Whatever it Takes: The Real Story of Gordon Brown and New Labour. Steve Richards
up and joked: ‘I am sure we will all wake up in the morning and find that the Tories have won again.’
From the start there was a collective fear that they were dreaming. The fear never died. They could not quite believe that the Tories were no longer an invincible force. From the beginning nearly all of them felt like impostors disturbing the natural order of things. Already those at the top of New Labour had acquired a reputation for arrogance, but the opposite was closer to the truth. In their insecurity they were never arrogant enough in imposing or even articulating an alternative vision after eighteen years of Conservative rule.
The insecurity persisted. I recall one social gathering on a Saturday evening in north London halfway through Labour’s second term after the party had won another landslide in 2001. Those around the dinner table included a cabinet minister, the owner of an independent TV production company, two newspaper columnists and an influential economist. Along with the cabinet minister nearly all those around the heaving dinner table were Labour supporters at a time when the government had been in power for several years. The question of the evening was: How do we get a progressive consensus when the right is so powerful in Britain? Even when the left of centre wielded considerable power it did not dare to recognize the changed situation, or at least the potential for change.
In 1997, alone of the shadow cabinet, Brown had been able to choose his Treasury team and inform them in advance which ministerial jobs they would be taking up. Geoffrey Robinson for example informed Ian Hargreaves, his editor at the New Statesman, that Brown had made him Paymaster General long before the general election had even been called.
They huddled together in a corner of the Royal Festival Hall for an hour. One of those who knew members of the inner court well described the gloomy mood. ‘They were bad times for Gordon and his senior allies. They weren’t celebratory because of what was going on behind the scenes, the battles with Tony.’ Those battles included who would be appointed to the cabinet and the roles of Brown’s senior courtiers.
There was also another twist at the Royal Festival Hall, additional cause for the introspective tension on what should have been a night of celebratory euphoria. In fact it was the voters who were euphoric. Senior New Labour figures who had waited eighteen years for such a moment were miserable. Shortly after Brown arrived Cherie Blair marched up to him and accused him of being disloyal to her husband. According to one onlooker she exclaimed, ‘You can’t accept Tony won the leadership can you?’ The same observer claimed she was ‘staggeringly rude’. This was to become a pattern. In the winding corridors that connected Numbers Ten and Eleven Downing Street Cherie would challenge Brown whenever she got the chance. In contrast to her husband’s calmer manner, she could not resist a cathartic blast.
Brown’s wife, Sarah, was also the occasional victim of sharp and sometimes insensitive onslaughts from Cherie. The two wives could not have been more different in personality, although they had similar experiences of following a career and bringing up families at the centre of power. Cherie was outgoing and had a famously skittish exuberance. She had been wary of Brown from the 1980s when he shared an office with Blair. Brown was not part of their social circle in Islington and there were no common ties between her and him beyond politics. Her wariness deepened after 1994 when she saw how he reacted to Blair’s victory in the leadership contest. She expected loyalty to ‘my husband’. In his own way Brown assumed quite genuinely he was displaying a form of loyalty, at least to the Labour party, which is why he was taken aback whenever Cherie went for him. He was always surprised to discover that people felt angry or upset by his behaviour, an uncanny lack of self-awareness.
Sarah was more introverted than Cherie and avoided confrontation in any form. Her background was in marketing and she had met Brown when working on various projects for the Labour party where she also advised on PR for the New Statesman. They started going out when Brown was shadow chancellor. Those who knew her well were never entirely sure whether her more retiring personality was moulded by shyness or aloofness. Either way, Sarah did not go for open confrontation. Sometimes Cherie did.
Someone who knew the Browns well says: ‘Gordon and Sarah took it personally when Cherie attacked them. She said horrible things – things that got in your head.’ On more than one occasion Sarah was reduced to tears following an exchange with Cherie. Tony witnessed some of the outbursts and according to Brown’s allies appeared to be embarrassed by them. If he was, he chose to do nothing about them. The outbursts continued for the next decade and extended to other members of the Brownite entourage, especially to Ed Balls. Cherie loathed Balls, perhaps as much as she loathed Brown.
Given the degree to which power in this particular government resided in the hands of two individuals, any event or relationship that reinforced the divide between them tended to have further ramifications. Brown’s self-absorbed and immature response to the 1994 leadership drama sowed the seed for the creation of Brownites and Blairites. Cherie’s aggressive loyalty to Tony fuelled the factionalism. Gordon and his inner court felt under attack from Cherie at times, and that, in a strange and destructive way, vindicated their need to form a separate court in the first place.
As far as they were concerned Brown and his inner court were to remain as distinct as they had been in opposition. They were not to be swamped by senior civil servants at the Treasury, the machinery of government or the clamouring ambitions of those more closely identified with Blair. The separation was not just an act of ambitious vanity, although this was a factor, but arose from a sense that they had a plan, a clear direction in which they wanted the government to move. They were not sure whether it would work, or whether Blair and his entourage would be supportive, but they intended to attempt it.
After a few hours’ sleep Brown went to see Blair briefly in Number Ten. The two of them walked alone in the garden on an unusually hot and sunny day for early May. The two of them were at the top of the government, buttressed by the biggest majority since the Second World War – quite a leap from the dingy office they shared at the start of their parliamentary career in 1983 and from the last Labour government that collapsed eighteen years earlier with no majority at all.
But both of them were businesslike. In markedly different ways both Blair and Brown had a rare capacity to focus on what needed to be done in any circumstance and to cut themselves off from some of the noisy distractions of politics. In the years that followed, outsiders who worked on projects with both of them, or one of them separately, tended to notice this quality more than any other, and were pleasantly surprised by their insight. They had read in the media endless cynical assessments about the duo, and then came face to face with their ability to compartmentalize and think with clarity even in the thick of a thousand other crises and internal rows.
On the Friday after the election Brown discussed briefly the logistics of his planned bombshell announcement about the independence of the Bank of England. Blair moved on to an issue that he and his press secretary, Alastair Campbell, had discussed separately and intensely on several occasions. He pressed again for Brown to sack his press secretary, Charlie Whelan.
The suggestion revealed much about the new and inexperienced government that was the source of much euphoric hope around the country. Most obviously Blair wanted Whelan sacked because he regarded him as a loose cannon, capable of firing on colleagues as much as on the opposition. But Blair’s concern went beyond Whelan’s unpredictable behaviour. He and Campbell had resolved to make the presentation of policy as central as its implementation. Campbell was explicit about this in a statement he delivered to departmental press offices in the first full week of power. Blair and Campbell had watched and benefited from the chaotic management of news under the Major administration. They were determined to control the message centrally, and their desire to do so was not a marginal issue but at the heart of Blair’s thinking about how he would be Prime Minister. Not surprisingly therefore, Campbell was keen to have Whelan out of the way in order to prevent conflicting messages emerging from Number Ten and the Treasury.
Later Blair and Campbell were to admit that in the early months – and arguably years – in office they retained the mindset of opposition, almost mistaking a favourable media report on an initiative for the successful implementation of policy. But their focus was not as trivial at it might appear to be. They recognized the power of the media in shaping the perception of a government and considered