Gordon Brown was elected to Parliament as MP for Dunfermline East (later Kirkcaldy & Cowdenbeath) in 1983, and joined the shadow Cabinet in 1989 as shadow Secretary of State for Trade, before becoming shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1992. He became Chancellor in 1997, when New Labour won power, and remained at the Treasury for ten years. Despite his time at No. 11, in three electorally successful consecutive Labour governments, Gordon Brown served as Prime Minister for fewer than three years, and he lost the only general election he fought. Steve Richards argues that Brown’s electoral fortunes were partly the result of mismanaging the matter of whether or not to call an election in the autumn of 2007, and that the events surrounding this decision derailed an otherwise sound strategy for his prime ministership. Brown was also unfortunate in having to come to power under the most difficult of circumstances.
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In order to make a judgement on a Prime Minister, we must take a close look at the context in which he or she acquired the crown. For reasons I will go on to explain, Brown became Prime Minister under unusually daunting circumstances. What is more, the challenging background was part of a pattern during his long career. Brown never had it easy. By 2007, when he finally entered No. 10, he had been travelling along a thorny path towards the summit for fifteen draining years. What happened in those preceding years was nothing compared with what was to follow once he entered No. 10, but the highly complex challenges he faced when he became shadow Chancellor in 1992 help to make sense of Brown’s brief and stormy rule as Prime Minister.
Brown became shadow Chancellor following Labour’s fourth successive election defeat. In the bleak post-election meeting of the NEC, the party’s polling and focus group guru Philip Gould presented the reasons why Labour had lost yet again. Gould declared gloomily: ‘In the end, it comes down to this. Voters do not trust us with the economy. They do not trust us to spend their money. They do not trust us with their taxes.’ After all Neil Kinnock’s heroic party reforms, Labour was still not trusted in relation to economic policy in general, and ‘tax and spend’ in particular. This was Brown’s dark inheritance.
He realised from day one as shadow Chancellor that he faced a stark conundrum. If Labour were to have a chance of winning next time, he would have to reassure voters that he could be trusted on the economy, while also finding a way of addressing the low levels of government spending on increasingly fragile, and, in some cases, decrepit, public services.
If there were to be a Labour government in the future, voters would expect it to deliver improved public services. Yet voters did not trust Labour to spend a halfpenny, let alone billions of pounds. Consider the challenges Labour faced after its 2015 election defeat, not least the perceptions of economic incompetence. Multiply that by 100 to get a sense of the intimidating mountain Brown faced in 1992.
The fact that, between 1992 and 1997, Brown addressed the conundrum successfully is one of the epic achievements in recent British politics. The fact that he continued to do so in power as Chancellor is an even more titanic achievement. Over the first two terms, at least, Brown managed to increase investment in public services, Labour continued to win elections, the markets remained calm, and newspapers that had regarded public spending as largely a waste of money stayed supportive.
He made the ascent via a number of different, complicated routes. First of all, the partnership with his young advisor Ed Balls was of critical importance, and was largely under-estimated by colleagues, opponents and political observers. Many contemporary commentators and politicians viewed their relationship almost entirely through a distorting prism, choosing to see a couple of toxic bullies bashing around various senior figures in the Labour Party. What actually happened over that period was much more interesting and important. The Brown/Balls relationship will be revisited by historians once everyone has calmed down about the Blair–Brown civil war. When the historians do look again, they will note that, together, Brown and Balls re-wrote left-of-centre economic policy at a point when Labour appeared doomed to eternal opposition because of its approach to the economy.
Brown was the politician who set the framework. His great insight was to recognise that, if he repositioned the party’s public pitch to the media, business leaders and the wider electorate, there would be space still to improve public services and, to some extent, address issues relating to inequality. Brown insisted resolutely that Labour could not put up the most familiar taxes – most specifically, income tax – if they wanted to win, and that Labour had to be trusted before it could spend much additional cash. From the day he became shadow Chancellor, he leapt on ‘Tory tax rises’, and stopped his colleagues from making spending pledges of any kind. In the meantime, he sought out tax rises that would be safe to advocate, such as a one-off tax on the privatised utilities that were making soaring profits. Balls was the young economist, previously a leader-writer on the Financial Times, who filled in much of the detailed policy. He had been an advocate of Bank of England independence before he became Brown’s advisor, and subsequently worked on how the fundamental reform could be implemented in a way that would grant independence while still giving the elected Chancellor considerable influence. Balls knew that Brown had no political space to propose income tax rises, so he worked on other revenue-raising measures that were less totemic and electorally fatal.
At key moments in the years to come, Balls challenged Tony Blair. Brown did so most days of the week. Blair gave little thought to economic policy in opposition, or while he was Prime Minister. He left it to Brown – a pattern that continued when David Cameron became wholly reliant on George Osborne to determine his government’s economic policy. Later, Blair’s admirers expressed bewildered frustration when wondering why Blair never sacked Brown. One of the many reasons was that, in the end, Blair knew no other colleague was qualified to meet the titanic demands. In the post-1992 period, at least, Blair largely appreciated what Brown was doing, and was generous enough to realise that, while he was flourishing as shadow Home Secretary, Brown faced the tougher task.
Nonetheless, Blair became timidly assertive at times. There were key emblematic moments after Blair became leader, when Brown and Balls had to confront what could sometimes be Blair’s more shallow and defensive approach to policy-making. I cite two of several. Before the 1997 election, Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers were insisting that Labour commit to not putting up the overall tax burden. Blair was minded to respond by making such a pledge. He and Brown had already made a commitment not to increase levels of income tax, and Blair now wanted to go much further in order to appease The Sun (in particular), superficially convincing himself that a Labour government could manage without raising the overall tax burden. If he had committed to the pledge, he would not have been able to make the necessary investment in public services he subsequently wanted (and urgently needed) to implement. Blair often proclaimed his boldness, but, in reality, he was more fearful than Brown in challenging their Thatcherite inheritance.
A youthful Balls was the one who took Blair on over making such a sweeping commitment in relation to the tax burden, suggesting at one meeting that such a pre-election pledge would be a lie. For certain, the pledge would have destroyed Brown’s political strategy, which was to signal a new, tougher approach to ‘tax and spend’, while more stealthily raising the tax burden in order to meet the need for higher spending. Blair would not have been able to make his subsequent pledge to raise health spending to the EU average if he had prevailed in his short-term desire to appease right-wing newspapers before the 1997 election.
At various points during his leadership, the EU became Blair’s preoccupation. Early on, he saw ‘Europe’ as his historic mission, ending the UK’s ambiguous relationship with the continent (as he put it). Towards the end of his leadership, he regarded the UK’s entry into the euro as a counter to his support for the US in Iraq – the pro-Europe Prime Minister as well as the pro-US Prime Minister. By focusing forensically and persistently on the economic consequences of joining the euro, Brown and Balls ensured the preoccupation did not go very far. These were important negative interventions, but, much of the time, their focus was more positive, in that they created new, durable economic policies.
Meanwhile, there was an ongoing debate about the future of public services throughout the period of the Labour government. The debate was complex. Blair was instinctively right in his restless quest for innovation, and right also in the self-serving conservatism of the public sector, but Brown and Balls were correct, too, when they responded by, in effect, stating: ‘Hold on a minute; you are telling us to go and find the money to increase spending on the NHS. You then want to introduce reforms where hospitals could go bankrupt, so we are taxing people to pay for hospitals that might close.’
The debates were complicated, sometimes deep and ideological. They revolved around the relationship between state and markets – what works and what appears to work superficially. They were never resolved in the New Labour era, or under the subsequent leadership of Ed Miliband.
More widely, Brown, who was three-quarters social democratic, believed that, after the 1980s (and especially 1992), the social democratic case could not be made as an election pitch. The British media, and parts of the British public in the short-term, would not allow it. He and Blair were in total agreement strategically about the need to keep Middle England and its newspapers on board. Instead, Brown believed that it was possible to extend social democracy by stealth. His approach was to increase public spending discreetly, and then retrospectively say: ‘Look at what we’ve done; the Tories threaten to cut it.’ The sleight of hand was smart. Voters approved of the investment once it had been made. Nine years after Labour’s slaughter in 1992, Blair and Brown fought the 2001 election on ‘Labour’s investment versus Tory cuts’ – a huge leap forward that would’ve seemed impossible after its fourth election defeat.
By 2007, when Brown became Prime Minister, he had already been implementing stealthy social democracy for a very long time – so much so that he had become famous for his stealth. Political opponents started to refer regularly to ‘Brown’s stealth taxes’. For Brown, this was a dangerous contradiction – he was known for being stealthy in the same way that Harold Wilson became famous for being devious. If you’re devious, no one should know you’re devious. Similarly, if you become well known for raising taxes stealthily, the strategy is blatantly no longer working.
For Brown as Prime Minister, the context was even more complex and daunting than the broader political situation in 1992 when he first become responsible for Labour’s economic policies. He had been at the centre of the political stage for too long – the shelf life in the modern era being around ten years. Unnecessarily, he had alienated an army of colleagues in his battles with Blair, mistaking aggressive rudeness for a political weapon. By 2007, Labour was well behind in the polls. Tony Blair’s personal ratings were in severe decline. The new Conservative leader David Cameron was getting standing ovations at every meeting of NHS workers he addressed, not because they adored him, but because of the complete chaos surrounding Labour’s health policy at that point. Iraq also remained toxic.
Yet, during the so-called ‘leadership contest’ – the absurd one-man contest in which Brown was the only candidate – the newspapers, which Brown rightly still cared about, were echoing the view of The Sun’s editorial: ‘The test for Gordon Brown’s leadership is whether he sticks to Tony Blair’s policies on Iraq and public service reform.’
This was Brown’s nightmarish inheritance as Prime Minister. He knew he had to move on from Iraq and he knew he had to reform public services in a different way to Blair, yet he knew also he had to keep on board the same set of newspapers (and the voters whom those newspapers attracted). The so-called Blairites in his party were also closer to The Sun’s editorial line. Brown knew that divided parties lost elections. He had to keep the Blairites on board while seeking to move on from Blair.
It is a myth that Gordon Brown had no plan for office when he got the job of party leader and Prime Minister. He did – and the thinking was characteristically smart and multi-layered, both fearfully cautious in the short term and more ambitious in the longer term. For the period before the general election, Brown appointed Ara Darzi, a distinguished doctor, to review various NHS services. He had a pretty clear idea of the outcome that he wanted to achieve. In effect, Darzi had a remit to propose reforms that met with internal NHS and patient support, while also reassuring newspapers that reforms were continuing.
Brown also understood that the growing lack of trust in the government, especially after Iraq, was both threatening Labour’s election prospects and undermining faith in democratic politics more widely. In response, he launched a characteristically cautious, but, in the view of some (Jack Straw specifically, who was given the remit), potentially radical constitutional reform.
There are other examples of changes that were quite subtle, but significant, such as the slight distancing in chemistry between the UK Prime Minister and George W. Bush on foreign policy.
In all cases – NHS reform, constitutional reform and foreign policy – Brown signalled incremental change. Brown had calculated, sensibly, that it would take a year to get the balance right between a small shift from the last period of Blairism and the keeping-on-board of Blair’s supporters in his party and in the newspapers. After an election in 2008, he would have more ambitious plans in all three policy areas (and others), which he would feel able to pursue once he had acquired the authority of winning an election as Prime Minister.
He never won such an election, though. The speculation that erupted about an early campaign soon after he entered No. 10 – which he had not anticipated – destroyed his pre-election calculations. Brown made one fatal mistake: foolishly, he assumed that the speculation about an early election would, in itself, destroy Cameron. Brown calculated that the frenzy of uncertainty would undermine the new Leader of the Opposition and drain him of confidence. A wounded Tory leader would be part of the repertoire that Brown could build on as he moved towards the election he planned for 2008.
Instead, Cameron remained impressively calm. The early election speculation mounted and ran out of control, and then Brown backed down. He did not call the election.
Brown had under-estimated how popular he would be when he became Prime Minister and had not thought deeply about how the honeymoon would lead to near irresistible calls for an early election. Such had been his oscillating ride as a senior politician, he had ceased to predict what might happen next in terms of how voters perceived him. This is not surprising. For a leader who quickly afterwards acquired a simplistic reputation as a loser, it is worth recalling the many ups and downs in his career (before he sank to the deepest depths with his mishandling of the early election frenzy).
In 1994, Brown was internally unpopular as shadow Chancellor, acquiring his reputation for fiscal prudence, so it was Blair who stood for the leadership. Brown had no choice but to stand aside. In 1997, Brown became popular, not least in the media, and many commentators hailed him as the chairman of the board – making the big decisions. After the attacks on the US in 2001, when Blair appeared to be a figure of global significance, Brown was widely dismissed as a marginal figure, doomed never to become Prime Minister. By 2005, Brown was so popular again that Blair had to bring him back to run the election campaign he had planned to run without him. By 2006, Brown was so unpopular that parts of the Labour Party were urging other candidates to stand as Blair’s successor. When he became Prime Minister, Brown was so popular that Labour’s fortunes in the polls were transformed far more quickly than he had anticipated, and he was under pressure to call an early election. When he failed to call the early election, he became the most unpopular Prime Minister since opinion polls began.
After encouraging speculation about an early election and then not calling one – out of justifiable fear he might lose – Brown was dead politically. The strategy he had planned no longer made any sense. He was not what he wanted to be – the apolitical father of the nation (a contrived position, of course, but one he felt comfortable with as he sought to build a big tent of support). The strategy for incremental policy change up to an election he had planned for around the time of the May local elections in 2008 made no sense any more. Suddenly, everything was out of the window. Almost as importantly, his team of close allies fell out over what had gone wrong and who was culpable. Fully alert to the nightmare, Brown was plunged into gloomy despair.
Instead of a year-long path towards an election, Brown was faced with the nightmare of three years with no strategy. This was emphatically the only course he had never contemplated, generating many wrong accusations that he’d had no idea what to do when he reached No. 10. He had thought about an early election and he had planned for one in a year’s time, styling himself as the father of the nation seeking a fresh mandate, having healed some of the wounds from the final phase of Blair’s leadership. Suddenly, in October 2007, a few months after acquiring the crown, he had been exposed as a partisan figure, and he had no public voice to accompany his new fragile position. His public voice had always been that of an almost apolitical figure, while he covertly made left-of-centre changes on the side. He never used the term ‘redistribution’ in public, but quietly redistributed. He never used the term ‘social democrat’, even though part of his agenda was social democratic. He no longer had a public voice and he was dangerously exposed.
How did he respond to the biggest trauma of a tempestuous career? On the whole, badly. For him, it was the ultimate nightmare. He was never good at coping calmly with problems of any sort or dealing with people, and here he faced a terrible problem in which he needed the support and buttress of many.
In his dependence on a range of individuals – from Peter Mandelson to Alistair Darling, who he had previously regarded as a short-term Chancellor before Balls moved to the Treasury – Brown became powerless. One of the many tragic ironies of his career is that he had ached to become leader and Prime Minister, tormented by the ambition, but, when he achieved it, he ended up being far less powerful than when he was Chancellor. It is a twist of Shakespearean proportions: when he finally seized the crown, he became relatively powerless.
One of the reasons for the mighty impotence was that he lost control of the Treasury. In opposition, Brown, to his great credit, recognised that he had to seize control of the Treasury. In 1997, he and Balls went in there and dominated as resolutely as Geoffrey Howe had in 1979. In the Treasury, he combined prudence with purpose. Conveniently, the media focused largely on the prudence, singing his praises. But the purpose mattered just as much – social justice, in the form of better public services and help for the poor, largely through tax credits. For the first time, the Treasury, as an institution, was asked to focus on public service outcomes and equality. In 1979, Geoffrey Howe entered the Treasury with his first monetarist Budget already written. Brown was as well prepared and equally radical in intent. In control of the Treasury, he was in control of the government.
The most interesting revelation in Darling’s memoir was not the claim about what a monster Brown could be – we all knew that. Darling revealed in his book that, when Brown appointed him as Chancellor, he also told him with admirable candour that ultimately he wanted Balls in that position. Brown could be thuggish towards colleagues, but he was not devious. Brown’s moods were all on the surface. He told Darling that Balls would be in the Treasury quite soon and that Darling would only be there for a short time. Once more, we are left to reflect on what might have been. If Brown had killed off speculation about an early election immediately, and instead held one the following year, Balls would have been Chancellor if he had won.
But, after the non-election, Brown lost his authority, Darling became the commanding figure in the Treasury, and Brown never replaced him with Balls – though he was desperate to have Balls there, utterly dependent on their partnership. Even in No. 10, Brown had sharp political instincts, but Balls was the economist who could turn instinct into policy. He was now dealing with Darling, who took a much more orthodox Treasury view, and Brown could do nothing about it, although he had become deeply wary of Treasury orthodoxy.
If somebody had told Brown in the mid-2000s – say, 2005 – that in one of his first reshuffles, he would bring back Peter Mandelson, he would have gone and lain down in a darkened room for about a month at the prospect. Unfairly, he had come to loathe Mandelson for the latter’s support of Blair. But Brown had to bring Mandelson back because he was becoming powerless. Actually, that was one of his smarter moves; the return of Mandelson calmed down a partially insurrectionary parliamentary party and had a unifying impact on the Labour Party at a point when many were predicting meltdown.
But then there was meltdown of a different sort. Brown had a period of rotten luck – a quite breathtaking sequence of genuine misfortune that not even his worst enemy could have blamed him for. Brown was to blame for some crises, but he was incredibly unlucky as Prime Minister. Everything started to go wrong: various Cabinet ministers were accused of fiddling their expenses (when he had hoped to rebuild trust); officials lost all the child benefit data (when he had hoped to convey solid competence before calling an election); and then there was the global financial crash and the near collapse of the UK economy. Here was a Prime Minister – already in despair because of the non-election and the utter implosion of everything he planned – who now faced the prospect of banks going bankrupt within minutes.
On the whole, his response to the nerve-shredding emergency was impressive. While Cameron was arguing for immediate real-term spending cuts, Brown co-ordinated a near global fiscal stimulus. He brought the world leaders together for the G20 in London, including statespeople like Merkel, whose every instinct would normally have been against a co-ordinated fiscal stimulus. By the time of the 2010 general election, the British economy was growing again. No bank had gone bankrupt in a way that would have caused utter chaos; people had still got their money out. Subsequently, David Cameron and George Osborne, with the active support of the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, claimed that the UK was as fragile as Greece in 2010. This was not the case.
In many respects, it was fortunate for the UK that Brown was PM when the crisis erupted. As a long-serving Chancellor, he was well qualified to rise to the crisis: he knew all the key players and he had been immersed in the politics and policies of the financial sector for more than a decade. Bizarrely, the crisis saved his leadership, giving him a renewed sense of purpose.
Yet, at the most testing moment imaginable for a leader, sections of his party were conspiring to remove him, although he was well suited to lead during this particular form of apocalyptic crisis. There was no one else remotely qualified to become Prime Minister at such a time, and if, following an act of regicide and a bloody leadership contest, David Miliband had become Prime Minister in 2008 or 2009 – when banks were on the verge of collapse, with implications for the entire economy – he would not have known what to do or who to turn to.
Brown’s substantial response to the global crisis was, of course, too late to save his career. It was all too late even by October 2007, just months after him seizing the crown. He was doomed by the non-election frenzy. Nevertheless, saving the British economy from collapse and an even deeper recession will go down as a significant achievement in the context of a broader career in which Brown often triumphed against the odds.
Even so, the causes of the crisis marked the end of his version of New Labour, as the war in Iraq sowed the seeds for the fall of Tony Blair. For both Blair and Brown, the seeds of their electoral success grew to destroy them. Blair had concluded that, after the defeats of the 1980s (when Labour was seen as anti-US and soft on defence), a Labour Prime Minister had to be loyal to the US President and be an ally in military missions. In being loyal to President Bush, Blair marched towards his doom. Brown worked on the assumption that a Labour government had to be seen to be close to the thriving financial sector. As Labour Chancellor, he felt he would be trusted if seen in the company of senior bankers. When he wanted to convince the public to accept a tax rise to pay for the NHS, he asked a banker to commission a report into the future funding. Suddenly, bankers were the biggest public enemy in the land. His protective shield made him more vulnerable. In the decade that followed, Labour leaders struggled to escape from Iraq and the banking crisis; Blair and Brown had moved towards Iraq and the banking crisis precisely to escape their party’s past.
Viewed from the perspective of the global financial crash – a framing shaped by Cameron, Osborne and Clegg after the 2010 election – Brown’s leadership, and his long tenure at the Treasury, looks reckless. But the Cameron–Osborne–Clegg narrative – that Brown’s spending triggered the crash – is a highly one-sided account. Viewed from the perspective of when Brown started out on his thorny path in 1992, a different narrative emerges. After four Labour election defeats, Brown worked with some of the post-1979 orthodoxies, rather than seeking to challenge them one more time and risk facing another electoral setback. Within those orthodoxies, he found the cash to build more hospitals, improve public transport and redistribute cash to the low paid, while also presiding over a growing economy and winning elections. After the crash in 2008, he led the economy out of a recession that could easily have turned into a depression.
Brown’s departure from No. 10 was as much a part of a pattern as his arrival. Virtually every commentator in the land, as well as a host of Cabinet ministers, had assumed for months – and, in some cases, years – that Brown would be gone on the Friday after the 2010 election, a leader burdened for the rest of his life by a terrible defeat.
As with almost every episode in Brown’s long career at the top of politics, assumptions formed with unswerving confidence proved to be wrong. Brown was not going anywhere other than Downing Street on the Friday after the May election, and Labour was still more or less alive as a national force, suffering some terrible losses but also making a few unforeseen advances. The denouement of Brown’s career was appropriately complex and ambiguous. Unquestionably, Labour had been defeated at the election – yet no other party had won. Far from becoming immediately irrelevant in the early hours after the 2010 election, Brown and his party were still clinging to power.
The days that followed were a compressed version of his highly charged, nerve-racking career – a career marked by dashed hopes and moments of soaring optimism, fuelled by self-interest and altruistic ambition. As the votes were being counted, Brown was a player again in the midst of historic turmoil. Typically, his control over the levers of power was far from straightforward. For many years, Tony Blair had stood in Brown’s way. When Brown finally became Prime Minister, he was, for much of the time, too unpopular and unsure of himself to take full control. David Cameron and Nick Clegg were then preparing to pull levers, too. Brown was used to it, always operating in a tiny amount of space and seizing moments when they arose. Politicians quite often act in the way they do because they have no choice. Great ones make the most of tiny spaces.
Brown had lost and won. He had come second in the contest, but he was still breathing as a leader, and the Conservative leader David Cameron was in no position to claim victory. The Conservatives had won 307 seats, Labour was second with 258, and the Liberal Democrats had fifty-seven. A hung parliament presented possibilities. Brown always seemed to function on frighteningly narrow political terrain. Even though he had lost, he had options – or appeared to. Fleetingly, there was the possibility of a historic coalition with the Liberal Democrats.
It never happened. History took another course, but – in the light of subsequent events – perhaps, for both Labour and the Liberal Democrats, the option should have been explored more extensively than it was. Labour suffered further setbacks in 2015, and the Liberal Democrats were virtually wiped out.
How simultaneously odd and typical that it was Brown, the most tribal of politicians, who was left briefly negotiating with other parties in the hope of forming a coalition, and not Blair, who had envisaged a partnership with the Lib Dems when he became leader in 1994, nor Ed Miliband, who polls had suggested wrongly might lead a coalition after the 2015 election. Brown was making history even when history was passing him by – a Labour leader seeking to work with other parties in government, once again responding to circumstances he had not envisaged.
What he had envisaged in 1992 and then accomplished – making Labour economically credible while having the space to invest in public services – is what makes him a much bigger figure than current orthodoxy allows.