Gordon Brown: Prime Minister. Tom Bower
and broadcasters and using satellite communications to disseminate and constantly upgrade information.
The powerhouse for this change was to be the Treasury. ‘I see the Treasury,’ Brown wrote, ‘as a department of national economic reconstruction to deal with the short-term problem of unemployment and the long-term national economic decline.’ Revealing his own abandonment of socialism as a figleaf to give false comfort to the middle class, he ridiculed the Tories for relying on the free market and individual opportunity rather than government intervention to finance industry. ‘I see the public sector as the engine of growth out of recession,’ he wrote, re-emphasising his true beliefs. He spoke of levying a windfall tax on the excess profits of the privatised utilities – copying the Tories’ windfall tax on banks – to finance a ‘New Deal’ on employment and, with another reminiscent whiff of Harold Wilson, he attacked the major banks for increasing their dividends.
This potpourri of socialism and Clintonism irritated John Smith. The leader disliked the modernisers’ policies, and he ostracised Mandelson. Smith was not surprised when John Edmonds, the GMB union leader, called him personally to protest about Brown and Blair’s visit to America. ‘They’re getting too much publicity,’ complained Edmonds. ‘This Project is mischief-making and about personal ambition.’ Although a decade later Edmonds would acknowledge ‘a lack of imagination among the trade unions in the early 1990s’, he was gratified in 1993 by Smith’s rejection of the modernisers’ proposals for the next election campaign. Smith supported large government spending, and disliked Brown’s refusal to commit Labour to use the proceeds from council house sales for more building. In meetings of the shadow cabinet, the leader remained silent when Brown’s proposed windfall tax was criticised for being too small. ‘We cannot meet those expectations,’ Brown told Frank Dobson. Smith overruled Brown for being ‘too conservative’.
In contrast, during their arguments, while Murray Elder, Smith’s chief of staff, sat silently in the background, Smith growled, ‘You’re going too fast.’ In private, Brown raged about Smith’s unwillingness to support the modernisers while encouraging the traditional left. While in public Brown praised John Smith’s ‘egalitarianism’ and ‘concern for justice’, emphasising Smith’s concern as a Christian socialist for Labour’s moral purpose, he detested Smith’s blinkeredness. Smith ignored the Tories’ private polls which showed that Labour was still regarded as ‘dishonest and incoherent’, and on the side of losers. Relying on the lowest common denominator for electoral appeal, Smith was sure, would prove successful. ‘The Tories are destroying themselves,’ he observed about the government’s bitter battles over Europe. ‘Labour can sleep-walk to victory.’
Brown found that his frustrating battle with John Smith to change Labour was losing him friends and allies. Visitors to his office reported that his Horatio-on-the-bridge act on the shadow spending ministers was causing him anguish. ‘Gordon is torn and depressed about the irreconcilables,’ John Monks observed. Trade union leaders whom Brown regarded as friends – Rodney Bickerstaffe, Bill Morris and John Monks – were surprised during their private meetings that the man casting himself as the future ‘iron chancellor’ forgot to smile while brusquely refusing to advocate higher public spending funded by higher taxes and borrowing. Brown’s image was affecting his credibility. ‘Gordon,’ said one, ‘is really not interested in people; he’s only interested in people as economic agents, the ants in the anthill, and he wants ants to have a nice anthill.’ The alienated Labourites did not disagree with Norman Lamont’s successor as chancellor Kenneth Clarke when he jibed that Brown’s regurgitation of lists, strategies, statistics and predictions of doom were self-defeating. ‘He has as much policy content as the average telephone directory,’ mocked Clarke languidly across the floor of the Commons, ‘and if I may say so – it is a modest claim given the competition it faced – I thought the best parts of the hon. gentleman’s speech came when he was quoting me.’ Brown scowled. The dispenser of ridicule hated receiving similar treatment. Even John Smith’s agreement to relaunch Labour on 9 February 1993 as the party of the individual and to abandon any commitment to renationalisation brought only temporary relief.
Brown’s misfortune was that changing Labour’s economic policy to attract the middle classes was more difficult than Tony Blair’s task, as shadow home secretary, of altering the party’s social policies. While Brown chased every news bulletin, Blair, also helped by Mandelson, concentrated on making limited appearances with ‘warm and chatty’ preludes to reflective answers suggesting the moral high ground. Blair’s insistence on accepting interviews only on his own terms, and resistance to giving instant reactions to please the media’s agenda, gave his rarer interviews a cachet, and gracefully neutralised his opponents.
Brown had become weary. A visit to Newbury in early 1993 to campaign in the by-election caused by the death of its sitting Tory MP, John Major’s adviser Judith Chaplin, revealed the perils for self-publicists. The previously safe Tory seat was vulnerable. Norman Lamont had committed atrocious gaffes, not least his statement that high unemployment was ‘a price well worth paying’ to reduce inflation. The Tory candidate was an unappealing PR consultant. The seat should have been an easy trophy, but Brown’s performance in front of the television cameras at Vodafone’s headquarters, which were in the constituency, was unproductive. Confidently, he told journalists about the area’s high unemployment. ‘Rubbish,’ exclaimed Chris Gent, Vodafone’s managing director. ‘Our company has grown by 25 per cent in the last year.’ The Liberal Democrats won the by-election.
In March 1993 the London Evening Standard reported that while Brown was regarded with respect, Tony Blair was the frontrunner to succeed Smith. Brown was furious. On one occasion when Mark Seddon, the genial editor of Tribune, was interviewing Brown in his office, a member of Brown’s staff announced, ‘Tony’s gone ahead without you,’ referring to a meeting the two were to attend. Brown exploded, breaking a pencil in his fury.
The hostility towards Brown among his fellow MPs was growing. His monotone hectoring was criticised as all too revealing of an unworldly, unmarried forty-one-year-old mystified about the real world. His constant appearance in an identical uniform – blue suit, white shirt and red tie – regardless of the context bewildered those who judged people by such things. Brown’s reputation was not helped by a story of a car journey through countryside when he allegedly said to his companion, ‘Look, those cows have had their foals.’ His new critics delighted in carping that he was ‘a townie who didn’t know where his fish and chips came from’. Others recited an eyewitness’s account of Blair mentioning to Brown that he had once seen Marc Bolan perform. ‘Where is he now?’ asked Brown, preoccupied with drafting a statement. ‘Dead,’ replied Blair. Brown carried on writing, oblivious to the answer.
In fact he had become oblivious to everything other than his own truths. Like a man possessed, he steamrollered rather than reasoned with critics. Among his victims was Peter Hain, an ambitious left-winger brought up in South Africa whose circuitous route to the Labour Party via student protest, the Liberals and election as Tribune’s secretary baffled many. Unwilling to accept Brown’s economic prescription for an election victory, Hain wrote a pamphlet for the Tribune Group arguing for huge public spending, the abandonment of euromonetarism and a return to full socialism. Labour, Hain complained, had never previously attacked the Tories for increasing taxes, yet Brown was appealing to richer voters by promising to lower direct taxation. ‘Gordon has done a brilliant job in exposing Tory tax hikes,’ said Hain, ‘but voters need to be convinced that Labour can manage the economy more effectively. The modernisers have told us what we’re against but not what we’re for.’ Hain did not grasp that the shadow chancellor had not abandoned socialism in favour of Thatcherism other than as an election ploy. He espoused measured concealment to defeat the Conservatives. Neutralising Hain should have been effortless, but Brown’s methods compounded his predicament. Angry about its attack on himself, he sought to prevent Hain’s pamphlet’s publication. Hain was summoned to Brown’s office and