Gordon Brown: Prime Minister. Tom Bower
The Conservatives, he mocked, depended on financial support from mysterious foreign billionaires, including a tainted Greek shipping owner. ‘Most shamefully of all, [they take donations from] a Greek billionaire moving his money out of colonels into Majors.’ The cheers temporarily reinforced his self-confidence.
Brown’s contribution to the party’s manifesto for the 1992 election – ‘It’s Time to Get Britain Working Again’ and ‘Looking to the Future’ – reflected the next stage of his journey away from the Tribunites. He favoured regulation and competition rather than nationalisation, private business rather than state intervention, and supported seeking private venture capital on ‘strictly commercial lines’ for investment in public services. The flipside was his regurgitation of Harold Wilson’s thirty-year-old mantra of the ‘white heat of technology’ in a ‘new agenda for investment’. Using Wilsonian buzz words – technology, innovation, revolution, investment, modernisation – he castigated the Tories’ ‘trust in simplistic market answers’, especially to create a skilled workforce.
Even Brown was frustrated by the lack of originality in relying on Wilsonian vocabulary. He blamed Neil Kinnock personally, and the coterie around him including Charles Clarke and Patricia Hewitt, who professed to understand ‘modernisation’ and ‘the Project’ but who in his opinion were an albatross around the neck of the party as it prepared for the election. His revenge was to take pleasure in irritating Clarke by arranging meetings with Kinnock without telling his chief of staff. The consequence was uncoupling during the weeks before election day, 9 April 1992. Working from an office near Waterloo station, Brown barely spoke to John Smith, and fumed about the self-indulgence and lack of professionalism among the ‘London losers’, the wild and woolly left in the London Labour Party who were organising the hopeless campaign. He cursed the fact that Smith was approving policies without asking, ‘Can we win with this?’, and speaking to Donald Dewar about policy while ignoring himself. He cursed the party’s refusal to promote him as a spokesman on television, although he himself was partly to blame for that. Unlike every other shadow minister, he refused to appoint a liaison official at Walworth Road as a point of contact while he toured the country. Charles Clarke urged him to do so, but was rebuffed. Geoff Mulgan, his senior aide, never discussed Brown’s personal campaign with David Ward, Smith’s campaign manager. ‘You’re not a team player,’ Smith raged at Brown. ‘The problem is that you want to be the team leader.’
Smith was right, but was too stubborn to understand the reason. Convinced that tax increases were vote-winners, he had arranged a dramatic unveiling of his proposals on the Treasury’s steps in Whitehall just days before the election. As Smith stood in Whitehall surrounded by his smiling Treasury team, Brown seethed. Two years later he would praise Smith’s passion for equality, but at that moment he knew the folly of honesty. As they walked to their cars from the Treasury steps, Brown sniped at Smith, ‘You’ve lost us the election.’ Smith was visibly shocked, more by the disloyalty than by the prediction. Even Kinnock, under pressure from Brown, had confessed over dinner with friendly journalists at Luigi’s restaurant that Smith’s shadow budget was ‘wrong’, and had pledged to row back. Smith was unperturbed. A telephone call on Monday, 6 April, three days before election day, from Terry Burns, the Treasury’s permanent secretary, reinforced Smith’s conviction. Burns invited Smith to visit the Treasury to discuss Labour’s intentions if elected. There had been several previous conversations about Labour’s plans, which included possible withdrawal from the ERM. As Smith confidently drove to Whitehall carrying some papers prepared by Brown, he was convinced of victory. Left behind, his assistant Helen Liddell said quietly, ‘We’ve lost. Taxation has lost us the election.’
On advertising billboards across England, Smith’s tax increases were exploited by the Conservatives as Labour’s ‘double whammy’ of ‘more taxes’ and ‘higher prices’. John Major, parading as the victor of the Gulf War, exploited Kinnock’s waltz into the Tory trap of Labour’s reputation for economic incompetence. Although in Labour’s folklore the polls rose in their favour after Smith presented his shadow budget, nothing could save the party after Kinnock’s disastrous performance at a premature victory rally in Sheffield. Middle England decided that Labour could not be trusted. Tax and his own personal image, Kinnock was told, had extinguished their chance of victory. Five years later Brown would say, ‘I was always loyal to John Smith in public, but in private I had disagreements about the 1992 proposals.’
Just before election day, Tony Blair invited Robert Harris, an intelligent journalist and friend of Peter Mandelson, to lunch at L’Escargot in Soho. ‘Do you think Labour will win?’ asked Blair. ‘Yes,’ replied Harris. ‘I don’t think so,’ said Blair. ‘We’re going to lose.’ Labour had failed to break its dependence on the trade unions, and failed to understand the aspirations of hard-working English people of all classes. After the defeat, continued Blair, Gordon Brown would run against John Smith for the leadership, and Blair would stand for deputy. That scenario would require Brown to be courageous, and Blair appeared convinced that he would be. In fact Blair’s conjecture was either naïve or provocative. Over the previous twelve months, he knew, the trade unions had vetoed a challenge to Smith, and the parliamentary party was divided. He was deftly promoting his own interests. Brown was close to Smith, while Blair’s impatience with the Glaswegian was well known. Blair’s influence in a shadow cabinet led by Smith would be less than Brown’s. A Brown coup was the best option for Blair’s future.
Watching from Scotland as the election result was announced for Basildon in Essex, Brown exploded in anger. The sitting Tory MP had held on to a seat that Labour had to win if it was to have any chance of gaining power. ‘Basildon man’, cursed Brown, was ‘selfish’. Labour’s defeat was humiliating. The Tory majority fell from 102 to twenty-one, but it was their fourth successive election victory. Although there was a 2 per cent swing to the Tories in his constituency, Brown personally achieved a massive majority of 17,444. At that desperate moment Brown could not understand why England’s aspiring working class seemed to hate Scotland’s passion for collectivism and government interference. Both he and Blair were in despair.
The curtains of the Kinnocks’ house in Ealing, west London, were tightly drawn on the bright morning of 10 April 1992. Inside, the occupants were crying. Neil Kinnock was shocked that Labour had not won the election. In the west of Scotland, John Smith was similarly distraught, but robustly rejected any responsibility for the defeat. On the banks of the River Forth, Gordon Brown was considering the consequences of Kinnock’s resignation.
In his telephone conversations with close friends including Nigel Griffiths, Nick Brown, Martin O’Neill, Gavyn Davies and Doug Henderson, Brown alternated between bafflement and explosions of despair. Only Tony Blair aggressively argued in favour of Brown taking the risk of standing for the leadership. He invited Brown to meet at his home in Trimdon, in his Sedgefield constituency, with Nick Brown. As they walked in the countryside, Blair urged him to stand as the modernising candidate. Labour’s English MPs, he said, would support him against Smith who they agreed was incapable of appealing to aspiring English people. Three times Brown had placed first in the elections for the shadow cabinet, and his continuing popularity guaranteed him a fourth victory in the autumn.
At this decisive moment, Brown was paralysed by his emotions. The trade unions, he was told, favoured Smith; many MPs were against a divisive vote so soon after the party had been through hell to unite itself; and he had been assured that he would inherit the crown after Smith. In meetings over the following two days at Nick Brown’s home in Heaton in Newcastle, and then at County Hall, Durham, with Mandelson, Brown repeated all those reasons for not challenging Smith. The judgement of the Scottish establishment, he told Blair, could not be ignored. All were united by a near-blood oath to the clan chief. The middle-class minister’s son hated the thought of bloodshed. Listening to Brown, Blair was unimpressed by what he later dubbed a masquerade. In the opinion of those associated with ‘The Project’, Brown lacked courage to seize the opportunity and break