Members of the Cabinet began to worry that ‘he is going to make himself ill if he carries on like this.’45 Jacqui Smith told him to his face that it was a mistake not to have a summer holiday and ‘he ought to back off and have a bit of a rest.’46
Brown found being Prime Minister much harder than either he or his acolytes had imagined. It is a short walk from Number 11 to Number 10, but a giant leap for one man. ‘There was a belief that as soon as Tony went everything would be fine’, which ‘led to there not being as much preparation as could have been done and not enough recognition of the sheer challenge of being Prime Minister’.47 The Brown team had been adept at destabilising guerrilla warfare against Blair. When they were the insurgents, they could pick the issues where they wanted a fight and ignore others. This left them underequipped for the very different demands of being responsible for an entire government and having to battle on many fronts at once.
As Chancellor, Brown had often been able to do his Macavity trick of disappearing in a crisis. As Prime Minister, he could no longer play the mysterious cat. There is no hiding place at Number 10. Jack Straw, a Cabinet colleague broadly sympathetic to Brown at this stage, thought that he was still ‘feeling his way into the job’ as he discovered that it was ‘very different’ to and ‘much more multi-faceted’ than being Chancellor.48 He was on a steep learning curve. But since experience was supposed to be the reason he got the job, inexperience was not an alibi Brown could ever use. He sounded surprised to make the discovery that ‘hundreds of things pass your desk every week’.49 He did not excel at multi-tasking. His preference and his forte were to concentrate on one big thing at a time. He had largely been able to do that at the Treasury, where he could focus on the four or five major events of a Chancellor’s year. Prime Ministers can get hit by four or five major events in a month, even a week. ‘As Prime Minister, you are bombarded with things, everything happens in real time,’ says one Downing Street official who closely observed both Blair and Brown.50 Jack Straw agrees: ‘As Prime Minister, you have crises coming out of a clear blue sky to a degree you don’t as Chancellor.’51 Jon Cruddas, who worked at Number 10 before he became an MP, believes Brown underestimated ‘the sheer velocity of decision-making’ required of a Prime Minister.52
Torrential volumes of business flow through Downing Street, much of it demanding instant attention. Civil servants at the Treasury had adapted to and covered for Brown’s chaotic and intermittently intense way of making decisions. Officials at Number 10 and the Cabinet Office were at a loss how to deal with his working habits. Confronted with difficult decisions, one senior civil servant found: ‘He just delays and delays, thinking he will get a better set of options later. But quite often the options just get worse.’53
This was exacerbated because Brown was so power-hugging. Geoff Hoon summarises it well: ‘One of the great ironies of Tony and Gordon is that both of them didn’t have any time for ministers. The difference is that Tony broadly let you get on with it. He wasn’t much interested unless something went wrong. In contrast, Gordon wants to interfere in everything. He’s temperamentally incapable of delegating responsibility. So he drives himself demented.’54
That autumn, one of Brown’s officials told me: ‘You can get nothing agreed unless you can get thirty seconds in front of Gordon.’55 Even a Prime Minister as fanatically workaholic as Brown had only so many thirty seconds in his day. He could not hope to rule successfully by micro-managing every last detail of government. ‘There’s no number of hours you can work to solve the problems that come on a Prime Minister’s desk,’ notes Irwin Stelzer. ‘Getting into the office at five o’clock in the morning ain’t going to do it. There was a floundering.’56
His chronic aversion to delegating was deadly when combined with being slow to make decisions himself. ‘Gordon is cautious by nature,’ says Alistair Darling.57 In the words of Harriet Harman: ‘Gordon likes to think his way round all the problems.’58 Murray Elder agrees: ‘He wants a lot of information before he makes decisions and he wants to know every angle.’59 As a result, he had a tendency to analyse to the point of paralysis.
‘Gordon is somebody who is cautious in his decision-making,’ concurs Jack Straw. ‘Tony was a much more instinctive decision-maker. With Tony you had the reverse problem that you’d find there was a decision and then he had to think of the arguments in favour of it.’60
Civil servants noted the contrast in prime ministerial style and put it this way to the veteran Whitehall watcher Sue Cameron:
When John Major was in Number 10 and there was a big decision to be taken, he would order papers and he would read through them, often quite late into the night. The next morning, he’d make a decision. When Blair was in Number 10, he’d tell his civil servants to read the papers and give him a shortlist of options and in the morning he’d make a decision. With Gordon, he sends for the papers, he reads them late into the night and then the next morning he sends for more papers.61
That was compounded by the serious flaws in the structure and staffing of Number 10. No-one around Brown had enough of his trust or sufficient clout to force him to make decisions or to take them for him. ‘It was a set-up that reinforced Gordon’s weaknesses.’62
People were also too scared to give him advice. ‘His nearest and dearest all seemed to be physically intimidated by him,’ says one civil servant who observed him with Spencer Livermore, Ed Miliband and Damian McBride. ‘They were very tense around him. They were very reluctant to tell him when he was wrong. None of his people liked to contradict him.’63
One of his closest allies in the Cabinet believes that Brown had ‘got into bad habits’ in his final years at the Treasury.64 Murray Elder agrees that ‘one of the difficulties was that on so many subjects people would behave in the same way as they had done when he was Chancellor and just walk in and speak to him. Actually, you need more structure than that.’65 One of Brown’s most loyal supporters in the Cabinet described the state of Number 10 as ‘chaos’.66 Nor was he good at masking it from opponents, who could tell that he was ‘just overwhelmed by the pressures of being Prime Minister’.67
Even the basic housekeeping wasn’t being done. Letters from important people, including MPs, went unanswered. An aide to one senior minister lamented that when they called Number 10 ‘no-one answers the phone.’68 There were cases of foreign embassies not being told whether a visiting leader was going to be granted a meeting with the Prime Minister and dates being muddled up.69 The French Prime Minister offered to come over for the opening of the splendid new Eurotunnel station at St Pancras in November. The Foreign Office was excited, but could not get Brown interested and there was a gratuitous snub to the ‘very offended’ French.70
Routine decisions took weeks to process. Cabinet ministers and their senior officials began to speak with extraordinary vehemence about what one called ‘the sheer dysfunctionality’ of Number 10.71 They did not know the half of it. On the account of one civil servant: ‘However chaotic it looked from the outside, it was a billion times worse inside.’72
The building was in a state of near anarchy. ‘Gordon was wandering around Number 10, talking to people, e-mailing people, getting lots of little bits of advice from different people. What he wasn’t getting was that advice synthesised by somebody whose responsibility was to think strategically.’73
What most shocked those who had admired him as Chancellor was his failure to convey any clear sense of purpose for his Government. His first Queen’s Speech was widely regarded, on both right and left, as a damp squib. John Kampfner, the editor of the New Statesman, lamented: ‘There is no sense at all that Gordon Brown knows the extent to which he really wishes to change Britain and if so where.’74 One senior civil servant confided: ‘At least with Blair, I always knew what the story was. With Brown, I don’t. I don’t know where we stand.’75
It was always a Blairite critique of Brown that he was a poor communicator. In his first phase at Number 10, his leaden style appealed to some as
a refreshing change from the flashy thespianism of Tony Blair. As time went on, it became increasingly evident that Brown lacked the range of presentational skills required to be a successful modern leader. He seemed incapable of telling the electorate a persuasive story.
That was linked to his propensity to freeze when confronted with a dilemma. Labour’s refusal to make good on the manifesto promise of a referendum on the European treaty was exciting the predictable animosity of the phobic press. The Sun and the Daily Mail, who scared Brown even more than they had Blair before him, were especially vitriolic. Brown’s response was not to take on the argument, but to hope that it would go away if he kept his head down for long enough. Jim Murphy, the able Europe Minister, was instructed to take the legislation ratifying the treaty through Parliament by making the proceedings as tedious as possible. David Miliband attempted to take on the opponents with a speech in favour of the EU only for Brown to order the Foreign Secretary to delete the most positive passages. Number 10 then briefed the phobic press that it had cut off the legs of the Foreign Secretary. This was the sort of gratuitous aggression that poisoned Brown’s relations with colleagues.
The Portuguese laid on a grand signing ceremony in Lisbon in December. Brown agonised over whether he should attend. His presence would give the phobic press further ammunition, but to stay away would offend European allies. He resolved his dilemma by trying to split the difference. He did fly to Lisbon, but timed his arrival late so that he missed the ceremony and the celebratory leaders’ lunch. This only succeeded in infuriating everybody. His European peer group were annoyed, while he attracted the scorn of both pro-Europeans and anti-Europeans in Britain.
During his long agitation to take over at Number 10, Brown privately attacked Blair and Mandelson for practising ‘triangulation’, the political tactic pioneered by Bill Clinton of trying to be popular by occupying a position equidistant between your party’s position and that of its opponents. It was a recipe, he used to argue, for being pushed ever rightwards and meant that Labour could never build a long-term consensus around its true values.76 Yet Brown now habitually practised the politics of splitting the difference and did it with such lack of finesse that he made himself popular with no-one.
He made a similar error a few months later when confronted with a dilemma about the Olympics. In the build-up to the Beijing Games, the famous torch was making its way around the world to the accompaniment of protests against China’s atrocious record on human rights. The torch was bodyguarded by a phalanx of Chinese security men in tracksuits. This created an especially delicate situation for the British Government because London was the host of the subsequent Olympics. Confusing signals came out of Number 10 about whether Brown planned to attend the games in Beijing or boycott them. When the torch reached London, the question was whether it should be allowed up Downing Street for a photo opportunity. Advised that a refusal would cause ructions with the Chinese, Brown let it come to his front door. The mistake was to permit the shell-suited squad of Chinese heavies through the gates as well. He stood by the torch, but not touching it, surrounded on his own street by the Chinese goons. Says one of the ministers involved on the day: ‘It was total disaster.’77
These presentational pratfalls were the symptoms of something more profound. The Government lacked a coherent programme and a compelling narrative. One member of the Cabinet lamented: ‘The dots aren’t being joined up.’78 Others feared that the problem was even more fundamental: there were no dots to join. ‘He hasn’t got a plan,’ Tony Blair sighed to one of his staff shortly before he handed over the premiership.79 The absence of a plan was becoming stark. One of Brown’s senior aides later confessed: ‘We had a strategy for the transition, but not a strategy for government.’80 Another long-time associate and admirer was driven to the sad conclusion that ‘maybe Gordon used up all his ideas when he was at the Treasury.’81
It became a constant theme of conversations with Cabinet ministers of all varieties – Brownite, Blairite and neither – that the Government was adrift. This failure to establish a clear sense of direction made them more vulnerable to both opponents and bolts from the blue. ‘What disappointed me and I think disappointed a lot of people was that when he’d actually got to the top there wasn’t a great deal of steam left,’ comments Vince Cable, the Deputy Leader of the Lib Dems. ‘He seemed to have run out of ideas, seemed to have run out of big projects and that by itself makes you at the mercy of events.’82 Cable had known Brown for longer than most of the Prime Minister’s colleagues in the Cabinet. He was a fellow Labour councillor in Glasgow in the 1970s and a contributor to The Red Papers for Scotland, the first political tract that Brown published as a young man. Brown regarded Cable with more respect than most opponents. So he felt it particularly sharply when the Lib Dem produced the most piercing jibe about the tragic decay of his premiership.
Standing in as leader of his party – the Lib Dems were in the throes of yet another leadership contest – Cable rose at Prime Minister’s Questions: ‘The House has noted the Prime Minister’s remarkable transformation in the last few weeks from Stalin to Mr Bean.’83 The rest was lost in howls of laughter. Members of the Cabinet, lined up along the frontbench beside Brown, struggled not to join the merriment. Hazel Blears found it ‘a pretty good joke’.84 Jack Straw says: ‘It was a good moment for Vince Cable, it was a very good line.’ The Justice Secretary only managed to suppress guffaws because ‘I’ve got used to not showing my emotions at Prime Minister’s Questions.’85 Several members of the Cabinet came up to the Lib Dem afterwards. They did not upbraid him for being so rude at the expense of their leader, but told him ‘they’d rather enjoyed the joke.’86
Vince Cable was the temporary head of a party which had gone through three leaders in less than two years. It was a new nadir when Gordon Brown could be tormented by the mockery of a Lib Dem.
At the end of the year, the Prime Minister retreated to his home in Fife to nurse his wounds in the company of some of his oldest friends. His summer honeymoon now seemed to belong to a long-gone era. It had turned into an awful autumn and then a wicked winter. He was stripped of the aura of invincibility which secured him an uncontested coronation and then cloaked him for the early weeks in Number 10. The multiple accidents and errors which began with the election debacle reminded people that this was a rusty government presided over by a flawed man who had been at the centre of power for more than a decade. Labour’s position was now as troubled, if not more so, as it was in the last days of Tony Blair. Gordon Brown was a scarred and often ridiculed Prime Minister.
Hogmanay is an important night for most Scots, but there was little air of celebration at the Prime Minister’s home in North Queensferry. Brown was not up at midnight to see in the New Year. He took himself off to bed at ten.87
31. The Penny Drops
Whenever the Prime Minister was anxious, one of the first people to get a call was his namesake and veteran of the long march to Number 10, Nick Brown. The Deputy Chief Whip was on holiday in Cuba on Sunday, 17 February, when the phone rang.
‘We’re going to nationalise Northern Rock,’ the Prime Minister confided to this old ally, a Newcastle MP with a keen constituency interest in the fate of the stricken Geordie bank. His friend in Havana saw the funny side. ‘Gordon, I’m in Cuba,’ laughed Nick Brown. ‘Here, all the banks are nationalised.’ The Prime Minister growled down the line: ‘It’s only temporary.’1
Gordon Brown had never envisaged himself as a political cousin of Fidel Castro. Apprehensive of any act which might be interpreted as a lurch leftwards, he spent months searching for an alternative to nationalising the wrecked mortgage bank. ‘The fear was that this would be tantamount to Gordon Brown hitting the rewind button to circa 1983.’2
The Rock caused many weeks of fright within Government after it was bailed out with an emergency loan from the Bank of England the previous autumn.3 Despite the Government guarantees to depositors, savers continued to flee the bank whenever it made
alarming headlines. In November 2007, there was another run on the Rock, this time a ‘silent run’ when customers stampeded to remove their money via the internet.4 At a withdrawal rate of £200 million a day, the bank would have no money by the end of the year. The share price whipsawed violently as hedge funds bought in and out with a view to making a quick killing. Trading was suspended three times. On one especially nerve-jangling day, Alistair Darling came into his office in the morning to be greeted by a deputation of senior civil servants. ‘How bad is it?’ asked the Chancellor. ‘Pretty bad,’ responded John Kingman. ‘We’re not standing on the window ledge, but we’re keeping the window open just in case.’5 By year’s end, the Treasury’s exposure was escalating towards £50 billion and the Rock had become a deadweight on the Government. Senior figures at the Bank of England were growing ‘pretty cranky’ and began to brief that ‘there was a kind of paralysis at the Government level in handling this crisis.’6 John McFall, the Labour chairman of the Treasury select committee, concluded that ‘a number of weeks were wasted’ in a futile search for a private sector rescue when it was already clear ‘there wasn’t a deal on the table.’7 The vacillating Tories never produced a plausible solution, but that didn’t stop them flaying the Government for failing to bring the saga to a conclusion. The Lib Dems and some Labour MPs said the Government should just get on and nationalise the bank. It was not just on the left that public ownership was seen as the clean solution to the most ignominious episode in modern British banking history. Sir Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary who had previously been Permanent Secretary at the Treasury, shared the view that they should go for public ownership.8 Even such an unrevolutionary organ as the Economist, where they worshipped Adam Smith not Karl Marx, advocated nationalisation.
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