Robinson arranged for the accountants Arthur Anderson to prepare the details of how a windfall tax would be implemented and the likely level of revenue that would flow from the measure. The hired specialists showed in considerable detail how the tax could raise £6 billion to finance a ‘welfare to work’ programme and improve some hospital buildings. The ultra-cautious Brown insisted that they aim only for £5 billion and did not make excessive claims about what it could achieve. Separately Balls worked on other discreet revenue-raising measures.
In the early spring of 1997, shortly after Brown had played his ‘tax and spend’ ace on the Today programme, the shadow cabinet member Michael Meacher declared in an interview with a naive candour: ‘We have ruled out increases in income tax but there are plenty of other taxes we could put up.’ When he read the interview Brown was livid: inadvertently Meacher could have brought down with a single sentence the entire fragile tax-and-spend edifice. Meacher was right. Balls and Ed Miliband were looking in detail at other ways in which a Labour government might find some cash.
The media was so excited about Meacher’s comments that he chose to hide in his shed in order to escape the attention of journalists on his doorstep. On his mobile phone, surrounded by gardening equipment, he expressed his bewilderment to friends: ‘I did not break with party policy,’ he declared.
That was precisely the point. Meacher had given away too much about party policy. From that moment the decent well-meaning left-winger was doomed. Although a member of the shadow cabinet, he was not appointed to the cabinet in 1997. His punishment extended way beyond exile in his shed.
Apart from his search for a few stealth taxes, Balls was preparing for prudence, the stability from which he and Brown could pursue some limited social democratic objectives. It was during this period that Brown concocted his famous golden rules in which he would borrow for investment only over the economic cycle and would ensure that public debt was held at a ‘stable and prudent level’. The rules became famous for being implemented rigidly at first, manipulated in times of some difficulty and then spectacularly cast aside in the autumn of 2008. They played an important part, though, both in conveying a sense of trust in the early years and in providing a framework.
The fiscal rules were another reason why Labour won in 1997 with the biggest landslide since the Second World War and also with the widest range of self-imposed constraints. Business leaders were reassured. Voters who had dismissed Labour in 1992 as reckless tax-and-spenders were able to support the party. Tory-supporting newspapers could hardly believe their luck. They could back Labour and still have a government seemingly committed to the orthodoxies of recent years.
Labour won power bound hand and foot to prudence.
Albeit heavily manacled, Brown had made his Herculean leap. In the space of five gruelling years he had more or less achieved what appeared to be impossible when he became shadow chancellor. Assisted by the exhausted, divided Conservative government and the broad appeal of Tony Blair, he had made Labour appear the more competent party in relation to the economy.
Brown remained the ultimate student politician, basing his activities and approach on the many successful campaigns he led at Edinburgh University when he was always leader of a small gang, scheming and campaigning around the clock. There was an unconscious macho swagger as the group gathered in the evening, often in Robinson’s suite of rooms at the Grosvenor House Hotel. They watched football together on TV and reviewed where they stood politically over a beer at the end of the day.
Robinson described the roles well. Whelan could be gregariously charming over a cigarette and a glass of wine. He cultivated political editors and columnists who were or would become closer to Brown’s cause than Blair’s. He acted as he saw fit, but did so with Brown’s approval. Brown always stood by him. Brown expected loyalty as a matter of course, but always reciprocated, taking assiduous care to promote and protect allies, more so than Blair, who was relatively casual and careless in his treatment of political friends. Whelan was not to last long in power, but others from a similar mould followed. Brown saw politics as a noble battle, but he took the fighting more seriously than any other contemporary politician. Sometimes the fights were necessary, occasionally they were acts of assertiveness, a substitute for Blair’s powers of patronage, and often they were merely habitual, the ugly side of Brown’s politics.
There was never a pause in the fight, even on the night of Labour’s landslide election win in 1997. The Conservatives had been defeated overwhelmingly, but for Blair and Brown the real battle had only just begun. It was between themselves, a clash of ambition, ideology and strategic will that could never be submerged even when the duo had cause to celebrate glorious victories.
On election night in May 1997 most of the country seemed to be dancing the night away, or at least staying up to watch the election results, cheering joyfully when Tory cabinet ministers fell. Even some of those who did not vote Labour, most of the electorate, succumbed to the mood quickly. Polls showed that Labour’s popularity soared once the votes had been cast. By the summer and autumn of 1997 the party was breaking all records in terms of opinion-poll leads, suggesting that some of those who had supported the Conservatives in the election or who had not voted were also enthused.
The mood was too excitable, at odds with the ambiguous nature of a limited turning point. Labour had achieved an unprecedented landslide, but it was based on a cautious incremental programme. The result was historic, but not the manifesto that produced it. The year 1997 was not a watershed like 1945 or 1979, with elections that heralded deep, almost revolutionary change as governments shaped and followed the zeitgeist of their times. For varying and contradictory reasons voters had put in place a government resolved to show that it was different from previous Labour administrations and in some ways in tune with the orthodoxies that had shaped the previous eighteen years of Conservative rule. ‘We were elected as New Labour. We will govern as New Labour,’ Blair declared pre-emptively outside Number Ten as he arrived for the first time as Prime Minister.
By 1997 Brown’s reputation was rising again in the Labour party and beyond. He had travelled his first full circle: hailed as a formidable reformer in 1992, he was seen that way again as he headed for the Treasury. The phase in between, when he was so unpopular he would not have won a contest in a parish council, had passed. It would soon return. There were other circles to complete, but as Labour returned to power most newspapers and his party recognized the contribution he had made to the landslide. At any rate they cheered the public narrative, the emphasis on prudence and stability.
On this night in May 1997 Brown relished the fact that an electoral barrier had been overcome, but straight away there were more battles to be fought. According to his close allies he felt no sense of euphoria on election night. The victory was a brief pause before the next stage of the eternal political journey. There were pressing problems on his mind and he wanted them sorted fast.
From election night onwards this was the battle as Brown saw it. He had stamina, resilience, limitless willpower, the strength to threaten near-fatal trouble for the government if he chose to do so. Blair had the mighty powers of prime-ministerial patronage. In theory at least Blair could appoint and sack who he wished.
As Chancellor Brown had no equivalent powers, at least in terms of ministerial appointments. In theory at least, like the rest of the government he was dependent on the patronage of Blair. All he had to cling to was the so-called Granita deal and the fact that he had a plan for the economy whereas no one else in the government, Blair included, had given any significant thought to economic policy. Brown had not let them, but his possessiveness remained an easy excuse on their behalf to abstain from deep thinking on the subject.
In the early morning of 2 May Brown briefly joined the celebrations at the Royal Festival Hall. Revealingly, the jubilation was fuelled by disbelief. Along with several other journalists, I had a ticket for the event and soon after arriving bumped into David Miliband, dancing along to ‘Things Can Only Get Better’, Labour’s anthem for the campaign. Seeing Miliband on the dance floor was