Quietly, Brown began consulting trade unionists, key party activists and sympathetic MPs about the possibility of an alternative to Smith as party leader if Labour was defeated at the general election. He calculated the permutations to see whether he might beat Smith, or at least achieve a sufficient vote to mark his future inheritance. The more Smith insisted on the manifesto overtly pledging higher taxes, the more resolutely Brown sought out dissidents. His unhappiness climaxed during one stormy meeting. Kinnock had agreed with Smith to pledge tax increases in the manifesto. Brown disagreed vociferously, and questioned Smith’s principles. Did Smith actually understand economics? Brown found his bonhomie irritating, and suspected his regular attendance at church was deceptive. Brown’s dislike of what he saw as the bigotry of western Scotland – the area of John Smith, John Reid and Helen Liddell – swelled. In the back of his mind lurked new doubts about Smith’s tolerance of corruption in his local party. The murkiness in Monklands seemed to reflect Smith’s self-limiting terms of reference towards house prices, wages and human motives. All his attitudes were shaped by his experience in Scotland. His caricature of middle England was the expensive, eccentric neighbourhood of Hampstead in north-west London, and he did not understand the real middle England’s reaction to the prospect of higher taxation. Nor did Kinnock. As for John Reid, Brown was disdainful of a man he characterised as an untrustworthy, indiscreet, alcoholic thug.
Despite his disparagement of John Smith’s insularity, Brown himself was uneasy with England’s growing multi-culturalism. His integrity, grittiness and clannishness – the essence of his Scottishness – were familiar characteristics in the English shires, but not across the urban sprawls. Proud of his background, he felt only contempt for the criticism of him by London’s media classes and those Labour MPs who disliked his refusal to peel away his Scottish skin. Like Smith, Brown knew little about middle England’s mood beyond the windows of the northbound express train from King’s Cross to Scotland on Friday nights. Neither man had much affection for England’s neat villages, picturesque market towns and manicured countryside. To Brown London was a workplace, not a cultural home. He was rarely seen in the capital’s theatres or concert halls, in contrast to his attendances at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh. Scots, he was happy to remind others, are an internal people, well known to each other but distant from outsiders.
The gap between the two cultures irritated Mo Mowlam, Brown’s deputy as shadow DTI spokesman. In 1991 he criticised her slapdash approach and coarseness, sparking her dislike of the northern cabal around him. After one dinner in an Indian restaurant with Brown, Henry McLeish, Nigel Griffiths, Doug Henderson and Nick Brown, she told friends the experience was so appalling that she believed Brown was unfit to become the party’s leader. His companions were hardly impressive praetorian guards. Unlike Winston Churchill, Brown did not like dominating first-rate minds. The esprit de corps his loyalists engendered magnified his character traits.
In a rare attempt to humanise his image and attract support, he agreed to co-operate with Fiona Millar, a young Labour supporter employed by the Sunday Express, on a newspaper profile. The overt reason was Brown’s candidacy to be the party’s next leader. Naturally, he told Millar that he was ‘cool towards the notion’. He did however admit that his personality and policies irritated many Labour MPs. ‘It’s the old story,’ he confessed, ‘that your opponents are across from you in the House of Commons and your enemies are next to you. There are a number of people who resent me, but all I have done is get on with my job, and I don’t think anyone would accuse me of not being a team player.’ The profile’s first public description of his home was not encouraging. The austerity of a new floral three-piece suite in the living room, and the undisguised sparseness of the other rooms with their bare walls and a solitary piano, a present from his mother, were not mitigated by his exclamation, ‘Moving here has changed my life,’ or the disclosure that he played golf and tennis, watched football and ‘many films’, and read detective novels. Piles of books were scattered around the house, most of them about political theory and ideology. Only a few looked unread. The humanisation of Gordon Brown required something to fill the glaring gap – a woman in his life. Coyly, he explained, ‘Marriage is something that hasn’t happened yet. I’ve been too busy working, but everything is possible.’ He admitted to a ‘girlfriend who is a lawyer’, but stipulated that Caldwell should not be named, to which Millar agreed. To compensate for that self-censorship, she conjured the colourful depiction of Brown as ‘the thinking woman’s crumpet’, apparently known as ‘the awayday favourite’ by female staff on BBC’s Question Time because he was their choice of companion when travelling outside London.
The interview, however, was a failure. Brown’s resistance to introspection and reluctance to admit to any ambitions beyond politics left the reader baffled about the real man. There were no clues about his personal life, his ambition, his inner turmoil or even any mention of his unusual habit of always wearing dark blue suits, bought in bulk, and red ties. Unanswered was the question of whether Brown was merely a product of his era, or a man who might one day shape the nation’s destiny. Some would say that he was not so much unwilling to reveal himself as incapable of self-analysis or even self-deprecation. Outside politics, he was unable to define himself. While there was no doubt that following his progress would be worthwhile, his destination was unresolved.
The only real consequence of the interview was to encourage Neil Kinnock to suspect plots. In the fevered atmosphere, he believed that Donald Dewar, with John Smith’s support, was seeking to mount a coup against him in favour of Smith, an accusation Dewar’s confidants laughingly derided. For his part, Smith was convinced that Brown was plotting against himself, and asked the GMB trade union leader John Edmonds to warn Brown off. Edmonds telephoned Mandelson at his home in Hartlepool on a Friday night. ‘I gather the mice are playing,’ he said. ‘What are you talking about?’ replied Mandelson. ‘People say you’re plotting for Gordon and against John.’ Mandelson denied the allegation. Brown, Edmonds continued, should cease manoeuvring to become the leader after the 1992 election. In Edmonds’s opinion, the party would not skip a generation. John Smith was the party’s candidate. Brown heard about the threat within minutes. Frustrated by Kinnock and irritated by Smith, he pondered whether he should strike. His opportunity was short-lived.
Smith complained to Kinnock about Brown’s ‘precociousness’. Kinnock appreciated Brown as a ‘bright spark’, and since Smith was a year older than himself, half-favoured Brown as the next leader; but Smith refused to countenance the jump of a generation. Kinnock made no attempt to reconcile the two, except to bark, ‘Grow up.’ To reinforce his position, Smith summoned Brown and demanded a personal assurance that he would not stand in the next leadership election. Instead of outrightly refusing to commit himself, Brown mumbled some inconsequential platitudes. At the crucial moment, calculating the compromises and betrayals that would be necessary for success, he lacked the courage to accept the challenge. ‘You won’t stand in my way after the next election?’ asked Smith directly. ‘No,’ Brown meekly replied. He would tell his staff that he had refused to join any plot because he feared that rumours of division could cost Labour the election. The self-discipline of the machine politicians protected Kinnock from newspapers reporting disenchantment among the parliamentary party.
Gordon Brown had harmed his own cause. He emerged from the foothills of a botched coup neurotic about the whispers. ‘Who’s saying things about me?’ he asked Mandelson. Doubts and distrust became embedded in his relationships. In self-protection he began minutely controlling every aspect of his life. At private meetings he became irascible, although in public his carefully written and rehearsed speeches, liberally sprinkled with original jokes, concealed his anxieties. His self-discipline suggested an assured future.