Gordon Brown: Prime Minister. Tom Bower

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СКАЧАТЬ the prime minister emboldened Brown. He had won a reputation as a serial embarrassment to the government by regularly revealing confidential information supplied by disgruntled civil servants; his latest had exposed the government’s refusal to increase consumers’ rights against the privatised utilities. By spring 1991 he consistently appeared the outstanding member of the shadow cabinet, ranking among Labour’s giants. The perceptive interpreted his speeches as reflecting his serious disenchantment with the party’s leadership. To Kinnock’s irritation, he was mentioned as the leader-in-waiting. Dissatisfaction was particularly prevalent among Scottish MPs fearful of a fourth election defeat.

      Although the opinion polls had swung back in Labour’s favour, a weariness was infecting the party, and there was uncertainty about whether Kinnock could win an election victory. With Blair’s encouragement, his personal assistant Anji Hunter and Peter Mandelson were touring Labour constituencies to identify kindred spirits who supported radical change despite intimidation and threats of deselection. The roots of the New Labour project, forging a brotherhood of survivors before the outbreak of renewed conflagration, started just one year before a general election which Kinnock anticipated winning. The birth of this magic circle, born from despair and cemented by bonds of close friendship, was gradual. In Mandelson’s version, he was uncertain whether Labour could ever win an election with a Celtic leader. Over lunch with a sympathetic journalist in 1991, shortly after his selection as the parliamentary candidate for Hartlepool, Mandelson mused, ‘It’s time we had an English leader.’ He was already veering towards Blair. ‘People listening to the BBC’s broadcasts of Blair’s speeches,’ continued Mandelson, ‘say here is the next leader of the Labour Party.’ He would later deny having turned away from Brown so early.

      Brown was more concerned by the substance than the image. Despite his visits to the City, John Smith favoured the old-style socialist command economy rather than an equal partnership between the government and capitalists. Brown’s conversations at his regular dinners with Doug Henderson, Martin O’Neill and Nick Brown revolved around replacing Smith’s obsolescent ideology with a new agenda. ‘You’re promising things you can’t deliver,’ O’Neill told Brown. ‘It’s the same trap as the seventies.’ Usually, Brown did not comment. Despite the Glasgow versus Edinburgh friction, he shared the same Christian socialist values as Smith. Both favoured community values rather than satisfying the aspirations of the enfranchised ex-working classes. Like Smith’s, Brown’s world revolved around Scotland’s party machine and the plight of Kirkcaldy and similar Scottish communities – uneconomic coalmines, decrepit linoleum factories and Harold Wilson’s failed investments in technology – and what he called ‘the causes of poverty which are unemployment and a welfare state that isn’t working’.

      To avoid criticism from the trade unions, Brown resisted questioning Smith’s agenda even among friends, although he knew he would have to break away from that view. During 1991 he confided to Peter Mandelson that Smith would be unsuitable as chancellor if Labour won the 1992 election. Smith, he believed, was too dogmatic and simplistic on economic matters. Mandelson and Brown agreed that electoral success depended upon committing the party to as little as possible. Contrived obfuscation was the ideal strategy. The obstacles were Smith, who was antagonistic towards such tactics, and Kinnock, who was reluctant to endorse Brown’s proposals to prove Labour’s economic competence.

      The disputes between the three – Kinnock, Smith and Brown – Kinnock complained, were loud and long. They agreed not to revoke the Conservatives’ trade union legislation or to advocate a return to 83 per cent tax rates; but they were firmly committed to the redistribution of wealth. Would it be inviting electoral suicide, they wondered, to mention tax increases and a commitment to full employment in the manifesto? Watching John Smith ploddingly composing the tax plans for the shadow budget depressed Brown. Despite his sparkling performances in the House of Commons, Smith lacked originality. The more he insisted that the manifesto would pledge to levy ‘fair taxes’, the angrier Brown became. Smith spoke of ‘one more heave’ to prevent a fourth Tory victory, a term condemned by Brown as self-revealingly crude and destined to end in a similar fiasco to 1987. Brown believed that only he foresaw the imminent disaster. He alone was certain of the proper route to victory. In response, Smith castigated him for offering no new ideas.

      Quietly, Brown began consulting trade unionists, key party activists and sympathetic MPs about the possibility of an alternative to Smith as party leader if Labour was defeated at the general election. He calculated the permutations to see whether he might beat Smith, or at least achieve a sufficient vote to mark his future inheritance. The more Smith insisted on the manifesto overtly pledging higher taxes, the more resolutely Brown sought out dissidents. His unhappiness climaxed during one stormy meeting. Kinnock had agreed with Smith to pledge tax increases in the manifesto. Brown disagreed vociferously, and questioned Smith’s principles. Did Smith actually understand economics? Brown found his bonhomie irritating, and suspected his regular attendance at church was deceptive. Brown’s dislike of what he saw as the bigotry of western Scotland – the area of John Smith, John Reid and Helen Liddell – swelled. In the back of his mind lurked new doubts about Smith’s tolerance of corruption in his local party. The murkiness in Monklands seemed to reflect Smith’s self-limiting terms of reference towards house prices, wages and human motives. All his attitudes were shaped by his experience in Scotland. His caricature of middle England was the expensive, eccentric neighbourhood of Hampstead in north-west London, and he did not understand the real middle England’s reaction to the prospect of higher taxation. Nor did Kinnock. As for John Reid, Brown was disdainful of a man he characterised as an untrustworthy, indiscreet, alcoholic thug.

      Despite his disparagement of John Smith’s insularity, Brown himself was uneasy with England’s growing multi-culturalism. His integrity, grittiness and clannishness – the essence of his Scottishness – were familiar characteristics in the English shires, but not across the urban sprawls. Proud of his background, he felt only contempt for the criticism of him by London’s media classes and those Labour MPs who disliked his refusal to peel away his Scottish skin. Like Smith, Brown knew little about middle England’s mood beyond the windows of the northbound express train from King’s Cross to Scotland on Friday nights. Neither man had much affection for England’s neat villages, picturesque market towns and manicured countryside. To Brown London was a workplace, not a cultural home. He was rarely seen in the capital’s theatres or concert halls, in contrast to his attendances at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh. Scots, he was happy to remind others, are an internal people, well known to each other but distant from outsiders.

      The gap between the two cultures irritated Mo Mowlam, Brown’s deputy as shadow DTI spokesman. In 1991 he criticised her slapdash approach and coarseness, sparking her dislike of the northern cabal around him. After one dinner in an Indian restaurant with Brown, Henry McLeish, Nigel Griffiths, Doug Henderson and Nick Brown, she told friends the experience was so appalling that she believed Brown was unfit to become the party’s leader. His companions were hardly impressive praetorian guards. Unlike Winston Churchill, Brown did not like dominating first-rate minds. The esprit de corps his loyalists engendered magnified his character traits.

      In a rare attempt to humanise his image and attract support, he agreed to co-operate with Fiona Millar, a young Labour supporter employed by the Sunday Express, on a newspaper profile. The overt reason was Brown’s candidacy to be the party’s next leader. Naturally, he told Millar that he was ‘cool towards the notion’. He did however admit that his personality and policies irritated many Labour MPs. ‘It’s the old story,’ he confessed, ‘that your opponents are across from you in the House of Commons and your enemies are next to you. There are a number of people who resent me, but all I have done is get on with my job, and I don’t think anyone would accuse me of not being a team player.’ The profile’s first public description of his home was not encouraging. The austerity of a new floral three-piece suite in the living room, and the undisguised sparseness of the other rooms with their bare walls and a solitary piano, a present СКАЧАТЬ