Gordon Brown: Prime Minister. Tom Bower

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СКАЧАТЬ supporters, Tribune celebrated the ‘public hammering’ of the modernisers and their ‘pals’ who, eighteen months after Kinnock’s defeat, had failed to have ‘Labour’s future sewn up’. The ‘sub-Thatcherite, euro-dreamland’ and ‘Clintonite supply-siders’ had been defeated by ‘Labourism’.

      In July 1993, Brown and Blair were flummoxed. ‘John’s letting us hang out to dry,’ Brown complained. In particular, Smith’s negotiations to break trade union power within the party were proceeding with excruciating slowness. Introducing ‘one man, one vote’ (OMOV) to replace the unions’ block vote was important if Labour was to capture the confidence of the middle classes. Smith, it appeared to Brown, was not supporting that change. Brown told Blair that Smith was even refusing to see him. ‘Well,’ replied Blair, ‘just walk past his secretary, shout “I’ve got a meeting,” and walk in.’ That might work for Blair, Brown knew, but he lacked the audacity.

      As Brown was tortured by Smith’s obduracy, the weakness of his character emerged. While he could confidently withstand intellectual arguments, he lacked the resilience to cope with excessive emotional pressure. Unable to manage his rejection, Brown became depressed by the OMOV disagreement, and edged towards a nervous breakdown. ‘We won’t carry the party with that,’ he repeated endlessly, fearful of risks and contemplating defeat. The contrast between Brown and Blair at this time was revealing. As Oliver Wendell Holmes, the US supreme court judge, commented about Franklin Roosevelt, ‘A second-rate brain and a first-rate temperament is OK, because you can buy in first-rate brains.’ Equally furious as Brown that Smith was not enthusiastically supporting modernisation, Blair coolly took risks to challenge Smith, and then considered retiring from politics. But his supporters urged him to be resolute. ‘You’ve got to realise that you must stand as the next leader,’ he was told while staying with friends in the country. ‘But Gordon wants it so much more than me,’ replied Blair. Until then, the two may have been known as ‘the twins’ or ‘the blood brothers’. In summer 1993, the description ‘Brown – Blair’ shifted to ‘Blair – Brown’.

      Those gloating during that summer about the humbling of ‘the king of soundbites’ were premature. In the weeks before the party conference, after listening to the advice of Ed Balls, Gavyn Davies, Michael Wills and others, Brown regained his self-confidence and composed a seminal speech to re-establish the modernisers’ gospel and purposely retreat from a commitment of wealth redistribution. Enthused by a slogan used by George Bush, he would replace ‘tax and spend’ with ‘invest and grow’. The breakout on 28 July 1993 was a public renunciation of the 1992 manifesto. With gusto, Brown announced that Labour was not against wealth, and would jettison the commitment to levy a 50 per cent inheritance tax. He would no longer insist that managing exchange rates was ‘absolutely necessary’. The counterattack was immediate. Angry trade union leaders and left-wingers telephoned journalists to condemn Brown’s ‘unfashionable’ appeal to the wealthy. Brown retaliated in August. In inflammatory language, he pledged in ‘The New Economic Agenda’, a party pamphlet, to cut taxes and drop all specific spending plans. Labour, he reaffirmed, would never again ‘tax for taxation’s own sake’. ‘From now on,’ he wrote, ‘Labour believes in creating the necessary wealth to fund the social benefits we demand.’

      Without doubt he was inspired by his father’s sermons about Christians triumphing over weakness, pain and misfortune not only courageously, but cheerfully. And, although not immune from misfortune and discouragement, he was urged to join those ‘going forward with a smile … when all seems so dark … more than conquerors, helping us not just to scrape our way to victory but to gain victory very comfortably and successfully’. As the Reverend John Brown had exulted, ‘Let no one go away saying: “I can’t; I can’t; it’s not for me.”’ John Brown’s inspirations were Winston Churchill and Ernest Bevin for being ‘determined on set objectives’. He extolled his congregation, including his sons, ‘Should not all of us, like these two statesmen, have set objectives which we are determined to attain?’ That was Gordon Brown’s Herculean task.

      Over the following weeks, Brown was battered by the left. On 26 September he arrived at a meeting of the National Executive Committee prepared for a stormy confrontation. Snide remarks about his competence were still being made about a stunt in which he had posed with Harriet Harman in front of a huge poster with the legend ‘Tory Tax Bombshell’. The event had misfired when he floundered about the size of the proposed tax increases, with estimates ranging from £59 to £226. At the meeting, the anger towards him was worse than Brown had anticipated. He was puzzled. As a child, he had grown up understanding poverty. There were decaying shipyards and coalmines down the road, worn boots shuffling on the street and endless sermons from his father about the deprived. He had worked passionately to help the poor, but now, despite his commitment, he was being attacked. ‘Don’t the bastards understand?’ he shouted in the privacy of his room. Then he surrendered. The Conservatives’ tax reductions during the 1980s, he said, had been indefensible, and he supported higher taxes. The Mirror’s headline the following morning – ‘Brown Demands Higher Tax Rates for Wealthy’ – signalled his retreat, but during that day, 27 September 1993, he began to reverse his recantation. The choice the party faced was between John Prescott’s ‘traditional values in a modern setting’ and Brown’s socially refined Thatcherism. Proud to be a man of conviction without any doubts, he could be insensitive to the qualities of those who showed a hint of human weakness.

      The trade unions wanted a pledge from Brown to borrow and spend £15 billion in order to reduce unemployment. Brown became obdurate. The trade unions, he believed, were the biggest single obstacle to Labour’s election victory. Nye Bevan, the giant of Labour’s left, was quoted in Brown’s biography of James Maxton castigating Scottish rebels: ‘I will tell you what the epitaph on you Scottish dissenters will be – pure but impotent. Yes, you will be pure all right. But remember at the price of impotency. You will not influence the course of British politics by as much as a hair’s breadth.’ Brown would not repeat that mistake and damage Labour’s election chances. Defiantly, he was prepared to bring the whole house down to crush the opposition. Unpopularity was the price for performing his duty. As he stepped into the corridor, he was asked, ‘Does Labour still believe in the redistribution of wealth?’ Impulsively, he replied, ‘Yes.’ Those were his principles. Later that night, reflecting upon his strategy for Labour’s election victory, he said to those in the bars and corridors: ‘I am not against wealth. I just want everyone to be richer.’ Standing at other bars, Peter Hain and John Edmonds remorselessly disparaged Brown. ‘We should not replace the Red Flag with the White Flag,’ said Edmonds. Shedding Labour’s traditional socialist image, agreed Hain, would destroy all hope of the party ever regaining power. Their animosity was personal.

      Brown and Blair arrived at the 1993 party conference with Smith’s reluctant agreement to curb the trade unions’ control of the party and impose ‘one man, one vote’. The union leaders were incensed. While they would expect Tony Blair to be anti-union, the transformation of Brown grated among the traditionalists. ‘This is a phoney battle,’ John Edmonds challenged Brown, ‘to show Labour is not in thrall to the unions. This is all about Mandelson positioning you and Blair as acceptable, and is against John Smith.’ The battle for OMOV, Edmonds believed, was a figleaf for Brown’s sympathy with Thatcherism. ‘You won’t carry Labour support on these policies,’ he told Brown. ‘I don’t believe in promising full employment any more,’ Brown replied. ‘It gives the impression of a government creating worthless jobs at great cost.’ To hear that from Brown’s mouth surprised the socialist.

      That year’s shadow cabinet elections, Brown knew, would be an uncomfortable test. The party man who had spent a lifetime attending committee meetings could no longer expect the unions’ automatic support. Their antagonism caused him СКАЧАТЬ