Whatever it Takes: The Real Story of Gordon Brown and New Labour. Steve Richards
thrilled, as the shadow chancellor was already acquiring a reputation for neglecting some of those who had put themselves out on his behalf and for being socially graceless. To their bewildered disappointment Brown took them to a local Italian near Westminster, where he gulped a bowl of spaghetti in near-silence and returned quickly to his office. Such behaviour meant it was easier for people to become Blairites rather than Brownites, even if their politics were closer to Brown.
The NEC election in the summer and early autumn of 1993 had been traumatic for Brown. Clearly he feared that if he had been voted off the NEC he would never have recovered. It was his first experience of hostile perceptions at a national level, after rising to the top of the Labour party and performing well in shadow cabinet elections.
Evidently the role of shadow chancellor was taking its toll. He was making progress on his original impossible conundrum, to devise an economic policy that was fair without taxing and spending, but he was doing so in ways that were making him intensely unpopular within his party, even if they were helping to make Labour more credible. The lack of positive support made him angry and depressed, two emotions that helped to fuel his further unpopularity, a familiar sequence in Brown’s later career.
In 1993 he would have been more traumatized still if he had known as he struggled with his unpopularity that in a year’s time there would be a vacancy for the party’s leader.
Politicians and journalists enjoy speculating about possible future leaders. The speculation can be fun, mischievous, or highly significant, sometimes a combination of all three. Who will lead next? In the early to mid-1990s the question was asked persistently in relation to the Conservative party and its leader, John Major. Potential candidates in the cabinet struck poses, conscious that they might be called upon to shaft their precarious leader or to take part in a contest if a vacancy arose. Attention was focused in particular on the ambitions of Ken Clarke, Michael Heseltine and Michael Portillo.
Yet it was the Labour party that made a change suddenly. The suddenness was the key, determining the course of events for another decade at least.
No one was ready for John Smith to die when he did. Between July 1992 and the early summer of 1994 there was a universally held assumption that Smith would lead his party into the next election. The assumption is the most important factor in understanding the high politics of Labour in these seemingly subdued two years and the reaction of almost violent intensity from Brown when he realized he was not going to be the successor. During these years the Conservatives were exhausted by government and yet energized by factional rows over almost everything. Labour was complacently calm, sleepwalking, as one anxious MP put it.
Smith was a new leader, popular within parts of his party and to some extent with the broader electorate. He combined the reassuring presence of a country solicitor with an egalitarian resilience that seemed willing to take on disapproving voters in England. He was a lively performer in the Commons, witty and sure-footed. Most important of all, he possessed a serene self-confidence.
Smith’s press secretary, David Hill, who went on to work for Tony Blair, told me he had seen such unflappability in only one other senior politician, President Mitterrand, a Socialist who had won elections in France against what seemed to be the prevailing mood of the times. Hill was not spinning on behalf of his leader. He meant it and he was right. Blair, Brown and their impatient allies recognized the complacency that such self-confidence could induce. They were less ready to acknowledge that Smith possessed a sense of perspective and proportion when seemingly overwhelming crises erupted.
The key to Smith’s calm was that, unlike so many of his confused and bewildered colleagues, he had been a minister. Smith was in the cabinet for the final phase of Jim Callaghan’s government up to 1979. Power did not seem so elusive and mysterious for a Labour politician who had experienced it. For everyone else around him, power seemed as awesomely distant as the moon.
Before Smith secured the leadership his name topped any poll of potential leaders by an intimidating margin. Not surprisingly, after he won the 1992 leadership contest by a landslide, there was no feverish, highly charged speculation between politicians and political journalists over who should lead Labour in the immediate future. Such musings would have been fantastical. Not even the most attention-seeking columnist sought to make waves by asserting that Labour would have a new leader by the mid-1990s. He or she would have attracted derision rather than attention.
There were, as there always are, predictions in newspapers about future leaders. Those forecasts focused on Gordon Brown and, with an increasing intensity, Tony Blair. With accidental and mischievous timing, a flattering profile of Blair appeared in the Sunday Times on the day after Smith had been elected. Amidst the glowing prose and rock star-like photographs spanning several pages, the writer, Barbara Amiel, suggested that Labour should have opted for Blair as its leader rather than Smith.
Such words can have an intoxicating impact on the subject of the profile, on his or her admirers, and on the media that feeds on speculation about potential leaders, but the timing on the weekend Labour had elected a new leader meant that her flattery did not fuel questions about a sudden change. It would have made no sense: ‘Smith wins by a landslide! It’s time for Blair!’ The Sunday Times had thrown the equivalent of a tiny pebble into a calm sea.
Blair had hit upon a third way in nurturing his profile: articles about his leadership qualities at a time when there was no serious speculation about the top job. He became a potential leader when there was apparently no chance of becoming an actual leader in the near future. This was a dream contrivance, as a profile can build quietly and without too much destructive intensity.
No one accused Blair of making a destabilizing bid for the leadership. Instead there was a polite hum of approval around him and low-level doubts about Brown, who continued to alienate colleagues with his single-minded possessiveness over economic policy and his introspective rudeness. In their different ways both of them could cope with this polite approval, these negative whispers. They could get on with their lives and more or less sustain their own political friendship.
The hyperactive shadow chancellor read with irritable wariness the glowing profiles of Blair, but he was playing a much longer game, assuming that when there was next a leadership contest he would be established as the senior figure who had transformed Labour’s economic policy. He had topped shadow cabinet polls. He had been an acting shadow chancellor and now held the senior post permanently. He assumed he was in a different league to his friend, partly because he was. Even during this period Brown assumed that Blair would be a supremely important colleague when he himself became leader.
How closely Brown and Blair worked together between 1992 and the early summer of 1994 is illustrated by their quick responses in the immediate aftermath of Labour’s fourth defeat. Their instincts were to meet up without delay and decide how they should respond to the latest electoral calamity. They gathered several times over the postelection weekend at the home of the Newcastle MP Nick Brown, later to be identified as one of Brown’s closest confidants, the personification of a ‘Brownite’, scheming loyally for his man against Blair. In this more delicately harmonious phase he was now a junior partner in the joint Blair/Brown post-election dance. Peter Mandelson joined them too, wondering what should happen next.
What Blair thought should happen next is part of the early New Labour mythology. During their exhausted and yet curiously energized exchanges over those dark days in April 1992, Blair urged Brown to stand for the leadership. For a brief period Blair was intensely persistent. An adviser to Brown who witnessed one exchange when the two of them had returned to Westminster the following week says: ‘They almost came to blows on it. Tony was adamant about it. He really wanted Gordon to stand.’
Here was an early example of Blair forming a simplistic view about a situation and then acquiring a conveniently passionate conviction. On a far grander scale he displayed precisely the same characteristics in relation to Iraq more than ten years later. By 1992 Blair’s political character was taking shape.
Brown