On the evening before Labour’s election victory in 1997, Alastair Campbell called me from Tony Blair’s constituency home. He knew that, as always, The Times would be running its final opinion poll in that night’s paper and, as usual, was seeking a bit of guidance for his boss.
I told him that Labour had an absolutely massive lead and was heading for a landslide. It should have been no great surprise because the polls had been saying that for some days. I did not mention that if our MORI survey was translated into seats, the majority could be more than 180.
Alastair’s response surprised me. ‘Talk to Tony,’ he said. Blair was with him and was fighting to grab the phone off him.
‘Phil, what’s this about you saying it’s going to be a landslide?’ he said.
‘You are going to get a landslide,’ I said confidently.
‘But if you publish that poll no one will come out and vote. You know I’m always warning against complacency,’ said Blair.
‘We are running that. Polls are expensive and everyone else has got one. Don’t worry, they won’t put people off. Everyone will want to jump on your bandwagon.’
‘I doubt it,’ he muttered, handing the phone back to Alastair.
‘For Christ’s sake, calm him down,’ I said. ‘He must know he’s won.’
‘You know what he’s like,’ said Alastair.
I was writing most of that conversation down as we had it, thinking it might come in useful one day. I don’t think Blair seriously thought that any newspaper would suppress an opinion poll, or if he did Alastair – a journalist on the Mirror and the Today newspaper before joining Blair in 1994 – would have told him otherwise. For me it showed the nervousness of a man who had waited so long for power. The run-up to the campaign had been cautious. Even though the Tories were in complete disarray and looking as if they needed a long period to recuperate, Blair and Gordon Brown were desperate to avoid mistakes.
A series of policy announcements in the years running up to the election – including the one committing Labour to sticking to Tory spending plans for two years – were the mark of a leadership desperate to ditch Labour’s tax-and-spend image. Even now, with victory hours away, Blair was leaving nothing to chance. He went on almost to achieve the victory margin suggested by the most optimistic interpretation of our poll.
He and Brown had reached this high point in their careers after a long wait. It is easy to forget that they had both been in Parliament for fourteen years before this moment of glory arrived, and others in the New Labour world had waited even longer.
Peter Mandelson – along with Blair and Brown, the architect of New Labour – had been in Labour politics through the 1980s. He served as the party’s director of communications from 1985 to 1990, when he boosted Neil Kinnock’s modernization drive and assiduously promoted the cause of Brown and Blair, whom he saw as future Labour leaders. I first met Blair in 1982 when he fought the Beaconsfield by-election, the only election he lost in his political career.
The impatience created by this seemingly interminable wait for power was undoubtedly a factor in the way that the Blair–Brown relationship developed from brotherly cooperation to rivalry, and later to a bitter struggle that almost destroyed them both. As political editor of The Times throughout Blair’s thirteen-year leadership of Labour, and Brown’s time as shadow chancellor and then chancellor – and as a journalist whom I’m pleased to say both trusted – I had a ringside seat as this astonishing battle of wills took its course. I think I was trusted because I took no one’s side, as no good journalist should. I have always got on with both of them, although both have told me straight over the years that they have not liked some of the things I have written about them.
As the psychodrama unfolded over the years, I on an almost daily basis had conversations with the close allies of Blair and Brown in which they would regularly talk about each other and often in the most hostile terms. But if it was material privately said, I never reported to one side what the other was saying in a telltale kind of way. For my job to work, I had to be sure that both sides – whether it be Alastair Campbell or Peter Mandelson on the Blair side or Ed Balls, Charlie Whelan or Damian McBride on the Brown side – knew that they could safely talk to me. Some of my contemporaries were characterized as either Blairite or Brownite, and seen to be writing more from one camp than the other. But I hope and believe I managed to straddle this precarious tightrope.
I knew Blair and Brown from almost the day they entered the Commons in 1983, and Mandelson of course had spoken to me as Labour’s chief spinner on a daily basis for years. As I write elsewhere, all three had become disillusioned with the progress towards modernization during John Smith’s brief tenure, and his death was to create a fissure in their relationship that was never to heal.
Smith’s death, on the morning of Thursday, 12 May 1994, shocked the nation. The newspapers the next morning all led on the mourning for a man they called ‘Labour’s lost leader’. I wrote the story of Smith’s death and its implications for politics, but it was a second story that I persuaded the news desk to put on the front of the paper that caused intense ructions in the Blair–Brown–Mandelson team over that weekend.
My intro stated that ‘Tony Blair emerged last night as favourite to succeed John Smith’ and went on to say that he and Brown faced the agonizing task of deciding whether they should at last become rivals or whether one should stand aside for the other. I said that among Labour MPs ‘the emerging view appeared to be that Mr Blair was the runaway favourite’. I added that leading left-wing strategists to whom I had spoken were advocating the idea of a Blair–John Prescott leadership ticket.
It seemed a decent second story but I could never have predicted the problems it would cause. The next day I received calls from an ally of Blair telling me that Mandelson was being blamed by Brown and his colleagues for briefing the story to me.
I had based it on chats with several MPs but mainly my own certain feeling at the time that it would be Blair, and not Brown, when the time came. As it happened, I had NOT spoken to Mandelson at all that day because my main preoccupation had been reporting the death of Smith and the reaction to it. I have learnt subsequently that my colleague, Peter Riddell, DID speak to Mandelson on the day Smith died. Mandelson asked Peter what he thought. Peter replied it had to be Blair, and Mandelson told him that ‘Gordon should not be ruled out’.
During the day the story appeared, Mandelson called me and suggested I had erred too much towards Blair in my story, that it was not as simple as I thought, and that there were strong cases to be made for both men. He was taking a totally unexpected line, and it led me to wonder whether Gordon was in the room with him as he made the call. Until Gordon did make plain that he was not going to run against Blair some time later, I received several calls from Peter telling me that the race was open.
I was to learn weeks afterwards that Don Macintyre, who had written a similar story to mine on the front page of The Independent, was also given the third-degree that Friday for what he thought would be an uncontroversial assertion that Blair was the favourite to take over. So it was a few weeks before Brown finally reconciled himself to standing aside, doing so on 1 June. I wrote that he had kept to the friends’ private understanding that they would not fight each other for the top job, and increased the likelihood of a runaway victory for Blair on 21 July, the leadership election date.
Brown and Blair had sealed each other’s fate at their famous Granita restaurant meeting in Islington the previous Tuesday. Precisely what went on there, only the two of them know. The deal was that Blair would go it alone for the leadership and that Brown would have control of economic and social policy.
I’m told even now that Brown did not go into that meeting asking for a deal under which he would take over at some unspecified day in the future. It is possible that Blair mentioned that he did not intend to stay in the job forever and this was used by Brown later when the question of the succession became more urgent in the second Labour parliament. One problem for Brown, then and throughout their partnership, was that he tended to take conversations with Blair literally. That was unwise.
I do know that Ed Balls went along to Granita because Brown asked him to, but he had no intention of staying and left after Brown and Blair had perused the menu, even though Blair then awkwardly invited him to stay. For a meeting that has been invested with so much significance, it did not last long. I have learnt that about ninety minutes later, Brown joined his team – including Balls, Charlie Whelan (Brown’s press secretary) and Sue Nye, who ran his office – in the Atrium Restaurant at Millbank and ordered a steak and chips. He was not impressed with the fare on offer elsewhere.
Brown in 1994 was in the wrong job at the wrong time. He had been regarded, including by Mandelson, as the senior partner in the relationship for most of the time they had been together. But Gordon as shadow chancellor had had to make decisions that were unpopular with activists and some MPs, while Tony was on the far more promising beat of shadow home secretary, where his ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ message had caught the mood of press and public. So Brown settled down to be a very powerful number two, in opposition and in government, until he finally, and in his eyes belatedly, grabbed the prize in 2007.
As he swept to a convincing victory on 21 July 1994, Blair declared that Labour must fight complacency and never expect victory to fall into its lap – a mantra he was to repeat and repeat, and a version of which I was to hear on election eve 1997.
At his post-leadership election victory conference, Blair had a huge surprise in store. He had decided over the summer that the way to prove that he really was intent on changing Labour was to scrap Clause 4, the bedrock of its socialist past. With the backing of Brown and, crucially, John Prescott, he announced he would be bringing forward a modern constitution to bring the party up to date. He did not specifically mention Clause 4 to the conference but his briefers, notably Campbell, made sure no one was in any doubt, and he pulled it off with aplomb.
Labour still had an election to win and there was already an unexpected internal obstacle to that happening, as I was to reveal in a Times splash on 11 May 1996. Its appearance on the front was a bit of an accident. I had first pitched the story as a page-two analysis of Labour’s internal troubles. But a night editor, Liz Gerard, saw the copy and told me it was better than anything else the paper had that night, and would I mind seeing it on the front?
I never minded seeing my stories on the front but this was to cause a storm. I revealed that Mandelson and Brown, once the closest of friends, had not spoken to each other for eighteen months, except at formal meetings where contact was unavoidable. I wrote that Blair feared the rift between two of his most important lieutenants could damage Labour’s electoral effort. Brown was in charge of day-to-day campaigning and Mandelson was running the general election planning group.
I quoted a member of the shadow Cabinet as telling me: ‘They owe it to the rest of us to make up.’ I further ventured that Donald Dewar, the chief whip, was probably the only person who could persuade them to put aside their differences. I wrote that relations had never been repaired since Brown had suspected Mandelson of promoting Blair’s chances after Smith’s death.
Again the balloon went up. The Sunday papers went to town on my story and when they returned to the Commons on the Monday, all kinds of people were ringing me up and speculating who my sources had been and asking me to make clear that it was not them. As I had spoken to an awful lot of people for what I thought would be a backgrounder rather than a splash, the chances of the sources being discovered were negligible. But it was a serious problem. I was told later that my story had had the impact of Brown starting to talk to Mandelson, but it was essentially in the interests of party unity and election victory that it happened, not because they were suddenly friends again.
Labour moved inexorably towards victory, with Brown announcing first a squeeze on public spending and then delivering a pledge that Labour would not put up the basic or higher rates of income tax. Together he and Blair were assuring Middle England that it had nothing to fear from them. With Mandelson, and with quite bit of help from Neil Kinnock – who had buried Labour’s unilateralist defence policy – they had remade the Labour Party. On 1 May 1997, they got their reward.