On the whole the media too rated Brown highly in 1992. Politicians and journalists had witnessed the quick-witted oratory in the Commons and the command of a brief. Every newspaper had assumed he would secure the most senior post in the shadow cabinet and saw his elevation when it came as a signal of serious intent for Labour. He was forty-one when he became shadow chancellor, his girlfriend Sheena Macdonald was a glamorous TV interviewer and presenter. There was little talk then of his introverted eccentricities, although those who knew him well were aware of them. The orthodoxy at the time from across the political spectrum was that Brown was a formidable and charismatic politician. That changed from the summer of 1992.
One of the reasons why Brown’s reputation fell dramatically between the summer of 1992 and the spring of 1994 is easy to discover: he became shadow chancellor. It is the fate of shadow chancellors to be unpopular. Most ambitious politicians yearn for the post in the doldrums of opposition. Their hunger is irrational. The post destroys reputations.
By virtue of the job shadow chancellors must appear economically credible, serious figures capable of making tough choices. They are also part of a team seeking to win an election and therefore cannot say anything that risks alienating too many voters. The few who are successful combine the appeal of a reassuring accountant and the skills of a political artist. Ultimately they must frame an economic policy that is able to withstand intense scrutiny from the media and political opponents. As a further complication shadow chancellors must devise policies in ways that are consistent with their party’s principles even though their party will have recently lost an election espousing policies on which those principles were based.
A popular shadow chancellor is a contradiction in terms. There is a long list of shadow chancellors who held the job for a relatively short period. A much smaller number move up to become a chancellor of the Exchequer.
In Brown’s case he was embarking on an exercise that required the stamina of the marathon runner, though he did not know at the beginning that he would be a shadow chancellor for five years and Chancellor for more than ten. Such a time span, fifteen years of being responsible for Labour’s economic policy, is the equivalent of running several marathons in the desert. Many a talented politician would have fallen by the wayside long before.
The unusual demands of the job are highlighted by the fate of Brown’s highly gifted predecessors and Tory successors who failed to meet the tough criteria. After Labour’s 1983 landslide defeat the newly elected deputy leader, Roy Hattersley, became shadow chancellor but opted with relief for the relative safety of Home Affairs four years later after the party lost again. Hattersley admitted later that even by the 1987 election campaign there were some questions in television interviews about the party’s ‘tax and spend’ policies he could not answer without contradicting his leader, Neil Kinnock: ‘Instead I took the only course available to me … I attacked the interviewer.’ Hattersley was a more experienced politician in 1983 than Brown was in 1992. Four years were more than enough for him.
John Smith took over from Hattersley in 1987. He was respected and popular with the wider electorate but also failed to come up with policies that had a broad appeal.
The pattern of failure continued on the other side. After their 1997 defeat Conservative shadow chancellors also struggled to make their mark. They came and went more often than Conservative leaders, which was saying something during this period of identity crisis for the party. Francis Maude, Michael Portillo, Michael Howard and Oliver Letwin performed the role without coming up with popular, credible policies as the Conservatives lost three elections in a row. None of them enjoyed the experience particularly or emerged with his reputation enhanced. In some cases perceptions of their political expertise diminished considerably. Even the nimble-footed and astute George Osborne was the subject of intense internal and external criticism. For much of the 2010 election campaign he was hidden away, regarded as a liability.
Osborne discovered as other shadow chancellors had done before him that jealous rivals expressed a lofty disdain. But it did not fall on rivals to square the circle. They could pop in and out of the debate on economic policy, proposing a tax cut here or a spending rise there. They were under no obligation to paint a wider picture, one in which all the inconvenient sums added up. If they had done all the sums they would have been unpopular too.
The critics have an easy role as members of a loud disgruntled chorus. After the summer of 1992 the chorus around Brown soon became loud and large. It never went away. None of them realized, or were willing to acknowledge, the scale of the task that he faced. The context was unremittingly bleak. Soon after losing the 1992 election Neil Kinnock read a biography chronicling his arduous nine-year leadership. He sent a note to the author that concluded with a single exuberant and yet despairing sentence: ‘What a bloody way to spend my forties!’ There was no election win to compensate for the bloody, stressful battles that Kinnock had fought courageously for nearly a decade. By 1992 Labour’s commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament had been dropped – a cause to which Kinnock was once passionately committed. Labour no longer advocated withdrawal from Europe. Kinnock had sought to be business-friendly. The party had seen off the once potentially fatal threat of the SDP and had purged the left-wing Militant Tendency from its ranks. It had been neurotically careful not to propose sweeping tax rises, ones so punitive that they might reduce the pay packets of relatively low earners. It had agonized over spending plans and made only limited pledges. In some ways it was the slicker party in the field of presentation. Still Labour lost, miles behind the Conservatives in terms of votes.
A fortnight after the 1992 election Labour’s National Executive Committee met for the post-mortem at the party’s headquarters in Walworth Road, a mile or so away from Westminster. The internal pollsters reported that the party had lost above all for a single reason: it was not trusted to run the economy. In spite of all Kinnock’s reforms, voters still assumed that Labour would tax and spend recklessly. There had been no enthusiasm for the Conservatives, but a much greater fear of Labour’s economic policies. This would be Brown’s challenge as shadow chancellor.
As he embarked on his thorny ascent Brown operated as a solo player and all of the traits that would come out later were evident, albeit in a lower key. One of his early advisers was Neal Lawson, who joined Brown in the summer of 1992. Lawson was beginning his own distinct journey leftwards. Later he was the founder of Compass, a group that challenged the pragmatic expediency of both Blair and Brown:
Gordon didn’t operate with a group of people who knew his mind. There were individual conversations, like hands of a clock he would have a talk with someone for an hour and then move on to the next. There was no collective conversation. Each of us was aware of bits of his thinking, but he held all the cards himself. It was frustrating as the only person who knew the whole strategy was Gordon. It was in his head, but never discussed with all of us in a group.
Brown never changed his approach. A wary insecurity meant that he was not at ease in large group discussions, even when he was Prime Minister in Number Ten. He was a hopeless people manager, unable to notice if there was a sense of divisive paranoia in his court. His idea of teamwork was a one-to-one session with his closest colleague, Ed Balls. Soon a lot of the team would turn against him on this basis alone. But in 1992 Brown had a clearer idea of what was required to win trust for an economic policy than anyone else in the Labour party.
At the broadest level, the outlines on an otherwise dauntingly blank canvas, he had a plan that went along these lines: make a public argument with the widest possible appeal while preparing policies more discreetly that were still rooted on the left of centre. He became so persistent as a public narrator that few noticed what was happening below. In embryonic form, this was his version of New Labour.
Although Brown wrote more books