LESS THAN TWO hours after Alistair Darling made his humiliating apology on live television, Labour MPs made their way to the second-floor committee corridor of the Houses of Parliament, overlooking the River Thames, and gathered in Committee Room 15 for what promised to be one of the most fraught gatherings since Labour had come to power more than twelve years previously.
Members had returned to Westminster following a week’s break in their constituencies, where they had become all too aware of the depth of public anger over their expenses claims. Many had hoped that by removing the Speaker they might have lanced the boil, but they had quickly discovered that fury was still raging on the doorsteps. There was a growing realization that huge numbers of Labour MPs would be for the chop at the next general election, and now, instead of just blaming the Daily Telegraph for their perilous position, the politicians were pointing their fingers at the hopeless response of the party’s leaders, and in particular at Gordon Brown.
Many Labour MPs felt that Brown was still failing to grasp the magnitude of the events unfolding around him. On Monday morning, at the time he was, briefly, defending Alistair Darling, he had revealed during an interview on GMTV that he had found time over the weekend to ring Simon Cowell, the omnipresent music industry Svengali, to enquire about the well-being of Susan Boyle, the Britain’s Got Talent runner-up whose eccentric behaviour in the show’s final had led to concerns for her state of mind. Many observers were staggered that the PM had had time to worry about such trivia when he was under such pressure.
The Parliamentary Labour Party meets every week on a Monday evening when the Commons is sitting. The meetings, which are held behind closed doors, are often brief, anodyne affairs. Not this time. The 150-plus MPs crowding into the room wanted their chance to put the Prime Minister on the spot. They also hoped their leader might calm their nerves with a morale-boosting speech as they prepared for what was certain to be a difficult week with the European and local council elections just days away.
They were to be sorely disappointed. Brown didn’t turn up. Instead, it was his deputy Harriet Harman who once again had to step into the breach. Harman urged the backbenchers to have ‘iron in their souls’, telling them: ‘We can get through this,’ though ‘it is going to be tough,’ but her bracing words had little effect. Barry Sheerman, who was later to become one of Brown’s chief critics, complained about the way Michael Martin had been driven out of the Speaker’s chair, saying it was a sign of how the Labour leadership had failed to stand up for MPs during the expenses scandal. David Hamilton, the MP for Midlothian, accused ministers of ‘making policy on the hoof’. Ian Davidson, the Glasgow South West MP, drew hoots of laughter when he mischievously, and ironically, suggested: ‘This is not the time to panic.’ Dennis Skinner, the veteran left-wing MP known as ‘the beast of Bolsover’, shouted a lot.
One of the most pressing questions debated by the MPs was whether they should voluntarily publish their expenses claims, to spike the Telegraph’s guns, or do everything they could to keep them secret. The majority were against publication, particularly so close to the elections. Virtually all those present were expecting the party to be annihilated at the polls, and many of them, particularly those who had prospered under Tony Blair, had had enough. As they left the meeting, some were already preparing to turn their backs on Parliament for good.
The following morning, Patricia Hewitt, a former health secretary, unexpectedly announced that she would be stepping down at the next election, diplomatically citing a desire to spend more time with her family as her reason. The decision came as a surprise to many Westminster-watchers, but before they had time to digest the news Beverley Hughes, the children’s minister, announced she, too, would be quitting Parliament at the next election, and would step aside from her government position when the next reshuffle came. Then Tom Watson, a Cabinet Office minister and one of Brown’s key allies, said he would be leaving the front bench. His resignation drew gasps in Westminster, as Watson had been one of the key players in the ‘coup’ to replace Tony Blair with Gordon Brown and had only recently joined the government. But Watson, it seemed, had seen the writing on the wall. With Labour living on borrowed time, he was said to have become disillusioned with politics, and he, too, wanted to spend more time with his family.
Now came the biggest shock. The 24-hour news channels began reporting that Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, had told the Prime Minister she wished to leave government and return to the back benches. All of a sudden, the public could see that Labour’s ship was sinking, and its once-loyal crew were rushing to jump overboard before they were dragged down with it. In Downing Street, Gordon Brown’s aides convinced themselves that a coordinated attempt to undermine the Prime Minister had been launched. Spin doctors hit the phones to tell journalists that Smith had told Brown several months previously that she wished to leave the government at the next reshuffle. If that were so, the obvious question was: why had news of her decision leaked now? It had not come from Smith herself, so who had it come from? Was there a traitor in the Cabinet who had opportunistically told the broadcasters about the home secretary’s plans in order to fan the flames?
Suspicion quickly fell on ‘friends’ of Hazel Blears, the communities secretary, who had already become a loose cannon on the deck following her criticism of the Prime Minister’s YouTube performance. She was one of the few people who was both in a position to know of Smith’s secret decision and sufficiently disloyal to make it public knowledge.
Smith later backed the Prime Minister, saying he ‘can and should’ stay on as leader of the Labour Party, and that he still had her ‘utmost respect’. It did little to steady the ship, however, as a reshuffle was now inevitable. Cabinet ministers began to jockey for position, eyeing up each other’s jobs. Lord Mandelson, the increasingly influential business secretary, was reported to covet a move to foreign secretary. David Miliband was touted as a possible home secretary to replace Smith. The schools secretary Ed Balls, Brown’s closest colleague, was openly being talked about as the next Chancellor, as the Prime Minister prepared to make Alistair Darling walk the plank.
But as the evening wore on, it became increasingly clear that Brown was facing a mutiny. David Miliband said publicly that he had no intention of leaving the foreign office. It was rumoured that he had even persuaded Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, to call Brown and urge him to keep the young Blairite in his post. Worse still, Alistair Darling started to dig his heels in. Emboldened by the day’s dramatic resignations, and seeing the Prime Minister’s authority waning by the hour, Darling defiantly faced down his leader, telling him he was not prepared to go quietly.
What a mess. Harriet Harman (who else?) dutifully gave the broadcasters a target to aim at that evening as she tried to persuade the public Brown was still in control. ‘It is not the wheels falling off the government,’ she was forced to say in one interview that evening, but the ground seemed to be opening up beneath Brown’s feet. For the first time, the country began to get a real sense that the Prime Minister could be just days away from being forced from office.
Although few people knew it at the time, Brown held a private meeting that night with John Reid, the combative former home secretary, who has never been a man to mince his words. Officially, Reid was in Downing Street to have a conversation about football (an odd choice of topic by the Prime Minister, as his government collapsed around him). But reports would later suggest that Brown, in desperation, was pleading with Reid to return to his old job at the home office. One account of the conversation, later published in several newspapers, ran like this:
Brown: ‘Will you be my home secretary?’
Reid: ‘No.’
Brown: ‘You have to support me.’
Reid: ‘No, I don’t. I have to support my country and my party, and that means you have to stand down.’
Although Reid later described the transcript as ‘inaccurate’, he pointedly failed to deny the substance of the reports.
A few miles further west, a rather different sort of drama was taking place. Matthew Bayley’s wife Liz had warned him that morning that she felt as though the birth of the couple’s second child might be imminent, but Bayley, knowing that details of the last of the 646 MPs’ expenses were to be published that day, decided to risk going in to work anyway. After writing up that day’s newslist, which included Jacqui Smith’s resignation, he dashed home and took his wife to hospital: baby Nye was born at five thirty that evening.
Gordon Rayner was woken at 6 a.m. the following day by his radio alarm clock switching on to the headlines on the Today programme. Never at his best in the mornings, Rayner had found the early starts in the bunker tough going, with a 50-mile commute to London every day from his home in rural Berkshire, where he lived with his partner and three children. But on this occasion he was wide awake within seconds, scarcely able to believe what he was hearing. The programme was reporting that the Guardian, New Labour’s most slavishly loyal ally in the media, had printed a front-page editorial calling on the Prime Minister to resign.
‘Did you hear that?!’ Rayner said, as he shook his slumbering partner, Julie. ‘Brown’s finished! He can’t carry on now, surely?’
After a hasty breakfast, Rayner set off for the office, stopping off at a petrol station to pick up a copy of the Guardian. The newspaper contained a devastating full-page attack on Brown which tore into not only his political failings but also faults in his character.
‘The Prime Minister demands the right to carry on, even as the Cabinet implodes around him,’ it said.
The Home Secretary, the Chancellor, and perhaps even the Foreign Secretary may go, and Labour faces its worst defeat in history on Thursday, but the Prime Minister does not recognise his direct responsibility for the mayhem.
The truth is that there is no vision from him, no plan, no argument for the future and no support. The public sees it. His party sees it. The Cabinet must see it too, although they are not yet bold enough to say so …
Flaws in his character that drove his party close to revolt last summer now dominate again. He is not obviously able to lead. He blames others for failures and allows them insufficient credit for successes, as the current dismembering of Alistair Darling’s reputation shows …
His timidity in the face of the expenses crisis has been painful. The blunt reality is that, even if he set out a grand programme of reform now, his association with it would doom its prospects … Labour has a year left before an election; its current leader would waste it. It is time to cut him loose.
As character assassinations go, it wasn’t so much a sniper’s bullet as a cruise missile programmed to explode on the Prime Minister’s breakfast table.
‘Seen the Guardian?’ Rayner breathlessly asked the other reporters as he arrived in the bunker.
‘Yeah,’ said Rosa Prince. ‘It couldn’t be worse for Brown.’
‘I’m starting to think he might go, you know,’ Rayner replied.
‘It’s unbelievable,’ Christopher Hope said, shaking his head. ‘This whole thing might just end up bringing down the Prime Minister.’
There was still plenty of work to be done, with more expenses stories to be written, but the bunker team found it hard to concentrate during the course of the day, with one eye always straying to the television news for any further signs that Brown might be about to go.
By now, the Prime Minister’s plight was starting to draw comparisons with a Shakespearean tragedy, though Julius Caesar never had to deal with anyone quite so poisonous as Hazel Blears. Few doubted she had been the source of the ‘Jacqui Smith quits’ leak, but now, not content with stabbing her boss in the back, on Wednesday Blears got up and decided to stab him in the front for good measure.
At 9.30 a.m. she held a blistering meeting with Brown at No. 10, during which Brown expressed his displeasure over her expenses claims. Blears responded by telling her boss she was going to quit the Cabinet for ‘personal reasons’. At 10 a.m., less than twenty-four hours before polling stations opened for the European and local council elections, Blears went public with the announcement.
She timed it to have the maximum possible impact. Brown was due at the dispatch box in Parliament just two hours later to face David Cameron at Prime Minister’s Questions. Instead of preparing for the broadside he would inevitably be getting from the opposition leader, Brown watched with horror as news channels carried Blears’s resignation letter, in which she offered no praise or support for Brown but instead talked of the need for Labour to ‘reconnect with the British people’. It said:
Today I have told the Prime Minister that I am resigning from the Government.
My politics have always been rooted in the belief that ordinary people are capable of extraordinary things given the right support and encouragement.
The role of a progressive government should be to pass power to the people. I’ve never sought high office for the sake of it, or for what I can gain, but for what I can achieve for the people I represent and serve.
In this next phase of my political life, I am redoubling my efforts to speak up for the people of Salford as their member of parliament. I am returning to the grassroots, where I began, to political activism, to the cut and thrust of political debate.
Most of all, I want to help the Labour party to reconnect with the British people, to remind them that our values are their values, that their hopes and dreams are ours too.
I am glad to be going home to the people who matter the most to me – the people of Salford.
Finally, there’s an important set of elections tomorrow. My message is simple: get out and vote Labour.
Having delivered this statement, the tiny MP then strutted out of her office wearing a brooch inscribed with the words ‘rocking the boat’. No one could accuse her of being subtle.
Some of Westminster’s most respected commentators began to write the Prime Minister’s political obituary. Chris Moncrieff, the Press Association’s 77-year-old parliamentary reporter (who is such an institution after fifty years’ service that he even has a bar named after him in Parliament), said he had ‘never seen anything like this at all’ and believed it was ‘extremely doubtful that [Brown] can carry on’. He described him as ‘a dead man’ who ‘can’t even trust his own Cabinet colleagues’.
Blears had become the fourth female MP to announce her resignation in the space of twenty-four hours, prompting fears in Downing Street that the Prime Minister was facing a mass walkout of senior Labour women, dubbed the WAGs (Women Against Gordon).
Brown had little time to brood on this latest act of treachery before he had to be in the Commons. Cameron seized the opportunity at Prime Minister’s Questions to suggest that Brown’s authority over the Cabinet had ‘simply disappeared’; he accused the Prime Minister of being ‘in denial’ and challenged him to go to the country. Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, suggested: ‘The Prime Minister just doesn’t get it … the country doesn’t have a government. It has a void. Labour is finished.’
It was brutal stuff, but Cameron failed to land a knockout blow on the Prime Minister. Downing Street aides thought this was proof that the Tory leader lacked the ‘killer instinct’, but many Conservative MPs were privately hoping that Brown would limp on as Prime Minister and speculated that Cameron might deliberately have gone easier than he might. The last thing they wanted was a new, more popular, Labour leader.
Brown returned to Downing Street after Prime Minister’s Questions in a foul mood. And there was plenty more bad news to come. As he retired to his office that night, he was updated on the progress of an email being discussed by Labour backbenchers attempting to gather seventy-one signatures – the number needed, under Labour Party rules, to trigger a vote on a leadership election. The email, in the form of a letter to Brown, said:
Over the last 12 years in Government, and before, you have made an enormous contribution to this country and to the Labour Party and this is very widely acknowledged.
However, we are writing now because we believe that in the current political circumstances you can best serve the interests of the Labour Party by stepping down as Prime Minister and so allowing the party to choose a new leader to take us in to the next election.
The plan was that the letter would be published the day after the local and European elections, provided that at least fifty Labour MPs had agreed to sign it. Nick Brown, the chief whip, suggested the plot had been organized by Alan Milburn and Stephen Byers, two arch-Blairite former ministers who had done their darnedest to block Brown’s unopposed takeover from Tony Blair two years earlier (only to find they had no alternative candidate to put forward). Nick Brown later had to apologize to the pair, admitting he had no evidence that they were involved.
With each passing minute, Brown’s chances of surviving as Prime Minister appeared to be diminishing. Alan Johnson, the health secretary, was installed by bookmakers as 6–4 favourite to be the next Labour leader, with Harriet Harman at 5–1 and David Miliband at 8–1. Lord Mandelson, the calmest head in the gathering crisis, toured television studios to plead with Labour MPs not to ‘make it worse’ for the party by signing the email.
Brown went to bed on Wednesday night as Prime Minister, but could he survive another day?
Thursday, 4 June was polling day in the European and local elections, a day which had for weeks been pencilled in as a crisis point. Brown would be left to gnaw on what was left of his stubby fingernails until 10 p.m., when the polling stations closed and exit polls would give him the first impression of just how bad a defeat his party had suffered. That was the moment when the knives would surely start coming out for Brown, and the Prime Minister and his aides began working on a survival plan.
It soon became apparent from local Labour activists that their voters were staying away from the polling stations in droves. The picture was pretty dismal, though not quite as bad as it could have been. The Liberal Democrats were not prospering either, and people were not defecting in large numbers to the Conservatives. The big winners appeared to be the smaller, minority parties that are not even represented in Westminster.
Unusually, the results from the elections would not be announced that evening. The local election votes for councils across England and Wales would be counted the following day. The counting for the European elections would be on Sunday, after polls across the entire continent had closed. This was a mixed blessing for Downing Street strategists. On the one hand, they had some breathing space to finesse the survival strategy; but on the other, the poor election results would be spread over three days. Would this lead to pressure building or subsiding?
Back at the Telegraph, another day of expenses coverage was being planned. Spurred on by the success of re-examining the expenses claims of Alistair Darling earlier in the week, the team had been studying Brown’s claims once again.
The Prime Minister’s expenses were a mess. Holly Watt and Gordon Rayner discovered that Brown, like Darling, had submitted bills for council tax, utilities and service charges for one property which covered a period when he was claiming on another. In particular, Brown had claimed for council tax and service charge bills for his London flat over a period when his second home was in Scotland, following his decision to flip second homes. He also submitted an estimated electricity bill for his home in Fife which partly covered a period when his London flat was his designated second home. In total, Brown appeared to have made claims totalling £512 for the ‘wrong’ properties.
During previous discussions with Downing Street over the handling of the newspaper’s investigation, William Lewis had decided to offer one concession to Gordon Brown out of respect for the office of Prime Minister. Lewis had given Brown a promise that if the Telegraph intended to run any more stories about his expenses, Lewis would personally inform Downing Street staff himself, enabling Brown to deal with the editor directly. Now, honouring his earlier promise to the Prime Minister, Lewis called Brown’s aide Michael Dugher to warn him that Rayner would be contacting him with some queries over the PM’s expenses.
After the questions arrived asking about the apparent discrepancies in Brown’s claims, Downing Street instructed the House of Commons fees office to conduct an urgent investigation into the Prime Minister’s expenses claims. The fees office discovered that there had been some improper claims, albeit on a minor scale. Brown immediately agreed to repay money wrongly claimed, and at 7.48 p.m. Lewis received a lengthy statement explaining Brown’s expenses.
However, on reading the response Lewis remained unconvinced of the seriousness of the Prime Minister’s conduct and therefore the merit of the story. Although interesting, it was not the silver bullet that everyone had now come to expect from the Telegraph. With the deadline rapidly approaching, as a precaution the production team had prepared two versions of the next day’s front page. But Lewis had already made up his mind and he rejected the version containing the Brown story. The editor called in Winnett to explain the decision.
‘It just didn’t feel quite right,’ Lewis told him. ‘The one thing any editor will tell you is that you’ve got to follow your instincts, and I’m just not sure about this one. Let’s regroup tomorrow.’
In the event, the story was published later that week.
Meanwhile, within an hour the week’s biggest bombshell of all was about to sweep every other story off the next day’s front pages.
With half an hour to go until the polls closed, Brown was in the Downing Street ‘war room’ with Lord Mandelson and key advisers. A side room leading off it had been cordoned off since that morning with a ‘no entry’ sign on the door. Inside was a whiteboard which had on it the names of everyone in government. This was where the reshuffle was being planned. But at 9.30 p.m. the war room was disturbed by a call from the Downing Street switchboard. James Purnell was on the line. The work and pensions secretary wanted to inform the Prime Minister that he had decided to resign.
Both Brown and Mandelson were taken aback. Only the previous day, they had discussed promoting Purnell to schools secretary (replacing Ed Balls, who was pencilled in as the new Chancellor once Darling had been forced out), and he had given them cause to believe he was interested in the job. Each in turn now spoke to the young minister, who had himself been tipped as a future Prime Minister, to try to persuade him to change his mind. He replied that he had made his decision and would be sticking to it. Unbeknown to Brown and Mandelson, Purnell had already written his resignation letter and sent it to several newspapers which were being printed as they spoke.
As the call ended, both men were perplexed; then, at 9.53 p.m. Purnell’s resignation letter arrived by email. The mood in the room quickly turned to anger as Brown and Mandelson read it. It said:
Dear Gordon,
We both love the Labour Party. I have worked for it for twenty years and you for far longer. We know we owe it everything and it owes us nothing.
I owe it to our Party to say what I believe, no matter how hard that may be. I now believe your continued leadership makes a Conservative victory more, not less, likely.
That would be disastrous for our country. This moment calls for stronger regulation, an active state, better public services, an open democracy. It calls for a government that measures itself by how it treats the poorest in society. Those are our values, not David Cameron’s.
We therefore owe it to our country to give it a real choice. We need to show that we are prepared to fight to be a credible government and have the courage to offer an alternative future.
I am therefore calling on you to stand aside to give our party a fighting chance of winning.
The party was here long before us, and we want it to be here long after we have gone. We must do the right thing by it.
I am not seeking the leadership, nor acting with anyone else. My actions are my own considered view, nothing more. If the consensus is that you should continue, then I will support the government loyally from the backbenches. But I do believe that this question now needs to be put.
Thank you for giving me the privilege of serving,
Yours
James Purnell
Disastrously for Brown, Purnell had become the first Cabinet minister to call for him to go. And before the Prime Minister and Mandelson had had time to discuss the implications of the full-frontal attack in the letter, the BBC Ten O’Clock News began, and its main story was Purnell’s resignation, including the damning letter which Brown had received only minutes earlier. It was the ultimate act of betrayal.
Television and radio stations cleared their schedules for a frenzy of speculation about Brown’s future. Pundits and politicians were virtually unanimous in their predictions of the Prime Minister’s demise. Mike Smithson, editor of the website politicalbetting.com, told BBC Radio Five Live he was offering odds of 5–1 against Brown surviving another two months. ‘I think Gordon Brown is now dead,’ he said. ‘Once someone has put their head above the parapet others will follow and it’s going to be a bloody ending.’
Winnett was in the Thistle Hotel next to the office, having a much-needed pint, when his BlackBerry buzzed in his pocket with a text message from Andrew Porter telling him the news. Production chief Richard Oliver was standing next to him as he read it.
‘Shit. Purnell’s resigned!’ Winnett gasped. ‘This is it. There’s no way Brown can survive now. We’d better get back to the office.’
Winnett, Oliver and Telegraph design guru Himesh Patel downed their drinks and rushed back, with Winnett’s BlackBerry constantly receiving texts and emails.
‘Jesus! This is it, surely,’ texted Rosa Prince.
‘Got to be,’ Winnett typed, as he walked across the Telegraph’s main newsroom, where he was quickly joined by Tony Gallagher, who had been halfway home when he heard the news and had promptly turned around and come back. Andrew Porter, still in Westminster, began writing a new splash, while political correspondent James Kirkup started working up a profile piece on Purnell.
In Downing Street, Brown, Mandelson and Balls began hitting the phones. One of Mandelson’s first calls was to David Miliband, one of the major potential leadership contenders. Word had reached Downing Street that Purnell had told Miliband of his intentions several hours before. The plans for a reshuffle were abandoned as Brown and his team set about finding out if Purnell’s resignation was part of a coordinated coup attempt. If Miliband intended to follow his close friend out of the Cabinet, Brown could safely assume he was about to face a leadership challenge which he would be unable to survive.
To his immense relief, Brown was told that Miliband was not intending to resign. The foreign secretary was effectively promised he could keep his job in return for a pledge of loyalty to the Prime Minister. He agreed. But there were other potential leaders who still needed to be contacted. Panic began to set in when Brown, Mandelson and Balls could not get hold of Alan Johnson, the health secretary and bookies’ favourite to be the next leader. His phone was switched off. He eventually called back and also pledged his loyalty.
By 1 a.m. a survival plan was largely in place. The reshuffle had been torn up, Darling and Jack Straw had been told they would keep their jobs, and it seemed the Prime Minister might just cling on. Brown went to bed for a few hours’ sleep while Mandelson remained for a short while to make a couple more calls.
By 6.30 a.m. the Prime Minister was back in the ‘war room’ to finish the reshuffle. The first visitor – before the cleaners had even arrived – was Harriet Harman, Labour’s deputy leader, who was assured her position was secure. However, by the end of the day Mandelson would be installed as ‘First Secretary of State’, in effect Deputy Prime Minister. Then came the Chancellor, who had already told his wife Margaret that he would not accept another government job. Brown could not risk Darling going to the back benches. He too was safe. But Brown’s plans for the rest of the Cabinet would soon have to be shredded on another day of shock resignations.
As the investigation team assembled in the bunker, there was only one topic of discussion: could Brown survive the day?
‘I reckon he’s finished,’ Nick Allen said.
‘What do you think?’ Gammell asked Winnett. ‘Are we going to end up bringing down the government?’
‘If there’s any more resignations I think that’ll be it,’ Winnett replied.
‘It’s history in the making, you know,’ Prince mused. ‘I just can’t believe this is happening.’
Turning to the magnetic wall, by now covered with pictures of MPs who had resigned, Rayner said: ‘We’d better get a picture of the Prime Minister printed off, just in case.’
Within an hour, the mood had changed again. David Miliband had been interviewed as he left his house, and had given his support to the Prime Minister. Perhaps, then, there was no organized coup after all, and Purnell had shot his bolt for nothing.
But then came news of another resignation. John Hutton, the defence secretary, had decided he wanted to leave Parliament at the next election and was to step down from the Cabinet straight away. Although he issued a statement in support of Brown, the minister was known to be sceptical about the PM’s abilities and his exit from government while British troops were heavily engaged in Afghanistan looked bad. As renewed talk of a coup swept Westminster, Brown tried to seize the initiative by carrying out the reshuffle he had sketched out only hours before. It didn’t go according to plan. The steady stream of resignations was about to turn into a flood.
Geoff Hoon, another of the longest-serving Cabinet ministers, was one of the first into No. 10. The transport secretary had told the Prime Minister a year previously that he wanted an ‘international role’. However, there were no vacancies. Hoon told Brown he too would be resigning, but he decided not to cause a stir. His friend Darling was safe and the prospect of becoming the next European Commissioner was still on the table. He resigned to the back benches and offered his support.
Margaret Beckett, the former foreign secretary who had rejoined the government as housing minister just months before, was disgruntled at not being offered a Cabinet position. She also decided to leave government (and later made an unsuccessful bid to become the next Speaker). However, she too did not go on the attack.
Paul Murphy, the Welsh secretary, and Tony McNulty, employment minister, also decided they wanted to return to the back benches.
At one stage, for those watching at home and in offices up and down the country, it seemed as though it was impossible even to pop to the loo without missing another ministerial resignation. By mid-afternoon, the number of ministers who had resigned since Tuesday of that week stood at ten. Crucially, however, none of those who resigned on reshuffle day had openly criticized the Prime Minister or called on him to stand down.
Brown and his team managed to put together a patched-up Cabinet, finding new faces to fill the vacancies left by those who wanted out. The Prime Minister decided it was time to face the media, and summoned reporters to Downing Street for a press conference to begin at 5 p.m.
As the journalists looked through a printed list of the new Cabinet, several noticed a glaring omission. Caroline Flint, the Europe minister often described as ‘Parliament’s most glamorous MP’, was missing from the list. Had she simply been forgotten? Had she resigned? What was going on? Flint had been one of Brown’s most steadfast supporters during the crisis, and had even rushed out to make a statement of support on live television the previous evening, criticizing Purnell’s resignation.
In fact, even as the media were gathering outside No. 10 for the press conference, she was discussing her future with the Prime Minister. She had been expecting a major promotion as a reward for her loyalty. But Brown wanted her to remain as Europe minister, albeit with the offer of a full place in the Cabinet. Flint declined the offer and left, seething.
Minutes later, Brown arrived at the lectern in the briefing room looking shaken. His voice trembled as he vowed to fight on.
‘If I didn’t think I was the right person to lead these challenges I would not be standing here,’ he said to the assembled press. ‘I have faith in doing my duty … I believe in never walking away in difficult times. I will not waver. I will not walk away. I will get on with the job.’
Outside the press conference, however, all hell was breaking loose. Flint had released a resignation letter, and it was the most incendiary yet.
‘You have a two-tier government, your inner circle and then the remainder of Cabinet,’ she wrote in the letter to Brown, which the Prime Minister had not yet seen. ‘Several of the women attending Cabinet – myself included – have been treated by you as little more than female window dressing.’
Within moments, the BlackBerries of the reporters inside the press conference began vibrating.
‘Why has Caroline Flint resigned and said you think women are window dressing?’ demanded one reporter.
Brown staggered back a step, as if absorbing a physical blow, before insisting that there were still plenty of women in Cabinet.
‘Besides, I am delighted to announce we have a very strong candidate for Europe minister: Glenys Kinnock,’ he added.
Glenys Kinnock? The reporters in the press conference looked at each other, incredulous. Had they misheard? The wife of former Labour leader Neil Kinnock had spent the previous few years making a tidy living as an MEP, having never sat in Parliament. Had Brown just said he was parachuting her into the government?
‘Are you telling us you cannot find a single candidate to be minister for Europe out of 350 MPs?’ asked one reporter. He certainly was. And there were more surprises to come. Sir Alan Sugar, the star of the television show The Apprentice, was to be given a peerage and a post as ‘enterprise tsar’. The news was greeted with disbelieving stares, followed by laughter.
It had been another disastrous day for the Prime Minister – but he had survived, against all odds, through a combination of sheer stubbornness and the Labour Party’s utter inability to get rid of leaders.
‘If this had been the Tories, Brown would have been gone three times over,’ observed Holly Watt in the bunker. ‘Thatcher was basically booted out on the strength of one critical speech from the back benches, never mind all this!’
Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London and Telegraph columnist, memorably likened Brown’s would-be assassins to the inept criminal masterminds who try – and fail – to kill Inspector Clouseau at the end of the Pink Panther films.
The day’s events proved to be a headline-writer’s dream. ‘Stiletto in the heart of Brown’ was the Telegraph’s splash, reflecting on Caroline Flint’s resignation, alongside pictures of her posing in high heels and scarlet lipstick for a magazine shoot.
Away from Westminster, the results from voting in thirty-four councils across England showed that the public had resoundingly rejected Labour. The Tories gained 233 councillors while Labour lost 273 seats and the Liberal Democrats 4. The Conservatives recorded 38 per cent of the national vote; Labour was beaten into third place with a historic low of 23 per cent of the vote.
Friday’s dismal local council results were compounded on Sunday when the results of the European polls began to come in. Labour had been beaten into third place behind the UK Independence Party. It had failed to win the popular vote in Wales for the first time since 1918 and had been crushed by the SNP in Scotland. Most worrying was that the failure of Labour voters to turn out in the north had led to the BNP winning two seats in the European Parliament. It was the worst electoral showing for Labour in almost a century. Brown clearly wasn’t out of the woods just yet.
Monday, 8 June saw another weekly meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party. The gathering – back in Committee Room 15 – was now being seen as crunch time. After days of plotting, it was the moment when the rebels would have to either show their hand and demonstrate they had the support or else leave Brown to focus on his role as Prime Minister.
Brownites spent much of the day working the phones, cajoling waverers into weighing in behind the Prime Minister. MPs in marginal seats claimed they were being threatened with withdrawal of support for their re-election campaigns if they spoke out. Frank Field, a former minister, accused Brown’s aides of ‘terrorizing’ Labour MPs into line. Jane Kennedy, a farming minister, refused to give an assurance that she would remain loyal to the Prime Minister and left her post, becoming the twelfth minister to leave the government in a week.
This time, Brown did turn up for the meeting. The room was so packed that several Cabinet ministers were struggling even to get through the door. The corridor outside the committee room was filled with journalists and the broadcasters were reporting live from outside the entrance to the Commons.
Brown stood up. ‘I have my strengths and I have my weaknesses,’ he said. ‘There are some things I do well, some not so well. I have learned that you have to keep learning. You solve the problem not by walking away.
‘I’m not making a plea for unity, I’m making an argument for unity.’
Labour MPs were surprised. For the first time that many could remember, Brown had shown humility.
Although a few spoke out against Brown, it became clear that the rebels had not managed to gather enough support for a leadership vote. They may have been ‘bullied into submission’, as the Telegraph put it the next day, but one way or another the Labour Party had failed to depose their leader. Gordon Brown was still Prime Minister.