Gordon Brown: Prime Minister. Tom Bower

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СКАЧАТЬ Geoff Mulgan and John Eatwell. The path back to power, he accepted, was for Labour to appeal to the middle class by changing its image and policies. The first obstacle was the party members, including himself.

      In July 1992 the party faithful were still cursing the ‘culture of contentment’. Gordon Brown hated ‘Basildon man’, the motivated working-class aspirant whom he damned as ‘a selfish, indeed self-centred individual’. To win ‘Basildon man’s’ allegiance, he decided to conceal his disgust and promote the new credo that ‘There is no clash between individual freedom and the advancement of the common good.’ In the frenzy of his writing and speeches, he appeared to abandon his attachment to the idea of the state ‘that all too easily assumes that where there is a public interest there must always be a centralised public bureaucracy’. The state itself, he acknowledged, could itself be a damaging vested interest. In his rush during the summer to compose a new ideology, there were inevitably contradictions. He abandoned pure socialism but espoused collectivism, arguing that individuals should group together for the common good. He abandoned state controls but wanted the markets to operate subject to such controls in the public interest. The new gospel was to revolutionise the Labour Party’s image, but only partially its substance. Gordon Brown could not break away from his life’s attachment to socialism. He urged the faithful not to despair, because ‘The truth is that our natural constituency is the majority who benefit from a just society.’

      In the new House of Commons, the Tories were soft targets. During the election campaign John Major had pledged, ‘Vote Conservative on Thursday and the recovery will continue on Friday.’ Instead, the recession had worsened. Unemployment was rising back towards three million, interest rates were increasing, property prices were falling, car workers were working short time, and the government was poised to announce massive spending cuts. Norman Lamont, the chancellor, was regularly lambasted for misleading the country that taxes would be cut, when in fact they were going up. Inexorably, an old-fashioned sterling crisis was about to explode. Devaluation from the exchange rate of DM 2.95 to the pound was the best cure, but Britain’s membership of the ERM rendered that remedy unavailable. Lamont sought help from the German central bank, but was snubbed. Germany’s economy was expanding while Britain’s was shrinking. Unusually, Lamont’s crisis was also Brown’s. He had supported entry into the ERM, and he rejected unilaterally devaluing sterling.

      The unfolding disaster fulfilled the predictions of Bryan Gould and other Labour opponents of joining the ERM. Their criticism was inflamed by Brown’s aggressive dismissal of their opinions. Robin Cook, supported by Peter Hain, Ken Livingstone and other anti-Europeans, wanted devaluation. Even John Smith supported ‘realignment’. ‘Labour,’ warned Smith, ‘should know the dangers of fixed exchange rates. Harold Wilson’s greatest mistake was to hold sterling against the dollar between 1964 and 1967.’ Gordon Brown disagreed, and insisted that Labour could never again be the party of devaluation. The party, he warned, would lose credibility by following such a policy. Tough on the new orthodoxy, he was sticking to the ERM; forgetting the modernisation gospel he had preached just days earlier, he promoted Old Labour policies of cutting interest rates and greater government investment. Using the identical lexicon as Harold Wilson twenty-five years earlier, he regularly lashed out at the ‘handful of shirt-sleeved speculators’ and City whiz kids dictating the lives of millions and the destinies of national economies. The outbreak of warfare in the party became focused on Brown, who appeared a confused ideologue.

      In early September 1992 the economic crisis escalated. The government’s defence of the pound was faltering. Brown’s support for remaining in the ERM was emphatic. ‘There are those like Lady Thatcher who believe that Britain should devalue,’ he wrote in the Sunday Express on 6 September, ‘and turn its back on Europe and the exchange rate mechanism with all the harsh consequences that would ensue.’ Brown’s alternatives to devaluation were state subsidies and increased taxes. Throughout that week, as the crisis intensified, he was telephoned by journalists and asked why the pound should not be devalued. ‘I can’t afford to think it’s overvalued,’ Brown replied, ‘because it would seem as if Labour believed in devaluation.’ Those who pushed him to promote Britain’s exit from the ERM were met by a solid wall. He refused to consider the possibility that he was wrong. His inconsistency gave the impression that he did not understand economics. In 1997 he would tell Paul Routledge that he had anticipated the crisis. Considering his statements at the time, this appears to be untrue.

      Late in the afternoon of Wednesday, 16 September 1992, Brown was in his office in 1 Parliament Street, overlooking the Treasury building. That morning he had still been convinced that the government would remain in the ERM, helped by Germany’s revaluation of its own currency. He would be vindicated, he reassured John Smith, despite his critics including Ken Livingstone, who again had advocated devaluation. Around Brown were his advisers Neal Lawson, Michael Wills, Lord Eatwell and Geoff Mulgan. The tension was high. The constantly updated television news bulletins reporting Norman Lamont’s battle to save sterling were unnerving. If Labour had won the election in April, Brown would have been the focus of the TV cameras outside the Treasury, and the target of baying Tory MPs inside the Commons. His plight was better than Lamont’s, but the politician whose talent was to ridicule his opponents knew that he was vulnerable to mockery. He had allied himself to a policy which, to his amazement, was collapsing – and worse, he did not understand the reason.

      At 7.30 p.m. everyone in Brown’s office watched the television pictures of the chancellor emerging into the spotlights, brushing his hair, and confessing defeat. Britain, he announced, was withdrawing from the ERM and devaluing. In a surreal exercise, the viewers in Brown’s office darted between the television and the window, gazing down at Lamont in the distance to reassure themselves that the television pictures were reality.

      After Lamont’s announcement came to its abrupt conclusion, the atmosphere in the office was ‘on a knife edge’, recalled one of those present. All eyes swivelled towards Brown and then away. His shock was palpable. He had made a fundamental mistake, and he was terrified. This was the most testing moment of his political career. His refusal to seek the nomination in Hamilton or to contest the party leadership were failures of courage, but were not life-threatening. This crisis endangered his entire future. At that moment he was due to lead the attack against the Tories for a policy he himself supported, and simultaneously he was under attack from the left wing of his own party for ideological folly. No one was certain whether he would cope with the explosion of emotion. Under pressure, the ashen-faced Brown’s behaviour was extraordinary. Some eyewitnesses say they observed the neurotic pessimism of the son of the manse. Others witnessing the brooding volcano in that untidy office would mention the inherent self-destruct button of the Scottish character.

      But Brown did not self-destruct. He reasserted his self-control, the tension eased, and he began designing a strategy for his survival. Driven by his hatred for the Tories and his searing ambition to become party leader, he contrived a convincingly venomous denial of the past. ‘We have to fight to avoid going down with the government,’ was the common sentiment. His first decision was to reject an invitation to appear on that evening’s Newsnight. He knew he would have to answer the charge that if Labour had won the election they would have been hit by the same crisis, and would have reacted identically to the Tories. The party, Brown decided, had to avoid self-flagellation and pontificating about the ‘current mess’. Instead, he would offer soundbites damning the government.

      As he faced the news cameras he propped a piece of paper in front of his eyes bearing the words, unseen by the viewers: ‘Huge chasm’. His identical soundbites, emphasising this ‘huge chasm’ between the government and Labour, blamed everything on the Tories, and suggested that Labour had never endorsed the disastrous policy. ‘We demanded СКАЧАТЬ