Gordon Brown: Prime Minister. Tom Bower
That success had, in Monks’s opinion, catapulted Blair up to Brown’s level.
Although the two were close, their differences were marked. Blair took a metropolitan view of politics, eager to lobby for the support of the rich and to criticise the trade unions. By comparison, Brown refused to attack the trade unions, and remained antagonistic towards capitalism. The similarity between the two was that both felt ‘modernisation’ was necessary to win an election. While Brown’s journey had been a struggle through a mass of research and intellectual reasoning, Blair acted largely by instinct. One marked difference was in their attitude towards John Smith. Brown was committed to his mentor, but in Blair’s opinion Smith was tainted by his toleration of cronyism and corruption among local party activists employed by the council in his Monklands constituency. Similarly, Blair had little confidence in Kinnock. By the end of 1990, Brown’s mood about the party’s leadership was edging closer to Blair’s. The countdown to the test of his character began on 28 November 1990. The outcome would depend upon his courage.
Eight days after failing to win sufficient votes in the first ballot of Conservative MPs in a leadership vote brought about by Michael Heseltine’s challenge following Geoffrey Howe’s devastating resignation speech, Margaret Thatcher resigned as prime minister. John Major’s election as the new leader revived the Tories’ fortunes in the opinion polls. Labour fell 5 per cent behind the Conservatives. Overnight, Brown’s unease about Labour’s election chances increased. The task of persuading the electorate of Labour’s financial competence fell to him and John Smith. Smith proposed launching an offensive in the City, which had been rapidly denuded of Tory grandees following ‘Big Bang’, which transformed not only the City but Britain as a whole.
Over the next two years, Smith and Brown frequently visited financial institutions in a ‘prawn cocktail circuit’ in an attempt to attract supporters. They were successful among the American, Australian and continental bankers who lacked tribal prejudice against old Labour. But British stalwarts like Lord King, Rocco Forte, Lord Delfont, Stanley Kalms, Alan Sugar and Clive Thompson were incontrovertibly grateful to Thatcher’s revolution. Few were convinced that Smith and Brown actually liked the City’s denizens, or understood the complexities of bank capital. Brown appeared not to have lost his conviction that ministers and civil servants could manage industry better than the entrepreneurs. His references to the Guinness and Barlow Clowes scandals cast him as a mudslinger, unaware that the development of the City as the world’s third-largest trading centre would destroy the amateurs he loathed.
Brown was scathing about such criticism. Honesty, he said, was more important than undeserved wealth. His ‘vision for the new world’ to replace the Tories’ ‘bleak, gigantic marketplace of self-seekers, each in lonely competition with each other’ was ‘a community of opportunity’. The rottenness of Thatcherism was epitomised by the appointment of fourteen former Conservative ministers as directors of companies they had helped to privatise. Those appointments suggested more than greed. ‘Privatisation,’ Brown said tersely about the new millionaires, ‘began with selling the family silver. It is now ending in the farce of golden parachutes for departing cabinet ministers.’ The recipients of ‘jobs for the boys’ included Norman Fowler, the former transport minister who joined National Freight, a company privatised by his department; Norman Tebbit, the ex-industry secretary who became a director of the newly privatised British Telecom; Peter Walker, formerly energy secretary and now a director of British Gas; and Lord Young, another former industry secretary who, after overseeing the privatisation of Cable and Wireless, was appointed a director of the company.
Those apparent conflicts of interest were to Brown as repellent as the huge profits earned by the newly privatised utilities and the unprecedented pay increases which their directors awarded themselves. His cure was a reaffirmation of the virtues of public ownership, a national investment bank, legislation to ban ‘unjustified rises in company directors’ pay’ and a ban on ‘huge perks’. Labour insiders including Charles Clarke noticed Brown’s cautious retreat from ‘modernisation’ as he once again opposed the privatisation of state monopolies. Nothing was said, however, because his attacks helped bring John Major’s honeymoon to a quick end. Electors voiced their disenchantment about perceived corruption, the faltering economy and bickering ministers. Major, who irritably described Brown as ‘a master of the personal insult’ and ‘a dismal Jimmy, always jumping onto bad news and ignoring anything good’, appeared vulnerable.
Rattling the prime minister emboldened Brown. He had won a reputation as a serial embarrassment to the government by regularly revealing confidential information supplied by disgruntled civil servants; his latest had exposed the government’s refusal to increase consumers’ rights against the privatised utilities. By spring 1991 he consistently appeared the outstanding member of the shadow cabinet, ranking among Labour’s giants. The perceptive interpreted his speeches as reflecting his serious disenchantment with the party’s leadership. To Kinnock’s irritation, he was mentioned as the leader-in-waiting. Dissatisfaction was particularly prevalent among Scottish MPs fearful of a fourth election defeat.
Although the opinion polls had swung back in Labour’s favour, a weariness was infecting the party, and there was uncertainty about whether Kinnock could win an election victory. With Blair’s encouragement, his personal assistant Anji Hunter and Peter Mandelson were touring Labour constituencies to identify kindred spirits who supported radical change despite intimidation and threats of deselection. The roots of the New Labour project, forging a brotherhood of survivors before the outbreak of renewed conflagration, started just one year before a general election which Kinnock anticipated winning. The birth of this magic circle, born from despair and cemented by bonds of close friendship, was gradual. In Mandelson’s version, he was uncertain whether Labour could ever win an election with a Celtic leader. Over lunch with a sympathetic journalist in 1991, shortly after his selection as the parliamentary candidate for Hartlepool, Mandelson mused, ‘It’s time we had an English leader.’ He was already veering towards Blair. ‘People listening to the BBC’s broadcasts of Blair’s speeches,’ continued Mandelson, ‘say here is the next leader of the Labour Party.’ He would later deny having turned away from Brown so early.
Brown was more concerned by the substance than the image. Despite his visits to the City, John Smith favoured the old-style socialist command economy rather than an equal partnership between the government and capitalists. Brown’s conversations at his regular dinners with Doug Henderson, Martin O’Neill and Nick Brown revolved around replacing Smith’s obsolescent ideology with a new agenda. ‘You’re promising things you can’t deliver,’ O’Neill told Brown. ‘It’s the same trap as the seventies.’ Usually, Brown did not comment. Despite the Glasgow versus Edinburgh friction, he shared the same Christian socialist values as Smith. Both favoured community values rather than satisfying the aspirations of the enfranchised ex-working classes. Like Smith’s, Brown’s world revolved around Scotland’s party machine and the plight of Kirkcaldy and similar Scottish communities – uneconomic coalmines, decrepit linoleum factories and Harold Wilson’s failed investments in technology – and what he called ‘the causes of poverty which are unemployment and a welfare state that isn’t working’.
To avoid criticism from the trade unions, Brown resisted questioning Smith’s agenda even among friends, although he knew he would have to break away from that view. During 1991 he confided to Peter Mandelson that Smith would be unsuitable as chancellor if Labour won the 1992 election. Smith, he believed, was too dogmatic and simplistic on economic matters. Mandelson and Brown agreed that electoral success depended upon committing the party to as little as possible. Contrived obfuscation was the ideal strategy. The obstacles were Smith, who was antagonistic towards such tactics, and Kinnock, who was reluctant to endorse Brown’s proposals to prove Labour’s economic competence.
The disputes between the three – Kinnock, Smith and Brown – Kinnock complained, were loud and long. They agreed not to revoke the Conservatives’ trade union legislation or to advocate a