The split between Brown and Darling was also played out, and again in a way damaging to their election prospects, over VAT. Brown wanted to make a manifesto pledge that Labour would not raise VAT so that he could hit the Tories for not making the same commitment.129 Ben Wegg-Prosser, who had been one of Tony Blair’s senior staff, joined the campaign planning team in February, principally to assist Mandelson. Wegg-Prosser thought there was an unhealthy obsession with the idea that a ‘VAT bombshell’ campaign could destroy the Tories. ‘Instead of thinking positively, people hung on to it like a crutch.’130 The Chancellor kicked away that crutch. To Brown’s impotent fury, Darling refused to make the VAT pledge on the grounds that no responsible Chancellor should make such an absolute commitment.
Right on the eve of the campaign, there was an even more critical division about ‘the very concept’ of how Labour should fight the election. Mandelson, who was supposed to be in charge of planning it, and Brown, who would be principally fronting it, ‘had different ideas about the message we wanted to take to the country’.131 Mandelson believed that Cameron’s ‘time for a change’ theme could only be countered by the party projecting its own ‘positive vision’ about how the future would be better under Labour. He had the support of Philip Gould, who had returned to help with the election. Gould said his polling and focus groups showed that voters were yearning for change and would support the party that most convincingly offered it.
By contrast, Brown wanted to run an essentially negative campaign. He was influenced by David Muir, a former advertising man who had become his Director of Strategy. Muir told Brown that voters in his focus groups fled back to Labour when presented with scary messages about the Tories. This demonstrates the limitations of politics by focus group: they had led Gould and Muir to opposed conclusions about how the campaign ought to be fought. It was Muir’s approach that chimed with Brown’s basic instinct to present himself as the safe pair of hands and put most emphasis on attacking the Tories as too risky to trust with the economy and public services.132 The choice was between running a fear-driven campaign like that or the hope-orientated campaign desired by Mandelson. Strong messages could have been fashioned from either approach. They ended up in confusion because ‘there was a strategic split that was never resolved.’133 By Mandelson’s own admission: ‘We never thrashed out our differences of approach … we never properly battled it out.’134 The consequence is summarised by Justin Forsyth, Brown’s Director of Communications. They were unable to properly exploit the pre-election period: ‘It was half-cocked always. Gordon had not made decisions about the campaign. Many of the Cabinet weren’t pulling their weight. So we didn’t deliver anything with a full punch.’135
Douglas Alexander gamely told the media that Labour would fight a ‘word-of-mouth’ election. This was another way of saying that they had little money. The war chest was roughly a third of the size in 1997. The number of campaign staff had shrunk by a similar proportion. Labour would not be able to afford paid advertising for the first election in decades. This was a legacy of the debts run up by previous campaigns, the sleaze scandals that had frightened away donors, and a reluctance among all but the trades unions to give money when it looked so unlikely Labour would be returning to power. Mandelson was in a defeatist frame of mind. He feared that ‘the electorate had made up their minds about Gordon.’ He described himself as ‘like a commander with no control over his forces in the field’.136 The troops had low confidence in their generals. ‘There were not many party staff and those that were there did not feel they were getting any direction,’ says Wegg-Prosser. He found his old friend, Mandelson, ‘uncomfortable, as everyone was, because we were going into the campaign totally unprepared. It was like we were opening a restaurant and the tables weren’t laid.’137 It was worse than that: the head chefs couldn’t agree on what menu they should be offering and the rest of the kitchen were doubtful that any customers would turn up anyway.
The Cabinet were profoundly pessimistic. A senior civil servant observes that ‘almost all of them thought they were going to lose big time.’138 Peter Hain felt that colleagues were behaving as if ‘we had already lost’. Even the optimists in the ministerial ranks had a more limited aspiration than winning another majority. They prayed that they could run the Tories close enough to produce a hung parliament and this might allow them to stay in office in coalition with the Liberal Democrats.139
Brown was alone in seeming to believe he could somehow defy the odds and secure a fourth majority for Labour. One of his officials found the Prime Minister ‘insanely optimistic’.140 On the eve of the campaign, Brown told his senior staff: ‘No-one but me thinks we can do this, but we can.’141
40. Dusk
Sue Nye bustled around the lobby of Number 10 trying to marshal the Cabinet. Once they were finally lined up in some sort of order, they followed Gordon Brown out on to Downing Street. Unusually for an election announcement, the entire senior team was going to flank the Prime Minister.
He told everyone what they already knew: the election would be held in exactly one month’s time, on 6 May.
‘I am not a team of one,’ he said. ‘As everybody can see, I am one of a team.’ The choreography was designed to dilute public hostility towards Brown and to raise questions about David Cameron being a one-man band. Hearing Brown describe himself as a team-player, Peter Mandelson, standing just over the Prime Minister’s right shoulder, parted his lips into a thin smile. Harriet Harman looked quizzical. David Miliband’s mind seemed elsewhere. Alistair Darling looked like he’d rather be anywhere else. Tessa Jowell strained to be sunny, but had lost the will to grin by the time Brown had finished.
‘Britain is now on the road to recovery,’ he said. ‘And now is not the time to put it at risk.’ He concluded: ‘Let’s go for it.’1
He returned inside to make a short speech in the Pillared Room to the civil servants he might never see again and the political advisers who had emptied their desks, not knowing whether they would ever return and largely assuming they wouldn’t. He told them: ‘You’re more than colleagues, you’re family.’2 One in his audience found it ‘Emotional. Elegiac. There was a strong sense this was his farewell speech.’3 With Sarah beside him, he told a self-deprecating story about his bungling attempts to court her. He had invited Sarah for an intimate dinner in his flat and was pleased with his efforts until he suddenly realised that he had laid out not a table cloth, but a duvet cover. The Prime Minister’s staff spoke of him being placid, even light-spirited, at least by his standards. Even for a leader behind in the polls, there is some comfort in the rituals of the start of an election campaign.
David Cameron had pre-empted Brown’s formal announcement by speaking fifteen minutes earlier. The Tory leader stood on the balcony of the old County Hall on the south bank of the Thames, against a sunlit backdrop of the Commons. ‘Vote for change’ banners streamed in the breeze off the river. He was surrounded by a claque of young Tories, two black parliamentary candidates prominently displayed. He was accompanied by his pregnant wife, Samantha, but not members of the Shadow Cabinet. ‘It comes down to this: you don’t have to put up with another five years of Gordon Brown,’ he said before adding that a Conservative government ‘frankly … couldn’t be any worse’.4
The media were least interested in Nick Clegg. He had struggled to make an impression on the nation’s consciousness in his two years as leader of the Liberal Democrats. A TV interviewer had recently teased him that he had walked the length of Waterloo station and not received a flicker of recognition from anyone.5 ‘Who’s Nick Clegg?’ was a running gag on an edition of the satirical show Have I Got News for You. Clegg felt obliged to give joint billing to his deputy, Vince Cable. Polls suggested that the Treasury spokesman was the voters’ choice to be Chancellor and a bigger electoral asset to the Lib Dems. Clegg pleaded with voters not to treat the election as ‘a two-horse race’ and insisted that the campaign was ‘wide open: all bets are off’.6
The
most uncertain election in many years presented formidable challenges to each of the leaders. David Cameron required the largest swing to the Conservatives since 1945 just to gain the 117 seats which would secure a Tory majority of one. Nick Clegg would have to resist a squeeze on the third party. No Prime Minister had been as unpopular as Gordon Brown and gone on to win.
On the first campaign day, he travelled by train in standard class to Kent, a county packed with the sort of marginals that would decide the contest. Cameron was flown to Birmingham in an executive jet. Their methods of transport illustrated the disparity in their financial muscle. The Tories, brimming with cash, could have spent far more than the legal maximum of £19 million. Labour had already eaten through about half of the £8 million it had managed to raise for a shoe-string campaign. At past elections, a small army had accompanied the leader on his tours. His support team had shrunk to a platoon of enthusiastic but inexperienced twentysomethings. There was an early warning that basic advance work was deficient. On a visit to the headquarters of Innocent, the makers of smoothie drinks, Brown was allowed to pause beneath a fifteen-foot sign. He had not been forewarned that it read: ‘You can’t polish a turd, but you can roll it in glitter.’
Cash was so tight that members of the campaign team were having to meet all their expenses out of their own pockets.7 Yet to begin with ‘morale was pretty good’ at Labour campaign headquarters in Victoria Street. They knew that it would be a miracle if they won the election, but ‘people thought we had a chance of stopping the Tories from getting a majority.’8
The Conservatives made early headway with their attacks on the ‘tax on jobs’, the rise in National Insurance contributions, which they promised to part-reverse if they won. Nick Butler says: ‘The Tories made a lot more of it than we expected.’9 Over several days of rolling declarations, chief executives and chairmen of major companies came out in support of the Conservative policy. ‘The Tories had been very cute to set this whole thing up with their business backers,’ says Ben Wegg-Prosser. ‘It worked like a dream for them.’10 There was a ‘big effort’ to find business leaders who would back Labour’s position. It was a failure because ‘we couldn’t get anyone.’11 The media scored the opening round as a victory on points for the Conservatives. A few hard blows were being landed on the Tories, but not by Labour. Nick Clegg called it ‘patronising drivel’ when Cameron pushed tax breaks for marriage and the Lib Dem accused the Tory leader of trying to ‘fool’ the electorate by promising tax cuts that couldn’t be afforded.
Brown and Mandelson had still not resolved the tension between them over whether their campaign should be based around fear of the Tories or hope in Labour. Mandelson appeared to be prevailing when the manifesto was launched on Monday, 12 April, at a new hospital in the marginal Birmingham seat of Edgbaston. Brown spoke against a background of a computer-generated sun rising over a field of waving corn. ‘At the heart of Labour’s manifesto is the great and common purpose of national renewal,’ he declared. ‘We are in the future business … we are building a future fair for all.’12
He deployed the word ‘future’ fourteen times to introduce a manifesto with a cover that was distinctly retro. It featured an idealised nuclear family on the brow of a hillside gazing over the iridescent green fields of the next five-year plan towards a blazing sun. Many were reminded of Soviet-era communist propaganda, which echoed the way Private Eye lampooned Brown as a Stalinist ‘Supreme Leader’. The document was initially only available in digital form because the party was too impoverished to print copies. By contrast, the rival 130-page Conservative manifesto was the first in recent history to be produced in the form of a hardback book. With a sober, dark-blue cover intended to resonate with the gravity of the financial crisis, it looked like a hymn book.
Brown’s speech at his manifesto launch was laced with references to ‘New Labour’, a phrase he had eschewed for much of his premiership. Afterwards, Mandelson said: ‘The spirit of Tony Blair smiles down on New Labour today.’13 The corporeal form of Tony Blair was absent abroad on an African safari.
The manifesto had been drawn together by Ed Miliband and Patrick Diamond, the Director of Policy Planning. It offered some radical reforms to the constitution, the financial sector and public services. The document suffered from two major handicaps which encapsulated Labour’s broader predicament. Diamond correctly observes that ‘writing a manifesto after thirteen years in power is just tough.’14 A party in office for so long is always vulnerable to the question: why haven’t you done these things before? They had had thirteen years to introduce an elected House of Lords. The manifesto often read like a list of things they regretted not doing earlier. Brown had had a belated conversion to Blairite ideas about reform of the public services. Diamond believes Brown had reached ‘a better position on public services by the time of the election. The trouble was it was too little, too late.’15
Parties of the centre-left are happiest promising to build a New Jerusalem. The state of the national finances meant they simply could not make any commitments that cost serious money. A promise in earlier drafts to give universal free school meals was one of several that were deleted.16
The opening week of the campaign was regarded by the parties and the media as merely a preliminary skirmish. Real battle would be joined when the leaders confronted each other in the first televised debate. TV debates had long been common in America and continental Europe, but they had not happened in Britain before because the frontrunners in each campaign saw no reason to risk their advantage. It had taken an unusual combination of circumstances to break this barrier. Cameron had first issued the challenge when Brown became Prime Minister and the Tories didn’t back away later because they assumed their leader’s superior communications skills would give them the edge. With Labour so far behind, they didn’t think they had much to lose and Brown was confident that he could destroy Cameron on policy. The devious Mandelson had tried to engage the Tories in a conspiracy to exclude Nick Clegg from the debates.17 That showed his ignorance of electoral law and was never going to be acceptable to the broadcasters.
Sue Inglish, a BBC executive, chaired the months of negotiations between the broadcasters and the parties about the rules for the debates. She had ‘a heart-sinking moment’ when Brown’s negotiators, Justin Forsyth and David Muir, turned up with the rule book for American presidential debates, a document that was two inches thick. But the parties agreed the ‘key principles’ with surprising rapidity and the negotiations, while protracted, were generally smooth. ‘It never got nasty,’ says Inglish.18 Labour had initially argued for a large number of debates spread over six months while the Tories wanted just one during the campaign. They compromised on three. The Tories and Labour accepted early on that Clegg would be given equal time and status with Brown and Cameron, a concession which would have significant consequences. Alex Gardiner, an ITV executive, says: ‘We were all surprised. We couldn’t believe how easily they agreed.’19 Andy Coulson, the lead Tory negotiator, didn’t resist because he believed that it would look to the public like an unfair two-party stitch-up if Clegg wasn’t given equality.20 Justin Forsyth says Labour acceded for the same reason.21 Labour and the Tories were agreed that they ‘didn’t want a Question Time type of audience’ which could cheer or boo or answer back.22 They feared it would colour the responses of viewers at home. Only at the very end of the negotiations did they hit a really sticky point. It had been agreed that each debate would have a different theme: domestic affairs, the economy and foreign affairs. Lots were drawn to determine the order. Labour had earlier signed off on this procedure, but Brown was disgruntled when his negotiators reported back that the economy had not been picked as the first subject. He wanted to kick off with the issue on which he was most confident. ‘We can’t agree on that,’ Forsyth and Muir told Inglish. This held up final agreement for a fortnight, but Labour, isolated on this point, eventually had to give in.
Never before had one single election event been freight
ed with such promise and peril as the first debate. Cameron spoke for all three leaders when he remarked: ‘It’s like having one big huge job interview in front of the whole nation.’23 All started rehearsing weeks in advance and were desperate to know how their rivals were prepping. Richard Collins, a hugely experienced producer of political debate programmes who had been making them for international television for ten years, gave technical assistance to all the parties. Collins was the only person to witness all three in private rehearsal. Alastair Campbell had joined the team which was preparing Brown. Collins was a little stunned when Campbell produced his wallet, pulled out an enormous wodge of high-value banknotes, and said, presumably as a joke: ‘I’m sure you’ll be our spy in the other camps.’
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