The End of the Party

by Andrew Rawnsley

  The Chancellor swore to himself. Darling instantly grasped that this was ‘really very, very bad’1 for a Government still reeling from the double debacles of the phantom election and the Pre-Budget Report.

  The poor unfortunate with the unenviable task of briefing the Prime Minister was Gavin Kelly, the Deputy Chief of Staff at Number 10. Gordon Brown was so enraged that he leapt across the room. Grabbing a startled Kelly by the lapels of his jacket, Brown snarled: ‘They’re out to get me!’2

  The timing of the data disc disaster, coming so soon after those other reverses, suggested to him a conspiracy against his premiership.3 There was absolutely no evidence for that outside his paranoid imagination. He always had something of a victim mentality. Some friends believed it derived from failing to get the leadership in 1994 and others traced it further back to the long and agonising weeks in his youth when he was imprisoned in a hospital bed brooding on the injustices of life after the rugby accident which left him with only one functioning eye.

  His horror about the discs was understandable. Discussing with allies how he planned to fight back from the October disasters and regain the respect of the country, Brown had told them that the key was to deliver a period of ‘good government’.4 Now what had happened? The personal information of nearly half the population had gone missing.

  For ten days after the Prime Minister and Chancellor were alerted, they kept it secret from the public, first in the hope that a frantic search by HMRC and the police would turn up the discs and then to buy time to give the banks a chance to implement security measures. No-one ever did discover what happened to the lost discs. For all anyone knew, they might still be lost in the mail, being used by an unobservant official as a drinks coaster or in the hands of a criminal gang.

  Finally, on Tuesday, 20 November, Darling publicly admitted to the loss in a statement to incredulous MPs. When a government is in trouble, the House of Commons often generates farmyard noises: exaggerated groans, stagey shouts, pantomime jeers. Much of this is synthetic sound and fury. Only a few days earlier, the latest bungle at the Home Office was exposed when it was revealed that 5,000 illegal immigrants had been cleared to work in security. One illegal was employed on the front desk at the Home Office. Even more astonishingly, another was given a job guarding the Prime Minister’s car. Yet MPs were by now so inured to examples of administrative incompetence that there was no significant clamour for the resignation of the Home Secretary.

  The lost discs were of a special category of calamity. The entire child benefit database had been placed on two unencrypted discs which a junior official then popped into a courier’s envelope. The package was neither recorded nor registered. Genuine gasps of amazement greeted Darling when he admitted that Revenue and Customs had perpetrated the ‘huge, massive, unforgivable mistake’ of losing the confidential data of more than 9 million adults and 15 million children. ‘It includes child benefit numbers, national insurance numbers and, where relevant, bank and building society account details,’ said a visibly shaken Darling as Brown sat slumped behind him, face like thunder.5 Haunted by the run on the Northern Rock, the Chancellor pleaded with those affected not to stampede to banks to close their accounts. This blunder was at the same time childish in its simplicity and gigantic in its scale. Every voter could instantly grasp what had been done wrong and how it might impact on millions of them. Sir Paul Gray, the Chairman of HMRC, took some of the heat off the Chancellor when he accepted responsibility for the scandal and resigned. Yet such a fundamental breach of faith between state and citizen was bound to reflect on the Government. Opposition MPs were quick to point accusing fingers at Brown’s decision as Chancellor to order staff reductions after creating a monster department by merging Customs and Excise with the Inland Revenue. The press of all political complexions was lacerating. ‘Mind-blowing incompetence’, shrieked the Daily Mail.6 ‘25 million victims’, screamed the Mirror.7

  Senior Cabinet members had no doubt that it was ‘a serious debacle’.8 Neither the Prime Minister nor the Chancellor was personally culpable for the loss of the discs, but it hurt the reputations of both. For the Chancellor, it came on top of continuing trouble at Northern Rock. Darling, whose pre-Treasury reputation was as a dull but safe minister, appeared to have become a magnet for trouble.

  As for the Prime Minister, it accelerated the change in his media image from Capability Brown into Calamity Brown. To shudders inside Number 10, Steve Bell of the Guardian started to draw Brown in the grey underpants that the cartoonist had first used to exemplify the haplessness of John Major.

  Some of the many enemies that Brown had made over the years began to break cover. Two days after the revelation of the discs disaster, five former Chiefs of the Defence Staff launched a co-ordinated attack on him for underfunding the armed forces and treating them with ‘contempt’ when men and women were being killed and maimed in Iraq and Afghanistan.9 The Conservatives were enjoyably astonished to find that a poll deficit to Labour of ten points had flipped into a Tory lead of ten points in just eight weeks. ‘I keep pinching myself to make sure I am not dreaming,’ chuckled one senior Tory.10

  Troubles were hitting the Government ‘one after another after another’. Jack Straw ‘got a sense that Gordon thought: “What else is going to come through the window?” ’11

  On the last weekend of November, the Prime Minister was flying back from a summit of the Commonwealth Heads of Government in Uganda. As his plane cruised above Africa, he sat in the first-class cabin, his usual black marker pen in hand, working on the speech he was going to deliver to the CBI on Monday. His officials briefed the accompanying media that it would scotch suggestions that Brown was a reincarnation of Major and his Government was lurching from blunder to scandal. Yet even before his plane touched down in Britain, the Prime Minister was aware of another torrent of trouble. On Saturday night he was alerted to an exclusive in the Mail on Sunday about David Abrahams, a Newcastle property developer.12 This maverick figure was simultaneously ubiquitous and mysterious, a strange hybrid of Zelig and Walter Mitty. Abrahams had given Labour in excess of £630,000 over four years and was the party’s third-most generous donor since Gordon Brown became leader. Abrahams had often used intermediaries to channel large sums to the party. His conduits included such unlikely high rollers as a Tyneside jobbing builder who drove a battered transit van and lived in an ex-council house. Other proxies were a secretary in Gateshead and a Toryvoting lollipop lady. Transparency was supposed to be the founding principle of the laws on party funding enacted by Labour. Concealment of a donor’s identity was banned in Section 54 of the 2000 Act, while Section 56 requires parties to take all reasonable steps to establish the bona fides of their donors.13 Abrahams threatened to sue anyone who linked his masked donations with a controversial planning application for a business park in prime land off the A1. He said: ‘Any suggestion that I have made donations in exchange for favours is false and malicious.’14 He also contended that he wasn’t aware that he was at risk of breaking the law by using intermediaries. ‘Mistakes were made, of course, and no-one is denying that,’ he later wrote. ‘I donated money to the Labour Party through intermediaries because of a desire for anonymity, not secrecy.’15

  His ‘anonymity’ was now blown as the exposure of these donations dominated the front pages and news bulletins. The Electoral Commission launched inquiries into potential breaches of the law. It also became apparent that the millionaire was not always shy of the limelight. Abrahams was a well-known figure in Labour circles in the north-east and had once entertained ambitions to be a parliamentary candidate. He had met Gordon Brown and enjoyed a front-row seat for Tony Blair’s farewell in Sedgefield earlier in the year.

  Labour had hoped that it had heard the last of donations scandals with Blair’s departure, only for another one to erupt less than six months into Brown’s premiership. Some of Blair’s friends derived bitter satisfaction from the spectacle of Brown, the self-styled possessor of a ‘moral compass’ who ad
vertised himself as so ethically superior to his predecessor, floundering in the mire. The early rhetoric of Brown’s premiership came back to bite him. By claiming to be a sweeping new broom who would clean up and restore trust in politics, he had issued an invitation to the media to take any transgression and turn it into an enormous scandal that proved he hadn’t kept the promise. ‘It’s a nightmare,’ said one of Brown’s closest ministerial allies. ‘People are very edgy because they don’t know what else is going to come out.’16 Brown called a news conference at Number 10 with the principal aim of establishing his own innocence and casting the blame on to colleagues. ‘I knew nothing of these donations,’ he declared. ‘I had no knowledge until Saturday night, neither did I have any knowledge of this practice.’17 It was true that Brown was hyper-sensitive on the whole issue of donations. The party’s fund-raisers complained that they were finding it more difficult to attract money because the Prime Minister was reluctant to make himself available to potential donors or to entertain them at Number 10 and Chequers.18 In his desperation not to be tainted by the Abrahams Affair, Brown overruled party officials by insisting that all the money be returned immediately. He told reporters that these things ‘were going on for some time’.19 In other words: blame Blair.

  Harriet Harman was a recipient – an unknowing and innocent one, she said – of an Abrahams donation to her deputy leadership campaign. Her partner, Jack Dromey, was the party Treasurer who did not know the source of the money for the second scandal in a row, even when some of the cash was banked by the campaign team of his wife. It took seven attempts by reporters at the Number 10 news conference to get the Prime Minister to say that he still had confidence in Harman. She reacted by letting it be known that she would not go down without a fight. Dromey angrily claimed that there had been ‘complete concealment’ and described the use of conduits as ‘absolutely wrong’.20 Her camp then revealed that the idea of getting a donation from one of Abrahams’s intermediaries had come from within Brown’s campaign team. The murk got even thicker when it emerged that Jon Mendelsohn, Brown’s own election fund-raiser, had discovered the hidden payments after taking up his job in September and discussed his concerns about it with the party’s General Secretary.21

  Brown was frantic to put as much distance between himself and the donations as he possibly could. In an endeavour to make himself sound the most outraged of all, he declared: ‘What happened over these donations that had not been lawfully declared is completely unacceptable.’22

  By making that pronouncement, Brown was covering his own back at the price of making a nonsense of his own internal inquiry. That statement also ensured that an investigation would have to be conducted by the police and left the party’s General Secretary to swing in the wind. Peter Watt resigned. On his later account, Brown had promised to ‘look after’ Watt when the General Secretary took the fall only then to betray him twenty-four hours later at the news conference. ‘There was huge pressure for someone to take the rap. I knew that elected politicians were going to dive for cover. There was no way Gordon or Harriet were going to stand by me. They made a choice that I was expendable,’ said Watt. ‘Publicly, Gordon talks about values and his moral compass, but actually the way he conducts himself behind the scenes is anything but that – it’s brutal.’23

  The Metropolitan Police launched another long investigation into Labour donations. In a further echo of the Blair years, yet again it did not result in any prosecutions. Peter Hain was forced to resign as Work and Pensions Secretary in January – the first Cabinet casualty of Brown’s premiership – when the late declaration of £100,000 in donations to his failed deputy leadership campaign was referred to the police. No charges followed. Hain was later cleared by Parliament of any ‘intention to deceive’, but rebuked for a ‘serious and substantial’ breach of the rules.24

  The damage of the Abrahams Affair was done in the court of public opinion. Jack Straw described it as ‘mind-blowing’. Alan Johnson called it ‘a lousy and very depressing week for the party’.25 Once again, Labour looked as though it had an appallingly casual attitude towards laws passed by its own Government. Voters were left with the impression that the whole business of party fund-raising was by definition sleazy.

  Gordon Brown’s morale sank lower. He privately groaned: ‘For this to happen to me, it eats my soul.’26 Number 10 lived on shredded nerves. ‘It was one damn thing after another,’ says one senior aide. ‘We just didn’t know what was going to hit us next.’27 Visitors to Downing Street found the staff in ‘shellshock’ and asking: ‘How can this have happened to us? We’re still the same people who were very popular two months ago and now we’re besieged.’28

  It accelerated the profound psychological descent of Brown since the election debacle. One of his most senior and longest serving aides says: ‘He closed in on himself. He went to ground. He was a lonely figure.’29 His inner demons gnawed at him with the fear that perhaps he was not up to being Prime Minister. ‘It’s my fault, it’s all my fault,’ he self-flagellated in front of some intimates.30 He was consumed with remorse and guilt for the mistakes he made over the phantom election. The fit of paranoia with Gavin Kelly over the data discs was just one of many manifestations of his raging moods. He became even more temperamental about his coverage in the media, obsessively monitoring the press headlines and the prominence he was getting in television news bulletins. If his speeches and initiatives were ignored or got less coverage than David Cameron, he would ‘lash out’ at those around him.31

  A dark pall descended on the whole building. An official noted that ‘he surrounded himself with people who amplified his weaknesses rather than compensated for them. There was no camaraderie. It was a quite depressive, introverted, dysfunctional coterie.’32 Long-standing members of his inner circle had endured Brown’s temper for years and accepted the tantrums as part of the price of working for a complex man they admired. One veteran of his court says: ‘Over the years, I’ve had all sorts of things thrown at me – newspapers, pens, Coke cans.’33 This sort of behaviour was a shock to staff at Number 10 who had been accustomed to the courteous manners of Tony Blair and John Major. ‘Gordon’s mood was absolutely black the whole time. He was in a permanent state of rage,’ observes one civil servant. ‘Staff were afraid of him because he was always shouting at people, being unpleasant, constantly blaming people for things going wrong. He never had a nice word to say to anybody.’34 Another official agrees: ‘He was astonishingly rude to people.’35 Civil servants were shocked by his habit of abruptly getting up and leaving meetings when officials were in the middle of speaking. He became notorious within the building for shouting at the duty clerks, bawling at the superbly professional staff who manned the Number 10 switchboard and blowing up at the affectionately regarded ‘Garden Girls’, so called because the room from which they provide Downing Street’s secretarial services overlooks the garden. When one of the secretaries was not typing fast enough for an angrily impatient Prime Minister, he turfed the stunned garden girl out of her chair and took over the keyboard himself.36 Word of these incidents reached the alarmed ears of the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Gus O’Donnell, who was becoming increasingly anxious about the Prime Minister’s behaviour.37 The Cabinet Secretary was so concerned about the garden girl episode that he made his own inquiries into it.38

  Though the worst excesses of the Prime Minister’s temper were kept hidden, it was inevitable that some accounts began to filter out across Whitehall and then into the media, which reported stories about mobile phones being hurled in fury and the furniture being kicked.

  One civil servant who applied for a position at Number 10 was asked at the interview whether he could cope with ‘extreme verbal abuse’ and violence done to objects. The civil servant was so scared by the description of what it could be like to work for the Prime Minister that he withdrew his application.39

  Wednesday was an especially hazardous day to be working in close proximity to the Prime Minister. He was getting pulped
at the dispatch box by David Cameron with a regularity which Labour MPs found excruciating to watch.

  ‘For ten years, you plotted and schemed to have this job – and for what?’ the Leader of the Opposition ridiculed him during one typical encounter that autumn. ‘No conviction, just calculation; no vision, just vacuum. How long are we going to have to wait before the past makes way for the future?’

  Brown responded by complaining that the Tory leader had once promised ‘an end to the Punch and Judy show’.40 So Cameron had. But it sounded painfully lame for Brown to protest about being punched too hard. He became increasingly obsessive about preparing for these clashes. The prep team would meet at Number 10 on Tuesday evening for a preliminary discussion about what might come up at PMQs and how he should handle it. They then reconvened on Wednesday morning. In rehearsals, Ed Miliband or Ian Austin usually played the part of David Cameron. This was not a role to which either was really suited because they were not temperamentally equipped to be brutal with the boss.41 Geoff Hoon, the Chief Whip, was another regular member of the prep team for PMQs. One Wednesday morning, having had an early engagement that day, Hoon arrived at Number 10 at breakfast-time. Entering the prep room, he expected to have a long wait for the others only to find that Gordon Brown was already there, sitting alone, scribbling notes with his black marker pen, worrying away about how he was going to handle that day’s high noon with Cameron.42

  Brown had been ‘ferociously hard-working’ since childhood, says his friend Murray Elder.43 The eternal scholarship boy responded to adversity by thinking that he would find the answer to his problems by labouring even harder. He went to bed later and got up earlier, working even more fiercely in the belief that this was the way to get on top of things. He did not grasp that what he most needed to do was to learn to delegate and to prioritise. Sarah Brown despaired that her husband could not be persuaded to stop. ‘I used to believe Gordon when he said he wasn’t a workaholic,’ Sarah sighed over a lunch with one friend. ‘I don’t now.’44