Livermore made the case that they had gone too far to pull back now: ‘If we don’t do it, the only people who will be celebrating are Tory Central Office.’ Shrum disagreed: ‘That’s the very worst reason to do it.’ Miliband said it confirmed his view that an election would be a mistake. Alexander shifted towards the antis.87
Brown walked out saying he was late for a meeting on Burma. Once he was gone, they had a franker debate. They could say in his absence what they could not say in his presence: that pulling out would be devastating to his reputation. But to nearly all in the room it was already obvious that ‘Gordon had gone cold on the whole idea.’88
The Prime Minister looked into the suddenly icy water and became scared of a risky plunge. One member of the Cabinet very close to Brown says: ‘Gordon had never been that firmly persuaded. So it didn’t take much to push him off.’89 If he pressed ahead now, it would be against his cautious instincts, against the advice of the most seasoned operators in the Cabinet, against the pleas not to send them into battle from some Labour MPs in marginal seats, and against the counsel of his opinion pollsters.
The inner circle reconvened that afternoon, this time in Brown’s office. He asked each of them in turn – Alexander, Livermore, Miliband, McBride and Nye – what they thought. No-one expressed a clear view. No-one wanted responsibility for the decision. ‘So we are not going to do it then?’ asked Brown morosely. Everyone avoided his gaze.90
Less than a fortnight since the triumphalist Labour conference and his ill-judged tease about seeing the Queen, he was going to have to retreat. He phoned Balls, who had disappeared to his constituency for the weekend, to discuss how they might limit the damage.91
Most of the Cabinet were in a state of ignorance about what was happening inside Number 10. The majority of ministers assumed that they were heading for an election having heard nothing to the contrary from Downing Street. That Friday evening, I spoke to several senior members of the Cabinet, all of whom believed that Brown was now so far down the runway that it was too late to abort take-off. One senior minister said: ‘You know I was always against this, I told you that at the party conference and I haven’t changed my view, but Gordon has let it go so far that I can’t see how he can back off now.’92 Another senior minister who always regarded an early election as crazy believed it was too late to retreat because ‘it would look like we were running scared.’93 Labour MPs likewise assumed that ‘it was a lock-down decision, there was no getting out of it, there was no rewind button to hit, we were off, the election was about to be called.’94
Senior Lib Dems and Conservatives thought so too.95 David Cameron briefed staff at Tory party headquarters that Friday and told them the date would be 8 November.96
By breakfast-time on Saturday, Brown had absolutely concluded that he would not risk it. The next question was how to announce his climb-down to the world. In the middle of the morning, Damian McBride rang Barney Jones, the editor of the Andrew Marr Show, to fix an interview with the Prime Minister. Brown had got into a habit of doing pre-recorded interviews with Marr because Brown thought it was more controllable than a live interview. Jones warned McBride that it was perilous to record this interview on Saturday afternoon and expect its contents to remain secret until the next morning. ‘If he is going to say what I think he is going to say, the idea that this will hold till Sunday is for the birds,’ the BBC editor presciently protested to McBride. ‘This is bad for us and bad for you.’97 McBride rejected that advice and insisted that Brown would only do it as a pre-record. Jones and Marr were told by Number 10 that they were to share the Prime Minister’s announcement with no-one else, not even colleagues at the BBC. To a member of the Number 10 communications team, this showed that Brown ‘fundamentally didn’t understand the media. He thinks it is about dividing and ruling with journalists as it is with everyone else. There was never a shift in the mindset from being a Chancellor who wants to be Prime Minister to being Prime Minister.’98
It was delusional to think that news of such magnitude could be managed like this in a 24/7 media environment. By Saturday morning, senior members of the Cabinet were in the loop and word of the cancellation of the election was reaching any political journalist with decent contacts. One troubled member of the Cabinet observed to me that morning: ‘The big, precious thing Gordon had – his reputation for solidity – that will be eroded.’99 ‘We’re going to take a terrible hit for this,’ correctly predicted one of Brown’s Cabinet allies.100 ‘So much for Gordon, the great strategist,’ sighed a third member of the Cabinet.101
The Tories got wind of it by Saturday lunchtime.102 As Jones and his crew tried to slip in and out of Number 10 that afternoon to record the interview, rival broadcasters already had the scoop. Adam Boulton, the Political Editor of Sky, stood on Downing Street venting his fury that a statement of such importance had been exclusively handed to the BBC and describing the retreat from an election as an abject humiliation. By mid-afternoon, the airwaves were already shrieking with the scorn of Opposition MPs and derision from some Labour ones as well. John McDonnell, the Labour MP for Hayes and Harlington, laid into the ‘inexperienced testosterone-fuelled young men in Brown’s team’ who had ‘presented the Tories with an open goal’.103
This was kind to the Prime Minister for it laid the blame on his courtiers rather than the king himself. That court started to devour itself as members of the inner circle attempted to dump culpability for the farrago on each other. To try to distance Brown and Balls from the debacle, Damian McBride spent Saturday afternoon on the phone to journalists of Sunday newspapers. He was spinning all the blame on to Douglas Alexander, Spencer Livermore and Ed Miliband. Several reporters were successfully persuaded that they were at fault for pushing Brown towards an election and then getting lastminute cold feet. As McBride rubbished other members of the Prime Minister’s inner circle to reporters, he was caught in the act by Livermore who yelled at the spin doctor: ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ McBride retorted that he was obeying orders from Balls: ‘I’ve been told to by Ed.’ The two aides screamed at each other in front of civil servants until Sue Nye dragged them out of the room.104
Many relationships in the Brown court were permanently poisoned by this calamitous episode. Alexander and Miliband would never again trust Balls and McBride. An utterly disenchanted Livermore, who was least skilful in deflecting blame for a debacle that had many authors, left Number 10 six months later.
The fratricidal spinning and the interview fiasco added tactical foolishness to strategic stupidity. Gordon Brown was supposed to be the great chess player of British politics, the man who always thought a dozen moves ahead. The legend was exploded that weekend when the supposed grandmaster checkmated himself.
The fatal error was procrastination. Even Brown, never a man happy to confess to error, would later acknowledge ‘maybe I should have done it earlier.’105 He left the decision ten days too late. The time to decide was when he spoke on the Monday of the Labour conference. Had he ruled out an election at that point, he would have done so from a commanding position in the polls and presented himself as a statesmanlike leader rising above the temptation to make an opportunistic dash to the country. That was a context in which it would have been hard for his opponents or the media to accuse him of cowardice.
Had he chosen to announce an election in his conference speech, he could have dramatically changed the political dynamic. The Conservatives would have been thrown off balance. Their inheritance tax promise would have been less of a bombshell, submerged as it would have been in the wider election story. It would have looked less like a clever stroke and more like an act of desperation.
To this day, there is no agreement in Labour’s ranks about whether an early election would have been a triumph or a disaster. The result of an election that never happened is unknowable. What we do know is that Labour was ahead in the polls in the autumn of 2007 and then fell behind, and for most of the time very badly behind, for the following two years. Had
he gambled and won, Brown would have enjoyed a personal mandate along with up to five years to get through the oncoming economic downturn. What we also know is that many senior Tories feared they were about to go down to a fourth defeat. Michael Gove ‘thought at the time that he had a very good chance of pulling it off. Labour had a strong chance of doing well and securing another mandate.’106 One member of the Shadow Cabinet likened Brown’s hesitation to Dunkirk, when Hitler delayed sending in his Panzers and gave the British army the chance to escape over the English Channel to fight another day.107 Vince Cable of the Lib Dems believes: ‘He should have gone for the election. He may have lost some seats, but he would have come back with real legitimacy and authority.’108
His closest allies saw the election debacle as the moment when it all began to unravel for the Prime Minister. ‘The sense of it being on and it being off was a watershed looking back at it,’ says Nick Brown. ‘Because I think people felt that if there wasn’t going to be an election, the speculation should have been damped down earlier than it was.’109 Cabinet ministers agree that it was a terrible self-inflicted wound. In the words of Peter Hain: ‘The mistake was to allow this particular train to leave the station in the first place when you weren’t clear about the destination and that was a fiasco which did the Government a lot of damage.’110
The press on the Sunday and Monday after his retreat savagely questioned the Prime Minister’s judgement and temperament. Iron Gordon was rechristened Bottler Brown. It wrecked the image of a commanding and straightforward leader that had been successfully cultivated during the first ninety days of his premiership. At his party conference, he was marketed with the slogan ‘The Strength to Succeed’, offering his character as the issue on which he asked to be judged. Of the many ironies about The Election That Never Was, one was that he had planned to fight it on his decisiveness and competence. Now he looked incompetent and indecisive. Brown had not really changed. For good and bad, he was still the man he had always been. It was perceptions of him that were utterly transformed. Overnight, his positives were flipped into negatives. It was like one of those sci-fi movies in which a mad scientist throws a switch and all the polarities are reversed. The strong Gordon who had fathered the nation through the summer crises flipped into the chicken Gordon who didn’t dare face the country. The Prime Minister who presented himself as a spin-free break with the artifices of his predecessor was now seen as a manipulator obsessed with pursuing narrow partisan advantage. The self-described conviction politician was exposed as a furtively calculating politician. Worse, a calculator who miscalculated. The opportunity to have a new relationship with the electorate and start afresh was squandered. A year’s work was undone in fourteen fatal days. The character question about Brown was revived. There was a reawakening of the Cabinet’s misgivings about his temperament. His credibility was diminished in the eyes of the media. His Tory opponents were invigorated.
David Cameron was gifted a second honeymoon with journalists who again became respectfully interested in the Tory leader. Having won the game of election bluff, Cameron was positioned to scorn Brown for a ‘humiliating retreat’ and pretend that the Tories had always been confident about facing the country. ‘I am disappointed,’ he claimed. ‘I wanted an election from the moment he walked into Downing Street because I don’t believe he has a mandate and I want to take our arguments to the British people.’111 Alex Salmond mocked Brown in Scots as ‘the big feartie from Fife’.112 On Monday morning, Jack Straw conceded the obvious: ‘The opinion polls are one of the factors that we take into account. It would be ridiculous to suggest otherwise, and I don’t think anybody is doing that.’113
One person did try to pretend otherwise: Gordon Brown. He made a painful position even more excruciating for himself by insisting that the retreat had nothing to do with the polls. Everyone found this incredible and would have been even more derisive had they known just how much secret polling he had commissioned in the weeks leading up to the debacle. At noon on Monday, he faced political journalists at a Number 10 news conference. Ruefully, he said: ‘I think your weekend has been better than mine.’114
This did not win him their sympathy. Many of the journalists, just like the Labour Party, had been marched up the hill and down again by the Grand Old Duke of Fife. His honeymoon with the media was definitively over. Reporters dropped any deference as they taunted Brown to admit that he had run away from the country because of the turn in the polls. They were mocking to his face when he claimed that he was so keen to ‘deliver my vision’ that he would have called off the election even if his pollsters had told him he would have won with a majority of 100. This untruth was so transparent that he set himself up for further laceration when he faced David Cameron in the Commons two days later. The Tory leader jeered: ‘He’s the first Prime Minister in history to flunk an election cos he thought he was going to win it!’115
The Tories fell about laughing. On the benches behind Brown, there was a funereal silence and matching faces.
The following day, Alistair Darling rose to deliver a pre-election financial package when there was no longer an election. On the Saturday that Brown called it off, the two men agreed that they should pull the inheritance tax cut hastily cobbled together in imitation of the Tories. In the words of a Treasury minister: ‘We were told to slam everything into reverse.’116 Only they couldn’t. A dismayed Darling was told by his officials that it was too late: the Pre-Budget Report was already at the printers.117 The Chancellor’s wife would later confide to friends: ‘It was not Alistair’s PBR.’ This was true: it had been dictated to the Chancellor by the Prime Minister. Before he moved into Number 10, Brown joked that he did not intend to emulate William Gladstone, who combined being both Prime Minister and Chancellor. It was becoming painfully apparent to Darling that this was precisely what Brown wanted to do. ‘Alistair was practically camping in Number 10 in the days leading up to the PBR,’ says a member of the Cabinet. ‘Alistair was not at all happy.’118
When he addressed MPs, Darling made the announcement on inheritance tax with not a drop of conviction. The most he would subsequently say in defence of it was that it had ‘some merit’119 – damning with the faintest of praise what was supposed to be the centrepiece of his first big occasion as Chancellor. Sitting beside him in the Commons, the true author had a glint in his eye, but it was swiftly apparent that Brown had again been too tactical for his own good. Rather than trump his opponents with this manoeuvre, it looked as though Labour was lamely playing catch-up. Responding for the Conservatives, George Osborne largely ignored Darling and went straight for Brown. ‘He talks about setting out his vision of the country, but he has to wait for us to tell him what it is,’ the Shadow Chancellor mocked a glowering Prime Minister. ‘We all know this report was brought forward so it could be the starting gun for the campaign – before you took the pistol and fired it into your foot.’120
It was not just the imitation inheritance tax cut that came under fire. The CBI and the trades unions were in rare unity when they condemned a bizarre new regime for capital gains tax which gave privileged treatment to wealthy partners in private equity funds and rewarded short-term speculators in antiques and fine wines while hitting ordinary workers in share ownership schemes and genuine entrepreneurs who had built up businesses over many years. The Government was soon in retreat.
Both the mini-Budget and the accompanying spending review were all too obviously cobbled together on the back of a (now redundant) campaign leaflet. Irwin Stelzer, a man of the right, observes: ‘It let the Tories have the initiative. Gordon was the King of the Hill on tax policy and suddenly he’s playing “me too” catch-up. That was a very bad policy decision and a bad political decision.’121
While the Conservatives claimed to be winning the battle of ideas, Labour MPs were uneasy that their Government was crudely apeing the other side. ‘It looked like it was solely about political positioning and it looked like we were playing fast and loose with the electorate,’
says Jon Cruddas. ‘That was crystallised by the look in Gordon Brown’s eye which signalled that it was all an exercise in smoke and mirrors.’122
The Daily Telegraph, which just a week before praised Brown as ‘formidable’, scorned a ‘theme-free statement’ that gave ‘the overwhelming impression’ that ‘this Government is coming perilously close to running on empty.’123
Darling, who received a highly negative press for his first important outing as Chancellor, became angry with Brown for forcing him to do it, cross with himself for not standing up to the Prime Minister and determined to be stronger in future. The PBR was both a significant political error which reduced confidence in the Government’s decision-making and a financial misjudgement which left them behind the curve of events. Expensive games were played with inheritance tax rather than taking measures to prepare for the oncoming economic storm already being signalled by the markets. Six months later, Darling acknowledged to me: ‘If you were able to wind the clock back and do things differently, of course you would have done things differently. If I knew then what I know now, some things would be different.’124
After the debacle of the phantom election, what the Government most needed was to be calm, solid and purposeful. This episode instead made it look frantic, hollow and rudderless. Gordon Brown, the master of events just a month before, had now put himself at the mercy of them.
30. It Eats My Soul
Alistair Darling was at his home in Edinburgh on the morning of Saturday, 10 November, when the phone rang. His Private Secretary broke it to him that Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs had somehow lost two computer discs containing the confidential personal and banking information of more than 20 million people.
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