This is how I saw them, the New Labour years. I focus on the under-reported policy developments as well as the soap opera. Both were significant and became connected. I do not believe that Blair was ‘pro-reform’ and Brown was ‘anti-reform’. It was much more complicated and more interesting than that. By the end of his leadership, and arguably at the beginning, Blair was a social and economic liberal, in many ways closer to the Conservatives, leading a centre-left party that he knew was in a different place from him. Brown was a timidly cautious social democrat seeking to run a country that he feared was in thrall to economic liberalism and instinctively Conservative. These are the contortions that confused and distorted everything.
I look at the years through the prism of Brown’s career because there are more unanswered questions and mysteries than there are in the extensively chronicled life of Blair. In my view both were misunderstood, but Brown more so. Two early books on Brown by Paul Routledge and Robert Peston were part of the battle at the time with Blair, acts of war. They became episodes in the story rather than attempts at explanation. Elsewhere Brown’s epic flaws have generated a thousand headlines and several books, while his remarkably long period in which he was virtually alone responsible for economic policy is too easily dismissed or taken for granted. And yet if he, rather than Blair, had left British politics in 2007, the Labour government would have been left with a much bigger hole as it tried to come to terms with the economy.
In the end Brown left five days after the 2010 election. But his exit was not the predicted humiliation, and fleetingly he did what he had done so many times before: he sought to do whatever it took to retain power. For once he did not succeed, but the fact that he had the space to try was in itself an appropriately epic coda to an extraordinary career.
Smiling determinedly and with transparent effort, Gordon Brown arrived at the election count in Kirkcaldy’s Adam Smith College just after 12.15 a.m. on 7 May 2010. This was the day he was supposed to lose power for ever. Virtually every commentator in the land, as well as a host of cabinet ministers, had assumed for months and in some cases years that Brown would be gone on the Friday after the election, a leader burdened for the rest of his life by a terrible defeat.
As with virtually every episode in Brown’s long career at the top of politics, assumptions formed with unswerving confidence proved to be wrong. Brown was not going anywhere other than Downing Street on Friday 7 May, and Labour was still more or less alive as a national force, suffering some terrible losses but also making a few unforeseen advances. The denouement of Brown’s career was appropriately complex and ambiguous. Unquestionably Labour had been defeated at the election, yet no other party had won. Far from becoming immediately irrelevant in the early hours of Friday morning, Brown and his party were still clinging to power.
The days that followed were a compressed version of his highly charged, nerve-racking career, one marked by dashed hopes and moments of soaring optimism, fuelled by self-interest and altruistic ambition. As the votes were being counted Brown was a player again in the midst of historic turmoil. Typically his control over the levers of power was far from straightforward. For many years Tony Blair had stood in Brown’s way. When Brown finally became Prime Minister he was for much of the time too unpopular and unsure of himself to take full control. Now David Cameron and Nick Clegg were preparing to pull levers too. Brown was used to this, always operating in a tiny amount of space and seizing moments when they arose. Politicians quite often act in the way they do because they have no choice. Great ones make the most of the tiny spaces.
To rapturous applause from supporters, Brown and his wife Sarah shook hands and embraced old friends as they awaited the declaration in his constituency. Here at least was mutually uncomplicated affection, local friendships arising from a shared passion for politics but not ruptured by rivalry and ambition at the very top.
Defeated leaders, or leaders on the verge of defeat, are brought to life by visits to their constituencies. Harold Wilson became less paranoid when he felt the affection of voters in Huyton, his seat in the North West of England. John Major was at once more relaxed when he headed for the comforting safety of his Cambridgeshire seat with one of the biggest majorities in the country. From the more troubling terrain of opposition Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock felt the same about their seats in Wales, where intense loyalty to them was at such odds with the raging disdain expressed elsewhere.
Brown always seemed to function on frighteningly narrow political terrain and he was already feverishly thinking through the likely outcome of the election result and considering his options. Behind his sincere and yet forced smile as he greeted old friends, he was calculating. Even now, as the votes were being counted in an election he had lost, he had options, or appeared to have them.
The Prime Minister had delayed his arrival long enough to contemplate the TV channels’ exit poll and the inconclusive early declarations. He was exhausted after the campaign and the long, contentious years at the top, but was also energized, having slept in the late afternoon and eaten lamb stew for his dinner in an almost relaxed frame of mind.
The lull had not lasted for very long. Lulls never did in his career. Both the exit poll and the actual results pointed to a hung parliament. Although in the confused early hours there was unjustified scepticism about the exit poll, there was no doubt even then that, in terms of the share of the vote, the Conservatives had come first and Labour second. The Liberal Democrats were well behind in third place.
Brown had come second, but was still breathing as a leader and the Conservative leader, David Cameron, was in no position to claim victory. Brown had lost and won. A hung parliament presented possibilities. He had spent much of the campaign fearing that Labour would come third, a historic defeat and bleak personal humiliation. After the first televised debate when ‘Cleggmania’ erupted, Brown had told his closest ally, Ed Balls, that he would resign at once if the Liberal Democrats overtook Labour.
His speech at the count reflected the uncertainty. Normally he prepared speeches too thoroughly. This one was compiled speedily after brief telephone conversations with Peter Mandelson and Ed Balls once the exit poll had been broadcast at ten o’clock. The speech had a valedictory air and yet was not quite a farewell. Even now, seemingly doomed, Brown delivered words that had more than one purpose, as he had done for nearly two decades.
To a packed hall, Brown reflected the grey fuzziness of the results:
The outcome of this country’s vote is not yet known. But my duty to the country, coming out of this election, is to play my part in Britain having a strong, stable and principled government, able to lead Britain into sustained economic recovery and able to implement our commitments to far-reaching reform to our political system – upon which there is a growing consensus in our country.
Sarah Brown, tall and berry red in a bright coat, stuck like glue to her husband’s side during the count, as she had done for much of the campaign. Standing on stage, nervously adjusting his jacket, Brown looked like a man desperate to fight on, even though the results were suggesting his career as a leader may be over.
Indeed the early part of his speech sounded as if he was taking his bow from the national stage:
Let me say to the people of this great constituency, there is no greater privilege than to serve in Parliament the people you have grown up with. Men and women you have gone to school with, whose children have also grown up here.
A few yards from here is the home in which I grew up as I was young. Immediately across the road from here is the church where my father preached and where I first began to learn about social justice.
And decades ago I learned here in Kirkcaldy something that has never left me – I learned what true friendship is.
And so many of us who meet first at school have been friends for life, and many of them are here tonight and I thank you for your unwavering