Gordon Brown: Prime Minister. Tom Bower

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СКАЧАТЬ in people as economic agents, the ants in the anthill, and he wants ants to have a nice anthill.’ The alienated Labourites did not disagree with Norman Lamont’s successor as chancellor Kenneth Clarke when he jibed that Brown’s regurgitation of lists, strategies, statistics and predictions of doom were self-defeating. ‘He has as much policy content as the average telephone directory,’ mocked Clarke languidly across the floor of the Commons, ‘and if I may say so – it is a modest claim given the competition it faced – I thought the best parts of the hon. gentleman’s speech came when he was quoting me.’ Brown scowled. The dispenser of ridicule hated receiving similar treatment. Even John Smith’s agreement to relaunch Labour on 9 February 1993 as the party of the individual and to abandon any commitment to renationalisation brought only temporary relief.

      Brown’s misfortune was that changing Labour’s economic policy to attract the middle classes was more difficult than Tony Blair’s task, as shadow home secretary, of altering the party’s social policies. While Brown chased every news bulletin, Blair, also helped by Mandelson, concentrated on making limited appearances with ‘warm and chatty’ preludes to reflective answers suggesting the moral high ground. Blair’s insistence on accepting interviews only on his own terms, and resistance to giving instant reactions to please the media’s agenda, gave his rarer interviews a cachet, and gracefully neutralised his opponents.

      Brown had become weary. A visit to Newbury in early 1993 to campaign in the by-election caused by the death of its sitting Tory MP, John Major’s adviser Judith Chaplin, revealed the perils for self-publicists. The previously safe Tory seat was vulnerable. Norman Lamont had committed atrocious gaffes, not least his statement that high unemployment was ‘a price well worth paying’ to reduce inflation. The Tory candidate was an unappealing PR consultant. The seat should have been an easy trophy, but Brown’s performance in front of the television cameras at Vodafone’s headquarters, which were in the constituency, was unproductive. Confidently, he told journalists about the area’s high unemployment. ‘Rubbish,’ exclaimed Chris Gent, Vodafone’s managing director. ‘Our company has grown by 25 per cent in the last year.’ The Liberal Democrats won the by-election.

      In March 1993 the London Evening Standard reported that while Brown was regarded with respect, Tony Blair was the frontrunner to succeed Smith. Brown was furious. On one occasion when Mark Seddon, the genial editor of Tribune, was interviewing Brown in his office, a member of Brown’s staff announced, ‘Tony’s gone ahead without you,’ referring to a meeting the two were to attend. Brown exploded, breaking a pencil in his fury.

      The hostility towards Brown among his fellow MPs was growing. His monotone hectoring was criticised as all too revealing of an unworldly, unmarried forty-one-year-old mystified about the real world. His constant appearance in an identical uniform – blue suit, white shirt and red tie – regardless of the context bewildered those who judged people by such things. Brown’s reputation was not helped by a story of a car journey through countryside when he allegedly said to his companion, ‘Look, those cows have had their foals.’ His new critics delighted in carping that he was ‘a townie who didn’t know where his fish and chips came from’. Others recited an eyewitness’s account of Blair mentioning to Brown that he had once seen Marc Bolan perform. ‘Where is he now?’ asked Brown, preoccupied with drafting a statement. ‘Dead,’ replied Blair. Brown carried on writing, oblivious to the answer.

      In fact he had become oblivious to everything other than his own truths. Like a man possessed, he steamrollered rather than reasoned with critics. Among his victims was Peter Hain, an ambitious left-winger brought up in South Africa whose circuitous route to the Labour Party via student protest, the Liberals and election as Tribune’s secretary baffled many. Unwilling to accept Brown’s economic prescription for an election victory, Hain wrote a pamphlet for the Tribune Group arguing for huge public spending, the abandonment of euromonetarism and a return to full socialism. Labour, Hain complained, had never previously attacked the Tories for increasing taxes, yet Brown was appealing to richer voters by promising to lower direct taxation. ‘Gordon has done a brilliant job in exposing Tory tax hikes,’ said Hain, ‘but voters need to be convinced that Labour can manage the economy more effectively. The modernisers have told us what we’re against but not what we’re for.’ Hain did not grasp that the shadow chancellor had not abandoned socialism in favour of Thatcherism other than as an election ploy. He espoused measured concealment to defeat the Conservatives. Neutralising Hain should have been effortless, but Brown’s methods compounded his predicament. Angry about its attack on himself, he sought to prevent Hain’s pamphlet’s publication. Hain was summoned to Brown’s office and lambasted for thirty minutes. ‘We believe markets must work in the public interest,’ he was lectured. Brown did not understand markets and his list of do-gooding schemes – the University for Industry, a Global Environmental Task Force for young people – and his belief in ‘the community and independence’ did not impress Hain, who insisted that the publication of the pamphlet would go ahead. Convinced that even a single dissenting voice would damage the party, Brown tried to persuade other Tribune members to stop Hain, but without success. Next he sought Mandelson’s help, warning about the pamphlet’s potentially dire consequences. He failed again. With Robin Cook’s support, Hain published his pamphlet. No one noticed its appearance. Brown began to lobby against Hain’s re-election as Tribune’s secretary.

      The succession of rows instigated by Brown among Labour apparatchiks was costly. Repeatedly he lost his temper, screaming obscenities at those he damned as dishonourable or incompetent. Losing the sympathy of potential allies was undermining his status. His admonition that ‘The policies are unpopular with the party but we have to stick with them,’ combined with his refusal to smile while delivering his television soundbites, suggested a dour man. ‘He loves mankind,’ Voltaire is said to have written, ‘therefore he does not need to love his neighbour.’ To outsiders, Brown appeared a tough man, determined to carve out and control his empire; but in the privacy of his office, surrounded by the chaotic debris of books and papers, he violently chewed his fingernails and festered about his predicament. He was oblivious that his terseness, his seeming lack of human warmth, alienated others. Many could not identify with a rumpled, unusually driven man with limited small talk. Trying to understand his Jekyll and Hyde qualities tested the patience of too many. Brown’s passion to transform Labour was understood, but the personal cost was not appreciated. A contemporary profile in the Sunday Telegraph described him, with his ‘smouldering Celtic looks, dry humour and deep Scottish burr’ as ‘the natural heart-throb of the Labour Party’. That exaggeration was accompanied by the more accurate assessment that his qualities of laughter, wit and lightness ‘shine in small company’. The mystery was why a man who could be warm and amusing among friends was so austere in public.

      Any prospects of marriage had now receded. Brown’s recent move from Kennington to a flat in Great Smith Street, Westminster, formerly owned by Robert Maxwell’s company, had brought him physically even closer to his work. His relationship with Marion Caldwell had foundered, and at the instigation of a friend he was reunited with Sheena McDonald, who by then had become a well-known TV presenter about national politics. There was good reason for her to believe that as they had so much in common their friendship would develop into a permanent relationship, if not marriage. Fearing that any public appearance with Brown would compromise her independence as a journalist, she preferred the relationship to remain secret, which suited Brown, but did not help his image.

      In early May 1993, in an attempt to recover the party’s favour, Brown presented ‘Labour’s New Economic Approach’, a policy paper proposing a radical assault on the free market and the City’s vested interests. He had performed a half-reverse somersault from his new gospel. Labour, he promised, would attack bank charges, the business battalions, the fat cats, the monopolies and the shortages of choice, training and opportunity. To reinforce his credentials he launched a campaign against multi-millionaires residing in the UK but claiming to be domiciled overseas in order to avoid British taxation. ‘The Tory СКАЧАТЬ