoch, though, did not think there should be an early election and was using his biggest-selling daily organ to try to prevent one. ‘Not his finest hour’ was the verdict of the Sun, which attacked Brown for dismissing the calls for a referendum on the EU treaty.45 Brown’s anger about that was as nothing compared with his reaction on Wednesday evening, when he learnt of the coverage in The Times. Danny Finkelstein, the paper’s Comment Editor, a former speech-writer to John Major and a keen student of American politics, had been struck by the familiarity of many phrases in Brown’s speech. Finkelstein confirmed his suspicions by Googling any line that sounded like a speech-writer’s phrase.46 Brown said: ‘Sometimes people say I am too serious.’47 That was awfully similar to a sentence used by Al Gore in 2000 when he accepted the Democratic nomination: ‘I know that sometimes people say I’m too serious.’ Brown: ‘This is my pledge to the British people: I will not let you down.’ Gore: ‘I pledge to you tonight: I will never let you down.’48 Finkelstein identified several examples of phrases recycled from speeches by Gore and Bill Clinton, both former clients of Bob Shrum, adviser and speech-writer for Brown. When Finkelstein posted it on his blog that afternoon, the deputy editor of The Times, Ben Preston, thought it would make ‘a great splash’ for the next morning’s paper.49

  When Brown learnt that The Times planned to lead its front page with how he had rehashed American phrases, he was ‘incandescent’.50 From his suite at the Highcliff, he rang complaining to Preston and Robert Thomson, the editor of The Times. ‘It’s a Tory plot,’ he raged, trying to bludgeon them into pulling the story. ‘This won’t be forgotten.’ He was maddest of all with his own team. Brown went berserk with Bob Shrum, whose long friendship did not protect the American from a ferocious blast of Brown’s temper. ‘How could you do this to me, Bob?’ Brown screamed at a shaking Shrum. ‘How could you fucking do this to me?’ Then the Prime Minister started yelling at the other aides present: ‘Just get out! Just get out of the fucking room!’ Sue Nye became so alarmed that she felt compelled to come into the room to protect the unfortunate Shrum.51

  Most of the media chose to ignore the Times story, but Brown continued to rage about it in private for days afterwards. ‘It totally threw Gordon off,’ says one of his inner circle. ‘When he should have been thinking about the election, he was boiling about this.’52

  This angry face of Brown was masked from the public. On the Wednesday of the conference, his handlers put him in a format designed to show a relaxed and humorous dimension to the Prime Minister. He sat in an easy chair on the conference stage alongside the journalist and broadcaster Mariella Frostrup, who hosted a question-and-answer session. Always wary and often paranoid about live events, the Prime Minister felt comfortable with this interlocutor, who had previously interviewed him at a literary festival.

  Before the event, Frostrup was led through the corridors of the conference centre to a ‘back room in the depths of the building behind the big hall’. Waiting to perform, she and Brown ‘were just left there for about two hours’. As they separately made notes in preparation for the event, she was most ‘struck by what a lonely job it is’.53

  On stage, Brown dealt easily with the soft questions from delegates and got them laughing with anecdotes about the old days of the health service when a trolley would come round the wards to serve drinks. ‘You could have Guinness, you could have beer,’ he amused them. ‘Free beer for all the workers.’

  Then Frostrup popped the big question. ‘It’s been a very successful three months. It’s been a very successful conference. And I wondered if, in the intimate atmosphere of the conference centre here, you wanted to illuminate me on whether you felt it would be a good time for an election?’

  The friendly interviewer relaxed Brown into dropping his guard. ‘Charming as you are, Mariella, I think the first person that I would have to talk to is the Queen.’54

  With that unwise tease, which publicly confirmed for the first time that he was thinking about an early election, the Prime Minister himself openly joined in the game. That lunchtime, the fever was further intensified by Ed Balls, when he was asked on the radio whether it might not be risky to go to the country early. The Children’s Secretary revealingly replied: ‘It’s a very interesting question as to where the gamble really lies.’55 Balls ‘kicked himself’ the moment the interview was over.56 He was now converted to the idea, but he had not meant to go that far in public. The Sunday after the conference, Balls had a long and influential discussion with Brown. ‘It is your decision, but I would go for it,’ said Balls. ‘What you can’t do is make a half-decision.’ One reason to go for it, he argued, was that it was unlikely the media ‘will give us such an easy ride at any other time’.57

  By the end of the week in Bournemouth, ministers felt it ‘building to a frenzy’.58 Ed Miliband began trawling ‘frantically’ among Cabinet ministers for ideas to put in the manifesto.59 Most Labour MPs were convinced that it was on. Jon Cruddas – whose partner, Anna Healey, was principal aide to Harriet Harman – was typical: ‘I remember going away that weekend, talking to my agent and preparing the ground, as every MP in the land was doing. There was no doub
t that it looked like a no-brainer that we were heading for an election.’60 Frank Field had been sceptical, but ‘by the end I believed that he was going to have an election. I even wrote my election address; fortunately, I didn’t put a date on it.’61 The published polls the weekend after the conference gave Labour a lead of between six and eleven points. Some of the Cabinet openly talked about a dash to the country. ‘We could turn a majority of 60 with two and a half years to run into a majority of 100 with five years to run,’ said John Denham of the ‘exciting’ poll results in the press.62

  Staff in the Number 10 Policy Unit were working flat-out, ‘all writing chapters for the manifesto. We really thought it was going to happen.’63 Campaign grids were drafted. The unions were ‘kicking in money’.64 Brown ordered several crucial events to be brought forward to create a springboard. The most significant was to instruct Alistair Darling to advance the date of the Pre-Budget Report and the comprehensive spending review in order to splice them together so that election sweeteners could be scattered before the voters. The weekend between the Labour and Tory conferences, Darling told Andy Burnham, the Chief Treasury Secretary, to hurry up settlement of the spending negotiations with ministers so that they could be announced in ten days’ time. ‘It was all systems go,’ says one member of the Cabinet.65 Discreet inquiries were made of Buckingham Palace to ensure that the Queen would be in London if Brown needed to ask for a dissolution of Parliament.

  The Tories trudged up to Blackpool for their conference looking as defeated as the faded Lancashire resort. ‘Cameron meltdown as public urge early vote’ was the Observer splash on a poll giving Labour a seven-point advantage over the Tories. Better still for Brown, he was trouncing his Tory opponent on all the key qualities that people look for in a Prime Minister. More than two thirds of voters expected Labour to win an election.66

  The Lib Dems were also in a miserable state. Sir Menzies Campbell’s qualities counted for little with a press which had largely made up its brutal mind that he should be in a retirement home. Senior Conservatives that I spoke to during this period trembled before the prospect of a fourth defeat. One member of the Tory frontbench said: ‘David Cameron may no longer be leader of the Conservative Party by Christmas.’67 Cameron told a friend: ‘My political career could be over before I’m forty-two.’68

  Brown’s calculation when he stoked election speculation was that it would divide the Tories and they would fall apart under pressure in Blackpool. Given the Conservatives’ long history of committing suicide in public, it is easy to see why Brown gambled on the Tories imploding. Yet it turned out to be a serious miscalculation to assume that Cameron and his party would not fight back. The threat of an imminent election galvanised the Tory leadership, rallied their activists and muzzled dissent. David Davis, who was Cameron’s rival for the leadership two years earlier, cancelled all his appearances at fringe events to deny the media any opportunity to interpret anything he said as divisive.69

  The centre of attention on the first day of the Tory conference was George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor. The issue he targeted was inheritance tax. More people had been sucked into its net over the past decade, largely as a result of the boom in property prices. Even so, barely more than a twentieth of Britons were wealthy enough to be touched by inheritance tax.70 It had nevertheless become a hot-button issue among the middle classes, not least owing to noisy press campaigns against ‘the death tax’. Osborne unveiled a crowd-pleasing promise to exempt all but millionaires from inheritance tax. He said he would finance his pledge by introducing a new levy on wealthy foreigners living in Britain – the ‘non-doms’. This artfully made his promise seem a cost-free gift to British citizens at the expense of rich foreigners.

  Douglas Alexander and Spencer Livermore watched Osborne’s speech on a television at Labour’s headquarters in Victoria Street. ‘That’s it,’ said Livermore. ‘We can’t have an election.’ Alexander looked glum: ‘Do you think?’ The next morning’s press largely cheered Osborne for proclaiming ‘Death to Death Taxes’. Deborah Mattinson was running focus groups in key southern marginals – places like Croydon, Watford and Slough – to test voter reaction to the Tory conference. She was soon reporting a ‘definite mood swing’ to the Conservatives. Osborne’s inheritance tax pledge ‘was like a laser to the heart of the swing voter in marginal seats’.71

  Brown had received and rejected advice to do something about inheritance tax in his last Budget the previous March.72 Alistair Darling had no plans to tackle it in his financial package that October.73 After Osborne’s speech, Brown told Darling to quickly rustle up a Labour version of an inheritance tax cut. The Chancellor was resistant. Darling protested that there was not time for the Treasury to do proper costings. Shaky maths was precisely the grounds on which Labour was attacking Osborne. Brown overruled Darling. He told the Chancellor they had to be able to neutralise the Tory promise before an election.74 The Treasury began to scrabble together its own scheme.

  Campaign planning continued to gather pace. Billboard sites for advertising were hurriedly booked. Battersea Heliport in south London was asked to find 100 landing and take-off slots for campaign tours. By the end of the week, Labour had committed itself to £1.2 million of campaign spending.75 As one Cabinet minister puts it: ‘It had gone way beyond “on your marks”.’76

  In the middle of the Conservative conference week, the Prime Minister made a sudden appearance in Iraq. The concept was to upstage and diminish David Cameron by projecting Brown as an international statesman while his petty opponents fought among themselves. But the Tories did not fall apart in Blackpool. And Brown did not look statesmanlike in Iraq. He came over as crudely opportunistic when he promised that ‘by Christmas, 1,000 of our troops can be brought back.’77 This announcement was leaked to the BBC on Monday night in time for its main ten o’clock bulletin in an attempt to steal some of the thunder of the Tories’ inheritance tax promise. It swiftly emerged that half of the troop withdrawals had been previously announced and about a quarter of the troops were already home. This reawakened memories of Brown’s vice of double-counting and triple-announcing. His fly-in, fly-out visits to Baghdad and Basra did not look like the ‘new politics’ he promised when he arrived at Number 10. It came over as the brazen exploitation of British troops for electioneering. Sir John Major, in a rare and therefore more salient intervention by the former Conservative Prime Minister, attacked Brown for the ‘pretty unattractive … cynicism’ of using the troops for partisan purposes.78 The headlines were almost universally critical.

  This also supplied David Cameron with the opportunity to present himself as a contrast to the machinating Prime Minister. On his conference’s climactic day, the Tory leader delivered his sixty-seven-minute speech without an autocue. He spent the previous day committing his text to memory, a trick he mastered at Eton. ‘It might be a bit messy, but it will be me,’ he declared before achieving a near-faultless delivery as he strode the stage of the Winter Gardens. This feat – ‘Look, Mum, no notes’ – was a stylistic triumph. It was a high form of spin for Cameron, the former PR man for a TV company, to project himself as unspun. Yet even Labour people acknowledged the success of the performance. He presented himself as nerveless and bluffed that the Conservatives were much more confident than they truly felt. ‘You go ahead and call that election,’ Cameron goaded Brown. ‘Let the people pass judgement.’79

  By dithering over the decision, Brown had already trapped himself in a crucial respect. The earliest possible election date was now 1 November, a wintry Thursday for a British election. Bob Shrum argued with Brown that this wasn’t decisive. Shrum was accustomed to the American practice of holding presidential and congressional elections in November. Those with more experience of fighting British elections could see a problem, a very big one. The clocks would have gone back, bringing nightfall earlier. ‘Getting your vote out is crucial,’ argued Hazel Blears, who did not like the prospect ‘of knocking on doors in November with dark nights closi
ng in’.80 It was also dawning on the Brown team that the contest would be on a dated electoral register. Even if they won, their mandate would not seem so refreshed if the turn-out was low and accompanied by claims that many people had been disenfranchised.

  At the end of the Tory conference week, there were three more published polls to digest. In one, Labour’s lead was cut from eleven points to four.81 In another, a ten-point lead shrivelled to just three.82 In a third, the Tories had closed an eight-point gap since the start of the conference season to get neck and neck with Labour.83

  The ‘crunch meeting’84 took place at Number 10 on Friday, 5 October. Early that morning, in a phone conversation with a close Cabinet ally, Brown was ‘still going for it’ but sounded anxious about what he was going to hear from his pollsters.85 The inner court gathered in a ground floor room on the right-hand side of Number 10 with a view of Downing Street through its bow-fronted window. Ed Balls was the only absentee. Stan Greenberg put his laptop down on the table and fired it up. Sue Nye then brought in the Prime Minister. Brown sat opposite the pollster, who positioned the laptop between them so that the Prime Minister could squint into the screen. Everyone else stood about, shifting nervously. Alexander and Livermore, who had already been shown the polling, looked grim. Greenberg presented a gloomy analysis of fieldwork from 150 key marginal seats. Labour had lost ground to the Tories whose promise on inheritance tax appeared to be responsible for much of the dramatic swing to them, especially in marginal seats in the Midlands and the South. The ‘balance of risk’ was that Labour would achieve ‘a small win’. Looking across at Brown, Greenberg said: ‘I can’t guarantee what your majority will be.’ They were in the territory of a parliamentary majority in the teens. If the campaign didn’t go well, it could be worse: a hung Parliament. ‘It was awful, a depression settled on the room,’ says one present.86 Brown looked at the pollster: ‘So we can’t do it?’ Greenberg responded: ‘It looks very difficult now.’