Brown found it almost unbearable, even though Blair gave him everything he asked for. There was no small talk and no laughter. Brown made his demands and insisted that they be formalized. Blair said he would be happy to do so and added casually as an extra layer of reassurance that he would want to be leader for ten years at the most. He became expansive on the subject. No one should do it for as long as ten years. He had talked about it with ‘Cherie and the kids’. He would be in the pressure cooker for less than ten years.
Later Cherie was furious when she realized that Brown had taken this as a commitment, a pledge. ‘Why did you tell him that?’ she asked Blair more than once that summer and over the next decade. Quite unnecessarily, Blair made the timing of his departure an issue even before he had been elected leader.
A briefing paper was drafted immediately after the meeting by Peter Mandelson. It stated that Blair was committed to Brown’s ‘fairness agenda – social justice, employment opportunities and skills’. In a copy obtained by the Guardian in May 2003 Brown had scrawled across one sentence ‘has guaranteed this will be pursued’, an acid intervention that suggested Brown had doubts about Blair’s commitment to his ideas, and an early sign of the ideological tension that was to erupt fully during Labour’s explosive second term in power. A transaction had taken place between the two of them, and it was over policy.
There was no formal agreement over the timing of any handover, but during the 2001 election campaign the television executive and close friend of Blair’s Barry Cox gave me his assessment of the forthcoming second term: ‘Tony is relaxed about the outcome of the election. This time he knows he is going to win with a fairly big majority. But he is really worried about Gordon. When Gordon realizes that Tony has no intention of going in less than ten years he knows Gordon will explode. He is not sure how to handle it.’
The casual reassuring aside made unnecessarily in the summer of 1994 had become a trap for Blair and a lifeline for Brown as ambition ate away at him. But the essence of the Granita deal lay deeper. Brown’s main concern was not about precisely when Blair would stand down, although he seized on Blair’s remarks about the length of time he envisaged doing the job and clung to the words with a neurotic ardour for years to come. Brown went to Granita with more immediate ambitions. The deal was about the balance of power between them.
This notorious meeting was even more important than mythology suggests. Already it has been the subject of a TV drama and formed the centrepiece of many accounts of the period. The exchanges were more epic than even the fictional drama conveyed. In the space of an hour and a half Blair made commitments that Brown chose to regard as carved in tablets of stone. In the years that followed Brown would exclaim regularly to his inner court in relation to Blair: ‘He’s broken the Granita deal!’, especially when Blair instigated a cabinet reshuffle without consulting him.
Why did Blair give away so much in 1994 at a point when he was walking on water, widely regarded as the next prime minister before he had even won the leadership contest, easily the most lauded politician in the United Kingdom?
According to his close courtiers at the time there were many thoughts whirling around Blair’s mind. He knew Brown wanted the leadership more than he did and that he had turned previous assumptions on their head. In negotiations Brown could be intimidating at the best of times. This was Brown’s worst of times. It was a testament to Blair’s growing steeliness that he was able to withstand the onslaught at all. Above all, though, Blair needed Brown. The shadow chancellor was the key architect in terms of economic policy. Take him out of the equation and Labour would be left without a strategy for the economy. In addition, and importantly at this stage, Blair admired how Brown had revised the party’s policies. He was content to give him wider powers because he assumed they were thinking along similar lines.
Looking back many years later, a Brown ally noted that both men were desperately naive in assuming that any arrangement between the two of them could be formalized: ‘Tony Blair should never have given Gordon Brown what he asked for and Gordon Brown should never have believed that he would get it.’ But the Brownite ally also pointed out the context: ‘In the spring of 1994 we didn’t know there would be three terms of a Labour government. We were in opposition. We had not won an election. Modernization hadn’t begun. We were not sure what kind of party it would become. We didn’t know whether or not we would win the next election or when it would be.’
Here were two ambitious politicians, used to losing elections, mapping a precarious path that might have led to another election defeat or to a victory fairly soon. Both were on the pessimistic side even when polls were pointing to a landslide in the build-up to 1997. They had no idea they would be taking this agreement into power with massive majorities. For Blair the deal became an irksome ball and chain. For Brown it was a source of destructive hope.
For both it was also unavoidable. Although he would still have won, Blair did not want to fight a contest against Brown any more than Brown wanted to take on Blair. Their venture was too fragile, too dependent on a projection of assertive, and to some extent illusory, self-belief rather than actual deeply held confidence. It would not have survived a battle between the tentative co-architects. They thought Labour might lose the next election if only one of them stood. They feared even more the destructive impact of a public duel between them.
The deal at Granita was necessary for both of them even though it was a way of avoiding hard choices. Neither of them had to define clearly what they stood for and where they differed as a result of Granita. New Labour was born formally in an Old Labour backstage deal, an agreement that allowed it to escape clearer public definition. If there had been a contest between them, both would have been compelled to highlight the main difference: Brown stood to the left of Blair. Both would rather have died than have engaged in such a revealing battle. They preferred to be submerged in the comfort of apolitical terms and never engage in a candid public dialogue about where they stood in relation to each other.
For a party seeking to govern, the dynamics were more extraordinary, two individuals dividing up the spoils as if no other figure or institution mattered. That was the point. On this the lofty assumptions of Blair and Brown were right. They were taking over a party and they could choose to act as they wished.
One of Brown’s defining characteristics in public and in private was that he never stopped. Monumental setbacks came and went. Triumphs were passing moments before he moved on to the next challenge. I have met few politicians with such relentless stamina. Tony Benn was another who kept going in the face of defeat, often to the fury of his colleagues. Margaret Thatcher was another, but she was more sustained by political highs. There are not many. In February 2010 Brown spoke to the interviewer Piers Morgan about dealing with ‘pain’ in his life, but said that he always ‘fell forward’, a revealing phrase. In a life punctuated by almost unbearable pain he was speaking specifically about the summer of 1994 when he lost out on the leadership to Blair.
After Brown announced that he would not stand for the leadership he did not skip a beat before planning with his small group how he would shape the next phase.
The resolutions made by Brown over this crucial period were a reflection of his complex personality and came to give it sharper definition over the next decade. To some extent they shaped the debate within the Labour party, or at least at the top of New Labour, which was where the only debates were permitted to take place.
First Brown resolved to take full control over economic and welfare policy as had been discussed at Granita. As the economy and welfare touched upon virtually all aspects of domestic policy, he was making an unprecedented resolution. No other shadow chancellor had sought or acquired such spectacular dominance.
For Brown this was the weighty compensation that occasionally lifted his summer gloom. In spite of his friendship with Smith, Brown never knew for sure how much space he enjoyed in relation to economic policy. Now he knew. The terrain was his alone. Even in this, the sunnier uplands of his thoughts, Brown harboured doubts. His press secretary, Charlie Whelan, told me in the autumn of 1994: ‘Gordon knows Tony won’t always give him this power. It’s