Gordon Brown: Prime Minister. Tom Bower

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СКАЧАТЬ a similar vein he toured Labour associations, occasionally helped by Douglas Alexander, a young Scottish lawyer crafting his speeches, damning the ‘markets [which] cannot educate’ and urging investment in British technology to fill the country’s ‘innovation gap’ and ‘training gap’. His campaign was not universally applauded by his colleagues. He was accused of being an effective critic, delivering coruscating diatribes against Thatcherism, but providing few new ideas for a cure. He spoke fluently, full of certainties, simultaneously as a moderniser and a traditionalist, but seemed uncertain about the consequences of his proposals. His reputation rested on his industry, but the party’s intellectuals wanted a heavyweight, left-wing analysis of Thatcherism. They questioned whether Brown was merely a Labour loyalist, promising the creation of ‘economic powerhouses’ to create jobs and an end of unemployment, or an original thinker. His journalistic, broad-brush approach to politics, rarely arguing about socialist philosophy, was proof for his critics of frivolity. ‘He has a moral revulsion against the government,’ wrote Paul Addison, ‘but you felt he would only offer a more decent form of Thatcherism in its place. It’s no longer really a socialist solution.’

      Brown hated any criticism, and these attacks were particularly serious. His reaction was noticeable. The formerly witty, approachable man was gradually assuming the posture of a burdened statesman. To prove his suitability for power and to protect himself from making mistakes, he adopted a new gravitas in order to help establish Labour’s reputation for competence. Journalists travelling with him noticed how his good humour evaporated when a camera appeared, and despite his friendship with an interviewer, a sheet of plate glass would suddenly seem to separate the two. Anxious to micro-manage his appearances, Brown adopted a habit of robotic repetition. One memorable example of his repeated attempts to manipulate the agenda occurred during an interview with David Frost. In reply to an enquiry, Brown said, ‘That isn’t the question.’ Frost retorted, ‘Yes it is, because I just asked it.’ The mystery for his new audience was whether Gordon Brown would emerge as an undisputed leader thanks to some hitherto unseen magic, or whether the enigma merely masked blandness.

      His opportunity to disarm the cynics came on 5 October 1990, the last day of the Labour Party conference in Blackpool. After many bitter arguments, Margaret Thatcher had reluctantly announced that Britain would join the ERM, at the rate of £1 for DM 2.95. Critics immediately predicted disaster, believing that the pound was overvalued. The prime minister was beleaguered. By contrast, Smith and Brown appeared serene. Labour’s lead in the polls had soared to double figures, and the party leadership, convinced of the country’s weariness with Thatcher, believed that electoral victory was inevitable. The question was whether Labour would support the government’s application to join the ERM at the high exchange rate. Most people were unaware that a year earlier, John Smith had quietly announced his support. At 4 p.m. on the last day of the conference, Roy Hattersley called Smith. ‘What’s our policy on ERM?’ he asked. ‘No alternative but to support the government,’ said Smith.

      Five years earlier the party, including Blair and Brown, had supported a policy of withdrawal from the European Union. Brown had played a significant part in transforming Labour into a more electable party, as had Blair. Charles Clarke, Neil Kinnock’s chief of staff, had asked John Monks, then deputy general secretary of the TUC, to meet the two MPs as examples of the party’s encouraging future prospects. In Monks’s opinion, Blair had proven his abilities in 1988 by astutely negotiating an agreement with the unions to acknowledge that the new Conservative laws ending the closed shop (which compelled workers to belong to a union) would not be revoked by a Labour government. That success had, in Monks’s opinion, catapulted Blair up to Brown’s level.

      Although the two were close, their differences were marked. Blair took a metropolitan view of politics, eager to lobby for the support of the rich and to criticise the trade unions. By comparison, Brown refused to attack the trade unions, and remained antagonistic towards capitalism. The similarity between the two was that both felt ‘modernisation’ was necessary to win an election. While Brown’s journey had been a struggle through a mass of research and intellectual reasoning, Blair acted largely by instinct. One marked difference was in their attitude towards John Smith. Brown was committed to his mentor, but in Blair’s opinion Smith was tainted by his toleration of cronyism and corruption among local party activists employed by the council in his Monklands constituency. Similarly, Blair had little confidence in Kinnock. By the end of 1990, Brown’s mood about the party’s leadership was edging closer to Blair’s. The countdown to the test of his character began on 28 November 1990. The outcome would depend upon his courage.

      Eight days after failing to win sufficient votes in the first ballot of Conservative MPs in a leadership vote brought about by Michael Heseltine’s challenge following Geoffrey Howe’s devastating resignation speech, Margaret Thatcher resigned as prime minister. John Major’s election as the new leader revived the Tories’ fortunes in the opinion polls. Labour fell 5 per cent behind the Conservatives. Overnight, Brown’s unease about Labour’s election chances increased. The task of persuading the electorate of Labour’s financial competence fell to him and John Smith. Smith proposed launching an offensive in the City, which had been rapidly denuded of Tory grandees following ‘Big Bang’, which transformed not only the City but Britain as a whole.

      Over the next two years, Smith and Brown frequently visited financial institutions in a ‘prawn cocktail circuit’ in an attempt to attract supporters. They were successful among the American, Australian and continental bankers who lacked tribal prejudice against old Labour. But British stalwarts like Lord King, Rocco Forte, Lord Delfont, Stanley Kalms, Alan Sugar and Clive Thompson were incontrovertibly grateful to Thatcher’s revolution. Few were convinced that Smith and Brown actually liked the City’s denizens, or understood the complexities of bank capital. Brown appeared not to have lost his conviction that ministers and civil servants could manage industry better than the entrepreneurs. His references to the Guinness and Barlow Clowes scandals cast him as a mudslinger, unaware that the development of the City as the world’s third-largest trading centre would destroy the amateurs he loathed.

      Brown was scathing about such criticism. Honesty, he said, was more important than undeserved wealth. His ‘vision for the new world’ to replace the Tories’ ‘bleak, gigantic marketplace of self-seekers, each in lonely competition with each other’ was ‘a community of opportunity’. The rottenness of Thatcherism was epitomised by the appointment of fourteen former Conservative ministers as directors of companies they had helped to privatise. Those appointments suggested more than greed. ‘Privatisation,’ Brown said tersely about the new millionaires, ‘began with selling the family silver. It is now ending in the farce of golden parachutes for departing cabinet ministers.’ The recipients of ‘jobs for the boys’ included Norman Fowler, the former transport minister who joined National Freight, a company privatised by his department; Norman Tebbit, the ex-industry secretary who became a director of the newly privatised British Telecom; Peter Walker, formerly energy secretary and now a director of British Gas; and Lord Young, another former industry secretary who, after overseeing the privatisation of Cable and Wireless, was appointed a director of the company.

      Those apparent conflicts of interest were to Brown as repellent as the huge profits earned by the newly privatised utilities and the unprecedented pay increases which their directors awarded themselves. His cure was a reaffirmation of the virtues of public ownership, a national investment bank, legislation to ban ‘unjustified rises in company directors’ pay’ and a ban on ‘huge perks’. Labour insiders including Charles Clarke noticed Brown’s cautious retreat from ‘modernisation’ as he once again opposed the privatisation of state monopolies. Nothing was said, however, because his attacks helped bring John Major’s honeymoon to a quick end. Electors voiced their disenchantment about perceived corruption, the faltering economy and bickering ministers. Major, who irritably described Brown as ‘a master of the personal insult’ СКАЧАТЬ