Gordon Brown: Prime Minister. Tom Bower

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СКАЧАТЬ an unexpected response. ‘You should get to know Gordon,’ said Mandelson. ‘He wants to be a friend of yours.’ Gould realised that he was being abandoned. Mandelson’s seduction – the offer of friendship, with its concomitant demand for emotional commitment – had been aborted. Even worse, Mandelson had switched. He was now briefing against Gould and promoting Brown and Blair. ‘It’s an ideological war,’ Gould realised, but was nevertheless relieved when his report, ‘The Productive and Competitive Economy’, was approved by the party executive on 25 May 1988. Unintentionally, he had prompted the conception of an emotional, triangular relationship between Mandelson, Brown and Blair.

      Peter Mandelson had become persuaded that Gordon Brown was the party’s future. Compared with so many Labour politicians, Brown was immensely attractive. Unaware of his lurking volcanic aloofness, Mandelson regarded Brown as a sensitive, handsome, entertaining professional tainted only by impatience and intensity. Among other MPs he was regarded as unselfish, willing to help those in difficulty, extending personal kindnesses even to those with whom he disagreed if they had won his respect as an intellectual equal, and arguing from knowledge rather than purely prejudice. Watching him at receptions, as he glad-handed and back-slapped the faithful with apparent conviction, and without betraying his dislike of the performance, few would have recognised the brooding workaholic who invariably arrived late at a restaurant for dinner with friends and, after gobbling down his steak and chips or a plate of spaghetti, would rush back to his rooms to either type a speech or read a book.

      Brown’s combination of intellect, sophistication, ambition and popularism appealed to Mandelson. Standing on the steps of the party’s headquarters in Walworth Road, he told Andy McSmith, a Labour press officer, ‘Gordon will one day be the party’s leader.’ Mandelson’s prediction surprised McSmith. Brown was still largely unknown. Mandelson acknowledged that obstacle, but had repeatedly promised Brown that it would be overcome. During their frequent meetings Brown constantly complained, ‘I’m not getting enough mention in the papers. My name’s only in a couple of them.’ Mandelson reassured him that his hard work would be rewarded. Both were grappling with the party’s ideology, and belatedly welcomed the opportunities of the 1987 defeat. With the support of the party’s left wing and the endorsement of Neil Kinnock, Brown believed he would eventually succeed the Welshman as the party’s leader. He dismissed the chances of his rivals, except possibly John Smith, who was handicapped by his poor relationship with Kinnock. Brown’s quandary was how to develop an alternative to Thatcherism. Marooned among orthodox Scottish socialists, he was still estranged from the consequences of ‘Big Bang’.

      Nigel Lawson’s boom had visible fault-lines, but Thatcherism appeared irreversible. Relying on people and markets rather than Whitehall civil servants to manage the economy was attractive to electors. Mandelson, alert to the new ideas, understood the dilemma. ‘I think you should go to Gordon,’ he told Michael Wills, a television producer at LWT’s Weekend World who drafted policy documents and speeches for him. ‘Help him become prime minister.’

      Interested in the failings of British industry, Wills had just completed a series of documentaries revealing the limitations and frustrations of British managers. In particular he had been struck by an interview with a supplier of car components who volunteered that he had resisted borrowing money from the banks in order to build a new production line to manufacture gearboxes for Honda. His reason was depressing. In the early 1980s he had borrowed for a similar venture, but interest rates had soared and he had been financially crippled. Ever since, he had decided to remain small and safe by not borrowing. He spoke eloquently and authoritatively about the Conservative government’s failure to help industry. This was fertile ground for Labour to exploit, Wills told Brown. Wills introduced Brown to the experts consulted by Weekend World, with whom he discussed the essence of Thatcherism and its American counterpart, Reaganism. Reluctantly, he began to recognise the strength of some Tory policies and the disadvantage of Labour’s adherence to Attlee’s consensus. There was reason to acknowledge that the growth of Europe’s and America’s successful economies was not the result of state intervention. Listening and brooding, he agonised over how to balance incentives to entrepreneurs, the restriction of public spending and the financing of social justice. ‘We need a fairer Britain,’ he repeated as he learnt to sympathise with the market economy. ‘We’ve got to work from first principles towards policies,’ he told his confidants, irritated by Kinnock’s ignorance of economics and John Smith’s resistance to change. Under Smith as shadow chancellor, Labour’s economic policies remained rigidly anti-market, against joining the ERM and in favour of controlling exchange rates. ‘We must persuade the rich of the need for fairness,’ Smith had said, apparently without realising the inherent contradiction. Wealth creators, by definition, are not social philanthropists, but ruthlessly ambitious to earn money for themselves.

      Three successive election defeats had convinced Brown that simply damning the Tories’ sympathy for the rich would not reverse Labour’s political decline. The party needed new ideas. That summer he spent three weeks in Harvard’s library, studying industrial policy and discussing the cause of America’s economic success with local academics. He returned to Westminster emboldened by his intellectual rejuvenation. His task was to find a compromise between old Labour’s philosophies and Thatcherism. There were many false starts. Essentially, he was searching for ideas to help him write a new Labour epic that could rank with Anthony Crosland’s Future of Socialism, a 500-page analysis of how to create an egalitarian, socialist Britain, published in 1956. Throughout, Brown asserted with evangelical sincerity that social Christianity could provide greater fairness and prosperity through a more efficient economy, all in the cause of socialism.

      Nigel Lawson’s budget in 1988 was another ideological challenge. Treasury statistics showed that the reduction in the top rate of tax – from 83 per cent under Labour in 1979 to 60 per cent nine years later – had actually increased the amount of money received by the Treasury, as the rich had less reason to evade and avoid taxes. In his penultimate budget, Lawson announced that the top rate of tax would be reduced from 60 per cent to 40 per cent, and the basic rate cut to 25 per cent from 33 per cent. The Labour benches erupted in uncontrolled protest. The Commons was suspended for ten minutes. Brown joined in the protest. He rejected Lawson’s argument that encouraging enterprise would benefit the poor. Too many millionaires, he raged, were enriching themselves from tax loopholes, not least from share options. Lawson’s budget allowed company directors to buy shares at 1984 prices and take the profits in 1988, paying capital gains tax of 30 per cent rather than 60 per cent. ‘Britain is fast becoming a paradise for top-rate tax dodgers,’ Brown protested, demanding that the ‘share option millionaires’ should be penalised. Instead of rewarding the rich, the government should invest in education and training. Brown was echoing the mantra voiced by Harold Wilson twenty years earlier, although six years of Wilson’s government had ended, at best, in economic paralysis. His unoriginal accusations did not dent Lawson’s claim to have achieved a hat trick – higher spending on public services, lower tax rates and a budget surplus.

      Overshadowing Lawson’s self-congratulation was the rising value of sterling and his bitter row with Thatcher about whether Britain should join the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM). The growing strain between Lawson and Thatcher, and the prospect of rising inflation and an implosion of the boom, encouraged Brown’s belief that the government’s economic policy was doomed. Neil Kinnock’s misfortune was that his alternative policies were unattractive to Labour’s far left. Their representative, Tony Benn, launched a bid for the leadership, and the old internecine war erupted once again. Benn’s bid was trounced at the 1988 autumn party conference in Blackpool, but all the percentage points gained from the Tories shown by the opinion polls evaporated. Labour remained a party of protest, and not an alternative government.

      At the end of the party conference Brown returned to Edinburgh with John Smith. Over the previous week the shadow chancellor had as usual enjoyed himself, living up to his reputation at many parties as a heavy drinker, and smoking cigars after big meals. On reaching home he felt unwell, and was examined in СКАЧАТЬ