The other Brown was still the journalist he had been as a young man. He never grew out of many of the compulsions of that profession. One of his senior staff found that ‘the first conversation every morning with Gordon was about what was in the newspapers.’10 He would participate in the 7.30 a.m. ‘morning call’ when the Number 10 spin doctors discussed media handling. On flights abroad, he would sit in the first-class cabin obsessively asking aides: ‘What’s the story? What’s the story?’ During a trip to the Vatican, he badgered his staff so repetitively that one aide eventually groaned to another: ‘Prime Minister meets Pope. Why doesn’t someone tell him that’s the fucking story?’11 The neurotic journalist in Brown was addicted to headline-chasing through the production of instant and often artificial initiatives. In the space of just five days, he popped up in the Sun and on American Idol to promise that he would wipe out malaria; signed up to a Daily Mail campaign against supermarket plastic bags; told football crowds they should be nicer to referees; and talked about constitutional change and Aids and Britishness. As his difficulties deepened, he became more compulsive. It generated an atmosphere of ‘randomness … initiatives going off everywhere’.12 There was a lot of noise, but little signal.
Voters tend to be most impressed by practical promises to enhance their lives delivered over a realistic timescale. New Labour always had a vice for being either frenetically short-term or unbelievably long-term. Brown exemplified that as he swung between announcing five-year plans that were too grandiose to be credible and mayfly initiatives that were here today and forgotten tomorrow.
This handicap was married with the continuing inability to create an orderly regime at Number 10. By the turn of the year, Brown had grasped that it was ‘pretty essential’ to try to sort it out.13 He now saw that the small shell of former Treasury apparatchiks whom he had brought with him to Number 10 were not up to the task of running Government. In January, he promoted Jeremy Heywood, the former Principal Private Secretary to Blair, who returned to Downing Street after a stint in the private sector with Morgan Stanley, to the newly created position of Permanent Secretary at Number 10. This cut across the traditional responsibilities of the Cabinet Secretary, but Sir Gus O’Donnell did not resist the innovation. He and Heywood were friends. O’Donnell had once rented out his house to the other man. The Cabinet Secretary was hugely relieved that someone was taking on the challenge of trying to create some order out of the chaos at Number 10.14 Heywood took over ‘running everything that was not political’.15 A highly able and workaholic official, he had some limited success trying to focus Brown, but his efforts would always be compromised so long as the Prime Minister remained pathologically determined to try to run every bit of Government himself.
Less fortunate was Stephen Carter, a talented recruit from the private sector in his mid-forties who was also imported into Number 10 in the New Year. Carter’s impressive résumé included being a former Chief Executive of OFCOM and of the Brunswick PR agency. The Prime Minister was so desperate to get him on board that he rang him on Christmas Eve to offer him the job of Director of Strategy and then rang him again on Boxing Day. They had met just twice, at a wedding and at a party. This was a fragile basis for a relationship, especially with someone like Brown. ‘He needed Gordon’s trust and that is very hard to win.’16 Carter came to Number 10 mainly on the recommendation of Sarah Brown, who had heard good things about him from Alan Parker.
The arrival of Carter also meant the departure of Tom Scholar, whom Brown had persuaded to return from a plum posting in Washington as Britain’s representative at the World Bank to become his short-lived Chief of Staff. Brown was going to ring Scholar on his wedding day to tell him that he was losing his job. When the Prime Minister was warned that it was Scholar’s wedding day, he was still going to ring him.17
‘Gordon is like a lighthouse,’ says one Number 10 official. ‘The light is on you at full intensity for a while and then his attention sweeps elsewhere and you are plunged into darkness.’18 To begin with, Brown was deferentially interested in Carter’s advice. The new Director of Strategy was horrified by what he found at Number 10. Three essential policy positions were vacant, the private office was under-resourced, the speech-writing capability was considered inadequate, and there was no serious effort on the web or other digital communications. Within a month, he had given Brown a list of twenty-five key deficiencies that had to be tackled.
Things began to go wrong for Carter when he tried to create order among the political staff. He sent an e-mail to Brown recommending that some of them be removed, not knowing that e-mails to the Prime Minister were automatically copied in to others at Number 10, including some of those that Carter was suggesting for the sack.19
He tried to prune the Prime Minister’s schedule and curb Brown’s impulse to unleash barrages of noisy but ineffective announcements. ‘Stephen would badger away at Gordon on presentational things – to take his jacket off, to use more approachable, more human language – things the rest of us had given up on,’ says one senior Brown aide.20 Carter was among those who believed, correctly, that one of the reasons the public were resistant to ‘bonding’ with Brown was because he lacked a proper ‘contract’ with voters because he had never been elected in his own right.21 Carter never succeeded in getting Brown to accept that he had to radically change his style, tone and way of running things. ‘It was an impossible job spec,’ says one Brown aide sympathetic to Carter. The Director of Strategy grew to dread having to present Brown with polling and focus group research about the low regard the voters had for him.
A senior civil servant thought it was ‘ill-fated from the start’.22 Carter was not what Brown supposed him to be. The Prime Minister was really looking for his own Alastair Campbell. ‘Gordon thought he was getting a comms person, but Stephen was a management person.’23
He was undermined from the start by the old Brown clique. ‘He bumped into Damian McBride, who saw him as a threat,’ says another of Brown’s aides. ‘It was a turf thing.’24 A senior civil servant saw that ‘from the word go, he and Damian were at each other’s throats.’25 There was a stream of stories from within Number 10 which were usually coloured in a way designed to discredit Carter in the eyes of Brown and Labour MPs. At one meeting he was reported to have asked: ‘Who is JP?’ – a leak designed to show his ignorance of the Labour Party, where everyone knew that JP stood for John Prescott.
‘Stephen was a really nice bloke,’ comments one civil servant. ‘He just didn’t know what he was letting himself in for. They made a decision to fuck this guy. By April, it was transparent to everyone in the building that he was dead.’26 In the eyes of another witness, Carter ‘had a bloody awful time’.27 One member of the Cabinet saw the Carter experience as characteristic of Brown’s approach to relationships. ‘Gordon falls in love with people, calls them up the whole time at all hours. Then he decides he’s disappointed with them and freezes them out.’28 Carter left Number 10 that autumn with a peerage and was briefly berthed as a minister before leaving Government altogether the year after.
Carter was one of many advisers who tried to furnish Brown with a theme for his premiership. ‘There was an endless quest for Gordon’s purpose.’29 For a short while, policies were packaged around the slogan ‘On Your Side’. The Prime Minister had another brief enthusiasm for ‘The Opportunity Revolution’. For a month or so, ‘the flavour of the month’ was Lucy Parker, sister of Alan and friend of Sarah Brown. She came up with ‘The Talent Agenda’. Instructions went out that everything had to be branded under that heading. ‘Every department was told to shape its policies to “talent”. Then overnight it was dropped.’30
One very senior civil servant sighs: ‘In the Treasury, he did have a strategic narrative, but he never found one as Prime Minister. All sorts of people tried to give him one. Number 10 tried. The Cabinet Office tried. Whatever strategic narratives he’s been given, he’s never been happy with it.’31
A lengthy e-mail dropped into t
he Prime Minister’s inbox that spring with advice on how he might recapture the initiative, fashion a theme for the Government and take on the Tories. ‘This is absolutely on the money,’ Stephen Carter remarked to Jeremy Heywood, both of whom automatically received copies of Brown’s e-mails. ‘Who is it from?’ ‘It’s Tony Blair,’ explained Heywood.32 The unravelling of Brown’s premiership fulfilled all Blair’s worst fears about the man who had levered him out. Yet the former Prime Minister was magnanimously anxious to help.
Part of the explanation for the internal contradictions and cramping caution of Brown was that he could not decide what he wanted to preserve about the Blair decade and what he wanted to repudiate. ‘Gordon never resolved in his own mind the tension between continuity and change.’33 A test case was security and civil liberties. Brown began his premiership with a strong signal that he intended to rebuild bridges with liberal Britain by softening the authoritarianism of his predecessor. In the speech ‘On Liberty’, he contended that it was the ‘animating force’ and ‘founding value of our country’ and declared that all future policies would be subject to a ‘liberty test’.34
He proposed to MPs ‘a new constitutional settlement that entrusts more power to Parliament and the British people’.35 He talked about introducing a Bill of Rights and also a Civil Service Act to entrench Whitehall’s neutrality. His long-time friend and ally Michael Wills worked enthusiastically on the constitutional project, but it was progressively neutered. Some reforms were delivered, such as the formal enshrinement of Parliament’s right to a vote before the country went to war. He surrendered the prime ministerial prerogative to appoint bishops, the Poet Laureate and the Astronomer-General, but these were not powers he was interested in wielding anyway. They were more acts of symbolism than of substance.
He told his first Cabinet that policy would in future be made through the machinery of Government and Parliament, not from the sofa in Number 10 and through the media, a promise to return to collective decision-making that pleased the mandarins and won admiring early press notices. That was a pledge not kept either. Civil servants who were initially ‘really pleased and very hopeful’ about the commitments to ‘a return to Cabinet decision-making and an end to sofa Government’ were left feeling let down and ‘tremendously marginalised’.36 Brown was, at heart, a constitutional conservative, as was Jack Straw, the lead minister. It was two years into his premiership, much too late to do anything substantial, before a constitutional Bill was finally produced. This contained a mishmash of tinkering reforms which were a thin shadow of the original bold plans floated in the first flush of his premiership, when he talked so much about restoring public trust. Introducing an elected House of Lords was kicked into touch, substantial reform to party funding ran into the sands, there was no attempt to revive local government, introduce fixed-term parliaments or lower the voting age. Even the plan to make the Attorney-General independent of government, which had been included in the draft Bill, was dropped. Whitehall was successfully resistant to a Bill of Rights. ‘It ran into a vicious attack from hardline officials at the Home Office’, who found allies in other departments which were ‘very anxious about the Bill of Rights because it fetters executive action and entrenches the protection of the individual against the state’.37 A Cabinet revolt against Straw killed the idea. Brown had opposed ID cards as Chancellor. Now, thinking to project himself as a security Prime Minister, he supported them.
A big choice, and one that might also define how he related to his predecessor, was the balance between preserving civil liberties and taking measures against terrorism. Early on, he sounded keen to fashion a fresh and less divisive approach. ‘I think over the next few years, we will have to deal with it in new ways,’ he told me in an interview. ‘It is not simply a military, intelligence and policing problem, we’re going to have to win the battle of hearts and minds.’38 He reached out to the Opposition parties and to Shami Chakrabati, the charismatic and effective head of Liberty. She found him ‘incredibly generous with his time’, willing to listen, ‘charming, polite and thoughtful’ and apparently sincere when he talked about getting to a ‘consensus’ about how to legislate against terror.39 She thought ‘we were still talking’ when the Government abruptly abandoned the search for consensus and announced legislation to greatly extend the amount of time that terror suspects could be held without charge. One of Brown’s motives was to show that he could win a battle which had defeated Blair.40 To Labour MPs like Jon Cruddas, it looked like ‘an exercise in political positioning’ rather than a stance of conviction and was designed to build ‘a political hedge fund against future terrorist attacks’.41
Extending pre-charge detention to forty-two days, less than the ninety days attempted by Blair but still multiples longer than anywhere else in the Western world, aroused the opposition of both Charlie Falconer and Peter Goldsmith, Justice Secretary and Attorney-General until June 2007. They were joined by a Who’s Who of senior figures from the judiciary. An especially significant opponent was the Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Ken Macdonald. It was hard for the Government to make a case for taking powers that the chief prosecutor declared to be an unnecessary violation of civil liberties. Alan West, whom Brown personally recruited as Security Minister, caused a flurry by going on radio to admit: ‘I still need to be fully convinced that we absolutely need more than twenty-eight days and I also need to be convinced what’s the best way of doing that.’42 An hour later, after a meeting with Brown at Number 10, the former admiral did a hard tack and came back into line, saying: ‘Maybe I didn’t choose my words well.’ He covered his climb-down by calling himself ‘a simple sailor’.43 The former Chief of Defence Intelligence was far from simple, but he had been politically naïve. ‘The lesson I learnt is that one can’t be quite as open as that.’44
The crucial vote on the report stage of the legislation came on Wednesday, 11 June, in the wake of the debacle over 10p tax and the rout at Crewe and Nantwich. Brown was frantic to avoid yet another authority-shredding defeat. Amidst feverish horse-trading and arm-twisting, Labour MPs reported that they were offered all manner of sweeteners in return for their votes. A Labour MP who had not been spoken to by Brown for twenty years was treated to a twenty-minute conversation with a Prime Minister desperate for his vote. One Labour MP who was still recovering from surgery was pushed into the division lobby in a wheelchair. Another who was fighting cancer was asked to leave his hospital bed. Even then, the Government only just squeaked a victory and owed it to nine votes from MPs of the Democratic Unionist Party. There was a temporary distraction when David Davis, condemning what he called the chicanery in the Commons, resigned as Shadow Home Secretary to trigger a protest by-election. His gesture was drained of potency when Labour made the smart, albeit cowardly, decision not to put up a candidate.
The Government’s debilitatingly narrow win on forty-two days proved to be pointless. Cathy Ashton, Labour’s leader in the Lords, warned that the legislation would be shredded by peers and it duly was. A hostile speech by Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former head of MI5, dealt the coup de grâce. It was eventually pulled altogether that autumn under the cover of the financial crisis. As for the grand promises of constitutional renewal, they gathered dust.
On Friday, 27 June, Brown had his first anniversary in Number 10, an event marked not by celebration but by further humiliation. He woke up to the result of the Henley by-election in which Labour finished an awful fifth, beaten not just by the Tories and Lib Dems, but also by the Greens and the BNP. He spent much of the rest of the day trying to persuade Wendy Alexander not to resign as Labour leader in Scotland after she was threatened with suspension from the Edinburgh Parliament for twenty-four hours over campaign donations. She quit the next day.
All this deepened the darkness encroaching over his premiership. There were cries of betrayal from the left-wingers who had foolishly imagined that Brown would give them socialism in one country. Liberals found his premiership no less centralising and a
uthoritarian, and in some ways more so, than his predecessor’s. That did not mean that there was contentment among the Blairites. They didn’t like Brown’s backpedalling on public service reform and complained that he was even more useless as a strategist and communicator than they had feared. The Tories were almost Oedipal in their awe for Blair even when he had his back to the wall. They were becoming contemptuously confident against Brown. Critics from across the spectrum were united in saying that his premiership lacked shape, vision and any palpable purpose other than its own survival. The hero of the summer of 2007 descended into the zero of the summer of 2008. He knew that the worst wounds on his premiership had not been inflicted by the Conservatives or the media, but by himself.
That summer, Brown descended into a terrible place, politically, psychologically and physically. ‘He looked awful,’ says a senior member of his staff. ‘People at Number 10 were pinning their hopes on the holiday, but the fear was that he wouldn’t have a proper holiday.’45 A retired senior civil servant came to visit former colleagues at Downing Street. He was spotted by the Prime Minister who, desperate for someone to talk to, dragged him into his office for a chat. ‘He looked tired in his bones,’ the former mandarin told friends. ‘It was that sort of tiredness that a week’s sleep won’t cure.’46 A senior politician had a meeting with the Prime Minister shortly before the recess and was shocked by what he saw. ‘He looked absolutely terrible. The shoulders were hunched. The flesh was literally dripping off his face. I wanted to give him a hug.’47
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