The End of the Party

by Andrew Rawnsley

  Brown was rehearsed at Victoria Street, where the news conference room was turned into a mock studio. Collins felt that Brown hated the experience. ‘He was always late for rehearsals. He was on edge. He recognised that it was important, but he didn’t want to be there. He wanted to get away as quickly as possible.’

  In rehearsals, Campbell pretended to be Cameron. ‘He hammed it up and played it as a pantomime dame.’ Theo Bertram, a Number 10 aide, stood in for Clegg. Douglas Alexander, David Muir, Justin Forsyth and Sue Nye would line up ‘like an X-factor panel’ giving notes on Brown’s performance. Peter Mandelson would sometimes sit at the back ‘cackling with laughter’.24

  Brown was perpetually anxious that he didn’t have enough information on a given issue and was forever demanding ‘more facts’. He was fixating on the wrong thing. It wasn’t a problem ‘getting the factual stuff into his head’. The big challenge for his team was to persuade him to stop thinking of the debates as ‘an extension of PMQs’ and curb his urge ‘to intellectualise and over-complicate’. They tried to teach him how to make emotional connections with an audience. Michael Sheehan, a media trainer who had worked with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, was brought in to help. ‘He got it into Gordon’s head that it mattered how you looked.’25 Brown would become obsessive about phrases to attack the Tories that no-one else thought worked. They spent one session having to convince him that ‘Where’s the meat in the pie?’ was not the killer line that would slay Cameron.

  One of the final rehearsals at Victoria Street took place on Sunday, 11 April. His team called out performance tips: ‘Remember not to grip the lectern’, ‘Look at the others when they are speaking’. ‘Stay on your tiptoes’, Campbell kept reminding Brown, who had an extra-high lectern because of his eyesight. His sight was a significant handicap, but not one which his aides wanted drawn to the attention of either the media or the voters. The team tried to train him to look into the lens of the camera so as to establish a connection with the audience at home. The trouble was his sight was so poor he often couldn’t locate the camera. They eventually resorted to having Sue Nye stand next to the camera and wave her red handbag.26 She would not be able to do that in the real debate.

  In the dispassionate view of the TV professional, Richard Collins, Brown was still struggling to master the debate format. Collins was amazed at the end of this rehearsal. ‘His people were all congratulating him on his improvement. My jaw dropped. I thought he still had a long way to go before he was good. They were yes men. No-one gave him a hard time. They told him what he wanted to hear. They wanted him to go away happy.’27

  In Cameron’s rehearsals, two Tory frontbenchers stood in for his rivals: Brown was played by Damian Green, while Jeremy Hunt, who looked and sounded a bit like Clegg, took the role of the Lib Dem leader. The Tory prep team thought Hunt performed strongly as Clegg, but didn’t believe it mattered, joking to each other that ‘Jeremy is a better Clegg than Clegg himself can possibly be.’28

  The Lib Dems, who didn’t have the money to hire American consultants like the other two, had ‘a home-grown team’ put together by Clegg’s Chief of Staff, Danny Alexander. Clegg told his team that he expected Brown to be much the same as usual. The Lib Dem leader predicted that ‘Cameron will try to appear less slick and smarmy than he usually does.’29

  In the days building up to the opening debate, Labour tried to lower the bar for Brown by talking down expectations. Neil Kinnock remarked: ‘Of course, Gordon has got a radio face – and nobody can get away from that.’30 David Miliband said: ‘There’s no question that Cameron goes into this debate with all the odds being stacked in his favour.’31

  The first debate was staged on Thursday, 15 April, at the ITV studios in Manchester. On the day, each leader was offered ‘closed-set time’ to familiarise himself with the studio. ‘Where will the quizmaster be?’ asked Brown, his slightly bizarre way of referring to the moderator, Alastair Stewart. During Cameron’s familiarisation session, he went exploring around the back of the set, joking that he was ‘looking for an escape route’. His ‘huge entourage’ were ‘paranoid about seeing every camera shot in advance’.32

  From the viewers’ perspective, Brown was going to stand at the right-hand podium in all three debates. This was at the request of Labour because of his sightless left eye. Cameron and Clegg alternated in the centre spot, the Tory taking it the first time. There was a countdown clock, with traffic lights across the top, to warn the leaders when they had nearly used up their alloted time. It flashed ‘TEN SECONDS’ in orange and then ‘STOP’ in big red letters. Brown had such difficulty seeing the clock that the technicians had to try ‘larger and larger screens’. They eventually installed a 50-inch one. Even when it was moved just six metres away, ‘he couldn’t see anything except the flashing orange and red.’33

  To try to relax her husband, Sarah Brown took him for an afternoon walk in a park. When he returned to the studio in the early evening, he was still jangling with anxiety. Brown had barely a word to say to the ITV panjandrums waiting to greet the leaders. Alex Gardiner, the executive producer of the debate, recalls: ‘Everyone who spoke to Gordon Brown said: “My God, he’s nervous.” He rushed to his dressing room, head down, charging, being very abrupt with the people who were taking him there. Cameron was obviously nervous too. Clegg was quite relaxed.’34 He was probably just better at masking his nerves. The Lib Dem knew this was an unprecedented opportunity for him to shine. He said beforehand: ‘I’d better not blow it.’35

  Shortly before the transmission, Brown said to Justin Forsyth and David Muir: ‘Thank you. You’ve done everything you can. It’s now up to me.’ He asked for five minutes alone in his dressing room.36

  The live debate, which would be watched by 9.9 million viewers at its peak, began at 8.30 p.m. Just in case anyone found it hard to tell the leaders apart, they wore colour-coded ties: Cameron in light blue, Clegg in yellow and Brown in fuchsia. As the minutes counted down to transmission, Brown’s tie would not hang straight. Two gallant attempts by Donna, the floor manager, couldn’t fix it.37 When the programme went to air, Brown showed his anxiety by jumping the gun and starting his opening statement before his microphone was turned up. ‘I know what this job involves,’ he said, going for the experience pitch. ‘These are no ordinary times. This is the defining year. Get the decisions wrong now and we could have a double-dip recession.’ Cameron began with an apology for the expenses scandal: ‘Your politicians – frankly, all of us – let you down. Faith and trust in politics … we badly need that once again in our country.’ Clegg looked the most at ease as he directed his fire equally at ‘the two old parties’. He told voters: ‘Don’t let anyone tell you the only choice is the same old politics. We can do something new, something different.’

  Brown was characteristically on top of the detail, often seeming to know more about what was in his opponents’ manifestos than they did themselves. He was aggressive with Cameron. ‘Be honest with the public, because you cannot airbrush your policies even if you can airbrush your posters,’ he jabbed at the Tory leader. ‘It’s not Question Time, it’s answer time, David.’ These lines were too obviously pre-cooked. He signalled his punchlines by flashing a mirthless grin which came on and off as if it was being controlled by his team via a remote control with a dodgy connection.

  Cameron, less fluent than usual, betrayed his nerves with darting eyes. He sounded over-coached. All of them had come with a litany of anecdotes about encounters with members of the public who had said something which just happened to corroborate the argument the leader wanted to make. The most egregious uses of this technique came from Cameron, who claimed: ‘I was in Plymouth recently and a forty-year-old black man actually made the point to me’ – a point which supported the Tory position on immigration controls. According to Cameron, the man had said: ‘I came here when I was six, I served in the Royal Navy for thirty years.’ That would make this alleged man just ten when he joined the navy. For most of the debate, Cameron
was straining so hard to look prime ministerial that he ended up sounding constipated.

  It swiftly became apparent that Clegg had the superior understanding of how to prosper in this TV format, one in which rational argument was subordinate to establishing rapport at an emotional level with the audience. He addressed questioners by their first name. ‘You won’t believe this, Jacqueline …’ He looked straight down the barrel of the camera to connect with the audience at home. Brown forgot to do either. One of his team lamented afterwards: ‘The things a natural would do, he doesn’t do.’38

  Where Brown chopped at the lectern and Cameron gripped it hard, Clegg stepped back from it. By the second half of the ninety minutes, the Lib Dem was signalling his confidence by nonchalantly keeping a hand in his trouser pocket, another technique he’d tested in rehearsal. He attacked Brown and Cameron simultaneously. Referring to them as ‘these two’, he lumped them together as the figureheads of a tired old duopoly that had ruled Britain for far too long. His most resonant line of the night was ‘The more they attack each other, the more they sound exactly the same.’ This bite was clearly prepared, but he inserted it at a point where it seemed a natural and spontaneous response to his bickering opponents.

  Clegg’s approach to the debate ruined Labour’s gameplan. That was to try to induce Clegg to join Brown in a two-against-one versus Cameron. ‘I agree with Nick,’ said Brown, a phrase that became a tag of the night. He made overtures to the Lib Dem on several occasions. ‘Nick supports me,’ claimed Brown about constitutional reform. Clegg snorted: ‘There is absolutely nothing to support.’

  The combination of the expenses scandal and the financial crisis, an unpopular government and a still distrusted Conservative Party, had created a glittering opportunity for the Lib Dems. Clegg had seized his moment. He made himself look the equal of the other two and a personable, reasonable and refreshing alternative to them both. He gave the strongest of the closing statements, declaring: ‘Don’t let them tell you that the only choice is between the two old parties who have been playing pass-the-parcel with your government for sixty-five years, making the same promises, breaking the same promises. Give real change a chance.’39

  The three leaders shook hands at the end and were then supposed to stand by their podiums. Brown, either forgetting the rule or deliberately breaking it, plunged into the audience. He started to shake the hand of everyone sitting there, whether they were keen or not. Cameron and Clegg froze on the stage momentarily, and then followed him.

  Even before the credits rolled, the rival parties were trying to persuade journalists to award victory to their man. A hangar-like hall at the Hilton hotel had been turned into the ‘spin room’ for the night. Peter Mandelson, the veteran sultan of spin, was in his element. Like a king lizard in the sun, he basked in the attention of the journalists at whom he was flicking his tongue. He was spinning ten minutes before the debate was over. ‘Behind Cameron’s veneer was just more veneer.’ In the centre of another crowd of journalists, Campbell was deriding the Tory leader for ‘slogan after slogan, sound-bite after sound-bite’ – as if he was a complete stranger to them himself. Just a few feet away, George Osborne was describing an entirely different debate. ‘Gordon Brown needed a game-changer tonight, and he didn’t get it.’ Paddy Ashdown averred that ‘Nick walked away with it.’

  The propaganda churned out by their teams was the diametric opposite of what the leaders actually felt. Cameron came off the stage feeling he had mucked up. Clegg went outside for a cigarette and sought an opinion about his performance from a police bodyguard. ‘All right, sir,’ replied the lugubrious policeman. Clegg feared he had fluffed it. Labour’s team ‘felt positive and relieved. We thought Gordon had done well.’ But Brown returned to his green room unhappy with his performance and dwelt on answers that he thought he had delivered badly. He complained about himself: ‘I could have done better.’40

  All the spinning was largely pointless because instant polls would deliver the message that most mattered: the viewers’ verdict. The Lib Dem won handsomely in all four polls, which also agreed that Cameron had come a poor second and Brown had been left with the wooden spoon.41

  This was crushing news to his team. ‘We thought they were unfair. We didn’t really understand them,’ says Justin Forsyth. ‘We hadn’t realised the instant polls would play so big.’42 It made Brown more self-critical about his performance. Mandelson told him: ‘Forget it. There’s only one story coming out of this – Clegg.’43

  He was right. There was a sensational change in the status of the Lib Dem leader. The man who began the campaign as the also-ran in the shadow of his deputy was transformed overnight into the star who had stolen the show. ‘Enter the outsider,’ declared The Times, saying that ‘he used the limelight of the historic broadcast to devastating effect.’ ‘Clegg comes of age,’ proclaimed the Independent. Under the headline ‘Clegg seizes his moment’, the Guardian judged that ‘he stole the first televised leaders’ debate in British political history by offering himself up as the fresh and honest alternative to two tired old parties in an electrifying, fast-moving, 90-minute primetime broadcast.’ The Tory Telegraph agreed: ‘Clegg’s star rises in great TV showdown’. So did the Daily Mail: ‘Clegg wins the TV war of words’.44

  Bookmakers instantly cut their odds on a hung parliament and even a Lib Dem victory. The day after the debate, Brown felt obliged to say that Clegg would be ‘rightly pleased’ with his performance while Cameron was forced to acknowledge that the Lib Dem had ‘a very good debate. “A plague on both your houses” is a very good song and he sang it very effectively.’45

  The Tories were stunned. Osborne was overheard in the ‘spin room’ admitting: ‘We have not yet worked out how to deal with Clegg.’ There were fierce internal recriminations as Tories asked themselves why they had agreed to the debates. Cameron admitted to me that his campaign had been ‘shaken up’. He claimed to have foreseen that the debates would boost the Lib Dems. ‘I absolutely knew at the time that you were going to give a leg-up to the third party.’46 This made some Conservatives even crosser that he had agreed to them. The Tory leader had not anticipated the threat that Clegg would exploit the chance to best Cameron at his own game, out-Dave Dave, and steal the mantle and mantras of change. Agreeing to the debates had proved to be a major strategic error by the Conservatives.

  The evident distress among Tories made Labour feel better, even though their battered champion had come third. They embraced Clegg’s triumph almost as if it was their own because it disrupted the previous media narrative that Cameron was marching inexorably on Number 10. Labour strategists bubbled with hope that a Clegg surge would deprive Cameron of a majority by putting some vulnerable Labour and Lib Dem seats beyond the reach of the Tories. The day after, a senior aide to Brown excitedly told me: ‘This has blown the election wide open!’47

  There was another eruption into the campaign. On Wednesday, 14 April, a volcano under a glacier in a remote part of Iceland woke up after two centuries of dormancy. As newsreaders struggled to twist their tongues around the pronunciation of Eyjafjallajoekull, she spewed forth a vast cloud of volcanic debris, which drifted 1,000 miles south towards Britain and mainland Europe. Shortly after nine in the morning on Thursday, the National Air Traffic Service announced a total shutdown of all UK airspace. All flights were grounded for fear that the tiny particles of glass and pulverised rock would cripple the engines of planes. The complete closure of the skies over Britain was unprecedented. The power of Mother Earth had paralysed air travel in a way that had never been managed by strikers, weather or terrorists.

  There was a pan-European ban on air travel by the weekend and more than a million people had seen flights cancelled. The media began to clamour about the Britons stranded abroad, many of them families on their Easter holidays. On Sunday evening, Brown presided over an emergency meeting in COBRA. Senior staff from the Met Office forecast that the winds blowing the ash cloud towards Britain were unlikely to shift for an
other five days. Andrew Adonis, the Transport Secretary, reported that the situation was more critical than the media had yet realised. The press were reporting that 200,000 Britons were marooned abroad. Journalists were, for once, underestimating the gravity of a crisis. Figures compiled by his officials suggested that more than twice as many people were stranded.48 Airlines were highly agitated about the huge cost to their businesses. They had started to conduct test flights through the cloud to try to prove that it was safe. The Transport Secretary himself was becoming sceptical that a total shutdown was necessary, but he was adamant that any decision to ease the flight ban had to rest with the Civil Aviation Authority. It would be an absolute catastrophe for the Government if planes were permitted to fly and they then crashed. Adonis was ‘kept awake at night’ by the thought that a single wrong call by him could lose the election.49

  The Conservatives had come up with a so-called ‘eight-point action plan’ to rescue the stranded Britons, which made Brown anxious for a scheme he could call his own. Alan West, the Security Minister, produced a suggestion. Ark Royal had recently left dock for exercises in the Atlantic. Said West: ‘Wouldn’t it be a magnificent contribution if the Ark was moved into the Channel?’50 Other ministers present suspected that the former First Sea Lord saw deploying the aircraft carrier as a wonderful public relations opportunity for the navy to prove its value to the country at a time when the services were arguing about which of them should bear the brunt of cuts to the defence budget. Officials were sceptical about the idea. No-one had even discussed the practicality of deploying warships with the Ministry of Defence. But ‘Gordon and Peter seized on it immediately.’51 West’s wheeze would make it look as though they had a plan. The COBRA meeting broke up and Mandelson called an impromptu news conference outside Number 10. Flanked by Adonis and West, he declared that the Government was looking into every means possible ‘for getting our people home’. The press was briefed that the Government was planning ‘a Dunkirk-style sea rescue’ of the stranded Britons.52