The End of the Party

by Andrew Rawnsley

  Brown knew that his premiership now dangled by the thinnest of threads. If this was the beginning of a well-organised putsch, his premiership could be dead by midnight. Purnell’s lead only had to be followed by David Miliband and Alan Johnson, the Health Secretary, who was most widely tipped as the best replacement Prime Minister. If they struck, it would be fatal. These two men held his fate in their hands. ‘I thought this could be it,’ says one senior official present in the ‘war room’ that night. ‘It could all be over.’106 Both Brown and Mandelson started to make frantic phone calls to find out whether Purnell was a lone gunman or the first shot in a firing squad. Mandelson phoned Miliband, who extracted a guarantee that he would be kept at the Foreign Office.107 It was then established from Johnson that he was not going to join Purnell. Brown rang Tony Blair for advice and asked his predecessor to intervene with Blairites to prevent them from resigning. Brown, who had used a coup to push out Blair, had been reduced to pleading for Blair’s help to protect him from a coup. The irony was not lost on the other man.108 Ed Balls arrived in the war room to learn that imminent danger appeared to have passed. ‘The opportunity was handed to them on a platter,’ says one of Brown’s closest Cabinet confidants. ‘They did not take it.’109 By eleven o’clock, Brown could breathe a little easier. He had survived the most dangerous hour of his premiership.

  Mandelson, turning himself into Brown’s life support machine, made more calls to flush out and bind in suspected doubters. They were desperate to get prominent Blairites on television to make declarations of loyalty. Mandelson reached Tessa Jowell as she was driving her car. ‘Would you go on television?’ he asked. She hesitated. ‘I need to think about what’s happened.’ She was driving to the London home of Charlie Falconer. When she arrived, the two Blairite friends started arguing about what to do. Falconer planned to add his voice to those calling for Brown’s head. ‘He’s a disaster,’ said Tony Blair’s old flatmate. He urged Jowell to join them. She wasn’t convinced: ‘It’s no good going on the television and saying the PM must resign. Then what? Won’t the Labour Party kill us if we do this?’ Their argument was interrupted by another call to Jowell from Mandelson. In his feline way, he took the blame on himself: ‘It’s my fault. I haven’t been strong enough.’ It was Brown’s bad treatment of colleagues that had provoked Purnell to resign. ‘I love James,’ said Mandelson. ‘I should have done more to stop Gordon’s misconduct.’ Mandelson promised Jowell that ‘Gordon can be different.’ He pledged to her, as he did to many others that night, that the Prime Minister had had such a severe fright that he finally understood he had to change the way he ran the Government. She was eventually booked on to Sky at two thirty in the morning.110 The loyal Jowell would be rewarded with a return to full Cabinet rank.

  Around midnight, Mandelson told Brown he should go to bed. The Business Secretary said he and Heywood would stay up to supervise bringing forward the reshuffle from Monday to Friday. The Prime Minister took himself off upstairs to the flat while the man who had been his close friend, then his deadly enemy, and was now his most essential prop carried on working the phones into the early hours.

  On Friday morning, Labour contemplated the results of local elections which were utterly catastrophic. All four of its remaining county councils were lost. There were further resignations from the Cabinet. John Hutton quit as Defence Secretary and Geoff Hoon departed too. Both had no faith in the Prime Minister, but neither made a call for him to quit. Caroline Flint noisily resigned a little later with a scathing attack on Brown for running a ‘bullying’ regime which treated women like ‘window-dressing’.111 Her knife was blunted because she had given a declaration of loyalty to him less than twenty-four hours earlier, which made her seem motivated by pique that she hadn’t been promoted to the Cabinet. ‘It was resignation by hissy fit,’ scoffed one minister.112

  Brown was fortunate that potential regicides were even more inept, indecisive and ill co-ordinated than the tottering king. John Hutton had made a promise to Brown that ‘he would go in a gentle way.’113 Geoff Hoon was hoping to be nominated as the next European Commissioner.114 James Purnell ‘didn’t want to be seen as part of a plot’ so had told hardly anyone what he planned.115 A dozen resignations occurred over seven days. Had all the departing ministers resigned in a choreographed fashion with an agreed candidate to replace him, they would have left his premiership mortally threatened. Had Miliband and Johnson joined them, it would have been terminal. They were restrained not by any admiration for Brown nor because they invested any hope in him. They were paralysed by terror that a change of leader, especially if he had to be dragged out kicking and screaming, would create irresistible pressure for an early general election at which Labour would be massacred.116 ‘Never mind an autumn election, there could have been a July election,’ says one pivotal figure in the Cabinet who decided not to make the move.117 They clung on to Brown for no more noble reason than fear of something worse.

  On Friday morning, the Prime Minister again talked to the Chancellor. Darling’s hand was now immensely strengthened. Both men knew that Brown could not afford to lose any more ministers. Both men were also aware that the Chancellor knew so many of the Prime Minister’s dark secrets that he could deliver a resignation speech that would kill his premiership. Brown buckled and agreed that Darling would stay at the Treasury. James Purnell, by sacrificing his own job, had inadvertently secured both Darling and Miliband in their places. Brown was also forced to elevate Alan Johnson to the Home Office. Where once he crushed rivals, Brown’s grip was now so weakened that he had to promote them.

  As the threat of a Cabinet coup evaporated, there remained the potential menace of a backbench uprising. Barry Sheerman, a select committee chairman, demanded a secret ballot of Labour MPs on the leadership. Brown’s acolytes responded with a clumsy attempt to foment trouble for Sheerman with his constituency party.118 On Friday afternoon, the Prime Minister broke off from the reshuffle to call a news conference at Number 10. ‘I will not waver and I will not walk away,’ he said, a declaration designed to warn Labour MPs that they would have to break his fingers before they could prise them off the doorknob of Number 10.119 Nick Brown brandished ‘the rule book’ and dared the plotters to come up with a challenger and the signatures of seventy-one Labour MPs, which was the number necessary to trigger a contest.120 It was a display of the raw power politics at which the Brownites had always excelled.

  On Sunday evening, the results of the European elections were declared and they were even more cataclysmic for Labour: Wales lost, Scotland lost and fifth place in the south-east of England behind the Tories, the Lib Dems, UKIP and the Greens. Labour’s share of the vote crashed to 16 per cent, the party’s worst result in a national election since the First World War. The British National Party secured two seats in the European Parliament. The election results were ‘absolutely dreadful’, says Tessa Jowell, and left Labour ‘in a very bad place indeed’.121

  Perversely, this calamity threw another lifeline to Brown by making Labour MPs even more petrified of an early general election. ‘The whips were telling us that if he went down, we would all go down with him,’ says one Labour MP.122 The attempt by Charles Clarke, Stephen Byers and others to organise a backbench uprising was flzzling out. When the leading rebels met on Monday afternoon, the number of MPs supporting a putsch had dropped to fifty-four, short of the seventy-one they needed.123 The crucial handicap was that they did not have a plausible challenger now that all the senior figures were bound into the Cabinet. They required a Labour equivalent of Michael Heseltine to do to Gordon Brown what Heseltine had done to Margaret Thatcher. ‘There was never a Heseltine figure – that was always the fatal flaw,’ remarks one former Cabinet minister.124

  Brown survived, though in a horribly mauled condition. At his next encounter with David Cameron in the Commons, the Tory leader crowed: ‘Can I first of all say how pleased I am to see the Prime Minister in his place!’125 The Prime Minister was forced to retain both a Ch
ancellor and a Foreign Secretary he wanted to move. Ed Balls, denied the promotion to the Treasury that he craved, was sore and depressed. Darling held on to his job but at the price of everyone knowing the Prime Minister did not want him there. The reputations of Johnson and Miliband suffered when they were accused of having less spine than a jellyfish.

  Only one member of the Cabinet stepped out of the smoking wreckage of electoral calamity and abortive coup as an enhanced figure. That was Baron Mandelson. His position as the effective Deputy Prime Minister was confirmed when he was made Lord President of the Council and additionally garlanded with the baroque title of First Secretary of State. During the time of Brown’s maximum peril, it surely crossed Mandelson’s serpentine mind that he was presented with a golden opportunity for retribution. He might have terminated Brown’s premiership as payback for the way in which Brown allowed his acolytes to destroy Mandelson’s first Cabinet career. One Iagoesque hint that Brown should step aside for the good of the party would have been deadly. Yet sometimes in politics there are tastes even sweeter than revenge. It was more satisfying for Mandelson to make a dependent of Brown.

  Mandelson had never thought that he could climb to the very top. He was the ultimate courtier who pursued his ambitions through getting close to the Labour leader of the time: first Neil Kinnock, then Tony Blair and now, most remarkably, Gordon Brown. Mandelson was at last enthroned where he had always wanted to sit. He was the leader’s indispensable grand vizier, the undisputed right-hand man. He once hoped to occupy this role for Tony Blair when New Labour was at the peak of its powers with many years in office to look forward to. All those titles and all that influence had finally come to him under Gordon Brown just as twilight was falling on their project. That was the tragedy for Peter Mandelson of his late triumph.

  He nevertheless pomped in his new status. When a colleague teasingly addressed him as ‘the Deputy Prime Minister’, Mandelson archly replied: ‘Deputy?’ On Monday evening, Brown faced 300 Labour MPs and peers in committee room 14 at the Commons. Mandelson sat directly behind him, ostentatiously passing down notes of advice to the Prime Minister. Brown admitted that he needed to ‘address my weaknesses’, a rare concession from such a proud and stubborn man. He promised he could change, casting himself as a bad husband pleading to be allowed back into the marital home. He managed to keep his temper when Charles Clarke and four other MPs told him to his face that he should quit.

  The mutineers were met with silence. The insurrection had flopped. The general mood of the meeting was supportive. Geraldine Smith, the MP for Morecambe, a Brown loyalist and previously no fan at all of Mandelson, rose to say that she had seen the Baron batting for the Government and defending the Prime Minister on Sunday television. ‘I found myself suddenly falling in love with Peter Mandelson.’126

  From his perch behind the Prime Minister, Mandelson peered over his spectacles, puckered his lips and blew her a little kiss.

  38. No Time to Lose

  The crew of the Hercules were making their final checks before take-off. Gordon Brown was at the end of his trip to Camp Bastion, the headquarters for the British army in the lethal Afghan province of Helmand. He had made a private visit to the wounded in the hospital during this August trip. He had paid tribute to ‘the courage, the bravery, the professionalism and the patriotism’ displayed by the soldiers in a conflict which had killed and maimed so many of their comrades. He had promised them that more helicopters and armoured vehicles were on the way.1 He had worked hard to dispel the belief, widely held among soldiers, that the Prime Minister neither understood the armed forces nor valued them. As he prepared to board the Hercules, Gordon Brown bade the troops farewell with the words: ‘Thank you for all you do.’ Then he added: ‘Enjoy the rest of the summer.’ Many of the aides and officials travelling with him were accustomed to the Prime Minister’s verbal malfunctions, but they could not believe that they had just heard him say that to soldiers in harm’s way in Afghanistan.

  Brown flew back to growing domestic opposition to the conflict and the continuing fallout from another storm with its origins in the ‘war on terror’.

  On 20 August, a private jet took off from the west of Scotland. It was bound for Tripoli. On board was Saif Gaddafi, favoured son and potential successor of the Colonel-tyrant. He was accompanying Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the Libyan convicted of placing the bomb on Pan-Am 103 and the only person ever imprisoned for the explosion over Lockerbie in 1988. Suffering from advanced prostate cancer, he had been freed from Greenock prison on compassionate grounds by the Nationalist government in Edinburgh. A hero’s welcome awaited him in Tripoli.

  Gordon Brown was not entirely oblivious to the potential for the prisoner’s release, after serving less than a fortnight in jail for each victim of the Lockerbie atrocity, to ignite a firestorm of outrage. He had discussed the Megrahi case with Gaddafi when the two met at the G8 in Italy in July and had tried to persuade the Colonel to keep it low key.2 It had also come up when Peter Mandelson encountered Saif during another summer sojourn at the Rothschild villa in Corfu. A spokesman later insisted that there was only ‘a fleeting conversation about the prisoner; Peter was completely unsighted on the subject.’3 As al-Megrahi was flown home, a private ‘Dear Muammar’ letter from the Prime Minister was delivered to the Libyan dictator by the British ambassador in Tripoli. It asked the Libyans to avoid giving his return a ‘high profile’ and ensure it was ‘a purely private family occasion’.4 That plea to spare Britain embarrassment went unheeded. Gaddafi then deepened it by publicly thanking ‘my friend Brown’ for ‘encouraging the Scottish government to take this historic and courageous decision’.5 Al-Megrahi was greeted by an exuberant Libyan crowd waving Saltires in a display orchestrated by the regime as part of the build-up to Gaddafi’s gaudy celebration of the fortieth anniversary of his seizure of power. Disgust with these scenes swelled the outcry from the many who saw the release as a betrayal of the 270 victims of the atrocity, the majority of them American. Barack Obama expressed himself outraged.

  Gordon Brown said nothing at all. He carried on with his holiday in the Lake District and Fife as if nothing unusual was happening. Sarah Brown, in an attempt to force her husband to take a proper rest, had insisted that Number 10 officials could call the Prime Minister only between two and three each afternoon.6 Even those who did get through to him did not feel able to press him to take action. ‘He has never to this day sorted out the political part of Number 10,’ one senior civil servant told me in the immediate aftermath of this affair. ‘It was weak to begin with. It’s still weak now.’7 Key advisers were not to hand as the furore developed. Ed Balls was on a family holiday in California. Jeremy Heywood was sailing in the Mediterranean. The ‘unsighted’ Peter Mandelson, the man who was supposed to be so good at ‘seeing around corners’, had not seen round this one. ‘We were caught cold. The system failed him. We all failed him,’ says one senior official. ‘We had no idea about the furtive discussions between the Foreign Office and the Libyans.’8

  Even when it was evident that this was escalating into a huge controversy, Brown tried to maintain a position that it was solely a matter for the Edinburgh Government, which took the brunt of the initial outrage. Yet he was never going to be able to sustain this defence for his silence. According to Saif, the prisoner had been ‘on the table’ in all the commercial dealings between Britain and Libya9 which followed Tony Blair’s ground-breaking visit to Tripoli in 2003.10 The prisoner transfer agreement under which he was released was in negotiation during Blair’s second visit in 2007. That trip, made just before he left Number 10, also sealed lucrative contracts for British energy firms, including one that brought BP back to Libya after an absence of more than thirty years. A week after the release, it emerged that Jack Straw had reluctantly agreed to include al-Megrahi in the prisoner transfer deal at a critical point in BP’s negotiations with Gaddafi’s regime for a gas and oil deal potentially worth £15 billion.11 There was not evidence of a crude oil-for-terr
orist deal, but there were plenty of indications that commercial interests were entangled with the negotiations leading up to the release. The Justice Secretary subsequently confirmed that trade was ‘a very big part’ of the talks with the Libyans over the prisoner. ‘I’m unapologetic about that … Libya was a rogue state. We wanted to bring it back into the fold. And that included trade because trade is an essential part of it.’12

  This was the realpolitik defence which Brown could have mounted by arguing that al-Megrahi’s release was the unsavoury price to be paid for bigger prizes. Bringing Libya out of the cold was not just good for British businesses, but also for the fight against al-Qaeda and nuclear proliferation. Yet even when he returned to Number 10, he issued only a brief and evasive statement, saying merely that he was ‘angry and repulsed’ by the celebrations in Tripoli.13 For thirteen days, he sustained a monastic silence about whether it was right or wrong to release the Libyan. He was frozen by fear that, whatever he said, it would infuriate someone: the United States, the Scottish Government, the Labour Party in Scotland, the Lockerbie families, the Libyan dictatorship, or the oil companies. He stayed silent even as his silence became the loudest story about the affair. This failure to adopt a position and defend it was like hanging up a sign outside Number 10 with the invitation: ‘Post your conspiracy theories here’. Not to have a view also looked ridiculous when Downing Street was issuing opinions on his behalf on everything from England’s victory in the Ashes to the death of Michael Jackson. One of Brown’s closest confidants in the Cabinet laments: ‘I’ve no idea why silence was regarded as the best strategy. It was a screw-up.’14

  A cascade of papers was then released by the Westminster and Scottish governments which revealed that the Libyans had been secretly told by the Foreign Office that Britain did not want al-Megrahi to die in prison. David Cameron accused the Government of ‘double dealing’ for reassuring Washington that it wanted the Libyan kept in jail while telling Tripoli that it hoped he could die with his family.15 The outcry finally compelled Brown to speak the next day. He broke his silence during a visit to Birmingham to promote a youth unemployment plan, a launch that was swamped by the affair. He was forced on to his critics’ ground when he issued a blanket denial: ‘There was no conspiracy, no cover-up, no double dealing, no deal on oil, no attempt to instruct Scottish ministers, no private assurances by me to Colonel Gaddafi.’ Only now did he make the case that it was ‘in all our interests and Britain’s national interest that Libya rejoins the international community’.16