Whatever it Takes: The Real Story of Gordon Brown and New Labour. Steve Richards
discovered the problems in opposition when they sought to do the same in reverse and pledged to stick with Labour’s spending levels. They made the grand announcement and could not follow it through. Within eighteen months they had dropped the commitment.
In Brown’s case the dilemma was clear. What would be the purpose of a supposedly centre-left government if it could not put the case for higher spending and redistribution? What would members of the shadow cabinet promise if they could not offer increased investment in Britain’s declining public services? There was an obvious danger in being stuck mouthing a perverse political message: ‘This Conservative government is not investing enough and we will not invest enough either. Vote Labour. Thank you and good night.’
There were no obvious answers to the questions, and yet Brown had to find them or risk entering another election in which Labour would be slaughtered over ‘tax and spend’. He had to find a way of taxing and spending without taxing and spending.
As they gathered in his chaotically untidy office in One Parliament Street after he had been made shadow chancellor, Brown told his small team of advisers: ‘We’ve got to work from first principles towards policies.’ At this early stage Brown possessed a central insight, one that he clung to like a lifeline as he sought to address his ‘tax and spend’ conundrum. The insight was defensively pragmatic and highly significant. He resolved to make the main dividing line with the Conservatives more emphatically one between competence and incompetence, a divide without an ideological dimension, neither a left or right issue, another New Labour attempt to depoliticize the public debate.
Such ambition appears desperately narrow and puny, not least when Brown faced a Conservative government in the early to mid-1990s that was to display confused incompetence on a spectacular scale, as if John Major and his unruly MPs had volunteered to dance to his tunes. But determined expediency was a drastic break with Labour’s immediate past. It was the starting point of a cautious revolution, one that was to prove at least as demanding as more romantic crusades.
Not only does an opposition have to prove that the government is a poor manager of the economy, it must convince voters it would be a more effective administrator. This seemed almost impossible in the summer of 1992 after Major had won an election partly by conveying a sense of reassuring steadiness and Labour had lost on the grounds that it offered the rockiest of rides.
The strategic decision also demanded a steely self-discipline from Brown. It is more fun and easier going to play the romantic politician in opposition. Wielding no power leaves speeches, declarations and positioning as the only means of definition. For Labour politicians, clear and attractive definition had tended to come from intoxicating images of better-funded public services and promises of redistribution from rich to poor. Brown resolved to project competence alone.
As part of his pragmatic insight Brown recognized that Labour’s reputation in relation to economic policy was so low that a single word out of place risked another election defeat. If a member of the shadow cabinet uttered a word that implied a rise in public spending the newspapers would leap and Labour’s reputation as a reckless party would be further reinforced. Therefore he made clear from the beginning to his shadow cabinet colleagues that no such word should be uttered.
Brown’s forbidding approach to any public utterance was a source of many of his problems for the rest of his career in two key areas, relations with colleagues and the projection of his own image in the media, further examples of how the seeds of his undoing were sown at the very beginning.
With a determined possessiveness, he claimed the economics terrain as his alone and voluntarily tied himself up in chains as a public figure, comfortable from now on only with carefully rehearsed, formulaic answers and statements. In later years Brown was criticized widely for his stilted public performances, the contorted sentences and the humourless, repetitive relentlessness of his messages. They are partly explained by the fact that he carried the burden of presenting Labour’s economic policy from 1992, justifiably worried about saying anything that would lose the party another election. In opposition parties have only words for ammunition. Brown was always terrified of a verbal explosion that would blow apart the fragile edifice. He was neurotically fearful, and could have displayed more deftness in interviews, but the pressure was immense and on a scale not faced by his carping colleagues.
Although he took this approach to extremes, both in his standing guard on the terrain and in his own over-rehearsed speak-your-weight-machine presentational style, there was a mountain of evidence to back up his judgement that ruthless self-discipline was required.
To take one example of many from Labour’s immediate past, in the build-up to the 1992 election there had been a calamitous spat between Kinnock and Smith over taxation policy, exposing differences between the two of them and conveying, accurately, that Labour’s taxation policy had not been fully thought through. This was after years in which both had resolved to get it right, assiduously determined to demonstrate that Labour’s sums did add up and in ways that should not alarm most voters.
Kinnock and Smith had not cleared the ground first. What was tax for? What was a politically acceptable level of tax? Were there other ways of raising money other than those that led to electoral dead ends? In the absence of a clear and common purpose, leading figures went off-message, incurring a media onslaught. By contrast Brown sought at first an underlying clarity and was determined that only he would do the clarifying.
A powerful lesson emerges from the experience of Labour’s long exile in opposition, and from the Conservatives’ confused approach to tax and spend when they were out of power. Leaders must decide what messages they want to convey before embarking on the task of policy making. Brown understood what was required, but such an unbending approach to the public presentation of economic policy alienated other shadow cabinet colleagues almost immediately.
At the very least they yearned to roam a little into economic policy – terrain that took them to the heart of politics. If they tried, Brown would slap them down. In the end they gave up trying. In effect this meant Brown had a near-monopoly over Labour’s economic policy from 1992, and certainly by 1994 when Blair became leader. Gradually his colleagues ceased to even think, let alone to speak, about the central area of policy making for any political party. While Brown’s iron will meant that Labour’s ‘gaffes’ in relation to the economy no longer dominated media coverage, there was also a deadly negative consequence. The atrophy of thought across large sections of the Labour party started when Brown became shadow chancellor. By 2007 as the party sought out potential leadership candidates other than Brown it discovered that there were none, partly because most of the obvious alternative choices had no experience of economic policy, not even of debating it in the privacy of cabinet meetings. From 1992 Labour produced only half-formed politicians, none of them giving much thought to the policy area that defined what was possible in every other field.
There was though a positive consequence: a single message was conveyed ruthlessly for years in an era when the media was on the lookout for contradictions and inconsistencies. This was the period when political journalists bemoaned the politics of the straitjacket and leapt when anyone loosened the knots.
From the summer of 1992 the shadow cabinet were silenced as Brown took his case to the media. Brown could see a headline a mile off, good and bad. He was fascinated by the running orders of television news bulletins. When he bumped into a BBC Political Correspondent in the mid-morning at Westminster his first question would be: ‘What are you leading on at one o’clock?’ If the exchange took place in the afternoon he would ask the same question of the forthcoming six o’clock news. When I saw him for a coffee on one occasion when he was Chancellor we passed a TV screen reporting the main leader’s speech from Charles Kennedy at the Liberal Democrats’ conference. It was twenty past one. Brown said without pausing: ‘That’s quite low down the bulletin. He’ll be disappointed he’s not higher up. The Liberal Democrats are still not seen as a serious force in the media, are they?’ He was days away from a big IMF conference in the US, but was interested in where the Liberal Democrats managed to be in the running order of a news bulletin.
Brown had a fascination beyond professional interest in the way the media worked, one that he passed on to Blair after they became colleagues in 1983. It was not just the TV