Senior officials at Number 10 were surprised that Brown had not ‘put out feelers to the Lib Dems’ well in advance of polling day. ‘Even though it had been blindingly obvious for a long time that a deal with them would be the only way to stay in power, Gordon had done no serious thinking about what he’d do with the Lib Dems.’30
The Lib Dem’s Holy Grail was electoral reform. Labour had had a deathbed conversion to the most minimalist version of reform, a change to the Alternative Vote. Legislation for a referendum on switching to AV had been introduced in the last gasps of the Parliament. But it was tabled so late that it failed to reach the statute book. Only in the final few days of the campaign had Brown asked Nick Pearce and Gavin Kelly, the head of the Policy Unit and his Deputy Chief of Staff, to work up a paper on how Labour and the Lib Dems might reconcile their policy positions.31 Then there was Brown’s extremely poor relationship with Clegg, a factor which would prove to be crucial. Brown had never been adept at masking the fact that ‘he didn’t take the Lib Dems seriously.’32 In previous dealings between the two men, notably over the expenses scandal, Clegg felt that Brown was patronising, overbearing and impossible to reason with. The Lib Dem leader didn’t think Brown had the temperament to be the leader of a coalition. Clegg told colleagues: ‘If he can’t work with his Cabinet, how is he going to work with us?’33
Brown had done nothing to reach out to the other man. ‘Why didn’t Gordon seek to create a relationship with Clegg, make a few overtures, talk to him, before the election?’ asks Adonis. ‘It seemed such an obvious thing to do, but he made no effort whatsoever. I suppose the only explanation is character.’34
On Friday evening, the two men talked on the phone. Beforehand, those around Brown urged him to be pleasant to Clegg. The Lib Dem leader explained that he was not ‘closing the door’ on negotiations with Labour but ‘I have to talk to the Tories first.’ Brown dominated the conversation. ‘I want to fix the economy and I want to see through political reform,’ he said. ‘I’m the only one who can make this happen.’ He urged Clegg to do a deal: ‘We can make a progressive coalition against the Tories.’35 Forsyth, Mandelson, Wood and officials were listening in to the call. When he came off the phone, Brown asked them: ‘Was I OK?’ Mandelson purred: ‘Charmant.’36
What sounded to them like Brown turning on the charm did not come over that way to Clegg. To his ears, Brown had been characteristically hectoring. Clegg complained to his Chief of Staff: ‘He was talking at me – telling me what to think, not asking me what I thought.’ Says Alexander: ‘Nick felt this was not someone who was intent on a partnership. Also there was no sense of reality from Gordon about his own position.’37 Labour was taken wholly by surprise when journalists were briefed from the Lib Dem side that the call had gone badly.
The Conservative and Lib Dem negotiating teams met that evening for their first face-to-face talks: ninety minutes across the table in a room at the Cabinet Office. The Lib Dems were pleasantly surprised that the Tories addressed them as equals, seemed to be wholly serious about a coalition, and were falling over themselves to compromise on policy. According to members of the Lib Dem negotiating team: ‘The Tories were offering more than we were demanding … We’d say what about a, b and c, and they’d say we’re surprised you haven’t asked for d and e as well.’38 Paddy Ashdown recalls: ‘The Tories were saying you can have this policy and that policy and would you like this one as well because we’ve been trying to get rid of it.’39
The Conservatives were not being generous for the sake of it; they were driven by their hunger to return to power. William Hague and George Osborne were the two most senior Tories on their negotiating team. During a break in the talks, they stood at the room’s window. It looked out over the back of Number 10. ‘This is how close we are,’ said Osborne. ‘Brown is in there, wondering what we’re doing. We have to make sure we get him out.’40
They were also being gently encouraged to do a deal by Sir Gus O’Donnell. This was not political partisanship on the part of the Cabinet Secretary, but the reflection of a different form of bias. Civil servants have a default preference for stable government and that seemed more likely to be delivered by a Con–Lib deal than a Lab–Lib one. There was also the fear that the financial markets, though calm at the moment, would react very negatively to a protracted period of uncertainty or the formation of a weak government. ‘Scenario 4’ had ended badly when the civil servants had war-gamed it. The Cabinet Secretary told the Tory and Lib Dem teams that the more comprehensive the deal, and the quicker they arrived at it, the better it would be.41
The Tory side could see that ‘the Lib Dems were surprised by how generous we were.’ The Conservatives were also getting the strong impression that at least two members of the four-strong Lib Dem negotiating team – Chris Huhne and David Laws – were enthusiastic about a bargain with the Tories ‘and didn’t want a Labour deal to work’.42 In the race to woo the Lib Dems, Labour was already well behind the Tories by Friday night.
On Saturday morning, Brown was angry with the Lib Dems because Clegg wouldn’t open talks with Labour on the same footing as those with the Conservatives. He said to his aides: ‘Once the Tories have their hands on the levers of power, we’ll never get them off, we’ll never get them out.’43
At lunchtime, he walked through the drizzle to take part in the commemoration of the sixty-fifth anniversary of VE Day at the Cenotaph. Before the ceremony, he and the other two leaders waited in an anteroom at the Foreign Office. The Prime Minister had with him his official spokesman, Simon Lewis. He thought the body language between Clegg and Cameron looked ‘pretty good’ while ‘Gordon was tight.’44 It is usual for the Prime Minister to lay his wreath first, which is what Brown expected to happen. Just before the trio went out, a Ministry of Defence official announced that the three leaders were to lay their wreaths simultaneously.45 The rules of precedence had been left hanging along with Britain’s Parliament.
Afterwards, the leaders walked across Horseguards to meet war veterans. A group of people shouted out to Cameron: ‘Good to see you, David! Well done!’
That afternoon, Brown flew up to Scotland, a surprise to some of his team and also, in their view, a mistake. He was partly reacting to criticism from the right-wing press that he was behaving like a ‘squatter’ at Number 10. This was an unfair attack: he was constitutionally entitled – obliged, in fact – to stay in office until it was clear who could command the confidence of the Commons. But he felt stung by these press attacks. He was also being advised by Ed Balls, Peter Mandelson and Sue Nye that he shouldn’t give the impression that he was ‘holed up’ at Number 10.46 To Simon Lewis, Brown said: ‘I don’t want to be seen clinging to power.’47
While Brown flew north, a Labour negotiating team had been hurriedly scrambled together. It was led by Mandelson and included Balls, Adonis, Ed Miliband and Harriet Harman. Their first face-to-face talks with the Lib Dems were held at Portcullis House on Saturday afternoon. Unlike the negotiations with the Tories, these talks were kept secret. The Lib Dems did not want to be accused of conducting an auction, though this was precisely their intention. As Tessa Jowell puts it, Clegg was now ‘double-dating’.48
From his point of view, this made perfect sense. It would help to manage the doubters in his party towards a deal with the Tories if he could say that he had faithfully explored the Labour alternative. His negotiating position was also immensely strengthened by being courted by both sides. As Menzies Campbell says: ‘Either we got something out of Labour or the mere fact that we were talking to Labour would be enough to force the Tories to offer more.’49
It was a further sign of Labour’s lack of preparation for a hung parliament that their team turned up with a skimpy negotiating document which Mandelson had not bothered to read before the meeting, and Balls arrived not knowing who else from the Cabinet would be there. Some of the Lib Dems looked askance at the composition of the Labour team. Said one of them: ‘If you are serious about a negotiation, you
don’t send along Ed Balls.’50 This was one of several examples of the two sides’ mutual suspicion leading to misunderstandings of each other’s motives. Brown thought the Lib Dems would be impressed that ‘he was sending his top team’. By including Balls, his closest confidant in the Cabinet, Brown thought he was making it clear that he was taking the negotiations very seriously.51 The Lib Dems took it as a sign of the opposite.
At 7 p.m. on Saturday night, Cameron and Clegg quietly slipped into Admiralty House to meet each other. Their personal chemistry was much better than that between Brown and Clegg. For all the insults they had exchanged on the campaign trail and in the TV debates, Cameron and Clegg found each other amenable company. It helped that they were of a similar age, temperament and background: one the Eton-educated son of a stockbroker, the other the Westminster-educated son of a banker.
They were also reasonably simpatico in their political positions. Cameron saw himself as ‘a liberal Conservative’; Clegg was a right-leaning Liberal. The meeting went well. Reflecting on the encounter later, Cameron said: ‘It felt like it was beginning to click.’52 According to Clegg: ‘We discovered that the more we compared notes on what we wanted to do, the more a momentum developed.’53
Brown returned to London on Sunday. His first face to face with Clegg was scheduled for 4.15 p.m. They had agreed to meet at the Foreign Office in the room of the Permanent Secretary. To try to keep this rendezvous concealed from the mobs of reporters and TV crews swarming around Westminster and Whitehall, Clegg’s car pulled over in Birdcage Walk, where he switched into a different vehicle. Hidden in his ‘unmarked car’ Clegg managed to enter the Foreign Office without being spotted. Brown’s team thought they could get him to the meeting unnoticed by sending him the side way out of Downing Street, some distance from the photographers and camera crews camped opposite the door of Number 10, and into the Foreign Office through the Ambassadors’ Gates. Justin Forsyth looked out of the window to check that ‘the coast was clear’. Brown set off with Tom Fletcher. He took his Private Secretary with him as an alibi. If he was seen, they could claim he was crossing the road for a meeting about foreign affairs. Brown was successfully smuggled past the camera crews only to be spotted by a technician in a BBC truck.54
The most delicate issue was the position of Brown himself. As early as noon on Friday, Mandelson had texted Clegg’s Chief of Staff: ‘Between us (pl protect) ask Nick how big an obstacle is GB for LDs.’ Alexander responded that he was a huge one.55 One of Clegg’s greatest concerns about doing a deal with Labour was what he called ‘the legitimacy issue’.56 Would it not look like ‘a coalition of the losers’ if the Lib Dems kept Labour in power? The public would revolt, he feared. Voters would certainly not understand why someone who had been rejected as Prime Minister was still at Number 10. Many Lib Dem candidates who had fought southern seats were reporting that they had lost support because voters wanting to be sure of ejecting Brown had switched to the Tories. In the Lib Dem view: ‘it was impossible to do a deal unless Gordon went.’57
Brown understood he was a problem, according to Justin Forsyth. Forsyth and David Muir discussed the impediments to a deal with Brown and said to him directly: ‘There’s policy, there’s the maths, and there’s you.’ Brown did not argue. ‘Gordon was not in denial and realised he had to play himself out.’ The question was how quickly. He was hugely reluctant to relinquish the premiership as swiftly as others, including members of his own Cabinet, thought he would have to. ‘He wanted to stay longer to start with,’ says Forsyth.58 Adonis agrees: ‘He still hadn’t reconciled himself to going in a few months.’59
Brown and Clegg were ‘smiling and laughing’ when they came out of the meeting at the Foreign Office.60 That was not really a good sign: they had not properly thrashed out the issue of Brown’s departure. On Clegg’s later account, Brown went on about how ‘we’ve got this great shopping list of policy’ that they could agree on while Clegg ‘kept saying it’s not an issue just about my list of policies. It’s also about what kind of government would be acceptable to people.’61 The Lib Dem leader had again raised the ‘legitimacy issue’, but felt uncomfortable spelling out explicitly that it meant Brown would have to depart and quickly. Afterwards, Clegg told Alexander that he had ‘tried to make it clear that Gordon had to go, but had probably done it in too subtle a way for Gordon to get it’.62 Brown hardened into a more stubborn position over the rest of the day. He told Mandelson that he was willing to step aside in due course, but he didn’t want it to look like he had been pushed out. ‘I have been humiliated enough.’63
A further meeting with Clegg was arranged for that night. To stay entirely invisible to the media, at 9.15 p.m. Brown descended into the basement of Number 10, where a hefty security door had been unlocked to allow him to access a steep set of steps. They led down into Pindar, a network of tunnels used by Winston Churchill during the Second World War. The tunnels connect Downing Street with Whitehall departments and stretch all the way to Buckingham Palace. Brown took a tunnel that brought him up inside the Ministry of Defence. He was then driven to the Commons in an anonymous car. He and Clegg met in Brown’s room at the Commons. Mandelson was with Brown. Clegg was accompanied by Danny Alexander.
This meeting did not go well. They spent a lot of the time talking at cross-purposes – Brown going on about policy, Clegg about legitimacy – before they got to the nub. Brown suggested to Clegg that the Lib Dem could be ‘the public face of the coalition’, but he would stay on as ‘an interim Prime Minister’ for an unspecified period of time. That was hopeless, thought Clegg. He tried to make his point sensitively. ‘That won’t work,’ he said. ‘If there’s going to be a new government, it’s got to be a new government.’ Clegg felt awkward about saying this in front of the others and subsequently wished he’d done it one-to-one. ‘Please understand I have no personal animosity,’ he said to Brown, but they would never sell a Lab–Lib coalition to the public ‘unless you move on in a dignified way’. The Lib Dems thought Brown had to say he would leave Number 10 by October at the latest. Brown dug in, arguing that he should remain as Prime Minister until the economy was fully recovered and they had held a referendum on AV. In his mind, this would give him a high note on which to depart and a legacy. The Lib Dems feared that voters would be so furious if Brown stayed at Number 10 that a referendum on voting reform would be lost. Alexander told him so bluntly: ‘We’ll never win a referendum if you’re in charge.’
Brown was taken aback. ‘I don’t think that’s right,’ he replied. Mandelson stepped in to try to smooth things over. ‘We can talk about this further.’64 The meeting concluded without agreement. The Lib Dems left feeling frustrated that ‘Brown wouldn’t put any timescale on his departure.’65
When he and Clegg spoke again, this time on the phone around midnight, the conversation got nowhere. Clegg afterwards told colleagues that Brown was now ‘in a very obdurate mood. He would only say that he would go sometime in the Parliament.’66
David Laws came round to Paddy Ashdown’s home in London at around two in the morning. He reported that the talks with Labour had been ‘dreadful’ and that ‘Nick has had a terrible conversation with Brown.’ Ashdown said he would try to get hold of Tony Blair in the Middle East. They spoke at around 3 a.m. London time. Ashdown told Blair that Brown was poisoning the chances of a deal. ‘Gordon has to go. If he doesn’t go, it will never fly.’ Blair responded: ‘Leave it with me. I’ll see what I can do.’67 At six on Monday morning, Brown talked on the phone to Vince Cable. Cable reiterated the Lib Dem view that Brown would have to say he was going. Brown grunted and hung up. Alexander sent the same message to Mandelson. Ashdown rang Adonis to say Brown’s swift departure was ‘a deal-breaker’.68 Adonis repeated this to Brown, as gently as he knew how.69
The pressure on Brown was now intense and further amplified because the Tories and Lib Dems had emerged from nearly six hours of talks on Sunday to say that they had made very positive progress. Crucially, though this was n
ot known to the media at the time, the Lib Dems were falling in with the Tory plan to tackle the deficit by starting to cut spending early and deep, an as yet unrevealed volte face from their position during the campaign.70
The Monday morning press added to the sense of urgency about the need to put a new government together soon. ‘Britain on hold’ was the splash headline of The Times. In even bigger type, the Daily Telegraph declared: ‘A nation in limbo’. The Guardian called it: ‘Deadline day for Tory deal’.71
On Monday morning, Brown and Clegg had another conversation. ‘My view hasn’t changed,’ said Clegg. ‘You just can’t carry on.’72 By mid-afternoon, says Andrew Adonis, ‘Gordon realised he had no more cards to play except his own resignation.’73 Brown talked again to Clegg on the phone at 4.30 p.m. and said: ‘I’ll go in six months.’ Afterwards, Brown seemed ‘eerily calm’.74
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