Whatever it Takes: The Real Story of Gordon Brown and New Labour

This was becoming the equivalent of an epic centre court final at Wimbledon, with Brown the veteran competing against two younger, rising stars. Brown had responded to Cameron’s statement on Friday with one that was crafted with the same level of political artistry, a stunning return to Cameron’s beautifully played stroke. Yes, Brown would be going. No, he would not be going quite yet – an echo of Blair’s resignation statement in September 2006. Brown had highlighted two priorities, the economy and political reform. He was looking for a graceful exit, one that would bristle with historic possibilities as he left in place a progressive coalition, but he was realistic enough to realize that he could play no part in the medium-term future. He had recognized this, or almost had, for a long time.

After Brown’s statement some of the key figures in Number Ten rushed out to proclaim the new progressive opportunity. Adonis, Douglas Alexander (who never really believed that this was a progressive opportunity) and Alastair Campbell toured the studios to put the case for a Lib/Lab coalition. Brown sat back and watched, his career almost over whatever happened next.

What did happen next revealed quite a lot about Clegg, his favoured Liberal Democrats and parts of the Labour party. The first meeting between Labour’s negotiating team and the Lib Dems’ equivalent had been fairly informal on the Saturday afternoon. Labour’s team consisted of Adonis, Mandelson, Balls, Ed Miliband and Harriet Harman. During that meeting they sensed that the Lib Dems were moving towards Labour. Mandelson was certain throughout that they were playing Labour along to get more from the Conservatives, but the others dared to wonder, and with mixed feelings, whether they were about to begin a fourth term in partnership with the Lib Dems. Before the cabinet meeting on the Monday afternoon, Balls was with Brown when he got another call from Clegg. By that point Clegg appeared to be moving fast towards Labour. He said to Brown that Labour and the Liberal Democrats were the two progressive forces and were therefore natural partners. By late Monday afternoon Brown and Balls were briefly convinced that a deal was on. Early on Monday evening Brown chaired his final cabinet meeting. No one knew for sure that this would be the end. Quite a few assumed now that Brown would be Prime Minister until the autumn. Brown also thought for a few hours this was likely.

No cabinet minister spoke out overtly against a Lib/Lab coalition, although several had intense private doubts, in particular Jack Straw. Brown talked through the situation with considerable enthusiasm showing none of the bad-tempered lack of patience he could display when chairing cabinet meetings in less tempestuous times.

The Labour and Lib Dems’ negotiating teams met immediately after the cabinet, so quickly that ministers had no time to discuss in advance what they would be willing to concede. In the event they offered to move at least as far as the Conservatives, especially in the area of civil liberties, a policy area where the government had acquired a ragbag of policies, adopted for reasons of neurotic insecurity rather than principled machismo. The policies had never been fully supported by anyone on Labour’s negotiating team. Perversely, a sticking point in the discussions was Labour’s commitment not to start cuts in public spending until the following year. Even though the Lib Dems had argued for the same policy in the election campaign, David Laws was now insisting that immediate cuts should be part of the package. Chris Huhne also called for immediate legislation on the Alternative Vote followed by a wider referendum on other options for electoral reform. Even Adonis was taken aback at such a prospect. Huhne suggested ‘this would be an experiment in an experimental coalition’. Although Labour’s team was much more wary after this meeting, they assumed that Clegg was sincere in his willingness to do a deal and agreed to meet again on the Tuesday morning. Labour’s team also proposed a separate meeting between Cable and Alistair Darling.

Hungry for power almost as an end in itself, Cameron and Osborne rushed out a new offer in response to Labour’s moves, a referendum on the Alternative Vote. This was the same as Labour was offering in relation to electoral reform, although Labour was committed to campaigning for the change whereas the Conservatives were opposed. The duo had spent the last four years seeking a route to power, changing economic policy on the basis of the latest focus-group findings and proclaiming their party’s modernization without changing many of the assumptions and polices that they had inherited. Cameron and Osborne opposed voting reform, but their desire for power meant they did not hesitate to make the offer.

Their move was decisive. When Clegg got the news, a few minutes before it was released to the media, his mind was more or less made up. He wanted to do a deal with the Conservatives and take part in a formal coalition. He had never had much doubt. Later Clegg was hailed for his ruthless negotiating techniques, but he did not have to try very hard. Both sides were desperate for a deal and at times he had been genuinely torn, not least because Ashdown had moved some distance over the weekend towards Labour, and his other former leaders – Charles Kennedy and David Steel – had always been keener on a deal with Labour.

But Clegg was reaching a firm decision on Monday evening and acquired ammunition from former cabinet ministers David Blunkett and John Reid who led the charge against a Lib/Lab coalition. Reid spoke out passionately against an arrangement. In fact Labour was not proposing a formal arrangement with the SNP, only with the Lib Dems, but Reid was not one to allow details to intervene. Blunkett was far more perceptive and his opposition carried more weight. The left of the Labour party started to speak out as well. On the other side Cameron faced similar problems with the right of his party, but Clegg had found his soulmate, two pragmatic leaders bound by their hostility towards the state and their capacity for polite, almost apolitical negotiations.

The dynamics revealed much about Labour’s diminished hunger for power. Reid and Blunkett had been cabinet ministers. Straw had served in the cabinet from 1997 to the very end. If they had been eager for their first ministerial posts their reaction to the result might have been very different. Sated personal ambition played a part in the cries within Labour against a Lib/Lab coalition.

On the Tuesday morning Brown and Clegg had one further meeting, but Labour’s negotiating team sensed they were being played along. The Lib Dems had briefed misleadingly that Labour’s team had been aggressive in the negotiations, especially Ed Balls. Adonis, no natural ally of Balls, was adamant that Balls behaved politely throughout. Labour’s team sensed trouble, assuming the briefing was aimed at showing Ashdown and others that they had tried but faced immovable objects. Brown, who had been in some ways the most enthusiastic for a coalition, moved from high hope on Monday night to pessimism by Tuesday morning. Still he clung to a shred of optimism. At midday, hours before his resignation, he had a phone call with Sir Ming Campbell, spelling out in detail how the mechanisms were in place for a Lib/Lab coalition and how he had prepared for the appointment of Lib Dems in senior departments.

During a phone call with Brown early in the afternoon Clegg was evasive. ‘Look, I’m not in a position to give you a definitive answer,’ he told Brown. ‘I want to continue to speak to both sides. Coalition talks take a long time in other countries. There’s nothing unusual about this. Why the hurry?’

Brown responded: ‘The country will not understand if this ambiguity continues. The public needs certainty and we must provide an answer.’ He issued one last plea to Clegg: ‘I am convinced this is the right time to create a Progressive Alliance. I know the electoral arithmetic is difficult but I think there is a way round that.’

Clegg fudged again: ‘I still want to go on talking to both sides.’

Brown struggled to hide his frustration as he replied: ‘I have to go the Palace soon. If you are not prepared to commit yourself you have to tell me. Now.’

Clegg: ‘I will call you back in five minutes after I’ve talked to my advisers.’

After Brown put the phone down, he discussed his next move with Mandelson, Campbell, and old cabinet allies Ed Balls, Ed Miliband and Douglas Alexander. They knew it was over. One observer noted: ‘We all agreed it could not go on any longer. It was obvious Clegg wasn’t serious about doing a deal. He was using it so he could go back to Cameron and get more out of him. We didn’t have the numbers and the Labour Party just wouldn’t wear it.’

Brown had made one big mistake in the four days. He had failed to summon Labour MPs for an early meeting in order to keep them fully informed. As a result they felt excluded and ignorant and began to express public wariness to a deal. Seen widely as a Labour tribalist, Brown had given little thought to the tribe as he planned a realignment on the centre left more dramatic than any plan contemplated by Tony Blair. By Tuesday mid-afternoon Brown knew that there would be no deal: he would be out of power within hours.

After three years of erratic, frail authority he decided to seize full control of his departure, with the help of Mandelson and Campbell, the great choreographers and manipulators of the New Labour era. As was often the case with the misunderstood duo, they were motivated by humane considerations as they planned a final move. Politicians are human beings, as fearful of public humiliation as anyone else. They had helped ease the way for a small army of ministers. Now the game was over for Brown, for them and for Labour. They wanted to help Brown to leave with dignity. Brown spent much of the day writing letters to friends and colleagues, thanking them for their support, a generous gesture made with no ulterior motive.

Brown also wrote the final version of his farewell speech, including a reference to his own personal failings, although others had encouraged him to part with a hint of humble self-awareness. With Sarah, Mandelson arranged the perfect visual departure in which finally their two sons John and Fraser would join them in the public eye as they left Number Ten for the last time, a humanizing image that had eluded Brown when he sought to cling to power.

In one final phone call Clegg had begged Brown to stay on for a little longer while he resolved what to do. Brown refused at first and then appeared to waver a little. Mandelson grabbed a card and wrote in big bold letters: ‘No More Time!’ He ostentatiously placed the card in front of Brown. There was no more wavering. Brown had also spoken to Blair again on the phone, explaining that he had given up hope of a deal. One way or another they were all there at the end as they had been at the beginning, Blair, Brown, Campbell and Mandelson. For all the mighty rows and fallings-out, they almost needed to be there for those final moments. When Mandelson had resigned from the cabinet for the first time he turned to Brown to help him compose his resignation letter even though Brown and his allies had brought about his downfall. Although Blair had kept Brown out of Number Ten for as long as possible, Brown turned to him for advice in his final days and Blair was happy to offer it.

Brown completed his call to Clegg insisting he had already decided to see the Queen to resign. ‘I can’t go on any longer, Nick, I’m going to the Palace.’

A resigned Clegg replied: ‘If that’s your decision …’ Brown said: ‘It is.’ He called Sarah and his sons John and Fraser to his office, hugged his Downing Street team and walked out of Number Ten with his family for the last time.

Before leaving he uttered the only speech he had given for more than two decades that had no complicated calculations behind it, no move on a chessboard:

Only those that have held the office of prime minister can understand the full weight of its responsibilities and its great capacity for good.

I have been privileged to learn much about the very best in human nature and a fair amount too about its frailties, including my own.

Above all, it was a privilege to serve. And yes, I loved the job not for its prestige, its titles and its ceremony – which I do not love at all. No, I loved the job for its potential to make this country I love fairer, more tolerant, more green, more democratic, more prosperous and more just – truly a greater Britain.

In the face of many challenges in a few short years, challenges up to and including the global financial meltdown, I have always strived to serve, to do my best in the interest of Britain, its values and its people.

And let me add one thing also. I will always admire the courage I have seen in our armed forces.

And now that the political season is over, let me stress that having shaken their hands and looked into their eyes, our troops represent all that is best in our country and I will never forget all those who have died in honour and whose families today live in grief.

My resignation as leader of the Labour Party will take effect immediately. And in this hour I want to thank all my colleagues, ministers, Members of Parliament. And I want to thank above all my staff, who have been friends as well as brilliant servants of the country.

Above all, I want to thank Sarah for her unwavering support as well as her love, and for her own service to our country.

I thank my sons John and Fraser for the love and joy they bring to our lives.

And as I leave the second most important job I could ever hold, I cherish even more the first – as a husband and father.

Thank you and goodbye.

The last sentence was uncharacteristic in its stark clarity. Brown swept out of Downing Street for the last time, leaving behind a political situation of tantalizing possibilities and dangers for those that had acquired or sought to acquire power. It was an appropriate parting gift from a complex political figure who had breathed the politics of opportunities and dangers ever since he had climbed close to the top when he became shadow chancellor in 1992. There had been no break after that until the cold Tuesday evening in May when he said goodbye. From the summer of 1992 he had been doing whatever it took to secure power and act with expedient principle. He had been doing so even in his final few days. Suddenly the tiny space in which he strode had shrivelled to nothing. No options remained any more.

ONE Trust

The high stakes and unpredictable outcome of the five days after the 2010 election campaign were so familiar for Brown that the sequence was almost a repeat, like the latest episode of long-running US television series where the plot and characters remain the same. Only the context had changed. Brief opportunities were seized and misjudgements made. Expedient hunger for power mingled with a vision of a new progressive consensus. In the final episode Brown failed to deliver, but he took his bow in a dignified manner and left behind a party that held enough seats to mount a serious challenge in the future.

He was more successful in the earlier phase of the long-running drama. The first episode in the series began during the summer of 1992, when Brown was made shadow chancellor. All the classic character failings were in place, along with the underestimated strengths of guile and conviction, a rare combination. Most politicians who possess intense conviction tend to display innocence when it comes to the street-fighting arts. Those who glory in their deviousness often lack conviction, coming to regard the scheming as an end in itself.

Politics moves so quickly that the day before yesterday is easily forgotten. I was constantly surprised how even some Labour MPs had only scant recollection of Brown’s role as shadow chancellor, but it was his performance in this far-off period that made me realize that some of the allegations made against him when he became Prime Minister – in effect that he was useless and short-sighted – made little sense. His role in the early years was immense, more important in policy terms than Blair’s.

Between 1992 and 1994 Brown began to rewrite left-of-centre economic policy making while navigating his way around the complex politics of Britain’s humiliating withdrawal from the Exchange Rate Mechanism. In both cases he moved Labour to a position of heightened popularity but made himself deeply unpopular. Every day the political temperature was high for him, yet he was more than a decade away from the unbearable heat of becoming Prime Minister.

The decline in popularity over these two years was a steep fall. In the summer of 1992 Brown was on one of his highs, having been a star performer during the previous parliament when he regularly topped the annual shadow cabinet poll, an election in which only his fellow Labour MPs had the vote. The poll was seen as highly significant and those that came top were inevitably regarded as potential future leaders. I recall seeing Robin Cook emerge from a meeting that had announced the shadow cabinet results in 1987. He was pale and had aged around twenty-five years in the space of half an hour. I asked him what was the matter. He could not speak. Shortly afterwards I found that he had been voted off the shadow cabinet, the equivalent of being sent to Siberia.

On the whole the media too rated Brown highly in 1992. Politicians and journalists had witnessed the quick-witted oratory in the Commons and the command of a brief. Every newspaper had assumed he would secure the most senior post in the shadow cabinet and saw his elevation when it came as a signal of serious intent for Labour. He was forty-one when he became shadow chancellor, his girlfriend Sheena Macdonald was a glamorous TV interviewer and presenter. There was little talk then of his introverted eccentricities, although those who knew him well were aware of them. The orthodoxy at the time from across the political spectrum was that Brown was a formidable and charismatic politician. That changed from the summer of 1992.

One of the reasons why Brown’s reputation fell dramatically between the summer of 1992 and the spring of 1994 is easy to discover: he became shadow chancellor. It is the fate of shadow chancellors to be unpopular. Most ambitious politicians yearn for the post in the doldrums of opposition. Their hunger is irrational. The post destroys reputations.

By virtue of the job shadow chancellors must appear economically credible, serious figures capable of making tough choices. They are also part of a team seeking to win an election and therefore cannot say anything that risks alienating too many voters. The few who are successful combine the appeal of a reassuring accountant and the skills of a political artist. Ultimately they must frame an economic policy that is able to withstand intense scrutiny from the media and political opponents. As a further complication shadow chancellors must devise policies in ways that are consistent with their party’s principles even though their party will have recently lost an election espousing policies on which those principles were based.

A popular shadow chancellor is a contradiction in terms. There is a long list of shadow chancellors who held the job for a relatively short period. A much smaller number move up to become a chancellor of the Exchequer.

In Brown’s case he was embarking on an exercise that required the stamina of the marathon runner, though he did not know at the beginning that he would be a shadow chancellor for five years and Chancellor for more than ten. Such a time span, fifteen years of being responsible for Labour’s economic policy, is the equivalent of running several marathons in the desert. Many a talented politician would have fallen by the wayside long before.

The unusual demands of the job are highlighted by the fate of Brown’s highly gifted predecessors and Tory successors who failed to meet the tough criteria. After Labour’s 1983 landslide defeat the newly elected deputy leader, Roy Hattersley, became shadow chancellor but opted with relief for the relative safety of Home Affairs four years later after the party lost again. Hattersley admitted later that even by the 1987 election campaign there were some questions in television interviews about the party’s ‘tax and spend’ policies he could not answer without contradicting his leader, Neil Kinnock: ‘Instead I took the only course available to me … I attacked the interviewer.’ Hattersley was a more experienced politician in 1983 than Brown was in 1992. Four years were more than enough for him.

John Smith took over from Hattersley in 1987. He was respected and popular with the wider electorate but also failed to come up with policies that had a broad appeal.

The pattern of failure continued on the other side. After their 1997 defeat Conservative shadow chancellors also struggled to make their mark. They came and went more often than Conservative leaders, which was saying something during this period of identity crisis for the party. Francis Maude, Michael Portillo, Michael Howard and Oliver Letwin performed the role without coming up with popular, credible policies as the Conservatives lost three elections in a row. None of them enjoyed the experience particularly or emerged with his reputation enhanced. In some cases perceptions of their political expertise diminished considerably. Even the nimble-footed and astute George Osborne was the subject of intense internal and external criticism. For much of the 2010 election campaign he was hidden away, regarded as a liability.

Osborne discovered as other shadow chancellors had done before him that jealous rivals expressed a lofty disdain. But it did not fall on rivals to square the circle. They could pop in and out of the debate on economic policy, proposing a tax cut here or a spending rise there. They were under no obligation to paint a wider picture, one in which all the inconvenient sums added up. If they had done all the sums they would have been unpopular too.

The critics have an easy role as members of a loud disgruntled chorus. After the summer of 1992 the chorus around Brown soon became loud and large. It never went away. None of them realized, or were willing to acknowledge, the scale of the task that he faced. The context was unremittingly bleak. Soon after losing the 1992 election Neil Kinnock read a biography chronicling his arduous nine-year leadership. He sent a note to the author that concluded with a single exuberant and yet despairing sentence: ‘What a bloody way to spend my forties!’ There was no election win to compensate for the bloody, stressful battles that Kinnock had fought courageously for nearly a decade. By 1992 Labour’s commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament had been dropped – a cause to which Kinnock was once passionately committed. Labour no longer advocated withdrawal from Europe. Kinnock had sought to be business-friendly. The party had seen off the once potentially fatal threat of the SDP and had purged the left-wing Militant Tendency from its ranks. It had been neurotically careful not to propose sweeping tax rises, ones so punitive that they might reduce the pay packets of relatively low earners. It had agonized over spending plans and made only limited pledges. In some ways it was the slicker party in the field of presentation. Still Labour lost, miles behind the Conservatives in terms of votes.

A fortnight after the 1992 election Labour’s National Executive Committee met for the post-mortem at the party’s headquarters in Walworth Road, a mile or so away from Westminster. The internal pollsters reported that the party had lost above all for a single reason: it was not trusted to run the economy. In spite of all Kinnock’s reforms, voters still assumed that Labour would tax and spend recklessly. There had been no enthusiasm for the Conservatives, but a much greater fear of Labour’s economic policies. This would be Brown’s challenge as shadow chancellor.

As he embarked on his thorny ascent Brown operated as a solo player and all of the traits that would come out later were evident, albeit in a lower key. One of his early advisers was Neal Lawson, who joined Brown in the summer of 1992. Lawson was beginning his own distinct journey leftwards. Later he was the founder of Compass, a group that challenged the pragmatic expediency of both Blair and Brown:

Gordon didn’t operate with a group of people who knew his mind. There were individual conversations, like hands of a clock he would have a talk with someone for an hour and then move on to the next. There was no collective conversation. Each of us was aware of bits of his thinking, but he held all the cards himself. It was frustrating as the only person who knew the whole strategy was Gordon. It was in his head, but never discussed with all of us in a group.

Brown never changed his approach. A wary insecurity meant that he was not at ease in large group discussions, even when he was Prime Minister in Number Ten. He was a hopeless people manager, unable to notice if there was a sense of divisive paranoia in his court. His idea of teamwork was a one-to-one session with his closest colleague, Ed Balls. Soon a lot of the team would turn against him on this basis alone. But in 1992 Brown had a clearer idea of what was required to win trust for an economic policy than anyone else in the Labour party.

At the broadest level, the outlines on an otherwise dauntingly blank canvas, he had a plan that went along these lines: make a public argument with the widest possible appeal while preparing policies more discreetly that were still rooted on the left of centre. He became so persistent as a public narrator that few noticed what was happening below. In embryonic form, this was his version of New Labour.

Although Brown wrote more books and articles than any other senior political figure of recent times, his key beliefs were rarely spelled out. He chose to be deliberately evasive because in his view a wide coalition of support could only be built around vague concepts such as ‘courage’ or ‘Britishness’, more of those apolitical themes that defined the public face of New Labour. He did not believe that a country that had voted for a Conservative government in four successive elections was ready for candid arguments about higher public spending, tax rises to pay for it and redistribution. He still did not believe it was ready for candour after Labour had won three elections. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that he was correct. In 1992 the assumption was even less contentious.

Brown never used the term ‘left-of-centre’, preferring the less threatening and vague ‘progressive’ to describe his politics. Some of his motives and objectives were almost entirely hidden in a haystack of words aimed at reassuring potential doubters about what he was doing. One of those who worked closely with him in opposition and in government says:

Gordon believed that quite often he could accomplish radical acts, but sometimes he felt able to make the case for them only once the acts had been implemented. Sometimes he did not want to say too much in advance. To take one example he redistributed quite extensively without making the case overtly for redistribution, because he felt that voters would regard such a term with fear, associating it with Labour in the 1980s. But once the controversial policies, such as tax credits and discreet increases in public spending, had been implemented and middle England or the media was not raging, he would make the case for them.

The sequence does not seem particularly significant now, but it was revolutionary at the time. What had happened previously was that Labour shadow chancellors would make a general argument for tax rises, only to be slaughtered for it in much of the media and in opinion polls. By the time they came up with the detailed policies they had lost the argument.

An informative early guide to Brown’s values and approach is his biography of John Maxton, the left-wing Scottish Labour MP who helped to light up Westminster in the 1920s and 1930s. The book is revealing for the distant authorial voice that makes the case for expediency over impotent idealism.

Brown joked in the introduction that the book was ‘twenty years in the making’. He studied Maxton as a student at Edinburgh University in 1967, then wrote a PhD thesis about Scottish politics in the 1920s, and finally published the biography in the mid-1980s when he was an ambitious Labour MP. By the time of publication he was already calculating how closely he wished to be associated with the book’s subject, a Labour MP who never ruled. Even the publication of a book became an act of pragmatic idealism.

Brown described the scenes, evoked the personalities and told the story. But as an author he kept himself out of it, conveying neither enthusiastic approval nor the opposite. By the time the book was published in 1985 he was already developing his ambiguous public voice.

Quite often in the years to come, when he wanted to convey his own views he would do so under the protective clothing of somebody else, so that no one was quite sure where precisely Brown stood on highly charged matters. Many people, from the banker Sir Derek Wanless to President Obama, were to play the role of a shield for Brown as he implemented controversial policies. He never dared to rely on his voice alone, one that would be exposed to the howls of a thousand reactionary voices in response. His first shield was Maxton.