Gordon Brown: Prime Minister. Tom Bower
a news bulletin at 5.15 on a Saturday afternoon. ‘They’re trying to do me down,’ he shouted at Mandelson after watching one MP deliver a nine-second soundbite. Everyone, he claimed, was trying to ‘do him down’. He was prepared to travel from Scotland to London early on a Sunday morning to broadcast for a few fleeting seconds.
This hunger for influence was not accompanied by personal vanity. Repeatedly, he refused the opportunity to watch the playbacks of his party political broadcasts. Seemingly irked by his own face, his unfashionable opinion about politics was that the message rather than the image was important. Although assured by Barry Delaney, the producer of Labour’s political broadcasts, that women found him attractive, he was ambivalent about American talkshow host Jay Leno’s opinion that ‘Politics is show biz for ugly people.’
Brown’s mixture of frenzy and shyness prompted Peter Mandelson to suggest in late 1993 that he hire Charlie Whelan as his press spokesman. Mandelson had known Whelan since the 1992 election, and had been impressed by his abilities at the recent party conference while discussing OMOV. Brown knew him from the regular Tuesday lunches hosted by Gavin Laird, the general secretary of the AEUW. Laird had praised Whelan, his spokesman, as having ‘real flair’. Whelan’s particular talent, reinforced by his natural energy and bonhomie, was to spot opportunities for an AEUW representative to speak on TV news programmes. While his officials appeared in front of the cameras, rival trade unionists were ignored. That expertise was precisely Brown’s requirement.
Born in Peckham in 1955, Whelan would above all be obedient and loyal to Brown’s cause. ‘Able but very lazy,’ was his headmaster’s conclusion after the young Whelan failed one examination. In the hope of solving the problem, his parents sent him to a fee-paying boarding school in Surrey. He secured an unimpressive degree in politics at the City of London Polytechnic. When he started his first job as a foreign exchange dealer in the City, he spoke in a Home Counties accent. One year later, employed as a researcher by the AEUW, he spoke like a Cockney. Influenced by Jimmy Airlie, the forceful trade union leader renowned for his campaign to save the Upper Clyde shipbuilders, Whelan demonstrated his lack of political judgement when he joined the Communist Party in 1975. Whether he understood the reasons for the Party’s dramatic decline since the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 is uncertain. Probably the oppression of East Europeans was less important to him than loyalty to Jimmy Airlie. He only resigned from the Party in 1990, after the final collapse of communism.
The contrast between Charlie Whelan and Gordon Brown, the reserved, puritan non-smoker, could not have been greater – and that was the mutual attraction. During his fifteen years in the thuggish world of trade union politics Whelan had adopted a laddish style to promote his wheeler-dealer expertise. The clan chief spotted the chain-smoking, beer-drinking bruiser who shared a love of football as his man of business. Although Whelan was markedly unconscientious about detail, he would in some ways be an ideal soulmate. For his part, Whelan was flattered to be so close to the centre of attention. Whelan joined Ed Balls and Sue Nye within Brown’s inner cabinet. He welcomed the responsibility of solving Brown’s problems, delighted if the shadow chancellor telephoned six times in a day to seek consolation over an irritating news item. By then both had noticed that Peter Mandelson was less involved in Brown’s daily activities. Eight years after his appointment, Whelan was asked whether he had felt any loyalty towards Mandelson. ‘Yes,’ he smirked, ‘for about five minutes.’ That retrospective sarcasm reflected Whelan’s dislike for a man he called ‘Trousers’.
On Monday, 9 May 1994, Roy Hattersley was chatting with John Smith in Westminster. Their conversation drifted towards the shadow chancellor. ‘Gordon’s doing very badly,’ said Smith. ‘He’d have no chance to be leader if there was an election now. Blair would get it.’ There was no pleasure in Smith’s judgement. He did not disguise his dislike for Brown’s rival. ‘But fortunately,’ he added, ‘there won’t be an election tomorrow, so it will eventually be Gordon.’ As if he had a premonition of his fate, Smith repeated this to David Ward, his chief of staff. Gordon Brown was unaware of Smith’s opinion, but the disagreements between them had become insurmountable.
The telephone call soon after 9.30 on the morning of Thursday, 12 May 1994 was shattering. Saul Billingsley, Gordon Brown’s assistant, reported that Murray Elder needed to speak to him very urgently. Brown was in his flat in Great Smith Street as he listened to his childhood friend’s trembling voice. At 9.15, said Elder, John Smith had died after another heart attack. Brown was thunderstruck. His grief was genuine.
The night before, Brown and Smith had attended a fundraising dinner at the Park Lane Hotel. The party had been jolly. Many rich men, former contributors to the Tories, had pledged their new loyalty to Labour. Success in politics, Smith knew, is the talent to exploit unexpected opportunities. John Smith’s misfortune was Gordon Brown’s chance.
During those first hours, Brown was not wholly in mourning. Instinctively, he considered his tactics. He had dedicated his life to becoming number one. The prospect of failure was intolerable. Those close friends whom he telephoned noticed that his voice was sombre but not distraught. Nothing, he urged his confidants, should be said or done. The son of the manse understood human suffering and respect for proprieties. Decency demanded delay, if he was to avoid accusations of opportunism. Sue Nye, Ed Balls and Charlie Whelan arrived. Their conversation was short, and they departed. In the era before the widespread use of mobile telephones, communications would be slow.
Among Gordon Brown’s telephone calls was one to Tony Blair, who had just arrived at Dyce airport in Aberdeen to start a campaign tour. So many words had already been exchanged about John Smith that they got straight down to practicalities. They agreed to meet later that day, after Blair had cut short his journey and returned to London. Brown assumed that Blair would wait until after they had met before making any decisions.
After eleven o’clock, Peter Mandelson arrived in the flat. Whatever his faults, Mandelson was a serious politician who had dedicated himself to the party’s election success. He was also an astute judge of people’s strengths and weaknesses. Gordon Brown, he noted, did not regard Smith’s death just as a tragedy, but also as an opportunity which he was willing to grasp. There were few words of mourning. Mandelson spoke to Brown only about the succession. The Scotsman was emphatic that he would stand. When Mandelson did not comment, Brown misread his neutrality as support. Shortly afterwards, Nick Brown joined them.
Sheena McDonald arrived at lunchtime. The three men’s discussions had reached stalemate. Mandelson was endlessly on the telephone, Nick Brown was sitting silently on a chair, while Gordon Brown paced quietly around the room listening to Mandelson’s conversations. McDonald departed, leaving Brown to write an obituary for the next day’s Independent which would be notable for its hyperbole. John Smith, he repeatedly emphasised, was witty and good company. His premature death deprived ‘the country as a whole of something irreplaceable’, because Smith was ‘uniquely equipped … to bind this nation together and to heal the deep wounds of the past fifteen years’. He lamented that Smith had been standing ‘at the brink of his greatest achievement’, victory in the next election. In truth, Brown knew, Smith was singularly ill-equipped for that challenge.
Sitting in a corner of the untidy living room following the media coverage of Smith’s death in telephone conversations, Charlie Whelan’s temper rose. Commentators were privately predicting that Blair was the favoured candidate for the leadership. More alarming was the early edition of the agenda-setting London Evening Standard. The newspaper’s editor had heard about Smith’s death from a doctor at the London hospital. Charles Reiss, the Standard’s political editor, baldly stated that Blair was the heir apparent in a ‘dream ticket’ with John Prescott as his deputy. Brown, by contrast, was dismissed as the son of John Smith, the new representative of Old Labour. By mid-afternoon, Brown was working behind closed doors in his Millbank office. Outside, Caroline Daniel, a new researcher, sensed an unusually tense atmosphere. Sue Nye was warning everyone