The succession of rows instigated by Brown among Labour apparatchiks was costly. Repeatedly he lost his temper, screaming obscenities at those he damned as dishonourable or incompetent. Losing the sympathy of potential allies was undermining his status. His admonition that ‘The policies are unpopular with the party but we have to stick with them,’ combined with his refusal to smile while delivering his television soundbites, suggested a dour man. ‘He loves mankind,’ Voltaire is said to have written, ‘therefore he does not need to love his neighbour.’ To outsiders, Brown appeared a tough man, determined to carve out and control his empire; but in the privacy of his office, surrounded by the chaotic debris of books and papers, he violently chewed his fingernails and festered about his predicament. He was oblivious that his terseness, his seeming lack of human warmth, alienated others. Many could not identify with a rumpled, unusually driven man with limited small talk. Trying to understand his Jekyll and Hyde qualities tested the patience of too many. Brown’s passion to transform Labour was understood, but the personal cost was not appreciated. A contemporary profile in the Sunday Telegraph described him, with his ‘smouldering Celtic looks, dry humour and deep Scottish burr’ as ‘the natural heart-throb of the Labour Party’. That exaggeration was accompanied by the more accurate assessment that his qualities of laughter, wit and lightness ‘shine in small company’. The mystery was why a man who could be warm and amusing among friends was so austere in public.
Any prospects of marriage had now receded. Brown’s recent move from Kennington to a flat in Great Smith Street, Westminster, formerly owned by Robert Maxwell’s company, had brought him physically even closer to his work. His relationship with Marion Caldwell had foundered, and at the instigation of a friend he was reunited with Sheena McDonald, who by then had become a well-known TV presenter about national politics. There was good reason for her to believe that as they had so much in common their friendship would develop into a permanent relationship, if not marriage. Fearing that any public appearance with Brown would compromise her independence as a journalist, she preferred the relationship to remain secret, which suited Brown, but did not help his image.
In early May 1993, in an attempt to recover the party’s favour, Brown presented ‘Labour’s New Economic Approach’, a policy paper proposing a radical assault on the free market and the City’s vested interests. He had performed a half-reverse somersault from his new gospel. Labour, he promised, would attack bank charges, the business battalions, the fat cats, the monopolies and the shortages of choice, training and opportunity. To reinforce his credentials he launched a campaign against multi-millionaires residing in the UK but claiming to be domiciled overseas in order to avoid British taxation. ‘The Tory Party,’ he wrote, ‘does not have the will to close the loophole, but Labour does.’ The only ‘modernisation’ theme remaining was his rejection of the ‘old battles’ between the state and the private market. To the left, Brown appeared to have been trounced. Influenced by John Smith’s supporters, Tribune celebrated the ‘public hammering’ of the modernisers and their ‘pals’ who, eighteen months after Kinnock’s defeat, had failed to have ‘Labour’s future sewn up’. The ‘sub-Thatcherite, euro-dreamland’ and ‘Clintonite supply-siders’ had been defeated by ‘Labourism’.
In July 1993, Brown and Blair were flummoxed. ‘John’s letting us hang out to dry,’ Brown complained. In particular, Smith’s negotiations to break trade union power within the party were proceeding with excruciating slowness. Introducing ‘one man, one vote’ (OMOV) to replace the unions’ block vote was important if Labour was to capture the confidence of the middle classes. Smith, it appeared to Brown, was not supporting that change. Brown told Blair that Smith was even refusing to see him. ‘Well,’ replied Blair, ‘just walk past his secretary, shout “I’ve got a meeting,” and walk in.’ That might work for Blair, Brown knew, but he lacked the audacity.
As Brown was tortured by Smith’s obduracy, the weakness of his character emerged. While he could confidently withstand intellectual arguments, he lacked the resilience to cope with excessive emotional pressure. Unable to manage his rejection, Brown became depressed by the OMOV disagreement, and edged towards a nervous breakdown. ‘We won’t carry the party with that,’ he repeated endlessly, fearful of risks and contemplating defeat. The contrast between Brown and Blair at this time was revealing. As Oliver Wendell Holmes, the US supreme court judge, commented about Franklin Roosevelt, ‘A second-rate brain and a first-rate temperament is OK, because you can buy in first-rate brains.’ Equally furious as Brown that Smith was not enthusiastically supporting modernisation, Blair coolly took risks to challenge Smith, and then considered retiring from politics. But his supporters urged him to be resolute. ‘You’ve got to realise that you must stand as the next leader,’ he was told while staying with friends in the country. ‘But Gordon wants it so much more than me,’ replied Blair. Until then, the two may have been known as ‘the twins’ or ‘the blood brothers’. In summer 1993, the description ‘Brown – Blair’ shifted to ‘Blair – Brown’.
Those gloating during that summer about the humbling of ‘the king of soundbites’ were premature. In the weeks before the party conference, after listening to the advice of Ed Balls, Gavyn Davies, Michael Wills and others, Brown regained his self-confidence and composed a seminal speech to re-establish the modernisers’ gospel and purposely retreat from a commitment of wealth redistribution. Enthused by a slogan used by George Bush, he would replace ‘tax and spend’ with ‘invest and grow’. The breakout on 28 July 1993 was a public renunciation of the 1992 manifesto. With gusto, Brown announced that Labour was not against wealth, and would jettison the commitment to levy a 50 per cent inheritance tax. He would no longer insist that managing exchange rates was ‘absolutely necessary’. The counterattack was immediate. Angry trade union leaders and left-wingers telephoned journalists to condemn Brown’s ‘unfashionable’ appeal to the wealthy. Brown retaliated in August. In inflammatory language, he pledged in ‘The New Economic Agenda’, a party pamphlet, to cut taxes and drop all specific spending plans. Labour, he reaffirmed, would never again ‘tax for taxation’s own sake’. ‘From now on,’ he wrote, ‘Labour believes in creating the necessary wealth to fund the social benefits we demand.’
Without doubt he was inspired by his father’s sermons about Christians triumphing over weakness, pain and misfortune not only courageously, but cheerfully. And, although not immune from misfortune and discouragement, he was urged to join those ‘going forward with a smile … when all seems so dark … more than conquerors, helping us not just to scrape our way to victory but to gain victory very comfortably and successfully’. As the Reverend John Brown had exulted, ‘Let no one go away saying: “I can’t; I can’t; it’s not for me.”’ John Brown’s inspirations were Winston Churchill and Ernest Bevin for being ‘determined on set objectives’. He extolled his congregation, including his sons, ‘Should not all of us, like these two statesmen, have set objectives which we are determined to attain?’ That was Gordon Brown’s Herculean task.
Over the following weeks, Brown was battered by the left. On 26 September he arrived at a meeting of the National Executive Committee prepared for a stormy confrontation. Snide remarks about his competence were still being made about a stunt in which he had posed with Harriet Harman in front of a huge poster with the legend ‘Tory Tax Bombshell’. The event had misfired when he floundered about the size of the proposed tax increases, with estimates ranging from £59 to £226. At the meeting, the anger towards him was worse than Brown had anticipated. He was puzzled. As a child, he had grown up understanding poverty. There were decaying shipyards