Labour met for its last conference before the election to the sound of the Cabinet competing to make the most gloom-laden remarks. Alistair Darling won this contest by comparing his party with a gutless football team that had ‘lost the will to live’.44
On the Monday in Brighton, the dispirited gathering was briefly roused by Peter Mandelson. The man who was once treated by his party as its pantomime villain was now received and performed like a lovable pantomime dame. His first speech from the conference platform in nine years was a triumph of over-acting: a winking, grimacing, snarling, smirking performance which blended arch attacks on opponents and camp self-deprecation with psychological soul-baring and not a little self-indulgence. Yet it also expressed a passion to take on the Tories which was notably absent from much of the Cabinet. Telling them that Labour was ‘in my blood and in my bones’, Mandelson also delivered nearly all of the best lines from the conference. He admitted that they were ‘underdogs’ and in ‘the fight of our lives’ before getting roars of delight for the cry: ‘If I can come back … we can come back!’45
Mandelson promised Brown his ‘full, undivided loyalty’. That evening, the First Secretary confirmed that he was the most significant block on any further attempt to replace Brown with a new leader who might be more popular. Asked by me if there were any circumstances in which he would tell Brown to go, Mandelson offered an unequivocal ‘No’.46 New Labour was still dominated by the tormented relationship between its founding fathers. Mandelson had shown rational judgement back in 1994 when he switched allegiances from Brown to Blair, the most electorally appealing leadership candidate at the time. He could see the logic of replacing a leader who had become so unpopular, but to throw over Brown a second time would be to brand himself as treacherous in a way he could not bear. The party was still captive to the triangular psychodrama begun all those years before.
The conference gave him a whooping standing ovation, a career first for the man once demonised by activists. Afterwards, Tony Blair exchanged teasing phone texts with him about finally being loved by the Labour Party. Mandelson seemed genuinely touched by a transformation into conference darling which was also a sign of his party’s desperation. Labour now relied on the former Prince of Darkness to offer it a glimmer of hope.
Gordon Brown arrived in Brighton still tired after his trip to America and in a state of permanent fury about the media which erupted publicly in bad-tempered performances on television. Worried that he had been thrown off-balance by the interrogations about his eyesight and whether he was using pills, the Prime Minister’s team were highly nervous about how he would perform on the platform. On Tuesday morning, he rehearsed his speech using a full-sized replica of the conference podium set up in his hotel suite. There was even more stress than usually surrounded his conference speeches. David Muir and Kirsty McNeill, the principal members of the speech-writing team who had been working on it since August, were rewriting with him up to the wire.47 ‘They were still tearing stuff out and shoving things in as late as Tuesday lunchtime.’48
He was again introduced by his wife, whose own profile had undergone a transformation since she first performed as his warm-up woman the year before. Sarah Brown was now a much more visible public presence, though still a carefully uncontroversial one. A Sarah craze on the internet saw her attract more than three quarters of a million followers on Twitter for a bland mix of chatty observations about summits, charity announcements and fragments of family news. She had more than five times as many fans as there were members of the Labour Party. She had her own ‘Sarah Brown section’ on the Number 10 website, where devotees could follow her through ‘pictures, news and blog posts’.49 Cherie Blair would have been flayed by the press had she done that. Sarah Brown had also become an increasingly assertive presence behind the scenes. She encouraged her husband in his loathing towards journalists, which dismayed those on his staff who thought it was counter-productive to try to do battle with the entire British media. She was even known to upbraid members of the Cabinet for not being supportive enough.50
His wife introduced the Prime Minister as if she was talking about a stroppy teenager. ‘He’s not a saint. He’s messy. He’s noisy. He gets up at a terrible hour!’51 This attempt to humanise his eccentricities sounded over-scripted and awfully similar to Michelle Obama when she told Americans that her husband snored, smelt and didn’t do his share of the housework. This transatlantic device got much less approving notices than a year earlier. This was not because Sarah Brown’s performance was any less professional, but because deploying the Prime Minister’s wife to hail him as ‘my hero’ was a novelty the first time, but looked desperate the second.
When he came on to speak, the most successful paragraphs were at the beginning and absent from the script handed out to journalists, because they were one of the last-minute insertions during the feverish rewriting over lunchtime. He gave a storming list of Labour’s achievements, a reminder to his party, and anyone listening from outside, that they had accomplished things with power. This brought the conference to its feet. He was also compelling when he repeated his argument that he acted in the financial crisis while the Conservatives ‘faced with the economic call of the century … called it wrong’.52 Clever economists, such as Joseph Stiglitz, who featured in a video trailer before the speech, agreed. Labour retained some potentially persuasive narratives to tell the electorate: the banking system would have collapsed and the recession would have been worse but for the action they took; public services had been massively improved; the poor were better off than they had been.
Yet even when he had a story to tell, Brown could not get the voters to listen to him. It was also unwise for politicians to expect voters to reward them for their record, even when they got some things right. Mandelson had made public some of the advice he was tendering in private when he told the conference the day before: ‘Do not make the mistake of sitting back and expecting people to be grateful.’ Elections, he correctly contended, are won ‘on the future, not the past’. This would be ‘a change election … either we offer it or the British public will turn to others who do.’ He was equally right when he said Labour needed ‘new reform, new policies and new thinking’.53
There was little evidence of that holy trinity in the speeches made to the conference by the Cabinet. In the rare cases where ministers had bright notions, most of them had been stolen by the Prime Minister for his speech. Yet it still lacked a bold, big idea and relied on small-bore announcements designed to attract back target slivers of the electorate. There was no magnetic theme, killer punch, dramatic game-changer or memorable zinger. The performance was sufficient to get him through the conference week, but nothing like enough to change the terms of the struggle with the Tories. The clunkingly populist elements of the speech included one claim that he would put teenage mums in hostels. This echoed his 2007 effort to crudely appeal to the right-wing tabloids. Within hours, the biggest-selling of those papers threw it all back in his face.
At just before ten that evening, at restaurants, drinks receptions and hotel suites around Brighton, the mobiles and Blackberries of ministers began to buzz with the news. With malevolent timing, the Sun chose the evening of the big speech to reveal that its front page the next morning would declare that Rupert Murdoch’s weathervane tabloid was switching support to the Tories under the headline ‘Labour’s lost it’.54 The paper’s increasing aggression towards the Government had been signalling this defection for some time. Murdoch never knowingly backed any party that looked like a loser. What Number 10 had not expected was that the attention-seeking tabloid would try to ruin the Prime Minister’s speech. Peter Mandelson told News International’s Chief Executive, Rebekah Brooks, that the Murdoch empire would look like ‘a bunch of chumps, we will not lose any sleep over this’. Brooks said he used a rather stronger word beginning with ‘c’. The next day on the conference platform, the Liverpudlian union leader Tony Woodley ripped up a copy of the newspaper to loud cheers.
Whether or not the Sun could actually shift significant numbers of votes – academic studies suggested not – the switch was symbolic. The conversion of the tabloid to Tony Blair before the 1997 election was a milestone on New Labour’s march to power. Its reversion to the Tories under Gordon Brown was a marker of decline. Domination of the media had been one of New Labour’s touchstones during its years of success. ‘Gordon has no constituency in the media,’ remarked one gloomy ally of the Prime Minister,55 an observation which, with the partial exception of the Mirror, was true.
At 6 p.m. on Remembrance Sunday, Number 10 officials took a call from the Sun. It was giving a few hours’ warning that the tabloid was about to launch its most vicious attack yet on Brown. Under the headline ‘Bloody shameful’, the next morning’s front page accused him of failing to bow his head after laying his wreath at the Cenotaph.56 That lapse his staff put down to disorientation due to his poor eyesight.57 The stinger in the splash was a furious assault on the Prime Minister by Jacqui Janes, the grieving mother of a twenty-year-old soldier who had died of horrific injuries sustained in Afghanistan. She complained that a letter of condolence from Brown was a ‘disgraceful, hastily scrawled insult’ to her and the sacrifice of her son.58
Brown had continued with Blair’s practice of sending handwritten notes to the relatives of the dead. His handwriting was bad, as he himself acknowledged, and became more indecipherable when condolence letters were written in spare moments while travelling on trains, in planes and in the back of the car.59 The messiness of the letter to Mrs Janes was the result not of disrespect but of bad eyesight and tiredness. It was physically laborious for a man without sight in his left eye and a right eye compromised by a damaged retina. It was, though, inexcusably maladroit to send a letter to a grieving mother with her name misspelt and the name of her dead son apparently corrected with a scribble. This was also a consequence of the continuing dysfunctionality of the Number 10 machine. Though his staff knew that the Prime Minister’s penmanship was poor, none of them had ever dared suggest that Brown’s condolence letters should be checked before they were posted. ‘It was difficult. It was very personal. It was sensitive. It was a line we thought we could not cross.’60
On Sunday evening, Brown phoned the bereaved mother in an attempt to assuage her wrath. This backfired when she recorded the acrimonious thirteen-minute conversation in which she angrily blamed her son’s death on equipment shortages. A transcript of the call provided the Sun with more material on Tuesday. At a news conference that day, even hardened Westminster reporters found it painful to watch as Brown fell back on alluding to his own loss of his baby daughter to suggest that he understood bereavement.61 One sketchwriter present thought: ‘It was excruciating. You’d have needed a heart of Kevlar not to sympathise with Gordon Brown yesterday.’62 There was a backlash against the Sun. Most of the rest of the media accused the tabloid of crudely exploiting a mother’s grief to spring a nasty ambush on the Prime Minister. The majority of the public sympathised with him.63
After this episode, he spent ‘two to three times as long’ when he wrote letters to the bereaved, and systems were put in place so that they were checked by his staff before they were posted.64
Despondency enveloped the Cabinet. Labour was almost always below 30 per cent in the polls and often bumping around 25 per cent. Brown’s personal ratings were even more dire.65 At a meeting in October, Peter Mandelson gave a presentation to the Cabinet on communications strategy. Harriet Harman chipped in with the suggestion that they should campaign on ‘three Fs – future, family and fairness’. Alistair Darling and Douglas Alexander, who sat either side of Mandelson, were prompted to think of alternative Fs. ‘How about fucked?’ murmured Darling. ‘Futile,’ suggested Alexander. Mandelson added: ‘Finished.’66
The First Secretary had been shown depressing research by the party’s advertising agency. Saatchi’s head of research warned: ‘Gordon is a walking magnetic field for everyone’s negative feelings: their anger, anxiety, their broken washing machine or their kids’ disappointing school results. They don’t like the Tories. But given the choice, it seems they won’t have Gordon.’ Even Brown recognised it. ‘So much of the problem is me,’ he said to Mandelson. ‘I realise that.’67
A victory in the Glasgow East by-election, triggered when Michael Martin stood down as an MP, was no consolation when their position in the national polls was so atrocious. There was a resumption of furtive discussions, now involving around half of the Cabinet, about moving against Brown in such overwhelming numbers that he would be compelled to resign.68 What Mandelson called ‘the Blairite fraternity’ – Alastair Campbell, Philip Gould and Blair himself – urged him to stop protecting Brown. ‘They feared that if I helped to prop up Gordon beyond the point of no return, the result might be an even worse election drubbing than already seemed on the cards.’ They told him: ‘I should not stop him using the revolver if it came to that.’ Mandelson tried to court Campbell to come back to help plan the election campaign, but Campbell was reluctant to be involved with ‘propping up a lost cause’. Blair told Mandelson: ‘I should not be the one pillar keeping him upright.’69 Blair never publicly expressed his view that Brown ought to be replaced. The former Prime Minister continued to sustain a complete silence about Labour’s plight. He had made up his mind not to stalk his successor as Margaret Thatcher had tormented John Major. He also wanted to become the first ‘President of Europe’ – the actual title was President of the European Council – the first permanent leader to chair summits and represent the EU abroad. It was one of the world’s worst-kept secrets that he desired the job, an ambition that he first began to develop when he was Prime Minister. Jonathan Powell, his former Chief of Staff, was running a behind-the-scenes lobbying campaign.70
Blair’s chances initially looked quite promising. Nicolas Sarkozy had told Blair that he had the French President’s support, though that was not a promise to be entirely trusted. Sarkozy later proposed to Brown that he should take the job.71 Brown was flattered enough to repeat this to others, including Mandelson, who thought it would be ‘good for Gordon, good for Britain and very possibly good for our electoral chances’72 – not that Mandelson admitted to Brown that he wanted him to exit to Europe in order to put in a new leader. But Brown was not interested in the job.73 During one discussion with Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor joked to Brown that, though Blair was nominally a member of the socialist group, she would regard his appointment as a victory for Christian Democrats like herself.74
David Miliband urged support for Blair on the grounds that the EU needed to be represented by someone with global name recognition whose motorcade could ‘stop the traffic’ in Beijing, Washington or Moscow.75 Powell says Blair didn’t want ‘to look like he was trying too hard for it’.76 He would not campaign openly for the post, for fear of being too visibly rebuffed if he didn’t win it. This made him seem aloof. Only belatedly did he make a flurry of personal telephone calls to European leaders, by which time his hopes were already fading.77 Brown went to the other extreme and waged a campaign which was both loud in public and aggressive in private. ‘You need to get real,’ he tried to bully other centre-left leaders at a meeting in late October. He urged them to seize ‘a unique opportunity’ to put a ‘strong, progressive politician’ in the top job. Brown ended up in a shouting match with Martin Schultz, the anti-Blair leader of the socialist group in the European Parliament.78
The trouble was that ‘Gordon didn’t really have much clout in Europe so no-one wanted to do him any favours.’79 The German media, reflecting opposition to Blair on both left and right in Europe’s most powerful country, reported that the chances of the one-time favourite for the presidency had crashed to ‘almost zero’.80
The dominant centre-right in Europe demanded the presidency for one of their own members. There was little support amongst the socialist group, who had not forgotten how Blair had often disdained them when he was Prime Minister. The Iraq war and Br
itain’s exclusion from the euro-zone also stacked up against him. Blair did not get the presidency in part because of those things he did and did not do as Prime Minister. His international fame was more a handicap than an advantage. Sarkozy and Merkel preferred to have an unassuming fixer in the role, not a globe-trotting character who would rival them on the world stage.81 The Germans explicitly warned Powell that ‘they were against a strong President and neither they nor the French wanted a candidate with a high profile.’82 There was a traditional Franco-German stitch-up in favour of an obscure candidate from the Low Countries. The presidency was conferred on Herman Van Rompuy, Prime Minister of Belgium for less than a year.
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