The End of the Party

by Andrew Rawnsley

  As Straw plotted in the shadows, the first public strike was launched by David Miliband at the end of July. The Foreign Secretary set out his own recovery plan for Labour in a piece for the Guardian calling for ‘a radical new phase’. It was a manqué manifesto for the leadership. Not once in the course of a 975-word article did he mention the name of the Prime Minister. Presented as a critique of David Cameron, much of it could be read, as it was intended to be read, as an attack on the failings of Gordon Brown. ‘I disagreed with Margaret Thatcher, but at least it was clear what she stood for,’ wrote Miliband. At a time when Brown was widely mocked for being visionless, dithering and arrogant, the Foreign Secretary added that ‘we must be more humble about our shortcomings but more compelling about our achievements.’ He went on: ‘In government, unless you choose sides, you get found out.’19 Miliband’s move looked highly aggressive, though in some ways he was defensively trying to prevent anyone else from overhauling him as the most likely successor. Having failed to contest Brown for the premiership in 2007, he felt pressure to advertise his readiness to take over. ‘He had to settle the cojones question,’ said one of his nascent campaign team. ‘He’s pinned them on now.’20

  The Prime Minister was incandescent. He saw this as a betrayal when he had given Miliband the promotion to the Foreign Office that he had never got from Blair. There was a hot debate within his court about how he should deal with the threat. Brown was initially sympathetic to the view of some advisers that he should feign being relaxed. ‘If we attack Miliband, we’ll only give him momentum,’ argued one of his aides. Brown responded: ‘That’s exactly my view.’21 Ed Balls then convened a conference call with Ian Austin, Damian McBride and Tom Watson. The attack dog view prevailed. ‘It was decided to go for him.’22 Off-the-record briefings to the press were employed to denounce Miliband as ‘immature’, ‘self-serving’ and ‘disloyal’.23

  This backfired. Brown looked panicked while Miliband was not deterred. In subsequent appearances before the media that week, the Foreign Secretary confirmed that he was putting his ambitions on the map. On a radio phonein show, a caller urged him to ‘put up a leadership challenge and get that God-awful man Brown out.’ Rather than contradict her, Miliband joked: ‘That’s not one of my stooges, I promise.’24

  There was some consolation for the Prime Minister. The Foreign Secretary moved unilaterally without consulting any of the other would-be regicides. He had shown a draft of his Guardian article to James Purnell, but discussed his plans with hardly anyone else.25 ‘He didn’t tell any of us,’ says a former Cabinet minister at the heart of the plotting.26 Miliband in turn complained that colleagues failed to rally to his standard.27 His timing was poor. He made his move just as Parliament was heading into its summer break. The minds of MPs were already on the beach. If they were going to deal the death blow to their leader, it would not be in August. That gave the Prime Minister the summer holidays to hatch a plan for his survival.

  It was Sarah Brown’s idea that they should spend the first week of their break in the Suffolk coastal town of Southwold, a favourite among the affluent English middle classes who liked an upmarket bucket-and-spade holiday. Her career had been in public relations, at which she was a more skilled operator than either her husband or anyone else around him. Her personal PR was good: she won an almost universally positive press in her opening twelve months as the first lady of Number 10. She cultivated a much less controversial image than Cherie Blair by deliberately staying on the edge of the limelight. Her public appearances were mainly confined to charitable events. ‘She has not made herself a public figure,’ remarked Murray Elder, who saw her as ‘a tremendous supporter in every conceivable way’ for his friend in Number 10. ‘Sarah is very shrewd and capable politically.’28 Mariella Frostrup thought: ‘Sarah must be close to the perfect wife. She’s clever, kind and supportive.’29

  Brown deployed his wife as a human shield against the accusation that he did not understand the English middle classes. To one interviewer, he insisted: ‘My wife is from Middle England, so I can relate to it.’30

  The demure public image was the front on a woman with a steely mind who was fiercely protective of her husband and family. She formed a strong, and to some at Number 10 surprising, alliance with Damian McBride and Charlie Whelan based on their mutual interest in defending her husband. Sarah took charge of who came to lunches and dinners at Chequers. She rewarded McBride by telling him he could throw a Chequers lunch with guests of his choice – which he did.31 Downing Street regarded the Prime Minister’s wife as his best and chief propagandist. One member of the Brown communications team even went so far as to describe her as ‘Magda Goebbels’.32

  She designed the sojourn in Southwold, the quintessential English resort, to suggest that the Prime Minister was on the same wavelength as Middle Britain. It was entirely her idea, imposed on her protesting husband. ‘I don’t even know where it is,’ Gordon Brown groaned to one friend before he left for Suffolk. ‘He hated every minute of it and couldn’t wait to get to Scotland.’33

  Officials at Number 10 were desperate for the exhausted Prime Minister to get some rest. He was put on a fitness regime to try to improve his health and sleep. They tried to force him to take a proper holiday. ‘Systems were put in place to stop him being bothered.’34 These measures were not terribly successful as Brown defied their efforts to make him rest. A steady stream of his confidants slipped up to Southwold for councils of war with the Prime Minister. One visitor was Shriti Vadera. She stayed overnight for a ‘brainstorming session’ about what they were going to do about the precariousness of the banks, a discussion which began to incubate the idea of the comprehensive recapitalisation that would follow in the autumn. Vadera shrugged off complaints that she was interfering with the scheme to force the Prime Minister to take a holiday. She said to friends that ‘his form of diversion is an intellectual problem.’35

  Other holiday visitors were Ed Balls, Damian McBride and Sue Nye, with whom Brown discussed how they were going to save his premiership from its encircling enemies. He was now so besieged that he was contemplating recruiting figures who were among his bitterest foes during the Blair years. This was also a sign, not lost on Balls and other veteran allies, that the Prime Minister’s confidence in the support and advice of his old clique was waning. Approaches were made to Alastair Campbell, who modestly told friends that Brown had offered ‘any role I wanted’. Campbell did not want to return to Number 10 in a communications capacity and talks about a ministerial role did not lead to one. ‘There was an issue about what exactly he would do.’36

  Brown’s thoughts turned to Peter Mandelson. They were in regular phone contact over August, though there was still residual mistrust in the relationship and both were keeping secrets from each other. Brown did not know that Mandelson was spending part of that summer in Corfu, where he would share confidences with George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor. On Osborne’s later account, Mandelson ‘dripped pure poison’ about the Prime Minister’s performance. Even not knowing that, Brown remained highly suspicious of what he saw as Mandelson’s ‘compulsion for plotting’.37 He nevertheless discussed with Balls the idea of bringing Mandelson into the Cabinet. Balls was very wary, and Brown not much less so, but the Prime Minister was now so weakened that he was giving serious consideration to resurrecting the Cabinet career of the man who was once his mortal foe.

  Alistair Darling also spent that August worrying about his future. The spinning against him from within Number 10 was becoming more nakedly aggressive as the Prime Minister’s acolytes sought to displace blame for the Government’s travails. One point of friction was Darling’s resistance to Brown’s idea of relaunching his premiership with an ‘economic recovery plan’ in September. Darling thought it would look panicky when they’d already been forced to announce one emergency Budget that year. His officials didn’t like the idea of pre-empting the autumn financial statement.38 Another source of tension was Brown cutting out Darling by talki
ng directly to Mervyn King. The Prime Minister was trying to repair his relations with the Governor and create an alliance against the Treasury.39 Further trouble was caused by Number 10’s habitual spinning of headline-chasing economic initiatives without telling the Chancellor. A story about a possible stamp duty ‘holiday’ to encourage the housing market suddenly appeared on the same morning that an evidently bewildered Darling was interviewed on the Today programme. Not knowing whether or not this had been ordered by Brown, the Chancellor was reduced to stuttering incoherence.

  Darling was a decent man in a highly difficult position. He was struggling with an economic downturn much worse than the Treasury had anticipated, he was trying to clear up mistakes made by the man who was his boss, and he was working for a Prime Minister who was frantically fighting to save his own job. The Chancellor had suffered months of being second-guessed by the Prime Minister and bad-mouthed to the media by Brown’s retinue. Darling, an essentially passive politician, endured this with stoical patience. ‘Alistair sucked it up and sucked it up for a very long time.’40 His wife Maggie, a gregarious and vivacious former journalist, was made of feistier fibre than her husband. She persuaded him to sharpen up his defences by hiring a new chief political adviser. This was Catherine Macleod, the respected former Political Editor of the Glasgow-based Herald and a close friend of the Darlings for years. As part of a campaign to buttress his position, they invited influential journalists to dine with the Darlings in Downing Street to cultivate alliances with leading commentators. Hoping to establish Darling as a larger, more independent and more rounded public personality, they agreed to a request to do an in-depth interview for the Guardian’s Saturday magazine. The journalist Decca Aitkenhead spent two days over the summer with the Darlings at their remote croft on the Isle of Lewis in the Hebrides. She successfully discovered the deadpan wit and disarmingly frank character cloaked by Darling’s buttoned-up and monochrome public persona. With refreshing candour, the Chancellor ‘several times’ told his interviewer that ‘people are pissed off with us’.41 He also predicted that the coming year would be ‘the most difficult 12 months the Labour Party has had in a generation’, acknowledged that ‘we patently have not been able to get across what we are for’ and declared that it was ‘absolutely imperative’ that Brown communicate a clearer message at the party conference.42 Darling was equally direct about the state of the economy. His interviewer was ‘completely taken aback’43 when he told her that conditions ‘are arguably the worst they’ve been in 60 years’ and went on to forecast that ‘it’s going to be more profound and long-lasting than people thought.’44

  The Guardian originally planned to publish the interview on the eve of the Labour conference, but then brought it forward to the end of August. Darling’s arresting description of the economic outlook was projected on to the front page. The Daily Telegraph, which had somehow got sight of the interview, also had the story that Saturday morning and gave it the hostile interpretation that ‘many of his comments will be read with dismay in Downing Street.’45

  If Darling was at fault in his diagnosis, events would prove that he had underestimated the scale of the crisis. He subsequently said to me: ‘The only thing I’d change if I had my time over again is that I should have said: “arguably, the worst for a hundred years”.’46 Reaction to the interview from the Cabinet was divided. Some colleagues accused the Chancellor of talking down confidence and handing ammunition to the Tories. Others agreed with Darling that frankness with the voters about the economic outlook was a better strategy than the Panglossian picture painted by the Prime Minister. The most extreme reaction to the interview was inside Number 10, where the Chancellor’s cool truthfulness provoked raging fury. Through the paranoid prism of a Prime Minister under siege, it was seen as a premeditated attack and an attempt to sabotage the autumn relaunch. Brown phoned Darling on Saturday morning to tell him to back down. ‘This will be over in six months,’ insisted the Prime Minister. ‘Well,’ responded an astonished Darling. ‘I’m glad you think so.’47

  He refused to eat his words, instead repeating them in weekend television interviews in which he insisted he had a duty to be ‘straight’.48 In a phone conversation with Mandelson, Brown exploded: ‘That fucking Darling interview! It fucked up everything, absolutely everything, I wanted to do last week.’ The Prime Minister’s attack dogs were then unleashed to savage the Chancellor. Charlie Whelan, Brown’s ex-spinner, was informally back on the team. His official job was as Political Director of the Unite union, but Whelan was in regular attendance at Number 10 meetings. Whelan turned up at a book launch party at the Pillars of Hercules pub in Soho. He called together some of the journalists present. Unprompted, he started to ‘lay into the Chancellor’. He told them ‘this was “a gaffe”, “what a terrible thing to say”, “proves he doesn’t understand”, all stuff like this.’ One of the journalists in his audience, Nick Cohen of the Observer, ‘thought it extraordinary that at a moment of national crisis all the Prime Minister can do is send out his henchman to undermine the Chancellor of the Exchequer’.49 McBride was even busier spreading poison against Darling. ‘He told every journalist who had access to a pencil that Alistair’s interview was a disaster. There was the most absolutely vicious briefing against him.’50

  The result was a stream of front-page stories suggesting that Darling faced the sack. ‘Darling’s job on the line after recession blunder’ was the headline in The Times over the byline of the paper’s Political Editor, Philip Webster.51 The Chancellor knew where this was coming from. ‘A journalist of Phil Webster’s calibre doesn’t write a front-page splash unless he’s got a very good source. We really thought they were coming to get us.’52 Maggie Darling, a good woman who couldn’t stand the bad treatment of her husband, was understandably enraged. She could not contain her fury that the Chancellor was being so brazenly traduced from next door. She blew up to one friend: ‘The fucking cunts are trying to stitch up Alistair! The cunts! I can’t believe they’re such cunts!’53

  The Chancellor confronted the Prime Minister. ‘I don’t know who’s doing it,’ stonewalled Brown. As he always did when his acolytes were attempting to destroy a minister, Brown denied any responsibility. This episode further ratcheted up the tension within the Cabinet. The Darlings had been so close to the Browns that Maggie babysat for John and Fraser. If the Prime Minister allowed this to be perpetrated against a friend as old as his Chancellor, the Cabinet reasoned that none of them were safe.

  In the eyes of many ministers, Damian McBride was the principal villain in Number 10 and the ugliest manifestation of the Prime Minister’s dark side. Some of that reputation was well-deserved. In the words of another member of the communications team: ‘Damian was garrotting ministers left, right and centre.’54 He was also a poorly cloaked and foolishly reckless assassin who spread a lot of nasty briefing via text and e-mail. That did not mean that the chief propagandist was responsible for every media hit job perpetrated by the Brown machine on members of the Government. The finger was pointed at him when Ruth Kelly’s departure from the Cabinet was revealed in chaotic briefings in the early hours of the morning at the party conference. Kelly herself did not hold him responsible.55 McBride had got himself such a reputation that he now attracted the blame for both what he did and what was perpetrated by other operatives in the Brown spin machine. Several senior members of the Cabinet confronted Brown about the activities of his hit squad. Jacqui Smith told him: ‘This isn’t doing you any good. It’s got to stop.’ Brown, as usual, pleaded ignorance: ‘I’m not doing it.’ Ed Miliband and Douglas Alexander, two of the Prime Minister’s closest associates for years, repeatedly gave him the same warning.56 ‘Douglas had spectacular rows with Gordon about McBride.’57 Both Jeremy Heywood and Gus O’Donnell, the Prime Minister’s two most senior officials, urged him to remove McBride.58