In his biography of Brown, Robert Peston argues that the shadow chancellor could have won a contest against Blair if he had decided to stand in 1994. Paul Routledge makes the same case in his earlier biography, the first written about Brown. Routledge put the argument with such intensity that his book became the cause of a decisive split between Blair and Brown when they were in government.
Although misplaced, this was the determined view of Brown’s closest allies, who urged him to step forward and exploit his stronger base in the party. They were deceiving themselves out of loyalty to Brown and a sudden wariness about what Blair would do if he became leader. In the real world an unstoppable momentum was propelling Blair towards the leadership on the day of Smith’s death. It did not take the scheming of Peter Mandelson or of anyone else. The broadcasting outlets and newspapers exploded with voices from the Labour party and beyond arguing that Blair should be the next leader. Opinion polls of Labour voters and the wider electorate conveyed the same message. In effect Blair was unofficial leader by the evening of Smith’s death.
The suddenness of the changed situation gave Brown and his entourage no time to acclimatize. This is a partial justification for the delusional, self-absorbed and clumsily brutal response to the soaring rise of Blair. Obviously Brown was shocked and upset that a close friend had died. Equally obviously he wondered about what would happen next politically. There was a part of him that assumed Mandelson and Blair would be in touch at some point during the morning to discuss his candidacy for the leadership – another mistaken assumption. There were discussions, but none conducted on the certain basis he would be the candidate supported by the other two.
Brown’s sense of betrayal was immediate, intense and irrational. Most ambitious politicians are able to accept defeat, or what in this case was an implied defeat, in a leadership contest and get on with their careers fairly calmly. Even the hungriest recover quickly. Michael Heseltine had wanted to be prime minister since his student days at Oxford. After failing to win in 1990 he settled down to the less glamorous mission of finding an alternative to the poll tax as John Major’s Environment Secretary. The nearest this big, complicated, exuberant and shy figure achieved to his ambition was standing in for John Major at Prime Minister’s Question Time.
Brown could not settle down, and did not do so for another thirteen years. When he realized that Blair would wear the crown, his response was extraordinary. In a way that combined an insecure sense of entitlement, frustrated ambition, wilful competitiveness and, importantly, an underestimated principled conviction, Brown went about securing ownership over the future direction of the party and its policies as compensation. He assumed the role of leader in waiting the moment the new leader was elected. In the depths of his despair during those defining early summer weeks of 1994, Brown hit upon his own third way. He would not stand for the leadership but he would seek to lead. He would follow his third way with a constant resilience until he finally became leader in 2007.
Brown’s frustrated personal ambition and his factionalized feuding in the years that followed have already filled shelves of books. One of his concerns has received less attention, but it partly explains why he responded in the way he did. It relates to Brown’s assessment of Blair and of what he might do if he was left unchecked as leader. Publicly Brown has rarely hinted at his views of Blair. Away from his inner court he was discreet in private as well, but as early as 1994 he had genuine worries about what Blair would do to the Labour party and the country at a rare moment of heightened political opportunity. Brown’s critics will argue that it was very convenient for him to discover principled concerns to justify what they regard as his acts of treacherous betrayal, but in being so doggedly, selfishly determined, Brown unquestionably saved the new leader from himself at certain points and also secured the freedom to be, sometimes, a reforming chancellor. Of course at the same time Brown also pioneered the famously destructive factionalism of which he was a victim as much as Blair, but there was some important purpose behind the manoeuvring which was not fully explored at the time or since.
With some evidence to justify his views, Brown had come to regard Blair as a superficial policy maker, more interested in process than in the building up of detailed policies with the aim of reaching specified objectives. He feared that Blair regarded policy decisions as little more than symbols to help him produce changes in the political choreography, and that it was the shape and pattern of politics that interested him. In Brown’s view Blair would be excited by a policy that showed Labour had ‘changed’. He would be less interested in the implementation of policies in the hope of achieving measures that brought about social justice, or higher levels of investment in public services. He had seen no evidence that Blair was gripped by the issues that interested him: economic policies, reforms that helped to address poverty and created the structures that gave even the poorest the chance to fulfil their potential, Brown’s subterranean narrative and the reason why he was in politics.
In his obdurate disdain, Brown underestimated the potential importance of Blair’s fascination with choreography, the possibility of progressives uniting in some form of anti-Tory force to shape a ‘century for radicals’ as Blair called it, and also in an entirely different context the scope for change in Northern Ireland. But he had a sound cause for concern. The divide between them was not so much at this stage one of left and right, but between the superficial, inexperienced policy maker and one who had begun to reshape Labour’s economic policies with specific social objectives in mind. Blair’s close allies argued then and continued to argue that it was Brown who was the short-term headline grabber, the figure who acted solely for his own interests and ambition. He was more than capable of acting in this way and became even more capable in his later years, but at this stage of their respective careers Brown was delving deep into economic policy making. Blair was floating nearer the surface, showing a forensic concern about the need for Labour to change and scrapping policies that had been so electorally harmful. But Blair had no view on economic policy. He knew what he was opposed to – the old ‘tax and spend’ policies advanced by Labour – but was less clear what he was in favour of in ways that marked a difference with the Conservatives. Indeed there never was a ‘Blairite’ economic policy. The ubiquitous adjective was never applied even by ardent admirers to the key policy area, the one that drives everything else.
Brown’s main aim in the build-up to their famous meeting at the Granita restaurant in Islington in May 1994 was to make sure he had control over the policies he cared about and input into decisions that related to the highly charged choreography, including front-bench reshuffles, relations with other parties and electoral reform. Contrary to mythology he did not go to the Islington restaurant seeking a deal over when Blair would hand over the leadership to him. Apart from anything else he was by then a traumatized and battered politician. He knew high politics could never be planned so neatly. Indeed he was living through a traumatic period that demonstrated how easily assumptions and ambitions could be blown apart by an unexpected event. By the time of Granita he had already received a commitment from Blair that as leader he would back him as the successor.
As far as Brown was concerned the meeting was about control. In particular he was worried about what Blair might say or do as leader on taxation and welfare reform. He lived in genuine and not opportunistic fear that Blair would make a speech, for example, that ruled out increasing the overall burden of taxation without thinking through the longer-term consequences and in a way that would have wrecked Brown’s medium-term plans to raise taxation stealthily in order to pay for improvements in public services. He arrived at Granita seeking political space for himself and a degree of ideological incarceration for his young friend who was about to become a mighty leader.
During their relatively brief dinner at the Islington restaurant Brown was broodingly determined. Blair sought to be solicitously accommodating. Ed Balls joined Brown for the first course, almost as if Brown could not bear to enter the restaurant alone. He needed a protective layer to deal with his new friend for