When Darling presented the PBR to the Commons, the Prime Minister, sitting to the left of the Chancellor, and Balls, two seats further down the frontbench, were beaming. They thought they had carved out dividing lines with the Tories that would disadvantage their opponents and boost Labour. The press coverage said otherwise. There were hostile headlines from papers of all political complexions. The Guardian groaned: ‘Darling soaks the rich … and the rest of us too.’137 The Chancellor was most wounded by The Times, which mocked: ‘The axeman dithereth.’138 Darling and Mandelson were even more appalled by how the Prime Minister dealt with interviews about the PBR. The Chancellor had tried to restore Labour’s fiscal credentials by formally declaring an ambition to halve the deficit by 2014 and coupling this with the warning that future spending rounds would be ‘the toughest in decades’.139 That message was largely obscured because Brown put all the emphasis on the promises of extra short-term spending and ignored the pleas of Darling and Mandelson that the Government’s credibility depended on placing at least as much weight on long-term deficit reduction.
The PBR was greeted with a scathing reception from City analysts and independent experts. The Institute for Fiscal Studies identified a huge hole in the arithmetic, which led to the conclusion that either Labour had no credible plan to tackle the deficit or that they were contemplating massive spending cuts and/or tax rises which they were concealing until after the election. As Jeremy Heywood had tried to warn Brown, it was the figures from the IFS, not those of the Government, that were trusted. Because Labour’s fiscal plans were not credible, the Tories were let off the hook. It relieved the pressure on David Cameron and George Osborne to explain how they would implement their programme of deeper and faster cuts. Public sector unions protested about a cap on pay rises and pensions. A new levy on the bonuses of bankers was the only measure that went down well. The increase in National Insurance applied to anyone earning more than £20,000 a year, a hit on 10 million voters, many of them modest earners. This was a gift to the Conservatives. A parallel hike in employers’ National Insurance contributions generated complaints from business that it would stifle job creation and smother economic recovery. ‘The NICs increase turned out to be a serious mistake and was regretted by everyone,’ says Nick Butler. ‘We ended up in the ludicrous position of saying it wasn’t a tax on jobs when it patently was.’140
At his Christmas drinks party on Thursday evening, the Chancellor tried to make light of the adverse reception. He joked that he had ‘gone up in the world’ in the eyes of his children when they read the Sun headline: ‘Darling just screwed more people than Tiger Woods’.141
He was not laughing inside. Both Darling and Mandelson felt they had suffered a major strategic defeat at the hands of Brown and Balls and it had put Labour in a worse position.142 Post-PBR polling suggested that the Tories had moved to a fourteen-point advantage on the economy.143 To a friend, Mandelson said: ‘It was received like a heap of sick.’144
This divide through the very top of government over economic strategy was mirrored by another split over electoral strategy. Brown had recently mocked David Cameron’s promise of an inheritance tax cut which would most favour the very rich as a policy ‘dreamed up on the playing fields of Eton’.145 It was quite a good crack, but a disturbing one, thought Mandelson and like-minded ministers, if this indicated that Brown was hoping to beat the Tories by waging class war. Partisan, negative attacks might play well in Labour’s tribal heartlands, but they also made Brown look like an even more divisive and dated figure. In a lengthy e-mail to Brown, Mandelson warned that they were ‘in danger of courting our core vote alone, at the risk of losing middle-class, Middle England voters’.146 Labour MPs in ‘Middle England’-type seats were already complaining that the cash-strapped party was refusing to help those defending the sixty or so marginals with majorities of less than 3,000.147
The First Secretary’s estrangement from the Prime Minister became severe. From the day after the PBR, Mandelson withdrew into a sulking silence. Previously a regular presence at the political strategy discussions at Number 10, ‘Peter was suddenly absent from these meetings. He was very disengaged. He clearly withdrew his love.’148
Mandelson virtually vanished from the media. This impersonation of Greta Garbo was all the more striking because he had previously been ubiquitous across the range from television to the press to glossy magazines. While mute in public, his private commentaries on the flaws of Brown became fruitily vituperative. In conversation, Mandelson started to sound almost as negative towards the other man as he had been during their fourteen-year uncivil war. He complained to friends that Brown could not focus beyond the next day’s headlines and was incapable of thinking strategically. Like others before him who had seen Number 10 from the inside, Mandelson concluded that Brown couldn’t forge the talented people at Downing Street into a coherent team because of a management style which was obsessively controlling, highly chaotic and inhibiting of open discussion. He had no-one around him who would tell the Prime Minister when he was wrong, said Mandelson. He was bad at addressing, making and conveying decisions. Even when you thought you had got a decision from him, it would as often as not unravel because he couldn’t stick to a position or allowed Balls to change his mind. Mandelson was caustic about Brown’s inability to understand the public or communicate with them: ‘He has no instinct for the voters. He can’t intuit them.’ The First Secretary would shake his head and sigh. ‘He just can’t do it.’ To one colleague who caught him in an especially vitriolic mood, Mandelson said: ‘I won’t do it twice. I won’t save him again.’149
Mandelson had helped protect Brown in the summer by assuring the Cabinet that the Prime Minister understood that he had to run a more orderly and collegiate government. Those promises had been broken in the eyes of many ministers. Douglas Alexander, who had long been disillusioned with his old patron and mentor, was now utterly disaffected. ‘Every question we face comes back to leadership,’ he would say. ‘Everything.’150 Bob Ainsworth was furious that he had become a target of derogatory, blame-shifting briefing by Number 10 against the Defence Secretary. In clandestine discussions with fellow members of the Cabinet who were contemplating a coup, Ainsworth said: ‘If we only wound him, we will make things worse. We must kill him.’151 Jack Straw, who greatly feared he’d lose his Blackburn seat, was bristling at his exclusion from campaign planning.152 Harriet Harman was bitterly discontented about the contemptuous treatment she felt she received at the hands of Brown and his staff. She was also alarmed about the lack of planning for the election and jealous of Mandelson’s status. Harman complained that she was not accorded the prominence and influence that she felt was her right as the party’s deputy leader. There was less than four months left before the beginning of the election campaign. Both she and Straw had concluded that Labour’s prospects were hopeless without a change of leader.153 The Cabinet had become a simmering cauldron of grievances and despair – most of all, deep, deep despair.
In the opinion polls published in the final quarter of the year, the average Tory lead was 12 per cent.154 A December draft of Labour’s election campaign ‘warbook’ warned that the Conservatives were ahead in marginals in northern England and had ‘commanding leads in the marginals in the south and Midlands’, which threatened ‘a heavy defeat’.155
The party’s private research found so much voter hostility towards Brown that the results were concealed from the Cabinet. Some ministers made their own discreet inquiries of independent polling experts, from whom they established that antipathy towards Brown accounted for about half of the Tory lead.156 This could be the difference between a moderate defeat at the election and what threatened to be a devastating rout. One senior minister believed: ‘If you had had a secret ballot of the Cabinet, there would be only two votes for Gordon – Gordon’s and Ed Balls’.’157 He might have received a little more support than that, but it was certainly true that all of them now felt doomed under Brown.
‘We’re going to lose,’ Darling said to Mandelson in a phone conversation just before Christmas. Mandelson didn’t argue. He ‘feared the scale of the defeat could be colossal’.
Darling continued: ‘You can tell, just by going into Tesco’s. People look away. They’re embarrassed.’ Then the Chancellor said: ‘We all know what the real problem is. It’s not because of what the Government is doing. It’s who is leading it.’158
If they were going to do something about it, then they would have to act early in the New Year. Time had very nearly run out.
39. Prisoners of their Fate
‘You promised me you’d be loyal,’ he said. ‘I have been loyal, Gordon,’ responded Tessa Jowell before arguing that her greatest obligation was to their party. ‘None of the people who work for you will tell you the truth. They’re too scared.’
At 6 p.m. on the evening of Monday, 4 January, she had gone to see him at Number 10 in order to say the words she had been rehearsing in her head for the last three months. ‘We’re going to lose the election because you are Prime Minister. The fact is voters don’t like you. They don’t understand you. It’s not fair, but there it is.’
Brown sunk his chin into his chest and defensively folded his arms. ‘So you’re telling me I have to go?’ ‘I’m not saying that – it’s got to be your decision,’ replied Jowell. ‘You have a duty to the party. If you care about the party, you should step aside.’
Brown became aggressive. ‘It’s too late,’ he contended. If the Cabinet wanted rid of him, they should have acted the previous June. He argued, which was genuinely his belief, that he was the only one who could hold things together. If he resigned, ‘the party will fracture into six pieces.’ He made a sarcastic allusion to David Miliband. ‘There’s no guarantee that you’ll get your favoured candidate.’
Jowell’s plea was not having the desired effect and they were repeatedly interrupted by Sue Nye coming in to remind him that the Secretary-General of the UN was waiting to have a phone conversation. The encounter ended with Brown and Jowell promising each other that neither of them would repeat this conversation to anyone else. So Jowell felt that agreement had been broken because soon afterwards Brown’s briefers launched a clumsy campaign to undermine her by spreading false claims that she was about to resign. She was furious.1
One Cabinet minister had acted on her own forlorn initiative to try to persuade Brown to go voluntarily. By Tuesday night, rumours were buzzing around Westminster of a more public and concerted effort. At ten o’clock on Wednesday morning, selected ministers and MPs received a phone text from Charles Clarke. The text read: ‘Stand by for a significant development straight after PMQs.’2
Shortly before Prime Minister’s Questions, Sue Nye learnt that Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt were planning to e-mail a letter to every Labour MP. The letter from the two former Cabinet ministers would call for a secret ballot on whether Brown should remain as leader. While his praetorian guard tried to discover more, the Prime Minister headed over to the Commons. He got the better of David Cameron in that day’s clash. The Tory leader had ‘messed up’, in his own words, by flip-flopping on his policy to give tax breaks for married couples.3 Brown mocked: ‘He cannot say “I do or I don’t” when it comes to the married couples’ allowance.’4 Word of the Hoon–Hewitt letter reached Cameron before the end of PMQs. But it was too late for the Tory leader to exploit the development: he’d already had his six questions. Labour MPs were still in the chamber cheering one of the stronger performances by the Prime Minister when, at 12.26 p.m., the e-mail dropped. Hoon and Hewitt wrote that the party was ‘deeply divided over the question of the leadership’ and argued that a secret ballot would settle ‘once and for all’ whether Brown should lead them into the election. The rather weaselly letter did not explicitly say that their purpose was to depose him, but everyone understood that was the point. They used the phrase ‘we can’t go on like this’.5 Coincidentally, that was the slogan which had just gone up on Tory billboard posters.
By the end of the day, nearly everyone was turning on Hoon and Hewitt, Cabinet members vehemently denied having anything to do with this gambit, and the letter-writers were scornfully dismissed as detached, discredited and embittered figures who had been crazy to attempt a coup for which there was never any support. This interpretation was given wide currency in the media at the time, but it did not make sense. Hoon and Hewitt were cautious characters never previously known for theatrical gestures. This was not a wild shot in the dark. The letter-writers had been directly encouraged by the senior ministers who wanted to oust Brown. From explicit conversations with these ministers or communications via intermediaries, Hoon and Hewitt acted in the belief that barely a handful of the Cabinet were prepared ‘to die in the ditch with Gordon’. On Hoon’s account, he and Hewitt had been told that ‘sufficient numbers of senior members of the Cabinet would act if we raised the flag.’ Hewitt’s oldest friend in politics was Harriet Harman. They went back decades. ‘Harriet knew exactly what we were going to do as did Jack Straw and several others,’ says Hoon. He had discussed the plan with the deputy leader the weekend before they sent the letter. Harman said to Hoon that ‘even Nick Brown is despairing.’ ‘She explicitly told me that she would tell Gordon to go. She felt it was her duty and obligation in order to save the party.’ The Cabinet ministers with whom Hoon discussed sending the letter also included his friend Alistair Darling. ‘Alistair’s fear was what would happen if we plunged the knife in, damaged Gordon, but didn’t finish him off.’ But the Chancellor didn’t say anything to discourage them. ‘Alistair knew what was going on and didn’t say: “Don’t do it.” ’ Bob Ainsworth was signed up to the insurrection and it had been indicated that Douglas Alexander ‘might well join in’. Hoon had communicated with Straw via two Labour MPs who were exceptionally close to the Justice Secretary. ‘I had it, on absolutely categorical authority, that Jack was going to do the business.’6 David Miliband was not so closely involved. As the person most likely to take over, he could not be seen near the scene of the assassination. But the Foreign Secretary also wanted the coup to succeed.7 Far from being a joke, this plot began as the most potentially lethal of all the attempts to depose Brown.
The planners of the coup were also emboldened to strike by Peter Mandelson’s visible estrangement from the Prime Minister. He might not be willing to wield the dagger himself, but the assassins had reason to believe that Mandelson would cease shielding Brown so that others could dispatch him. The First Secretary’s response to the publication of the letter was highly ambiguous. Mandelson left his ministerial suite in Victoria Street and was driven off through the snow for a lunch date. It was not until 2.07 p.m., more than ninety minutes after the launch of the coup attempt, that a statement went out in his name: ‘No-one should overreact to this initiative … The Prime Minister continues to have the support of his colleagues and we should carry on government business as usual.’8
This was so sphinx-like that it could be read as sly encouragement for the putsch. It was Mandelson who told Brown’s aides not to mobilise ministers on to television to profess their loyalty on the grounds that this would whip up a frenzy.9 Mandelson later admitted that this instruction ‘was also a convenient explanation for my own silence over the Hoon–Hewitt e-mail. I was still trying to work out its significance, and wondering where it might lead.’10
Brown had returned to Number 10 in a ‘jolly and ebullient’ mood after his success at PMQs and initially seemed ‘quite relaxed’ about the letter.11 Then he grew agitated because the media were asking why the Cabinet was silent. He countermanded Mandelson and told his aides to get ministers on television. Three hours after the publication of the letter, Shaun Woodward, the Northern Ireland Secretary, became the first Cabinet member to publicly defend Brown. He was followed on to the TV screens by the rest of the hardcore loyalists: Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper, Ed Miliband and Ed Balls. ‘The country will think we have lost our marbles,’ said Balls. ‘The Cabinet is fully beh
ind the Prime Minister.’12
In fact, most of the Cabinet were invisible. That was very conspicuous when 24/7 media had made sixty minutes a long time in politics. Sue Nye rang Tessa Jowell to ask her to deliver a public declaration of loyalty. ‘I’m not doing anything to help you,’ replied Jowell, still seething about how Number 10 had briefed against her. ‘I’m switching off my phone and taking industrial action.’13 Some ministers simply refused to return Number 10’s calls. ‘The phones went dead.’14
Harman, Darling, Johnson, Miliband and Straw, all the most senior members of the Government, were nowhere to be seen. Statements from ministerial offices were very slow to be forthcoming and those that did materialise were devoid of either personal or political endorsements of the Prime Minister. Some of the silent Cabinet were not part of the plot. They were simply seizing on an opportunity to punish Brown for the way he had treated them. Other ministers were deliberately advertising that he did not have their confidence. The night before the letter was sent, Harman said to another member of the Cabinet: ‘If something does happen tomorrow, we shouldn’t all rush out to give interviews supporting Gordon.’15 When Number 10 asked Harman to make broadcast appearances on behalf of Brown, her office declined on the grounds that the deputy leader had ‘lost her voice’. Harman did have the flu, but her vocal cords were lively enough to be holding intense private discussions all afternoon. One of Miliband’s aides rang round counterparts in other departments urging them to keep their ministers off the TV screens.16 A Cabinet member explains: ‘The idea was that the silence would be deadly.’17
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