Gordon Brown: Prime Minister. Tom Bower

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       TWO Metamorphosis

      Gordon Brown’s first impression of Westminster was of Bedlam. Bellowing, triumphant Tories boasting a 144 majority pushed past the dejected remnants of the Labour Party. Dressed in sharp suits, gleaming shirts and polished shoes, the swaggering representatives of the establishment reinforced Brown’s belief in society’s inequities and his commitment to the disadvantaged. His election victory had brought clarity into his life. There was a noticeable self-assuredness during his first days in the Palace of Westminster. His intellect and surviving a decade of political turmoil in Scotland protected him from the nervous breakdown affecting others in the party. While they behaved feverishly, he sensibly focused on establishing his presence with political journalists, positioning himself as a Tribunite, and supporting Neil Kinnock against Roy Hattersley in the leadership election. He preferred the Welshman’s left-wing, anti-European policies. Like most of his tribe, he was resolved to reimpose socialism. Even the collapse of the socialist experiment in France just eighteen months after President Mitterrand’s election was not absorbed as a portent.

      Luck, fate and effortless success had barely influenced Brown’s career so far. Everything he had accomplished had been earned by diligence and unpleasant experience. After the election there would be profits, losses and mixed blessings. Among the last were the arrangements for his office, which were certainly fateful and, in the long term, unhelpful.

      The small, windowless office he was assigned in the heart of the building could barely contain two desks and filing cabinets. Discomfort did not bother Brown, nor was he anything more than a little bemused by the choice of his co-occupant, Tony Blair, another newly elected MP. Subsequently, some would say that the coupling was not mere coincidence, but was the manoeuvre of a skilful matchmaker in the whips’ office brokering the notion that the two novices epitomised the party’s future hopes. That is unlikely. The two new young MPs were markedly different, although bonds would eventually develop.

      Tony Blair had never abandoned the fringes of the Labour Party adopted as a long-haired rock guitarist at Oxford. Uneducated about political theory, he had shown little interest in politics, pursuing an unremarkable career at the Bar. His affability, eagerness and flattery of Brown’s political mastery appealed to the Scotsman who already bore the scars of political battles. Together they could laugh. Blair was a good mimic, and Brown’s sarcasm was witty. Brown was generous: as a television producer he had perfected the art of scripting his interviewees’ opinions into snappy, pertinent soundbites. Blair received the benefit of that black art, also learning how to write eye-catching press releases, compose structured public speeches and cultivate the techniques of self-presentation. Taught to encourage the best in people, Blair deferred with courtesy to the confident grammar-school boy. Brown and Blair, in that order, became affectionately known around Westminster as ‘the twins’ or ‘the blood brothers’.

      Weeks after the election, over a drink in a Glasgow pub with Doug Henderson, then a regional organiser for the GMWU, Brown spoke about his experiences and about some of the other new MPs. Henderson had known Brown for ten years, discussing politics on platforms around Scotland and against each other on The Lion’s Share, a local television programme. ‘That Blair fellow,’ said Brown, ‘he’s quite clever.’

      Although Brown was instinctively more left-wing than Blair, he benefited from the proximity of a sympathetic soulmate. During their frequent conversations, not least later during their journeys abroad, they discovered a mutual frustration about the party’s direction and a common bewilderment about the solution. But in his maiden speech on 27 July 1983, Brown revealed no ideological dilemmas. His theme was the plight of his unemployed constituents. In an engaging delivery, he described ‘a new arithmetic of depression and despair’ – the ‘tragic toll’ of mass unemployment: ‘The chance of a labourer getting a job in my constituency is 150 to 1 against. There is only one vacancy in the local careers office for nearly five hundred teenagers who have recently left school.’ He criticised the government for not only causing unemployment in the crumbling coal, linoleum and textile industries, but for penalising the helpless victims of those closures. There was heartfelt grief in his description of those in the desolate communities expecting redundancy and fearing permanent financial hardship. Ignoring their plight, he continued, the government proposed to reduce benefits while taunting the unemployed that new jobs were available, if only they looked. The government’s task, he said, was to create those new jobs: ‘The House was told in 1948 that the welfare state was created to take the shame out of need. Is that principle to be overthrown by an ever-increasing set of government assaults on the poor that are devoid of all logic, bereft of all morality and vindictive even beyond monetarism?’ Brown was pleased by the murmurs of approval his ardour evoked. In his opinion, only state intervention and the imposition of a minimum wage could help those at the bottom of the social ladder. The conviction socialist derided the notion that free markets and self enterprise were preferable to planning by Whitehall.

      On the Conservative side there was respect for the feisty newcomer, but also some derision. Brown ignored the Tory riposte that Labour was responsible for unemployment in Fife. Jim Callaghan’s government had plunged the country into chaos, and now this young Scotsman was proposing to reintroduce the same discredited politics. Labour’s cure for ‘the sick man of Europe’ was similar to the Marxist dogma then crippling the communist countries of eastern Europe. Brown might win smiles by ridiculing the notion of the unemployed becoming self-reliant, if only by buying a ladder, bucket and cloth and offering themselves as window cleaners; he might arouse titters of laughter by taunting the Tories that ‘Up your ladder’ appeared to have replaced Norman Tebbit’s ‘On your bike’ speech; but the nation had now voted twice in succession against the legacy of Attlee, Wilson and Callaghan.

      Brown was undeterred. To him, self-improvement was as repulsive as the government’s plan to persuade the young unemployed to accept lower wages or face a cut in their benefits if an offer of training was refused. ‘Essentially,’ he told the Commons, quoting confidential government documents leaked to him by a sympathiser, ‘the papers say that the DHSS are to inculcate good working habits in the unemployed. What the government would be better doing is bringing new jobs to the area.’

      Penalising the personal behaviour of the working classes through taxation had been attacked in 1937 by Ernest Bevin, Attlee’s future foreign minister who was then leader of the TGWU. For Bevin and all socialists, the worst aspect of such retribution was the means tests to assess whether the poor should receive assistance from the state. The degradation of the inspections to assess poverty, argued Bevin, inhibited the poor both from saving and from seeking work. Forty-seven years later, Brown repeated the same arguments as an attack on the Conservative government’s review of universal payments of benefits to all, irrespective of wealth. In his opinion, even to consider targeting payments exclusively towards the poor was heresy. Means tests, he believed, were inhuman because they ‘would deter the claims of those most in need’. In his excitement he criticised the right-wing Adam Smith Institute on BBC TV’s Panorama on 10 December 1984 for, as he claimed, recommending the end of child benefit and the abolition of the welfare state. Sixteen months later, after difficult negotiations, the BBC apologised for broadcasting Brown’s erroneous statement. Brown was embarrassed. He prided himself on quoting carefully researched facts, and took exception to any accusation of mistakes or worse, distortion.

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