Gordon Brown: Prime Minister. Tom Bower

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СКАЧАТЬ the spotlight, and now his chance had arisen at the most favourable moment as, during Smith’s convalescence, he took his place on Labour’s front bench. Nigel Lawson’s strategy appeared to be crumbling. The Tories were becoming the victims of their own mistakes. There were widespread protests in Scotland against the new poll tax, inflation was climbing above 4 per cent, interest rates were rising towards 14 per cent, unemployment was stuck at three million and, with a worsening balance of payments, there was a run on sterling. Lawson’s boast about his ‘sound management of the economy’ was an easy target.

      ‘This is a boom based on credit,’ mocked Brown, eager to prove his skills during the debate on the autumn financial statement on 1 November 1988. Standing at the dispatch box in a crowded chamber, glancing at a speech printed out in huge letters to compensate for his poor eyesight, Brown relished the occasion. Countless speeches in dank Scottish assembly halls had primed his self-confident, exquisitely timed flourishes, mixing statistics and oratory while displaying his mastery of the dialectic, the rapier of eloquent Marxists. He deployed artful mockery to rile an arrogant chancellor for allowing consumption to spiral out of control and for making consistently wrong forecasts. ‘Most of us would say,’ scoffed Brown at his crestfallen target, ‘that the proper answer is to keep the forecasts and discard the chancellor.’ Each cutting jibe, accompanied by whoops of derision from the Labour benches, rattled Lawson’s pomposity. The chancellor had not anticipated the humiliation or the lukewarm support from the Tory benches. His pained expression was Brown’s reward. The result, Brown would later say, was ‘an unequal dialogue between a chancellor who had not yet made up his mind when to retire and a prime minister who had not yet made up her mind when to sack him’. During those magical minutes, Labour MPs felt a surge of hope. Here, perhaps, was the new hero they had sought so desperately. Brown sat down to roars of approval.

      Walking through the arched corridors of Westminster later that afternoon, he was suitably modest, feeling an inner calm about his good fortune. In just two days, Labour MPs would vote for the shadow cabinet. The combination of his Commons performance with his astute handling of a series of leaks had earned him an irreproachable reputation. Once again, he sought the help of Nick Brown to lobby for votes. The result, late on 6 November, was electrifying. As he rushed from Committee Room 14, Brown was laughing. He was top of the poll. Following him out of the room, Tony Blair was seen telephoning his wife Cherie to report his own first appearance on the list, his reward for humiliating Lord Young, the secretary of state for trade and industry, about the government’s misconduct of supervising Barlow Clowes, an investment company which collapsed as a result of dishonesty. The next morning’s newspapers praised Brown as ‘high flying’ and ‘a horse for early investment’. One sage wrote, ‘He appears to possess the ultimate political quality of luck.’ A few, aggressively briefed by Mandelson, speculated that Brown had become a future contender for the party’s leadership. Willie Whitelaw, the Tory elder statesman and former home secretary, said that both Brown and Blair were ‘improved and becoming a little dangerous’. Another observer noted that even at that moment Brown appeared affected by self-doubt: ‘He is very ambitious, but he seems to lack the nerve to go right to the very top.’ Brown’s image among the agnostics was not of a leader but of the Scottish engineer on the ocean liner, toiling away below decks in the engine room, polishing the pistons and removing the grease.

      An opportunity to shed that reputation was again provided by Lawson. After journalists briefed by the chancellor reported that he intended to target the poor and pensioners with benefits while withholding the money from the rich, Lawson complained that he had been misquoted. The furore allowed Brown to parade his Christian conscience. ‘The government’s real objective,’ he taunted the tarnished chancellor in the Commons, ‘is to move from a regime of universal benefits to a regime of universal means testing, jeopardising for millions of pensioners security in ill-health and dignity in old age.’ Means testing pensions, said Brown, was ‘the most serious government assault so far mounted on the basic principles of Britain’s postwar welfare state’. His reputation harmed by scathing headlines whose implication – ‘Veteran Chancellor Bloodied by Upstart’ – was clear, Lawson’s misfortunes resulted in rich kudos for Brown. The Commons was the perfect platform from which to parade his loathing for complacent Tories feigning to help the poor. They were men, he sniped, who cared for power and money rather than principle. Lawson and Nicholas Ridley, the secretary of state for the environment and High Thatcherite minor aristocrat, ranked among the worst. Ridley’s aspiration was to deregulate, to withdraw subsidies, and to delight in not pulling the levers of power. Ridley sneered at Brown’s ‘supply-side socialism’. Standing in the crowded chamber, Brown reacted with genuine anger to the chain-smoking minister who appeared to care more about his ashtray than his departmental in-tray. Above all, Brown reviled Thatcher’s affection for photo-opportunities: one day she was seen promoting science, the next day campaigning against litter, then advancing the cause of women and later urging the regeneration of the inner cities. ‘Today a photo-opportunity,’ he wrote, ridiculing the ‘Maggie Acts’ headlines, ‘tomorrow a new issue, the last one all but forgotten. The government’s main new investment in these vital concerns has been in its own publicity.’ His incandescence at the rising cost of official advertising, from £20 million to £100 million, seemed genuine. Four years later he would adopt the same tactics as virtuous ploys to help win an election.

      Brown’s pertinent strength in 1988 was his patent sincerity. Like a machine-gun, around the clock, seven days a week, he worked to capture the headlines, firing off press releases on every subject, with newsworthy coups offering leaks of confidential Whitehall information. One day he publicised a government memorandum about civil servants not encouraging grants for high-technology research; another day he produced secret government statistics showing that the poorest four million homes were worse off than they had been ten years earlier; another day he trumpeted a report by Peter Levene, the personal adviser to Michael Heseltine at the ministry of defence, recommending that, to save money, Royal Navy ships should be refitted by private contractors. Levene’s discovery that the efficiency of the naval dockyards could not be assessed because their accounting systems were ‘entirely meaningless’ was derided by Brown’s assertion, to cheers, that ‘this is the most devious government we’ve had this century’.

      Success fuelled his passion: at 7.30 on Boxing Day morning he telephoned Alistair Darling, a lawyer and Scottish activist educated at Loretto, a private school outside Edinburgh. ‘Have you seen the story in today’s Daily Telegraph?’ he asked. ‘No,’ replied Darling. ‘I’m still asleep.’ Deprived of a personal family life, Brown had become preoccupied by politics. Gradually, his passion distorted his perspective on life. Some accused him of hyperactivity, of becoming over-exposed as a rent-a-quote politician, robotically spouting One True Faith. He confessed his awareness that ‘rising can turn into falling pretty quickly’, and blamed his irrepressible desire to lead Labour away from its past and towards new policies. His fervour would brook no opposition, especially from other members of his party.

      Among the most difficult were his fellow Scots. His old foe George Galloway and John Reid, previously a sociable partner, had become argumentative and occasionally unreasonable. Reid and his group, Brown suspected, were quintessentially sectarian west Scotland left-wing hardmen, meeting as a caucus before general meetings to agree their arguments and votes. ‘He’s a music hall artist,’ Brown said of one agitator whom he castigated as ‘a prisoner of his upbringing’, perhaps failing to recognise that he too was a hostage to his own past.

      Among the shackles of that past was the feud with Robin Cook. ‘It’s chemical СКАЧАТЬ