The main sense, though, in which the book has turned out differently from what I had anticipated has less to do with my own choices or judgements than with what Harold Macmillan famously described as the determining force in politics: ‘Events, dear boy, events.’ As I began writing in earnest, I felt oddly liberated by no longer being directly part of the story I was setting out to tell. Tony had left office. Gordon was in Number 10. I was in Brussels, out of front-line British politics altogether. But then, suddenly and astonishingly, events took an unexpected turn. Not only did I find myself returning as a participant, rather than an observer. Once again I was at the heart of the story.
‘Can You Help Me?’
The most fateful four hours of my political life were also the most surreal. They began on the afternoon of the first Thursday of October 2008, across a tray of sandwiches, yoghurt and slightly overripe bananas, with Gordon Brown in 10 Downing Street. They culminated in my return to the heart of government, at the behest of a Prime Minister who for much of the previous decade had denounced and denigrated me.
Our first quiet step towards reconciliation, the rekindling of a deep if damaged friendship, came seven months earlier and two hundred miles away. It was a crisp late-February morning in Brussels, my base as European Trade Commissioner since I had left front-line British politics in 2004. Gordon was on his first full-dress visit to the European Commission as Prime Minister. Before making his way to the imposing, glass-fronted headquarters of the Commission on the Schuman roundabout, he had arranged for us to talk briefly in the office of our permanent representative to the EU, Kim Darroch, down the road. It would be the first time Gordon and I had met since his truculent takeover from Tony Blair in Downing Street the year before. I was intrigued, expectant. And apprehensive. From the moment in 1994 when Tony had emerged as the irresistibly obvious choice to succeed John Smith as Labour Party leader, Gordon had convinced himself that I had schemed behind his back to deny him the job. As he surely must have recognised, that was unfair, and untrue. Yet in more recent years, as he and his allies waged their insurgency against Tony, he had come to view me as Tony’s staunchest defender and as a siren voice of alarm over how and where he was likely to lead New Labour.
I had spent the early months of Gordon’s premiership trying to keep my head down. But I was goaded during a Today programme interview shortly before he took over to observe a bit mischievously that while this might ‘come as a disappointment to him’, the new Prime Minister couldn’t actually fire me from my Commission post, because I had been appointed by the government to a full, five-year term. Yet I hastened to add a note of reassurance. I said I did not intend to seek a second term once my time in Brussels ended in November 2009. I assumed the new guard in Number 10 would recognise that I was playing an important role in delicate negotiations for a world trade agreement. I also knew that my ability to do the job well, and to finesse the interests of individual EU states along the way, would suffer if I were seen to lack the confidence of my own government. The more I could stay off Gordon’s political radar, the better, and my Today interview was a maladroit first move in achieving this.
Privately, I was still upset over the way he had treated Tony, and me. I not only resented the personal pain caused to me by his behaviour, and that of his parliamentary foot-soldiers and media briefers; in addition to their part in ending my own cabinet career, I felt they had kept Tony from delivering on key areas of New Labour’s policy promise to Britain. They had acted to weaken his room for manoeuvre and his legacy in government, well beyond the huge damage caused by the aftermath of the war in Iraq. But Gordon was now leader. I did not want to become a sulking, resentful presence, desperately clinging on to past bad feelings and finding fault in everything he did. At his first party conference as Prime Minister, in Bournemouth at the end of September 2007, I used an address to the modernisers’ policy group Progress not just to praise him for his part in the transition from one New Labour government to another, but to extol him as the man incomparably qualified to tackle the new challenges facing our country in the twenty-first century.
I spoke with more certainty than I actually felt – though neither I nor anyone else could have anticipated the vertiginous decline in Gordon’s fortunes that would begin within days of the conference ending. Still, the message of support was genuine. It was rooted not only in political calculation, or a desire to ward off trouble for myself in Brussels. Though my earlier doubts about Gordon’s fitness as Prime Minister remained, I wanted to be proved wrong. Before our spectacular falling-out, he had been my closest friend and ally in politics. I was intimately familiar not only with Gordon’s weaknesses, personal and political. I knew his strengths: intelligence, iron determination, and above all a grasp of the economic challenges that were increasingly threatening our country and the world.
By the time Gordon arrived in Brussels, the seriousness of the world economic crisis for Britain was becoming clearer. Fully-fledged recession was some months ahead, but the American sub-prime banking meltdown had claimed its first UK victim. The previous autumn, a run on the Newcastle-based bank Northern Rock had brought it to the brink of collapse. It was saved only by financial support from the Treasury. In the months that followed, Gordon and his Chancellor, Alistair Darling, tried desperately to find a private buyer for the bank. Only days before Gordon came to Brussels, they had given up, and taken Northern Rock into public ownership. I happened to believe they were right both to have worked for a private deal as the better option, and to have chosen nationalisation when that proved impossible.
The immediate problem for the Prime Minister was that he was now mired in a political crisis as well as an economic one. It had begun at party conference. While I was publicly on my best behaviour, I had seen it coming. For days, Gordon’s inner circle had been stoking up speculation that he was about to call an early general election. His first three months in power had gone extraordinarily well. He was confronted with a cattle-disease scare, but the effects had been less severe than at first appeared likely. Two attempted terror bombings had mercifully resulted in only a single death, of one of the terrorists. A spate of summer flooding was of course bad for those affected, but turned out to be less serious than feared. He had dealt with these potential crises in an assured way, and his supporters were hailing his strength and statesmanship. Going into conference, he was riding high in the opinion polls. But he was also an unelected Prime Minister – not just because our 2005 general election campaign had been under Tony’s banner and not his, but because he had not even faced a challenge for the succession inside Labour. Now, here was a chance for a mandate of his own.
But from the moment I’d seen the first of the media hype, I was almost sure it wouldn’t happen. Gordon – the Gordon I had known so well and worked with so closely since the 1980s – was a risk-averse politician. In 1992, he had shied away from fighting John Smith for the party leadership. After John’s death – in fairness because Gordon had finally realised he couldn’t possibly win – he had stepped back from challenging Tony for the leadership. Most of all, Gordon was cautious when it came to Britain’s voters.
As the pre-conference election speculation intensified, a number of the old Blairite stalwarts had phoned me in Brussels. What did I think? Would there be a snap election? ‘I’ve known Gordon for more than twenty years,’ I replied. ‘I can tell you when the date of the election will be – May 2010.’ Yet, by the time I arrived in Bournemouth a snap election was being touted as a foregone conclusion. When a reporter asked me to comment, I said the minimum I felt I could get away with. ‘I can see no reason,’ I replied, ‘why he shouldn’t call an election.’
Within days, it all went horribly wrong. I was back in Brussels, and the Tories were holding their own conference in Blackpool, when I suddenly saw TV pictures