There were problems of policy substance, too. By far the most pressing was a legacy of Gordon’s final budget as Chancellor, three months before he had moved in next-door. As part of an eye-catching announcement reducing the standard tax rate to 20p, beginning in April 2008 – which meant now – he had axed the entry-rate 10p bracket. The unintended, and clearly unanticipated, effect was to damage those at the very bottom of the ladder just as the economic crisis was beginning to bite. The immediate result was the worst backbench rebellion Gordon had faced as Prime Minister. That subsided – only just – when he promised a package to compensate those who stood to lose out from the tax changes. This was the last thing we needed in the run-up to local elections across England and Wales on 1 May, and the results were disastrous. In the most high-profile contest, for Mayor of London, even Ken Livingstone could not stave off defeat to the Conservatives’ Boris Johnson. I won’t claim to have shed many tears for Ken. With an ego the size of the London Eye, and what I always felt was a facile populism, he had delighted in stirring up ‘real Labour’ opposition to Tony during our first years in government. Still, I recognised that his defeat was bad news. Even Ken’s image as a maverick, untainted by ordinary party constraints, had not saved him from falling victim to our declining fortunes. Nationally, we were not only outpolled by the Tories – by a margin of 44 per cent to 24 – we finished in third place, behind the Liberal Democrats.
I felt conflicted. Not about the results, of course. I was no less shaken than if Tony had still been in charge by our diminishing prospects of keeping David Cameron, short trousers or not, from ushering in a period of Conservative rule. Yet despite the renewed warmth I had felt for him in Brussels, I began to wonder whether even a more focused Gordon Brown, playing to his strengths, could really succeed in turning things round. I was by now intermittently back in touch with him by phone. Perhaps equally surprisingly, given Gordon’s role in hastening him out of Downing Street, so was Tony. Although now absorbed in his work on the Arab–Israeli conflict, his faith foundation and his business activities, Tony retained a train-spotter’s interest in British politics, however much, publicly, he wanted to keep out of it. He also cared about his own legacy, and how Labour was going to secure it and build on it. Like me, he wanted to offer support to Gordon, and I encouraged him to do so.
Tony phoned him in Downing Street the day after the local elections. He told him he had to push back, not to sound defeated, not to beat himself up. Yes, he said, he had to listen to what the public were saying. But what he really had to do – a message I was also conveying – was to reassert what government was doing, why it was doing it, and how it would improve Britain. He had to provide a clearer sense of direction, a strong reform programme. If he looked and sounded wounded, Tony told him, he would invite further attacks: ‘Be careful of what scent you give off.’ We both agreed, however, that Gordon was beginning to look bad, physically. Sleepless and grey. Fearful. On the ropes. No wonder everyone assumed that he was all of those things.
A few days after he had spoken to Gordon, Tony called me from the Middle East at my small, quirky Brussels flat, whose large windows I liked staring out of as I worked or talked on the telephone. He said he felt that while Gordon had the intelligence and the ideas, the drive and determination, to make a success of government, ‘none of that is the most important thing for a politician. It is intuition – what to do, when to do it, how to say it, how to bring people along.’ That, he felt, was Gordon’s problem. I agreed. Intuition, of course, was a political gift that Tony himself had in spades, and it had helped guide every step the three of us had taken in the long campaign to make Labour a party of government again.
After the local elections, Gordon scrambled to steady the wheel of what was beginning to look very much like a sinking ship. He brought forward his announcement of the government programme for the next Parliament. It proved to be a mishmash of the already known and the small-fry, and it was picked to pieces by the opposition, and even by some of the media pundits who at the height of Gordon’s war against Tony had cheered him on as Labour’s messiah-in-waiting. Nor was there any respite from Alistair Darling’s panicked ‘mini-budget’ in mid-May, in which he was forced to borrow £2.7 billion to cushion the effect of the 10p rate axe on at least some of the lowest-paid workers. In late May, Gordon faced a further electoral test, and a further body-blow. The death of one of my own early political allies, the indomitable Labour backbencher Gwyneth Dunwoody, forced a by-election in Crewe. The Tories cruised to victory in what should have been one of the safest of Labour seats, defeating Gwyneth’s own daughter by 8,000 votes. Gordon’s early contrast between his premiership and Tony’s was wearing perilously thin. The Brownite promise to an unsettled party had been that the Blair rollercoaster would be replaced by a calmer ride. Now it appeared we were going nowhere. Or very possibly off the rails.
In early June, Gordon called me again in Brussels. We agreed that I would come and see him at Downing Street when I was in London in the middle of the month. My role, if you could call it that, remained strictly informal. As far as I could tell, very few people knew I was back in touch with the Prime Minister. Sue Nye, Gordon’s office ‘gatekeeper’ and one of my oldest friends in politics, was in the loop. As for others in the inner circle, even those who knew Gordon and I were talking seemed puzzled about where this latest twist in our relationship was headed. That was understandable: so was I.
When I went to London, I arranged to have lunch with Jeremy Heywood the day before I was to meet Gordon. I wanted to bring myself up to date with how things were running in Number 10, and to see what I could do to help. Jeremy was now Permanent Secretary, Gordon’s top civil servant. In the early days of the Blair government he had been with Gordon at the Treasury, and before that, private secretary to Conservative chancellors. I had got to know him well when he moved to Number 10 and worked with Tony in 1999. When he arrived at the restaurant in the Royal Festival Hall, he was smiling. As he had been on his way out of Number 10, he said, Gordon had asked to see him. When he had explained that he was going to a lunch appointment, to meet me, Gordon had said he would join us – only to find that he couldn’t scramble his protection officers quickly enough. ‘The reason I made a point of mentioning you is that I’m still not sure just what your status is these days,’ Jeremy said. ‘I was afraid what Gordon might say if he found out. Now he says he wants to meet you this afternoon.’ I told him I had arranged to see Gordon the following day, but Jeremy replied: ‘He says he wants to meet you today, too.’ Looking back on it, I suppose that was when our real sense of reconnection began.
‘I’ve just been talking to Tony,’ Gordon said as I arrived in the upstairs study at Number 10 – Mrs Thatcher’s favourite room – from my lunch with Jeremy. I couldn’t help but chuckle. ‘Are things really that desperate?’ I asked.
‘Come on,’ Gordon replied with a broad smile. He told me he had read a speech I’d recently given in New York, on the need for new policies and institutions to address the challenges of the global economy, and said he wanted to find a time to talk further about what that meant not just for the EU, but for Britain. I felt flattered, which, I suspect, was his intention. Then, after only a short pause, he turned to a more immediate worry – his own political crisis. And he uttered four extraordinary words: ‘Can you help me?’
‘How?’ I asked, taken aback by his directness, and still feeling my way in this revived relationship.
‘By giving me your strategy,’ he said. ‘Only a few people in politics are strategists, and you are one of them. I need that. I need to know what you think of my situation.’
I had an instant in which to make up my mind how honest to be with him. I didn’t want to damage his confidence further, or put him off talking to me, but nor did I want to miss the chance to offer the kind of blunt advice I suspected