‘You could have done all of this without dumping on the government of which you were a member for the last ten years,’ I said.
‘I never did that,’ he insisted.
‘Yes, you did. You couldn’t resist it. It was all that neurosis and pent-up anger about Tony, fanned by the people around you.’
He insisted that he had moved beyond all that now. I think we both knew, and Tony too, that some of the scars would always remain. But I sensed that he was right. The terrible political knocks he had taken, and the crisis facing the party to which all three of us had devoted our lives, made the old battles seem somehow irrelevant. As I left, Gordon put his hand on my shoulder. ‘The main thing,’ he said, ‘is that I want us to work together. I want to rebuild our friendship.’
Still not quite sure where all this was leading, I agreed to have dinner the following week with three of Gordon’s aides: his Europe adviser Stewart Wood, the long-standing Number 10 business policy adviser Geoffrey Norris, and his trusted former Treasury adviser Shriti Vadera, who had now become a minister. Knowing that Gordon wanted me to provide input from Brussels as their recovery project began, they urged me to do all I could to help. By the end of the evening I felt there was a real understanding of the problems Gordon faced, and a commitment to help turn things round, at least amongst some of those around him. He had changed, they insisted. ‘He realises how bad things are. He realises it’s personal, that he is the problem,’ one of them said. ‘He’s calmer than you would have expected. He’s mellowed a lot – maybe because of the children.’ They felt that Gordon’s strengths had yet to come through, above all his grasp of the economic crisis and his understanding of what had to be done. ‘But he doesn’t communicate easily, and the public aren’t responding.’ That may be, I said. ‘But if he hopes to get people to like him, or even listen, he has to speak in a language people understand, and to be seen as acting for the national interest, not party or political interest. He has to lead.’
With Parliament breaking up for the summer, Gordon’s first real shot to show that kind of leadership would come in the run-up to the party conference in the autumn, and that was what I urged him to focus on, especially as his problems steadily increased. The economy continued to worsen. Unemployment was rising. The property market was heading south. The political picture was, if anything, more discouraging. The ill-health and subsequent resignation of the Labour MP for Glasgow East, David Marshall, presented Gordon with a nightmare scenario: an end-of-July by-election not only in a safe Labour seat, but a Scottish Labour seat, in his own political back yard. Labour initially struggled even to find a candidate. When the votes were counted, we lost, on a massive 22 per cent swing, to the Scottish Nationalists.
Gordon was by then ostensibly on holiday by the Suffolk seaside. In fact, he was in nearly constant contact with aides, and increasingly with me. His mood was bleak. That was nothing compared to the rest of the party. A few days after the by-election defeat, Foreign Secretary David Miliband wrote a piece in the Guardian. The party must not succumb to ‘fatalism’, he said. Yes, we were down. We had made mistakes. We had waited too long to reform the NHS. We had won the war but lost the peace in Iraq. We had held power too tightly in Westminster, rather than devolving it to the people affected by what we decided. But we had accomplished much as well, and should not be shy of saying so. The next election was winnable, if we embarked on a new stage of New Labour to confront challenges that were different from those we had faced when we had first come to power. We had to deal with the economic crisis and equip people to emerge stronger when recovery came. We had, David argued, to give more control over the public services to those who used them. We had to build a sense of local empowerment and local society. David Cameron, he said, ‘may be likeable and sometimes hard to disagree with’, but he had no competing vision. He was ‘empty’.
On the face of it, the article was simply an elegantly argued rallying cry. It did not directly criticise Gordon, but it did something that was immediately over-interpreted: it did not mention him at all. When one front-page headline screamed ‘Labour at War’, David had himself photographed with a copy of the paper, on which he had scribbled the word ‘not’. His article was not, he insisted, the start of a leadership challenge.
Inevitably, however, with Labour’s poll ratings so low, media speculation began to build about Gordon’s prospects for hanging on as leader. The subject was becoming not just a source of speculation within the party, but a national talking point. When I next spoke to Tony, he was sombre about the chances for a political recovery. ‘It’s all very sad,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to help him, but without letting him lead us to disaster.’ He also left me with a request to keep in touch with David Miliband. I texted David. ‘How are you?’ I asked. He replied: ‘Large mountain ahead. Orienteering/climbing/planning skills much needed.’ I texted back: ‘Guides, sherpas available.’
David was aware how difficult it would be for the government to recover public support, and I wanted to lend my experience in helping to achieve this. But both of us were in difficult positions: David because, before deciding not to stand, he had been the one credible challenger to Gordon as leader when Tony left Number 10; and I because although I still had my taste for domestic politics, I wanted to tread very carefully, and not to interfere.
I was close to David, having first worked with him when he was a very young, and fearfully bright, policy adviser in the run-up to the 1997 election. I was certain that his newspaper article was at most an attempt to put down a marker, to open up a debate and inject new purpose into the government. I shared his hope that this would happen – it was what I had been talking to Gordon about. David and I shared something else, as well: alarm at the drift and decline since Gordon’s first few months in Downing Street. In this, he was reflecting a wider concern, in the party and in cabinet, over whether Gordon could lead a recovery. He told me he feared the Guardian piece had made him look divisive, but he still felt it had been the right thing to do. He had provided a ‘coherent message’ that many ministers felt was sorely lacking. He said there was no move to push Gordon out, but there was a lot of unease in the cabinet.
Tony was getting the same message. When we next spoke, he said his sense was of a fatalism enveloping Labour MPs: some thought Gordon was unsalvageable and should go, while others thought he was unsalvageable, but that they just had to accept it. I couldn’t help replying that if that was true, history might be tough on Tony: ‘You saved your own skin by constantly stringing Gordon along, and then landed him on the rest of us when you went.’ He said he was afraid that might be true. When he added that his real fear was that the British public had simply given up on Gordon, and that the party would sooner or later follow suit, I pointed out that he’d been there too. ‘The same would have been true of you after Iraq. The people stuck with you, but only just. That saved you. Otherwise, it would have been curtains.’ He replied: ‘I know.’
But I think both of us felt a desire, a duty, to help Gordon if we could. The key would be the party conference in September. Tony felt his chances of pulling through were not high, and that if he failed, a leadership change would become inevitable. I thought this judgement was right. ‘It’s not about loyalty to one man,’ he said. ‘It’s about loyalty to the Labour Party. It’s about saving the Labour Party. He has to completely rethink and reconnect. If he fails, it’s hopeless. He cannot stagger on. The public aren’t going to elect him for another five years.’ If Gordon failed, there was at least David. ‘He’s not perfect,’ Tony said, ‘but he has matured. He’s humble enough to listen. He has to keep going, be strong, show decisive leadership.’
Tony and David talked several times as the summer wore on. Tony became ever more impressed by David’s strength and political instincts. Gordon, he believed, had about a 20