Gordon Brown: Prime Minister

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His election to the party’s executive coincided with the earlier appointment of Helen Liddell, a bus driver’s daughter who would later be known as ‘Stalin’s Granny’, as the Scottish party’s general secretary, and George Robertson as chairman. His encounters with both did not improve his popularity. As BBC Scotland’s economics correspondent, Liddell had a high public profile, and was an attractive face for Labour. Her appointment did not interrupt her frequent appearances on television news. Self-promotion, carped her critics, seemed more important to Liddell than engaging in the grind of party work and leadership. Her supporters countered that her value was in forging good relations with people. That was no consolation for Brown. Generally he did not handle women well, and he particularly lacked affection for Liddell. At executive meetings he was humiliated as she launched criticisms of him, especially of the ‘Red Paper on Scotland’, whose neo-Marxism she regarded as a threat to the party, regularly beginning with the phrase ‘The national leadership says … ’ Those seemingly innocuous words could be fatal to Brown’s ambitions. His energy and politics were creating rivals and occasionally enemies, just as his need for friends and benevolent advisers had become greatest.

In 1978 his impatience to become an MP was damaging his relationship with Margarita. Repeatedly, planned visits to the cinema and parties were abandoned as he responded to a telephone call and rushed to yet another meeting. In desperation, one night she had telephoned Owen Dudley Edwards with a ruse, asking, ‘Can you come down? Gordon wants you.’ Dudley Edwards arrived to discover that Brown was still drinking in a pub with two friends. Leaving Margarita alone had caused him no concern. The three friends eventually returned, slightly merry. Normally Brown’s companions would crash out on the floor while he flopped in an armchair to read a serious book. But on this occasion, while Margarita loudly reproached him, he picked her up and laughingly carried her to their bedroom. ‘You can see how in love they are,’ sang Dudley Edwards.

In an attempt to restore their faltering relationship, Margarita organised a weekend trip to a country cottage, and disconnected the telephone. Brown exploded in a rage. Relationships with women were sideshows in his life. He had become disturbed by the uneasy contrast of living with a sophisticated woman who enjoyed good food and elegant clothes, and the plight of Scottish workers, striking in large numbers across the country. While the party was immersed in strife as it tried to resolve the turmoil, Margarita seemed merely to tolerate Scottish provincialism, being principally concerned about the arrangements to visit her family in Geneva and her royal friends in their palatial homes across Europe. After five years, she also wanted evidence that the relationship had a future. Regardless of his affection, Brown was uncertain whether he could commit himself to a woman who was not a socialist, or could risk appearing with a princess before a constituency committee.

This crossroads in his personal life coincided with a remarkable political opportunity. Alexander Wilson, the Labour MP for Hamilton, a town south of Glasgow, died, and the constituency was looking for a candidate for the by-election on 31 May 1978. Hamilton had many attractions for Brown. The seat was a Labour stronghold, several senior party members had offered him their support, and his parents had moved to a church in the town. The obstacles were the other aspiring candidates. Alf Young, a journalist, was among them, although his chance of success was nil. Brown telephoned Young and asked whether he would stand aside. Young politely refused, adding that George Robertson, the Scottish party’s former chairman, who was supported by a major trade union, appeared certain of success. Brown aggressively challenged Young’s obstinacy, but failed to persuade him to surrender. A decisive voice, Brown knew, would be Jimmy Allison’s, the party’s organiser and a mini-Godfather. ‘It’s tight,’ said Allison, who knew the area well, ‘but you can win if you fight.’ Crucially, Allison pledged his support if Brown mounted a challenge. There might be blood, warned Allison, but that was acceptable among brothers. Even George Robertson, the favourite, acknowledged that there would be ‘a big fight’ if Brown stood, and the outcome would be uncertain.

‘I don’t know,’ Brown told Allison a few days later. ‘I think I should be loyal to the people in Edinburgh South. I don’t want to be seen as a carpetbagger and offend the good people who have helped me.’ Allison dismissed that as an irrelevance. Brown grunted and agreed to contact the party activists in Hamilton. But they, Allison heard, were unimpressed by his eagerness to avoid a fight with Robertson. Brown spoke about not being disloyal to the electors of Edinburgh South, but in truth he lacked the courage to work the system with a killer instinct. His caution was unexpected. Six years earlier he had confidently challenged Michael Swann. Outsiders were puzzled why the same determination now seemed to be lacking. They failed to understand Brown’s insecurity. He was still shocked by the consequences of his university protest for his academic career. His judgement, he believed, had been faulty. While he could confidently repudiate intellectual arguments, he lacked the resilience to withstand emotional pressure. He needed reassurance, but he had no one he could rely on. Some of his friends would dispute that he lacked courage. Others would say he feared failure. His consolation was hard work. Diligence, he believed, merited reward, and without hard work there should be no reward. That credo may be commendable for normal life, but not for ambitious politicians. Brown withdrew. Without a serious challenger, Robertson was nominated, and won the by-election by a margin of more than 6,000 votes. If Brown had arrived in Westminster in 1978, his own life, and possibly the Labour Party’s, would have been markedly different.

Similar indecisiveness plagued Brown’s relationship with Margarita. For weeks he hardly spent any time in Marchmont Road. James Callaghan had succeeded Harold Wilson as Labour prime minister, and increasingly Brown was preoccupied by the erosion of Callaghan’s authority – the government’s dependence on other parties at Westminster for a parliamentary majority had become unreliable – and the slide towards industrial chaos. In Scotland the party’s problems were compounded by disagreement about devolution. A referendum was to be held in March 1979, and the party was divided.

Excluded from those preoccupations, Margarita decided to end the relationship and leave Marchmont Road. ‘I never stopped (#litres_trial_promo) loving him,’ she said in 1992, ‘but one day it didn’t seem right any more. It was politics, politics, politics, and I needed nurturing.’ Brown’s friends would say that he terminated the relationship. ‘She took it badly,’ they said, ‘that she was less important than meetings.’ But in truth Margarita simply was fed up, and walked out. A few weeks later she met Jim Keddie, a handsome fireman, with whom she started an affair that would last for six years. During the first months Brown telephoned her frequently to arrange meetings, but despite his entreaties that she return, she refused. Over a long session of drinks with Owen Dudley Edwards, Brown repeatedly said, ‘It’s the greatest mistake of my life. I should have married Margarita.’ If he had been elected to Westminster in 1974 or 1978 they might have married, but the uncertainty created irreconcilable pressures. Jim Keddie was convinced that Brown remained haunted by Margarita. Although Margarita never mentioned any regret about leaving Brown, for several months after her departure she would turn up without Keddie at parties in Marchmont Road, or would see Brown at dinner parties held by Wilf Stevenson, a man convinced of his own glorious destiny. Keddie sensed that she hoped the relationship might be rekindled, but there was no reunion. ‘It just hasn’t happened,’ Brown would say thereafter about love and marriage. In the space of a few months he had lost the chance of both an early arrival in Westminster and marriage to a woman he loved. Whether he was influenced by his research into James Maxton’s life, with all its failures and disappointments, to avoid similar distress himself is possible, but he had failed to overcome his caution and indecisiveness.

Beyond a tight circle of friends, Brown concealed his emotions and re-immersed himself in politics. For an aspiring realist, the prognosis could not have been worse. The trade unions were organising constant strikes, public services were disintegrating and inflation was soaring. The ‘winter of discontent’ began. Rubbish lay uncollected on the streets, the dead remained unburied and hospital porters refused to push the sick into operating theatres. The middle classes and many working-class Labour voters switched to the Conservatives to save them from what they felt had become a socialist hell. The opinion polls predicted Margaret Thatcher’s victory whenever James Callaghan dared to call the election. Brown’s prospects in Edinburgh South looked dismal, but once again he was offered an attractive alternative.

Martin O’Neill, who would himself be elected to parliament in 1979, called Brown with an offer. O’Neill was chairman of the Labour Party in Leith, and he explained, ‘There isn’t a strong candidate here, and you could win a safe seat.’ Brown hesitated. ‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘I don’t think I can let the people in Edinburgh down.’ He expressed his fear of bad publicity after his failure to stand in Hamilton, and the probability of being tarred as an opportunist. The impression again was of indecision and fear of a competition whose outcome was, despite O’Neill’s assurances, uncertain. He sought refuge in hard work.

The first battle was to persuade the Scottish people to support devolution in the forthcoming referendum. Without uttering any overtly nationalist sentiments, he campaigned in favour of the ‘yes’ vote, speaking at dozens of meetings. Despite campaigning in the midst of widespread strikes, Brown believed he could deliver victory. Scotland, he argued, did not share England’s disenchantment with the Callaghan government. Fighting against the odds brought the best out of him. During one debate against Tam Dalyell in York Place, Edinburgh, Brown arrived after a last-minute invitation. ‘He stood up to me better than anyone else,’ Dalyell told a friend afterwards. ‘I was pretty formidable, but he had thought about it better than anyone I had met.’ Among his other opponents was Robin Cook, praised by some but damned by more, especially the former Labour MP Jim Sillars, who would later join the SNP: ‘Cook believed that he was intellectually superior to God.’ Dalyell watched the two sparring with each other. ‘They were two strong young men who knew that one of them would get in the way.’

On election day, 1 March 1979, Scotland’s airports were closed and there were food shortages. Productivity had fallen since 1974, annual wage increases were about 15 per cent and inflation was 15.5 per cent. The ‘yes’ and ‘no’ votes were evenly divided, but under the rules of the referendum the ‘yes’ vote could only be successful if it received not just a simple majority, but a majority of all those who were entitled to vote. Brown, like many in his party, deluded himself about the reasons for failure. Scotland’s new oil wealth had encouraged the belief that while England was dying, their country was being revitalised. Scottish voters, Brown failed to understand, were disenchanted by Labour. He was nevertheless optimistic about victory in the general election, which was finally called for May 1979.

Energetically he began campaigning in Edinburgh South against Michael Ancram, the Conservative candidate. His speeches were notable for their use of repetition as an oratorical strategy, and for their tidal wave of minutiae. Watching Brown’s campaign, Alf Young spotted its flaws: ‘He was always surrounded by a blitz of paper and a million bullet points. He exuded the belief that everything could be reduced to micro-targets and micro-meddling.’ His campaign ignored the widespread disgust with the strikers, and specifically rejected any increased control over trade unions, especially over picketing and unofficial strikes. Despite dozens of friends and supporters, including Margarita, working on his behalf, Brown was defeated by 2,460 votes. Later, in the party headquarters with a group including Robin Cook and Nigel Griffiths, a local activist, he confessed his devastation. Politically, Margaret Thatcher’s victory with a majority of forty-three seats was shattering. Brown was baffled by the national mood and the unexpected end of the Labour era.

The following morning, while television pictures showed Thatcher standing on the steps of 10 Downing Street quoting Francis of Assisi, Brown was slumped in a tattered armchair in Marchmont Road, surrounded by the debris of his campaign, contemplating his life until the next election. He had made a terrible mistake in refusing Martin O’Neill’s offer of a safe seat. No one congratulated him for fighting and losing. He would continue lecturing at the Glasgow College of Technology and the WEA, and would secure a junior researcher’s job on Ways and Means, a political programme produced by Scottish Television. After some complaints about the lack of political balance in his contributions he was moved to What’s Your Problem?, a weekly consumer programme exposing ripoffs by shops and local authorities. His productions were renowned less for their artistic qualities than for the efforts he took to rectify ills.

His new companion was a feisty former student at Edinburgh University, Sheena McDonald, born in Dunfermline, Fife. A brief introduction at one of his university parties by his brother Andrew had been remembered when they met again while working at Scottish Television. Dark, intelligent and fun, McDonald bore some physical resemblance to Margarita, but their characters differed sharply. She was an ambitious journalist, and prized her personal independence. Unlike Margarita, she had no intention of marrying Brown, although they had much in common. Like Brown, she was a child of the manse; her father was a former moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.

Brown’s attitude towards women had become entrenched. He knew he was attractive. He was well built – ‘fit, with good legs’ as one admirer recalled – but he denied to himself any need to share his life with a woman, or to trust anyone beyond his immediate confidants: his two brothers, Wilf Stevenson and Murray Elder. At the end of a day he was content to go home, endlessly watch games of football on television and listen to recordings by Jessye Norman or Frank Sinatra. He was neither interested in a woman’s life nor prepared to divulge his own secrets. Confessing to any doubts or exposing his weaknesses was anathema. Nothing would be allowed to undermine his determination to portray himself as supremely self-confident. His relationship with Sheena McDonald, like his job, was temporary while he found a safe seat. The obstacles to that, however, appeared to be multiplying.

The Labour Party in England was convulsed by defeat. In the leadership elections after Jim Callaghan resigned, the left-wing Michael Foot defeated Denis Healey by 139 votes to 129. The parliamentary Labour Party had patently misread the electoral result. Rather than distancing themselves from the wild antics of the militant trade unions, a majority of Labour MPs sought to encourage them. The growing split in the English party between sympathisers of the neo-Marxist Militant Tendency and the traditional socialists only partially infected the Scottish party, but Brown’s comrades nevertheless were embroiled in bitter disagreements about personalities and ideology. ‘Anyone who can survive that viciousness,’ sighed Jimmy Allison, ‘can survive anything.’ In that battle Brown represented the traditional Tribunites on the party’s executive, the ethical socialist rather than the Marxist. He faced hard-liners including George Galloway, the son of Irish immigrants, and Bill Speirs, a future general secretary of the Scottish TUC. For hours every week they battled about the transfer of power to left-wing activists, and whether Tony Benn and the left’s caucus should be supported despite Benn’s refusal to accept collective responsibility. Resisting any dalliance with those outside the mainstream, Brown argued against factionalism and declined invitations by Galloway and Speirs to join their group in the pub after meetings. He would insist that he was engaged in intellectual rather than malicious, personalised debates, and preferred to talk with the trade unionists. Both Galloway and Speirs, he believed, were blocking his promotion and influence. They would deny any subterfuge, although neither was particularly fond of Brown. In Galloway’s opinion he was an egghead, a brainy backroom boy and a workaholic policy wonk, but not an intellectual. Galloway believed him to be ambitiously manoeuvring to build relationships for his own personal advancement, rather than trying to build a better society. ‘He’s chosen not to be a comrade,’ agreed Speirs.

Their disagreements mirrored the sectarian division within the Scottish Labour Party. Galloway, a Catholic from the west coast, did not warm to Brown’s east coast Presbyterianism. He was scathing about Brown’s silences at the late-night meetings held by Alex Murray, a famed Scottish trade unionist in Ayrshire, at which Brown refrained from engaging in the debates. He was also irritated that Brown, despite being steeped in the history of the Labour movement, appeared to be motivated by instinctive beliefs rather than philosophy. Not an original thinker, concluded Galloway, nor a man who had suffered grinding poverty. As Galloway fondly repeated, the divisions within the Scottish Labour Party ran deep, and as with all divisions within a family, the disagreements were aggravated by personality differences. Brown’s idiosyncrasies could be particularly aggravating. While chairing the party’s Scottish Council, he would pull bits of paper out of his bulging plastic bag, say, ‘See, this is how we deliver,’ and list twenty points.

The disagreements intensified in 1980. In England, the Militant Tendency and the Bennites were emasculating the Labour Party. In Scotland, by contrast, the party was divided over unilateral disarmament and withdrawal from NATO, but remained united as a coherent group, despite outbursts of ill-discipline. The rows irritated Brown. At a meeting on 14 November 1981 he was disturbed that Galloway, representing the hard left, berated Michael Foot for not supporting Tony Benn against Denis Healey in the election for deputy leader. Brown had attached himself to the soft-left, Neil Kinnock tendency, advocating a ‘moral crusade’ to rebuild Labour’s appeal to voters. His personal response to the warfare was ‘One Person, One Vote’, a lacklustre pamphlet attacking the trade unions’ undemocratic use of the block vote to wield influence. All his other ideas had been rejected by the electorate. His support for John Silkin, a forlorn London lawyer, as deputy leader confirmed his own isolation from the realities in London. With a general election expected within two years, he still faced huge hurdles if he was to find a safe parliamentary seat. New hopes rested on his election in 1982 as the Scottish party’s vice-chairman and on a journalistic scoop – publishing an internal document of Britoil, an oil company operating in the North Sea which was on the verge of privatisation. The ‘strictly confidential’ document showed that the company’s profits would not grow for five years. The scoop (#litres_trial_promo), he hoped, would discourage private investors from buying Britoil shares from the government, but he was to be disappointed by the response. Despite his high profile and his loyal efforts for the party, he still sensed that he suffered handicaps. He sought advice from Jimmy Allison. ‘Get your nose in with the unions,’ Allison advised, adding that he would need to neutralise the opposition of the communists, who possessed sufficient influence in the Scottish Labour Party to veto any aspirant.

The most approachable trade unionist was Jimmy McIntyre, a popular leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU). McIntyre was concerned that in television interviews, compared to their employers, his members made fools of themselves. Brown agreed to organise a media course for Scottish shop stewards, using role playing – ‘You’re on strike, what do you tell media?’ In return, he expected McIntyre to help him gain selection for a safe seat. He also sought advice from Robin Cook. At a meal in a Chinese restaurant in Soho arranged by Murray Elder, Brown asked Cook for help. ‘I am sure (#litres_trial_promo) you will do very well, Gordon,’ Cook replied. Brown repeated his request and, he told his authorised biographer Paul Routledge, received the same non-committal reply. They did however agree to co-author a book. Scotland: The Real Divide, a collection of essays about poverty, would be published the following year.

The pace of Brown’s life remained frenetic. His relationship with Sheena McDonald had ended and he was seeing Marion Caldwell, a dark, good-looking lawyer born in Glasgow. They had met in 1981. Since neither wanted to sacrifice their professional career, there was an understanding that they would meet whenever he was minded. Their relationship was not exclusive. At the same time, Brown was also meeting Carol Craig, a publicist who would live with the journalist Alf Young. Off-hand relationships precisely matched Brown’s requirements. He was thirty years old. He had waited six years for a parliamentary seat. His impatience was explosive. Margaret Thatcher’s unpopularity, he calculated, would secure a Labour victory at the next election.

Over the previous months he had forged relationships in his native Fife. Helped by Tom Donald, a local journalist, and Jimmy McIntyre, he had taught politics at weekend schools for trade unionists and participated in their discussions, even mouthing support for Bennite co-operatives and nationalisation. ‘I don’t want any more pudding heads as MPs,’ McIntyre had reassuringly told Brown. ‘We don’t need any more ill-disciplined big drinkers in the Commons. We need clever, media-savvy types.’ Brown was his man. ‘Spend every evening at meetings,’ McIntyre advised him. That advice was endorsed by Alec Falconer, the TGWU’s shop steward at the Rosyth shipyards. When the opportunity arose, Brown was promised, the clan would beat off his rival contestants.

Having secured the support of the trade union officials, Brownneeded to win over two kingmakers. First, Hugh Wyper, a leader of the local Communist Party, was approached. George Galloway says that he was consulted by Wyper and, despite his reservations, urged that the communists support Brown because the trade unions needed his brainpower. Wyper gave his approval. Second was Alec Kitson, the deputy general secretary of the TGWU at its headquarters in London and a communist sympathiser, albeit a member of the Labour Party. He agreed that Brown was a suitable candidate. Having secured that support, Brown waited for an opportunity.

In 1983 Dunfermline East, a safe Labour seat near Edinburgh, was looking for a candidate. Known locally as ‘Little Moscow’, the old coalmining area had been represented from 1935 to 1950 by Willie Gallacher, a communist MP. Both the communists and the TGWU agreed that Brown, the Scottish Labour Party chairman that year, was ideal. All other challengers were rebuffed and the selection was predetermined. Nervously, Brown travelled with Jonathan Wills from Edinburgh to make his speech to the party committee in Cowdenbeath. David Stoddart, the constituency agent, was primed to favour Brown. Like any prospective candidate, Brown promised the committee, if selected, to be active, to care for the constituency’s children, pensioners and the poor, and to fight for the destruction of the hated Tory regime. Soon after his speech, the machine delivered him the guaranteed seat in Westminster.

That summer, during the Edinburgh Festival, John Reid, who was then working for Neil Kinnock, was drinking in a pub with Roy Hattersley, a member of the Labour shadow cabinet. ‘You should meet Gordon Brown,’ Reid told Hattersley. ‘He’s a young man who’s bound to be leader of the party one day.’ Hattersley, a traditional socialist, made a note of this newcomer who shared his dislike of the Bennite extremists but supported public control of the economy and a planned economy. He and Brown also shared a disgust that Roy Jenkins, the idol of many in the party, had won a parliamentary seat at a by-election in Glasgow Hillhead in 1982 for the new SDP, a breakaway party led by the ‘gang of four’ former Labour cabinet ministers – Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen and Bill Rodgers.

Brown had immersed himself in the politics of that by-election while employed as a researcher for a television documentary. He regarded Jenkins as a traitor, and could not understand why the split had occurred. Like many party activists, he remained oblivious to the public’s anger about strikes by public sector workers. He was convinced that the increase in unemployment under Margaret Thatcher to more than three million and her cuts in public spending would persuade the voters to return to Labour. He discounted the Tories’ appeal to the middle classes, the fact that inflation had fallen from 20 per cent to 4 per cent, and their pledge to control the unions by introducing secret ballots before strikes and removing the protection of union funds from civil litigation. The evidence of his political blindness was displayed in Scotland: The Real Divide, the book he co-authored with Robin Cook. Both damned Thatcher’s analysis of Britain’s economic weaknesses, and extolled the virtues of Clement Attlee’s postwar legacy.

In common with many party stalwarts, Brown regarded Attlee’s nationalisation of industry, the creation of the NHS and his education reforms as a historic benchmark. He ignored the food rationing, industrial stagnation and economic incompetence which eroded Labour’s popularity before the 1950 and 1951 general elections, excluding the party from office for thirteen years. In Brown’s judgement, Attlee’s glory was the destruction of the barriers to equality and social justice. Those landmark successes, he lamented, were being reversed by the Thatcherite assumption that inequality was permanent. To restore Attlee’s legacy, he urged the redistribution of wealth. The top 10 per cent of the population, who, he claimed, owned ‘80 per cent (#litres_trial_promo) of our wealth and 30 per cent of our income even after tax’, should suffer higher taxes while the disadvantaged received a guaranteed minimum wage, higher state benefits and more public spending. He opposed the proposed privatisation of the utilities, British Telecom and British Airways. Enterprise, in Brown’s opinion, meant state initiatives or personal work as approved and aided by the government. Prices, incomes and wages, he believed, should be fixed by statute. He supported subsidies to dying industries and opposed legislation to end overmanning and restrictive practices in the docks and industry. He mocked the chancellor Nigel Lawson’s ‘Medium Term Financial Strategy’, which intended to abandon short-termism and create a climate for long-term economic growth without inflation. Until the socialist society was built, Brown confidently predicted in his new book, ‘the era of automatic growth is not only over but unlikely to return in the near future’.

Brown was proud of the book, and looked forward to the launch organised by Bill Campbell, a university friend and the publisher, at a press conference in Edinburgh. As usual, Brown was late. Cook, the local MP, did not wait for him, but launched into a speech suggesting to the audience that he was the sole author. Rushing into the room, Brown discovered that Cook had stolen the limelight. His fury towards Cook that day, some would say, caused the permanent breach between the two. That is unlikely. The grudge was older than that. Cook’s insensitivity was just the latest instance of his ungenerous nature. Besides their many disagreements at Edinburgh University and in committee meetings, not least over devolution, Brown was angry that Cook had refused to endorse his campaign for chairmanship of the Scottish Labour Party or to help him find a parliamentary seat. The image of Cook drinking whisky alone at the Abbotsford bar was that of a man who was simply disliked. Brown suspected, probably correctly, that Cook was unwilling to help a potential rival, and his fury never abated.

The general election was called for 9 June 1983. Britain’s recent military victory in the Falkland Islands overshadowed the domestic recession. The sharp rise in unemployment, from one million to three million, caused by the Tory squeeze on manufacturing and the public services encouraged Labour to hope for support from disillusioned Tory supporters. But Labour’s Achilles heel was its manifesto. Michael Foot’s promise of renationalisation, the reintroduction of controls and the withdrawal of Britain from the EU, damned by shadow cabinet member Gerald Kaufman as ‘the longest suicide note in history’, destroyed the party’s electoral chances.

Brown, however, had good reason for elation. He won his seat by a 11,301 majority, gaining 51.5 per cent of the vote. His ambition to enter parliament was finally realised. After delivering a rousing acceptance speech at Lochgelly town hall he was driven to the home of David Stoddart, his agent. Grouped around the television, he and his supporters watched the results from around the country. Jonathan Wills, Brown’s old friend, arrived shortly after. ‘Gordon, well done,’ shouted Wills as he entered the dark room, expecting a jubilant celebration party. ‘There’s a beer over there,’ snapped Brown. ‘Sit down and shut up.’ Wills obeyed. ‘I’ve never seen anyone as depressed in my life,’ he said later.

Gloom came easily to Brown. Some blamed his Presbyterian puritanism, but others identified a more profound trait. His misery reflected his remoteness. He had not understood the electoral plight of socialism. He was perplexed that his hatred for the Tories was not shared by everyone. The Scottish socialist was isolated from the mainstream of English political thought. To his credit, he resolved before travelling to Westminster to avoid the ‘Scottish trap’, making a deliberate effort not to be identified as predominantly concerned with Scottish issues. He would be a national rather than a regional politician. The star of Kirkcaldy and Edinburgh University expected to shine as a star in the capital.

TWO Metamorphosis (#ulink_f1281480-2c7c-55ee-9ca2-65337aeb1631)

Gordon Brown’s first impression of Westminster was of Bedlam. Bellowing, triumphant Tories boasting a 144 majority pushed past the dejected remnants of the Labour Party. Dressed in sharp suits, gleaming shirts and polished shoes, the swaggering representatives of the establishment reinforced Brown’s belief in society’s inequities and his commitment to the disadvantaged. His election victory had brought clarity into his life. There was a noticeable self-assuredness during his first days in the Palace of Westminster. His intellect and surviving a decade of political turmoil in Scotland protected him from the nervous breakdown affecting others in the party. While they behaved feverishly, he sensibly focused on establishing his presence with political journalists, positioning himself as a Tribunite, and supporting Neil Kinnock against Roy Hattersley in the leadership election. He preferred the Welshman’s left-wing, anti-European policies. Like most of his tribe, he was resolved to reimpose socialism. Even the collapse of the socialist experiment in France just eighteen months after President Mitterrand’s election was not absorbed as a portent.

Luck, fate and effortless success had barely influenced Brown’s career so far. Everything he had accomplished had been earned by diligence and unpleasant experience. After the election there would be profits, losses and mixed blessings. Among the last were the arrangements for his office, which were certainly fateful and, in the long term, unhelpful.

The small, windowless office he was assigned in the heart of the building could barely contain two desks and filing cabinets. Discomfort did not bother Brown, nor was he anything more than a little bemused by the choice of his co-occupant, Tony Blair, another newly elected MP. Subsequently, some would say that the coupling was not mere coincidence, but was the manoeuvre of a skilful matchmaker in the whips’ office brokering the notion that the two novices epitomised the party’s future hopes. That is unlikely. The two new young MPs were markedly different, although bonds would eventually develop.

Tony Blair had never abandoned the fringes of the Labour Party adopted as a long-haired rock guitarist at Oxford. Uneducated about political theory, he had shown little interest in politics, pursuing an unremarkable career at the Bar. His affability, eagerness and flattery of Brown’s political mastery appealed to the Scotsman who already bore the scars of political battles. Together they could laugh. Blair was a good mimic, and Brown’s sarcasm was witty. Brown was generous: as a television producer he had perfected the art of scripting his interviewees’ opinions into snappy, pertinent soundbites. Blair received the benefit of that black art, also learning how to write eye-catching press releases, compose structured public speeches and cultivate the techniques of self-presentation. Taught to encourage the best in people, Blair deferred with courtesy to the confident grammar-school boy. Brown and Blair, in that order, became affectionately known around Westminster as ‘the twins’ or ‘the blood brothers’.

Weeks after the election, over a drink in a Glasgow pub with Doug Henderson, then a regional organiser for the GMWU, Brown spoke about his experiences and about some of the other new MPs. Henderson had known Brown for ten years, discussing politics on platforms around Scotland and against each other on The Lion’s Share, a local television programme. ‘That Blair fellow,’ said Brown, ‘he’s quite clever.’

Although Brown was instinctively more left-wing than Blair, he benefited from the proximity of a sympathetic soulmate. During their frequent conversations, not least later during their journeys abroad, they discovered a mutual frustration about the party’s direction and a common bewilderment about the solution. But in his maiden speech on 27 July 1983, Brown revealed no ideological dilemmas. His theme was the plight of his unemployed constituents. In an engaging delivery, he described ‘a new arithmetic of depression and despair’ – the ‘tragic toll’ of mass unemployment: ‘The chance of a labourer getting a job in my constituency is 150 to 1 against. There is only one vacancy in the local careers office for nearly five hundred teenagers who have recently left school.’ He criticised the government for not only causing unemployment in the crumbling coal, linoleum and textile industries, but for penalising the helpless victims of those closures. There was heartfelt grief in his description of those in the desolate communities expecting redundancy and fearing permanent financial hardship. Ignoring their plight, he continued, the government proposed to reduce benefits while taunting the unemployed that new jobs were available, if only they looked. The government’s task, he said, was to create those new jobs: ‘The House was told in 1948 that the welfare state was created to take the shame out of need. Is that principle to be overthrown by an ever-increasing set of government assaults on the poor that are devoid of all logic, bereft of all morality and vindictive even beyond monetarism?’ Brown was pleased by the murmurs of approval his ardour evoked. In his opinion, only state intervention and the imposition of a minimum wage could help those at the bottom of the social ladder. The conviction socialist derided the notion that free markets and self enterprise were preferable to planning by Whitehall.

On the Conservative side there was respect for the feisty newcomer, but also some derision. Brown ignored the Tory riposte that Labour was responsible for unemployment in Fife. Jim Callaghan’s government had plunged the country into chaos, and now this young Scotsman was proposing to reintroduce the same discredited politics. Labour’s cure for ‘the sick man of Europe’ was similar to the Marxist dogma then crippling the communist countries of eastern Europe. Brown might win smiles by ridiculing the notion of the unemployed becoming self-reliant, if only by buying a ladder, bucket and cloth and offering themselves as window cleaners; he might arouse titters of laughter by taunting the Tories that ‘Up your ladder’ appeared to have replaced Norman Tebbit’s ‘On your bike’ speech; but the nation had now voted twice in succession against the legacy of Attlee, Wilson and Callaghan.

Brown was undeterred. To him, self-improvement was as repulsive as the government’s plan to persuade the young unemployed to accept lower wages or face a cut in their benefits if an offer of training was refused. ‘Essentially,’ he told the Commons, quoting confidential government documents leaked to him by a sympathiser, ‘the papers say that the DHSS are to inculcate good working habits in the unemployed. What the government would be better doing is bringing new jobs to the area.’

Penalising the personal behaviour of the working classes through taxation had been attacked in 1937 by Ernest Bevin, Attlee’s future foreign minister who was then leader of the TGWU. For Bevin and all socialists, the worst aspect of such retribution was the means tests to assess whether the poor should receive assistance from the state. The degradation of the inspections to assess poverty, argued Bevin, inhibited the poor both from saving and from seeking work. Forty-seven years later, Brown repeated the same arguments as an attack on the Conservative government’s review of universal payments of benefits to all, irrespective of wealth. In his opinion, even to consider targeting payments exclusively towards the poor was heresy. Means tests, he believed, were inhuman because they ‘would deter the (#litres_trial_promo) claims of those most in need’. In his excitement he criticised the right-wing Adam Smith Institute on BBC TV’s Panorama on 10 December 1984 for, as he claimed, recommending the end of child benefit and the abolition of the welfare state. Sixteen months later, after difficult negotiations, the BBC apologised for broadcasting Brown’s erroneous statement. Brown was embarrassed. He prided himself on quoting carefully researched facts, and took exception to any accusation of mistakes or worse, distortion.

In London, his life beyond politics was limited. He shared a flat in the Barbican with Andrew, his younger brother, who was also employed as his personal assistant. He worked relentlessly, rarely appearing in the Commons bars or tea rooms to cultivate friendships. On Friday afternoons, long after most MPs had returned to their constituencies and homes, he sat alone in his cramped office, the floor covered in press releases, books and newspapers, speaking on the telephone. On Saturdays in Edinburgh he was occasionally seen with Marion Caldwell at parties, but he preferred that she remained out of sight. He liked drinking with his friends in pubs and especially working men’s clubs. There was a sincere fraternity in having a pint with workers who shared his love of the Labour Party and its heroes. He fumed against the reduction of grants to the Rosyth naval shipyard in his constituency, deriding proposals to privatise it and publishing a pamphlet attacking the arms trade and proposing that the yard should be converted for civilian use. He also opposed the closure of any coalmines, although they were often uneconomic, and caused many of those who worked in them to suffer fatal illnesses. On every social and economic argument he supported the hard, socialist solution. A test of those sentiments arose during the miners’ strike in March 1984.

Few doubted that Arthur Scargill, the National Union of Mineworkers’ leader, was intent on repeating the miners’ triumph against Edward Heath in 1974. He wanted to prove his power to protect miners’ livelihoods and to embarrass a Conservative government. In 1981 he had humiliated Thatcher by threatening a strike if the government closed down uneconomic mines. Having assessed that the stocks of coal were low, Thatcher retreated. But two years later the government had quietly accumulated sufficient coal stocks to withstand a strike of at least six months. As anticipated, on 1 March 1984 Scargill declared a strike in Yorkshire. Knowing that he would lose a national ballot, he organised strikes in militant localities across the country without organising proper votes. Flying pickets intimidated other miners to strike. The television pictures of fierce clashes between trade unionists and the police, resulting in thousands of injuries and arrests, raised the stakes. If Scargill won, the Thatcher government would be as vulnerable as Heath’s had been. Her advantages were preparation and sharp disagreements among the miners. The outcome was not inevitable.

Regardless of Arthur Scargill’s shortcomings, the miners’ plight became a human tragedy. Neil Kinnock refused to condemn the strikers, while Gordon Brown openly supported them, protesting against the government’s ‘vindictive cuts’ and refusal to pay benefits to their families. Instead of condemning the violence, he pleaded with the police and government to release imprisoned miners, and never publicly criticised Scargill despite the strike’s questionable legitimacy and the lack of support from workers in the power, steel and transport industries. On the picket lines he openly praised the miners despite being irked to be standing with their wives in the cold and rain, organising their communities’ survival, while some strikers were drinking in their clubs. At Christmas a trickle of English miners returned to work, isolating the militants. In March 1985, after one year, the strike collapsed. Brown, however, had never wavered. He earned the miners’ gratitude, accepting in appreciation gifts of miners’ lamps and certificates.

Like most in the Labour movement, he did not fully understand the implications of the miners’ defeat. He thundered against the reduction of regional aid and the gradual loss of manufacturing jobs, and demanded that the government create new jobs, but he was bogged down in an ideological wasteland. Labour had reached a nadir, and was unelectable until the extremists in the party were expelled. Neil Kinnock had many weaknesses, but among his strengths was the courage in November 1984 to confront the militants in order to save the party from fratricide. Unlike many Labour MPs, Brown did not openly join that struggle. He did not travel through England supporting the fight against Tony Benn and the Militant Tendency, nor did he overtly attack the militants. Rather, he preferred to return directly to Scotland from London. Nevertheless, he was among the members of the new intake offered a chance to break the extremists’ stranglehold. Neil Kinnock told Roy Hattersley, ‘I want Tony Blair in the Treasury team.’ To avoid the impression of outright favouritism, Hattersley suggested that Kinnock appoint two new MPs, and that Brown also be promoted to speak on employment and social security. Labour needed his abilities, said Hattersley. Kinnock had met Brown during the devolution debates in Scotland. Although they had disagreed, he appreciated the young Scotsman’s efforts to prevent a party split. Soon after the 1983 election Donald Dewar had proposed that Brown should join the Scottish team, but Kinnock had resisted, saying he should cut his teeth first. By the time Hattersley made his suggestion, Kinnock felt Brown deserved promotion. But while Blair accepted the offer and was appointed spokesman on the City and finance, Brown refused. ‘I wasn’t ready (#litres_trial_promo),’ he later explained. ‘It’s crazy that Gordon rejected the offer,’ Blair complained to Hattersley. ‘The problem is that Gordon is so honest,’ replied the bemused deputy leader.

Brown’s refusal was not wholly altruistic. He had, he believed, too much to lose by accepting a junior post, not least a delay to the completion of his biography of James Maxton. If he had written the book a decade earlier, his analysis of Maxton’s life would have lacked his personal experience of political struggle. In his heart Brown idolised his hero’s idealism for social responsibility, education and the abolition of poverty. But in his head he understood how Maxton had undermined his ambitions for a better society by refusing to compromise to obtain power. ‘The party whose cause he championed for forty years could, with justice,’ Brown wrote, ‘be accused of committing political suicide for the sake of ideological purity.’

In spring 1985, as the biography neared completion, Labour moved ahead in the opinion polls and the opposition parties won important victories in the local elections. Electorally, Labour’s devotion to traditional socialism appeared justified. Despite the defeat of the miners, the government had been shaken by the botched privatisation of British Leyland, rising inflation and high unemployment. Brown was writing a regular weekly column for the Daily Record, the Scottish version of the Daily Mirror, providing money to pay his researchers and access to a wide audience. Through his many contacts he sought confidential information to embarrass the government in the Commons and in the newspaper. Once it was seen that he handled leaks properly and could be trusted, he expected a regular supply.

In May 1985 he secured a confidential government review proposing to encourage the young unemployed to find jobs by reducing their social benefits. This, he raged, was ‘a raid on (#litres_trial_promo) the poor’. In July he attacked the government for employing undercover agents to investigate young mothers claiming benefits for single households while secretly cohabiting. Those investigations, he claimed, punished the poor. Brown’s pride lay in his probity. Lawyers at the Daily Record were disturbed by the threat of a libel writ following an item in his column about the sale of council houses in East Kilbride. The newspaper wanted to settle, but Brown refused. He was, the newspaper’s lawyers remarked, ‘obsessive to be perceived as utterly truthful’. He discreetly warned the complainants, ‘If you want to carry on and do business in the future when we’re in government, you should drop the libel action.’ The complaint was withdrawn, and eventually Brown’s allegations were confirmed. Since Robert Maxwell had bought the Mirror Group in July 1984 Brown had refused invitations to his parties, albeit without revealing his reasons. Nevertheless, he was content to take Maxwell’s money and promote his own profile.

The change of the political atmosphere in 1985 persuaded Brown to accept a front bench appointment. The invitation in November to work with the shadow spokesman for trade and industry by specialising in regional affairs was issued from John Smith’s office. Initially the two men forged an easy relationship, convincing themselves that the omens for electoral success were good. Thatcher’s position looked vulnerable, especially in Scotland, after a huge increase in rates. As the value of sterling fell following a drop in the price of oil, Labour was convinced that capitalism was in crisis. The mini-earthquake caused by ‘Big Bang’, the deregulation of the stock market in October 1986, confirmed their belief that capitalism was besmirched. The sight of bankers and brokers selling their companies for huge sums to foreign invaders aroused disdain about Thatcherism and free markets. Brown did not anticipate the social revolution sparked by the disappearance of the City’s traditional classes, or the rise of a meritocracy who would be unimpressed by his campaign to renationalise the privatised industries. Others close to him did understand however. In conversations with Gavyn Davies, then an economist at Goldman Sachs, the American merchant bank, and husband of Neil Kinnock’s assistant Sue Nye, John Eatwell, a Cambridge economist who was advising Kinnock, and especially Peter Mandelson, the party’s new director of press and public relations, he heard the first arguments in favour of a reconsideration of Labour’s policies.

Peter Mandelson, the grandson of Herbert Morrison, a prominent minister in Atlee’s government, and a former television producer, was attractive to Brown. He appreciated Mandelson’s vision for the party to ‘modernise’, although neither fully understood the obstacles to Labour’s re-election. Both were encouraged by a new self-confidence at the party conference in 1986 in Blackpool, not least by the first defeat of the extremists. Under Mandelson’s influence, Labour was distancing itself from the Attlee legacy to attract the middle classes. The red flag, the party’s traditional symbol, was replaced by a red rose, to suggest the abandonment of a strident socialist agenda, especially confiscatory taxes, although the party’s actual policies contradicted the impression. Brown returned to Scotland to fight the 1987 election pledging to abandon Britain’s independent nuclear capacity, close America’s military bases, halt the sale of council houses and repeal the Tory laws limiting trade union power.

Labour’s certainty that the Tories would not win a third consecutive election should have been shaken in the new year. The economy improved – growth increased to 4.8 per cent – and despite violent picketing outside News International’s new headquarters in Wapping, Labour refused to condemn the trade unions outright. Three million were unemployed, but the opinion polls swung back in the Tories’ favour, showing Labour at 29 per cent, the SDP-Liberal Alliance at 26 per cent and the Conservatives at 43 per cent.

In the early days of the election campaign at the end of May 1987, Brown and his party leaders were nevertheless optimistic. Mandelson’s coup of a glossy election broadcast by Hugh Hudson of Neil Kinnock and his wife walking hand-in-hand in visually stunning photography roused the party’s spirits. Kinnock’s popularity rose sixteen points overnight. The reports from Conservative Central Office of arguments among Tory leaders gratified Labour’s planners, convinced of their strength on health and education. Labour’s undoing started in the last week of the campaign. In a television interview, Kinnock was asked what would happen if Russia invaded Britain, unprotected by a nuclear bomb. He replied that guerrilla bands fighting from the hills would resist the invader. That strategy found few sympathisers in the Midland conurbations, London and the south-east. Portrayed as a leftist loony, Kinnock was also vulnerable on taxation. Roy Hattersley and John Smith had pledged to reverse privatisation and restore most social benefits. The cost of that, the Tories claimed, would increase income tax to 56 pence in the pound. At first Kinnock insisted that only those earning over £25,000 a year would face higher taxes, but under persistent questioning he admitted that those earning over £15,000 would pay ‘a few extra pence’. The newspaper headlines ‘Labour Tax Fiasco’ frightened the middle classes. Thatcher’s accusation that with Labour ‘financial prudence goes out of the window’ struck a mortal blow.

Campaigning in Scotland, Brown was distanced from these misfortunes. The swing to Labour in his area suggested that there would be a rout of Tory seats. He did not believe the national opinion polls, and was heartened on election night by a BBC Newsnight exit poll predicting huge Tory losses and a ‘hung’ parliament. His smile disappeared long before his personal result came in. The Tories lost in Scotland but would be returned with an overall 101-seat majority. Brown won his seat with an increased majority of 19,589, practically 50 per cent of the votes cast. His personal pleasure was suffocated by the national result. ‘He was shaken by the defeat,’ reported a close friend the next morning. ‘He thought Labour would win nationally as it had in Scotland.’ Ten years later, Brown would claim to Paul Routledge that at the time of the 1987 election he had blamed Labour’s plans for high taxation for having ‘put a cap (#litres_trial_promo) on people’s aspirations’. In reality he appears not to have contemplated lower taxation until long afterwards.

In the autopsy of the defeat, the dissatisfaction with the party’s deputy leader Roy Hattersley was widespread. John Smith, popular, funny and fast at the dispatch box with a joke or a mocking aside, was expected to inherit the shadow chancellorship despite his poor grasp of economics. He encouraged Brown to stand for election to the shadow cabinet, impressed by the young man’s loyalty, hard work and use of leaked documents to discomfort the government. Brown was pleasantly unintoxicated by his status, arriving at meetings like an overgrown student with bundles of ragged papers spilling onto the floor. He was also noticeably devoid of the argumentative stubbornness that would emerge later. Smith’s endorsement was critical to Brown’s campaign in the election. Helped by Nick Brown, a northern England trade union officer also elected to parliament in 1983, he came eleventh out of forty runners, an unexpected success. John Smith was duly appointed shadow chancellor and Brown shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, the youngest member of Neil Kinnock’s new team. ‘He’s going to be the leader of the Labour Party one day,’ Kinnock told Tom Sawyer, a member of the party’s National Executive Committee. Kinnock regarded Brown as a kindred spirit against John Smith, of whom he was wary, although he judged both Scots to be reliable. The Scottish MPs were a group of experienced politicians, held together despite personal differences by a tribal brotherhood based upon ability. United by their hatred of Thatcher and not scarred by Militant, their principal shortcoming was provincialism. Everything was interpreted from a Scottish point of view, and as a result their contribution to the inquest into the causes of the unexpected election defeat was muddled.

Kinnock ordered a review of the party’s whole ideology. Labour, he acknowledged, was unelectable without the support of the middle classes. The review of the economic policies was entrusted to Bryan Gould, a New Zealander and the shadow spokesman for trade and industry. Gould, an organiser of the recent election campaign and a member of Labour’s left wing, believed that traditional socialism remained the party’s anchor. Brown no longer agreed, and refused to participate in Gould’s work. His unease had emerged after forensic discussions about the party’s policies with Doug Henderson, John Smith and Murray Elder – all Scotsmen who would spend one week every August hill-walking and mountaineering in Scotland with their families. ‘Brown wanted a break from the past,’ reflected Gould sourly. ‘His idea was to be more congenial towards the City.’ Gould, more senior than Brown, was unwilling to accommodate Brown’s ill-defined opinions, and was encouraged to pursue his course by Peter Mandelson, whose patronage had promoted Gould’s importance in the media. ‘Peter gave me a very comforting feeling,’ Gould acknowledged, ‘introducing good contacts and placing my name in very good contexts.’

The stock market crash on 19 October 1987, ‘Black Monday’, confirmed Gould’s conviction about ‘capitalism’s irreversible crisis’. Ideologically, Brown could offer no solution to Labour’s unpopularity in the polls or suggest an alternative to Thatcherism, apart from announcing that Gould’s intention to re-impose economic controls would guarantee electoral disaster. ‘Bryan’s being unhelpful,’ Brown was told some weeks later by John Eatwell. ‘His report to the party conference will recommend the renationalisation of some privatised companies.’ Brown agreed that Gould’s proposals, the springboard for his ambitions to be party leader, were reckless. He combined with Blair to urge Mandelson to abandon Gould. While Mandelson pondered, Brown and Blair took it upon themselves to frustrate the review.

Busy preparing to dispatch his final report later that day to the printers, Bryan Gould was surprised when Gordon Brown, Tony Blair and John Eatwell entered his office in the Norman Shaw building unannounced. ‘We want all references to nationalisation and renationalisation taken out of the report,’ announced Brown. ‘You’re too late,’ replied Gould angrily. ‘You refused to sit on the committee and do any work, and now you want to interfere. No way. Go away! All of you!’ Gould stared particularly at Blair. His presence was inexplicable, since he, as shadow spokesman for employment, was not even eligible for membership of the committee. The report was dispatched and printed. Gould’s victory, however, was bittersweet. At the end of 1987 a series of unfavourable references to him appeared in newspapers. He suspected that he knew the identity of the source, but his repeated attempts to reach Peter Mandelson were unsuccessful. Eventually he elicited an unexpected response. ‘You should get to know Gordon,’ said Mandelson. ‘He wants to be a friend of yours.’ Gould realised that he was being abandoned. Mandelson’s seduction – the offer of friendship, with its concomitant demand for emotional commitment – had been aborted. Even worse, Mandelson had switched. He was now briefing against Gould and promoting Brown and Blair. ‘It’s an ideological war,’ Gould realised, but was nevertheless relieved when his report, ‘The Productive and Competitive Economy’, was approved by the party executive on 25 May 1988. Unintentionally, he had prompted the conception of an emotional, triangular relationship between Mandelson, Brown and Blair.

Peter Mandelson had become persuaded that Gordon Brown was the party’s future. Compared with so many Labour politicians, Brown was immensely attractive. Unaware of his lurking volcanic aloofness, Mandelson regarded Brown as a sensitive, handsome, entertaining professional tainted only by impatience and intensity. Among other MPs he was regarded as unselfish, willing to help those in difficulty, extending personal kindnesses even to those with whom he disagreed if they had won his respect as an intellectual equal, and arguing from knowledge rather than purely prejudice. Watching him at receptions, as he glad-handed and back-slapped the faithful with apparent conviction, and without betraying his dislike of the performance, few would have recognised the brooding workaholic who invariably arrived late at a restaurant for dinner with friends and, after gobbling down his steak and chips or a plate of spaghetti, would rush back to his rooms to either type a speech or read a book.

Brown’s combination of intellect, sophistication, ambition and popularism appealed to Mandelson. Standing on the steps of the party’s headquarters in Walworth Road, he told Andy McSmith, a Labour press officer, ‘Gordon will one day be the party’s leader.’ Mandelson’s prediction surprised McSmith. Brown was still largely unknown. Mandelson acknowledged that obstacle, but had repeatedly promised Brown that it would be overcome. During their frequent meetings Brown constantly complained, ‘I’m not getting enough mention in the papers. My name’s only in a couple of them.’ Mandelson reassured him that his hard work would be rewarded. Both were grappling with the party’s ideology, and belatedly welcomed the opportunities of the 1987 defeat. With the support of the party’s left wing and the endorsement of Neil Kinnock, Brown believed he would eventually succeed the Welshman as the party’s leader. He dismissed the chances of his rivals, except possibly John Smith, who was handicapped by his poor relationship with Kinnock. Brown’s quandary was how to develop an alternative to Thatcherism. Marooned among orthodox Scottish socialists, he was still estranged from the consequences of ‘Big Bang’.

Nigel Lawson’s boom had visible fault-lines, but Thatcherism appeared irreversible. Relying on people and markets rather than Whitehall civil servants to manage the economy was attractive to electors. Mandelson, alert to the new ideas, understood the dilemma. ‘I think you should go to Gordon,’ he told Michael Wills, a television producer at LWT’s Weekend World who drafted policy documents and speeches for him. ‘Help him become prime minister.’

Interested in the failings of British industry, Wills had just completed a series of documentaries revealing the limitations and frustrations of British managers. In particular he had been struck by an interview with a supplier of car components who volunteered that he had resisted borrowing money from the banks in order to build a new production line to manufacture gearboxes for Honda. His reason was depressing. In the early 1980s he had borrowed for a similar venture, but interest rates had soared and he had been financially crippled. Ever since, he had decided to remain small and safe by not borrowing. He spoke eloquently and authoritatively about the Conservative government’s failure to help industry. This was fertile ground for Labour to exploit, Wills told Brown. Wills introduced Brown to the experts consulted by Weekend World, with whom he discussed the essence of Thatcherism and its American counterpart, Reaganism. Reluctantly, he began to recognise the strength of some Tory policies and the disadvantage of Labour’s adherence to Attlee’s consensus. There was reason to acknowledge that the growth of Europe’s and America’s successful economies was not the result of state intervention. Listening and brooding, he agonised over how to balance incentives to entrepreneurs, the restriction of public spending and the financing of social justice. ‘We need a fairer Britain,’ he repeated as he learnt to sympathise with the market economy. ‘We’ve got to work from first principles towards policies,’ he told his confidants, irritated by Kinnock’s ignorance of economics and John Smith’s resistance to change. Under Smith as shadow chancellor, Labour’s economic policies remained rigidly anti-market, against joining the ERM and in favour of controlling exchange rates. ‘We must persuade the rich of the need for fairness,’ Smith had said, apparently without realising the inherent contradiction. Wealth creators, by definition, are not social philanthropists, but ruthlessly ambitious to earn money for themselves.

Three successive election defeats had convinced Brown that simply damning the Tories’ sympathy for the rich would not reverse Labour’s political decline. The party needed new ideas. That summer he spent three weeks in Harvard’s library, studying industrial policy and discussing the cause of America’s economic success with local academics. He returned to Westminster emboldened by his intellectual rejuvenation. His task was to find a compromise between old Labour’s philosophies and Thatcherism. There were many false starts. Essentially, he was searching for ideas to help him write a new Labour epic that could rank with Anthony Crosland’s Future of Socialism, a 500-page analysis of how to create an egalitarian, socialist Britain, published in 1956. Throughout, Brown asserted with evangelical sincerity that social Christianity could provide greater fairness and prosperity through a more efficient economy, all in the cause of socialism.

Nigel Lawson’s budget in 1988 was another ideological challenge. Treasury statistics showed that the reduction in the top rate of tax – from 83 per cent under Labour in 1979 to 60 per cent nine years later – had actually increased the amount of money received by the Treasury, as the rich had less reason to evade and avoid taxes. In his penultimate budget, Lawson announced that the top rate of tax would be reduced from 60 per cent to 40 per cent, and the basic rate cut to 25 per cent from 33 per cent. The Labour benches erupted in uncontrolled protest. The Commons was suspended for ten minutes. Brown joined in the protest. He rejected Lawson’s argument that encouraging enterprise would benefit the poor. Too many millionaires, he raged, were enriching themselves from tax loopholes, not least from share options. Lawson’s budget allowed company directors to buy shares at 1984 prices and take the profits in 1988, paying capital gains tax of 30 per cent rather than 60 per cent. ‘Britain is fast (#litres_trial_promo) becoming a paradise for top-rate tax dodgers,’ Brown protested, demanding that the ‘share option millionaires (#litres_trial_promo)’ should be penalised. Instead of rewarding the rich, the government should invest in education and training. Brown was echoing the mantra voiced by Harold Wilson twenty years earlier, although six years of Wilson’s government had ended, at best, in economic paralysis. His unoriginal accusations did not dent Lawson’s claim to have achieved a hat trick – higher spending on public services, lower tax rates and a budget surplus.

Overshadowing Lawson’s self-congratulation was the rising value of sterling and his bitter row with Thatcher about whether Britain should join the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM). The growing strain between Lawson and Thatcher, and the prospect of rising inflation and an implosion of the boom, encouraged Brown’s belief that the government’s economic policy was doomed. Neil Kinnock’s misfortune was that his alternative policies were unattractive to Labour’s far left. Their representative, Tony Benn, launched a bid for the leadership, and the old internecine war erupted once again. Benn’s bid was trounced at the 1988 autumn party conference in Blackpool, but all the percentage points gained from the Tories shown by the opinion polls evaporated. Labour remained a party of protest, and not an alternative government.

At the end of the party conference Brown returned to Edinburgh with John Smith. Over the previous week the shadow chancellor had as usual enjoyed himself, living up to his reputation at many parties as a heavy drinker, and smoking cigars after big meals. On reaching home he felt unwell, and was examined in a hospital. While getting dressed afterwards, he suffered a heart attack. Smith’s misfortune was Brown’s opportunity. For twenty years he had prepared himself for the spotlight, and now his chance had arisen at the most favourable moment as, during Smith’s convalescence, he took his place on Labour’s front bench. Nigel Lawson’s strategy appeared to be crumbling. The Tories were becoming the victims of their own mistakes. There were widespread protests in Scotland against the new poll tax, inflation was climbing above 4 per cent, interest rates were rising towards 14 per cent, unemployment was stuck at three million and, with a worsening balance of payments, there was a run on sterling. Lawson’s boast about his ‘sound management of the economy’ was an easy target.

‘This is a boom based on credit,’ mocked Brown, eager to prove his skills during the debate on the autumn financial statement on 1 November 1988. Standing at the dispatch box in a crowded chamber, glancing at a speech printed out in huge letters to compensate for his poor eyesight, Brown relished the occasion. Countless speeches in dank Scottish assembly halls had primed his self-confident, exquisitely timed flourishes, mixing statistics and oratory while displaying his mastery of the dialectic, the rapier of eloquent Marxists. He deployed artful mockery to rile an arrogant chancellor for allowing consumption to spiral out of control and for making consistently wrong forecasts. ‘Most of us would say,’ scoffed Brown at his crestfallen target, ‘that the proper answer is to keep the forecasts and discard the chancellor.’ Each cutting jibe, accompanied by whoops of derision from the Labour benches, rattled Lawson’s pomposity. The chancellor had not anticipated the humiliation or the lukewarm support from the Tory benches. His pained expression was Brown’s reward. The result, Brown would later say, was ‘an unequal dialogue between a chancellor who had not yet made up his mind when to retire and a prime minister who had not yet made up her mind when to sack him’. During those magical minutes, Labour MPs felt a surge of hope. Here, perhaps, was the new hero they had sought so desperately. Brown sat down to roars of approval.

Walking through the (#litres_trial_promo) arched corridors of Westminster later that afternoon, he was suitably modest, feeling an inner calm about his good fortune. In just two days, Labour MPs would vote for the shadow cabinet. The combination of his Commons performance with his astute handling of a series of leaks had earned him an irreproachable reputation. Once again, he sought the help of Nick Brown to lobby for votes. The result, late on 6 November, was electrifying. As he rushed from Committee Room 14, Brown was laughing. He was top of the poll. Following him out of the room, Tony Blair was seen telephoning his wife Cherie to report his own first appearance on the list, his reward for humiliating Lord Young, the secretary of state for trade and industry, about the government’s misconduct of supervising Barlow Clowes, an investment company which collapsed as a result of dishonesty. The next morning’s newspapers praised Brown as ‘high flying’ and ‘a horse for early investment’. One sage wrote, ‘He appears to possess the ultimate political quality of luck.’ A few, aggressively (#litres_trial_promo) briefed by Mandelson, speculated that Brown had become a future contender for the party’s leadership. Willie Whitelaw, the Tory elder statesman and former home secretary, said that both Brown and Blair were ‘improved and becoming (#litres_trial_promo) a little dangerous’. Another observer noted that even at that moment Brown appeared affected by self-doubt: ‘He is very ambitious, but he seems to lack the nerve to go right to the very top.’ Brown’s image among the agnostics was not of a leader but of the Scottish engineer on the ocean liner, toiling away below decks in the engine room, polishing the pistons and removing the grease.

An opportunity to shed that reputation was again provided by Lawson. After journalists briefed by the chancellor reported that he intended to target the poor and pensioners with benefits while withholding the money from the rich, Lawson complained that he had been misquoted. The furore allowed Brown to parade his Christian conscience. ‘The government’s real (#litres_trial_promo) objective,’ he taunted the tarnished chancellor in the Commons, ‘is to move from a regime of universal benefits to a regime of universal means testing, jeopardising for millions of pensioners security in ill-health and dignity in old age.’ Means testing pensions, said Brown, was ‘the most serious (#litres_trial_promo) government assault so far mounted on the basic principles of Britain’s postwar welfare state’. His reputation harmed by scathing headlines whose implication – ‘Veteran Chancellor Bloodied by Upstart’ – was clear, Lawson’s misfortunes resulted in rich kudos for Brown. The Commons was the perfect platform from which to parade his loathing for complacent Tories feigning to help the poor. They were men, he sniped, who cared for power and money rather than principle. Lawson and Nicholas Ridley, the secretary of state for the environment and High Thatcherite minor aristocrat, ranked among the worst. Ridley’s aspiration was to deregulate, to withdraw subsidies, and to delight in not pulling the levers of power. Ridley sneered at Brown’s ‘supply-side socialism’. Standing in the crowded chamber, Brown reacted with genuine anger to the chain-smoking minister who appeared to care more about his ashtray than his departmental in-tray. Above all, Brown reviled Thatcher’s affection for photo-opportunities: one day she was seen promoting science, the next day campaigning against litter, then advancing the cause of women and later urging the regeneration of the inner cities. ‘Today a photo-opportunity,’ he wrote, ridiculing the ‘Maggie Acts’ headlines, ‘tomorrow a new issue, the last one all but forgotten. The government’s main new investment in these vital concerns has been in its own publicity.’ His incandescence at (#litres_trial_promo) the rising cost of official advertising, from £20 million to £100 million, seemed genuine. Four years later he would adopt the same tactics as virtuous ploys to help win an election.

Brown’s pertinent strength in 1988 was his patent sincerity. Like a machine-gun, around the clock, seven days a week, he worked to capture the headlines, firing off press releases on every subject, with newsworthy coups offering leaks of confidential Whitehall information. One day he (#litres_trial_promo) publicised a government memorandum about civil servants not encouraging grants for high-technology research; another day he (#litres_trial_promo) produced secret government statistics showing that the poorest four million homes were worse off than they had been ten years earlier; another day he trumpeted a (#litres_trial_promo) report by Peter Levene, the personal adviser to Michael Heseltine at the ministry of defence, recommending that, to save money, Royal Navy ships should be refitted by private contractors. Levene’s discovery that the efficiency of the naval dockyards could not be assessed because their accounting systems were ‘entirely meaningless’ was derided by Brown’s assertion, to cheers, that ‘this is the (#litres_trial_promo) most devious government we’ve had this century’.

Success fuelled his passion: at 7.30 on Boxing Day morning he telephoned Alistair Darling, a lawyer and Scottish activist educated at Loretto, a private school outside Edinburgh. ‘Have you seen the story in today’s Daily Telegraph?’ he asked. ‘No,’ replied Darling. ‘I’m still asleep.’ Deprived of a personal family life, Brown had become preoccupied by politics. Gradually, his passion distorted his perspective on life. Some accused him of hyperactivity, of becoming over-exposed as a rent-a-quote politician, robotically spouting One True Faith. He confessed his awareness that ‘rising can turn (#litres_trial_promo) into falling pretty quickly’, and blamed his irrepressible desire to lead Labour away from its past and towards new policies. His fervour would brook no opposition, especially from other members of his party.

Among the most difficult were his fellow Scots. His old foe George Galloway and John Reid, previously a sociable partner, had become argumentative and occasionally unreasonable. Reid and his group, Brown suspected, were quintessentially sectarian west Scotland left-wing hardmen, meeting as a caucus before general meetings to agree their arguments and votes. ‘He’s a music hall artist,’ Brown said of one agitator whom he castigated as ‘a prisoner of his upbringing’, perhaps failing to recognise that he too was a hostage to his own past.

Among the shackles of that past was the feud with Robin Cook. ‘It’s chemical between those two,’ John Smith told friends, concerned about the sour relationship. Cook was himself renowned as a good hater and not a team player. ‘A bombastic pain when I first met him,’ was Jimmy Allison’s judgement about a man accused of flip-flopping on major policies – the euro, nuclear weapons and Britain’s relationship with the United States. While Cook spoke impromptu on those issues, alternating between vehement opposition and support, Brown avoided extremes, courteously delivering written speeches based upon intellectual reasoning, only rarely being wrong-footed. His success increased Cook’s tetchiness. In turn, Brown became convinced that Cook, as he told friends, was ‘trying to destroy me’. No one regarded this apparent paranoia as serious, but there was a less attractive personality beginning to emerge. Success and publicity had transformed Brown into a man with an unqualified belief in himself, convinced that he was the best socialist, the best thinker, the best persuader, the best media performer and the best at everything else. The political truth was gradually defined as what suited Gordon Brown at that moment, and socialism was defined as those ideas that best served his interests. If his black-and-white judgement about Cook was challenged, a grim mood enveloped a man now increasingly consumed by hatreds. Only occasionally could he restrain his monochrome ambition.

To help John Smith’s recovery, Brown accompanied him in regular ascents of Scotland’s mountains over 3,000 feet in height – known as Munro-bagging – occasionally with Chris Smith, the MP for Islington, and Martin O’Neill. Those walks inspired Brown to write a pamphlet, ‘Where is the Greed?: Margaret Thatcher and the Betrayal of Britain’s Future’. At heart, the pamphlet revealed an old-fashioned Christian socialist concerned to alleviate suffering, seeking a modern way to vent his spleen against the Thatcherite conviction that state interference was a principal cause of society’s faults. Only the state, he claimed, could redress the growth of poverty and inequality since 1979. Eager to win the next election, the ‘new realist’ despaired about the past decade of Labour history and the danger of following John Maxton into oblivion. His solution, using new words to promote old ideas, was a rehashed attack on ‘free market dogma’.

John Smith sympathised (#litres_trial_promo), but was alarmed by his friend’s hyperactivity. During his convalescence he regularly telephoned Roy Hattersley, the deputy leader, and asked, ‘What’s Gordon up to?’ ‘Nothing,’ replied Hattersley, ‘but being loyal.’ To certify his reassurance, Hattersley invited Brown to lunch the week before Smith’s return. ‘What job would you like to do?’ he asked. ‘I think I’ll remain as shadow chief secretary,’ replied Brown, ‘to help John back to health.’ Brown’s restlessness for change and personal success did not appear to endanger Smith.

In early summer 1989, Margaret Thatcher became personally vulnerable. The poll tax had provoked violent protests, and her antagonism towards the ERM was dividing her from Nigel Lawson and Geoffrey Howe, the foreign secretary. To reinforce her position, Howe was demoted to leader of the House and Sir Alan Walters, an enemy of Lawson, was recalled as her personal economic adviser, based in 10 Downing Street. Lawson was incandescent. The disarray among the Tory leadership was oxygen for an accomplished political debater blessed with sharp wit, and Brown deployed his invective in a masterful Commons performance. ‘Many lonely, sad and embattled people,’ he said, mocking Lawson across the dispatch box, ‘labour under the delusion that their thoughts are being influenced by the Moonies next door … I assure the right honourable gentleman that he is not paranoid. They really are out to get him.’ Lawson sat stony-faced as Labour MPs jeered, ‘Go on, smile,’ and roared their approval as Brown recited the wretched statistics about inflation at 6 per cent, interest rates at 15 per cent and a growing trade deficit which undermined the chancellor’s reputation. No Labour politician wanted to hear that unemployment had fallen to 1.7 million and that manufacturing output had increased every year between 1983 to 1989 by an average of 4.75 per cent. Brown feigned deafness to Lawson’s assertion that Britain’s managers had finally been liberated to earn profits because of real competition, the destruction of protectionism and the strangulation of the trade unions’ restrictive practices. Devotion to socialism, retorted Lawson, was restricted to Albania, Cuba and Walworth Road. Not so, replied Brown spurred on by a party cheered by their discovery of a potential leader; there was socialism in Sweden, France and Spain. And soon, they hoped, in Britain. Lawson’s misery fuelled his opponent’s morale. As the chamber emptied, the crowd followed Brown and John Smith to the Commons bar. Endless hands smacked the dark-suited back of the man who fellow MPs were convinced was the star of the new generation, the future leader who would expunge the miserable memories of Wilson, Callaghan and Foot.

That evening, Brown was congratulated by Neil Kinnock. Confirming Brown’s potential to inherit the leadership, the Welshman offered two pieces of advice: ‘For credibility, you need to vote against the whip. And secondly, you’ve got to learn to fall in love faster and get married.’ Brown laughed. He had introduced Kinnock to Marion Caldwell, but had no intention of proposing marriage, despite her fervour. ‘Oh, there’s lots of time for that,’ he replied. Kinnock’s advice may not have been followed, but an unlikely source would possibly be more influential.

Just before the summer recess, Brown was travelling with Michael Howard, the secretary of state for employment, on a train from Swansea to London. Howard recognised Brown as a fellow intellectual. Flushed by the Conservatives’ continuing supremacy despite their difficulties, Howard settled back in his seat and presented a detailed critique of Labour’s unresolved electoral weaknesses. The party, he said, would never win another election until it ceased alienating the ‘margins’. Brown listened silently as Howard lectured him about appealing to voters’ personal interests in taxation, schools and health. To overcome middle-class antagonism, concluded Howard, Labour needed to address the details of those individual issues rather than blankly preach socialism. On arrival in London, the opponents bade each other farewell. In later years Howard would wonder whether his free advice had helped Labour finally to defeat his own party.

Brown was certainly anxious to learn during that summer. Americans had become his inspiration. The previous year he had met Bill Clinton in Baden-Baden, in Germany. Clinton was touring the world to meet other politicians before declaring his bid for the presidency. His big idea to roll back ‘Reaganomics’, with its greed and debts, was to introduce a ‘New Covenant’, reasserting the existence of a ‘society’ in America and declaring that citizenship involved responsibilities as well as rights. Brown found Clinton engaging, although intellectually muddled. There was nevertheless (#litres_trial_promo) scope for a partnership between Clinton’s advisers and Labour’s ‘modernisers’, including Peter Mandelson and Geoff Mulgan, a policy adviser. One year later, Brown would spend the summer in Cape Cod, reading through a suitcase of books on which the airline had levied an excess weight charge, and seeking out Democrats to hear about their new ideas.

He returned to Westminster anticipating excitement, but not the earthquake of 26 October 1989. Margaret Thatcher’s refusal to join the ERM and her protection of Alan Walters had humiliated Nigel Lawson. Insensitive to the danger, she allowed Lawson to resign, and then dismissed Walters. The prime minister’s relationship with Walters was an easy target for Brown’s derision: ‘It was the most damaging appointment of an adviser by a head of government since – I was going to say, since Caligula’s horse, but at least the horse stayed in Rome and worked full-time.’ Turning to the choice of John Major to replace Lawson as chancellor, Brown jeered, to the unrestrained acclaim of the Labour backbenches, ‘He has had the right training for the job over the past few weeks when he was foreign secretary – private humiliation, public repudiation and instant promotion.’ In the shadow cabinet elections in autumn 1989 he again topped the poll, and was appointed shadow spokesman for trade and industry.

For the modernisers, especially Blair and Mandelson, Brown embodied their best hopes for Labour’s eventual success. Suggestions that he was a candidate for the leadership inevitably roused his personal enemies and political critics on the left to question the essence of the man. The sceptics sensed a lack of ruthlessness, judged his charm as weakness, and doubted his willingness to grasp the jugular in order to advance his cause. Perhaps, they speculated, he lacked a game plan eventually to win the leadership. Their doubts were reinforced by Brown’s notorious disorganisation, persistently arriving late for, or completely missing, meetings. He was known to be irked by the practical details of life. Frequently he arranged a meeting in a restaurant but forgot to book a table, or even found the doors locked. His sometimes uneasy relationship to reality led to gossip concerning his uncertain commitment to others. His obsessive privacy, suggesting a fear of embarrassing revelations, also fuelled rumours, while his provincial rough edges suggested foreignness to the metropolitan media. ‘I think most (#litres_trial_promo) Scots are pretty reserved about their ambitions or personal lives. I think I am,’ he told an interviewer in 1989 who asked why he so rarely smiled. His friendship with Nigel Griffiths, a confirmed bachelor and the MP for Edinburgh South since 1987 who worked devotedly for him, excited unjustified gossip, not least after Owen Dudley Edwards said the two were like ‘Christopher Robin and Pooh Bear in an enchanted place in the forest’.

Outside Edinburgh, few were aware of ‘Dramcarling’, Brown’s new double-fronted red-brick house in North Queensferry, set on a hill above the road with a garden rolling down towards the Firth of Forth and with a view of Edinburgh Castle on a clear day. He had after many years found his dream. The house epitomised his love of Scotland – its poetry and scenery. The interior reflected another trait, having been neither redecorated nor refurnished. The dirty sofas from the shambolic top floor of his Edwardian house in Marchmont Road were dropped into the rooms overlooking the garden, and a familiar pile of books, government reports and newspapers began accumulating across the floors, around the battered typewriters and discarded word processors, towards the ramshackle kitchen. The man without taste hated domesticity.

During the decade Brown knew Marion Caldwell, his attitude towards women and relationships aroused bewilderment. Although he spent holidays with Caldwell in America, she remained in her own home in Edinburgh. He regularly disappeared for substantial periods, arriving at her doorstep when it suited him and failing to excuse himself if he was absent. Relationships with women in Brown’s life tended to be one-way affairs. Nurturing them was unimportant; affection was only perfunctorily acknowledged and reciprocated. Caldwell was among those women who were fascinated by his magnetism – the Alpha Male – and who pandered to his demand for immediate attention whenever requested. He happily allowed her to develop her career in Scotland. She was welcomed to the North Queensferry house at weekends, to sit quietly while he wrote endless articles, speeches and pamphlets. On Saturday nights he often refused to go out, preferring to watch Match of the Day. He expected Caldwell demurely to enjoy his pleasures, grateful that she was unable to visit London during the week. Sharing a flat in Kennington with his brother Andrew, he liked partying among high-achieving Scots in London. Although some have described a blissful romance with Caldwell in Scotland, Brown was interested in other women in the south. Some witnessed him pursuing Maya Even, a pretty Canadian presenter of the BBC’s Money Programme, while others recall him considering forging a relationship with Anna Ford after a dinner party at her home in Chiswick. The discretion of witnesses and the absence of chitchat protected Brown, who was classed by one Conservative newspaper as ‘single, reticent, good (#litres_trial_promo) humoured and charming’.

Divergence of opinion about a politician’s character is not unusual, but in Brown’s case it became particularly pertinent as he and John Smith reached a Rubicon. Economics, they agreed, had become a more serious business in politics. In any future election manifesto, Labour would need to provide statistics to establish its financial responsibility and to substantiate its challenge to Thatcherite orthodoxy. Any promises would require proof of proper costing. ‘Competence’ was the buzz word both bandied. To expunge the memory of Harold Wilson’s devaluation of sterling in November 1967 and the humiliation of Denis Healey begging for help from the International Monetary Fund in October 1976, it was best, they agreed, to support Britain’s entry into the Exchange Rate Mechanism. Labour’s support for the ERM would convince the electorate of the party’s commitment to non-inflationary policies. Smith and Brown approached Neil Kinnock for his support. Kinnock, who was equally worried about Labour’s image as irresponsible economic managers, was persuaded by the other two that the party needed to become conventional about spending and inflation, and against devaluation. Supporting the ERM, he was told, would prove Labour’s responsibility. At the same time, the party should also abandon its undertaking to withdraw from the European Union and even pledge to revalue the pound if the Tories devalued.

During those weeks, Brown did not ask himself how he, an anti-monetarist, could support the identical policy as Nigel Lawson, a monetarist. The more important conundrum was preventing new divisions in his own party. Inevitably, there would be arguments and casualties. Once Kinnock had committed Labour to Europe, the anti-Europeans would fight back, especially Bryan Gould, the aspiring left-wing leader of the party who was still promoting renationalisation and devaluation. The only solution to Gould’s opposition, Brown and Smith might have agreed with Samuel Brittan of the Financial Times, was to ‘put him on a slow boat to China’. Brown’s method was more subtle. By stealth, Gould’s influence was to be obliterated.

At the shadow cabinet meeting on 16 November 1989, John Smith described his proposed embracing of the ERM. By not joining, Brown added, Britain’s prosperity had been damaged. As predicted, Gould protested, outrightly opposing a policy switch. Kinnock did not respond. ‘It’s like fighting a marshmallow,’ Gould realised. ‘No one is willing to take me on.’ At the end of that day Gould blamed Mandelson for his humiliation, but in retrospect he understood his mistake. Gordon Brown, not Mandelson, had been planning his downfall, but Brown’s opposition had been so ‘subterranean’ that Gould had wrongly identified his enemy. He was being sidelined by Brown on the grounds of personal dislike and political disagreement. Lacking a powerbase within the party, Gould could not outwit a machine politician with fifteen years’ experience in Scotland of settling grudges without overtly plunging the dagger. ‘I’m being destroyed by stealth,’ Gould complained. ‘I’ve never been confronted with the reasons for my demotion.’

Brown misunderstood the ERM. At a subsequent meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) to discuss the system, he told MPs that by linking the value of sterling to that of other currencies, Britain would be applying socialist planning to the economy rather than relying on market forces. In crude terms (#litres_trial_promo), he was convinced that the ERM would disarm, even punish speculators. ‘We can fight speculators if we join the ERM,’ he told the PLP, revealing his ignorance of the mysteries of markets. He failed to (#litres_trial_promo) understand that speculators profit from fixed exchange rates, and that membership of the ERM would prevent Britain from unilaterally changing its interest rates. ‘This is the economics of the madhouse,’ thought Gould as he listened to Brown’s arguments. Brown and Smith, he realised, genuinely believed that the ERM was ‘a new magical device which would insulate their decisions about the currency against reality’. Brown was deluded that a handful of central bankers could beat the money markets.

To improve his understanding of economics and improve his relationship with the media, Brown recruited three advisers – Geoff Mulgan, Ed Richards and Neal Lawson. Mulgan, the senior adviser, had already established a relationship with Bill Clinton’s staff in order to learn how Labour might change its image and policies to appeal to the middle classes. Richards and Lawson were young and inexperienced, but satisfied Brown’s need for help both to mount a sustained attack against Thatcherism and to promote himself within the party.

Margaret Thatcher’s encouragement of greed, according to Brown, had splintered British society. In a seminal article published in the Guardian on 21 September 1990, he expounded his loathing for ‘an ageing leader’ who sounded too old to care and who was, like Mao, determined to stay on at any price. His accusations were harsh. The result of her ‘dream of unrelieved competition to produce improvement’, Brown wrote, accompanied by the ‘nightmare of any support by the state’, had been that ‘the rich have done better, the poor worse’. He railed against Thatcher’s ‘unfettered market’, her ‘promoting self-improvement of the poor’ and the ‘weaning [of the poor] from welfare’. He attacked the proposed privatisation of prisons, air traffic control and London Transport as sinful, cursed by ‘the enthusiasms of an extremist tendency too young to care’. The Thatcherites’ pretensions and wild assertions were, he wrote, merely a smokescreen to ‘promote self-indulgence among the very rich’.

In a similar vein he toured Labour associations, occasionally helped by Douglas Alexander, a young Scottish lawyer crafting his speeches, damning the ‘markets [which] cannot (#litres_trial_promo) educate’ and urging investment in British technology to fill the country’s ‘innovation gap’ and ‘training gap’. His campaign was not universally applauded by his colleagues. He was accused of being an effective critic, delivering coruscating diatribes against Thatcherism, but providing few new ideas for a cure. He spoke fluently, full of certainties, simultaneously as a moderniser and a traditionalist, but seemed uncertain about the consequences of his proposals. His reputation rested on his industry, but the party’s intellectuals wanted a heavyweight, left-wing analysis of Thatcherism. They questioned whether Brown was merely a Labour loyalist, promising the creation of ‘economic powerhouses’ to create jobs and an end of unemployment, or an original thinker. His journalistic, broad-brush approach to politics, rarely arguing about socialist philosophy, was proof for his critics of frivolity. ‘He has a moral revulsion against the government,’ wrote Paul Addison, ‘but you felt he would only offer a more decent form of Thatcherism in its place. It’s no longer really a socialist solution.’

Brown hated any criticism, and these attacks were particularly serious. His reaction was noticeable. The formerly witty, approachable man was gradually assuming the posture of a burdened statesman. To prove his suitability for power and to protect himself from making mistakes, he adopted a new gravitas in order to help establish Labour’s reputation for competence. Journalists travelling with him noticed how his good humour evaporated when a camera appeared, and despite his friendship with an interviewer, a sheet of plate glass would suddenly seem to separate the two. Anxious to micro-manage his appearances, Brown adopted a habit of robotic repetition. One memorable example of his repeated attempts to manipulate the agenda occurred during an interview with David Frost. In reply to an enquiry, Brown said, ‘That isn’t the question.’ Frost retorted, ‘Yes it is, because I just asked it.’ The mystery for his new audience was whether Gordon Brown would emerge as an undisputed leader thanks to some hitherto unseen magic, or whether the enigma merely masked blandness.

His opportunity to disarm the cynics came on 5 October 1990, the last day of the Labour Party conference in Blackpool. After many bitter arguments, Margaret Thatcher had reluctantly announced that Britain would join the ERM, at the rate of £1 for DM 2.95. Critics immediately predicted disaster, believing that the pound was overvalued. The prime minister was beleaguered. By contrast, Smith and Brown appeared serene. Labour’s lead in the polls had soared to double figures, and the party leadership, convinced of the country’s weariness with Thatcher, believed that electoral victory was inevitable. The question was whether Labour would support the government’s application to join the ERM at the high exchange rate. Most people were unaware that a year earlier, John Smith had quietly announced his support. At 4 p.m. on the last day of the conference, Roy Hattersley called Smith. ‘What’s our policy on ERM?’ he asked. ‘No alternative but to support the government,’ said Smith.

Five years earlier the party, including Blair and Brown, had supported a policy of withdrawal from the European Union. Brown had played a significant part in transforming Labour into a more electable party, as had Blair. Charles Clarke, Neil Kinnock’s chief of staff, had asked John Monks, then deputy general secretary of the TUC, to meet the two MPs as examples of the party’s encouraging future prospects. In Monks’s opinion, Blair had proven his abilities in 1988 by astutely negotiating an agreement with the unions to acknowledge that the new Conservative laws ending the closed shop (which compelled workers to belong to a union) would not be revoked by a Labour government. That success had, in Monks’s opinion, catapulted Blair up to Brown’s level.

Although the two were close, their differences were marked. Blair took a metropolitan view of politics, eager to lobby for the support of the rich and to criticise the trade unions. By comparison, Brown refused to attack the trade unions, and remained antagonistic towards capitalism. The similarity between the two was that both felt ‘modernisation’ was necessary to win an election. While Brown’s journey had been a struggle through a mass of research and intellectual reasoning, Blair acted largely by instinct. One marked difference was in their attitude towards John Smith. Brown was committed to his mentor, but in Blair’s opinion Smith was tainted by his toleration of cronyism and corruption among local party activists employed by the council in his Monklands constituency. Similarly, Blair had little confidence in Kinnock. By the end of 1990, Brown’s mood about the party’s leadership was edging closer to Blair’s. The countdown to the test of his character began on 28 November 1990. The outcome would depend upon his courage.

Eight days after failing to win sufficient votes in the first ballot of Conservative MPs in a leadership vote brought about by Michael Heseltine’s challenge following Geoffrey Howe’s devastating resignation speech, Margaret Thatcher resigned as prime minister. John Major’s election as the new leader revived the Tories’ fortunes in the opinion polls. Labour fell 5 per cent behind the Conservatives. Overnight, Brown’s unease about Labour’s election chances increased. The task of persuading the electorate of Labour’s financial competence fell to him and John Smith. Smith proposed launching an offensive in the City, which had been rapidly denuded of Tory grandees following ‘Big Bang’, which transformed not only the City but Britain as a whole.

Over the next two years, Smith and Brown frequently visited financial institutions in a ‘prawn cocktail circuit’ in an attempt to attract supporters. They were successful among the American, Australian and continental bankers who lacked tribal prejudice against old Labour. But British stalwarts like Lord King, Rocco Forte, Lord Delfont, Stanley Kalms, Alan Sugar and Clive Thompson were incontrovertibly grateful to Thatcher’s revolution. Few were convinced that Smith and Brown actually liked the City’s denizens, or understood the complexities of bank capital. Brown appeared not to have lost his conviction that ministers and civil servants could manage industry better than the entrepreneurs. His references to (#litres_trial_promo) the Guinness and Barlow Clowes scandals cast him as a mudslinger, unaware that the development of the City as the world’s third-largest trading centre would destroy the amateurs he loathed.

Brown was scathing about such criticism. Honesty, he said, was more important than undeserved wealth. His ‘vision for the (#litres_trial_promo) new world’ to replace the Tories’ ‘bleak, gigantic marketplace of self-seekers, each in lonely competition with each other’ was ‘a community of opportunity’. The rottenness of Thatcherism was epitomised by the appointment of fourteen former Conservative ministers as directors of companies they had helped to privatise. Those appointments suggested more than greed. ‘Privatisation,’ Brown said tersely about the new millionaires, ‘began with selling the family silver. It is now ending in the farce of golden parachutes for departing cabinet ministers.’ The recipients of ‘jobs for the boys’ included Norman Fowler, the former transport minister who joined National Freight, a company privatised by his department; Norman Tebbit, the ex-industry secretary who became a director of the newly privatised British Telecom; Peter Walker, formerly energy secretary and now a director of British Gas; and Lord Young, another former industry secretary who, after overseeing the privatisation of Cable and Wireless, was appointed a director of the company.

Those apparent conflicts (#litres_trial_promo) of interest were to Brown as repellent as the huge profits earned by the newly privatised utilities and the unprecedented pay increases which their directors awarded themselves. His cure was a reaffirmation of the virtues of public ownership, a national investment bank, legislation to ban ‘unjustified rises in company directors’ pay’ and a ban on ‘huge perks’. Labour insiders including Charles Clarke noticed Brown’s cautious retreat from ‘modernisation’ as he once again opposed the privatisation of state monopolies. Nothing was said, however, because his attacks helped bring John Major’s honeymoon to a quick end. Electors voiced their disenchantment about perceived corruption, the faltering economy and bickering ministers. Major, who irritably described Brown as ‘a master of the personal insult’ and ‘a dismal Jimmy, always jumping onto bad news and ignoring anything good’, appeared vulnerable.

Rattling the prime minister emboldened Brown. He had won a reputation as a serial embarrassment to the government by regularly revealing confidential information supplied by disgruntled civil servants; his latest had (#litres_trial_promo) exposed the government’s refusal to increase consumers’ rights against the privatised utilities. By spring 1991 (#litres_trial_promo) he consistently appeared the outstanding member of the shadow cabinet, ranking among Labour’s giants. The perceptive interpreted his speeches as reflecting his serious disenchantment with the party’s leadership. To Kinnock’s irritation, he was mentioned as the leader-in-waiting. Dissatisfaction was particularly prevalent among Scottish MPs fearful of a fourth election defeat.

Although the opinion polls had swung back in Labour’s favour, a weariness was infecting the party, and there was uncertainty about whether Kinnock could win an election victory. With Blair’s encouragement, his personal assistant Anji Hunter and Peter Mandelson were touring Labour constituencies to identify kindred spirits who supported radical change despite intimidation and threats of deselection. The roots of the New Labour project, forging a brotherhood of survivors before the outbreak of renewed conflagration, started just one year before a general election which Kinnock anticipated winning. The birth of this magic circle, born from despair and cemented by bonds of close friendship, was gradual. In Mandelson’s version, he was uncertain whether Labour could ever win an election with a Celtic leader. Over lunch with a sympathetic journalist in 1991, shortly after his selection as the parliamentary candidate for Hartlepool, Mandelson mused, ‘It’s time we had an English leader.’ He was already veering towards Blair. ‘People listening to the BBC’s broadcasts of Blair’s speeches,’ continued Mandelson, ‘say here is the next leader of the Labour Party.’ He would later deny having turned away from Brown so early.

Brown was more concerned by the substance than the image. Despite his visits to the City, John Smith favoured the old-style socialist command economy rather than an equal partnership between the government and capitalists. Brown’s conversations at his regular dinners with Doug Henderson, Martin O’Neill and Nick Brown revolved around replacing Smith’s obsolescent ideology with a new agenda. ‘You’re promising things you can’t deliver,’ O’Neill told Brown. ‘It’s the same trap as the seventies.’ Usually, Brown did not comment. Despite the Glasgow versus Edinburgh friction, he shared the same Christian socialist values as Smith. Both favoured community values rather than satisfying the aspirations of the enfranchised ex-working classes. Like Smith’s, Brown’s world revolved around Scotland’s party machine and the plight of Kirkcaldy and similar Scottish communities – uneconomic coalmines, decrepit linoleum factories and Harold Wilson’s failed investments in technology – and what he called ‘the causes of (#litres_trial_promo) poverty which are unemployment and a welfare state that isn’t working’.

To avoid criticism from the trade unions, Brown resisted questioning Smith’s agenda even among friends, although he knew he would have to break away from that view. During 1991 he confided to Peter Mandelson that Smith would be unsuitable as chancellor if Labour won the 1992 election. Smith, he believed, was too dogmatic and simplistic on economic matters. Mandelson and Brown agreed that electoral success depended upon committing the party to as little as possible. Contrived obfuscation was the ideal strategy. The obstacles were Smith, who was antagonistic towards such tactics, and Kinnock, who was reluctant to endorse Brown’s proposals to prove Labour’s economic competence.