I don’t think either of us had any doubt that Gordon would return to London after the summer recess with a new determination to turn things round, but at the beginning, events did not help him. The trouble began, at least in Gordon’s mind, with the closest thing he had to an old friend, except for Ed Balls, in the cabinet. Alistair Darling – a Scot, a long-time admirer of Gordon, and his Chief Secretary at the Treasury after the 1997 election – was evidently feeling increasingly pessimistic about where the country was heading, from an already obvious economic downturn to something far worse, and, it seemed, frustrated at being constantly second-guessed by Number 10. He gave a long, and extraordinarily frank, interview to the Guardian writer Decca Aitkenhead at his holiday cottage in the Outer Hebrides. His remarks were not personally unkind towards Gordon, but he felt the country was ‘pissed off’ with the government: ‘We patently have not been able to get across what we are for, and what we are about.’ And he said he believed the recession would be ‘more profound and more long-lasting than people thought’. The economic straits Britain found itself in were ‘arguably the worst they’ve been in sixty years’.
The word ‘arguably’ disappeared from the quotes picked up by other newspapers and broadcasters when Alistair’s interview appeared. George Osborne had a field day, launching an assault on Gordon’s legacy as Chancellor and his ‘truthfulness’ as Prime Minister. Gordon was furious, because he felt Alistair’s comments were yet one more distraction from his hoped-for September recovery. When he called me, he was seething. I probably didn’t help things by questioning how he had allowed his media briefers to leak his plans to ‘go personal’ at the party conference – a bizarre theft of his own headlines that risked detracting from the impact of his speech when he made it. ‘I didn’t do that!’ he protested. ‘Well, somebody did,’ I said calmly, to which he replied: ‘OK. But we’re going from one improvisation to another. It’s ridiculous. I’ve got all these things to do, all this policy in my mind, but no means of communicating it.’ Then he got to what was really upsetting him. ‘That fucking Darling interview! It fucked up everything, absolutely everything, I wanted to do last week.’
None of us reckoned, however, on a series of events about to erupt five time zones away from Downing Street. They were hugely significant, an economic shock so seismic that they made Alistair’s interview seem understated. They began with the news that one of America’s most venerable investment banks, Lehman Brothers, might be going to the wall. Over the weekend, the US authorities scrambled to find a buyer. On Monday, Lehmans filed for so-called Chapter Eleven protection. It was the biggest bankruptcy in American history. World stock markets tumbled. Another British bank, HBOS, was soon showing signs of being in serious trouble. This was staved off by Gordon, who with a word in the ear of the Lloyds chairman Victor Blank encouraged a mega-merger between Lloyds and HBOS. By the end of the week, with the Labour conference convening in Manchester on Sunday, the economic news was becoming ever more worrying.
Gordon phoned me on Friday night. He said he had been trying to get me for two days – I had been at a climate change conference in Oslo, and had not been returning messages. He started by talking about his conference speech. It was clear the political ground had shifted. ‘Now,’ I told him, ‘you actually have something big to talk about in your speech. It really is the global economy, stupid.’
This was what we had been talking about since the summer. But now it was well and truly dramatised. The terrible crisis meant it was not just a theoretical and not just a political argument, but a real, immediate challenge. If Gordon got his message right, he had an opportunity to break through in a way he simply would not have been able to do before.
He agreed. ‘It’s not just about individuals and society. It must be markets as well,’ he said. His only doubt, one Tony would have found reassuringly New Labour, was how far he could go in attacking the markets. I reassured him that it wasn’t about attacking the markets, but individuals within them who had been acting irresponsibly, and that he should have no compunction about attacking them. But mostly what I told him was to put all his extraneous worries to one side: the so-called coups, Alistair’s interview. ‘Don’t, for God’s sake, let yourself get sidetracked,’ I said. ‘And don’t stop being prime ministerial.’
I was fairly certain now that, given the economic turmoil, Gordon had every chance of turning in a performance sufficient to save his job. Only a frontal assault from David Miliband was likely to spur rebellion, and that was not going to happen. For the media, however, the conference was shaping up as a tale of two speeches: David’s on the Monday, and Gordon’s on the Wednesday. David spoke eloquently, and ranged far beyond his brief as Foreign Secretary. In parts, he sounded very much like a leader-in-waiting. He echoed his July call for the party to choose hope, energy and new ideas over ‘fatalism’. But even without his unfortunate ambush by a photographer outside the conference hall, who snapped him grinning and holding a banana, David was not pushing for the leadership. Besides, there was no vacancy. Unless, of course, Gordon unravelled when he strode onto the stage.
He did the opposite. By some distance, it was the most powerful performance, the most effective message, he had delivered since his descent had begun a year earlier. It was personal. It connected. It had touches of self-deprecating humour. It played to his strengths. Galvanised by the magnitude of the new economic and financial crisis, he managed to produce what he had so far been failing to do. He offered a coherent reply to questions left unanswered for so long: What were the challenges Britain faced? What were the policies, vision and leadership needed to rise above them? And why was he the man to provide them? His most effective line, aimed at David Cameron, was: ‘I’m all in favour of apprenticeships. But let me tell you that this is no time for a novice.’ It was clever, it was simple, and it was what people wanted to hear.
I was back in Brussels when Gordon gave his speech, and was preoccupied with preparing for a trip to China and a speech of my own when I got there. Especially with the economic crisis deepening, I was keen to encourage expanding business and trade ties between the EU and the Chinese. But I was determined to press Beijing on our concerns about protectionist barriers, and China’s lacklustre attitude to enforcing intellectual-property rights. I watched Gordon’s address on television, however, and saw that it had gone well. I got two text messages that evening. The first was from one of the team at Number 10, saying very kindly that I’d made a ‘profound difference’ to Gordon’s performance. The second was from Sue Nye. ‘Gordon,’ it read, ‘says “thank you” for your help.’ As always with big set-piece speeches, especially Gordon’s, I was just one of many who had contributed. But it had been worth the effort. I told Gordon I felt it had been a good speech, the right message, effectively delivered, at the right time. What I didn’t say, in part because I was sure Gordon already knew and feared it, was that he had cleared only the first hurdle on the road to recovery.
By the time we next spoke, I was in Singapore, on my way home from Beijing. The call came in the early hours of the morning. He was upset by continued signs of discontent among an assortment of backbenchers, echoed by several former Blair cabinet ministers. There was a ‘plot’ to drive him out, he insisted: ‘The plotters are the problem.’ He singled out three former ministers as the alleged culprits: Stephen Byers, Alan Milburn and John Reid. ‘They are steering it,’ he said. ‘They had a plan, it misfired, and they failed. They wanted to wreck the conference, and they didn’t succeed.’
In fact, as far as I could tell, neither they nor anyone else had had some grand plan for conference Armageddon. At least for now, Gordon