Whatever it Takes: The Real Story of Gordon Brown and New Labour. Steve Richards
was up listening to News Briefing on the BBC, a programme that went out earlier than the Today programme, even earlier indeed than Farming Today. He had read the newspapers before most of his colleagues had woken up. More than any politician I have met, including David Cameron and George Osborne, who were accused of being obsessed with public relations, Brown followed the media the way a music critic listens to a concert.
In the early phase of his period as shadow chancellor he was a ubiquitous figure, appearing especially on television news bulletins with an absurd regularity, showing his naivety by assuming that ubiquity is the same as quality. Brown thought nothing of scrapping his plans to attend a football or rugby match in Scotland on a Saturday afternoon if there was a chance of going to a studio in Edinburgh or Glasgow to deliver a fifteen-second sound bite for the news bulletins. Brown was aware of the ratings for all the bulletins, which ones mattered and which did not. If one of his colleagues, say Robin Cook or David Blunkett, appeared on the Saturday teatime bulletins he was furious as he knew it got the highest audience of the week. Even when he was Prime Minister he wanted to be on TV more, complaining to his staff when he was not featured on the bulletins. Sometimes he would contrive an entire event in order to appear on TV as Prime Minister. Like so much else, a habit of neurotic self-projection began in 1992.
He knew also of the power of the Sunday newspapers in setting the agenda for the rest of the week. Brown was the recipient of many leaks from the Treasury and political editors of Sunday newspapers were offered documents that appeared to place the Conservative government in a bad light on an almost weekly basis. Quite often they were of limited significance, but Brown pushed them hard, working around the clock to expose any weaknesses in the government, especially in relation to spending plans or the higher taxes that it was being forced to implement.
His pell-mell hyperactivity did his party some good, as he managed to generate a range of superficially damning stories about the Conservative government. But his persistence led some political editors to doubt his judgement and sense of proportion. In addition to being so careful about his every public utterance, Brown quickly lost a significant dimension of his public personality. He became so controlled that his other slightly more ebullient side disappeared from public view and from the view of his colleagues. Before becoming shadow chancellor he had been a vivacious and witty speech-maker in the House of Commons and on platforms. Controlled ubiquity was his new theme. It was his answer to the anarchic chaos of the 1980s, and no one had a better one.
Before Brown had a chance to develop his public narrative in the media he was tested by a historic event. The unusual summer political calm in 1992 obscured a growing economic crisis. The leader of the Liberal Democrats, Paddy Ashdown, described the situation with a prophetic insight in an article for the Guardian written in the month that Brown became shadow chancellor:
There is a curious feeling of slack water in British politics, almost of stagnant water. You know the tide is going to start moving sometime and some people say they have never known a period like it … all of us are sitting with our fingers in the water saying which way is it going to move?
The tide was propelled by Britain’s membership of the Exchange Rate Mechanism. Over the summer Britain’s membership became the subject of even greater controversy than it had been before, with many economists from across the political spectrum arguing that it was strangling any hopes of recovery. Some Labour MPs and left-of-centre columnists in particular saw a striking political opportunity: call for withdrawal and blame the Tory government for joining in the first place, a double whammy to counter all the double whammies that the Tories had deployed against Labour.
There was a problem with this approach. Labour had enthusiastically supported Britain’s membership of the ERM. Indeed the support had defined its more ‘modern’ approach to Europe and economic policy making. As a result Brown faced his first big awkward decision as shadow chancellor. Should he make the case for Britain to leave the ERM or at least to realign sterling within the ERM? In theory at least this would have placed Labour in a strong position if Major was forced to withdraw.
Still young and relatively fresh, Brown was more capable of thinking several moves ahead on a political chessboard than later in his career. By the autumn of 2007 it became fashionable to argue that he was a clumsy, short-sighted strategist. That was not the case early on in his career, and only became so when he faced an avalanche of events and opponents towards the end. His approach to the ERM issue is an early example of Brown taking the lead and landing his party in a fruitful place at the end of the sequence.
Brown sensed and feared that calling for realignment or withdrawal from the ERM would lead to taunts that Labour was still the same unreformed and reckless supporter of devaluation. So he did not call for such a move. This was not an easy decision to reach. John Smith’s closest allies and a substantial number of Labour MPs, including a section of the shadow cabinet, wanted him to make the call.
Instead he chose precisely the opposite course, seeking to make a virtue out of consistency and through being an ‘opponent’ of devaluation. Repeatedly he declared on those teatime TV bulletins: ‘Devaluation was not our policy at the last election, is not our policy now and will not be our policy at the next election.’
As ever, Brown’s calculations were multi-layered and were to come up repeatedly in the coming years in different circumstances. Indeed the ERM controversy serves almost as a template of contorted and yet in the end highly effective Brownite tactical thinking.
First, he was determined to signal a break with Labour’s past. Previous Labour governments had been almost fatally derailed by enforced devaluations. He was not going to be a shadow chancellor calling for another humiliating devaluation. Second, he was worried about being on the wrong side of the argument with the Conservative government. He thought wrongly that John Major would prevail and that sterling would stay in the ERM. He feared the claim that while the Conservatives had patriotically defended the currency the same old Labour party was talking down the pound. Third, he wanted to show that Labour was robust enough to meet the disciplines of being a member of the ERM.
The issues changed, but those three factors recurred again and again in Brown’s career as he went about taking pivotal decisions: a fear of Labour’s past, an exaggerated alarm that the Conservatives, not Labour, would end up on the patriotic side of the argument, and a hunger to show that Labour was now the ruthlessly disciplined party. When some Labour MPs accused him of being the Iron Shadow Chancellor, with its echoes of Thatcher’s Iron Lady, Brown was delighted. Even if it alienated some in his party, such a label ticked the boxes as far as he was concerned. In 1992 he was pleased to be compared with Thatcher. In 2007 as Prime Minister he invited Thatcher to tea, another echo. Like the bankers, Thatcher formed another protective layer. His politics could not have been more different from hers, but he hoped to appeal to voters and newspapers that revered Thatcher.
Even the Lady was used as a false trail.
In the late summer of 1992 Euro-sceptic members of the shadow cabinet fumed over what they were witnessing. Here was a Conservative government heading for a terrible crash pursuing a policy that was being fully supported by Labour’s shadow chancellor.
Superficially their view appeared to be vindicated on 16 September, one of the most highly charged days in modern British politics, when the government was forced to pull out of the ERM after several attempts to prop up the pound by putting up interest rates to comically frightening levels. With mixed emotions Brown watched from his office in Westminster as a drained but privately relieved Norman Lamont made a statement as Chancellor to confirm the new government policy. Some of Brown’s allies at the time did not know why the shadow chancellor was not more damaged by what had happened. ‘I don’t know how Gordon got away with it. He supported the policy that had led to the government’s humiliation.’
On one level Brown did not get away with it as the anger of some shadow cabinet colleagues grew. But Brown’s cautiously defensive approach was vindicated almost at once. After the ERM debacle opinion polls showed that support for Major’s government had slumped. The Conservatives were never ahead in the polls again up until the 1997 election and well beyond. Labour had gained politically without taking the risk of being attacked as the party that talked down the currency, an onslaught that would have left Brown