Gordon Brown: Prime Minister. Tom Bower

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СКАЧАТЬ with Sheena McDonald had ended and he was seeing Marion Caldwell, a dark, good-looking lawyer born in Glasgow. They had met in 1981. Since neither wanted to sacrifice their professional career, there was an understanding that they would meet whenever he was minded. Their relationship was not exclusive. At the same time, Brown was also meeting Carol Craig, a publicist who would live with the journalist Alf Young. Off-hand relationships precisely matched Brown’s requirements. He was thirty years old. He had waited six years for a parliamentary seat. His impatience was explosive. Margaret Thatcher’s unpopularity, he calculated, would secure a Labour victory at the next election.

      Over the previous months he had forged relationships in his native Fife. Helped by Tom Donald, a local journalist, and Jimmy McIntyre, he had taught politics at weekend schools for trade unionists and participated in their discussions, even mouthing support for Bennite co-operatives and nationalisation. ‘I don’t want any more pudding heads as MPs,’ McIntyre had reassuringly told Brown. ‘We don’t need any more ill-disciplined big drinkers in the Commons. We need clever, media-savvy types.’ Brown was his man. ‘Spend every evening at meetings,’ McIntyre advised him. That advice was endorsed by Alec Falconer, the TGWU’s shop steward at the Rosyth shipyards. When the opportunity arose, Brown was promised, the clan would beat off his rival contestants.

      Having secured the support of the trade union officials, Brownneeded to win over two kingmakers. First, Hugh Wyper, a leader of the local Communist Party, was approached. George Galloway says that he was consulted by Wyper and, despite his reservations, urged that the communists support Brown because the trade unions needed his brainpower. Wyper gave his approval. Second was Alec Kitson, the deputy general secretary of the TGWU at its headquarters in London and a communist sympathiser, albeit a member of the Labour Party. He agreed that Brown was a suitable candidate. Having secured that support, Brown waited for an opportunity.

      In 1983 Dunfermline East, a safe Labour seat near Edinburgh, was looking for a candidate. Known locally as ‘Little Moscow’, the old coalmining area had been represented from 1935 to 1950 by Willie Gallacher, a communist MP. Both the communists and the TGWU agreed that Brown, the Scottish Labour Party chairman that year, was ideal. All other challengers were rebuffed and the selection was predetermined. Nervously, Brown travelled with Jonathan Wills from Edinburgh to make his speech to the party committee in Cowdenbeath. David Stoddart, the constituency agent, was primed to favour Brown. Like any prospective candidate, Brown promised the committee, if selected, to be active, to care for the constituency’s children, pensioners and the poor, and to fight for the destruction of the hated Tory regime. Soon after his speech, the machine delivered him the guaranteed seat in Westminster.

      That summer, during the Edinburgh Festival, John Reid, who was then working for Neil Kinnock, was drinking in a pub with Roy Hattersley, a member of the Labour shadow cabinet. ‘You should meet Gordon Brown,’ Reid told Hattersley. ‘He’s a young man who’s bound to be leader of the party one day.’ Hattersley, a traditional socialist, made a note of this newcomer who shared his dislike of the Bennite extremists but supported public control of the economy and a planned economy. He and Brown also shared a disgust that Roy Jenkins, the idol of many in the party, had won a parliamentary seat at a by-election in Glasgow Hillhead in 1982 for the new SDP, a breakaway party led by the ‘gang of four’ former Labour cabinet ministers – Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen and Bill Rodgers.

      Brown had immersed himself in the politics of that by-election while employed as a researcher for a television documentary. He regarded Jenkins as a traitor, and could not understand why the split had occurred. Like many party activists, he remained oblivious to the public’s anger about strikes by public sector workers. He was convinced that the increase in unemployment under Margaret Thatcher to more than three million and her cuts in public spending would persuade the voters to return to Labour. He discounted the Tories’ appeal to the middle classes, the fact that inflation had fallen from 20 per cent to 4 per cent, and their pledge to control the unions by introducing secret ballots before strikes and removing the protection of union funds from civil litigation. The evidence of his political blindness was displayed in Scotland: The Real Divide, the book he co-authored with Robin Cook. Both damned Thatcher’s analysis of Britain’s economic weaknesses, and extolled the virtues of Clement Attlee’s postwar legacy.

      In common with many party stalwarts, Brown regarded Attlee’s nationalisation of industry, the creation of the NHS and his education reforms as a historic benchmark. He ignored the food rationing, industrial stagnation and economic incompetence which eroded Labour’s popularity before the 1950 and 1951 general elections, excluding the party from office for thirteen years. In Brown’s judgement, Attlee’s glory was the destruction of the barriers to equality and social justice. Those landmark successes, he lamented, were being reversed by the Thatcherite assumption that inequality was permanent. To restore Attlee’s legacy, he urged the redistribution of wealth. The top 10 per cent of the population, who, he claimed, owned ‘80 per cent of our wealth and 30 per cent of our income even after tax’, should suffer higher taxes while the disadvantaged received a guaranteed minimum wage, higher state benefits and more public spending. He opposed the proposed privatisation of the utilities, British Telecom and British Airways. Enterprise, in Brown’s opinion, meant state initiatives or personal work as approved and aided by the government. Prices, incomes and wages, he believed, should be fixed by statute. He supported subsidies to dying industries and opposed legislation to end overmanning and restrictive practices in the docks and industry. He mocked the chancellor Nigel Lawson’s ‘Medium Term Financial Strategy’, which intended to abandon short-termism and create a climate for long-term economic growth without inflation. Until the socialist society was built, Brown confidently predicted in his new book, ‘the era of automatic growth is not only over but unlikely to return in the near future’.

      Brown was proud of the book, and looked forward to the launch organised by Bill Campbell, a university friend and the publisher, at a press conference in Edinburgh. As usual, Brown was late. Cook, the local MP, did not wait for him, but launched into a speech suggesting to the audience that he was the sole author. Rushing into the room, Brown discovered that Cook had stolen the limelight. His fury towards Cook that day, some would say, caused the permanent breach between the two. That is unlikely. The grudge was older than that. Cook’s insensitivity was just the latest instance of his ungenerous nature. Besides their many disagreements at Edinburgh University and in committee meetings, not least over devolution, Brown was angry that Cook had refused to endorse his campaign for chairmanship of the Scottish Labour Party or to help him find a parliamentary seat. The image of Cook drinking whisky alone at the Abbotsford bar was that of a man who was simply disliked. Brown suspected, probably correctly, that Cook was unwilling to help a potential rival, and his fury never abated.

      The general election was called for 9 June 1983. Britain’s recent military victory in the Falkland Islands overshadowed the domestic recession. The sharp rise in unemployment, from one million to three million, caused by the Tory squeeze on manufacturing and the public services encouraged Labour to hope for support from disillusioned Tory supporters. But Labour’s Achilles heel was its manifesto. Michael Foot’s promise of renationalisation, the reintroduction of controls and the withdrawal of Britain from the EU, damned by shadow cabinet member Gerald Kaufman as ‘the longest suicide note in history’, destroyed the party’s electoral chances.

      Brown, however, had good reason for elation. He won his seat by a 11,301 majority, gaining 51.5 per cent of the vote. His ambition to enter parliament was finally realised. After delivering a rousing acceptance speech at Lochgelly town hall he was driven to the home of David Stoddart, his agent. Grouped around the television, he and his supporters watched the results from around the country. Jonathan Wills, Brown’s old friend, arrived shortly after. ‘Gordon, well done,’ shouted Wills as he entered the dark room, expecting a jubilant celebration party. ‘There’s a beer over there,’ snapped Brown. ‘Sit down and shut up.’ Wills obeyed. ‘I’ve never seen anyone as depressed in my life,’ he said later.

      Gloom came easily to Brown. СКАЧАТЬ