Gordon Brown usually hid his famous temper when in the company of journalists, but we heard plenty about it second-hand from his staff – usually from the press advisers required to bring him news of the stories we’d written.
One shell-shocked aide told me the tale of being summoned down to the Treasury gym just after 6 a.m. by Brown, furious that the story he had briefed to the BBC was being ignored by the Today programme in place of some criticism he had faced from the Education Select Committee.
The chancellor was committed to do the crucial 08.10 Today interview slot that day and hated the idea of being ambushed. I was told that the aide entered the gym to find the chancellor stark naked in front of his open locker, fresh from the shower. Unabashed, Gordon directed an angry tirade at the aide, the Education Select Committee, and the BBC, in that order.
This was continuing when a humble official from the Revenue entered for his own morning workout. I was told that, suddenly conscious of his lack of dignity, Brown turned to fetch his towel, unaware that – in his fury – he’d moved several yards away from his own locker. He found only a locked one behind him instead, causing him to scream in anger and unleash his famous clunking fist at the closed locker. I was informed that the poor Revenue official went white and left.
Countless stories about Brown’s propensity for furious outbursts have been told over the years. The one above has survived undisclosed until now. It was Tony Blair who first mentioned Brown’s fist. Speaking in the Commons in late 2006, he warned David Cameron that the next election would be a flyweight versus a heavyweight and, however much Cameron might dance around the ring beforehand, at some point he would come within the reach of a big clunking fist. Brown did not hit people, but he did take it out on objects when he was annoyed.
The memoirs of many Labour politicians have told us about the two sides of Gordon Brown – the kind, funny, learned man who could light up a conversation anywhere; and the serious, driven, near-demented figure obsessed with destroying his rivals and becoming prime minister at all costs (the man who allegedly told Blair on one occasion that he had ‘stolen my f***ing Budget’.)
Although Brown inspired deep loyalty among people who worked for him – people like Sue Nye, Charlie Whelan and Damian McBride (the former Customs and Excise official who became communications chief under Brown at the Treasury and later his special adviser in Number 10) – Whitehall was full of tales for years of how rough and rude Brown could be to his staff. Many were apocryphal. McBride, in his book Power Trip, said, for example, that in all his years working for Brown at the Treasury and in Number 10, he had never seen a mobile phone being thrown!
But there was a darker side. Andrew Rawnsley wrote in The End of the Party that Brown’s abusive behaviour and volcanic eruptions of foul temper left Downing Street staff so frightened that he received an unprecedented reprimand from the head of the civil service. Gus O’Donnell, the former Cabinet secretary, became so alarmed by the then Prime Minister’s behaviour that he launched his own investigations when he received reports of Brown’s bullying of staff. O’Donnell then gave the Prime Minister a stern ‘pep talk’ and ordered him to change his behaviour. ‘This is no way to get things done,’ he told Brown, the book claims.
According to Rawnsley, O’Donnell was so disturbed by the effect on those in Downing Street that he took it upon himself to try ‘to calm down frightened duty clerks, badly treated phone operators and other bruised staff by telling them, “Don’t take it personally”’. The book also claims that during one rage, while in his official car, Brown clenched his fist in fury after being told some unwelcome news and then thumped the back of the passenger seat with such force that a protection officer sitting in the front flinched with shock. The aide sitting next to Brown, who had just told him the information that provoked the outburst, cowered because he feared ‘that the Prime Minister was about to hit him in the face’.
A former Blair spin doctor, Lance Price, said in The Mail on Sunday in 2009:
Brown has never been known for his composure under pressure. He throws things – telephones, mugs, anything to hand. He screams at people. In short, he loses it and, if your staff are never sure when they might need to duck, they are not going to give you their best advice. And Brown needs all the advice he can get.
One adviser who worked for Brown for years told me that while he was very physical, he was never violent. He would take out his frustrations on objects, like staplers, typewriters, laser printers (he shoved one off a desk on one occasion) or desks. Like McBride, this adviser had not seen a mobile phone being thrown.
The stories are legion and given the law of averages, some of them must be true. Before the Rawnsley book came out, Brown in a pre-emptive interview with Channel 4 News said:
If I get angry, I get angry with myself … I throw the newspapers on the floor or something like that, but please … I was brought up – my father, I never heard him say an unkind word about anyone and I always think when you’re – the heat of the moment you say things sometimes, of course you do get angry, mostly with yourself. But I’m very strong-willed, I’m very determined, I think the country wants someone that will push things forward, and not allow things to be stagnant and stale, and every morning I get up with a determination to do my best for this country.
I felt there were two sides to him in his dealings with the press. I remember shortly after he became chancellor, he invited political editors and their partners to a reception at Number 11 and it was then that I felt you saw a nicer Gordon. He had taken the trouble to learn the names of all the wives, husbands or partners and spent the whole evening concentrating on chatting to them rather than the people he knew well. They were utterly charmed and he left a lasting impression on them. I remember going to see England beat Scotland at Wembley in Euro ’96 with Brown and friends, and having a great time. At summits when he was chancellor he could be the life and soul of any party.
Over the years, Peter Riddell and I did many interviews with Brown at the Treasury. They were exceedingly friendly affairs at both the start and end, but once the interview was under way the game-face came on and Gordon would deliver his clearly planned lines almost as if he was speaking in the House of Commons. There would be no frivolity, no jokes until the job was done, and then it would be back to books, sport, even a bit of gossip.
Those enjoyable encounters often made Peter and me remark upon how frustrating a colleague Brown must be when he allowed the deadly serious side of this complex character to trump the human side. Because Brown, on his good days, was very good company indeed and the sort of bloke you would happily invite to your local for a pint. McBride tells in his book of the ‘hugely jolly’ Christmas parties Brown and Sarah threw for close colleagues each year, usually with Eds Balls and Miliband in attendance. He invited them there because he enjoyed their company and humour so much. They’d eat Sarah’s traditional lasagne, exchange presents, receive a book from Brown, followed by singing led by Balls and a political adviser called Jon Ashworth.
As McBride recalled in Power Trip:
But the highlight of these evenings was always Gordon’s comedy routine. It was never so much the content of the jokes and anecdotes he told that was so entertaining, but his gradual inability to speak because he was laughing so much under the constant heckling from the Eds.
Anyone who remembers Brian Johnston’s hysterics on Test Match Special in 1991 will know the kind of high-pitched squeal Gordon used when pleading: ‘Come on, you guys, stop it.’ Tears streaming down his face, he would finally make it to the punchline of a story about Donald Dewar or union leader Jimmy Reid, and would always, always botch it, the cue for everyone to fall about laughing.
So there we had it – Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. People who came into contact with him were never sure which one they would encounter.
That was how it was for me one late night in 1997. Around three months after Labour’s election landslide, I was invited to the Treasury to be given an advance look at the International Monetary Fund (IMF)’s first verdict on the economic policies of the new Labour Government. Brown and his team were delighted that an IMF group – which had spent the last ten days in London talking to ministers, Bank of England officials and the City – was giving a glowing report on the chancellor’s early stewardship, saying he had set a high standard for his economic policies and had taken decisive steps towards achieving his goals.
He was praised for his decision to make the Bank of England independent and using the Budget to make rapid strides towards sound public finances. The report, with those passages highlighted, was handed to me and I went back to the office. On reading the full report, however, I found that the IMF was also telling Brown that he might have to increase taxes on consumers, possibly through widening the VAT net, to prevent an already buoyant economy getting out of hand. The report also cast doubt on Brown’s plans for a national minimum wage, saying it would be a ‘blunt instrument’.
To me this was a better news line. A good rule of thumb for me was that the word ‘tax’ – whether raising it or cutting it – was always going to make a better headline than someone or other praising the government of the day. But as chance would have it, I was talking during the afternoon to Larry Elliott, economics editor of The Guardian, whom I knew would have been given the same treatment by the Treasury. Larry was a regular player – along with people like Ed Balls and Andy Burnham – in what I rather grandly called my All Stars football team, which in those days had an annual fixture against an outfit put out by my best mate, Rob Freeman of the Mail, at the Arsenal training ground north of London.
Larry, too, had spotted the ‘raise taxes’ line and agreed it beat that fancied by the Treasury. My story appeared on the front of The Times, and the balloon went up. My first call at around 10.30 p.m. was from the chancellor’s press man, Charlie Whelan, who complained vociferously that I had missed the real story. He ended a rather tempestuous conversation by calling me a four-letter word not beginning with ‘s’. We got on well and it was the sort of thing that happened in the heat of the moment sometimes.
Shortly afterwards, the phone went again and it was Ed Balls. Having been a journalist at the FT before becoming Brown’s economics adviser, he knew better than anyone that a reporter worth his salt would not change a story unless it was wrong or there was some other very good reason to do so. As I had with Charlie, I told Ed I thought my line was better; I felt he had gone through the motions, probably to keep Brown at bay.
I went to bed and the phone went again. ‘Phil, it’s Gordon Brown here.’ Now the chancellor himself, perfectly politely but with a tone of regret in his voice, was telling me that he thought I had underplayed the key point in the IMF report. I was rather flabbergasted to have received the call but held my ground, and I think he, too, realized it was too late to do anything about it. Years later as I prepared this book, I checked how other papers had played the story and, to be fair to the Treasury, most went with the line they wanted – even my old colleague Tony Bevins in The Independent wrote at the top of his story that Brown had received a ‘glowing testimonial’ from the IMF.
I should say here that Brown’s call was highly unusual. In my long experience, ministers used their special advisers or press officers to ring up late at night and complain about the angle on a story. It was not something they did themselves, although sometimes they were not averse to having a go later if they happened to run into you.
For me, the most striking thing about the conversation was that Gordon had called himself Gordon Brown, not Gordon, when he came on the phone. We had known each other since 1983, and had always been on first-name terms. I guess he was trying to rattle me into changing my story. It did not work.