In contrast to the last time David had been in the frame for a leadership challenge, when Tony stepped down, I had no intention of publicly expressing a view. When he phoned me in mid-August, I said that he appeared to be in a very different state of mind from the year before. ‘Not quite,’ he said. ‘I didn’t bottle it in 2007. I never intended to stand.’ What about other members of the cabinet, I asked. He said no one seemed in the mood to speak out unless they were sure others were going to join in: ‘There’s a lot of “After you, Claude” going on.’ David said there was no way of knowing how things would develop. He was anticipating the main argument Gordon and his allies would make to forestall a move: that the public wouldn’t wear a second unelected Labour Prime Minister. ‘If we do replace Gordon,’ he said, ‘we have to go for an election four to six months later. The moment you appear frightened of the voters, you’re finished.’
Whatever Gordon’s chances, I knew that he faced a steep climb, and that only by clearing his head and investing all his energies in an autumn recovery would he have any real chance of success. He was frustrated. He felt wronged. He was also obviously unsettled by the newspaper chatter about coups and conspiracies, and about David Miliband too. I tried to get him to put all that out of his mind. I was about to go on holiday myself, departing by easyJet for Naples to join Italian friends whose company I had enjoyed on Capri every summer since my first years in Brussels. When I called Gordon before leaving, to try to lift his spirits a bit, he was preoccupied with the party conference, above all with what we both knew could be his make-or-break speech. Though we spoke only in general terms at first, I told him the key was that it had to contain a personal appeal, to connect emotionally in a way he had so far been failing to do. It would have to provide the definition he had failed to offer when he moved into Number 10. I also urged him to seize the moment before conference by giving a few interviews in which he could set up his relaunch. He had to explain the lessons he had learned over the past few months, how his approach to the job would change, and how he would lead the government and the country forward. In other words, there had to be a genuine sense of reflecting and learning, almost of starting again.
During August, he became more and more anxious. He began to include me in daily, hour-long conference calls involving a tightly-selected group. How my participation did not become public, I will never know. I am also not sure how much help these calls were. Every morning on Capri I would sit in the shade, mobile pinned to my ear, and run through an array of ideas and themes for Gordon to put in his conference speech, and an accompanying policy document that would be published at the conference. As I later discovered, whatever we agreed in the morning would often be unravelled by further conference calls, with different participants, during the course of the day. So when we spoke again the next morning, we would often go back to square one and cover the same ground all over again. It was a cycle with which I became more and more frustrated, with nobody taking charge of the process on his behalf.
Gordon became jittery when I said that in his pre-conference interviews he would have to explain to people how his views of government, and his approach to it, had changed as a result of the difficulties he found himself in. ‘You mean Mea culpa?’ he asked, something we both knew would not come easily to him. No, I said. Just be honest. Give an account of why things had gone wrong. His message should be: ‘I have been able to reflect about what the country is going through, and about our response. These are real challenges, and I think we have to strengthen how we cope with them. This is what the government is going to do about it – this is where I was, and this is where I am now going.’
I also tried to steer him away from falling back on an urge to build the speech around a nuclear assault on David Cameron and the Tories – the ‘dividing-line’ approach he had first drummed into both me and Tony in the 1980s in his ceaseless quest for the killer opportunity to wrong-foot the Conservatives. ‘Dividing lines with the Tories can’t be your priority now,’ I said. ‘If you have any dividing line, it’s between the easier, simpler, original politics of New Labour when first elected, and the new politics of the economic crisis that we have to deal with now, and where the Tories offer nothing.’ He also had to be personal. Not soppy, not apologetic, but he had to reach out to the public, draw them in, and help them understand him better. Gordon warmed to that. He even drew a comparison between his past ‘struggles’ and those of Barack Obama – a parallel that I hoped, for his sake, would end up on the cutting-room floor.
Still, he was right to believe he had a compelling story to tell. He had struggled. With the loss of his eye. With the death of his and Sarah’s first child, Jennifer, in January 2002, ten days after her birth. And four years later, with the news that their youngest son, Fraser, had cystic fibrosis. ‘I have overcome setbacks and tests which I’ve had to struggle with,’ Gordon said. ‘My health, and my daughter, and my son.’ I sensed that this might indeed provide the emotional connection Gordon had so often lacked. It would ring true, because it was.
Gordon also called me separately at times to share his fears that moves were afoot to drive him out. During one call, he said he had heard that the former Blair cabinet heavyweight Charles Clarke was ‘putting pressure’ on David to ‘reveal his hand, be a candidate – saying he must do so or be discounted. They’re getting a letter together to say there must be change. They’re getting signatures for a coup.’ ‘Sounds familiar,’ I teased him, thinking back to previous attempts by Gordon’s own supporters to drive Tony from office. I told him there were no plots for a coup as far as I could tell, and there wouldn’t be as long as he focused on September and the conference, and got everything right.
He agonised, too, about his staff – and they about him. Now that I was in fairly regular contact with Gordon and his aides, I got both sides of the story. Gordon felt alone. He felt he needed to do too much – and very often, all – of the policy-making himself. He said, surprisingly, that was partly why it had occurred to him to bring me back into the mix, and that he had even toyed with contacting me much earlier, in May 2007, the month before he moved into Number 10, but had concluded that it would not have worked. Now he wished he had done.
In fact, as even his closest aides made clear to me, Gordon himself was a big part of the problem. At the Treasury he’d had a well-oiled machine, a group of experienced and gifted civil servants under the direction of a unique political ally, Ed Balls. Ed was so close to Gordon – so seamlessly identified not only with his thinking, but his ambitions – that he was Deputy Chancellor in everything but name. Now Ed was Children, Schools and Families Secretary. He was still very much part of the inner circle, but he was not based in Downing Street. He had a day job, and legitimate ambitions of his own. Running the government and the country was simply harder than running the Treasury. Shorn of Ed, Gordon lacked, or at least had not yet acquired, the new set of skills and staff members he needed. One of his closest advisers put it best: ‘Gordon is a hub-and-spoke operator. He’s the hub, and he works through lots of separate spokes, rather than an integrated machine.’ Another member of the team said: ‘He only trusts people in boxes, silos. He listens to them in that particular context, like he would use an electrician or bring in a plumber. He’s not geared to run a group that interacts, communicates with one another.’ They all agreed that there was no one – no Ed Balls – to pull things together for him, and that was the chief loss.
The more I spoke to Gordon, and to those around him, the more convinced I became that the key to any recovery was Gordon himself. With all his ideas, with all his passion, he seemed so distracted, so distressed, that I wondered whether he would be able to rise to the occasion at the party conference. It wasn’t just the politics he had to get right, I told him. Not even just the speech, though that would obviously be crucial. He had to look revived as well. I kept urging him to rest, spend time in the sun, exercise, eat well. ‘You’ve got to take care of yourself so that people get a different picture of you, as on top of the job rather than struggling with it,’ I said on one occasion. ‘If you look better on the outside, people will feel you’re more in control of things.’ I think he realised I was right.
Very quietly, he said: ‘It was all so wretched between us all – you, me, Tony. It was so wasteful! We could have achieved so much more. We still did a lot, though. Perhaps surprisingly.’
‘I