Whatever it Takes: The Real Story of Gordon Brown and New Labour. Steve Richards
with Clegg first … appear gracious and prime-ministerial …’
Brown’s subsequent intervention was perfectly pitched, making it clear that he was not deserting the stage but nor was he seeking to block others from taking over. In truth he had no power to block anyone, but Brown was almost enjoying a final challenge in which for him the stakes were not as high as they were for Cameron and Clegg. Either he would soon be released from the burden of power, or he would be the author of a breakthrough, a partnership between Labour and the Liberal Democrats. He would be making history once more.
The sweeping statement made outside Number Ten on Friday morning incorporated both scenarios:
With the outcome of the general election, we find ourselves in a position unknown to this generation of political leaders with no single party able to have a Commons majority and therefore have a majority government … I therefore felt that I should give you, and through you the country, my assessment of where we are. I do so as Prime Minister with a constitutional duty to seek to resolve the situation for the good of the country, not as the leader of the Labour party less than a day after the election.
This was both true and disingenuous. Brown was still the Prime Minister until an alternative could assemble adequate parliamentary support. Parts of the media attacked Brown for staying in Number Ten with a brutality that suggested the election campaign was still taking place, unable to stop kicking their victim even when there was no point in doing so. Brown had no choice but to stay put until the chaos of the election result had been resolved. But at the same time he was acting with the interests of the Labour party in mind, at least what he regarded as the party’s interests.
First, it is well understood that we face immediate economic challenges that must be met. A meeting of the Euro Group is being held tonight to discuss Greece and other issues. On the critical question on the formation of a government that can command a parliamentary majority, I have of course seen the statements of other party leaders. I understand and completely respect the position of Mr Clegg in stating that he wishes first to make contact with the leader of the Conservative party … For my part I should make clear that I would be willing to see any of the party leaders, clearly should the discussions between Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg come to nothing, then I will of course be prepared to discuss with Mr Clegg the areas where there may be some measure of agreement between our two parties.
The statement cleverly conveyed a sense of business as usual, challenging the media and the voters to accept that Brown could still rule. More specifically he reminded Clegg and his party where they shared common ground.
Brown was almost exhilarated. On the Friday after the election no leader exerted full control. But he was more in control than he had been during what for him had been a wretchedly bleak campaign.
Brown had in common with Blair a capacity to focus on changing events with a forensic ruthlessness and sense of purpose. His first phone call on the Friday morning was to summon his Transport Secretary, Andrew Adonis, to Number Ten. Lord Adonis had been a close ally of Tony Blair’s, and before that crucially he had been an active supporter of the SDP/Liberal alliance. He knew the Liberal Democrats better than anyone else in the cabinet. In yet another ironic twist Brown turned to Adonis, a figure he once viewed with suspicious hostility, in order to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, a concept he had viewed with horror while Blair was leader.
But on the Friday morning he was deadly serious, pulling prime-ministerial strings. The invitation to Adonis was testimony to his seriousness. He was working with Mandelson and Adonis, two figures who enthused about realignment on the centre left during the period that Brown was against any such transformation of the landscape, partly because he was not in charge to do the transforming.
For the first half of the election Brown had toured the country, captured on camera once or twice a day at a supermarket or at a school. In these bland locations he repeated the same message that ‘he was looking forward to debating substance and not style’. That was more or less it. Mandelson had controlled the campaign in London, holding press conferences with vivacious, combative wit. Brown had been reduced to the role of King Lear, travelling from place to place with his entourage, stripped of real power within his party and beyond while those wild allies he had trusted and admired for their strategic insights were banished from the centre. Brown’s wily old press secretary, Charlie Whelan, was explicitly told by Mandelson he would not be welcome at Labour’s headquarters in Westminster. One of Whelan’s successors, Damian McBride, was working for a school in north London, in political exile. Even Ed Balls had been reduced to a marginal role during the campaign. Each of them was bursting with ideas about how Labour could win and how Brown could be projected more effectively, but they were rarely heard since Mandelson and Alastair Campbell, also back at the heart of the operation, were not inclined to listen to any of them.
The Prime Minister’s futile tour and the absence of those who had served him with unswerving loyalty highlighted one of the great tragic ironies of Brown’s career. Brown had ached to replace Blair, but he proved far more powerful when he was Chancellor than as Prime Minister, and nowhere was his loss of authority more vividly exposed than during the campaign. In the 2001 and 2005 elections he and his entourage held absolute sway at the party’s headquarters, determining strategy and calling the tunes. During the unseasonably cold late spring of 2010 Mandelson pulled the levers in London as Brown toured pointlessly.
Now the election was over he was quite unexpectedly playing a familiar role, doing whatever it takes to stay in the game. By the early afternoon his space to manoeuvre became even more constrained. David Cameron issued his response to Clegg and Brown. His speech was a work of art, a collaborative act of political genius that had been carefully prepared in advance. From early spring Cameron had recognized that he might not win an overall majority, having been confident of doing so a few months earlier. During the Conservatives’ conference in the autumn Lord Ashcroft, the party’s controversial donor and strategist, had told him he would win an overall majority of seventy. Some of Cameron’s advisers thought the prediction was too pessimistic. But the Conservatives’ support had fallen after their policies came under fleeting scrutiny at the start of the year. More fundamentally Oliver Letwin, an influential ally who had regular access to Cameron, was convinced that politics had changed and no single party could expect to win substantial victories again. Even when polls were predicting a big Tory lead, Letwin expected a tiny majority or none at all.
Letwin and a few others around Cameron were surprisingly relaxed about a political situation in which the Liberal Democrats might be a permanent third force of some national significance. They were convinced that Clegg and several other senior Liberal Democrats were much closer to them than to Labour, particularly in their critical attitude towards the state. This was by no means a universally shared view in Cameron’s circle, and their pre-election objective had been to take as many seats as possible from Clegg’s party. Nonetheless a common theme in their political discussions was that the Liberal Democrats under Clegg were potential allies, and not at all a party of the centre left.
In the light of the inconclusive results, the conflicting motives of Cameron and his inner circle came together. Cameron and his shadow chancellor, George Osborne, were instinctively more tribal than Letwin, but they had watched in awe as Tony Blair had threatened to destroy their party for ever by forming a big tent that included an army of non-Labour supporters in informal alliance. They also recalled more vividly Brown’s fleetingly successful attempt to do the same when he became Prime Minister in 2007. A Tory MP defected to Labour and several non-Labour ministers joined the government. Brown had a soaring honeymoon as he strayed outside party boundaries. In spite of their massive majorities Blair and Brown cleared the path for the extraordinary events that followed the 2010 election, a politics of multi-layered calculation amidst proclamations of new and partially intended purity, the so-called new politics.
Whatever the definitions applied to their approach, Cameron and Osborne had chosen politics as their vocation in order to rule. They were fascinated by the choreography of politics, ways to win and the dark routes that led to defeat. On the whole they were perceptive readers of the rhythms. On this occasion they were titanic composers, recognizing an opportunity in their failure to win an overall majority. In his speech delivered early on Friday afternoon in Westminster, Cameron acknowledged that his