Brown’s small team, already introverted, became much more insular after the summer of 1994, almost as a collective act of defiance, like mourners gathering to protect for ever the one who has been left behind. Together they had been through the trauma of betrayal as they irrationally saw it. As far as they were concerned their leader was Brown. Their man, a natural leader, had made the sacrifice of not standing for leadership, elbowed aside by a figure who was a relative lightweight. From now on, and with a greater intensity than before, they worked for Brown and viewed with raging suspicion the activities of those who were closer to Blair.
Until this point there had been no ‘Brownites’ or ‘Blairites’. It was Brown’s response to the leadership trauma that invited those imprecise labels. He needed a court although he was not king. Indeed he needed one because he was not king. As some of his closest allies admitted many years later, Brown’s response at least in this respect was ‘immature’. That is a mild description. Brown was childlike in his need to have ‘his’ people around him as an alternative court to Blair’s.
In particular, and famously, Mandelson became an enemy. Brown could not fully understand why Blair had let him down. He did not even try to understand Mandelson’s reasons for supporting Blair. When Brown sensed early on that Mandelson was not fully behind his candidacy he lapsed into fuming despair and wrongly spied his fingerprints on every front-page news story that favoured Blair. The two of them did not have a civil, relaxed conversation again until Brown became Prime Minister. Like many others Mandelson became a ‘Blairite’ first and foremost because Brown would have nothing to do with him. Up to the early years of the Labour government Mandelson rather nobly told journalists that Brown was the only leader to replace Blair ‘in spite of all the obvious problems with Gordon’, but as far as Brown and his entourage were concerned there was not a millimetre of space for rapprochement of any sort. Soon Mandelson ceased to make even the qualified case for Brown as successor.
The divide was to have profound practical implications, the first example of New Labour’s capacity to become utterly dysfunctional. Blair’s dependence on Mandelson and Brown’s unyielding hostility meant that from the start there were two separate empires. The arrangements were always bizarre, but especially so during the 1997 election campaign. One senior figure who worked in the party’s Millbank headquarters says: ‘On one level it is a miracle we won that election. Peter and Gordon were supposed to be running the campaign but they did not talk to each other. They worked on either side of the main newsroom. Gordon was openly contemptuous of anyone who worked with Peter. It was unbelievable.’
The divide was even greater during the 2001 campaign, although Mandelson had a much lower profile. By then anyone in the Blairite court was sidelined by Brown. New Labour was widely praised for its professionalism, especially when it came to winning elections. But the professionalism was accompanied by the amateurish trappings of a feud.
The choreography of the divide in various buildings was highly significant and destructive, not least when Brown and his entourage took over Number Ten in the summer of 2007, marginalizing those who had worked for Blair when they might have learnt invaluable lessons about how to run the Downing Street machinery. They chose not to learn.
The formation of the Brownite court was not solely the equivalent of an emotional, cathartic scream. It had one important function. The courtiers and their king were seeking ways of prevailing over the more rootless Blair, knowing that no other individual or institution in the newly servile party was big enough to do so. Their court became the Resistance, the only form of accountability in a party that had lost the will or nerve to scrutinize the leadership. This became increasingly important in government.
Another important consequence that arose from the summer of 1994 was to have a profound impact on Brown’s political reputation. The shadow chancellor was determined not to play the political martyr any more than was absolutely necessary in the future. In ways that his internal enemies continued to underestimate, he would still take tough decisions in relation to the economy, ones that sections of his party would not like. But he would also make sure that he was identified with the more immediately popular policies as well. Often in the years that followed Brown alienated colleagues through claiming association with popular policies and disappearing when there was a crisis of any sort. Angry ministers suggested that Brown was a coward who could not cope with trouble. Columnists closer to the Blairite court compared him to Macavity the mystery cat, nowhere to be seen when the going got tough.
Brown viewed the situation from a different perspective. He had taken all the knocks transforming Labour’s economic reputation and had lost out on the leadership. He would continue to take them in the future, but from the summer of 1994 onwards he wanted to be more directly associated with palatable policies as well, and he was not going to go out of his way to defend Blair at all times, especially when he disagreed with the policies being pursued. Already he felt a martyr. There were limits to his martyrdom, not least because he wanted to be in a better place the next time a vacancy for the leadership arose. He did not want to be caught out again. In effect his leadership campaign began on the hot summer’s day he stood aside for Blair in 1994.
Brown’s failure to secure the leadership, the crushing of misguided assumptions, had one final consequence. The loss drove Brown into acts of treacherous collusion. With a ruthless precision and transparent lack of subtlety he chose to be friendly with those frontbenchers who had their doubts about Blair. Already he was watching carefully, sniffing out potential allies on the front bench and in the media for the struggles ahead and when the time arrived for the next leadership contest. Before long there would be ‘Brownite’ journalists as well as ‘Brownite’ MPs, a distinction that led to even more ‘Blairite’ journalists in response.
During the run-up to the 1997 election Brown became friendly with Clare Short, someone who was popular in the party at the time, seen as principled but expedient enough to dance to New Labour’s tunes. Brown recognized that as a leading figure on the centre left, Short would be a useful ally in a future leadership contest and possibly in some of the internal battles he knew he would be fighting over policy.
In July 1996 Short gave a dramatic interview to me that marked the end of the New Labour truce, one in which every member of the shadow cabinet had paid public homage to Blair. Feeling sore after a reshuffle in which she was demoted, Short condemned the ‘people in the dark’ behind Blair, arguing that the likes of Mandelson and Alastair Campbell were bringing out the worst in Blair, giving the impression that Labour had changed, when it had not. She described the idea that the party had changed as ‘a lie’. When the interview was published it led every news bulletin and was the main front-page news story in every newspaper. Mandelson alerted Blair and Campbell, who were both on holiday. In Blair’s absence Mandelson had been put in charge of the party machine. He warned senior party workers: ‘This interview could lose us the election!’ Alert to every danger he added: ‘She’s broken the spell.’ With typical mischief he then went on to ask me what time of day she had given the interview. I told him it was mid-afternoon the week before. ‘Exactly …’ he replied with a knowing smile, implying that Short was drunk. She was not. She knew what she was doing, attacking Blair’s leadership without attacking Blair directly.
Only one shadow cabinet member knew about the interview in advance. Over a glass of wine one evening at Westminster, Short told Brown what she had said and told him that there would be trouble. There was a pause after which Brown replied cheerfully: ‘Well I will be up in Scotland when it is published and will be out of it. Leave it to Mandelson to sort out!’
Nonetheless the level of disloyalty at this point is easily overplayed. Brown sought always to be co-leader and to be in a strong position as the leader in waiting, and yet he shared Blair’s hunger to win the next election. Their project to modernize Labour was about to be implemented. They had talked for years, now they had the power to act unimpeded. Brown was never, even at his angriest, a wholly destructive force. Part of him was always calculating how Labour could win, what needed to be said and done to challenge the Conservatives who he never forgot were the main opposition. In one of the many twists in the complex range of intense relationships at the top of New Labour, Brown helped to write Blair’s victory speech in 1994. Here is Philip Gould,