The End of the Party

by Andrew Rawnsley

  Blair’s testimony was often contradictory and slippery on details. He gave inadvertent confirmation of how cavalier he had been. When the committee focused on the bogus claims about Iraq’s non-existent WMD, he was asked if he understood the difference between ballistic weapons and the battlefield variety. ‘I didn’t focus on it a great deal’ was his casual reply. It confirmed one of the consistent character traits of Blair: he ignored inconvenient facts which got in the way of his certitudes. Faced with the charge that at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians as well as thousands of Allied troops had lost their lives because of slipshod pre-war planning, he did finally confess: ‘If we had known what we know now, we would have done things very differently.’ This was his only significant concession that things had turned out badly.

  At the end of six hours of testimony, his voice slightly hoarse by now, Blair remained defiantly unrepentant. Sir John inquired whether he had any regrets. ‘Responsibility but not a regret for removing Saddam Hussein,’ said the former Prime Minister. ‘He was a monster. I believe he threatened not just the region but the world. Even if you look back now, it was better to deal with this threat, to remove him from office.’50

  The chairman drew his attention to the presence in the inquiry chamber of people who had lost family members in the conflict. He invited the witness to say something to them. Blair instead reiterated his lack of regret. Some in the audience erupted. One shouted: ‘You’re a liar!’ Another added: ‘And a murderer!’ Several were led out of the hearing in tears.

  Blair’s testimony was never likely to change anyone’s mind, one way or the other, about the Iraq War. But he might have addressed their hearts. At his peak as a leader, he had been highly skilled at emotional politics, the ability to convince people that he ‘felt their pain’. In the presence of some of those who had suffered enormous grief because of Iraq, he had either forgotten how to do empathy or he could no longer be bothered to try. Even friends and admirers were surprised that Blair did not at least express sorrow for the loss of life. He did not do so because he was most concerned about how the media would portray his appearance. He was determined to say nothing that would create the headline: ‘Blair pleads for forgiveness’. He would rather appear callous than look cowed. His former communications chief, David Hill, says: ‘He took the view that he wasn’t going to be given any benefit of the doubt by the media. If he said: “I’m sorry about this, I’m sorry about that”, there would be screaming headlines: “Blair apologises – he got it wrong”.’51

  The chairman offered him a third opportunity to express sorrow. ‘Is there any final comment you wish to add?’

  Blair’s face turned stony and his lips pursed: ‘No.’

  Gordon Brown appeared before the inquiry five weeks later. He was initially resistant to testifying before the election, but that crumbled when the Opposition started to make an issue of it. His advisers calculated that there was more risk in looking like a man with something to hide.52 There was a much smaller group of protestors than there was for Tony Blair, a quarter of the number of journalists and a tenth of the level of expectation. In many ways, this had been the story of Brown’s premiership. On this occasion, at least, it did not bother him. He arrived by the front entrance to create a contrast with the way in which Blair had been smuggled into the building. To strike another, Brown began his testimony with a prepared encomium to the ‘sacrifice’ of British troops and stressed how ‘very sad indeed’ he was about the loss of life.

  Unlike Blair, Brown had not been previously subjected to prolonged interrogation about Iraq. He gave a blanket defence of the invasion as ‘the right decision for the right reasons’. To have done otherwise would have made him look risibly weak as well as hypocritical for not resigning at the time. While he could not disassociate himself from the basic decision, he distanced himself from almost everything else. He said that war had not been his department. It was not for him to ‘second-guess military decisions’, not for him to question the false intelligence that ‘seemed plausible at the time’, not for him to ‘interfere in what were very important diplomatic negotiations’, not for him ‘to expect to see private letters’ between Blair and Bush, not for him to ‘take personal responsibility for everything that went wrong’. He several times stressed: ‘I wasn’t the Foreign Secretary or the Prime Minister.’53 The man who had been a uniquely powerful Chancellor presented himself as no more than the backroom accountant.

  The central charge against Brown was that British troops had needlessly lost their lives because he refused to give adequate funding to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Other witnesses had elaborated damagingly on this issue. Sir Kevin Tebbit, the former Permanent Secretary at Defence, testified that he had to run the department on a ‘crisis budget’ because of ‘guillotining’ by Brown at the end of 2003.54 Sir Bill Jeffrey, who succeeded Tebbit, agreed that there was a spending squeeze shortly after the invasion and said that troops were sent to war with ‘an outdated stock of armoured vehicles’.55 General Mike Walker, Chief of the Defence Staff between 2003 and 2006, revealed that senior commanders had threatened to resign over the defence budget.56

  Brown repeatedly told the inquiry that ‘no request’ from the service chiefs ‘was ever turned down’ and insisted: ‘We had a rising defence budget.’57 By the end of his four hours of evidence, his salvos of statistics seemed to have shelled the panel into submission. Some members of the audience drifted off to sleep. The feeling among his staff was that he had emerged unscathed. This did not last long for his testimony provoked an incandescent reaction from former commanders. ‘For Gordon Brown to say he has given the military all they asked for is not true,’ fulminated General Charles Guthrie, who said Brown had ‘wanted to give the military as little as he could get away with’.58 Admiral Michael Boyce was even blunter: ‘He’s dissembling. It’s just not the case that the Ministry of Defence was given everything it needed … the MoD was starved of funds.’59

  The Government’s own figures showed that, contrary to Brown’s assertions, defence spending had been cut in real terms at crucial periods during both the Afghan and the Iraq conflicts. Brown was forced to write to the inquiry admitting that he had given a misleading account, but he did not apologise. Neither he nor Blair wanted to face the truth that lives were squandered because of the grave mistakes made in Iraq and Afghanistan. The largest lies of politicians are the ones they tell themselves.

  At a rally in the Midlands on Saturday, 20 February, Gordon Brown unveiled his election slogan, ‘A Future Fair for All’. He asked voters to take a ‘second look’ at the Government and endeavoured to strike a note of humility about his own failings. ‘I know that Labour hasn’t done everything right,’ he said. ‘And I know, really I know, that I’m not perfect.’60

  He knew something else: the following morning, the Observer would commence its serialisation of extracts from the first edition of The End of the Party.61 Those closest to him had long been fearful that the truth about his character would one day be exposed. It was widely reported in advance of publication that Number 10 was highly nervous about the book and especially agitated that it would reveal the uglier dimensions of the Prime Minister. According to the Guardian: ‘For weeks, Downing Street had been bracing itself for Andrew Rawnsley’s book as if it was expecting the arrival of a particularly violent storm.’62 In advance of publication, Number 10 attempted to make Brown’s persona look more attractive to voters by putting him on ITV’s Life Stories, usually a vehicle for gentle interviews with celebrities. The interviewer, Piers Morgan, told Brown beforehand that he wanted ‘to try and achieve a miracle. I’m going to try and make you sound human. Even vaguely human would be an improvement.’63 The soft format did allow Brown to offer glimpses of the more engaging side of his personality, but he was well out of his comfort zone and it showed.

  In their effort to pre-empt The End of the Party, some of his more misguided acolytes went to the bizarre and counter-productive lengths of trying to guess the worst th
at would be said of the Prime Minister’s private behaviour, plant rumours in the media that the book would depict him as a monster, and then put him on television to deny stories that they themselves had put about. He appeared on Channel 4 News to swear: ‘I have never, never hit anybody in my life.’ Nor, he claimed, had he ever shoved anybody. ‘I don’t do these sort of things.’64

  The next morning, the Observer launched the serialisation with the splash: ‘Civil service chief warned Brown over his abusive treatment of staff’ and led off with the book’s revelation65 that the Prime Minister had ‘received an unprecedented reprimand’ about his conduct from the Cabinet Secretary.66 Downing Street had been braced for revelations about his volcanic temper, but they had not anticipated this, not least because very few people, even inside Number 10, were aware that Brown had been cautioned by the Cabinet Secretary. The chapters extracted inside that day’s Observer were a balance between those from which Brown emerges with credit, such as his globally emulated plan to save the banks, and those which explored the negative dimensions of his personality and leadership. It was the character revelations which initially excited the intense interest of the rest of the media. Downing Street did not make any serious effort to challenge anything specific and took refuge in issuing the blanket denial: ‘These malicious allegations are totally without foundation.’67

  As the airwaves hummed with discussion, Peter Mandelson was put on Sunday television as the principal character reference for the Prime Minister. ‘I don’t think he so much bullies people as he is very demanding of people,’ he said. It would be stretching the truth too far even for Mandelson for him to try to deny that Brown had a temper. So he acknowledged that the Prime Minister ‘got angry’, but tried to put a more attractive gloss on it by suggesting that this was the product of his impatience to get things done. When Mandelson was asked whether he himself had ever been hit by Brown, he gave the eyebrow-raising reply: ‘I took my medicine like a man.’

  The First Secretary haughtily sneered at what he called a ‘flam up’ by the Observer and claimed that the book painted a picture of Brown’s character which was ‘not really one I recognise’.68 Mandelson had always had a slippery relationship with the truth, but this was a high level of dissimulation even by his standards. At the very same time as he was dismissing the revelations about Brown’s behaviour, Mandelson was furtively assembling his own ‘memoir’, which was rushed into print just two months after the election. In his own words, or phrases attributed to Tony Blair, that ‘memoir’ described Brown as ‘hair-raisingly difficult to work with’, ‘a nightmare’, ‘brutal’, ‘a backstabbing character’, ‘mad, bad, dangerous and beyond hope of redemption’, ‘someone who articulates high principles while practising the lowest skullduggery’ and ‘like something out of the mafiosi’.69

  Mandelson’s denials provoked an intervention from Christine Pratt, the chief executive of the National Bullying Helpline, who said she had received calls from ‘staff in the Prime Minister’s office who believe they are working in a bullying culture’.70 There were inconsistencies in her account which left her vulnerable to the ferocious counter-attack now being run by Mandelson. Patrons of her organisation complained that she had breached the confidentiality of callers to the helpline and resigned. The unfortunate Mrs Pratt was chewed up and spat out by the Labour machine.

  She was a diversion from the main debate prompted by the book’s publication. Brown’s paranoia, volatility, disloyalty and bad conduct towards colleagues were central to the explanation of why his government had been so dysfunctional. ‘10 Downing Street has been an awful place to work,’ commented The Times. ‘Bullying management is not just unpleasant management, but also poor management. As every schoolchild knows, bullies are weak.’71 The Guardian thought: ‘The Rawnsley revelation that will stick is that Mr Brown’s anger is fed at root by an insecurity which also inhibits him in the core prime ministerial tasks – delegating and deciding. Time and again his overriding concern to dump blame on others damages the government he leads.’72

  Many senior Labour figures conspicuously refused to attack the book or defend the Prime Minister. They knew the accounts of his conduct were authentic because so many of them had been the victims of it. At the same time as The End of the Party was being denounced by Brown’s acolytes, I was privately encouraged by members of the Government. One minister left the message: ‘Andrew, just checking you’re safe, you’re all right. Great read. If you’re feeling a bit bruised, just think that’s what my life is like every day. God bless.’73

  Brown fell back on some odd choices as apologists for his character. The most unintentionally funny was John Prescott, a man who had once hit a voter. The former deputy Prime Minister attacked me on the grounds that I wanted to ‘sell the book’. When we encountered each other on Newsnight, Prescott raged: ‘The big problem is him!’ I pointed out that both he and his wife had published memoirs, and sold the serial rights to Associated, publishers of the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday. I invited him to disclose how much the Prescotts had been paid for taking the shilling from Labour’s most mortal enemies in the press.74 The Evening Standard reported his reaction: ‘An apoplectic Prescott declined the offer and was not heard from again.’75

  Matthew Norman of the Independent was amused: ‘John Prescott’s face after being imperiously swatted for hypocrisy by Mr Rawnsley was something to behold. It required an idiot of the very first water to dismiss a bullying charge by reacting with snarling fury to being challenged himself. You might as well have adduced Harold Shipman as star medical witness for Dr Crippen’s defence.’76

  Brown had made enemies of many colleagues over the years and some of them could not conceal their pleasure that his dreadful behaviour had finally been uncovered. At a Labour fund-raising event, Charlie Falconer spotted Catherine Macleod, the special adviser to the Chancellor. Like many other people, Falconer had been struck by the book’s account of Maggie Darling’s expletive-rich fury when her husband had been a target of Brown’s hit squad. To Macleod, Falconer cheerfully remarked: ‘Why did Maggie stop at just three cunts to describe him?’77

  On Tuesday evening, the Chancellor himself gave on-the-record corroboration of the book’s account of the poisonous briefing against him for being too truthful about the economy. Darling told a television interviewer that ‘the forces of hell were unleashed.’78 At Prime Minister’s Questions the following afternoon, Brown and Darling sat next to each other looking awkward as David Cameron described them as ‘at war’ and ridiculed the Prime Minister’s unconvincing denials that he had allowed his henchmen to take their hatchets to his next-door neighbour. The rowdiness of backbenchers became so loud that John Bercow, the Speaker, threatened to suspend the sitting. If MPs didn’t stop shouting: ‘I might have to ring some sort of helpline myself!’79

  Brown’s response to the questions about his character was illustrative of it. To one interviewer, he suggested that his behaviour was completely normal. ‘I get angry sometimes – doesn’t everybody?’80 No, not in the way he did.

  The revelation that the Prime Minister’s conduct towards staff was so awful that it led to a warning from the Cabinet Secretary put Sir Gus O’Donnell in a delicate situation, made more complicated once Brown had flatly denied it. Several differently worded statements were issued by Downing Street, none of which actually rebutted the disclosure. A senior Number 10 official explains: ‘We were negotiating a very careful form of words that Gus could live with.’81 The Cabinet Secretary could not call the Prime Minister a liar without igniting a constitutional crisis, but O’Donnell was not willing to make a liar of himself on Brown’s behalf by denying what he knew to be true. Their relationship had badly deteriorated. One fellow civil servant thought ‘Gus always looked nervous when he came in to see Gordon’ and noted that he now rarely met the Prime Minister unless others were present.82 That was understandable. Even the Cabinet Secretary had been on the receiving end of ‘screaming and swearing by Gordon’.83

&n
bsp; After four days of maintaining a diplomatic silence, Sir Gus elegantly finessed his dilemma by adding to the stock of mandarin euphemisms. He told a committee of MPs: ‘I talked to him about how to get the best out of his staff.’84

  By the end of the week, Number 10’s denials were taken seriously by no-one. The Mail on Sunday had possession of a recording of Stewart Wood talking to Suzie Mackenzie, a Scottish writer who had been asked by Brown to write a biography which she intended to be admiring until she discovered too much about his character. Mackenzie said she felt compelled to release the tape because of Brown’s ‘shameful deception’ when he denied the accounts of his conduct in The End of the Party.85 Wood was heard confirming that he had been shocked and distressed when he was sworn at and shoved by the Prime Minister.86 Brown did ‘not quite’ throw a punch at him, said Wood, who was also recorded confessing that the Prime Minister was ‘rude in a kind of routine way’ and Brown’s senior staff had been too willing to make excuses about behaviour that was not tolerable.87

  The furore attracted a lot of attention from the international media. The most amusing contribution came from the Apple Daily site, based in the Far East, which launched a hugely popular computer-generated animation of Brown hurling a secretary out of a chair, punching the car seat, shoving Wood aside, and other incidents from the book. Wood’s wife, Camilla, teased her husband that the CGI version of him looked much more handsome. For staff at Number 10, there was a pleasing by-product from the controversy. The Prime Minister felt compelled to try to be nice to them, at least temporarily. They reported that ‘he’s been saying please and thank you and trying to be smiley with everyone.’88

  Looking for a bright side, some Labour strategists managed to persuade themselves that Brown’s temper might even be turned into a plus with voters. Prompted by that, the Guardian’s April Fool on its readers was a story saying that Labour would run an election poster campaign picturing Brown squaring up to Cameron and the legend: ‘Step Outside Posh Boy’.89