10,00 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
For the first eighteen months of Jeremy Corbyn's leadership, Labour MPs were in open revolt. The party seemed to be heading back to the early 1980s, when old-school Marxists tried and failed to take over the party, at a shocking electoral cost. The snap general election called by Theresa May for 8 June 2017 looked set to consign Labour to the history books. But the best-laid plans of mice and men... How long can the uneasy peace between moderate, anti-Corbyn MPs and the leader's loyal grassroots activists last? What does Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party have in common with the Labour Party of Attlee, Wilson and Blair? Is there even a future for either version of 'democratic socialism' in the twenty-first century? Or is the Labour Party, as generations of voters have known it, finally coming to the end of its useful life? The seeds of Labour's travails and its hostile takeover by the hard left were sown years earlier, during the turbulent, chaotic last years of the Labour government. In Ten Years in the Death of the Labour Party, columnist and former Labour MP Tom Harris turns the spotlight on the decisions that doomed the party's fortunes and the people who made them.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
Ähnliche
TEN YEARSin the DEATHof the LABOUR PARTY
TOM HARRIS
To Carolyn, for her love, support and ceaseless encouragement.
CONTENTS
PREFACE
In 1984, the year I joined the Labour Party, I read a book by Austin Mitchell, a serving Labour MP at the time, depicting the civil war that had engulfed his party in the aftermath of its defeat at the 1979 general election and which, even then, showed little sign of waning. It was titled Four Years in the Death of the Labour Party and it was one of the first books I read once I decided to bite the bullet and join the party that, only a year earlier, I had felt unable to support in the general election.
Looking back at that tumultuous and dramatic time from the perspective of 2017 is illuminating. After being thrown into opposition, Labour MPs – only they had the power at the time to select party leaders – chose the left-wing Michael Foot to replace defeated premier Jim Callaghan. There then followed an intense battle between the party’s right and left wings, the former personified by Labour’s deputy leader Denis Healey, the latter by demagogue and former Industry Secretary Tony Benn. The feud between the two men culminated in 1981 when Benn challenged Healey for the deputy leadership, perfectly exposing just how split the Labour movement was, when the incumbent held on with a majority equivalent to less than 1 per cent of the vote.
The newly empowered left saw a chance to throw their weight around and did so by threatening to deselect any Labour MP who didn’t sign up to their own exclusive, elitist brand of socialism, which included unilateral nuclear disarmament, taking the UK out of the European Economic Community (EEC) without a referendum and nationalising a large section of British industry. This in turn led to the biggest split the party had endured since 1931, with the creation of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) by the so-called Gang of Four: former Home Secretary and Chancellor, Roy Jenkins, recently returned to these shores after a stint as president of the European Commission; David Owen, Foreign Secretary under Callaghan; Shirley Williams, the former Education Secretary who had lost her seat at the 1979 election; and former Transport Secretary, Bill Rodgers.
Thanks in large part to the nature of Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system, a hangover of the kind of two-party politics that prevailed throughout much of the twentieth century, the SDP failed in its stated aim of ‘breaking the mould’ of British politics. It succeeded only in splitting the anti-Conservative vote, helping to deliver three-figure majorities for Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at the 1983 and 1987 general elections.
We now know, thanks to the patience and determination of individuals like Neil Kinnock, John Smith, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and many others who refused to walk away or give up on the Labour project, that the party eventually recovered and went on to win the 1997 and 2001 general elections with unprecedented landslide majorities, as well as the 2005 election with a handsome, though more modest, majority. So, only a few years ago, a more appropriate ‘sequel’ to Mitchell’s 1983 book might have been titled Fourteen Years in the Resurrection of the Labour Party.
Alas, the resurrection was not as successful for Labour as it was for Lazarus, at least in terms of longevity. Whatever the continuing debates over New Labour’s achievements and failures, its domination of British politics lasted for a shorter period than anyone would have expected on that bright new dawn in early May 1997. Thirteen years remains the longest unbroken period of government in Labour’s history, with Blair becoming the first Labour leader ever to win two, let alone three, consecutive working majorities. But when it all came to an unedifying end in the frantic, dramatic days following the 2010 general election, Labour was already on a downward spiral that exclusion from office only seemed to accelerate.
This book does not aim to present an impeccably fair sequence of events from 2007 to 2017; it can be fairly criticised for overemphasising many of the protagonists’ failures and missteps, while ignoring their (occasionally) impressive achievements. Yet the purpose of this book is to identify those events and judgements that were pivotal to the demise of the Labour Party during (and, perhaps, beyond) this period. I make no apology for accentuating the negative while eliminating the positive, for only by doing so can we understand the voters’ judgement.
To state that Labour is dying is not to predict categorically that it will, ultimately, kick the political bucket. After the drama of Theresa May’s snap election and disastrous campaign in 2017, few would bet their house on Labour’s imminent demise. Conceivably, it could yet return to government under its most left-wing leadership in its (or Britain’s) history. And, if not, who is to say that the period of ‘dying’ might not take years, even decades before the process reaches its natural conclusion? It might even be the case that Labour enters a state of living death, the Nosferatu of British politics, doomed to wander aimlessly through the political twilight, not quite dead, yet not quite attached to the reality of life, condemned to hover in the purgatory between irrelevance and government. A bit like the Liberal Democrats.
Ten Years in the Death of the Labour Party has not been written from an objective point of view. I am decidedly partial in my perspective. The last decade has been one of desperate frustration for me; were I not a Labour member and supporter it would have seemed a lot more entertaining. Yet, having been a member of the party almost all of my adult life, and having spent fourteen years as a Labour MP, recent history has been a genuinely heartbreaking experience. Perhaps I hoped that writing this book would prove a cathartic experience – that remains to be seen.
My deep gratitude goes to the staff at Biteback and particularly to Iain Dale, whose experience in publishing my previous book, Why I’m Right and Everyone Else is Wrong, did not discourage him from giving me another opportunity to see my name on the nation’s bookshelves. Gratitude is also due to Henry Hill who, despite being a Tory, has offered me genuine friendship and wonderful advice (and proofing expertise) in this project.
Most of all, thank you to my friends and former colleagues in the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) whose friendship during my time in the Commons lifted my spirits every day. Nowhere in the country can be found more dedicated or indefatigable public servants. I do not envy them their task, in these troubled times, of trying to guide our party back onto the straight and narrow. But if anyone can do it, they can.
Tom Harris
October 2017
CHAPTER ONE
BUTTERFLY’S WINGS
It had all been going so well.
On Friday 5 October 2007, the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, had a decision to make. In some respects it was the simplest one a Prime Minister ever has to make, with a binary yes-or-no answer: should he call a general election and seek a fresh mandate for his premiership from the electorate?
The Iron Chancellor (or ‘Irn Broon’, as a Scots wag had labelled him) had finally reached his ultimate political goal, the goal that had driven him all his life, from being the youngest ever rector of Edinburgh University to Member of Parliament, to the front bench of the Labour opposition and, more rapidly than virtually anyone had expected, to become heir apparent to John Smith as leader of the Labour Party. When Smith took over the helm of the party after its shattering fourth consecutive general election defeat in 1992, Brown had been appointed shadow Chancellor, a role that seemed perfect for the dour yet charismatic politician. But it was not, to him, the perfect role. For a start, it was in opposition, not government, and Brown craved the power that government would bring, the power to put into practice his ideas of a modern form of old-fashioned, electorally unpopular socialism.
And, in 1992, as Smith put the finishing touches to his first shadow Cabinet and prepared to do battle with the triumphant Prime Minister John Major, the wider party acknowledged that the leadership was in safe hands. That acknowledgement included an understanding that, whenever Smith chose to stand down from the role, the identity of his successor was only too obvious.
This was a view shared by the Dunfermline MP. It was not, however, a view that was shared as widely or as enthusiastically as Brown would have liked among a significant proportion of his parliamentary colleagues. His abilities were never doubted; his grasp of the finer points of economic policy, his ability to distil complicated facts and figures into easy-to-swallow sound bites for the media and their audiences – that was accepted and welcomed as a major contribution to Labour’s fightback after yet another defeat. Brown’s talents were an indispensable part of Labour’s courageous, and ultimately successful, strategy to regain the trust of voters, to be seen as a viable, serious alternative government in a way that eluded Smith’s predecessor, Neil Kinnock, for the nine years of his leadership.
Perhaps to other Labour MPs, Brown’s ambition was just a little too naked, his estimation of his own abilities just a touch overgenerous. There was a humourless arrogance, shared by his exclusive inner circle, about the inevitability of their man’s succession, an assumption that irritated a significant section of the PLP. What’s more, Brown, like Smith, was Scottish; would the party and the country be content for two successive leaders to hail from north of the border? The last Labour leader to represent an English seat had been Harold Wilson. Most importantly, one of the things on the short list of reservations about Brown was his personality. He could certainly affect charm when it suited him, but it didn’t always suit him, and MPs had doubts that the natural likeability that he possessed might not be easily communicated to a mass audience.
Such considerations were not of immediate concern, to either Brown or to the wider party, until the morning of 12 May 1994, when Smith’s untimely death instigated another leadership election, at which point Brown realised, to his dismay, that the man he regarded as his ‘junior partner’, shadow Home Secretary Tony Blair, enjoyed more support than Brown himself did. If Brown didn’t acknowledge this explicitly, it was only because, by not standing himself and by affecting the role of magnanimous party loyalist, he could pretend that the crown could have been his had he wanted it. But the party must come first and a divisive contest between its two leading ‘modernisers’ would not be in its best interests.
So, smiling for the cameras as much as he was able to, the shadow Chancellor remained in the post originally given to him by Smith and supported his former friend.
On Tuesday 15 June 2004, Brown became the longest continuously serving Chancellor of the Exchequer since the 1820s, beating David Lloyd George’s record of seven years and forty-three days. But Chancellor wasn’t the role he wanted for its own sake – he saw it as a stepping stone to the highest office, an office he never stopped believing had been unfairly denied him by the perceived (as he saw it) treachery of Blair ten years earlier. The alleged betrayal, recounted and enforced repeatedly by a coterie of friends and allies in Parliament and the media throughout Blair’s leadership of the party and the government, defined Brown; arguably it impeded his success as Chancellor, undermined his many achievements and allowed his opponents to emphasise his failures. Rumours of his stormy relationship with Blair inevitably percolated through to the public, forcing both men to admit that yes, there were tensions, but only tensions that added to the creative forces at the centre of government. There had been a deal, Brown’s allies insisted, a deal to which Blair had agreed as far back as 1994; a deal that meant Blair would fight two general elections and then retire, bequeathing the leadership to the Chancellor. The terms of any deal, if there ever was one, were always hotly contested by the followers of both sides. Brown fully expected – felt he was led to expect – an announcement by Blair in 2004 that he would resign as Prime Minister, allowing a smooth transition before an expected general election in May of the following year. But in September 2004, Blair announced that he intended to fight a third general election and would serve an entire parliamentary term before stepping aside in time to allow his successor to fight the next general election. A furious Brown told Blair: ‘There is nothing that you could ever say to me now that I could ever believe.’
In 2006, more than a year after Blair had led his party to an unprecedented third election victory, achieved despite the growing shadow of Blair’s – and Parliament’s – controversial decision to join the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the dam burst. Using the pretext of the Prime Minister’s reluctance to condemn Israel’s insurgence into nearby Lebanon, seventeen MPs, all allies of Brown’s, struck, signing a letter to Downing Street, a letter demanding Blair’s resignation. Wrongly believing that the signatories represented the wider consensus in the PLP, Blair announced he would be gone within the next year and that the forthcoming party conference in Manchester would be his last as leader. TV cameras caught Brown smiling broadly as he jumped into his ministerial car on leaving a meeting with his embattled leader.
Following the local, Scottish and Welsh elections in May 2007, Blair duly announced the date of his retirement: following a process within the Labour Party to choose his successor, he would leave Downing Street for the last time as Prime Minister on 27 June.
This time, Brown left nothing to chance. Despite the resentment of a large minority of Labour MPs towards him for perceived disloyalty to his leader over more than a decade, and even deeper resentment at the coup that finally dislodged Labour’s greatest election winner of all time, no one was prepared to challenge Brown for the top job. Senior Cabinet members and some junior ministers complained of threats by Brown’s allies against anyone who even contemplated standing against him to replace Blair. ‘I was told, in no uncertain terms, that if I even supported the principle of an open election, rather than a coronation, I could say goodbye to my ministerial car,’ one junior minister said.
As for senior figures, although less susceptible to intimidation, they could see no point in fighting an election they believed Brown would win heavily anyway. John Reid, Blair’s pugnacious Home Secretary, regarded as the government’s best communicator, received a number of invitations to throw his hat in the ring, but his response – that by standing in the contest he would feel obliged to serve in Brown’s Cabinet afterwards, and that he was simply unprepared to do so – echoed the reservations and assumptions of other would-be candidates. John Hutton, Blair’s Work and Pensions Secretary, told the BBC as the September 2006 coup was unfolding that a ‘serious, Cabinet-level candidate’ would emerge to challenge Brown. Yet, by May the following year, he had declared his support for Brown after all. The Environment Secretary, David Miliband, widely seen as the Blairites’ next great hope, announced that he, too, would support Brown. Even Charles Clarke, Neil Kinnock’s ex-chief of staff and a former Home Secretary to Blair, known to be an opponent and critic of the Chancellor’s within government, who had told the Sunday Times in April 2007 that if Miliband declined to stand then he himself would, eventually capitulated to the inevitability of a Brown tenure at No. 10, even going so far as to suggest he would be willing to return to the Cabinet under him (he was not offered any post by Brown).
It was the same old story, the same old excuse, at every turn: Brown was going to win anyway, so why bother? Why mount a challenge guaranteed to fail, whose only reward would be the undying enmity of the new Prime Minister?
Blair duly became one of Brown’s nominees in the leadership election, as did 312 other MPs, out of a parliamentary party numbering 356.
In fact, there was one challenger: John McDonnell, the hard-left MP for Hayes and Harlington, was a leading member of the small but voluble Socialist Campaign Group of MPs, made up of those who saw themselves as keepers of the true flame of ‘proper’ socialism, committed to high taxes, unilateralism and workers’ control. He announced he would be a candidate and duly started to seek the nominations from parliamentary colleagues that he would need in order to make it on to the ballot paper. Party rules at the time provided for each nominee to secure the support of 12.5 per cent of the PLP, or forty-five MPs. McDonnell failed to persuade colleagues, most of whom he did not know and with whom he almost never socialised, even to ‘lend’ him their nomination, a tactic used frequently to allow a no-hope candidate to stand for the sake of ‘broadening the debate’. In 2007, however, MPs were very well aware that the heir apparent (Brown had graduated from his ‘presumptive’ status of 1994) would brook no complications in the shape of another candidate on the ballot paper. And anyway, it was inconceivable that a member of the Socialist Campaign Group could ever be taken seriously as a leader of the Labour Party. Nevertheless, before nominations closed on Thursday 17 May, there was an open hustings event at which McDonnell was invited to participate (though, unfortunately, the media were not asked to attend). The Hayes and Harlington MP’s long record of voting against the Labour government encouraged one government whip, the Cardiff MP Kevin Brennan, to consider posing the question: ‘If you become leader and Prime Minister, will you start voting with the government?’ The question, sadly, was never put.
One argument for there to be only one candidate that was occasionally, though unenthusiastically, proffered was that it would save the party money; there would be no need to issue ballot papers if only a single name was on the ballot paper. Coronations cost little in the Labour Party.
However, this argument quickly fell through when John Prescott, Blair’s deputy since 1994, announced that he would step aside at the same time as the Prime Minister. A contest, and an expensive mass mailing of ballot papers to the party membership, was now inevitable, at least for the junior job. Six candidates duly stepped up to fill Prescott’s shoes: Harriet Harman (the then Minister of State for Constitutional Affairs), Peter Hain (the Northern Ireland Secretary), Alan Johnson (the former postman and postal workers’ union boss, who had risen to the position of Education Secretary under Blair, and who was regarded as the favourite at the outset of the contest), Labour Party chair, Hazel Blears; Hilary Benn (the International Development Secretary, whose father, Tony, had split the party down the middle with his own ill-fated challenge for the same job in 1981, in a very different era, of course), and backbencher Jon Cruddas, who had only entered Parliament in 2001. Six high-profile, capable, articulate and clever candidates for deputy; one talented, ambitious and flawed candidate for leader.
At close of nominations on 17 May, Brown was declared the winning (and only) candidate (by securing more than 308 nominations from fellow MPs he had made it mathematically impossible for any other candidate to secure enough qualifying nominations). But he had to wait until the party’s special leadership conference on 24 June for his long-awaited victory to become official. At that conference, Harriet Harman unexpectedly pipped Alan Johnson for the No. 2 spot by a margin of 50.43 per cent to Johnson’s 49.56 (Johnson having led the field, albeit narrowly, in all four preceding rounds of voting) and became Brown’s deputy.
Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday 27 June witnessed unprecedented scenes. Clapping is officially not allowed within the chamber of the Commons, but as Blair, standing at the despatch box for the last time, said an emotional goodbye to the place, the ranks of Labour MPs behind him and to the sides roared their appreciation, then stood to applaud. The Speaker Michael Martin looked on, smiling indulgently, unwilling to rebuke members for their defiance of protocol. Then the Leader of the Opposition, David Cameron, stood up and beckoned his own side to join in the applause.
The smooth transition of power dictated by Britain’s uncodified and ever-changing constitution operated smoothly, as Blair headed back to Downing Street and then left, his wife, Cherie, accompanying him, to head to Buckingham Palace to offer his resignation to Her Majesty. Ten minutes after Blair’s departure from his audience, Brown and his wife, Sarah, arrived at the palace to be appointed the Queen’s eleventh premier of her long reign. Returning from the palace to the iron gates of Downing Street at precisely 2.55 p.m., Brown rather awkwardly recited the words he knew would define the beginning of his leadership: ‘If we can fulfil the potential and realise the talents of all our people then I’m absolutely sure that Britain can be the great global success story of this century,’ he told reporters standing excitedly across from the famous black door, confined safely behind their metal barricade. Then, quoting his school motto, he said: ‘I will try my utmost [inexplicably, he pronounced it out-most]. This is my promise to all of the people of Britain. And now let the work of change begin.’
And the work did begin.
The new Prime Minister was finally where he believed he was destined to be, albeit ten years later than he felt was fair. And he could not have asked for a more confident and assured start. His first act was to appoint his Cabinet and junior ministerial ranks, a task unexpectedly interrupted by his (and his new Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith’s) first crisis: two car bombs were discovered parked in London’s busy West End early on the Friday morning, one directly outside Tiger Tiger night club in Piccadilly Circus. Both vehicles were removed and the explosives and nails they contained safely disposed of. The next day, Saturday, in what investigators later confirmed was a related incident, an Islamist terrorist carried out a violent attack at Glasgow International Airport by driving a car through the plate-glass walls at the front of the main terminal building.
Brown was forced to interrupt his phone calls to expectant would-be ministers in order to deal with the security aspects of the operation. On Monday 2 July, when Smith updated the House of Commons on the previous weekend’s events, she and her boss were broadly praised for their deftness in reassuring the nation and dealing with the unexpected attacks.
The next crisis Brown faced was a more typically British one. June had already proved to be one of the wettest on record, with double the average rainfall for the month. But July proved even worse for homeowners and farmers, and few areas of England escaped the threat of flooding. Again, Brown seemed in his element. Chairing regular COBRA (Cabinet Office Briefing Room A, to give its rather more pedestrian, less dramatic full title) emergency meetings, Brown was methodical and analytical, demanding facts and figures from the officials present. In July he decreed that every government minister, whatever their official remit and wherever they were in the country, should make sure they visited at least one site where residents had been badly affected by the floods.
The strategy worked. Brown’s personal ratings, already satisfactorily high as a result of the change of faces at the top of government, improved still further. His high-profile work on behalf of the nation helped capitalise on an opinion poll bounce reported during his first weekend at No. 10: an ICM poll for The Guardian reported a seven-point increase in Labour support, its best polling score since David Cameron became the Tory leader in December 2005. Brown personally could bask in one particular finding: a 35–23 per cent lead over Cameron on the question of ‘Who would make the best Prime Minister?’, reversing a Cameron lead of 5 per cent just three months earlier.
The omens were good for the double by-election due on 19 July, prompted by Blair’s resignation as MP for Sedgefield in the north-east of England, and by the death of Piara Khabra, the Labour MP for Ealing Southall in London. Despite five visits to the Ealing campaign by Cameron, his party failed to improve on the third place it had achieved at the previous general election; in Sedgefield, the Conservative candidate failed to hold on to second place and was beaten into third by the Liberal Democrats. In both seats, Labour held on comfortably. And, perhaps inevitably, talk began of an early general election.
Brown’s closest advisers were split. Spencer Livermore, one of his most senior advisers and confidants at No. 10, was in favour of going to the country in the autumn of 2007, despite the parliament having another three years to run. In this he was supported by Brown’s closest friend and supporter in government, the Schools Secretary Ed Balls. Other advisers expressed caution. Why needlessly risk a solid parliamentary majority and, perhaps almost as importantly, Brown’s personal political authority?
As rumours grew, it became apparent that the Conservative Party, too, was divided on the issue. As Parliament coasted towards the start of the long summer recess in July 2007, Lord Elder of Kirkcaldy was alerted in an unusual way to the normally well-hidden tensions within the main opposition party. Murray Elder had been a childhood friend of Brown’s and had remained one of the new Prime Minister’s closest friends and supporters ever since. He spent four years as secretary of the Labour Party in Scotland before becoming chief of staff to John Smith on his election to the leadership. After Smith’s death, Elder worked briefly for Smith’s successor before heading off to the private sector. He was ennobled in 1999. Other members of the Lords, of whichever party, regarded Elder as a reliable source of information as to what Brown might be thinking on any particular subject. It was in this capacity that he was approached one evening by a Tory peer who asked him: ‘Is Gordon going to call an early election?’
Elder replied, ‘Not that I’m aware, no.’
‘Fuck!’ replied the disappointed Lord.
Elder asked him, ‘Are you that confident of winning it if he did?’
‘No,’ came the reply. ‘We’d lose, and that means we could get rid of Cameron.’
And the Tory leader, in his various and energetic attempts to ‘detoxify’ the Tory brand after three calamitous and unprecedented general election defeats, had indeed incurred the ire of many of his party’s more traditional elements, elements that were content not to rock the boat until after the current leader had led the party to an expected fourth defeat. The prospect of dispensing with the sled-riding, bicycling, hoodie-hugging metropolitan Witney MP was one that was regarded as a substantial consolation prize in the event of Brown returning to No. 10 after an October poll.
So, the decision facing Brown, in late summer and early autumn 2007, just weeks after becoming Prime Minister, was an excruciating one. If he held an election now, would he return to Downing Street with an increased majority over what his predecessor had won just two years earlier? And if not, what would have been the point? Voters in Britain are widely thought to resent being expected to vote for no good reason.
And yet the attraction of having his own mandate, rather than one inherited from Blair, was one that was difficult to resist. If he fought and won, he would avoid the easy comparison with the last Labour Prime Minister who had gained office in midterm, James Callaghan, who plodded on to defeat at the messy end of a tortuous parliament. But what if he fought and lost? A Tory majority was never on the cards, but what if, as often happens in politics, unexpected events derailed Labour’s re-election campaign? What if Brown lost his majority entirely and ended up leading an enfeebled minority government, or having to do a deal with the Lib Dems in the next parliament? After getting used to large, sometimes overwhelming, Commons majorities in the last decade, Brown knew his party would never forgive such a careless, arrogant loss of a majority, which would have been seen as an act of hubris. Losing a 66-seat majority, when there really was no urgency to go to the country at all except to satisfy his own ego, could end his premiership after only a few short weeks.
According to Anthony Seldon’s Brown at Ten, Brown’s inner circle, though divided on the wisdom of an early election, had received explicit instructions on the eve of Labour’s annual conference to ‘talk up the possibility with journalists in order to destabilise Cameron’.
As delegates to the conference arrived in Bournemouth on Saturday 22 September, the attendant media wanted only to talk of one subject. Across the country, the word went out from regional and local organisers to candidates, MPs and campaign teams: get ready.
Throughout conference week and the week that followed, when the Conservatives’ conference was taking place, Labour MPs in marginal seats were told through official channels that an autumn election was on the cards. Gisela Stuart, who had gained her Birmingham Edgbaston seat with an impressive 10 per cent swing from the Conservatives on the night of the 1997 general election, had seen her 5,000 majority shrink in subsequent elections. Two years earlier she had held on with a majority of 2,349. Now, warned of what regional party offices in the West Midlands assumed were Brown’s intentions, Stuart and her campaign team rolled up their sleeves. If Labour’s majority in the Commons was to be preserved, her seat was exactly the kind that had to be successfully defended.
Some media outlets reported that there was even a possibility that Brown might announce the election during his conference address on the Tuesday. This proved another false hope, though the immediate post-speech polls gave further encouragement to those pushing for an autumn election. Still Brown prevaricated, while across the country local organisers made preparations.
And not only local organisers.
The party’s general secretary Peter Watt had been put on a campaign footing before the conference began. In fact, the number of full-time officials in Bournemouth had been drastically reduced, because Watt had sent so many of them back to London to finalise preparations for the general election. ‘The assumption all week was that it was going ahead,’ said Watt. ‘We actually cancelled annual leave for the coming period.’
After the conference and back in London, Watt oversaw lists of potential candidates and seats not yet filled. And introductory leaflets (‘pretty generic but with local candidates’ details in them’) were delivered to the party’s headquarters for distribution during the crucial first seventy-two hours after the election was called.
Even if Brown had been more confident of the way forward, shadow Chancellor George Osborne’s announcement at the Tories’ own conference the following week would have caused him to think again. To great acclaim and good media reviews, Osborne announced that a future Conservative government would raise the threshold on inheritance tax to £1 million. And he would pay for it with a levy on foreign ‘non-doms’, wealthy foreign residents living in the UK.
Whatever the economic arguments for the move, it was a masterstroke in terms of political tactics, putting Labour on the back foot and making the Tories look optimistic and confident. Brown’s unannounced visit to British troops serving in Iraq the same week, on the other hand, dealt a blow to his personal reputation: a convention of British politics is that rival leaders don’t try to upstage their opponents’ conferences – a particularly distasteful move when government resources and British troops in a combat zone are used in order to achieve it.
Watt recounts:
The week before, we [the election team, including Watt, Spencer Livermore and Douglas Alexander] had had a discussion and we asked what we would do if we were the Tories. And that [the inheritance tax announcement] is what we would have done. We needed to have a response, but we didn’t have one.
And by the end of that week, the decision had still not been made. If it were made now, an October poll was out of the question; now, the earliest that polling day could be arranged for was November, after the clocks had been turned back an hour at the end of October, heralding darker, decidedly voter-unfriendly evenings.
And then, on Friday 5 October, Brown was briefed on new polling that suggested a modest Tory poll lead in the marginal seats that would decide any election – and he bottled it.
There was spluttering outrage from Ed Balls, who believed his friend and mentor was making a calamitous mistake, particularly so given the briefing that had already taken place specifically to heighten expectations. That such expectations were now to be dashed was bad enough. The manner in which it had been done cast a long shadow over Brown’s reputation with the media.
On Saturday 6 October, Brown gave a pre-recorded interview to Andrew Marr for his Sunday morning political show on BBC1. The idea, opposed by some close to the Prime Minister, was to include in the interview the revelation that there would, after all, be no early election either in 2007 or, barring unforeseen events, the following year. It was optimistic, to say the least, to expect such political dynamite not to leak before the programme aired the following morning. In fact, it never had a chance to be leaked. As Brown left Downing Street after the interview finished, Marr briefed journalists standing outside on what Brown had said. The news led all the major news bulletins for the rest of the day.
Whether with regret or relief, candidates across the country stood down their operations. ‘We’re being told [by the party’s regional office] there’s going to be a general election,’ said Gisela Stuart. ‘We’re getting ready to have a targeted mailing out – I think 15,000 letters ready, addressed, bundled into rounds, all in crates. We check with regional office: “We’re still on, aren’t we?” “Yes, we’re still on.”
‘Then [a couple of hours before it hit the news] I get a phone call from Harriet Harman saying there’s no election.’ Stuart’s response was to invite all her core campaign team to share a crate of champagne while they made a bonfire of the 15,000 undelivered, and now useless, direct-mail letters.
The die was cast: the choice made, for good or for ill. It had never been an easy one to make in the first place, but the decision to stand down his troops after so much preparation had gone into ‘the election that never was’ had been Brown’s and Brown’s alone. Over the course of barely a week, his government made the transition from master of the British political sphere to its hapless victim. Brown’s sin was not in refusing to call an early election, but in authorising his allies to talk up the possibility of one. The sight of the country’s new Prime Minister, having marched his troops to the top of the hill only to reluctantly march them back down again without firing a single shot, sat uneasily with voters, who now started to look, however reluctantly and unenthusiastically, to David Cameron and the Conservative Party for leadership.
‘People had a sense that something pretty huge had happened,’ says Watt. ‘You didn’t need to see the headlines about “Bottler Brown” to see that. Something devastating had happened.’
Watt, who had been a strong supporter of Blair’s, said that, at the time of Brown’s arrival, other Blairites employed at party headquarters had had deep misgivings about the new Prime Minister.
But Gordon had had a fantastic summer, had completely exceeded our expectations. He almost had ‘Father of the Nation’ status. He’d had a pretty good conference; the No. 10 operation seemed to be doing a pretty good job. For a predominantly Blairite head office, we were pretty excited. It still felt like we were working for the number one political party in the country.
That week [of the Conservative Party conference] destroyed that. It felt like we were working for a second-rate political party.
Watt’s misgivings were reinforced on the following Monday, during a conversation with Fiona Gordon, Brown’s director of political relations.
She told us there was going to be a series of announcements to get the initiative back. But when I said that cancelling the election was a disaster, she denied the election had ever been called, so how could it have been cancelled? They just didn’t realise the enormity of what had just happened.
Labour’s poll ratings took an immediate dive from the moment the decision was announced. Voters began to suspect that ‘Irn Broon’ wasn’t the steadfast and reliable leader they had been led to believe. A year later, Guardian journalists Nicholas Watt and Patrick Wintour concluded: ‘On one thing only is there agreement. It marked a watershed in public perceptions of Brown, and represents the biggest unforced political error in the history of New Labour.’
Having reversed the Tories’ previous opinion poll lead in the immediate aftermath of Blair’s resignation – and often by double digits – Labour was behind again. In the twenty-nine months that were left of the parliamentary term, Labour only rarely – and fleetingly – took a lead in the national polls.
* * *
It had all been going so well. And it could have been so different.
If Brown had been more courageous (some might say ‘cavalier’) and gone to the country in October 2007 and won, he would have become the fourth Labour leader in history to win a general election in his own right. He would have been given the option of serving up to five more years. Having won his own mandate, he may well have chosen to step aside at a time of his own choosing, unharried by his enemies (an achievement only ever accomplished once by a serving Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, since 1945), once his preferred replacement as leader and Prime Minister had been lined up.
The 2008 financial crisis and MPs’ expenses scandal (see Chapter Two) would still have happened, but the consequences for the Conservative Party of losing a fourth consecutive general election may well have rendered them incapable of exploiting such difficulties. Cameron would undoubtedly have been forced from his job as party leader and who would have replaced him? Who was respected enough to be able to renew, reform and modernise the party while maintaining an appeal to the old guard? An unprecedented fourth loss and the resignation of Cameron might well have ended the Conservative Party’s ambitions to govern for a generation or more.
The future would have been Labour’s to own.
It was a future that didn’t materialise. Indirectly, from that one pivotal moment – the decision to confound and frustrate the expectations of candidates and media alike – flowed a succession of consequences that would, within ten years, transform the Labour Party, one of Europe’s oldest political parties, the founder of Britain’s welfare state and NHS, into an unrecognisable, extreme version of itself.
The supreme irony is that Labour could not point the finger of blame for this calamity at any of its political opponents or the media or big business or any of the range of its traditional enemies. All of its subsequent troubles were therefore self-inflicted; every poor decision and overreaction was the conscious and deliberate choice of Labour’s leaders. The party had no one to blame for its predicament but itself.
CHAPTER TWO
HOW TO GIVE A CAR CRASH A BAD NAME
The PLP was badly split, fractious and – at least parts of it – bitter by the time Gordon Brown made his first speech in Downing Street at the end of June 2007. Blairites, many of whom continued as ministers under their new leader (in fact, Brown would have found it almost impossible to fill all the spaces on his front bench without them) had had months, and in some cases years, to prepare for life under the new regime and so were prepared to lick their wounds, keep their heads down and give the new boss some time to prove he was fit to follow in the footsteps of Tony Blair.
But, as with the general electorate, such existing patience quickly evaporated when the shock of the election that never was reverberated around the country. Until that point, MPs known to have been critical of Brown while he was Chancellor were generous in their praise and honest in their surprise that they could have been wrong. Perhaps Brown was, after all, exactly the right face to present to an electorate that had become too cynical and jaded after ten years of Blair’s easy charm and wide smile. In the Members’ Restaurant (the stately dining room in the House of Commons, where only serving MPs and Lords who had also once been MPs could dine) talk during the late summer of 2007 was tinged with the smug satisfaction of the Brownites (most of whom never quite got round to saying ‘I told you so’, but then, they didn’t need to) and the more or less equal measures of disappointment and relief felt by the Blairites.
All that changed during the first weekend of October. From that moment onwards, the administration of Gordon Brown became defined by a series of disasters and, more importantly, from a political point of view, by a never-ending series of conspiracies by ministers and others to depose him and replace him with a candidate whom the electorate might consider more appealing. In fact, despite the global financial meltdown that threatened the world’s economies in 2008 and the rather more prosaic, though politically colossal, scandal involving MPs’ expenses in 2009, Brown’s tenure at No. 10 came to be defined by the almost permanent conspiracy (or conspiracies) by his own MPs to oust him as leader and Prime Minister. With hindsight and, arguably, even at the time, this could be seen as unfair to Brown, whose decisive leadership of the G20 may well have averted some of the more destructive consequences for jobs and economies of the bankers’ greed and hubris. The frustrating aspect for Brown and his advisers was that, according to the consistent conclusions of various polling organisations, such efforts were barely appreciated or even recognised by the British electorate.
Brown’s missteps began almost immediately, on Monday 8 October 2007, the day after the Marr programme was broadcast, with its, by now, not even remotely exclusive nugget about Brown’s decision not to hold a general election. This was the day the Prime Minister hosted his monthly press conference at No. 10. Inevitably, he had to field questions about the election that never was. Inexplicably, he denied that his decision not to hold the election had been anything to do with the opinion polls. Had this been true, he would have been the first Prime Minister in living memory who had taken such a decision without reference to them. And no one believed him. Journalists present would remember this occasion when, two years later, Brown was to deny another obvious truth in the aftermath of another crisis (see Chapter Three).
Under the headline ‘Crisis for Brown as election ruled out’, The Guardian reported on Conservative leader David Cameron’s largely successful attempt to exploit Brown’s difficulties: ‘The Prime Minister has shown great weakness and indecision and it is quite clear he has not been focused on running the country these last few months. He has been trying to spin his way into a general election campaign and now has had to make this humiliating retreat.’
Two days later, Cameron took full advantage of Brown’s travails when, at the weekly joust between the pair at Prime Minister’s Questions, he drew positive headlines (for himself and his party) by attacking Brown as ‘phoney’. For Brown and for Labour, this was a dangerous line of attack, given that the party had promoted Brown as ‘Not flash, just Gordon’ in a series of posters unveiled during Labour’s annual conference a fortnight earlier. Brown’s dour and apparently humourless demeanour was the very thing Labour strategists felt they could capitalise upon, making a virtue out of what, in the television age, would ordinarily have been seen as a weakness. So Cameron’s attempt to challenge this perception, to paint the Prime Minister as a phoney, risked undermining fatally the central value of what the Brown government had to ‘offer’.
In a carefully rehearsed sound bite that had his own benches rocking with laughter and, more importantly, which caused many in the press gallery above the Speaker’s chair to emit enthusiastic guffaws, Cameron told the House: ‘He is the first Prime Minister in history to flunk an election because he thought he could win it!’
Throughout all this, Brown barely hid his anger at each barb thrown in his direction. It was his worst performance, up to that point, at the despatch box, either as Prime Minister or as Chancellor. He was unaccustomed to being the butt of the joke, not in this chamber over which he had held such sway so often in a career that had lasted twenty-four years. Brown was used to praise – much of it deserved – for his easy command of the facts, and in the first fifteen weeks of his premiership he had clearly enjoyed the positive reviews he had received. He was not used to ridicule, and it showed.
If observers were unconvinced about the degree to which the media had changed its perception of Brown and his government, they only had to peruse the coverage of new Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling’s pre-Budget statement to the Commons on the Tuesday of that same week. A month earlier, perhaps Darling’s announcements would have been described as politically clever or imaginative, and would have acted as an indication that here was a government that knew what it wanted to achieve and how to make those aims a reality. But in the immediate aftermath of Brown’s decision not to hold an early election, after Brown had told them to their faces that the likelihood of winning such an election had played absolutely no part in his calculations, members of the press gallery found themselves with the bit firmly between their teeth. Here was a government that was vulnerable, a government that wasn’t about to face the voters any time soon, and so a government that had to be properly scrutinised and taken to task in a way that, arguably, its predecessor (and Blair himself) had not been.
Darling’s announcements were widely seen as political measures concocted for a general election. His statement failed to find favour with Labour’s left wing, which was unhappy about the doubling to £600,000 of the couples’ inheritance tax allowance, the consequent cost to the Exchequer of £1.4 billion a year by 2010 and by the fact that this was clearly a reaction to George Osborne’s own inheritance tax announcement to his own party’s conference a week earlier.
Darling also announced that, as the BBC reported: ‘UK economic growth will slow from 3 per cent this year to 2–2.5 per cent next year, a reduction from the previous forecast of 2.5–3 per cent made in March.’ It did not go unremarked upon that the March forecast had been made by Brown in his last Budget statement as Chancellor.
Even commentators who were normally sympathetic to Labour were hardly encouraging. Polly Toynbee wrote in The Guardian:
To give the children of the well-off a £1.4 billion inheritance bonus while the children of the poor only got another 48p a week in tax credits is symbolically far worse than that notorious 75p for pensioners. The halfway mark to abolish child poverty by 2010 will be missed by miles. Holding down public sector pay rises to 2 per cent for three years, only half next year’s expected private sector increase, will increase inequality.
Darling’s announcement of a cut in capital gains tax was, wrote Toynbee, ‘as shameless as it is dysfunctional’.
Morale within the PLP had taken a hit, but at this point few were panicking. There was still a great deal of good will towards Brown and the government from the Labour back benches and, after all, since no election was imminent, there was plenty of time to mount a fightback. The next general election was still at least eighteen months away, possibly two and a half years. As events developed, however, there was precious little time for such a fightback, since events seemed to conspire to knock the government continually onto its back foot.
On 20 November 2007, Labour whips texted MPs to urge them to attend the chamber to support the Chancellor, who would be making an emergency statement. To a hushed House and to genuinely outraged Members on both sides, Darling revealed that two data discs relating to child benefit claimants and containing the personal information of 25 million citizens – nearly half the country’s population – had gone missing in the internal mail system of Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC). The news brought widespread political and public condemnation, sparking fears of data fraud and dealing a near-fatal blow to Brown’s hopes for the introduction of a mandatory national identity database. In no way could Brown or his ministers be blamed for such a catastrophic error. Nevertheless, the incident played into the poisonous narrative, understandably encouraged by the Conservative opposition, that this government’s reputation for quiet competency was ill deserved and unravelling fast.
In his last Budget as Chancellor, as well as making a prediction on growth that had to be downgraded by his successor at No. 11, Brown had announced the reduction from 22p to 20p in the standard rate of income tax. In order to pay for this generosity, he also announced that the 10p rate of tax, which had been introduced in 1999 and mainly benefited lower-paid workers, would be abolished.
