Gordon Brown: Prime Minister. Tom Bower
that he is not paranoid. They really are out to get him.’ Lawson sat stony-faced as Labour MPs jeered, ‘Go on, smile,’ and roared their approval as Brown recited the wretched statistics about inflation at 6 per cent, interest rates at 15 per cent and a growing trade deficit which undermined the chancellor’s reputation. No Labour politician wanted to hear that unemployment had fallen to 1.7 million and that manufacturing output had increased every year between 1983 to 1989 by an average of 4.75 per cent. Brown feigned deafness to Lawson’s assertion that Britain’s managers had finally been liberated to earn profits because of real competition, the destruction of protectionism and the strangulation of the trade unions’ restrictive practices. Devotion to socialism, retorted Lawson, was restricted to Albania, Cuba and Walworth Road. Not so, replied Brown spurred on by a party cheered by their discovery of a potential leader; there was socialism in Sweden, France and Spain. And soon, they hoped, in Britain. Lawson’s misery fuelled his opponent’s morale. As the chamber emptied, the crowd followed Brown and John Smith to the Commons bar. Endless hands smacked the dark-suited back of the man who fellow MPs were convinced was the star of the new generation, the future leader who would expunge the miserable memories of Wilson, Callaghan and Foot.
That evening, Brown was congratulated by Neil Kinnock. Confirming Brown’s potential to inherit the leadership, the Welshman offered two pieces of advice: ‘For credibility, you need to vote against the whip. And secondly, you’ve got to learn to fall in love faster and get married.’ Brown laughed. He had introduced Kinnock to Marion Caldwell, but had no intention of proposing marriage, despite her fervour. ‘Oh, there’s lots of time for that,’ he replied. Kinnock’s advice may not have been followed, but an unlikely source would possibly be more influential.
Just before the summer recess, Brown was travelling with Michael Howard, the secretary of state for employment, on a train from Swansea to London. Howard recognised Brown as a fellow intellectual. Flushed by the Conservatives’ continuing supremacy despite their difficulties, Howard settled back in his seat and presented a detailed critique of Labour’s unresolved electoral weaknesses. The party, he said, would never win another election until it ceased alienating the ‘margins’. Brown listened silently as Howard lectured him about appealing to voters’ personal interests in taxation, schools and health. To overcome middle-class antagonism, concluded Howard, Labour needed to address the details of those individual issues rather than blankly preach socialism. On arrival in London, the opponents bade each other farewell. In later years Howard would wonder whether his free advice had helped Labour finally to defeat his own party.
Brown was certainly anxious to learn during that summer. Americans had become his inspiration. The previous year he had met Bill Clinton in Baden-Baden, in Germany. Clinton was touring the world to meet other politicians before declaring his bid for the presidency. His big idea to roll back ‘Reaganomics’, with its greed and debts, was to introduce a ‘New Covenant’, reasserting the existence of a ‘society’ in America and declaring that citizenship involved responsibilities as well as rights. Brown found Clinton engaging, although intellectually muddled. There was nevertheless scope for a partnership between Clinton’s advisers and Labour’s ‘modernisers’, including Peter Mandelson and Geoff Mulgan, a policy adviser. One year later, Brown would spend the summer in Cape Cod, reading through a suitcase of books on which the airline had levied an excess weight charge, and seeking out Democrats to hear about their new ideas.
He returned to Westminster anticipating excitement, but not the earthquake of 26 October 1989. Margaret Thatcher’s refusal to join the ERM and her protection of Alan Walters had humiliated Nigel Lawson. Insensitive to the danger, she allowed Lawson to resign, and then dismissed Walters. The prime minister’s relationship with Walters was an easy target for Brown’s derision: ‘It was the most damaging appointment of an adviser by a head of government since – I was going to say, since Caligula’s horse, but at least the horse stayed in Rome and worked full-time.’ Turning to the choice of John Major to replace Lawson as chancellor, Brown jeered, to the unrestrained acclaim of the Labour backbenches, ‘He has had the right training for the job over the past few weeks when he was foreign secretary – private humiliation, public repudiation and instant promotion.’ In the shadow cabinet elections in autumn 1989 he again topped the poll, and was appointed shadow spokesman for trade and industry.
For the modernisers, especially Blair and Mandelson, Brown embodied their best hopes for Labour’s eventual success. Suggestions that he was a candidate for the leadership inevitably roused his personal enemies and political critics on the left to question the essence of the man. The sceptics sensed a lack of ruthlessness, judged his charm as weakness, and doubted his willingness to grasp the jugular in order to advance his cause. Perhaps, they speculated, he lacked a game plan eventually to win the leadership. Their doubts were reinforced by Brown’s notorious disorganisation, persistently arriving late for, or completely missing, meetings. He was known to be irked by the practical details of life. Frequently he arranged a meeting in a restaurant but forgot to book a table, or even found the doors locked. His sometimes uneasy relationship to reality led to gossip concerning his uncertain commitment to others. His obsessive privacy, suggesting a fear of embarrassing revelations, also fuelled rumours, while his provincial rough edges suggested foreignness to the metropolitan media. ‘I think most Scots are pretty reserved about their ambitions or personal lives. I think I am,’ he told an interviewer in 1989 who asked why he so rarely smiled. His friendship with Nigel Griffiths, a confirmed bachelor and the MP for Edinburgh South since 1987 who worked devotedly for him, excited unjustified gossip, not least after Owen Dudley Edwards said the two were like ‘Christopher Robin and Pooh Bear in an enchanted place in the forest’.
Outside Edinburgh, few were aware of ‘Dramcarling’, Brown’s new double-fronted red-brick house in North Queensferry, set on a hill above the road with a garden rolling down towards the Firth of Forth and with a view of Edinburgh Castle on a clear day. He had after many years found his dream. The house epitomised his love of Scotland – its poetry and scenery. The interior reflected another trait, having been neither redecorated nor refurnished. The dirty sofas from the shambolic top floor of his Edwardian house in Marchmont Road were dropped into the rooms overlooking the garden, and a familiar pile of books, government reports and newspapers began accumulating across the floors, around the battered typewriters and discarded word processors, towards the ramshackle kitchen. The man without taste hated domesticity.
During the decade Brown knew Marion Caldwell, his attitude towards women and relationships aroused bewilderment. Although he spent holidays with Caldwell in America, she remained in her own home in Edinburgh. He regularly disappeared for substantial periods, arriving at her doorstep when it suited him and failing to excuse himself if he was absent. Relationships with women in Brown’s life tended to be one-way affairs. Nurturing them was unimportant; affection was only perfunctorily acknowledged and reciprocated. Caldwell was among those women who were fascinated by his magnetism – the Alpha Male – and who pandered to his demand for immediate attention whenever requested. He happily allowed her to develop her career in Scotland. She was welcomed to the North Queensferry house at weekends, to sit quietly while he wrote endless articles, speeches and pamphlets. On Saturday nights he often refused to go out, preferring to watch Match of the Day. He expected Caldwell demurely to enjoy his pleasures, grateful that she was unable to visit London during the week. Sharing a flat in Kennington with his brother Andrew, he liked partying among high-achieving Scots in London. Although some have described a blissful romance with Caldwell in Scotland, Brown was interested in other women in the south. Some witnessed him pursuing Maya Even, a pretty Canadian presenter of the BBC’s Money Programme, while others recall him considering forging a relationship with Anna Ford after a dinner party at her home in Chiswick. The discretion of witnesses and the absence of chitchat protected Brown, who was classed by one Conservative newspaper as ‘single, reticent, good humoured and charming’.
Divergence of opinion about a politician’s character is not unusual, but in Brown’s case it became particularly pertinent as he and John Smith reached a Rubicon. Economics, they agreed, had become a more serious business in politics. In any future election manifesto, Labour would need to provide statistics to establish