At 3 p.m., Brown went into Mrs Duffy’s neat, pebble-dashed terraced home. They sat together on the pensioner’s cream leather sofa, he delivered his apology, strained to win her over by calling himself ‘a family man’ and tried to soften her wrath by inviting her to Number 10. She said afterwards: ‘I just looked at him. I didn’t like to say it, but all I could think was: “I don’t think you’ll be there.” ’ Sue Nye hovered by the door along with a Labour publicity aide. They joined Brown in endeavouring to persuade Mrs Duffy to come outside with him to say she had forgiven him in front of the mob of TV crews on the doorstep. ‘He wanted me to go outside with him and shake hands in front of all the cameras. But I said no,’ she later recounted. ‘I didn’t want that fuss.’97
Brown emerged alone. Smiling fixedly, he said: ‘If you like, I’m a penitent sinner.’ He tried to explain himself: ‘I simply misunderstood some of the words she used. I made my apology.’98 Mrs Duffy remained resolutely indoors as the Prime Minister grovelled to her yet again on television.
This spectacular debacle left the Cabinet aghast. Jack Straw was ‘horrified’.99 Liam Byrne regarded it as ‘catastrophic’ because Brown had been offensive about precisely the type of Labour voter who was already disaffected.100 In the view of Mandelson: ‘There was no disguising what a disastrous turn of events this was.’ Yet he ‘didn’t really feel angry with Gordon. There was a certain inevitability about the incident.’101
Exposed for all to hear were some of Brown’s most unattractive character traits. His disdain for the Rochdale pensioner, moments after he had been trying to charm her in front of the cameras, made him look two-faced. It demonstrated how irrational Brown could be and why he found normal human relations so challenging. Gillian Duffy was by no means the most tricky customer a politician had run into on the campaign trail. The encounter was ‘a disaster’ only in the mind of a man prone to huge over-reactions to the mildest adversity and with a weakness for casting around for someone else to blame. To the campaign team, the worst thing about the episode was that ‘it told a wider story about Gordon not being in touch with people.’102 He had been shown to be contemptuous of the concerns expressed by the pensioner, especially on the subject of immigration, ‘an explosive issue with that group of voters’.103
Morale crashed. At Victoria Street, the last glimmer of hope was extinguished. ‘People were very down. It was the moment people stopped kidding themselves that we could win.’104 The same was true among the footsoldiers. ‘For activists on the ground, it was like a punch in the stomach.’105 That night Brown put his name to a message to party members apologising to them as well. ‘I am under no illusions as to how much scorn some in the media will want to heap upon me.’106 The next morning’s Sun cackled: ‘Gillian only popped out for a loaf. She came back with … BROWN TOAST.’ The Daily Telegraph headlined it: ‘Day of disaster’. The Guardian’s take: ‘Bigot gaffe torpedoes campaign’.107
The timing could not have been worse. The day after the disaster in Rochdale was the third leaders’ debate in Birmingham. Rehearsal time was lost and Brown’s concentration was destroyed. He did not sleep. ‘He was still beating himself up,’ says Justin Forsyth. ‘He was exhausted by it all. He was completely knackered the next day.’108
They intensively discussed how he should refer to the episode during the debate and whether he should make yet another apology in his opening statement. They eventually concluded that he should simply allude to it. He opened: ‘There’s a lot to this job, and as you saw yesterday, I don’t get all of it right.’109 Mrs Duffy was a background presence throughout the ninety minutes. Each party was provided with a ‘hotline’ to ring the programme producers with complaints. When a question on immigration was called, David Muir rang the ‘hotline’, demanding to know why there was an immigration question when the subject had already featured in the first two debates. He also objected to David Dimbleby repeating questions for the benefit of the audience.110
‘Immigration has been too high for too long,’ declared Cameron. The tracker ‘worm’, which gauged voter responses, turned very positive for the Tory leader.
Nick Clegg, no longer such a novelty act, looked a little sweaty. He was put on the backfoot over his position on Europe and his plan to create a route to citizenship for a limited number of illegal immigrants. His holier-than-thou tune was paying diminishing returns. ‘Let’s move away from these party political points!’ he said more than once to swelling groans among the journalists in the media centre. Cameron had saved his best until last: it was his most effective performance of the trilogy.
The final debate was mainly on the economy, supposedly Brown’s best suit. He was solid and had some strong lines. But he forgot many of the things his debate team had tried to train into him. Where both Cameron and Clegg were good at talking in clear and colloquial language, Brown rattled off lists and statistics in a form indigestible to many voters. He called Cameron ‘wrong and immoral’, and predicted that ‘the same old Tories’ would plunge the country into a 1930s-style depression. He was playing the ‘risk’ card because it was all he had left in his hand. Cameron retorted woundingly: ‘What you are hearing is desperate stuff from a desperate man.’111
This debate, like the two before it, pitilessly exposed Brown’s weaknesses as a communicator. He looked red-eyed and granite-grim. Rather than gaze steadily into the camera, his eyes flickered from the audience at home to the clock screen. He was visibly tiring. ‘In all the debates, he really flagged in the second half,’ observes Ben Wegg-Prosser. ‘He drifted. He was not as crisp, as clear, as persuasive as the debate went on. He just did not have the stamina of the other two. We all noticed that.’112
In the closing statements, Cameron and Clegg did what candidates are always advised to do: accentuate optimism and sound like winners. Brown did the opposite. He conceded the possibility of defeat and went heavily negative. ‘In eight days’ time, David Cameron may be Prime Minister, backed by Nick Clegg,’ he said. ‘I don’t like having to tell you this’ – an acknowledgement that voters might not like the attack he was about to launch. ‘I believe it is too risky to trust these two. Things are too important to be left to the risky policies of these two people. They are not ready for government.’113 The more aggressively he went negative, the further downwards the voter-response worm wriggled.
Afterwards, the leaders retired to the individual green rooms where their teams had been watching. When Cameron walked into his room, he was greeted with applause and cheers. When Brown walked into his room, he was met with silence.114
The Labour spinners went through the motions of trying to talk up their man. Mandelson claimed it was ‘quite extraordinary in all the circumstances’. It was a feat of sorts that Brown had got through the debate. But presenting his performance as a triumph was beyond even Mandelson’s skills as a spinner. He left the ‘spin room’ before long. Campbell was irascible. He barked at a journalist: ‘I couldn’t give a damn about your poll.’ A Tory official lurking on a staircase overheard Campbell saying to a security guard: ‘We’ve had it.’ When this was spread around the internet, Campbell insisted he was talking about the relegation of Burnley. The instant polls placed Brown third for the third time in a row.115
Labour had agreed to the debates because it believed that it had nothing to lose and Brown might win on substance. This proved to be a grave miscalculation. It was in the nature of the debates to elevate personality and presentational skills. In this format, being telegenic was bound to count for a lot more than being technocratic. The debates concentrated even more attention on the leaders, heightening the presidentialism of the election. That massively disadvantaged Labour, the party with the leader who was the poorest communicator and the most personally unpopular of the trio. Brown himself had often lamented to his aides that he was not ‘a politician for the television age’.116 He had probably lost the debates before they had even begun. A charismatically challenged leader who looked exhausted was guaranteed to suffer in com
parison with younger, fresher, bouncier rivals.
With six days left before polling day, Labour was even more fearful of coming third. Clegg was talking about the contest being ‘a two-horse race’ – between him and Cameron. ‘Brown has written himself out of the script.’117 Cameron was also treating Brown almost as an irrelevance, saying he had become ‘a shrunken figure’.118 David Miliband later described this point of the campaign as ‘a near-death experience’ for Labour.119
There was another cause for high alarm at Labour HQ. ‘People stopped giving any money,’ says Nick Butler. ‘There was a real panic that we’d have no money for the last week of the campaign.’ They were perilously close to the point where they would not even be able to pay the travel costs to get Gordon Brown and Cabinet ministers round the country. David Sainsbury, who had already given many millions to Labour, came to the rescue again. On the final Friday, he wrote another large cheque to tide them through.120
There was more morale-draining news that weekend when the Observer and the Guardian came out for the Liberal Democrats. The great majority of the rest of the press endorsed the Conservatives. The doggedly faithful Mirror papers were alone in supporting Labour.
Tony Blair had finally joined the campaign. ‘It’s great to have him back in the country,’ quipped Cameron. ‘He’s one of the few people who could actually afford another Labour government.’121 On Blair’s previous visit, just before the election was called, he had given a speech in Sedgefield which was more persuasive as a critique of the Tories than it was as a case for re-electing Brown. Much of the press had ridiculed Blair for his orangey tan and mid-Atlantic accent. He made no more speeches. He confined himself to a low-key tour to help a few old allies who were defending marginals. Brown was ambivalent about his predecessor playing a larger role. So was Blair himself.
A poster launch turned into a disaster when it distracted a driver who crashed his car. When this was reported to Blair, he initially misheard and thought the other person was talking about the campaign overall. ‘A car crash? I’m afraid it is.’122
Brown wanted to end the campaign by delivering a series of speeches ‘Gladstone-style’. This had been previously resisted by Sue Nye and other aides who knew how much time he took writing speeches.123 As it turned out, this was a good idea which brought out the best of him. His most effective piece of oratory was to the Citizens UK conference, the largest grouping of civil society organisations, at the Methodist Hall in central London. The other party leaders were received politely. Brown roused the audience to several standing ovations with an impassioned address in which he declared: ‘Let the word go out as you fight for fairness, you will always find in me a friend, a partner and a brother.’124 When a protestor was removed from the stage, the 2,500-strong audience broke into chants of ‘Gordon Brown! Gordon Brown!’ He was genuinely buoyed to have received such an unusually warm reception, telling them: ‘You have given me heart today.’
This speech and others during the final days were delivered with fervour and came peppered with quotations from scripture as if he was channelling from the pulpit of his late father, the idealised Christian figure he had often invoked at times of adversity.
The faithful who heard him were lifted, but this was also a sign that Labour had largely given up on trying to convert the doubtful. Instead of appealing to floating voters, all Labour’s efforts were now directed at attempting to limit its losses by trying to mobilise its base. This retreat into a ‘core vote’ strategy was also shown by Labour’s final party election broadcast. There was no message of hope – only one of fear. The broadcast featured men with clipboards calling on houses to tell people that their appointments for cancer treatment had been cancelled because the Tories were in government. In the last days, Labour did succeed in stirring visceral anti-Tory feeling in the more northern parts of the country. This boosted them against both the Conservatives and the Lib Dems. Several million Labour leaflets were sent out with the slogan: ‘Vote Clegg – Get Cameron’. In the south, the third party was being squeezed from the opposite direction as the Tories inflated anxieties about a hung parliament and rammed home the message: ‘Vote Clegg – Get Brown’. Some of the last polls suggested there was a puncture in the tyres of the Cleggwagon, though they failed to pick up just how much air was escaping.
In 1997, in 2001 and even in the challenging circumstances of the 2005 election, New Labour had been the most formidable campaign organisation in Europe. That slick, shiny, supercharged machine had rusted into a spluttering old banger by 2010. Labour’s campaign was awful and the result could have been worse had their opponents not also performed badly. The Conservatives – for all their money, press support and other advantages – did not clinch the confidence of the country. Most Tories thought their campaign was poor, confused and lacking in salient messages. They were heavily critical of the leader’s ‘Big Society’ theme as impossible to sell on the doorstep.125
Nick Clegg dramatically put himself on the map in the first TV debate, but then lost his way. His party did not have a strategy or the resources to capitalise on his surge. In the final week of the contest, the Lib Dem campaign petered out for lack of anything new to say.
Voting day was mainly sunny. Senior Tories believed they had done just enough to win a modest Commons majority. Though the final polls continued to point to a hung parliament, Labour thought the effort poured into the marginals by the Conservatives would give them an extra edge. Greg Cook, Labour’s veteran in-house pollster, was forecasting a narrow Tory majority of twenty to thirty. ‘Peter, Douglas, everyone thought there’d be a Tory government.’126
At just after eleven in the morning, the Browns left their home in North Queensferry to vote. He spent the rest of the day inside the home that sat on a hill overlooking the Firth of Forth. Foreboding dark clouds hung over the water as the nation delivered its verdict. In the evening, his closest aides – among them Justin Forsyth, Sue Nye and Stewart Wood – joined the Browns. Sarah cooked them a supper of meatballs. Gordon and Sarah then went upstairs to catch some sleep while the aides headed for their nearby hotel. They were watching the television in Stewart Wood’s room when the exit poll was broadcast at 10 p.m. ‘We all thought it was totally mad.’127 No-one believed the poll, though it turned out to be pretty accurate, because it was predicting that the Lib Dems had not gained seats, but lost them. On the BBC’s election night programme, Paddy Ashdown declared: ‘Your exit poll is rubbish.’128 The Tories were also stunned by the poll’s forecast that they would fall well short of gaining a parliamentary majority.
His aides took a cab back to the Browns’ house. At about half past ten, he came down from the bedroom, doing up his cufflinks and demanding: ‘What’s happening?’ When they told him about the exit poll, he was pleased that it appeared the Tories would be denied a majority.129
Brown sat in the kitchen to have his make-up done by Sue Nye. Then they headed to his constituency count, which was taking place just across the road from his father’s old church and the manse where he was raised. The first results from around the country did not seem to have a discernible pattern. There were hugely variable swings against Labour – some enormous, some tiny. As he waited for his own result, Brown kept asking: ‘Where’s the numbers? Where’s the numbers?’ He scribbled on a sheet of paper which listed the marginals. His mind was already on the possibility of staying in power in coalition with the Liberal Democrats. ‘He thought it could be game on,’ says Stewart Wood. ‘He was absolutely convinced they would rather do a deal with us than the Tories.’130
Around the country, many Labour candidates were highly nervous. Jack Straw ‘thought he was going to lose right until the ballot papers began to mount up’.131 That wily old survivor held on. So did Ed Balls, who had seen off a strong Tory challenge in his Yorkshire seat.
At party headquarters, the mood was a strange blend of sadness and happiness because ‘we had avoided a catastrophic result and just got a very bad result.’132 There was even th
e occasional cheer when some Labour MPs – a striking example was Gisela Stuart retaining Edgbaston – defied the national swing to the Tories.
It turned into a very deflating night for the Conservatives. Tories were right to feel that they had done badly to win only 36 per cent of the vote. Against a tired and often disunited government led by a very unpopular Prime Minister who had presided over a deep recession, David Cameron had added just three points to the vote share of Michael Howard five years previously. The results were a huge anti-climax for the Liberal Democrats. Their share of 23 per cent was slightly up on their position in the precampaign polls, but it was a crushing disappointment when their hopes had been raised so high.
That was some consolation for Labour, but not much. They had avoided third; they were still a bad second. The country had not embraced anyone else, but it had rejected them. Labour lost ninety-one MPs. The casualties included two of the Home Secretaries of the New Labour years, Charles Clarke and Jacqui Smith. The largest anti-Labour swings were in southern England. South of a line drawn from the Severn to the Wash, Labour had been reduced to just ten MPs outside London. They had gone full circle back to the rump representation in the south before the creation of New Labour. The party’s national share of the vote just scraped over 29 per cent. That was only a sliver better than Michael Foot in the ‘suicide note’ election of 1983. It was Labour’s second worst performance since 1918.
The Tories demanded that Labour acknowledge that it had lost the right to rule. After his result in Kirkcaldy, where he increased his personal majority, Brown resisted the Conservative clamour for him to concede defeat. ‘The outcome of this country’s vote is not yet clear,’ he said. ‘My duty to the country is to play my part in Britain having a strong, stable and principled government.’133
His mood that night repeatedly swung between hope and gloom. When news came through that Labour had retaken nearby Dunfermline and West Fife from the Lib Dems, he leapt up, punched the air and shouted: ‘Yes!’ Half an hour later, when Labour lost Corby to the Tories, he slumped: ‘For God’s sake.’134
The End of the Party Page 106