Gordon Brown: Prime Minister. Tom Bower
appeared affected by self-doubt: ‘He is very ambitious, but he seems to lack the nerve to go right to the very top.’ Brown’s image among the agnostics was not of a leader but of the Scottish engineer on the ocean liner, toiling away below decks in the engine room, polishing the pistons and removing the grease.
An opportunity to shed that reputation was again provided by Lawson. After journalists briefed by the chancellor reported that he intended to target the poor and pensioners with benefits while withholding the money from the rich, Lawson complained that he had been misquoted. The furore allowed Brown to parade his Christian conscience. ‘The government’s real objective,’ he taunted the tarnished chancellor in the Commons, ‘is to move from a regime of universal benefits to a regime of universal means testing, jeopardising for millions of pensioners security in ill-health and dignity in old age.’ Means testing pensions, said Brown, was ‘the most serious government assault so far mounted on the basic principles of Britain’s postwar welfare state’. His reputation harmed by scathing headlines whose implication – ‘Veteran Chancellor Bloodied by Upstart’ – was clear, Lawson’s misfortunes resulted in rich kudos for Brown. The Commons was the perfect platform from which to parade his loathing for complacent Tories feigning to help the poor. They were men, he sniped, who cared for power and money rather than principle. Lawson and Nicholas Ridley, the secretary of state for the environment and High Thatcherite minor aristocrat, ranked among the worst. Ridley’s aspiration was to deregulate, to withdraw subsidies, and to delight in not pulling the levers of power. Ridley sneered at Brown’s ‘supply-side socialism’. Standing in the crowded chamber, Brown reacted with genuine anger to the chain-smoking minister who appeared to care more about his ashtray than his departmental in-tray. Above all, Brown reviled Thatcher’s affection for photo-opportunities: one day she was seen promoting science, the next day campaigning against litter, then advancing the cause of women and later urging the regeneration of the inner cities. ‘Today a photo-opportunity,’ he wrote, ridiculing the ‘Maggie Acts’ headlines, ‘tomorrow a new issue, the last one all but forgotten. The government’s main new investment in these vital concerns has been in its own publicity.’ His incandescence at the rising cost of official advertising, from £20 million to £100 million, seemed genuine. Four years later he would adopt the same tactics as virtuous ploys to help win an election.
Brown’s pertinent strength in 1988 was his patent sincerity. Like a machine-gun, around the clock, seven days a week, he worked to capture the headlines, firing off press releases on every subject, with newsworthy coups offering leaks of confidential Whitehall information. One day he publicised a government memorandum about civil servants not encouraging grants for high-technology research; another day he produced secret government statistics showing that the poorest four million homes were worse off than they had been ten years earlier; another day he trumpeted a report by Peter Levene, the personal adviser to Michael Heseltine at the ministry of defence, recommending that, to save money, Royal Navy ships should be refitted by private contractors. Levene’s discovery that the efficiency of the naval dockyards could not be assessed because their accounting systems were ‘entirely meaningless’ was derided by Brown’s assertion, to cheers, that ‘this is the most devious government we’ve had this century’.
Success fuelled his passion: at 7.30 on Boxing Day morning he telephoned Alistair Darling, a lawyer and Scottish activist educated at Loretto, a private school outside Edinburgh. ‘Have you seen the story in today’s Daily Telegraph?’ he asked. ‘No,’ replied Darling. ‘I’m still asleep.’ Deprived of a personal family life, Brown had become preoccupied by politics. Gradually, his passion distorted his perspective on life. Some accused him of hyperactivity, of becoming over-exposed as a rent-a-quote politician, robotically spouting One True Faith. He confessed his awareness that ‘rising can turn into falling pretty quickly’, and blamed his irrepressible desire to lead Labour away from its past and towards new policies. His fervour would brook no opposition, especially from other members of his party.
Among the most difficult were his fellow Scots. His old foe George Galloway and John Reid, previously a sociable partner, had become argumentative and occasionally unreasonable. Reid and his group, Brown suspected, were quintessentially sectarian west Scotland left-wing hardmen, meeting as a caucus before general meetings to agree their arguments and votes. ‘He’s a music hall artist,’ Brown said of one agitator whom he castigated as ‘a prisoner of his upbringing’, perhaps failing to recognise that he too was a hostage to his own past.
Among the shackles of that past was the feud with Robin Cook. ‘It’s chemical between those two,’ John Smith told friends, concerned about the sour relationship. Cook was himself renowned as a good hater and not a team player. ‘A bombastic pain when I first met him,’ was Jimmy Allison’s judgement about a man accused of flip-flopping on major policies – the euro, nuclear weapons and Britain’s relationship with the United States. While Cook spoke impromptu on those issues, alternating between vehement opposition and support, Brown avoided extremes, courteously delivering written speeches based upon intellectual reasoning, only rarely being wrong-footed. His success increased Cook’s tetchiness. In turn, Brown became convinced that Cook, as he told friends, was ‘trying to destroy me’. No one regarded this apparent paranoia as serious, but there was a less attractive personality beginning to emerge. Success and publicity had transformed Brown into a man with an unqualified belief in himself, convinced that he was the best socialist, the best thinker, the best persuader, the best media performer and the best at everything else. The political truth was gradually defined as what suited Gordon Brown at that moment, and socialism was defined as those ideas that best served his interests. If his black-and-white judgement about Cook was challenged, a grim mood enveloped a man now increasingly consumed by hatreds. Only occasionally could he restrain his monochrome ambition.
To help John Smith’s recovery, Brown accompanied him in regular ascents of Scotland’s mountains over 3,000 feet in height – known as Munro-bagging – occasionally with Chris Smith, the MP for Islington, and Martin O’Neill. Those walks inspired Brown to write a pamphlet, ‘Where is the Greed?: Margaret Thatcher and the Betrayal of Britain’s Future’. At heart, the pamphlet revealed an old-fashioned Christian socialist concerned to alleviate suffering, seeking a modern way to vent his spleen against the Thatcherite conviction that state interference was a principal cause of society’s faults. Only the state, he claimed, could redress the growth of poverty and inequality since 1979. Eager to win the next election, the ‘new realist’ despaired about the past decade of Labour history and the danger of following John Maxton into oblivion. His solution, using new words to promote old ideas, was a rehashed attack on ‘free market dogma’.
John Smith sympathised, but was alarmed by his friend’s hyperactivity. During his convalescence he regularly telephoned Roy Hattersley, the deputy leader, and asked, ‘What’s Gordon up to?’ ‘Nothing,’ replied Hattersley, ‘but being loyal.’ To certify his reassurance, Hattersley invited Brown to lunch the week before Smith’s return. ‘What job would you like to do?’ he asked. ‘I think I’ll remain as shadow chief secretary,’ replied Brown, ‘to help John back to health.’ Brown’s restlessness for change and personal success did not appear to endanger Smith.
In early summer 1989, Margaret Thatcher became personally vulnerable. The poll tax had provoked violent protests, and her antagonism towards the ERM was dividing her from Nigel Lawson and Geoffrey Howe, the foreign secretary. To reinforce her position, Howe was demoted to leader of the House and Sir Alan Walters, an enemy of Lawson, was recalled as her personal economic adviser, based in 10 Downing Street. Lawson was incandescent. The disarray among the Tory leadership was oxygen for an accomplished political debater blessed with sharp wit, and Brown deployed his invective in a masterful Commons performance. ‘Many lonely, sad and embattled people,’ he said, mocking Lawson across the dispatch box, ‘labour under