Gordon Brown: Prime Minister. Tom Bower

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       THREE Turbulence

      The curtains of the Kinnocks’ house in Ealing, west London, were tightly drawn on the bright morning of 10 April 1992. Inside, the occupants were crying. Neil Kinnock was shocked that Labour had not won the election. In the west of Scotland, John Smith was similarly distraught, but robustly rejected any responsibility for the defeat. On the banks of the River Forth, Gordon Brown was considering the consequences of Kinnock’s resignation.

      In his telephone conversations with close friends including Nigel Griffiths, Nick Brown, Martin O’Neill, Gavyn Davies and Doug Henderson, Brown alternated between bafflement and explosions of despair. Only Tony Blair aggressively argued in favour of Brown taking the risk of standing for the leadership. He invited Brown to meet at his home in Trimdon, in his Sedgefield constituency, with Nick Brown. As they walked in the countryside, Blair urged him to stand as the modernising candidate. Labour’s English MPs, he said, would support him against Smith who they agreed was incapable of appealing to aspiring English people. Three times Brown had placed first in the elections for the shadow cabinet, and his continuing popularity guaranteed him a fourth victory in the autumn.

      At this decisive moment, Brown was paralysed by his emotions. The trade unions, he was told, favoured Smith; many MPs were against a divisive vote so soon after the party had been through hell to unite itself; and he had been assured that he would inherit the crown after Smith. In meetings over the following two days at Nick Brown’s home in Heaton in Newcastle, and then at County Hall, Durham, with Mandelson, Brown repeated all those reasons for not challenging Smith. The judgement of the Scottish establishment, he told Blair, could not be ignored. All were united by a near-blood oath to the clan chief. The middle-class minister’s son hated the thought of bloodshed. Listening to Brown, Blair was unimpressed by what he later dubbed a masquerade. In the opinion of those associated with ‘The Project’, Brown lacked courage to seize the opportunity and break the mould. He was a woolly apparatchik, eloquent about the party’s ideal philosophy, but unable, like a star pupil politely waiting for the offer of a prize, to elbow his way brutally past those he despised. The conversations ended with Blair losing his temper. Brown, he said, lacked the resilience to withstand personal criticism from his peers, and feared failure. He was a coward. The scales, Blair would tell Anji Hunter, had fallen from his eyes. In the future he would be less deferential towards Brown, less obedient. ‘He chickened out, taking the easy option,’ judged Blair. Others were less critical. ‘Gordon won kudos for not standing,’ said Tam Dalyell.

      Five years later, Brown presented his faint-heartedness as loyalty. ‘I felt I owed a debt of gratitude to John Smith,’ he told Paul Routledge. ‘I felt I had to be loyal. It was for no other reason. I had worked with him for almost eight years on the front bench, and it was right for me to be loyal. I thought the Labour Party was more ready for change than people imagined, but I never thought for a minute of standing against John Smith.’ He considered standing for the deputy leadership, but was turned down by Smith, who felt that two Scotsmen would be electorally unattractive. In turn, Blair rejected Smith’s offer to be his deputy. Revealing his prejudices, Smith chose Margaret Beckett, a left-wing trade unionist certain to antagonise middle England. To minimise their embarrassment and pose as ‘agents of influence’, both Brown and Blair telephoned journalists to explain why they were not standing for the deputy leadership. Few were convinced.

      Brown, previously tipped as the leader-in-waiting, was further deflated when, on 26 July 1992, the day after John Smith’s election victory, the Sunday Times devoted five pages to a profile of Tony Blair as the party’s next leader. Two days later Charles Reiss, the London Evening Standard’s political editor, published a percipient prediction under the headline ‘Coming War Between Brown and Blair’. The whispers in Westminster, reported Reiss, revealed a depth of unhappiness among English Labour MPs about Smith’s appearance as a ‘smiling uncle’. Compared to Blair, who looked approachable and urbane, the newly crowned leader was from the wrong generation. Even the cautious and rhetorical Brown, he wrote, offended some as old-fashioned. Some observers wondered whether the rivalry between Brown and Blair would mirror the similar battle twenty years earlier between Roy Jenkins and Tony Crosland, whose long friendship was corroded by their acrimonious contest for the Labour leadership during the 1970s. The speculation was short-lived. The party was preoccupied by yet another autopsy about its failure to overturn a Tory government responsible for a major recession. The debate identified several culprits, including Gordon Brown.

      Shortly after his appointment as John Smith’s shadow chancellor, Brown hosted a drinks party in his office. In the sombre atmosphere, Peter Mandelson, the newly elected MP for Hartlepool, was openly rebellious. ‘The party,’ he said loudly, ‘has to modernise, and John Smith is not up to it.’ Mandelson’s disloyalty caused no surprise. The dissent was not directed towards Smith alone. Mandelson’s audience knew that in other rooms Brown was under attack for having approved Smith’s discredited shadow budget. Brown’s silence was deemed to be incriminating. He dismissed the criticism as irrelevant. In 1997 he would claim that his new position as shadow chancellor had bestowed on him the power to challenge Smith ‘to change our whole economic policy’. That was undoubtedly the Herculean challenge he set himself in 1992, but at the time many doubted whether he could overcome Smith’s conservatism, and whether the party could change sufficiently to avoid a fifth election defeat.

      The hunger for victory persuaded Brown finally to acknowledge the achievements of Thatcherism. He jettisoned any affection for Neil Kinnock’s ‘Red Rose’. That misty-eyed, superficial change of image had not neutralised the public’s perception that Labour would restrict options, dampen ambitions and nationalise fitted kitchens. On the contrary, Kinnock had reinforced ‘Basildon man’s’ perception of Labour as an enemy, keen to impose shackles on behalf of society. Until the Attlee legacy was repudiated, the new shadow chancellor knew, Labour could not pose as a party offering СКАЧАТЬ