Gordon Brown: Prime Minister. Tom Bower
rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">harbouring dangerously revisionist, pro-establishment ambitions for the party’. Although they did not share Bryan Gould’s violent characterisation of him as a more fanatical monetarist than the Tories, they objected to any abandonment of socialism. Brown rebutted their criticisms. In the fashion of an evangelist, he behaved like the leader possessed of the truth and commanding his flock to follow. But to assuage his critics, he began perfecting the art of addressing different audiences with different messages. To please the left, he promoted himself as a true socialist. ‘Labour,’ he wrote in Tribune, ‘rejects the notion that a free-market approach to currency markets will bring lasting benefits to the British economy … Never again must speculators control the policy of government. Action must now be taken to strengthen European co-operation to diminish the power and role of speculators.’ Simultaneously, he was reinforcing loyalties among those friends who loathed the Tribunites. Supported by Blair and Mandelson, he confronted his critics. Robin Cook, the health spokesman, had predicted, ‘Labour will never govern again unless it adopts proportional representation.’ Cook was brushed aside by Brown with open scorn. Bryan Gould was damned as ‘dangerous and reckless’. John Prescott was derided for criticising the modernisers’ attempts to expunge the image of ‘a party of the poor and the past’ and to broaden Labour’s appeal to the middle classes. Seemingly uninvolved in the steamy rows was John Smith. The party leader disliked any dilution of Labour’s old ideologies. Just ‘one more heave’, he believed, would expel the Tories. Brown, Blair and Mandelson sought another route.
A possible way forward was revealed at a conference at Ditchley Park between the ‘modernisers’ and US presidential candidate Bill Clinton’s advisers. Although he disliked Thatcher’s indifference to social justice, Brown was impressed by Clinton’s equal antagonism towards the idle poor and the idle rich. Everyone without a good excuse, said Clinton, should work. ‘We want to offer a hand up, not a handout,’ was his memorable piety. The growing success of Clinton’s presidential campaign, thanks partly to his economic proposals, reinforced Brown’s commitment to abandon Labour’s traditional philosophy of universal benefits. Changing Labour’s gods, he calculated, could only be done piecemeal, accompanied by pledges zealously to help the working poor and the underclasses. To stem the inevitable criticism that he was adopting Thatcherite policies, he planned successive diversions to restate his socialist credentials. He would criticise the very class whose support he was seeking – the capitalists who on the eve of the election he had condemned as ‘doing well out of the recession’ – and praise the performance of the Scandinavians, Germans and Japanese, although he knew comparatively little of their true economic predicament. Working up to fifteen hours a day, he analysed the party’s weaknesses and concluded that its salvation required not just new ideas, but a new vocabulary describing a new party. Just as Margaret Thatcher had recruited Keith Joseph, Nicholas Ridley, Nigel Lawson and other intellectuals from the Chicago School to bury memories of the Heath government under new policies, Gordon Brown began, with Blair and Mandelson, to search for catalysts of a new party. For his personal quest, he needed new advisers.
His office had been reorganised under Sue Nye, an aggressive chain-smoker, formerly employed by Neil Kinnock, famous for asking ‘Have you got a mint?’ to disguise her habit. Although she might have been tainted by her association with the notorious pre-election rally at Sheffield, Nye was trusted as loyal, hard working and ruthless. Like Jessica Mitford, she decided by just a glance whether someone was acceptable or to be excluded. Her reasons for freezing out a person could be inscrutable, but her phrase ‘If you’re outside the family, you’re radioactive’ appealed to a man cultivating the authority of the clan chief.
Within the citadel, Brown needed a soulmate. His enquiries suggested that Ed Balls, a twenty-five-year-old Oxford graduate employed as a leader writer at the Financial Times, would be ideal. The Nottingham-born Balls, Brown heard, was a loyal Labour supporter but was disillusioned with John Smith. He had studied at Harvard under Larry Summers and Robert Reich, both advisers to Bill Clinton, and was sparkling with ideas about monetarism, how to avoid boom and bust, never rejoining the ERM, giving independence to the Bank of England and revolutionising Britain’s economy. Brown cold-called Balls to arrange a meeting. He was impressed. Balls’s intellect and their mutual admiration of America helped to form an immediate bond. In an exchange of letters, they agreed that Labour’s future success depended on winning the electorate’s trust in the party’s economic competence. Most importantly, Balls was prepared to undertake the grind to produce the fine economic detail that was beyond Brown’s experience. The association with Balls and his future wife, Yvette Cooper, would change Brown’s life.
In January 1993 Brown and Blair flew to Washington. Ed Balls had reinforced Brown’s attraction to Bill Clinton’s ideas, especially after Clinton’s election victory the previous November. With Balls and Jonathan Powell, a diplomat at the British embassy, they listened to Larry Summers and Robert Reich explain Clinton’s seduction of the American middle classes away from the Republicans, and his welfare-to-work programme. In a newspaper article after their return, Blair wrote enthusiastically about the exciting change in Washington. He praised the new vitality in the United States, and hailed the thousands of young people coming to Washington to build a new era. ‘The Democrats’ campaign was brilliantly planned,’ Blair wrote. Labour, he suggested, should copy Clinton’s policy, stressing ‘the importance of individual opportunity; of community strengths’.
Brown also returned inspired to seize the middle ground from the Tories. He was attracted to Clinton’s core proposition that governments had responsibilities to the whole community. That was not a new idea. Since 1988, Brown and others had discussed it with Clinton’s staff. The Democrats’ genius was their packaging. Labour, Brown felt, should avoid outrightly campaigning for egalitarianism. Rather than preaching ‘total equality’, the party should pledge ‘equality of opportunity for all’, with the assurance that ‘everyone can fulfil his or her potential’. The new slogans would offer choice and social change. The critical promise would be to reduce unemployment in a ‘partnership economy’ without increasing taxes.
To position Labour as the party of low taxation, Brown developed new catchphrases despite the protests of the left: ‘We do not tax for its own sake’; ‘We do not spend for its own sake’; and ‘We are not against wealth’. Simultaneously, he began to harp on the government’s tax increases – albeit only 1 per cent since 1979 – which contradicted the Conservative election pledge to lower taxation. The Tories were crudely classified as liars: ‘Either these ministers were incompetent on a scale which beggars belief, or … they set out to deceive the people of Britain on a massive and unprecedented scale.’ The gauntlet was thrown down: ‘There is no one left for this government to betray. They have no credibility. The electorate will never trust them again.’ Endless repetition, Brown hoped, would produce rewards.
A journey to the Far East in 1993 reinforced his conviction to discard other Labour sacred cows. Britain, he realised, could not compete with China on the cost of production, but only on the quality of the products. To beat the Pacific Rim required a skilled British workforce. ‘Capital’, demonised over the previous century by socialists, was a worthless target, he decided. The buzz words of his new Labour creed were ‘human capital’ and ‘knowledge corporations’. ‘Their lessons must be applied here,’ he wrote in countless newspaper articles about innovation in the Far East, developing the idea that ‘the value of labour can be enhanced as the key to economic prosperity’.
To spread the message from his office in London, or over the weekend from his home in Edinburgh, he sought to dictate the news agenda with interviews and press releases, urging Peter Mandelson to hunt for every possible appearance on radio and television to place him in the spotlight. He preached the homily that ‘in the modern economy we will earn by what we learn’, and recommended that ‘the system of personal