The End of the Party

by Andrew Rawnsley

  Some of his friends wondered how long Brown, a proud, clever and sensitive man, could endure being routinely roasted in the media as a semi-autistic, mendacious liability. ‘Why are they saying these things about me? Why are they doing this to me?’ the Prime Minister beseeched one aide.48 To a senior Scottish Labour MP, he confided: ‘So much has been thrown at me, I can’t go any lower.’49 Sarah Brown told a friend that she was ‘very worried’ about her husband. A sympathetic Labour peer thought he was ‘very crushed’. Brown could sense that even his closest allies were distancing themselves, even Ed Balls. ‘It was not exactly what was said, it was what wasn’t said. Ed wasn’t responding instantly any more when Gordon needed help.’50

  On another account, Ed Balls, Douglas Alexander and Ed Miliband ‘all decided that they were too busy running their departments to spend as much time as they used to with Gordon’.51

  He became even more paranoid that the world was conspiring against him. The Chinese province of Sichuan was hit by a devastating earthquake. Brown was taken to the Chinese embassy in London to sign the book of condolence for the victims. David Cameron also turned up. As Brown was driven away from the embassy, he seethed to his Private Secretary that Cameron’s presence was a deliberate attempt to undermine his status as Prime Minister. Tom Fletcher tried to calm him down: ‘It’s a cock-up.’ ‘No,’ said Brown. ‘It’s a conspiracy. I know about these things. It’s always a conspiracy.’ ‘Come on, this is ridiculous,’ responded Fletcher. ‘If it’s a conspiracy, who’s in it?’ Brown said: ‘The Chinese. The Tories. And the Foreign Office.’

  There was an embarrassing scene at the summer barbecue in the back garden of Number 10 for those who worked there. It was customary for the Prime Minister to make a speech to the staff. This required no fancy oratory; just a few words of thanks. When Brown proved reluctant, Jeremy Heywood endeavoured to persuade him. ‘It would be really good if you could do it,’ the senior official came close to begging the Prime Minister. ‘It would mean a lot to people.’ Brown shook his head: ‘I can’t do it. I can’t do it.’52

  Brown’s exhaustion and sense of isolation made his temper even shorter and blacker. Officials became more apprehensive than ever about delivering unwelcome news for fear of the reaction. One aide with bad tidings decided to break it to the boss when they were travelling in the back of the Prime Minister’s Daimler. As was customary, the aide took the rear seat behind the driver. Brown sat behind the protection officer. The cream upholstery of the seat back in front of Brown was flecked with black marks. When having a meltdown, the Prime Minister would habitually stab the seat back with his black marker pen. On this occasion, what the aide had to tell the Prime Minister provoked a more scary response than the stabbing of the pen. Face like thunder, Brown reacted by swinging back an arm and clenching his fist. The aide cowered back, fearing that the Prime Minister was about to hit him in the face. Brown crashed his fist into the back of the passenger seat in front of him. The protection officer flinched. This was happening more and more often. The Prime Minister’s compulsion to vent his temper by hitting the upholstery became so regular that sitting in front of him was regarded as the worst duty among the protection squad.53

  Immunity from Brown’s rages was not conferred on officials just because they had been long-time and loyal servants. If anything, he seemed to think he could be more abusive to those who were closest to him. He was probably right: they were the most likely to bury the darker truths about his behaviour. Stewart Wood – a senior adviser on Northern Ireland and foreign affairs and a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford – had served Brown intelligently and faithfully for years. In advance of the June meeting of the European Council, Wood arranged a lunchtime reception at Number 10 for the ambassadors representing the European Union. Brown joined them only for the coffee. Wood was waiting at the door of the first-floor Pillared Room, where the reception was being held, when Brown came up the stairs. The Prime Minister was in an especially evil mood. When Wood tried to brief him on which of the ambassadors he should speak to, Brown blew up in a staggering rage. ‘Why have I got to meet these fucking people?’ he yelled at his adviser. ‘Why are you making me meet these fucking people? I don’t want to meet these fucking people!’ Brown roughly shoved his adviser aside. He stormed into the room, leaving behind a shaken and shocked Wood.

  Several of Brown’s senior staff collectively decided they weren’t going to put up with this sort of conduct and told the Prime Minister to his face that he couldn’t go on behaving so badly.54

  Sir Gus O’Donnell became ‘very worried’ about Brown’s treatment of staff at Number 10. If it led to a formal complaint against the Prime Minister that would be both unprecedented and disastrous. The Cabinet Secretary tried to calm down frightened duty clerks, badly treated phone operators and other bruised staff by telling them ‘don’t take it personally’. O’Donnell eventually felt compelled to directly confront the Prime Minister and gave him a stern ‘pep talk’ about his conduct towards the staff. ‘This is no way to get things done,’ he told Brown and warned him that he had to moderate his behaviour.55 This seemed to have some effect. Brown was more careful in future about whom he made a victim of his temper.

  In July, Jeremy Heywood was on his way out of Number 10 for lunch when he was waylaid by Gordon Brown. The Prime Minister asked his Permanent Secretary whom he was seeing. A slightly sheepish Heywood confessed that he was having lunch with Peter Mandelson, the man with whom Brown had conducted an epic feud for more than a decade. To the civil servant’s surprise, Brown responded: ‘Can I come too?’ Heywood politely demurred. Brown then said: ‘Can you ask Peter to come and see me after lunch?’

  Unknown to the world, and to most of those who worked in Number 10, the Prime Minister had acquired a new and secret adviser whose identity would have been astonishing to everyone at Westminster. Not only was Peter Mandelson back at court, but he had returned to offer counsel and support to Gordon Brown. For fourteen years they had engaged in fratricidal struggle alternated with frozen silences. Their enmity – Mandelson called it an ‘uncivil war’ – was so deep for so long that it was the unanimous view that the relationship was irretrievably poisoned.56 Just before Brown became Prime Minister, relations fell to a new nadir after Mandelson’s radio interview in which he declared that he would not seek a second term as a European Commissioner in order to deny Brown the pleasure of sacking him. No-one had found it more difficult to reconcile themselves to Brown being premier than Mandelson. He didn’t care who knew it. He was a guest at a dinner party in the autumn of 2007 thrown at the Holland Park home of Roland Rudd, a City PR executive. Mandelson did not mask his disdain for Brown in front of other guests, who included David Owen, the former leader of the SDP; Matthew d’Ancona, the editor of the Tory-leaning Spectator magazine; and Nick Clegg, the future leader of the Lib Dems, and his wife. ‘He was openly slagging off Brown,’ says one at the table.57 Even at the height of Brown’s early honeymoon, when just about everyone else was at his feet, Mandelson rained on the emperor’s parade at the 2007 conference by publicly expressing scepticism about Brown’s speech.

  Paradoxically, the first intimations that their past affection might be rekindled came once Brown’s premiership ran into serious trouble. In February 2008, Mandelson gave a lecture in Cambridge defending globalisation against its critics.58 This attracted Brown’s attention and agreement. ‘He’s got it,’ Brown remarked to one surprised aide.59 In March, Brown went to Brussels for a meeting with the man he had for so long regarded as a sworn enemy. Officials doubted that the encounter would last its allocated twenty minutes. After an initially frigid start, the permafrost began to melt. When they discussed the gathering storm in the international economy, Mandelson turned on his charm. ‘It’s a good thing you’re there,’ he remarked, saying that Brown had the requisite experience and expertise for this moment. ‘The country is going to turn to you.’60 Officials were amazed when the two men chatted amicably for more than an hour – and about
much more than trade – while the British ambassador kicked his heels waiting to get back the use of his office.61

  That conversation, the longest and friendliest that they had enjoyed in years, initiated a rediscovery of the things that they had once admired in each other. They began to remember that once upon a time, before the great rupture after the death of John Smith, they had been closer to each other than either had been to Tony Blair. Now that Blair was gone from Number 10, the relationship was also no longer complicated by being a three-sided marriage.

  The thaw was helped along by go-betweens. Stewart Wood, for a long time the only one of Brown’s officials whom the Prime Minister would allow to have contact with Mandelson, invited him to dinner at Wood’s London home. Wood’s wife was Brazilian, which helped make the occasion warm for Mandelson’s partner, Reinaldo. Shriti Vadera was also at the dinner. She and Mandelson, both being sharp, gossipy and internationally minded, enjoyed each other’s company. The reconciliation was also aided by a mutual foe when Brown and Mandelson fought on the same side against Nicolas Sarkozy in the world trade negotiations.

  This rapprochement was further spurred by mutual desperation. Mandelson’s time as Trade Commissioner was winding down to retirement in 2009. With little prospect of a world trade deal, it looked as though his term in Brussels would end on a note of failure. The intellectual challenge and the perks of being a Commissioner had never fully reconciled him to his separation from British politics. His yearning to return was an ache more sharp because there seemed to be no chance of ever satisfying the desire. He told Philip Gould that he woke up every morning with ‘an almost physical pain’ because of his detachment from Westminster.62

  At his best, Mandelson had a most acute grasp of political strategy and communication, a talent sorely absent in Brown’s Number 10. A flailing and isolated Prime Minister needed those skills. The two men began to have increasingly frequent conversations on the phone in which Brown would seek advice from Mandelson about speeches and float policy ideas with him. One aide who overheard Brown’s end of a call recounts: ‘Gordon would ask: “What should we do about today’s Sun?” and “What should I say on tomorrow’s Today programme?” and “What should we do about this problem?” He was talking to Peter like he used to talk to Ed Balls.’63

  As far as the outside world knew, they were still enemies. In an interview, Mandelson made remarks which the media interpreted as another attack on Brown for failing to fashion a coherent and consistent message. ‘Jumping on passing bandwagons, hobby horses or marginal issues is not the way, in my view, for any government to present itself if it is going to sustain its support in the country.’64 Journalists, being in ignorance of their gradual and clandestine rapprochement, universally interpreted this as another shot of the uncivil war.

  Yet Brown did not take offence to this intervention as once he would have. Mandelson was saying in public what he was already telling Brown in private but more starkly. By the summer, Mandelson was slipping secretly into Number 10 or up to Chequers almost every weekend that he was in Britain.

  *

  There were still many edges to this emotionally tangled relationship. Mandelson’s first Cabinet career was destroyed by Brown’s acolytes when they leaked the Geoffrey Robinson home loan.65 Mandelson could not resist poking a finger into this deep scar. During one of their tête-à-têtes, he interrupted a discussion about a speech: ‘Gordon, we haven’t talked about what you let your people do to me.’ Brown looked down into his papers and grunted: ‘Yes, well, that should never have happened.’ After an awkward pause, Brown then said: ‘Now, what about the speech?’66

  Brown occasionally teased Mandelson with the thought that he might one day return to British politics, but the other man supposed that this was just joshing. His assumption that he could never return to the Cabinet liberated him to be increasingly blunt with Brown about the terrible state of his premiership. By July, Labour’s poll rating had descended from dire to diabolical. For fear of another petrol tax revolt, the Government committed another panicky U-turn by suspending indefinitely the scheduled 2p rise in fuel duty. Brown could sense the hostility towards him in the Cabinet when he could not even win their confidence about his economic messages. ‘Gordon started to think: “If I can’t convince them on the economy, that’s it.” ’67 The media turned feverish with speculation that senior members of the Cabinet were steeling themselves to sack the Prime Minister. David Marshall, the MP for Glasgow East, resigned – officially on the grounds of ill health. This triggered a by-election that Brown was so frantic to avoid that he rang Marshall ‘about fifteen times’ to plead with him not to quit.68

  At one meeting that summer, Mandelson issued Brown with a dreadful warning. You are in peril, he said, of going down in history as one of the worst post-war Prime Ministers. ‘If you don’t change, you are going to lose Number 10. You’ll be out by October or November.’ This was brutally accurate and franker than anyone else around Brown would dare to be. Yet Brown did not react angrily. He instead responded by nodding sadly and giving the other man a pitiful look. ‘I know. I know I’m going to lose it,’ the Prime Minister said to the man who had once been his closest ally, then his bitterest enemy and was now his secret confidant. ‘Will you help me?’69

  33. Assassins in the Shadows

  ‘Tis now the very witching time of night,’ declaimed David Tennant in the title role of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Hamlet, ‘when churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out.’1 Gordon and Sarah Brown were in the audience at the Courtyard Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, but both were having difficulty focusing on the performance when that night’s by-election could be so critical to the Prime Minister’s fate. With them were Paul Dacre of the Daily Mail and his wife. Brown was anxious that he was losing the editor who had recently dictated an editorial which heaped praise on the ‘formidable’ David Cameron and talked of the Government ‘destroying itself’.2 The theatre party also included Stephen Carter, the Number 10 Director of Strategy, and his wife. When they had seen the last act of the tragedy at Elsinore, Carter turned his mobile phone to show the text on it to Sarah Brown. He asked: ‘Do you want to tell him or shall I?’3

  The text warned that Labour had lost what was supposed to be its third-safest seat in Scotland. A Labour majority of 13,507 in Glasgow East was overturned by the Scottish Nationalists on a swing of 23 per cent. The triumphant SNP candidate, a charisma-free local councillor transformed into a swaggering conqueror for the night, proclaimed: ‘This victory is not just a political earthquake, it is off the Richter scale.’4 It was hard to argue with that.

  Under Brown, Labour had lost elections in suburban London, working-class Crewe and Nantwich, leafy Henley and one of the most deprived areas of Glasgow. One former member of the Cabinet grimly observed: ‘We have gone from being the One Nation party to being the No Nation party.’5 If Labour was losing in metropolitan England, southern England, northern England and the west of Scotland, where precisely were they going to be able to win with Brown? Gordon Prentice, the MP for Pendle, became one of the first Labour backbenchers to openly call for the Prime Minister to resign in the Government’s ‘best interests’ on the grounds that he lacked the skill ‘to persuade and enthuse’ voters.6 The MP spoke for more than himself.

  The day after that terrible defeat, Brown was in Warwick to address party activists, union leaders, MPs and ministers at the party’s national policy forum. He dealt with the by-election disaster by pretending that it hadn’t happened. He offered his audience a hollow recital of tired phrases and uninspiring statistics with which they were wearily familiar. One member of the Cabinet in the audience groaned to another that the Prime Minister appeared to be ‘in total denial’.7 Brown delivered a second address to the forum later that day. Some of his colleagues expected him to use this occasion, from which reporters were excluded, to talk frankly about their plight and outline a plan for recovery. To the horror of Cabinet ministers present, he instead deliver
ed almost exactly the same speech ‘except that it was worse’.8 Another minister present says: ‘He sent them away more depressed than when they arrived.’9

  The following day, Number 10 was visited by Barack Obama, not yet the Democratic nominee for the White House, but already hugely popular in Europe after his dazzling arrival in the political firmament. Asked about his host’s plight, Obama tactfully remarked: ‘You’re always more popular before you’re in charge.’10 He very obviously hedged his bets by also meeting David Cameron. The effect of the visit was not to sprinkle Brown with some secondhand Obama stardust. It drew an unflattering contrast between the idolising reception for the American and the public alienation from Britain’s leader.

  ‘This was absolutely rock bottom,’ believed one Cabinet minister. ‘None of us thought it could go on.’11 The Blairites could not resist saying privately that ‘we told you so, we warned that he would be a car crash of a Prime Minister.’12 Even some of Brown’s closest allies in the Cabinet feared it was near terminal: ‘There’s only so long that we can say that we need time to turn things around before people say we’ve had enough time.’13 Peter Mandelson, watching from the wings, thought that ‘New Labour was close to a nervous breakdown.’14

  The principal cause of it was the failings of Brown. What to do about him was the subject of ‘constant conversations’ among members of the Cabinet over June and July.15 David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, and his friend the Work and Pensions Secretary, James Purnell, were agreed that the Prime Minister had to be replaced if Labour was to have any chance of recovering. At least a third of the Cabinet took the same view, but these ministers were as yet unsure how his removal could be brought about without destroying the Government.16 The younger ministers were looking for a lead from older hands. The two key figures were Jack Straw and Geoff Hoon. Straw was the senior member of the Cabinet and had been Brown’s campaign manager for the leadership. Hoon was the Chief Whip. It would be very hard for Brown to resist if they headed a delegation of senior ministers telling him that he had to resign. Straw was regularly mentioned in speculative press pieces as the figure to lead ‘the men in grey suits’. He became so alarmed by this that he stopped wearing any of his grey suits.17 The hidden truth was that he was preparing to take action. The Justice Secretary was in constant clandestine communication with those plotting to topple Brown. One of those plotters was Charles Clarke. The former Home Secretary now had ample vindication for his predictions that Brown would turn out to be a dreadful Prime Minister. Shortly before the summer recess, Clarke and Straw had lunch together. As they sat down, Clarke expected the two men to dance around the issue. Clarke was taken by surprise when Straw talked immediately and directly about Brown. The Justice Secretary said in explicit terms that Brown had to go and declared that ‘something will be done.’ Straw also gave a very strong indication that a coup was in preparation when he talked to Frank Field, another veteran opponent of the Prime Minister who was more or less openly calling for him to quit. The Justice Secretary invited Field to come talk to him. The notional subject of their meeting – the criminal injuries compensation arrangements – was soon abandoned for a discussion about the Prime Minister. Straw spent much of the conversation trying to find out whether Field would back the Justice Secretary for the top job. Field, just like Clarke, left the meeting convinced that Straw was ready to move. Stephen Byers, the Blairite former Cabinet minister who tried to organise a leadership challenge against Brown in 2007, was a very active plotter. In the weeks between the Crewe and Nantwich by-election disaster and the summer recess, Byers had no fewer than six face-to-face meetings with Straw. The last of their discussions took place in Straw’s office at the Commons the day before the loss of Glasgow East. Straw indicated that he and Hoon would take action before the party conference. He suggested to Byers that they might also have the support of Alistair Darling, who was ‘very pissed off with the way he was being treated by Gordon’. The embryonic plan was to remove Brown at the beginning of September so that they could use the party conference at the end of the month as a showcase for potential successors.18