After the election that never was, Gordon Brown’s standing with his party never recovered. Although he listened, probably too much, to his advisers before calling the whole thing off, it quickly became seen as a spectacular political bottle job – something which some of his closest friends believed he could never get over. He was to win genuine international acclaim later for his handling, as chairman of the G20 group of nations, of the financial crash, but from now on, internally it was a struggle to survive.
One of the joys of being a political editor is that you get the chance to travel with the prime minister of the day, and as can be deduced from the stories in this book so far, I was clocking up the air miles by the hundreds of thousands by this stage of my career. For a prime minister, these trips often looked like an opportunity to get away from domestic trouble – but they rarely were because the travelling Lobby (something of a beast at home but even more ferocious when away) never let them forget.
One example of a trip that combined some genuine excitement about events normally outside our ambit with the political news that we always hungrily sought, was Brown’s trip to the Beijing Olympics in August 2008. Of all the trips I was offered during my years in charge, this was the one I was never going to hand over to a colleague. (My one-time deputy, Tom Baldwin, reckoned I only ever sent him to northern, cold capitals in Europe while grabbing all those in warmer climes for myself.)
In typical Brown fashion, however, we were made to earn the pleasure of being in the Chinese capital for the last couple of days of the Games and to see its closing ceremony, as well as Boris Johnson’s hilarious speech – ‘whiff-whaff is coming home’ – preparing the way for the London Olympics in four years.
Brown took us there via Afghanistan. We flew to Muscat in Oman in our usual style. But then we transferred to the less comfortable RAF Hercules transport plane, with its very hard seats, flew for four hours to Camp Bastion, visited British troops, flew north to Kabul for talks between Brown and President Karzai, and then flew all the way back to Muscat. There, after the briefest stop at the airport, we boarded our waiting plane to fly for another ten hours to Beijing. No beds were involved in any of this; we just kept going.
The trip happened in the middle of a turbulent summer for Brown. From being ahead in the polls in the autumn, Labour’s position had plummeted by the spring, and in Brown’s first electoral test in the May local elections, Labour lost a quarter of its councillors while Boris Johnson ended the reign of Ken Livingstone as London mayor.
The month before, Brown had virtually been forced into reversing the last big decision of his ten years as chancellor – scrapping the 10p rate of tax. He blinked first in a trial of strength with his back-benchers and was forced to come forward with a package of help costing hundreds of millions to compensate the losers.
The summer got worse. In July, Labour lost the Glasgow East by-election and the following week, just after Brown had left for a pre-Beijing summer break, David Miliband, the foreign secretary, wrote a notorious article for The Guardian outlining his vision for the Labour Party without giving Brown a mention. It was perceived as an outright attack on Brown’s leadership, and Brownite MPs called for Miliband’s resignation. I and other Lobby colleagues were told by friends of Miliband – as we had to call them – that it was indeed intended as an assault and that we should consider him to be a candidate in any contest that arose.
Miliband was the leading hope of the Blairites to replace Brown at the time. Some, including probably Blair, had hoped that he would stand against Brown in 2007. He had entered Parliament in 2001 after being Blair’s head of policy in opposition and then chief of his Number 10 policy unit for the first term. I have always regarded his politics to be to the left of Blair’s but he was the best chance that wing of the party had.
So it was against that background that Brown set off for the Olympics. This is a huge irony given what was to happen later, but I can reveal from conversations with impeccable sources that around this time there was a suggestion that Brown might make David Miliband his first secretary of state – effectively his number two – as he tried to broaden the appeal of his embattled government. But Miliband’s behaviour rendered that out of the question.
Britain was doing well at the Olympics but any hope Brown may have had of a ‘Beijing bounce’ on the back of medal successes was dashed by the latest monthly Ipsos/MORI poll, which gave the Conservatives forty-eight per cent of the vote and Labour twenty-four per cent. Brown had stayed silent since the Miliband article but on the way out to Beijing, he came down the plane to see us as usual and we got him to talk. Damian McBride, his press man, rightly had persuaded him it was an issue that would not go away and he might as well deal with it rather than have it hanging over him for the full trip.
He dismissed suggestions he was about to be challenged and insisted the public was interested in what the Government was doing to help them, rather than in internal politics. He said:
We are getting on with the job. You will find that, as we get into September, what the people of Britain are concerned about is what is happening to their mortgages, their gas and electricity bills and oil prices and petrol prices at the pumps.
They are the issues they want us to look at and address; that is what we have got to deal with. You will see us dealing with some of these issues as we come back in September.
Unconvincingly he told us that the foreign secretary’s controversial article which sparked a summer of turmoil could have been written by any member of the Cabinet – including himself. Labour would ‘go on and win the next election’. Brown said his relations with Miliband were fine and I wrote that three times he referred to him as ‘David’ during an on-the-record press briefing. To be fair, what else could he have done? Privately, friends on the plane told us they had no idea whether Brown would be challenged in the run-up to party conference.
In Afghanistan, the questions still followed him. At Camp Bastion he addressed 300 soldiers in the 39˚C (102˚F) heat, telling them that the whole country owed them a debt of gratitude. He said that the reputation of the British Forces for professionalism had been enhanced by their mission. Their achievements surpassed even those of the country’s Olympic stars in China. He told them they were heroes every day of the week and showed the same dedication, professionalism and courage as the triumphant Olympic competitors. Brown seemed to come alive during these meetings with the troops and his tribute was well taken by the men.
But at a press conference in Kabul with President Karzai, the questioning from British reporters was dominated by Brown’s relations with the Cabinet, particularly Miliband. Karzai looked on as Brown, clearly irritated that the questions were not about the British mission in Afghanistan, maintained his insistence that the British people were looking to him to get on with the job and deal with their fuel, food and mortgage problems. At one point Karzai, trying to be helpful, joked: ‘Cabinet ministers plotting is nothing new. We have them here too.’
On to Beijing and at last Brown, a great lover of sport, could enjoy himself. He watched several of the events and we were able to wangle tickets for ourselves to some through our friends and contacts on the ground. I had a brilliant time at the Olympic football final between Nigeria and Argentina, watching in the searing heat as twenty-year-old Angel Di Maria – many years later to join Manchester United – scored the only goal at the impressive Bird’s Nest Stadium. It was so hot that players were given formal breaks to rehydrate themselves.
In a press briefing, Brown called for an end to the medals-for-all culture in schools and announced plans to give all children five hours of sport a week by 2012. All too soon the trip was over. We had a great last night at London House in Beijing, an open-air bar for British competitors and visitors, set up to promote the 2012 Games. Boris stormed in late on and produced gales of laughter, from Brown as much as anyone, by insisting that table tennis, in which the Chinese had again excelled, was really a British sport invented on the dining tables of England and known as whiff-whaff. ‘Whiff-whaff is coming home!’ he shouted, and sent everyone home happy.
McBride was at Brown’s side throughout the trip, clearly the adviser then on whom he most relied. Spotted as a rising star as an official in revenue and customs, McBride had been made director of communications at the Treasury in 2003. Soon he became a special adviser, allowing him to behave in a political manner as Brown moved towards Number 10. In 2008 he was moved from the briefing job to be head of strategic planning, but he fell from grace in 2009 when his e-mails to a former Labour official, Derek Draper, suggesting ways of smearing leading Conservatives – including George Osborne – were leaked. He was sacked, went off to work for a charity and wrote his book before, in an unlikely return, he was appointed as an adviser to Emily Thornberry, shadow defence secretary, in 2016.
The summer wobble had hardened Brown’s resolve to fight and he decided to take on the doubters. I was leaked the Prime Minister’s personal foreword to a report from the Cabinet on the upcoming party conference, in which he warned his colleagues that he would confront his current problems in the way he had his personal ones in the past. In a rare show of emotion, he referred to the death of his daughter just a few days after she was born and the loss of an eye because of a rugby injury at school. I wrote that they were a warning to critics, including Charles Clarke, who had called for him to stand down the previous week, that he had no intention of going quietly.
That was soon to become obvious. Unknown to all but a few, Brown had been talking for months to his one-time close friend – and more recently enemy – Peter Mandelson. Mandelson was by now the trade commissioner in Brussels. Having been sacked twice in Blair’s first term, he had won re-election at Hartlepool in 2001, with his emotional ‘I am a fighter, not a quitter’ acceptance speech one of the more memorable episodes of the election. However, Blair would not bring him back a third time, and I wish I had gone to the bookmakers when I told my colleague Rosie Bennett that the only way he could ever return was under Brown. I would have got good odds as they were not talking at the time.
Mandelson stood down as an MP and went to Brussels in October 2004. As Brown’s first year fell apart over the non-election, the Prime Minister officially met Mandelson when they spoke about the world trade talks during a meeting at the European Commission headquarters in Brussels. They got on far better than could have been expected and it was not long before Brown was regularly calling Mandelson, as he had done twenty years before when they could only dream of returning Labour to power. The bond that held Blair, Brown and Mandelson together in the early days had, to all their surprise, still not broken – despite everything.
David Muir, Brown’s director of strategy, sounded out Mandelson about a return on a visit to Brussels and before long Mandelson was back in Number 10, settling the details of his reincarnation, for the third time, in government. Blair had advised him to take the role; others had been less encouraging. He was made a life peer, immediately taking his seat in the Lords as Baron Mandelson of Foy in the County of Herefordshire and of Hartlepool in the County of Durham, and becoming business secretary. The ‘comeback kid’ had returned. Brown at the hour of his greatest need had turned to him to rescue him.
Mandelson joked it was ‘third time lucky’. The PM said he needed ‘serious people for serious times’. He added: ‘Whatever the ups and downs have been in the past, everybody has got to come together and make sure that as a nation we come through this successfully.’ At one stroke Brown had neutralized – for now – any suggestion of a mass walkout in the autumn to force his departure. Labour politics had come full circle. Blair was gone and Mandelson was back with Brown. Who would have believed it?