Like most in the Labour movement, he did not fully understand the implications of the miners’ defeat. He thundered against the reduction of regional aid and the gradual loss of manufacturing jobs, and demanded that the government create new jobs, but he was bogged down in an ideological wasteland. Labour had reached a nadir, and was unelectable until the extremists in the party were expelled. Neil Kinnock had many weaknesses, but among his strengths was the courage in November 1984 to confront the militants in order to save the party from fratricide. Unlike many Labour MPs, Brown did not openly join that struggle. He did not travel through England supporting the fight against Tony Benn and the Militant Tendency, nor did he overtly attack the militants. Rather, he preferred to return directly to Scotland from London. Nevertheless, he was among the members of the new intake offered a chance to break the extremists’ stranglehold. Neil Kinnock told Roy Hattersley, ‘I want Tony Blair in the Treasury team.’ To avoid the impression of outright favouritism, Hattersley suggested that Kinnock appoint two new MPs, and that Brown also be promoted to speak on employment and social security. Labour needed his abilities, said Hattersley. Kinnock had met Brown during the devolution debates in Scotland. Although they had disagreed, he appreciated the young Scotsman’s efforts to prevent a party split. Soon after the 1983 election Donald Dewar had proposed that Brown should join the Scottish team, but Kinnock had resisted, saying he should cut his teeth first. By the time Hattersley made his suggestion, Kinnock felt Brown deserved promotion. But while Blair accepted the offer and was appointed spokesman on the City and finance, Brown refused. ‘I wasn’t ready,’ he later explained. ‘It’s crazy that Gordon rejected the offer,’ Blair complained to Hattersley. ‘The problem is that Gordon is so honest,’ replied the bemused deputy leader.
Brown’s refusal was not wholly altruistic. He had, he believed, too much to lose by accepting a junior post, not least a delay to the completion of his biography of James Maxton. If he had written the book a decade earlier, his analysis of Maxton’s life would have lacked his personal experience of political struggle. In his heart Brown idolised his hero’s idealism for social responsibility, education and the abolition of poverty. But in his head he understood how Maxton had undermined his ambitions for a better society by refusing to compromise to obtain power. ‘The party whose cause he championed for forty years could, with justice,’ Brown wrote, ‘be accused of committing political suicide for the sake of ideological purity.’
In spring 1985, as the biography neared completion, Labour moved ahead in the opinion polls and the opposition parties won important victories in the local elections. Electorally, Labour’s devotion to traditional socialism appeared justified. Despite the defeat of the miners, the government had been shaken by the botched privatisation of British Leyland, rising inflation and high unemployment. Brown was writing a regular weekly column for the Daily Record, the Scottish version of the Daily Mirror, providing money to pay his researchers and access to a wide audience. Through his many contacts he sought confidential information to embarrass the government in the Commons and in the newspaper. Once it was seen that he handled leaks properly and could be trusted, he expected a regular supply.
In May 1985 he secured a confidential government review proposing to encourage the young unemployed to find jobs by reducing their social benefits. This, he raged, was ‘a raid on the poor’. In July he attacked the government for employing undercover agents to investigate young mothers claiming benefits for single households while secretly cohabiting. Those investigations, he claimed, punished the poor. Brown’s pride lay in his probity. Lawyers at the Daily Record were disturbed by the threat of a libel writ following an item in his column about the sale of council houses in East Kilbride. The newspaper wanted to settle, but Brown refused. He was, the newspaper’s lawyers remarked, ‘obsessive to be perceived as utterly truthful’. He discreetly warned the complainants, ‘If you want to carry on and do business in the future when we’re in government, you should drop the libel action.’ The complaint was withdrawn, and eventually Brown’s allegations were confirmed. Since Robert Maxwell had bought the Mirror Group in July 1984 Brown had refused invitations to his parties, albeit without revealing his reasons. Nevertheless, he was content to take Maxwell’s money and promote his own profile.
The change of the political atmosphere in 1985 persuaded Brown to accept a front bench appointment. The invitation in November to work with the shadow spokesman for trade and industry by specialising in regional affairs was issued from John Smith’s office. Initially the two men forged an easy relationship, convincing themselves that the omens for electoral success were good. Thatcher’s position looked vulnerable, especially in Scotland, after a huge increase in rates. As the value of sterling fell following a drop in the price of oil, Labour was convinced that capitalism was in crisis. The mini-earthquake caused by ‘Big Bang’, the deregulation of the stock market in October 1986, confirmed their belief that capitalism was besmirched. The sight of bankers and brokers selling their companies for huge sums to foreign invaders aroused disdain about Thatcherism and free markets. Brown did not anticipate the social revolution sparked by the disappearance of the City’s traditional classes, or the rise of a meritocracy who would be unimpressed by his campaign to renationalise the privatised industries. Others close to him did understand however. In conversations with Gavyn Davies, then an economist at Goldman Sachs, the American merchant bank, and husband of Neil Kinnock’s assistant Sue Nye, John Eatwell, a Cambridge economist who was advising Kinnock, and especially Peter Mandelson, the party’s new director of press and public relations, he heard the first arguments in favour of a reconsideration of Labour’s policies.
Peter Mandelson, the grandson of Herbert Morrison, a prominent minister in Atlee’s government, and a former television producer, was attractive to Brown. He appreciated Mandelson’s vision for the party to ‘modernise’, although neither fully understood the obstacles to Labour’s re-election. Both were encouraged by a new self-confidence at the party conference in 1986 in Blackpool, not least by the first defeat of the extremists. Under Mandelson’s influence, Labour was distancing itself from the Attlee legacy to attract the middle classes. The red flag, the party’s traditional symbol, was replaced by a red rose, to suggest the abandonment of a strident socialist agenda, especially confiscatory taxes, although the party’s actual policies contradicted the impression. Brown returned to Scotland to fight the 1987 election pledging to abandon Britain’s independent nuclear capacity, close America’s military bases, halt the sale of council houses and repeal the Tory laws limiting trade union power.
Labour’s certainty that the Tories would not win a third consecutive election should have been shaken in the new year. The economy improved – growth increased to 4.8 per cent – and despite violent picketing outside News International’s new headquarters in Wapping, Labour refused to condemn the trade unions outright. Three million were unemployed, but the opinion polls swung back in the Tories’ favour, showing Labour at 29 per cent, the SDP-Liberal Alliance at 26 per cent and the Conservatives at 43 per cent.
In the early days of the election campaign at the end of May 1987, Brown and his party leaders were nevertheless optimistic. Mandelson’s coup of a glossy election broadcast by Hugh Hudson of Neil Kinnock and his wife walking hand-in-hand in visually stunning photography roused the party’s spirits. Kinnock’s popularity rose sixteen points overnight. The reports from Conservative Central Office of arguments among Tory leaders gratified Labour’s planners, convinced of their strength on health and education. Labour’s undoing started in the last week of the campaign. In a television interview, Kinnock was asked what would happen if Russia invaded Britain, unprotected by a nuclear bomb. He replied that guerrilla bands fighting from the hills would resist the invader. That strategy found few sympathisers in the Midland conurbations, London and the south-east. Portrayed as a leftist loony, Kinnock was also vulnerable on taxation. Roy Hattersley and John Smith had pledged to reverse privatisation and restore most social benefits. The cost of that, the Tories claimed, would increase income tax to