He survived because he was protected by powerful allies. One of them was the Prime Minister’s wife. Sarah Brown bought into McBride’s argument that he had protected the Browns’ young sons from press intrusion.59 Brown, who had always retained in his entourage at least one assassin, was the most important reason why he stayed. As another aide put it: ‘You prove your loyalty through brutality – there’s a part of Gordon that likes that.’60
Another target of the hit squad was Ivan Lewis, a junior Health Minister and ally of Alan Johnson, a potential candidate to replace Brown as Prime Minister. Lewis aroused Brown’s ire by being noisily critical in a series of interviews and articles. One in The Times in May was entitled ‘A final warning for Gordon Brown’ and another for the Sunday Times in August called for higher taxes on the rich and lectured the Prime Minister that ‘there must be no more 10p-tax-style mistakes.’61 For such a public breach of the conventions of loyalty, Brown would have been quite within his rights to either rebuke a junior minister or to fire him. An uglier method was employed to mete out punishment to Lewis and make an example of him designed to terrify anyone else who was thinking of voicing dissent. On Sunday, 7 September, the News of the World blared an ‘exclusive’: ‘Txt pest shame of minister’ with the subheading ‘Lewis is so “sorry” for behaviour’.62 The front page of the Mail on Sunday trumpeted the same story that Lewis had sent a stream of over-familiar phone text messages to a young female civil servant in his private office.63
This was damaging to a highly embarrassed Lewis from whom not a peep was heard thereafter. It was hardly helpful to the Government as a whole. Yet there were few Labour MPs who doubted that the story was planted by Number 10, which was privy to a confidential Whitehall report about the civil servant. The hit on Lewis stunned ministers who had regarded themselves as unshockable. One tough-minded minister says: ‘The phones were buzzing that weekend. Red hot. It was brutal, it was vicious, it was unnecessary. We all – most of us, anyway – have skeletons in the cupboard which they know about. If Number 10 would do that to him, it would do it to anyone.’64
On the same Sunday, a venomous personal attack was launched on David Miliband. The author of it was Derek Simpson, the joint leader of the Unite union, whose political department was run by Charlie Whelan.65 Nick Cohen of the Observer put it neatly: ‘As the Don went for all his enemies at once, the Sunday papers looked like the closing scenes of The Godfather.’66
The new political season opened in early September with the Prime Minister’s soldiers stabbing at both the Chancellor and the Foreign Secretary while key Cabinet members debated whether to send the Prime Minister to sleep with the fishes. This was an unpromising environment in which to launch a ‘recovery plan’ which was massively over-hyped. ‘The expectation management was dreadful,’ agrees one official.67 It coincided with the release of grim data detailing the collapsing confidence in the housing market and among consumers. A scheme to give one-off payments to help the poor with their fuel bills had to be abandoned when Brown could not win the agreement of the energy companies. Proposals to boost the housing market received an unenthused reception from the construction industry and estate agents. That was accompanied by a worthy but dull initiative to encourage home insulation. Brown was not going to save his premiership with loft lagging. The relaunch sank without trace.
Rumours reached the Prime Minister that an unknown number of Labour MPs planned to go public with demands for him to quit. The threat of a letter-writing campaign by backbenchers held a particular terror for Brown because it was precisely the same device his acolytes employed two years earlier to force a resignation date out of Tony Blair. Brown loyalists were sent out to gather intelligence about the weight behind the revolt. ‘Blair was taken by surprise when MPs moved against him,’ says one Cabinet minister close to Brown. ‘We did not want to repeat the same mistake.’68
Charles Clarke then launched his most direct attack yet when he warned that Labour was sleepwalking towards ‘utter destruction’.69 In subsequent interviews, Clarke expanded on his theme. If Brown did not go of his own volition, ‘then I think it would be down principally to the Cabinet to decide what to do. I think many in the Cabinet share the view that we are in great difficulty and are doubtful about our capacity to get out of it, but there is not a view in the Cabinet at the moment that they should go and speak to Gordon.’70 He accurately represented the angst in the Cabinet.71 Eight Cabinet ministers contacted by a Sunday newspaper, including Alan Johnson, David Miliband, James Purnell and Jacqui Smith, did not respond when asked whether Brown should lead Labour into the next election, despite a specific instruction by Number 10 that they should reply yes.72 But it was Clarke’s last point that proved to be the crucial one: the Cabinet was not ready to act.
Jack Straw spent his August holiday on the east coast of America in Martha’s Vineyard, where he wrestled with what to do. His despair about Brown’s leadership was balanced by a fear of the implications of changing Prime Minister without an election twice in the same parliament, something that had not been done since 1945. He and other plotters were also apprehensive that Brown might simply refuse to go and they would then be in a disastrous situation if there was insufficient support among Labour MPs to force him out. ‘You only get one shot,’ Straw told another member of the Cabinet.73 He came back from holiday to indicate to other plotters that he and Geoff Hoon had changed their minds about telling Brown that he had to go. Some involved believed that Hoon was ‘bought off’ with a promise from Brown that he would be nominated as the next European Commissioner. Straw’s wife, a former senior civil servant, was thought influential in persuading him to keep his knife sheathed. There was an additional complication that the Justice Secretary fancied the leadership for himself, which made him reluctant to dethrone Brown for the benefit of someone else.74 The consensus view in the Cabinet was that Brown had to be ‘given the autumn’ to show whether or not he could recover.75
Some in Labour’s ranks were not prepared to wait. In frustration with the paralysed Cabinet, more junior figures tried to precipitate events. On Friday, 12 September, Siobhain McDonagh, the MP for Mitcham and Morden, became the first member of the Government to call for a leadership contest. She was dismissed as a whip when it was revealed that she was among about a dozen MPs to write to party headquarters asking for leadership nomination papers in order to trigger a challenge. Joan Ryan was sacked as a vice-chairwoman of the party when she backed McDonagh. So did Janet Anderson and George Howarth, who were both close to Jack Straw. In the most savage attack on Brown to date, Howarth declared: ‘No-one can remember a time since Neville Chamberlain, after Hitler invaded Norway, that anyone was so unpopular. We can’t allow that to continue.’76 They were joined by long-standing critics, including Frank Field, Peter Kilfoyle and Fiona Mactaggart. Barry Gardiner, a Blairite former minister, came out as another Septembrist in a newspaper article that Sunday which charged Brown with ‘vacillation, loss of international credibility and timorous political manoeuvres. The tragedy for those of us who nominated the Prime Minister is that since achieving power he appears to have forgotten what it was he once wanted to do with it.’77 Gisela Stuart, another former minister, joined their insurrection by declaring that Labour had gone from ‘things can only get better’ in 1997 to ‘surely it can’t get much worse’.78 Charlie Falconer, close friend of Tony Blair, was giving them informal legal advice on the procedures for forcing a leadership contest.
David Cairns, the Minister of State for Scotland, was a former priest who had wrestled with his conscience for months about whether he could continue to support the Prime Minister. His name was on a list of ministers drawn up inside Number 10 who it was feared would join calls for Brown to go. On 16 September, his hand was forced by media reports that he was on the brink of resignation. He left the Government declaring that it was no longer possible to maintain the fiction that there was not a debate about Brown’s future. He wrote to the Prime Minister that it was time ‘to take the bu
ll by the horns and allow a leadership debate to run its course’.79
The rebels were a mixed bag of ex-ministers, well-established critics of Brown and former loyalists who despaired of the party’s prospects under his leadership.
The dissenting dozen had more support than their numbers suggested. Number 10 knew this from its own information-gathering operations.80 Key Cabinet ministers were strikingly reluctant to attack the mutineers. The Chief Whip merely questioned their timing. Geoff Hoon said: ‘I simply don’t think at this stage it’s appropriate.’ This was hardly a ringing endorsement of Gordon Brown nor a crushing rebuke to the rebels from the man supposed to be in charge of maintaining party discipline. John Hutton, the Business Secretary, also declined to condemn the revolt. ‘I’m not going to criticise any of my colleagues who want Labour to do better,’ he said and added: ‘I think my colleagues are right to say that the Government needs to do better. For heaven’s sake, we are 20 percentage points behind in the opinion polls.’81
On Tuesday, 16 September, Brown convened a ‘political Cabinet’ – called such because the civil servants are excluded from the room so that, in theory, ministers can talk candidly. It soon became clear that the Prime Minister did not want a frank conversation with his colleagues about Labour’s plight. Deborah Mattinson was wheeled in to give a polling presentation about the weaknesses of the Tory party. She told them that voters saw David Cameron as likeable and compassionate, but remained unsure what the Tory leader really stood for. Mattinson concluded her presentation by observing that the Conservatives had not yet ‘closed the deal’ with the electorate so it was still possible for Labour to win. Several ministers listened to this with mounting and undisguised amazement. It was not that they quarrelled with the pollster’s obvious account of the potential vulnerabilities of the Tory party. What they found astonishing was that they were being asked to talk about the weaknesses of their opponents rather than address their own epic unpopularity. ‘It was terrible,’ says one Cabinet minister. ‘The unbearable thing about Gordon’s Cabinets is the refusal to discuss the truth.’82 Hazel Blears braved Brown’s wrath by pointedly asking for the findings from the focus groups about voters’ views of the Government. The Communities Secretary wondered whether it might not be useful to hear about Labour’s strengths and weaknesses ahead of the party conference. Several other ministers raised their voices in support of that view. As Brown glowered, Ed Balls came to his defence, saying: ‘We know why the electorate do not like us.’83
The atmosphere turned dark. Some of the Cabinet were so embarrassed that they could not bring themselves to look at the Prime Minister and stared at their hands, buried their heads in papers, or fiddled with Blackberries. Accounts of this disastrous Cabinet were then partially leaked to some newspapers. The Evening Standard was told that the meeting was ‘just excruciating’.84 The Guardian heard from one minister that it was ‘bizarre and a denial of reality’ and from another that it was ‘a dreadful misjudgement’.85 This seriously alarmed Number 10. ‘Even someone with a skin as thick as Gordon’s was bound to be wounded by that,’ says one of his most senior aides. ‘If members of the Cabinet were prepared to so openly and shamelessly brief that his performance was dire, it looked as though the game might soon be up.’86
A convergence of factors came to his rescue. The backbench insurrection was lacking in numbers, organisation and an agreed outcome. The plotters of autumn 2006 had a precise ambition: to replace Tony Blair with Gordon Brown. The plotters of autumn 2008 were never clear where it all might end. ‘People couldn’t agree who would replace him,’ says one key conspirator.87 It was the wrong plot at the wrong time. By acting just before the Labour conference, a point in the calendar when the party tends to feel the urge to display its unity, they had increased the likelihood that their insurrection would be smothered. The party machine squashed the attempt to trigger a leadership contest. On the day of the Cairns resignation, the National Executive Committee took the advice of Labour’s General Secretary, Ray Collins, that the party was under no legal requirement to issue nomination papers. One leading figure plotting to remove Brown later lamented: ‘It was like First World War troops going over the top and getting mowed down by the machine-gun fire.’88
The Cabinet was not ready to do the deed. ‘We didn’t get a decisive lead from the Cabinet,’ says Frank Field. ‘There was not an agreed view in Cabinet what the alternative was and in those circumstances it’s very hard to dislodge a Prime Minister.’89 The senior ministers were Hamlet-like in their wavering over wielding the dagger. Jack Straw debated with himself many times afterwards whether he was right not to move against the Prime Minister. Once he had decided against, the Justice Secretary presented himself as the acme of public loyalty, declaring: ‘I’m absolutely clear Gordon Brown is the man with the experience and the intellect and the strategy to lead us through these current difficulties.’ Straw added: ‘Although I understand the frustrations that some of my colleagues feel, I don’t think they are correctly directed.’90 Alistair Darling also issued a loyalty oath, saying he had ‘every confidence’ in the Prime Minister. Harriet Harman described Brown as ‘the best person when there are difficult international economic circumstances’.91
The person who did most to throw a lifeline to Brown’s premiership was an American. That weekend, the US Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson, made the fateful decision to allow the collapse of Lehman Brothers. The fall of Lehmans, the first major Wall Street house to go bankrupt because of the credit crunch, triggered the most savage convulsions on the world’s financial markets.92 A calamitous event for the economy, it was politically fortuitous for Gordon Brown. He realised this almost at once, telling one confidant: ‘This changes everything.’93 Even those in the Cabinet who utterly despaired of him thought it would look unforgivably self-indulgent of the Labour Party to wage a battle over its leadership when the country was facing the most seismic financial crisis in generations.94 As one of the backbench rebels ruefully concluded: ‘Our timing was terrible.’95
The Labour conference in Manchester opened with huge pressure on the Prime Minister to perform. Some around him feared that his second speech as the party’s leader would also be his last unless he found a way of stabilising his position. ‘The speech had to be perfect. We knew that everything would fall apart if it was just another wall of Gordon sound.’96
One device was to deploy his wife. Ed Miliband was present at the Democrat convention in Denver in August when Barack Obama was introduced by his wife, Michelle. Brown had claimed to despise Blair for being too schmaltzy and previously sought credit for repudiating ‘personality politics’ and the ‘politics of image’. He was wary of the notion that his wife should be his warm-up woman when it was first suggested.97 By the time of the conference, his hesitation succumbed to his desperation. His wife did a deft job of raising the curtain for his speech, winning both warm applause from the delegates and sparkling press notices for a poised performance. The implicit suggestion of her remarks was that if she loved him then her husband must be human after all.
There were further borrowings from across the Atlantic in Brown’s speech. He plagiarised one of Obama’s signature phrases: ‘This is not about me but about you.’ He also borrowed another quintessentially American technique, the power of the humanising anecdote to make a political point. Brown related how the NHS saved his sight when he was young by giving him care that his parents could not have afforded to pay for. He tried to alchemise his weaknesses as a communicator into a strength. ‘I’m not going to try to be something I’m not. And if people say I’m too serious, quite honestly there’s a lot to be serious about. I’m serious about doing a serious job for all the people of this country.’ He made a personal attack on David Cameron, whom he accused of exploiting his children by ‘serving them up for spreads in the papers’. This was rich from a leader who had just leant on his wife as a prop.
There was a lively argument within his team about whether he should confess to his
mistakes, especially the debacle over the abolition of the 10p tax band. Gordon Brown never did contrition. He was ‘stung’ by that furore, he told the conference. ‘It really hurt that people felt I was not on the side of people on middle and modest incomes.’ Thus he portrayed himself not as the author of the mistake, but as the victim of the way people interpreted him.
This fifty-three-minute speech was generally better constructed and delivered than the conference performance of a year before. Its central assertion was that he was the only person qualified to lead Britain through the crisis engulfing the financial markets. The past seven days were ‘the week the world was spun on its axis, and old certainties turned on their heads’, declared Brown, a formulation that echoed Blair’s ‘the kaleidoscope has been shaken’ in the wake of 9/11.
The sharpest passage was aimed at puncturing the pretensions of those who wanted his job. ‘Everyone knows that I am in favour of apprenticeships, but this is no time for a novice,’98 he said, delivering the line with a smile of satisfaction. It was inspired by Ed Balls, who had said something similar during a dinner conversation with the editor of the Sun, Rebekah Brooks, formerly Wade. ‘You should use that,’ she said.99 The crack about novices was Goliath’s swipe at both the Davids, Cameron and Miliband. The TV coverage cut away to David Miliband when Brown delivered the slap-down. The Foreign Secretary was obliged to grit his teeth, hail Brown as ‘excellent’ and claim to believe: ‘I think Gordon found his true voice.’100
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