The role of Gordon Brown in the New Labour years is especially hazy and elusive. Like a central character in a whodunnit, his role and character seem obvious until we step back to question the assumptions that shape our perceptions. In spite of the mountain of words written about him there are many unresolved questions. Here are some of them, although others surface in the coming pages:
Why was Brown so seemingly poorly prepared for his period as Prime Minister when he had planned for his tenure at the Treasury like a military campaign?
Why did someone singled out by the highly demanding Peter Mandelson as ‘media friendly’ in the 1980s come to be regarded as a hopeless communicator by the time he became Prime Minister?
Why would some of Brown’s staff have died for him, while other colleagues loathed him?
Why was Brown, so gripped by the need to address poverty and poor public services, the best friend of bankers and an ardent supporter of a light regulatory regime for the City?
Why did a Chancellor who made a fetish of being prudent and reducing borrowing take huge risks with the level of public debt towards the end of his tenure at the Treasury?
Why did Brown react quite so badly in 1994 to Blair securing the leadership, a reaction that determined so much that followed? After all, other highly ambitious politicians have failed to become leader and reacted more calmly.
Were the differences with Blair beyond fuming ambition and if so what were they?
What are the lessons for a party, any party, when two figures and their closest advisers seize total control?
How significant was the role of the media as Blair and Brown played out their dance?
How to explain a figure that claimed his Presbyterian father was his model and spoke of his moral compass yet presided over a paranoid court with close colleagues in fear of being briefed against and one of his oldest friends, Alistair Darling, claiming the ‘forces of hell’ were unleashed against him in the early autumn of 2008?
How was such a devoted bibliophile so contorted, dense and plodding when he wrote and spoke in public?
The questions accumulate and feed on themselves. One prompts another. The answers shed light not only on Brown’s long career at the top of British politics, but on the entire New Labour project and on the challenges for the coalition government formed in the summer of 2010. In order to make sense of Brown’s stormy premiership and the New Labour years that preceded it I begin where the seeds were sown, the summer of 1992.
For nearly two decades political journalism became largely defined by whether a writer was sympathetic to Tony Blair or Gordon Brown: ‘Ah, that story about Brown dyeing his hair purple was written by Matthew Nice. That means it must have come from the Blair camp. Nice is a Blairite.’ If a flattering story about Brown appeared, written by Kevin Nasty, there was a similar response: ‘Ah, Nasty is a Brownite. It will have come from the Brown camp.’
The duopoly ruled the government, and although the duo was never as good at manipulating the media as it thought or had hoped, it came to determine the dynamics of political writing too. The result was a stifling form of journalism. Journalists are trained to detect relevance. Virtually all other institutions and individuals in politics had become irrelevant.
After Peter Mandelson’s first resignation, or sacking, from the cabinet at the end of 1998 the journalist John Lloyd went for coffee at his house in Notting Hill. In effect Mandelson had been forced out of the government by Gordon Brown’s close allies. A mournful Mandelson asked Lloyd whether he was close to Blair or Brown. Lloyd replied innocently that he knew and respected them both. Mandelson paused, looked up and declared: ‘That’s impossible. You’re either on one side or the other.’
In spite of Mandelson’s largely accurate declaration I remained in close contact with key figures in both the Blairite and Brownite courts. I also saw Blair and Brown regularly. The degree and range of contact was unusual. In most cases if a writer had access to one court there was little or no contact with the other. Throughout the era I kept closely in touch with both sides. This book reflects a range of conversations with Blair, Brown and other key figures from the early 1990s until the election in May 2010. The section on Brown’s premiership also includes retrospective insights from those who worked with Brown, based on a series of interviews I conducted for a BBC Radio 4 series, broadcast in September 2010.
Over the New Labour years, and to my surprise, Brown came to interest me more than Blair. I am drawn to political performers, and from the early 1990s no one could perform like Blair, but gradually I came to realize that Brown was embarked on an enterprise of awkward, cautious, pragmatic nobility as well as a self-centred egotistical one in his hunger to become leader. I also discovered there was a marked ideological contrast between the two of them, one that has still not been properly explored and yet was at the heart of their inflammable reign.
In his rows over policy with Brown, Blair tended to take the kind of view that David Cameron and Nick Clegg would have done, which is one reason why their disputes are still highly relevant. They were big rows too, and the policy questions are still unresolved. Perhaps they are beyond resolution. What is the precise role of the state? How to deliver modern public services? What is the relationship between the state and markets? How much does a modern government need to tax and spend? What is Britain’s relationship with Europe and the Euro? How best to respond to an epoch-changing global financial crisis? Is it possible to address the level of poverty in Britain in a way that does not in the end alienate affluent voters? The attempts to answer these questions will define the fate of governments and the main opposition parties too for decades to come. The coalition government asked all these questions again soon after its formation in 2010.
As they sought to address these questions, perceptions of Blair and Brown changed radically but in very different ways. Blair was idolized and then loathed by large parts of the media and the voters. Both were irrational responses. Views of Brown changed wildly over his career.
In 1992 Brown was on a high, appointed a youthful shadow chancellor, topping shadow cabinet elections and winning rave reviews in the media. By the summer of 1994 he was so unpopular that Tony Blair became leader and Brown did not even dare to stand. When Labour won power in 1997 he was seen widely as a great reforming Chancellor, the chief executive of the government. After 11 September 2001, when Blair became a global superstar, Brown seemed doomed to play only a supporting role. Many influential columnists wrote off his chances of becoming leader. After his budget in 2003 he was hailed as a defining radical, almost single-handedly conducting a social democratic revolution. In 2004 his fortunes were at such a low ebb he was excluded even from the team planning the general election. At the beginning of 2005 he was so popular that Blair had to bring him back to the heart of the election campaign and promise that he would remain Chancellor after the election. Following the election victory his popularity slumped so low that polls suggested Labour would be even more unpopular when he became leader. In 2007 when he did become Prime Minister he was so highly rated that he was tempted to hold an early election. His decision not to do so touched off a sequence in which he became the least regarded prime minister since polls began. In the autumn of 2008 he bounced back as the country slid into recession. At the start of 2009 he became deeply unpopular again as the recession took hold. During the 2010 election, polls suggested that Labour would be slaughtered, coming third in terms of the votes cast. It came second easily, and for a few days afterwards there was a faint possibility that Brown would remain as Prime Minister. The oscillating perceptions are linked to the unanswered questions relating to Brown’s wider career. Compared with Margaret Thatcher, John Major and, to some extent, Tony Blair, he was a more complex and elusive figure. Although