Gordon Brown became Labour leader on 24 June 2007, in an uncontested election after his only challenger, John McDonnell, shadow chancellor since the 2015 election, failed to get enough nominations to stand. Tony Blair – given a reasonably quiet last few months after bowing to Brownite pressure to name his departure date – departed the stage as prime minister with a flourish three days later.
The tale of the 2007 general election that never was has been told many times and in different ways. History has shown it to be the biggest missed opportunity in Brown’s career. It was called off in the end not because Brown thought there was a big chance of him losing, but because the doves in his team thought – on the basis of one new poll – that the majority bequeathed him by Tony Blair might be reduced. The fears of Labour MPs who believed they might be casualties in a quick rush to the polls played an exaggerated part in the discussions whose final conclusion left the likes of Spencer Livermore and Ed Balls – who had been pushing for an early election to build on Brown’s fledgling popularity – dismayed and fearing for the future.
I can reveal that it was not just one missed opportunity, but at least three. What has never been reported is that Brown had earlier gone much closer to laying down a timetable for an election that, in retrospect, he could easily have brought forward and which probably would have seen him become prime minister in his own right. Nothing is certain in politics but an attempt to win early would have been better than the fate eventually to befall him in 2010.
I have learnt that, on the morning of Brown’s speech on 24 June 2007, when he was crowned in Manchester as Tony Blair’s successor, there was serious discussion of using it to give strong hints that he was planning an election for about nine months’ time. The idea went so far that I and George Pascoe-Watson of The Sun got the strangest of calls from Damian McBride, Brown’s communications chief. He told us ‘off the record, not for use, and “don’t tell the news desk yet”’ that there might be a very good story emanating from the coronation speech.
Nothing had been finally decided, and it might well not happen, and if it didn’t we were never to say a word. But it was possible that Brown would set out a very firm, short-term programme for government that would lead people to conclude the election would come next spring, possibly in March. If so, the story would be that Brown was already preparing to call an election within nine months.
Our discussions with McBride were the sort that could only take place if there was complete trust between briefer and reporter. He was giving us a heads-up to be ready for something quite exceptional, which would give us time quietly to prepare election timetable pieces, but if it didn’t happen he was relying on us not to mention what we had been told. With this kind of deal, if either side broke their part of the bargain, there would be no further bargains.
Brown and his confidants discussed how far to go. And eventually they decided on an upbeat speech giving the impression that an election might not be far away – he announced the appointment of an election coordinator, Douglas Alexander – but leaving out any specific clues as to timing. Brown did not want to be boxed in by dates, not knowing how long any honeymoon he might get would last, and not wanting to be in a position the next spring where he was committed to an election but behind in the polls.
McBride made no reference to the discussions about Brown’s speech in his book Power Trip, but with his knowledge I publish them here. Knowing what we knew, George and I still wrote election stories. I said that Brown put Britain and the Labour Party on the alert for an election in 2008. George wrote the election would come within a year, with the most likely date the following June. But our stories lacked the specific commitment that could have been there if the hawks had won out in the pre-speech discussions.
What the plan showed for sure was that if the conditions were right, Brown certainly did want to go for an election in 2008. Deprived of the one he had warned us about, McBride needed to get another story out there quite quickly. To the surprise of the Brown camp, Harriet Harman took the deputy leadership just ahead of Alan Johnson, whom they had expected to win. We were briefed that Brown would be making her party chairman but not deputy prime minister despite earlier indications that he would give that job to his elected deputy. I wrote that Brown had shown his ruthless streak.
But what happened then took everyone by surprise, including the Prime Minister. His honeymoon was fast and furious. He then missed his second opportunity. As early as July, Spencer Livermore, who had been Brown’s chief strategy adviser when he was chancellor and took the same job in Number 10, was the lone voice calling for an early election in the autumn. After Brown had summoned the Cabinet to Chequers late in July for a discussion on the new political landscape, and ministers were given a poll presentation comparing Brown favourably with David Cameron, Livermore told him he should go to the country soon because the omens looked good.
Brown, it appears, was still thinking – as he had done on the day of his election, although he declined to say it then – about the prospect of going in April or May of 2008 and he brushed aside Livermore’s idea, presumably as too bold. But Livermore had his own reasons for pushing for the early poll. While at the Treasury he had opposed Brown’s decision in his last Budget to abolish the 10p rate of tax, and feared it would come back to haunt him when the measure came into effect the following spring. He was to be proved right. As it happened he had also pressed for Brown to cut inheritance tax and was dismayed by later events on that front.
So early in August Livermore presented a memo to Brown again putting the case strongly for an early election. He wanted it to be announced the next month. Brown’s handling of the foot-and-mouth outbreak, bomb attempts in London and Glasgow, flooding and even the crisis at Northern Rock contributed to a strong surge in popularity for the Government that had led to a wave of speculation about a snap poll. Livermore’s memo was shown to aides and, according to Andrew Rawnsley in The End of the Party, Douglas Alexander told Brown he must look at it seriously.
But Brown, distracted by Northern Rock, did not properly discuss it in August and only dug it out again in September. After rereading it he told figures like Alexander, Balls and Ed Miliband to keep the story running even though he was far from persuaded. According to Rawnsley, Brown later told his circle that one of his great regrets was ‘those lost weeks’ when he could have acted on the Livermore plan.
Brown again discussed the possible election with his Cabinet before the party conference in September and found it to be split, and some of the older members, including Jack Straw, opposed. But Livermore, still trying very hard to persuade his boss, and Bob Shrum, the American pollster whom Brown liked, suggested that he should call the election in his conference speech.
Brown was far from convinced but asked the team to prepare the ground in case that was what he decided as the conference approached. The polls continued to bode well and on the eve of the conference Douglas Alexander, the campaign chief, gave an interview which appeared to be putting the party on a war footing.
On the Sunday of conference, Ed Balls, interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s The World This Weekend, spoke of ‘the coming weeks and months’ when asked about election timing, a formula that others around Brown considered too careful. McBride was sent out to brief that Balls was not damping things down.
As the week progressed the momentum increased, the party prepared further, and by the Thursday, Balls was on the radio saying that the bigger gamble might be to wait rather than go now. As the conference wound up, the party was indeed on a war footing, and serious money was spent on the usual preparations such as advertising and poster sites. But Brown had missed another chance. Calling the election in his speech would have thrown the Conservatives into a tailspin. Their own conference would have been curtailed.
Even so, by the end of that conference week most ministers thought the election was on, and Brown ordered several events, including the Pre-Budget Report (PBR), to be brought forward in readiness for a snap poll. Things started to go wrong when the Tories began meeting in Blackpool. Brown had clearly hoped to spook them. But the speculation had the opposite effect and produced a united front.
It was George Osborne’s dramatic pledge to cut inheritance tax that gave the Tory conference a massive morale boost. More people had been sucked into the inheritance tax net in recent years because of the rise in property prices, and here was Osborne promising to free all but millionaires from the threat. The numbers affected would be small but the message to the middle classes was clear, which was why Livermore and others had pressed for action the previous spring. Alistair Darling, the chancellor, was asked to match Osborne’s scheme in the PBR.
But it was Brown’s long-planned trip to Basra – with pictures coming back of him glad-handing British troops on the Tuesday of the conference – that really got the Tories going, allowing them to accuse him of an election stunt and puncturing the patriotic image he had built up over three months. Even so, on the Thursday after the Tory conference, Pascoe-Watson, Andy Porter of The Telegraph and I invited McBride for lunch in Westminster. He took calls throughout, as was usual, and many were from within Number 10, but as he left us we were still in little doubt that Brown would go for it. McBride certainly wanted him to.
Back in Number 10 the Brown team were shattered by the Osborne gambit, and for some like Livermore it confirmed why going early would have been right. It would have denied the shadow chancellor his conference platform. On the Friday, the whole election team, apart from Balls, who was in his constituency, met with Brown again at Number 10. At 6.30 that morning Brown called Balls and told him the election was on. As Balls reports in his book, published in 2016, he told him: ‘I’ve thought hard about it, and we’re going to go for it.’ The public polls had shown a narrowing in the Labour lead and here Stan Greenberg, another American pollster, presented an analysis of fieldwork from marginal seats which suggested that, although Labour would win, its majority could be cut by thirty to forty seats. The internal poll really worried Brown, who asked what he would say to the thirty MPs who lost their seats through him going early.
I had a pretty good read-out of that meeting and I wrote later that Greenberg had drawled in his deep American accent that if Brown went for it, he would win but he might not win well. It is obvious today that far too much attention was paid to that one poll, and nobody seemed to be thinking about how the Government would almost certainly be able to improve its position during the campaign. Livermore, refusing to give up, said they had gone too far down the road to pull back now, but he had little support.
McBride wrote in his book that some of the MPs and advisers who had Gordon’s ear were clearly thinking about their own futures, shifting their positions and giving him a lot of subjective advice:
Inappropriate as it would have been he should have asked the likes of Michael Ellam (his official spokesman) what they thought, or listened more to long-serving advisers and friends like Bob Shrum and Sue Nye (his office chief), who he knew only had his interests at heart. He could have listened to me tell him that every journalist I spoke to was convinced we should go for it. And he certainly should have listened more to Ed Balls.
McBride wrote of Brown:
You’d have forgiven him for lashing out at those who’d urged him along at every stage and were now counselling caution, but he just seemed stoical. Finally he said: ‘Right, does anyone else have anything they want to say?’ like the lawyer of a condemned man hoping someone in the courtroom will produce an alibi. Everyone looked at the floor.
Brown’s mind was made up overnight and the next day, Saturday, Ed Balls called me in my Norfolk village, ostensibly to talk about Norwich City’s fixture that day. But he was despondent and told me that the election was off and that the news would be put out that night via a pre-recorded interview with Andrew Marr of the BBC. He regretted not being at the meeting but doubted whether he would have been able to turn the tide. He predicted that the Sunday papers would be awful for the Government, and he was not wrong.
The leadership then descended into recriminations, with McBride being blamed for the presentational cock-up which meant that the contents of a pre-recorded interview were splashed over the Sundays. In the Rawnsley book, McBride was also accused of trying to distance Brown and Balls from the ‘election off’ fiasco by pinning the blame on Alexander, Livermore and Ed Miliband, and he was said to have been caught in the act by Livermore, with whom he had a furious row.
In The Brown Years, a Radio 4 series, by Steve Richards of The Independent, Livermore said that McBride had told him he had been instructed to blame certain individuals, and that McBride had told him the order came from Balls. Livermore claimed that McBride worked for Balls as well as Brown. Balls denied ordering the briefing, saying he had never told McBride to brief against any colleague, elected or unelected: ‘So it’s not true.’
No one denies, however, that by now the atmosphere in the previously tight-knit group around Brown had become poisonous, which would not help him in the months and years ahead. The caution shown by Brown on the day of his coronation was perhaps understandable. But if he had listened to Livermore in July, and Balls, Shrum, Livermore and Alexander later, he could still have called his election without giving the Tories any chance to fight back. Livermore left Brown’s side in 2008.
Brown’s strategic brain would have told him that he should go for an election as early as he could. That is why he did not stop his inner circle presenting it as a live prospect. But when it came to the decision on that Friday in October, he allowed short-term tactical considerations – such as the loss possibly of a few Labour seats, which would have been quickly forgotten in the elation of a victory – to stand in the way. Tactics beat strategy.
After he had made the decision, and following the subsequent deterioration in his position, Brown did not react in his customary way by getting angry. Someone who watched him throughout told me:
Contrary to his normal behaviour, Gordon didn’t shout at anyone or seek to blame anyone. He was actually very introspective about it, as if he knew he’d made a very significant mistake, and that he knew the gravity of that mistake – that he’d probably blown his only chance of winning an election. It was certainly the only time I saw him react to a bad situation in that way.
The honeymoon had ended and the remaining thirty months of his premiership were riven by internal strife, plots against his leadership, a financial crisis and a general mood of despair as his party came to the end of its long spell in power, and made a return to the wilderness.