Anyone who doubts GB’s stoicism should have seen him late on the evening of 20 July 1994 the day before Blair was officially declared leader. Tony’s acceptance speech was not finished and Gordon was working on it in his office in Millbank. If you want to know what real loyalty is it is this: Gordon Brown late in the evening, cursing, muttering, arms flailing as he punched words into the computer, writing the speech that just a few weeks earlier he believed he would be making himself.
It seemed entirely natural to Brown to keep on working for the bigger victory. It was often written of him that he was neurotically, furiously obsessed about Blair being leader. Often it was the opposite extreme. He almost forgot that Blair was in charge. Shortly after the 1997 election Brown produced a document on economic policy. Ed Balls told him that Blair wanted to write the introduction. Brown looked genuinely surprised as well as annoyed. ‘Why does he want to do that?’ he asked Balls. The adviser had to remind the Chancellor that Blair was the Prime Minister.
In their private exchanges Brown continued to behave as if he rather than Blair was the senior figure, not as a conscious act of dominance but because that was what came naturally to him. In the spring of 1996 I was in Brown’s office one morning when his phone rang. Brown picked up the receiver and rattled off a series of instructions about how to handle Prime Minister’s Question Time scheduled for that afternoon. ‘If Major says that ask him why he had not acted earlier. If he did act earlier ask him why it made no difference. No, don’t go in that direction. We will get him on incompetence.’ After a few abrupt exchanges he put the phone down. I could hear Blair’s voice on the other end seeking advice, but after the call Brown did not tell me who it was. He never showed off to journalists about the influence he wielded (in contrast to Mandelson, who in company would announce when Blair was on the line before he picked up the receiver) and was nearly always discreet about what he thought of Blair. But he was quite capable of showing his fuming impatient disdain directly to the leader, almost choosing to forget that Blair had leapfrogged over him.
The period between 1994 and 1997, the nervous march towards power, is pivotal in understanding the strengths and weaknesses of New Labour and the differences at this stage between Blair and Brown.
From the beginning the two of them and their close allies were all that mattered. The rest of the shadow cabinet had no more than walk-on parts, and some of them were lucky even to get that rather unflattering role. The most graphic demonstration of their subservience arose at the launch of Labour’s ‘Road to the Manifesto’ document in 1996. When Blair, Brown and Margaret Beckett (the token woman who did not speak a word during the press conference) walked on to the stage the rest of the shadow cabinet stood to applaud. They were the audience, in some ways more passive observers than some of the highly influential political journalists who were also at the event.
Blair was a spectacularly successful leader of the opposition, engaging, focused, self-disciplined. His genius was to make defensively pragmatic leadership seem like a great radical crusade, although the contrast was bound to fuel disillusionment later when ecstatic voters began to take note of the fearful pragmatism.
In one particular area Blair’s task was easier than Brown’s. Blair inherited a large number of policies from Smith’s leadership. They ranged from a commitment to hold a referendum on electoral reform for the Commons to the introduction of a minimum wage. Blair’s main role was to revise some policies, drop others and make sense of them all to a largely right-wing media grown disillusioned with John Major’s government. He also sought to prove that his party had changed with his successful campaign to scrap Clause Four of Labour’s constitution and in his close dealings with the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Paddy Ashdown. This was an immense task, but one based largely on inherited policies.
Blair could compartmentalize his time ruthlessly, a great strength. In the build-up to the 1997 election, over one short recess he examined every policy in detail to analyse whether it could withstand the scrutiny of an election campaign and made changes if he concluded it could not. The controversial proposal to offer a referendum on the introduction of a Scottish parliament arose from this important exercise. Blair returned to Westminster and told his aides: ‘I just can’t see how we can argue that our election victory can be regarded as a mandate for such a precise and historic change … and how can we offer a referendum on the Euro on the grounds that it is a constitutional matter when we’re not offering one on a new parliament?’ In opposition Blair was alert to any inconsistencies in policy. In power coherence and consistency became more challenging. When David Cameron became leader of the Conservative party in 2005 he and his allies, in their emulation of New Labour, assumed that the earlier project flourished largely through spin and presentation. They were wrong. It was partly a product of forensic policy examination.
But Brown went one stage further in policy making, his distinct achievement. He did not only have the task of revising existing policies, but of raising a whole new sructure on that ground.
After Blair became leader, Brown’s liberating torment was evident at virtually every political event, free to develop economic policy while his former junior partner basked in leadership. In September 1994 Blair and Brown spoke at a gathering of business leaders held at the National Film Theatre on the South Bank, an appropriately artful backdrop for a significant act of political repositioning.
The two of them arrived together in the leader’s official car. When the car halted close to the NFT Blair strode out in front with an authoritative verve to greet the organizers, leaving Brown and Whelan to walk sheepishly several yards behind. Brown looked almost baffled by Blair’s assertion of leadership. I asked Whelan how Brown felt on occasions like this when Blair was so demonstratively the man at the helm. Whelan was capable of candour. ‘Gordon bloody hates it. Of course he does.’
But Blair was keeping to his guarantee. Brown had the space to do what he and his small team wanted. At the NFT Brown proclaimed the first of his famous dividing lines. There would be many more such divides to come, but this was the one that started to address ‘tax and spend’, the issue on which Labour lost elections. Brown declared that ‘Old Labour was a party of high taxation and high spending. New Labour will be the party of fair taxation and productive spending.’ In the speech he argued that the Conservatives had wasted public money on failed policies that had led to a lot of ‘unproductive spending’, not least on social security payments that arose unavoidably when the economy was under-performing.
In his first big statement on economic policy since the death of Smith, Brown had framed the public debate with political cunning. In effect his pitch was once more focused on the managerial divide between competence and incompetence. He argued that the Tories had been incompetent and therefore had no choice but to waste money on unproductive spending. Labour would be competent and therefore have more money to use for vaguely defined productive spending. The divide was aimed at exposing the Tories and purging any lingering sense that Blair and Brown would tax and spend recklessly. It was also perfectly timed. The economy was starting to grow. The recession had passed. Whichever party won the next election, there would be money for ‘productive spending’ and less need to spend so much on welfare payments. It was also at this conference that Brown hailed the ‘endogenous growth theory’ in which policies that promoted openness, competition, change and innovation would promote growth. Balls had inserted the theory without wondering whether his audience or the wider public would have a clue what was meant. Blair would not have been so complacent. In fact it meant a lot as far as Brown was concerned, as he sought ways to achieve growth so that he would not need to raise taxes in ways that he feared would lose Labour elections.
Such was the uncritical euphoria around the leadership of Blair at the time that virtually no one in the media asked too many questions about what precisely the distinction would be between fair and high taxation. Some might have argued that ‘high’ taxation on the wealthy was a fair means to raise some much-needed cash, but few bothered making that case in the buzz of the changing political situation. Within the Labour party the only divide that seemed to matter was a conveniently chronological one between the past and the present, the old and the new.
A few weeks later at Labour’s conference Brown developed the other side of his argument, one that would sustain him for fourteen years and had been his main