Gordon Brown was a highly volatile man, more so than his predecessor, who usually kept his emotions tightly disciplined. Some colleagues who found Blair to be chilly or always acting a role even in private thought Brown the warmer and more authentic personality. The private Brown could be thoughtful, clever, funny, engaging and self-deprecating when he was in the right mood and in company that made him comfortable. He was capable of being incredibly solicitous towards colleagues at times of family emergency, illness or bereavement. He was also a man who could be seized by titanic rages, or be consumed by awful self-pity and break down in tears. But put him in front of a camera and he struggled to do human.
In public, he was a constipated performer who found it beyond him to display any emotional range to the voters. Kathy Lette, a friend of Sarah Brown, found ‘a Grand Canyonesque chasm between his public and private persona. In private life, he’s witty and warm and engaging. He can seem very austere in his public persona and it’s a shame.’50 His fellow Scot Alistair Darling thought it came down to the fact that ‘basically he’s quite shy.’51 Others believed that Brown felt ‘spooked’ by ‘following on from one of the most successful political campaigners anywhere in the world’.52
Attempts to humanise his public image nearly always came off as comically inauthentic. So did efforts to suggest that he was trendier than he was. When he remarked that ‘the Arctic Monkeys really wake you up in the morning’53 there was widespread ridicule of the notion that he leapt out of bed to the sound of the noisy Sheffield band. In a subsequent interview, he could not name a single one of their tracks.54 As Matthew Taylor observes: ‘I’m afraid the great British public tend to think this is all a bit sad.’55 Another prompt for mockery was his odd pronunciations, especially of English words. ‘Born Mouth’ was how he rendered the city in Dorset and ‘York-shyer’ how he referred to the northern county. Some in Number 10’s dysfunctional communications operation thought the answer to his poor public image was to put the Prime Minister on more chat shows. One of the maddest ideas to circulate in Number 10 was to book him on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, a disaster that very nearly happened until Damian McBride intervened to put a stop to it.56 In a clunking response to rising grocery bills, Brown suggested voters should toast their stale bread and take other money-saving measures. This invited additional derision because the publication of these good housekeeping tips coincided with his attendance at a G8 Summit in Japan where the leaders dined on an eight-course meal which began with caviar and climaxed with a ‘fantasy dessert’. When out amongst voters, Brown often performed like an automaton who had been programmed to repeat the same joke and a script from which he never deviated. One minister who accompanied him on a visit to a children’s centre watched wincing as Brown moved from room to room ‘saying the same things in the same order in each room. It was robotic.’57 His lack of an ability to speak fluent human or form easy bonds with other people was a serious handicap. Modern politics demands from leaders the ability to make – or at least fake – an emotional connection with voters. Tony Blair had that capacity to excess, which made it even more starkly obvious that Gordon Brown could not do it.
A disadvantage at any time, this deficit was more acute when the country was feeling the economic pinch. In interviews and speeches, Brown banged on monotonously about making ‘the right long-term decisions’. The language of a desiccated calculating machine conveyed no sense that he empathised with voters’ immediate and everyday struggles to pay their mortgages and grocery bills. He often sounded impatient and irritated with the anxieties of the electorate. David Cameron, the son of a stockbroker married to the daughter of a baronet, lived a life remote from the experiences of most ordinary Britons. Yet he bested Brown when it came to projecting concern for their daily struggles. Cameron responded to voter angst about rising fuel prices by talking about how much it cost to fill up the car; Brown by theorising on the workings of international oil markets. Jon Cruddas accurately observed that Cameron showed more ‘emotional literacy’ than his own leader. He regretted that Labour MPs ‘find it quite difficult to say “What is the story?” and if we can’t do it, we shouldn’t be thinking that the voters can supply that for us.’58
This inability to communicate was calamitously combined with arrogance and indecision in the mismanagement of the 10p tax issue. By late April, the rebellion among Labour MPs was gathering weight and pace. A growing number of backbenchers were voicing support for an amendment to the Finance Bill drawn up by Frank Field to provide compensation for the 5.3 million people estimated to be worse off as a result of the abolition of the 10p rate. The prospect of losing the Budget caused high alarm in both Downing Street and the Treasury. Darling would have to resign if he was defeated on the Finance Bill.
On Sunday, 20 April, the Chancellor appeared on television. Caught between an irresistibly mutinous Labour Party and an immovably stubborn Prime Minister, Darling was obliged to insist that it would be ‘totally irresponsible’ to ‘unravel or rewrite’ the Budget and could only offer the vague promise that he would do something for the losers in the future.59 Brown still seemed to be in denial. He did not want to rewrite a Budget. He did not want to borrow any more money, a worry that had evaporated when the financial crisis hit later in the year. He did not want to face up to his own mistake. He spent his trip to America railing to his entourage that all the trouble was the work of Field – ‘he’s always been against me’ – and a handful of other MPs. It was also Darling’s fault, Brown complained bitterly, for not explaining the situation properly.60 He met Labour’s national executive that weekend. ‘No-one will be worse off,’ he insisted again to protesting members of the NEC and challenged them to ‘send me pay slips’ to show otherwise.61 Number 10 and the whips tried to frighten Labour MPs with the idea that a defeat on the Finance Bill would be so devastating that it would bring down the Government.62
Monday morning dawned to feverish predictions that Brown could be out of Number 10 within a week and more accurate suggestions that the issue was doing huge damage to Labour in the campaign for the local elections. Even senior ministers were referring to it privately as ‘our poll tax’.63 Reality finally began to penetrate the Prime Minister. His diary was hastily rearranged so that he could speak to that night’s meeting of the parliamentary party. He tried to undo the damage of his disastrous performance three weeks before. ‘I get it,’ he told them and promised there would be a review before the autumn which would ‘lead to action’. ‘But,’ he came close to begging, ‘we can’t have a Budget defeated.’64
It was too late. Semi-penitence and half promises of action later were not enough to calm the tempest. By Tuesday morning, forty Labour MPs, enough to deprive the Government of its majority, had signed up overnight to Frank Field’s amendment demanding the retention of the 10p band until the Government produced compensation measures. Geoff Hoon and Nick Brown warned the Prime Minister that they were heading for a terrible defeat.65
Sue Nye phoned Field to organise a meeting in the Prime Minister’s suite at the Commons. It contains an imitation version of the Cabinet table. When Field came in, Brown was at the table, hunched in the Prime Minister’s chair, looking dishevelled and surrounded by piles of paper with scribbled calculations. ‘We could change tax credits,’ said Brown. He frantically wrote some numbers with his black marker pen and shoved them across. ‘People don’t want a tax credit,’ replied Field. ‘What will be enough for them?’ asked Brown desperately.
Jeremy Heywood at Number 10 then invited Field over to try to find a face-saving formula for Brown. Field and Greg Pope, the other principal leader of the revolt, also met Alistair Darling, who ‘knew it was a mega balls-up and understood it all perfectly’ but was ‘never disloyal despite the way Brown treated him’.66
With the rebel numbers continuing to mount, the capitulation finally came on Wednesday, 23 April, when Brown sanctioned Darling to announce a compensation package. Field withdrew his amendment after the concessions were rushed o
ut before noon to try to rescue Brown from a humiliation at Prime Minister’s Questions. It did not spare him from a brutal assault by David Cameron. ‘Isn’t it the case that the Labour Party have finally worked out that they have a loser, not a leader? Has the Prime Minister got any idea what a pathetic figure he cuts today?’67 Brown privately complained that Cameron was a ‘public school bully’.68 The Tory leader was pursuing a deliberate strategy of trying to destroy Brown’s character in the eyes of the voters just as Labour had pilloried John Major when they pitilessly ridiculed him as weak in the run-up to the 1997 election. Nick Clegg joined in: ‘You used to be a man of principle, but if you can’t deliver on poverty, what on earth is the point of this increasingly pointless Prime Minister?’69
After this battering, Brown summoned television Political Editors to Number 10 for a series of hastily arranged interviews to try to shore up his authority. ‘I don’t think I’ve been pushed about at all,’ he insisted to Nick Robinson of the BBC.70 Yet the facts spoke for themselves. He had only conducted a disorderly retreat when faced with an imminent and catastrophic defeat in the Commons. Just weeks after insisting that nobody would lose out, and forty-eight hours after maintaining that an immediate compensation package was neither necessary nor possible, he had been forced to cave in to the weight of opposition on his backbenches. There was nothing elegant about the retreat. Everyone could hear the squeal of the Prime Minister’s wheels and smell the burnt rubber left along Downing Street. The Daily Mail, which Brown had worked so hard to cultivate, described his U-turn as ‘desperate’, ‘humiliating’ and ‘screeching’.71 The Times called it ‘The humbling of a Prime Minister’.72
The concessions were too piecemeal, grudging and last minute to save Labour from an electoral mauling just a week later. Millions of Labour’s natural supporters had found they were out of pocket on the eve of the May elections. The Labour MP Janet Anderson told colleagues that she had been chased down the street by a furious voter.
To compound the damage, the issue ignited great anger among the party’s activists, the very people Labour needed to be on the knocker getting out the vote. ‘The 10p tax issue was toxic. In my local general committee, people were outraged by it,’ says Peter Hain. ‘There were people who showed me their payslips. What they said was: “We don’t expect this from a Labour Government. This is the sort of thing the Tories do.” ’73
Though the impact was felt only by a minority of voters, it became a catalyst for the wider discontent with the Government and disaffection from the Prime Minister. The 10p issue had turned difficult elections for Labour into dreadful ones. Brown had ‘thrown the entire Labour machine’ into the contest for London. ‘I wanted for nothing,’ says Ken Livingstone. ‘Agents were brought in from all over Britain.’74 To no avail. His eight-year reign in the capital was terminated by Boris Johnson as voters preferred the Old Etonian’s ebullient inexperience to the Labour machine. In the local elections elsewhere in the country, the Conservatives secured 44 per cent of the vote while Labour on just 24 per cent came third behind the Liberal Democrats. This was Labour’s worst performance in a national election in four decades. Brown had not reversed the post-Iraq decline under Blair. He had made it considerably worse. After less than a year at Number 10, he was plumbing depths not visited by Blair even at his lowest. ‘The voters are no longer just moaning from the back of the car,’ observed one member of the Cabinet. ‘They are angrily getting out of the car and walking off elsewhere.’75 The wilful refusal to concede over 10p tax until it was too late was widely and correctly blamed for the massacre. ‘That was the real killer,’ says the defeated Livingstone.76 Nick Brown, close ally of the Prime Minister, agrees that it was ‘the single most important factor’ in the defeats of that May. ‘There was just no escaping it.’77
The writing was on the wall for many Labour MPs. Derek Wyatt, the MP for Sittingbourne and Sheppey in Kent, wobbling on a majority of just seventy-nine, helpfully called it a ‘John Major moment’ and said: ‘Gordon has committed spectacular own-goals and the public is punishing him for it.’78
There was a devastating disintegration of Brown’s standing with the public. Only one in five of voters now thought he was doing a good job. His reputation had collapsed on every front. He was rated worse than David Cameron on every key leadership quality, including competence, decisiveness, fairness, likeability, intelligence, being in touch with ordinary people, trustworthiness and strength.79
Brown became consumed by desperation to avoid another humiliation in the looming by-election in Crewe and Nantwich, which had turned into a mini-referendum on the tax issue. On Tuesday, 13 May, Alistair Darling introduced an emergency Budget just ten weeks after his original one. The Chancellor declared that he would spend £2.7 billion, money that the Government previously insisted it could not find, to raise personal tax allowances. The package compensated many, though not all, of the losers while also handing extra money to lots of more affluent taxpayers. This completed the trajectory from total denial to absolute capitulation. The Government was now giving an across-the-board tax cut, but got no credit for it because of the appalling handling of the issue. It utterly failed as a by-election bribe.
New Labour was once the cleverest and slickest electioneering machine in Europe. It fought a crudely misconceived parody of a campaign in Crewe and Nantwich. Labour activists dressed in top hats and tails tried to bash the Conservative candidate as a ‘Tory toff’. Edward Timpson’s family had made its fortune from the unaristocratic business of repairing shoes. It was Labour which parachuted in a political heiress. Tamsin Dunwoody was the granddaughter of a Labour baroness and the daughter of the late MP Gwyneth. Labour campaigners had apparently not noticed that the Bentley luxury car factory was in the constituency. Quite a lot of voters in Crewe and Nantwich depended on selling ‘toff’ limousines for their livelihood. By the end of the campaign, it was clear that it was not David Cameron whom voters regarded as out of touch with ordinary people. It was Gordon Brown whom they viewed as detached from reality. Tellingly, his photo did not feature on Labour’s campaign material in Crewe while it was plastered all over Tory leaflets. It is always a very bad sign when a party leader is regarded as their greatest propaganda asset by his opponents.
He did not stay up to wait for the votes to be counted. At around two in the morning of Friday, 23 May, the returning officer declared that a Labour majority of 7,078 had been converted into a Conservative one of 7,860 on a high turn-out. This was a better result than the Tories had dared hope for and a worse one than Labour at its most pessimistic had feared. Voters whose families were Labour for generations deserted the party. Crewe and Nantwich was the first time that the Tories had directly taken a seat from Labour at a by-election since Ilford North in 1978. The 18 per cent swing matched those achieved at by-elections by Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher on their way to Number 10. Voters there, as in the local elections earlier in the month, did not spray their dissent among protest parties. They switched to the Tories, which put momentum behind a growing assumption that the Conservatives would form the next Government.
On Friday morning, Brown ordered an emergency conference call of members of the Cabinet in an attempt to steady nerves. He then gave a round of interviews which had his own staff despairing because they were so poor. Within Number 10 ‘morale hit the floor.’80 The questions about his style, character and judgement began to metastasise into questions about whether he should be leader at all.
32. An Enemy in Need
As the Queen and the President of France took their places at the centre of the top table, someone was missing from the state banquet at Windsor Castle. ‘Has the Prime Minister got lost?’ asked a bemused monarch as she and Princess Anne looked around for him. ‘That’s Gordon,’ Nicolas Sarkozy smirked to his wife, Carla. The Queen remarked: ‘He disappeared the wrong way at the crucial moment.’1 This was in danger of being Gordon Brown’s epitaph: the Prime Minister who got lost.
There were unresolved tens
ions at the heart of his premiership from the moment that he stepped into Number 10. One was within his own character. Gordon Brown was a cross between nervy journalist and nerdy academic. A news obsessive and a lofty visionary uneasily coexisted in the same head. Irwin Stelzer found him an ‘extraordinarily intelligent man’ who was ‘better read than anybody I’ve ever met’.2 Kathy Lette thought similarly: ‘It’s like he’s been hooked up intravenously to an encyclopedia.’3 Alan West was rather awed: ‘His depth of knowledge is phenomenal.’4 A senior member of his staff reported: ‘Every morning we get these e-mails from Mount Olympus about fantastically nerdy policy points.’5 He made self-consciously intellectual speeches which did not wear his learning lightly. In a long discourse ‘On Liberty’, Brown referenced John Stuart Mill, Milton, Locke, Orwell, Churchill, Bolingbroke, Voltaire, de Tocqueville, Coke, Macaulay, Himmelfarb, Green, Hobson, Hobhouse and Tawney.6 It was rare for a modern leader to mention one philosopher or historian in a speech, never mind more than a dozen. ‘He wrote it all himself,’ said a friend believably.7 This was Dr Brown, the Prime Minister with a Ph.D. This Brown wanted to read every book, absorb every research paper and talk to every expert about an issue that caught his attention. When he engaged with a subject that animated him, his depth of understanding and mastery of the detail could be hugely impressive.
That April, George Clooney was a guest at Number 10. Just about all the staff found an excuse to be present for the movie star’s arrival. The cleaners in their pinnies lined up outside the Cabinet Room ‘like a guard of honour’.8 Brown was oblivious to the aphrodisiacal effect his visitor was having on everyone else. ‘Gordon wanted to talk to him about Darfur,’ says one of his aides. ‘Everyone else wanted to goggle at Clooney.’9 This was the high-minded Brown, the leader who had global visions.
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