That result came in at around 3 a.m. as he was sitting aboard a charter jet at Edinburgh airport waiting to take off for London. Soon afterwards, he was up in the air. So was the nation. Britain had its first hung parliament in more than a quarter of a century. It was not certain who would form the next government. It was clear that an era was drawing to a close.
New Labour’s years of success had been built around five pillars. One was the presentational and positioning skills of Tony Blair. Another was the continuous prosperity which fed a feel-good factor. A third component was the unattractiveness of their opponents for many years after the Tory defeat in 1997. The fourth was sustained investment in education, health and other popular public services. The fifth was representing themselves as the force of change, modernisation and the future.
This winning combination put them in power for thirteen years, much longer than any other period of Labour government and impressive compared with their centre-left counterparts in most other countries, including America, France, Germany and Italy. In crucial respects, New Labour had broadly kept the promise of the 1997 election slogan. Things did get better. There was a creditable range of achievements, from peace in Northern Ireland to the minimum wage to vastly increased investment in health and education. There were 44,000 more doctors working in the NHS and nearly 90,000 additional nurses. Waiting times fell to the lowest in the health service’s history and there was a dramatic decrease in deaths from cancer, strokes and heart attacks. There were 42,000 more teachers and nearly 4,000 schools were built, rebuilt or refurbished.135
Britain became a more social democratic country. They arrested, though struggled to reverse, the dramatic widening of the gap between rich and poor during the previous Tory years. The global forces stretching inequalities were mitigated by tax and benefit changes which lifted the incomes of the poorest tenth of households by 12.8 per cent while the richest tenth were worse off than they would have been by 8.7 per cent.136 On the negative side of the ledger, they had done only slightly better than their Tory predecessors in liberating from welfare dependency the millions without good education or training.
Much of what they had achieved was commended even by Conservatives. On moving into Number 10, David Cameron paid this tribute: ‘Compared with a decade ago, this country is more open at home and more compassionate abroad.’137 It was very unusual for an incoming Prime Minister to praise his predecessors like that. The Tories accepted the social reforms of the New Labour era. They pledged to protect the budgets of the NHS and international aid. These were examples of how the Conservatives had been compelled into some more progressive positions. Cameron also promised protection from spending cuts to the poor, the vulnerable and frontline services. The sincerity of those pledges remained to be tested, but he at least felt obliged to pay lip-service to Labour priorities.
In New Labour’s time, Britain became a more tolerant, more diverse, more socially just, more outward-facing and, despite the recession, more prosperous nation than in the Tory eighties and nineties. It also became a more indebted, more authoritarian, more statist and more cynical country.
New Labour ultimately lost because each of those five pillars of success was crumbled or broken by 2010. It was a formidable challenge to sustain the claim that they were the party of the future during a second decade in office. It was even harder to present themselves as such when led by Gordon Brown, a man often crippled by his caution and contradictions who had been at the apex of the Government throughout its time in power. Voters and the media had become much more minded to notice New Labour’s mistakes than its achievements. Cynicism towards the Government contrasted with the euphoric early days in power when New Labour laid claim to idealism and hope. The voter revolt against the political establishment, intensified by the parliamentary expenses scandal, was felt most acutely by the governing party. When the state is seen as failing or corrupt, it is especially damaging for the party that proclaims the merits of the state.
The Tories, having knocked themselves out of contention in the first two parliaments after 1997, had become competitive again under Cameron. He had not done enough to win himself a majority, but he had done sufficient to make the Tories the largest party.
The substantial improvements in public services were undermined in the eyes of voters by the suspicion that they had been built out of financial straw. The uninterrupted growth which had underpinned New Labour as an electoral project was brought to an end by the bursting of the financial bubble. The Government had a persuasive case that it had taken the action to save the banks and stimulate the economy which had prevented a bad recession from slithering into a worse depression. Yet even among those willing to give Brown credit for intervening to soften the economic crisis, it was not forgotten that he was the long-serving and boastful Chancellor in the years of excess leading up to the collapse. He who had bragged of ending boom and bust had presided over the biggest bust since the 1930s.
There were other fundamental reasons for their defeat. New Labour was a somewhat artificial construct, as broad coalitions for power usually are. The attempt to create a big tent which would appeal to voters and interests with opposed aspirations and conflicting priorities was almost certain to end one day with disillusion and defeat. The project which had once attracted both working-class and middle-class voters, north and south, male and female, steadily haemorrhaged support from all points of the demographic and geographic compass.
The three founding fathers of New Labour – Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson – had done their country a great service in 1997 by providing Britain with an electable, centre-left alternative to the Conservatives who had previously been so hegemonic. The trio were also responsible for the ultimate disintegration of their project. Decay first set in as a result of Blair’s decision to go to war in Iraq. The consequences eventually left him so weak that he could no longer resist Brown’s relentless demands to take over. Blair failed to build up potential alternative successors in the Cabinet, despite his own profound doubts that his Chancellor was fit to be Prime Minister. Brown had a shining moment for which he was owed the gratitude of not just his own country, but the world: saving the banking system from a catastrophic implosion. He otherwise lacked the character, judgement or temperament to be a successful Prime Minister.
Brown asserted a moral seriousness when he moved across to Number 10. That claim looked hollow, if not hypocritical, because of the poisonous activities of elements of his machine and the brutish manner in which he conducted relations with colleagues. His original boast that he would deliver steady competence – ‘not flash, just Gordon’ – was not fulfilled by a regime whose dysfunctionality was a result of his personality. He recognised one of his flaws, his lack of communication skills, but not the equally important ones: the inability to make timely decisions or to run an orderly and collegiate government or to fashion a vision around coherent policies for the future. The charge against him is severe: he spent ten years undermining Blair’s premiership and then threw away his own because he never worked out what he really wanted to do with it. After agitating for the crown for so long, Brown wound up being Labour’s briefest Prime Minister.
Mandelson played a key role in reforming Labour to transform it into a party that the nation would entrust with power. He then played a large part in breeding the mistrust that turned voters against them. He acknowledged that he became the embodiment of the manipulative spin and control-freakery which were the elements of New Labour’s style that many found repulsive. By shielding Brown from dethronement, Mandelson helped to prevent his replacement with a leader who might have improved their chances of staying in office. Polling suggested that Brown’s personal unpopularity cost Labour between twenty and forty seats at the 2010 election. That could, and probably would, have made the difference between Labour continuing in office in coalition with the Liberal Democrats and what actually happened.
These three men and the tangled relationships between them dominated
New Labour from its inception to its peak to its denouement. The Government never moved on to refresh a project that had been fashioned by this trio in the very different political and economic circumstances of more than a decade before. Labour struggled to turn its record into an account that the electorate wanted to appreciate and did not weave a narrative which could generate excitement and confidence in what they would do in the future.
They changed Britain. The country eventually yearned for a change from them because New Labour had failed to renew itself.
Epilogue: The Last Days
‘But that’s not the final word,’ said Gordon Brown. ‘That’s not the final word.’ He started to repeat this like a mantra as he was driven from Stansted airport into central London before sunrise on 7 May. He first called in on Victoria Street, where he had a meeting whose cast included Alastair Campbell, Peter Mandelson, Sue Nye and Labour’s psephological expert, Greg Cook. Results were still coming in, but it was certain by now that the Conservatives had fallen short of securing a Commons majority. By the time Andrew Adonis joined them, Brown was munching through his second bacon sandwich, scribbling calculations and declaring there was still the possibility of blocking the Tories if he could strike a deal with the Liberal Democrats. Adonis would be intensely involved in the frantic five-day attempt to keep Labour in power. A former member of the SDP, he had already started to open lines of communication with his friends among the Lib Dems.1
Brown headed to Number 10. As the sitting Prime Minister, he had the constitutional right to remain in office until it was clear who could form a government. Mandelson came over. ‘He was more crumpled than I’d ever seen him before,’ says one official.2 In overnight TV interviews, Mandelson had been talking up the idea of a ‘progressive alliance’ between Labour and the Lib Dems. Privately, he was deeply sceptical that it was either practical or desirable. To Charlie Falconer, Mandelson said he had told Brown: ‘I’ll try to do it for you, but I don’t think it’s going to work.’ Tony Blair was vehemently opposed to even making the attempt. He regarded it as ‘a doomed enterprise’ – and a dangerous one. Even if they could put together a coalition, it would be ‘perpetually unstable’, the public would see it as ‘illegitimate’ and there would be ‘an extreme reaction’ against Labour at the next election. Blair called from abroad to tell his friends in the Cabinet: ‘Anything that looks like Gordon trying to hang on is going to be a disaster.’ The first instinct of Blair and the Blairites was that Brown ought to announce his resignation immediately. To Mandelson, Blair said: ‘There will be an outcry if we stay on. There’s going to be another election, and we’ll be smashed if we don’t make the right judgements.’3
The final result put the Tories on 306 seats.4 Labour had 258 and the Lib Dems 57. Labour and the Lib Dems combined could not get to the total of 326 seats required to command a Commons majority of 1. Adonis was highly influential in persuading Brown and others that this was not an insuperable barrier. He argued that a Lab–Lib government could still be viable. The Nationalists and other minority parties would be very unlikely to vote with the Tories to bring down a Lab–Lib coalition. Therefore, reasoned Adonis, it could in practice have a majority of about thirty.5
After taking a short nap at Number 10, Brown called up Lib Dems with whom he had relationships, principally Paddy Ashdown, Vince Cable and Menzies Campbell. He told them: ‘We can make this work.’6
All the party leaders were swimming in a fog of uncertainty that morning. Nick Clegg ‘felt crestfallen’.7 Expectations of a great breakthrough for his party had been raised to dizzy heights during the campaign only to be dashed by the result. Thanks to the capriciousness and unfairness of the British electoral system, the Lib Dems had won nearly a million extra votes, but lost six seats. ‘This has obviously been a disappointing night for the Liberal Democrats,’ said Clegg when his constituency result in Sheffield came in at a quarter to seven. ‘We haven’t achieved what we hoped.’8
On the train down to London, he talked on the phone to Ashdown, who found Clegg ‘very knocked back’. Ashdown tried to lift the other man by saying there was no point in dwelling on might-have-beens. The hung parliament still presented opportunities which the Lib Dems might exploit to their benefit.9 During the campaign, Clegg had repeatedly insisted that the voters were ‘the kingmaker’. Now he occupied that position. But the choice was not a straightforward one. Most of his party instinctively felt closer to Labour than to the Tories, but the mathematics pointed in the other direction. On arriving at his party’s headquarters in Cowley Street, Clegg discussed the state of play with his senior strategists. The room had a whiteboard on which the results were written. ‘The numbers looked very awkward’ for a deal with Labour, says Danny Alexander, Clegg’s Chief of Staff.10 Speaking outside his party headquarters mid-morning, Clegg announced that his opening step would be to talk to the Conservatives.11 Watching this at Number 10, Brown was a little deflated, but not surprised. He knew that Clegg had to say this to honour his previous commitments to talk first to the party with the largest share of votes and seats.12
At 1.30 p.m., Brown came out into Downing Street to say that ‘Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg should clearly be entitled to take as much time as they feel necessary.’ In the event that their talks failed, he stood ready to explore the ‘substantial common ground’ between Labour and the Lib Dems.13 The idea was to look statesmanlike and fair-minded while also keeping Labour ‘in the game’.14
He had initially planned to speak at 4 p.m., but then rushed the statement forward to pre-empt David Cameron. Brown thought he had to move fast. He expected the Tory leader to make an immediate demand for the keys to Number 10. According to a senior civil servant: ‘He thought Cameron would say: “I’m the biggest party, I have won, Brown should go to the Palace.” ’15 Brown had in mind the precedent set by Alex Salmond. The election to the Edinburgh Parliament three years earlier had resulted in the Scottish Nationalists being the biggest party, but short of a majority. Salmond had leapt aboard a helicopter, flown to Holyrood and successfully demanded the right to form a government. Andrew Adonis says: ‘What Gordon expected, what we all expected, was that Cameron would declare that he’d won the election and we’d have been out within hours.’16
What the Tory leader actually did that morning came as a total surprise to Brown, to the media and to nearly all of the Conservative Party as well. Cameron had been driven into the capital in the small hours. As he made the journey from his Oxfordshire constituency, he was reeling. One person who spoke to him found Cameron ‘just stunned’ and dejectedly asking how he could have failed to win a majority.17 Cameron began to discuss what to do with George Osborne; his Chief of Staff, Ed Llewellyn; and other close confidants. Osborne was strongly of the view that even if they could form a minority Tory government, ‘being twenty down on every Commons vote would make life impossible. We needed some sort of arrangement with the Lib Dems.’18 The Tories did not feel powerful enough to attempt the gambit feared by Brown. ‘We did not think we were that strong,’ explains one member of the Shadow Cabinet. ‘We actually thought our position was quite weak.’19 One of Cameron’s senior aides adds: ‘We didn’t think that beating our chests and demanding that Brown leave office would work.’20 The constitutional position was that Brown, as the sitting Prime Minister, had the right to see if he could form a government. They trembled before the possibility that he might stitch up a deal with the Lib Dems which left the Conservatives in opposition. In that event, it was highly likely that Tory MPs would turn on and turf out Cameron and Osborne for their failure to return their party to power. Cameron needed to quickly draw the Lib Dems towards the Conservatives before they started talking to Labour.
The Tory leader snatched a couple of hours’ sleep at the Park Plaza hotel just over the river from Westminster. When his senior aides came in to the suite at 9.30, they found him eating a cooked breakfast. The suite had a picture window which afforded a panoramic view across the Thames to the House of Commons. The
vista summed up how the Tories felt: power was tantalisingly within reach, but not securely in their grasp. Cameron had pretty much made up his mind what he was going to do. He held a conference call with the Shadow Cabinet to outline his bold stroke. Some urged him ‘to be cautious’, but there was not a single serious voice of dissent from his colleagues, all of whom shared their leader’s desperation to attain power.21
Speaking at the St Stephen’s Club in Westminster at 2.30 p.m., Cameron unveiled his daring move. He declared that he was making ‘a big, open and comprehensive offer to the Liberal Democrats’ to work with the Conservatives. He did not quite say, but he heavily implied, that it could even be a full-blown coalition. ‘Inevitably the negotiations will involve compromise,’ he said. ‘That is what working together in the national interest means.’22
This stratagem, as audacious as it was unanticipated, sent both the media and the other parties into a frenzy. Clegg and his advisers ‘were all taken aback by how fast and comprehensively Cameron was moving’.23 At Number 10, Andrew Adonis thought Cameron had ‘played a blinder’.24 But that was very much a minority view within Downing Street. ‘Cameron has made a mistake,’ said Brown. ‘He’s been weak. He could have had us out of here and then formed a coalition.’25
If the talks between the Tories and Lib Dems hit an impasse, as Brown thought they surely had to do over the two parties’ opposed views about issues like electoral reform, Europe and the economy, it would let him back into the picture. ‘Gordon thought this gave him an opening.’26
Most Liberal Democrats thought of themselves as belonging to the centre-left. The idea of a deal with Labour ‘was more emotionally congenial’, to the senior, Ashdown generation of the party. ‘Most of us had been bred to be anti-Tory during the Thatcher years.’27 That still left enormous obstacles. One was the parliamentary arithmetic. Another was that there had been no advance work to smooth the way for a Lab–Lib Government or to legitimise the concept in the minds of the public. Before the election, Sir Gus O’Donnell had conducted secret rehearsals to test how various permutations of a hung parliament might play out. Officials had staged mock negotiations between the parties with civil servants playing the roles of the leaders. This wargaming had included one version– ‘Scenario 4’ – almost identical to where they found themselves now.28 Sir Gus had also drawn up a meticulously detailed manual setting out the rules to be followed in the event of parliament being hung. The Cabinet Secretary had quite properly presented it to the Prime Minister before the election. Brown was ‘furious’ with the Cabinet Secretary and point blank ‘refused to sign off on it’.29 That was a symptom of Brown being in denial before the election. He didn’t want to think about a hung parliament because he did not want to contemplate losing.
The End of the Party Page 107