The End of the Party

by Andrew Rawnsley

  COBRA met again early on Monday morning and then Brown called a news conference. In the cloud of volcanic ash, he thought he had glimpsed a silver lining: the opportunity to project himself as a prime ministerial figure above the pettiness of electioneering. He spoke to the cameras with a Turner seascape in the background. He impersonated a Churchillian tone: ‘We are seeing the spirit and the resilience of the British people at its best.’ He announced that three vessels – the Ark Royal, the amphibious landing ship Albion and the helicopter carrier Ocean – were being mobilised. ‘I expect Ark Royal to be moving towards the Channel,’ he declared in a sonorous fashion. Then he swept out, saying he was going to chair another COBRA.53

  On Tuesday, Albion docked in the northern Spanish port of Santander, where it picked up some stranded holidaymakers along with 200 soldiers returning from Afghanistan. That was the only contribution of ‘Gordon’s Armada’, which was essentially a publicity stunt. A meeting of European transport ministers had already agreed to relax the flight ban before the Ark Royal had got near the Channel. By Tuesday night, the six-day closure of British airspace was over. ‘Gordon’s Armada’ had sailed too late to make any substantial difference.

  Labour and the Tories were both still struggling to come to terms with Cleggmania. The weekend after the first TV debate, polls suggested that the Lib Dems had soared ten points in forty-eight hours. One poll even had Clegg’s party leapfrogging from third place into first. The Sunday Times gave that poll the hyperbolic headline: ‘Clegg nearly as popular as Churchill’.54 The Guardian, with its tongue more in cheek, asked: ‘Is Clegg really the new Obama?’55

  Labour called a news conference on the economy in the hope of elevating the issue that Brown thought his strongest suit. After the presentation by the Prime Minister and Chancellor, not a single question from journalists was about the economy. All of them were about Cleggphoria and the prospect of a hung parliament. Some reporters teased Brown by asking whether he’d serve in a Clegg government. ‘I know a little about what it is to have a short political honeymoon,’ said Brown, ruefully alluding to his failure to hold an election in 2007 when he might have won. ‘I wish him well in it.’56

  Labour’s response to the Lib Dem surge was confused and divided. Mandelson became the first senior figure to explicitly canvass the idea that the two parties could do a deal in a hung parliament. ‘I am not against coalition government in principle and, for Britain, anything would be better than a Cameron–Osborne government.’57 Like-minded members of the Cabinet talked up the idea of ‘a progressive alliance’. They suggested that Labour and Lib Dem supporters should vote tactically for whichever party had the best chance of winning in their constituency. The implication that in some seats ‘it would be OK to vote Liberal’ made Labour MPs fighting three-way marginals ‘absolutely incandescent’.58 Mandelson was contradicted by Ed Balls, saying: ‘Coalition politics is not the British way of doing government.’ He referred to them as ‘the Liberals’ – which was known to irritate Clegg. Asked why he did not call them by their proper title, Balls scoffed: ‘Is that their name? They have been so many things.’59 Given that Labour’s best hope of remaining in power was a coalition with the Lib Dems, it would have been astute to roll the ground in advance. Yet private lines of communication were not opened between the two parties.

  Clegg was rude about Cameron. He ridiculed the idea that the Conservatives represented change. ‘The clue is in the name.’60 But the Lib Dem leader was even more scathing about Brown. This was in large part because he was trying to neutralise the Tory claim that the Lib Dems would sustain Brown in power even if he was rejected by the voters. ‘I think he is a desperate politician and I just do not believe him,’ said Clegg, adding: ‘It would be preposterous for Gordon Brown to end up like some squatter in Number 10.’61

  In the six days since the first debate, Labour was down in the polls by an average of three points to 27 per cent. The Tories had decayed six to 32 per cent. The Lib Dems had shot up ten points to 30 per cent.62 The surge for Clegg had led to a few days of stunned confusion among the right-wing titles which dominated the national press. They were bewildered and infuriated that a politician could become popular without their permission. Paddy Ashdown warned Clegg: ‘They are going to come for you.’63 The Tory press duly did. The onslaught was at its most ferocious on the morning of Thursday, 22 April. In what looked like an attempt to destabilise him before that evening’s second leaders’ debate in Bristol, Clegg was personally attacked on four front pages. The Daily Telegraph went for him over his handling of donations, the Sun called him the ‘Wobble Democrat’, the Express headlined his ‘Crazy Immigration Policy’.64 The Daily Mail took an eight-year-old article he had written about British attitudes towards the Second World War and construed it into the headline: ‘Clegg in Nazi Slur on Britain’.65

  Clegg was disconcerted, but put a light face on it: ‘I must be the first politician who has gone from being Churchill to being a Nazi in under a week.’66 Mandelson tried to flip the attacks against the Conservatives. ‘These press stories are straight out of the Tory party dirty tricks manual’, said Mandelson, a man who had a Ph.D. in the dark arts. ‘This is born of Tory panic: the Tories are pushing the smear button in the hope that this will damage Nick Clegg.’67

  In advance of the second debate, Brown’s team cancelled campaign events in the hope that more rehearsal time would improve his performance. His opening statement tried to make a virtue of his poor communication skills. ‘If it’s all about style and PR, count me out. But if you want someone to make decisions, and with the judgement and a plan for the future, I’m your man.’ He also made a startlingly explicit admission that he knew many voters loathed him. ‘Like me or not, I have a plan for Britain’s future.’ The first pre-planned joke was delivered with a vulpine smile. Motioning at Cameron and Clegg, he said: ‘These two guys remind me of my two young boys squabbling at bathtime.’ Cameron sniped: ‘That was better in rehearsal.’ It looked as though Brown was reading the supposedly spontaneous quip from a sheet of paper in front of him. That was because he was. He had gone into the debate with a crib sheet of barbs and cracks, nearly all prepared by Alastair Campbell, because the team did not trust Brown to memorise them. He cast his opponents as naïve amateurs. ‘Nick, you would leave us weak. David, you would leave us isolated in Europe.’68 Stressing his experience was double-edged because it also stamped Brown as the candidate of the status quo in what was a change election.

  He delivered a stronger performance than in the first debate. But Cameron had also raised his game and Clegg held his ground. There was not the knock-out blow to the pretensions of his rivals that his campaign team yearned to see Brown deliver. The polls were divided about whether Cameron or Clegg had won; they agreed again that Brown had lost.69

  Tory anxiety about the Lib Dem surge was manifest in increasingly personal attacks on Clegg by Cameron during the following week. ‘The great plan of Nick Clegg is all becoming clear,’ the Tory leader cried to a rally. ‘He’s only interested in one thing and that is changing our electoral system so we have a permanent hung parliament, a permanent coalition and we never have strong and authoritative and decisive government. He wants to hold the whole country to ransom just to get what benefits the Liberal Democrats.’70 That night, the Tories used one of their remaining election broadcasts to try to scare voters about a hung parliament. Crude nooses swung over the Commons. Previewing the broadcast to journalists, George Osborne said: ‘A vote for a hung parliament is a vote for politics behind closed doors; indecision and weak government; a paralysed economy; yet another election; and, very possibly, waking up on May 7 to find Gordon Brown still in Downing Street.’71 The irony of such attacks would become apparent after the election.

  The Labour campaign was in an even greater crisis. The initial excitement that Clegg’s surge could deny a majority to Cameron had been superseded by fright that Labour might get fewer votes than the Liberals for the first time since 1910. Most poll
s were now placing Labour third.72 Philip Gould warned Brown, Mandelson and senior staff that this was a serious threat.73 ‘When we were consistently in third place, we became very worried,’ says Justin Forsyth.74 One symptom of Labour’s anguish was a letter of protest to the broadcasters. The letter complained that ‘the focus on debates, both the process surrounding them, and the polling before and after, has dramatically reduced the airtime dedicated to the scrutiny of the policies of the parties.’75 The debates had sucked the air out of the rest of the campaign and diminished the level of detailed policy scrutiny compared with previous elections. Daily news conferences were largely abandoned and the set-piece interrogations of leaders by star interviewers received much less attention than in the past. Labour was understandably frustrated that it could not get the media to cover good news for the Government. Statistics were released suggesting that the chances of being a victim of a crime had fallen to a thirty-year low. This went almost entirely unreported.76

  But Labour’s demands for a more high-minded campaign looked hypocritical when they were responsible for some of the silliest stunts. On the very day that Labour was claiming it wanted more focus on policy, Alastair Campbell was hyping up a surreal event in Corby. Brown appeared alongside an Elvis impersonator, who serenaded him with a rendition of ‘Suspicious Minds’.

  ‘Morale in Victoria Street was very low,’ says a special adviser to a Cabinet minister. ‘The decision-making process was shambolic because everything had to be cleared through Peter.’77 The open-plan office was overcrowded and very smelly because the air conditioning was switched off in the evenings and at the weekend. ‘It was a hellhole.’78 Mandelson had taken refuge in a separate office, in which he was ensconced with Douglas Alexander and Pat McFadden. ‘Peter was seen as remote from the rest of the campaign,’ says one of the senior team.79 Even Mandelson himself had little confidence in what he was doing. ‘I never felt able to get a grip on the campaign,’ he later admitted. ‘We never really seemed to get into a rhythm. Apart from the day of our manifesto launch, we lacked strong policy stories to lead the news agenda.’80

  His enemies in Brown’s old gang were sniping that Mandelson was hogging the limelight in London by dispatching Brown on a peripheral tour around the provinces. Brown was spending his days on tightly controlled visits to factories and community centres with the occasional foray into a supermarket. Rather than walkabouts on the street, he was sat in canteens or front rooms to chat with small groups who had been carefully vetted in advance to establish they were sympathetic. ‘Peter and Sue had decided to deploy Gordon this way,’ says Nick Butler. ‘They thought there would be ambushes: the media and the Tories would try to set him up. So he had to meet only safe people.’81

  This was extremely boring for the media. There were often empty seats on his press bus. Broadcasters had little appetite for transmitting the dull footage. One usually friendly commentator likened Brown to ‘King Lear wandering from place to place with his entourage, having been removed from the centre that he once ruled.’82 Another compared his peregrinations with those of ‘a minor Royal’ or a ‘visiting Soviet commissar’.83

  Brown was stung by suggestions that he was being smuggled from safe house to safe house to keep him ‘hidden away from the public’.84 That weekend, he blasted out ‘very frustrated’ e-mails demanding a change of approach.85 It was decided to take more risk and put him in less controlled environments, where he might have more spontaneous encounters with voters. This was to prove a fateful decision.

  On the morning of Wednesday, 28 April, the Prime Minister arrived in Rochdale for what looked like one of the duller events of that campaign day: watching young offenders cleaning a cycle path. Brown was in a morose mood. He had been ‘moaning all morning’ about the media for attacking his campaign and not reporting policy.86

  On earlier walkabouts, broadcasters had complained that the crush of boom microphones around Brown was spoiling the TV shots. So he’d agreed to wear a radio microphone. The mic was on his lapel when he met Gillian Duffy, a 65-year-old former council employee and lifelong Labour voter who had worked with disabled children. The pensioner accosted him with concerns, often to be heard from this kind of voter, about a range of issues, including the tax on her widow’s pension, crime and immigration. ‘You can’t say anything about the immigrants. All these eastern Europeans what are coming in – where are they flocking from?’ she said, answering her own question. She was mildly hectoring, but Brown answered her with courtesy. He had been successful so far at masking the foul side of his temper during the public rituals of electioneering. As the cameras rolled, he said charmingly: ‘You’re a very good woman, you’ve served your community all your life.’ The encounter concluded with the pensioner patting his hand. ‘It’s been very good to meet you,’ he said. ‘Take care.’ With a smile and a wave, he got into the back of his car. Mrs Duffy told reporters that he had won back her vote. Trapped at the back of the crowd, unable to get to Brown in time, was the aide responsible for removing the lapel mic.87

  As the Jaguar drove off, Brown turned to the other passenger, his Director of Communications, Justin Forsyth. Brown snapped: ‘That was a disaster. You should never have put me with that woman. Whose idea was that?’ ‘I don’t know, I didn’t see her,’ replied Forsyth. ‘It was Sue, I think,’ muttered Brown, wrongly blaming his veteran aide for letting the pensioner get at him. ‘It’s just ridiculous.’ Forsyth, an even-tempered and loyal aide who was very familiar with Brown blowing things out of proportion, endeavoured to convince his master that it probably wouldn’t receive much media coverage. Brown continued to vent: ‘They will go with that one.’ ‘What did she say?’ ‘Ach, everything,’ said Brown. ‘She was just a sort of bigoted woman. Said she used to be Labour. I mean, it’s just ridiculous. I don’t know why Sue brought her up towards me.’88

  Forsyth, his mind on their next engagement, was only half listening. To him, this was just Gordon in a typically grumpy mood. It was very low on the scale of Brownian eruptions. This was not one of the expletive-loaded episodes when he was really furious. He wasn’t using the f-word or pummelling the car seat. In fact, Forsyth was ‘barely paying attention to what Gordon was saying’.89

  The car had driven on a little further when the Director of Communications suddenly clocked the radio mic still on Brown’s lapel. Forsyth leant over and pulled the wire out of the transmitter.

  ‘That’s a problem,’ said Brown. ‘Why?’ asked Forsyth. ‘What did you say?’ ‘I said something to you about that woman,’ replied Brown. A few moments later, he remembered: ‘I used the word “bigot”.’ They debated whether Sky, who had supplied the mic, would release the audio. ‘They’ll use it,’ groaned Brown. ‘They’ll run with it.’ Says Forsyth: ‘He knew it would be big and bad.’90

  They were driven on to their next engagement: an interview with Jeremy Vine for his hugely popular Radio 2 show. By the time they reached the studio, every news channel was leading with Brown’s contemptuous words about the Rochdale pensioner. Live on the Vine show, Brown was played the clip. He crashed back in his chair like a man who had been hit in the jaw. Then he slumped forward, head in hand. He had forgotten Forsyth’s repeated warnings that the radio appearance was being filmed on a webcam.

  The BBC was broadcasting live pictures of the interview on its news channel. The campaign team in London watched with horror as the pictures were shown on the banks of TV screens at HQ. Mandelson shouted: ‘Where’s Justin? Get Justin!’ But it was now too late to give Brown another warning that he was being filmed. Audio clips from the car could now be played with the graphic visual image of the day: Brown clutching his head in despair. At Tory campaign headquarters, a great cheer went up.

  To Vine, Brown initially made a feeble attempt to cast the blame on to the broadcasters, complaining: ‘They have chosen to play my private conversation.’ But even he realised that blame-shifting would not work this time. ‘I apologise profusely to the lady,’ he said.91 Gillian Duffy th
us earnt an entry in Guinness World Records for extracting the fastest ever apology from Gordon Brown.

  By the time he had come out of the studio, Mrs Duffy had been tracked down and asked for her phone number. Brown immediately rang to apologise and say he wanted to see her to say sorry in person.

  His opponents, mindful that they too sometimes blew off in private, were cautious about trying to exploit the incident. Nick Clegg was even sympathetic, saying: ‘If we all had recordings of what we mutter under our breath, we would all be crimson with embarrassment.’92 But the media was now in a frenzy, amplified by 24-hour news channels which were endlessly replaying the ‘bigoted woman’ clip. Mrs Duffy was attracting more coverage than most members of the Cabinet had received during the whole campaign. Reporters were already descending on Rochdale to get her reaction and she was giving it. When Brown’s remarks were played back to the pensioner, she called herself ‘very upset’ and looked it. ‘He’s an educated person. Why has he come out with words like that? He’s supposed to be leading the country and he’s calling an ordinary woman, who’s come up and asked him questions most people would ask him, a bigot.’93 At Victoria Street, members of the team said to each other: ‘We’ve just lost the election.’94

  Brown was driven to the Radisson hotel in Manchester, his base for that day’s campaigning in the north. He was in a bad way, which only worsened when he saw the news coverage and the pictures of him in the studio. ‘I’ve let you all down,’ he said to the team on the road with him. He ‘was mortified about upsetting Sue. He was very clear that it was all his fault. He was beating himself up.’95 Alastair Campbell was with them in Manchester: ‘I don’t think I have ever seen him so angry with himself.’96