Meet the Brownies
Paul Routledge on the likely shape and colour of Gordon Brown’s government One afternoon in the late summer of 1997, I was called to the Treasury for an audience with Gordon Brown. It was not the first time I had been in the Chancellor’s private office, with its Scottish landscapes, deep armchairs and heavy drapes. But this was not an occasion for cushioned comfort. Grouped on one side of his enormous conference table were his spin doctor Charlie Whelan and economics adviser Ed Balls. At the head, with his back to an equally vast desk stabling two computer terminals, sat the brooding presence. He had the proofs of my biography of him on the table, with marginalia in a large, restless hand. About something, he was not amused.
The something was a letter from Peter Mandelson dated three years earlier, which purported to offer assistance for a putative Brown bid for the Labour leadership in the aftermath of John Smith’s death. Predictably, the note was nothing of the sort. Mandy’s message was freighted with gloomy warnings of a fatal split if Brown ran. I had acquired the letter during the course of my researches, and proposed to use it as evidence of Mandelson’s treachery. Gordon was unhappy. There might be serious repercussions. The letter must go. Balls and Whelan joined in the veto chorus. I had seldom seen either of them so nervous.
I prevaricated, but ‘the feeling of the meeting’ was against me, so, falling back on an old trade union negotiator’s trick, asked what was the quid pro quo. There was a brief silence, then Brown produced some copy of his own, typed as if a gorilla had been let loose on a computer. The two sheets detailed his view of Tony Blair’s sedulous campaign over preceding years to do him out of the leadership. He railed against the ‘weekend party circuit’ that had promoted Blair at his expense. The ‘London set’ had failed to defend the then shadow chancellor’s economic policy revolution, while he spent his weekends in Scotland. He insisted that he could have won the contest, but stood down in the interests of unity and party modernisation.
There was much more in the same vein. The document breathed hostility to Blair. It was too much to take in immediately, so I promised to think about withdrawing the letter. It quickly became clear that this was gold dust, better than Mandelson’s duplicitous intervention. This was proof positive, not merely evidence, of the gulf between Brown and Blair, a hitherto concealed feature of the political landscape that has dogged the Labour government from day one. I incorporated the text virtually word for word.
The purpose of disclosing these discussions is to illustrate two aspects of the personality of Labour’s next leader that will shape his exercise of power. One, obviously, is his acute dislike of the Blairistas, the modish metropolitan set who plotted their future with New Labour over the dinner table while he had the far harder task of demolishing the party’s tax and spend image. The aversion did not exclude Blair himself. Two, Brown is a remarkably cautious man, unwilling to pick enemies like Mandelson if needless conflict can be avoided. These qualities, of animosity and caution, will influence his Cabinet-making and his broad strategy for government.
At present, the argument raging within Labour is whether to give Brown a coronation handover from Blair, or risk a potentially damaging contest. There are no longer any serious candidates against him. David Blunkett’s spectacular self-defenestration has removed him from the running. Charles Clarke does not have a power base, and while Peter Hain may have the ego for a punt at the leadership, he does not have the support. David Miliband has wisely ruled himself out. There is little point in fabricating a phoney tournament, but some MPs argue that there must at least be an election for deputy leader, if only to breathe some life back into the moribund constituency organs. Such a campaign could bring forward new blood, with perhaps four or five wannabe nextgeneration leaders seeking John Prescott’s mantle — it being assumed that the Deputy Prime Minister, nearing 70, would want to step down when Blair goes.
The next, impossibly vexed question is timing. A rump of the PLP that never wanted Blair would like him to go as soon as he steps down from the EU presidency and G8 chairmanship in the New Year. A larger, and growing, group wants him to go earlier than mooted and certainly within the next two years, so that Brown has at least 18 months to stamp the personality of his government on the face of the still relatively new Tory leader David Cameron. Only a minority genuinely wants to see the Prime Minister serve a full term, up to the spring of 2009.
Superficially, the delivery of change is in the hands of Blair. No one can dictate to him the date of his departure — except the House of Commons. A string of parliamentary defeats on key aspects of his social agenda, particularly manifesto pledges on education and the NHS (though these were deliberately vaguely worded) would rob him of all authority. He would have to resign. ‘There are only so many defeats a prime minister can take before he has to go,’ says one of his fading-friend MPs. But the Brownites do not want the Blair premiership to end in rancorous humiliation. ‘Gordon would take over a bitter, divided, frustrated Labour party. If that happens, what Brown inherits would not be worth having,’ argues one of the ‘long game’ group of pro-Gordon ex-ministers.
Whatever the deadline — and it certainly looks more like mid-term than the June 2006 target of diehard malcontents — Brown’s problems only just begin when he finally steals the keys to No. 10 from Cherie’s handbag. He has to reshape the government and give it a fresh sense of direction a decade after coming to office. He would also benefit from a ‘poll tax moment’ of the kind that abolition of Thatcher’s hated impost gave John Major in 1990. But there is no obvious candidate, and in any event he is intimately associated with everything that Blair has done with the arguable exception of the Iraq war, for which his backing has never been convincing.
On the Cabinet front, Brown will certainly permit animosity to the Blairistas to overcome his natural caution. Assuming that they are all still in post, Clarke will be bundled out of the Home Office, possibly to be replaced by John Denham, the ministerial war resigner who has made a good fist of chairing the home affairs select committee. Jack Straw will take a long overdue bath, and Patricia Hewitt will be moved from Health. Some of the rats caught between ships, like Geoff Hoon, Leader of the House, and Tessa Jowell, bathed in the triumphal glow of the 2012 Olympics and backed by Brown in her 2018 World Cup bid, may make it to a fresh berth.
There is no room on board, however, for chief whip Hilary Armstrong. Her performance has slipped from weak to disastrous. The entire whip’s office needs a radical revamp, especially if the virus of rebellion is still rampant on the back benches. Brown would be minded to give his Caledonian tormentor John Reid the governorship of the Falkland Islands, but a more suitable punishment would be to move him from the MoD to the chief whip’s office. The Treasury will be governed from No. 10, under the satrapy of Alistair Darling or, at a pinch, Des Browne. In comes former economics adviser Ed Balls, probably at the level of chief secretary. Douglas Alexander is favourite to take over as chairman of the Labour party with a seat in the Cabinet.
Gordon’s Gang is easy enough to construct, though he will inevitably face charges of running the country via a Scottish Mafia. Much more difficult is the transition to a post-Blair government with a policy portfolio sustaining the precarious coalition that yielded three historic Labour victories. In fact, the challenge is two-fold: how to reinvigorate the PLP and the faithful in the country with a ‘poll tax moment’ that distinguishes him from the Blairite legacy, while still commanding the confidence of Middle England. Brown may gain from a propitious withdrawal of British troops from Iraq, along with the Americans, from the end of next year. He might also cheer his traditional supporters with a judicious remix of Blair’s reformist measures.
The Brownites still hope for ‘something big’ from their man once he has his hands on the levers of power. They point to his stunning move to give independence to the Bank of England within hours of becoming Chancellor, and the succession of rabbits he pulled from the hat on Budget days. One year it was a penny off income tax, another year free TV licences for the over 75s. The favoured area for his big idea is education. ‘Unlike Blair, Gordon really cares about education — in the round, not just where his kids go to school or failing comprehensives in Islington,’ insists an acolyte. Alas for such hopes; Brown has publicly backed Ruth Kelly’s ‘greater choice’ white paper on education.
Meanwhile Brown has moved early to demonstrate that the voters are his priority, not self-indulgent rebels. In an interview with New Labour’s house journal, the Times, last week he signalled that he would not be a soft touch for MPs hankering after a return to Old Labour. He boasted: ‘I have introduced most of the Private Finance Initiative, sold off air traffic control, made a controversial decision on the London Underground, set up the Gershon inquiry to sack or make redundant 80,000 civil servants, made the Bank of England independent and introduced the most widespread competition reforms this country has ever seen.’ He might have added, but did not, that he was also the architect of the national minimum wage (anathema to Blair), the many distributionist tax credits and the Warwick agreement with the unions that still binds the Labour movement to the government. But that would have trained his guns in the wrong direction. Instead, when asked for evidence of the ‘stable and orderly’ transition to power promised by Blair, Brown replied: ‘I think that is a matter for him. It was his statement.’ You can almost hear the contempt in his voice. The undercurrent of animosity is still there, almost a decade later. It is held in check, sometimes with a bleak smile, sometimes with a face like the thunder rolling from his native Fife hills. He could break Blair, but his innate caution, which he dignifies as prudence, holds him back. For his natural supporters, this is immensely frustrating. Perhaps he sees himself as Fabius Cunctator, ‘the hesitant’, wearing down the Carthaginians by delaying tactics. If so, he should reflect that Fabius became the patron saint of Labour moderates from whose ranks came the party’s least admired prime ministers.
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