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Times columnist
Who wants to be a Tory? In 2005 it was a lonely life. Even in the shires it was more embarrassing to say that you had voted blue than that you could not reverse a horse box. The Tories were in despair. They had liked the nice William Hague, the comprehensive-educated, northern lad with a pretty wife and lovely manners. It still rather hurt that the electorate had ridiculed his attempts to be more matey with his baseball caps and his 14 pints of beer.
This man seemed honourable and decent but Britain had rejected him. So they tried again. They chose an officer with four children, another charming, blonde wife and the shadow of a moustache. Iain Duncan Smith could put some backbone into the party, thought the loyalists. He would show the shallow Tony Blair how to be a gentleman.
But the quiet man soon went and Michael Howard, the former Home Secretary who promised cleaner hospitals and more school discipline, still could not make a dent in the polls.
The Tories were desperate. Who could save them from a life of slammed doors and dinner party jokes? The leadership contest of 2005 was a despondent affair. There was David Davis with his derring do and pick axe in his office and David Cameron, a Newbury boy with slicked-back hair.
As they met at the party conference in Blackpool, the mood was sombre. A few girls ran around wearing Mine’s a DD, for David Davis, T shirts. The tone seemed set. The words running through the Blackpool rock were Tory Losers.
Then something miraculous happened. A young man bounded on to the stage, with no notes and began to talk. The grassroots, who had become pale and lifeless in the arid soil, suddenly felt as though they had been watered. Soon they were nudging each other, tapping their hearing aids, looking thoughtful and clapping ecstatically.
David Cameron brought the Conservative Party back to life. When he patted his wife’s pregnant stomach at the end of his speech, the party knew that they had found their man. Here was an Old Etonian as at home in shorts as he was in plus fours, who gave them some credibility, no one sneered at him. Young women in wraparound dresses began to pour into Conservative Central Office, Oxbridge graduates were queuing for jobs as interns.
The leader wore things called Converse trainers that seemed to impress the press. He cycled to work (although there was that little hiccup when it was discovered that his chauffeur was following with his briefcase). His insistence on riding a sledge in Norway for a photoshoot was rather embarrassing but the country did not seem to mind so the grassroots were determined that they would not either. They turned a blind eye when Mr Cameron started hugging hoodies. The Heir to Blair, well that was a bit humiliating but never mind.
Onwards and upwards, the Tories were finally going places. Samantha Cameron was a working mother but she was not strident like Cherie Blair. And then there was Ivan. Mr Cameron was obviously a wonderful father to his disabled son.
It began to look rather promising. They soon started winning more council seats. The A list proved to be a blip. Then there was the question of grammar schools. Could they really accept a leader who didn’t cherish these great institutions? But they did.
Then just as they thought they might finally be in with a chance, Gordon Brown became Prime Minister and extraordinarily the country decided they liked him.
Here was the first real wobble. Had they chosen the right man? Didn’t he suddenly seem a bit young, a bit flash, a bit too toff? They should have stuck with Mr Hague. The party conference was a gloomy affair that year. Mr Major was wheeled in to provide extra support. Then young George Osborne did it. He promised to cut inheritance tax. The grassroots were relieved. They had not made a mistake, these boys knew on which side their crumpets were buttered. They would help the middle classes and wow Middle England. They had outbluffed Mr Brown, who could not now call a general election. The party was ecstatic. Mr Brown had become Mr Bean. The grassroots may have had a woman or ethnic minority candidate pressed on them but they proved to be decent chaps and chapesses. They would win.
Only, the polls changed again. By the beginning of 2010 it was clear that the Tories were not romping home. The recession had hit them hard. It was difficult to talk about GWB (General Well Being) when GDP was plummeting. People were not so polite any more. They thought the boys were a bit too aloof and distant. Their inner circle was too cliquey.
Mr Cameron sounded angry during the expenses scandal but he was not that clean either. Why should voters prune his wisteria? Who had let this happen? The grassroots felt let down by everyone now. The MPs whom they had served with scones and tea had done the dirty on them.
So they arrived at the election looking like an Eton mess, bits and pieces all jumbled together. Not really sure what they thought of their leader or their candidates or even their policies.
Then came Cleggmania, a slightly too clever Conservative manifesto (Invitation to Join the Government of Britain), the Big Society that none of them understood, and then days of uncertainty followed by a coalition, the kind of shabby deal that, a few days before, their leader had been writing off as disastrous.
Now they want to believe, they really do. They want to see the roses in the garden and the coalition and smile on it. They want to discover that they have two for the price of one, but they are nervous. Could they be the losers? The coalition manifesto drops many of their cherished plans and policies.
They worry that they have already had to give so much to the sandal-wearing yellows. It could all come at too high a price.
But they are emotionally shattered. They have given their all to this man in the past five years. They are staunch, they are loyal, they are tribal. And they are, after 13 long and lonely years, back in power where they believe that they belong. They will give him a chance.
Path to power: how the Lib Dems made history (#ulink_483a5f14-a5a8-5252-ad5c-d35097144f3b)
Greg Hurst
Editor of the Guide
The Liberal Democrats scarcely looked like a party on the brink of power for much of the 2005-10 Parliament. Two leaders resigned after losing support and authority, twice pitching members into leadership elections that were bitterly fought and bruising, rather than cathartic, and left some participants damaged. Yet despite periods of intense turbulence, the party underwent a profound transition as the leadership passed to a new generation with a different outlook from the social liberalism that had been its dominant philosophy for decades. An influx of 20 new MPs, a third of the parliamentary party, many of whom were able, experienced and, above all, ambitious, was another important dynamic.
The general election of 2005 was a double-edged sword for the Lib Dems. A net gain of 11 seats took them to 62 MPs, the highest for a third party since 1922, with some huge swings from Labour. The Conservatives, who gained five seats but lost three to the Lib Dems, unnerved those MPs who survived with precarious majorities with a ferocious new style of locally targeted campaigning. Such were the expectations that many Lib Dems hoped for a bigger breakthrough and saw the election as an opportunity missed.
Charles Kennedy, exhausted two days after the birth of his son, had torpedoed his own manifesto launch during the campaign by floundering over the details of a flagship policy for a local income tax. He found himself under pressure from the outset of the new term. Disappointment with the election result, compounded by tensions between social and economic liberals and frustration among new MPs with the party’s organisation in the Commons were compounded when Mr Kennedy drifted into one of his periodic bouts of introspection just as the party was crying out for leadership and strategic direction.
Although popular with many voters, Mr Kennedy was a source of increasing frustration with colleagues owing to an innate caution, chaotic organisation and reliance on a tight-knit inner circle of long-time friends. Although many suspected it, relatively few knew that he was an alcoholic who, when confronted by leading figures in the party in 2004, had agreed to undergo treatment but was subject to intermittent relapses. After months of tension, fresh drinking episodes in the autumn of 2005 proved to be the final straw for several of the younger generation of senior Lib Dem MPs, who began discussing plans for a multi-signature letter of no confidence in their leader.
A series of semi-public confrontations ensued during which Mr Kennedy, having previously appeared oddly detached, proved himself extraordinarily tenacious in seeking to cling on. Even when his alcoholism was disclosed, by a television journalist, he attempted a final throw of the dice by calling a leadership ballot of members in which he declared that he would be a candidate. His critics countered with a collective threat of resignation: 25 MPs declared that they would resign from their front-bench positions unless he fell on his sword. In a dignified statement the following day, Mr Kennedy duly stepped down.
The damage to the party did not stop there. Mark Oaten, a senior MP and, briefly, potential candidate for leader, was disgraced over liaisons with a male prostitute. Another candidate, Simon Hughes, Mr Kennedy’s chief rival for much of his leadership, was forced to admit to past sexual relationships with men, despite telling journalists that he was not gay.
It was the nadir: in January 2006, a YouGov poll put Lib Dem support as low as 13 per cent. The party looked at though it might tear itself apart. The unlikely and unexpected victory in the Dunfermline & West Fife by-election the following month, for which Mr Kennedy himself returned to the spotlight to campaign, helped to steady the ship.
The front-runner to replace him was Sir Menzies Campbell, the deputy leader, who made his name articulating the party’s opposition to the Iraq war. Any hopes of a coronation were dashed when Chris Huhne, a former MEP and one of the sharpest of the party’s new MPs, entered the race despite previously pledging to support Sir Menzies. Mr Huhne’s audacity enraged senior colleagues who had risked their reputations to topple Mr Kennedy but quickly won the admiration of many party activists, who mistrust anything that smacks of a stitch-up.
Sir Menzies won the election but Mr Huhne finished a strong second, after a vigorous campaign. Despite claims from supporters that Sir Menzies would bring a statesman’s authority to the role, his opening appearances in the Commons proved to be disastrous, as he struggled to be heard in the bear pit of Prime Minister’s Questions. In one early outing, as acting leader, he asked why one in five schools were without a permanent head. As his own party was itself without a leader, this provoked uproarious hilarity. Rapidly he was portrayed as too old, at 64, and out of touch. A determined man, he received coaching and his Commons performances improved but too late to rescue his reputation as an assured parliamentarian. Recriminations over his role in the traumatic resignation of Mr Kennedy also poisoned the well of the party’s body politic.
This was the Lib Dems’ awkward predicament as David Cameron, in his first year as Conservative leader, set about a re-branding exercise seeking to bite chunks out of their support. In a speech in Hereford, a precarious Lib-Con marginal constituency, Mr Cameron declared himself a “liberal Conservative” and appealed to Liberal Democrats to back him. His skilful championing of green issues threatened to wrest the mantle of environmental campaigning from the Lib Dems’ complacent grasp: plans by Mr Cameron for a wind turbine on the roof of his house and travelling by husky sled to view melting glaciers in Norway were vivid pieces of political positioning, although his environmentalism proved short-lived.
Another Conservative overture, seeking to field the former BBC Director-General Greg Dyke as a joint Tory-Lib Dem candidate for London Mayor, was more deftly rejected by Sir Menzies. The Lib Dems’ eventual candidate, Brian Paddick, proved to have questionable judgment and trailed in third place.
The following year, when Gordon Brown succeeded Tony Blair at No 10, the Lib Dems’ defences were tested again. Mr Brown wanted to appoint two Lib Dems to his Cabinet: Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon and another peer who he hoped would defect to Labour, as he tried to construct a broad-based “government of all the talents”. His plan leaked and was scuppered; oddly, Mr Brown assumed that Lib Dems would serve in a Labour administration, not a coalition with agreed policy concessions. The new Prime Minister settled on advisory posts for several Lib Dems: Lady Neu-berger (on volunteering), Lord Lester of Herne Hill (on constitutional reform) and Baroness Williams of Crosby (on nuclear proliferation). Matthew Taylor, a former front-bencher, conducted an inquiry on rural housing.
The impact was deeply unsettling for the Lib Dems. It smacked of a crude attempt to divide the party’s senior ranks, signalling to its left-of-centre supporters to return to Labour’s embrace. Like many of Mr Brown’s initiatives, the strategy soon unravelled but it again called into question the judgment of Sir Menzies and his closest adviser, Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope, both of whom had presented his long-time friendship with Mr Brown as an asset.
Another unnerving factor for the Lib Dems was the unfolding narrative of the prosecution of their biggest donor, Michael Brown, whose donations of £2.4 million doubled their 2005 election budget. He was later convicted of money-laundering and theft and some wealthy investors who were his clients demanded that money be returned to them by the Lib Dems, who insisted that they had taken, and spent, the money in good faith. The episode severely damaged the Lib Dems’ attempts to portray themselves as political reformers.
Under Sir Menzies’ leadership, his party’s poll ratings drifted slowly downwards, from 20 per cent in March 2006 to 15 per cent in the summer of 2007 and even 12 per cent that autumn, according to Populus, although they rose before and afterwards. When Mr Brown flirted with but abandoned a snap autumn election, Sir Menzies saw his chance and announced his resignation, knowing that his party had breathing space to elect his successor. His 18-month tenure, while difficult, saw important advances. Most notably he promoted to key spokesmanships and party positions a new generation eager to inject credibility on policy and greater professionalism into its organisation at Westminster: MPs such as David Laws, Ed Davey, Norman Lamb, Vince Cable and Nick Clegg. The forthcoming leadership election gave them a chance to complete their grip on the party’s levers of power.
There was little doubt that this new generation would choose as its champion Nick Clegg, a former MEP who entered the Commons in 2005, took an erudite interest in policy, was articulate and effective on television but had a restless disrespect for convention and a keen appetite for reform. As Sir Menzies had, Mr Clegg began in the uncomfortable position of front-runner and, like him, faced a formidable challenge from Mr Huhne. Mr Clegg’s campaign was cautious, holding back from his instinct to offer a bold, modernising agenda for fear of jeopardising his lead; Mr Huhne’s was slightly populist and overtly aggressive, attacking his rival for “flip-flopping”. His supporters at one point issued a rebuttal document entitled Calamity Clegg. The result was uncomfortably close, with Mr Clegg winning by about 500 votes.
Another by-product of the campaign was that the Lib Dems emerged with a new celebrity. Vince Cable, who was elected the party’s deputy leader in place of Sir Menzies, found himself standing in at Prime Minister’s Questions during the interregnum that followed his resignation. Dr Cable, who harboured leadership ambitions of his own before reluctantly ruling himself out because of his age, seized the moment.
His first attempt, when he cracked a joke, fell slightly flat: humour in the charged atmosphere on the floor of the House requires split-second timing and the ability to catch a mood. Undeterred, he tried again the following week. Mr Brown, having cancelled the autumn election, was embroiled in a scandal of hidden donations to Labour and the loss of child benefit records for 25 million families. “The House has noticed,” Dr Cable began, “the Prime Minister’s remarkable transformation in the last few weeks from Stalin to Mr Bean, creating chaos out of order, rather than order out of chaos.” The Commons collapsed into laughter. Vince Cable became a household name almost overnight.
Mr Clegg, like all new Lib Dem leaders, struggled to make an impact with the electorate, often finding himself in the shadow of his energetic deputy leader, whose profile rose throughout the financial crisis that engulfed Britain’s banks from autumn 2008. To frame the party’s response to the economic crisis Mr Clegg convened a small group of experts and advisers; Vince Cable was a prominent member but Mr Clegg insisted on chairing it himself, asserting his authority rather than deferring to his more experienced deputy.
He took care to stay close to Mr Huhne, seeking his counsel often and holding him close rather than allowing any rift to open between them; Mr Huhne repaid him with loyalty. Meanwhile, Mr Clegg’s allies were given key roles: David Laws played an increasingly key role in policy development, Ed Davey took charge of communications and Danny Alexander, who impressed Mr Clegg while working on his leadership campaign, became his chief of staff. Among backroom allies, he relied most on John Sharkey, a former advertising executive, for language in interviews and speeches; Polly MacKenzie to write his speeches; Jonny Oates for strategic media advice; Leana Pietsch on how issues would play in the press; and Alison Suttie to organise his office. This latter role was key: Mr Clegg, with three young children and impatient with the after-hours culture of the Commons, was ruthless in prioritising his diary and insisted on having time to take his boys to school or put them to bed, even if it meant returning to the Commons later. Much key party business was decided in conference telephone calls, with several advisers asked to ring a number with a PIN code at a given time for a focused discussion with the leader. It meant that the demands of managing a difficult and disparate party were contained and he could concentrate his energies elsewhere.
Mr Clegg’s approach was to develop an irreverent, anti-Establishment edge to the Lib Dems, both as a strategy for being noticed and to differentiate himself from Labour and the Conservatives: when standing for leader he pledged to go to prison rather than comply with a national identity card register. This meant embracing some future hostages to fortune: opposing the replacement of the Trident nuclear deterrent, on which Mr Huhne had campaigned, and an “earned amnesty” for illegal immigrants, developed by Mr Clegg himself while home affairs spokesman. The latter, in particular, cost the Lib Dems many votes. Other key policy developments included dropping a symbolic commitment to a new 50p top rate of income tax, agreed under Sir Menzies’ leadership and later implemented by Labour. Instead emphasis shifted towards taxing wealth, such as pensions contributions and capital gains, and exempting people earning beneath £10,000 a year from paying tax altogether, a policy revived from the 1997 manifesto. Mr Clegg made a further priority of improving education provision for children from poorer families.
An early test of his mettle was over Europe: Mr Clegg ordered his MPs to abstain on a Commons vote on whether the Lisbon treaty should be subject to a referendum, for which the Conservatives were campaigning. Several Lib Dems had pledged to constituents that they would back a referendum and could not comply, notably David Heath, Tim Farron and Alistair Carmichael in his Shadow Cabinet. Mr Clegg would not submit to a fudge by allowing them a free vote and accepted their resignations when they were among 15 Lib Dems to vote in favour.
If this episode was oblique, the issue that next introduced Mr Clegg to the voters was anything but. The Lib Dems inflicted on Gordon Brown his first significant Commons defeat, using one of their opposition days to table a motion to allow ex-Gurkha soldiers the right to live in Britain. The issue was simple for voters to understand and had the added appeal that the Gurkhas were backed by the television actress Joanna Lumley. Mr Cameron raced outside the Commons to join Mr Clegg celebrating with Ms Lumley for the television cameras. Mr Clegg again made waves by demanding the resignation of the Speaker, Michael Martin, over his inept handling of the MPs’ expenses scandal, the first party leader in modern political history to do so. He appeared about to find his voice just at a moment when Conservative support was slipping while Mr Brown remained a deeply divisive Prime Minister. Yet his pre-election conference missed this opportunity, with several errors. Mr Clegg unwisely urged “savage” cuts in public spending, and appeared to ditch a commitment to scrap university tuition fees but was forced to back-track after a party backlash. Vince Cable provoked anger from MPs by unveiling, like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat, a “mansion tax” on houses worth more than £1 million, later modified to £2 million.
Another of Sir Menzies’ legacies was to have ordered preparations for an early election from 2007, meaning that target seat planning, candidate selection, fundraising and campaign staff recruitment were well advanced. The process was headed by Lord Rennard, the party’s chief executive and architect of a string of by-election coups, but under Mr Clegg’s leadership pressure developed for a new approach. Lord Rennard stood down in May 2009, coinciding with controversy over his Lords expenses claims, for which he was later cleared, meaning that none of Mr Clegg’s core team had experience of running a general election.
Given Dr Cable’s higher profile, they agreed long beforehand to make the campaign a double act. To avoid a repeat of the fraught “two Davids” SDP-Liberal Alliance duopoly of 1987, when reporters took delight in pouncing on differences between David Owen and David Steel, they campaigned together. The Clegg-Cable partnership worked well enough but was rapidly overtaken by events, as the television debates finally made Nick Clegg a national figure in his own right. Greg Hurst is the author of Charles Kennedy: A Tragic Flaw (2006)
How Brown’s rivalry with Blair proved to be Labour’s undoing (#ulink_979c6370-a514-598d-b690-c248d7bcd672)
Philip Webster
Election Editor
His voice breaking with emotion, Gordon Brown, wearing a borrowed red tie, said farewell to frontline politics outside the door of No 10 five days after the general election. His final attempt to keep his party in office with a last-ditch deal with the Liberal Democrats was doomed from the start. When it came unstuck he was impatient to go, setting off for the Palace to see the Queen when his successor, David Cameron, was barely ready to follow suit. It was the job for which he had yearned all his life, and particularly during the ten years it was held by Tony Blair.
When his dream to win an election in his own right was finally shattered, however, Mr Brown was in no mood to hang around. In just three years the two founding fathers of new Labour had gone and the Conservatives were back in government for the first time since 1997. It was a partnership that had made Labour electable again after 18 years in the wilderness, but when they looked back on the Blair-Brown years most Labour politicians reflected that it was the intensity of their relationship, and Brown’s at times irrational desire to oust his old friend, that helped to destroy the project that they had worked so hard to create.
Mr Blair won the 2005 election having issued in advance an unprecedented promise that it would be his last, although he intended to serve for most of it. The move, taken at a time of weakness towards the end of the previous Parliament, was regretted by friends and other Blairites, who always harboured doubts about Mr Brown’s ability to win an election.
In the year after his third victory the Brownites kept snapping at Mr Blair’s heels and in the summer of 2006, The Times was dragged into the drama. Late in August we were invited to Chequers for an interview to mark Mr Blair’s return from his summer holiday. Our expectation was that the intention was to allow Mr Blair to lay out a timetable for his departure. The opposite happened. Given at least eight opportunities to say that the autumn party conference would be his last, Mr Blair declined. Asked at lunch afterwards what we thought the story would be, we told Mr Blair that it would be: “Blair defies Labour over leaving.” He did not demur.
Our splash the next day provoked an explosion throughout the Labour movement. Brown’s allies were furious and some of them launched into a plot to remove him. A Wolverhampton curry house was the venue for a number of parliamentary aides and Tom Watson, a junior minister close to Brown, to plan a letter calling on Mr Blair to go. “Without an urgent change in the leadership of the party it becomes less likely that we will win the election,” it said and its publication left the Prime Minister looking hugely vulnerable.
There was only one way to save his skin: to do what he had so deliberately avoided doing in his interview with The Times the previous week. He announced that the forthcoming conference would be his last as Labour leader, admitting that he would have preferred “to have done this in my own way”. Mr Brown got his way, but as the years unfolded it began to look increasingly like a pyrrhic victory. Mr Blair’s concession at least allowed the relationship between the two to return to something like the friendship they had once enjoyed.
Mr Brown was on course for the leadership and with no senior figures rising to challenge him he was crowned Labour king without a contest on June 24, 2007, promising to give the party not just policies but a soul. In his acceptance speech in Manchester, Mr Brown appointed a general election coordinator to show his party that it should be thinking of going to the country soon.
A far more dramatic announcement was, however, going to be part of Mr Brown’s speech until only a short time before he delivered it. He and many of his closest aides were planning that Sunday morning to do what no other leader had done before and announce there and then that there would be a general election the following year. This was to be a new-style leadership, it was argued, so let’s start doing things differently from the start. In the end it was removed; they concluded that it would be giving away far too much to the opposition parties, and there was even a fear that it might look disrespectful to the Queen, who is supposed to be told first of such matters. As later events were to show, however, it might have changed history.
It was left only for Mr Blair to take his bow the following week in the Commons, which he did with such customary élan that he had MPs from all sides rising in an unprecedented standing ovation at the end. He had managed ten years as Prime Minister, a remarkable feat. He had 28 minutes in the Palace saying goodbye to the Queen. Mr Brown went in later for a 57-minute audience and returned to No 10 as Prime Minister declaring: “Let the work of change begin.”
Along with Peter Mandelson, Mr Brown and Mr Blair were the architects of the new Labour project. They were friends from their entry to the Commons together in 1983 but the tensions created when Mr Blair took the leadership never lifted until he finally left office. He gave his Chancellor unprecedented powers over domestic policy, ones that he exercised to an extraordinary degree. Decisions that might normally have been made in No 10 were taken at the Treasury; Mr Blair often learnt details of Brown Budgets at the last possible moment. His style was one of “Stalinist ruthlessness”, according to a former Cabinet Secretary.
Mr Brown’s most fervent supporters believe that the tragedy of their man was that he came to the post too late, when public enthusiasm for new Labour, eroded so much by the Iraq war, was already seriously on the wane. With three victories chalked up by Mr Blair, his successor was always going to find it hard to bring off a fourth. But within the wider Labour movement, the tragedy of Mr Brown was that both he and his allies overestimated his ability to do the hardest job in Britain. They never foresaw that the man who enjoyed strong levels of public support for most of his time as Chancellor could become so unpopular in the relatively short time he occupied No 10.
For all the tributes he received for the way he led the country, and to a lesser extent the world, during the financial crisis, the public took against him. David Cameron based his whole election campaign on a slogan warning of “five more years of Gordon Brown” because Conservative focus groups, like Labour’s, told them that Mr Brown’s personal position was irretrievable.
For those who know him well, the other tragedy of the outgoing Prime Minister is that the clunky, ill-at-ease, irascible man the public perceives is not the same person that Mr Brown, at his best, can be. That Mr Brown is a man utterly devoted to his family and friends, warm in his dealings with the public when the cameras are out of sight, funny when relaxing, as wellread as anyone could be, a sporting facts-and-figures nerd. His wife, Sarah, and sons, John and Fraser, quite obviously mean so much to Mr Brown, who married in his forties, and he has often told friends that the one consolation of being out of office would be being able to spend more time with them. Sadly, as even his closest friends admit, the public perception is not an accident and is justified by Mr Brown’s behaviour over the years. His image as a bully is not accurate but he did get angry with himself, and with others, when things went wrong or they failed to meet his expectations.
It was, however, another personality trait that condemned Mr Brown to a political career that was to end without him winning a general election. During his long spell at the Treasury, and more crucially during those early weeks after he succeeded Mr Blair in 2007, Mr Brown acquired a reputation for dithering over big decisions. The habit was to cost him dear. As he almost announced on becoming leader, it had always been his intention on taking over to go to the country in 2008, but in the honeymoon period after he became Prime Minister, his popularity and that of Labour soared. The public liked the way he handled a run of national emergencies, including the floods and an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. So much so that Cabinet ministers were, by August, taking an autumn election for granted. Mr Brown, as a non-elected Prime Minister, could have rightfully asked for his mandate that September, ensuring that the party conferences were cancelled.
His inherent caution held sway. He needed more evidence that he was on a winner. He held the election threat over the Tory conference, believing that it would destabilise them. It was a disastrous miscalculation. He made the mistake of visiting British troops in Iraq on the day of the defence debate at the Conservative gathering, and a Tory charge of using the Forces as pawns got home. George Osborne’s announcement that he was slashing liability to inheritance tax shook the Labour high command. Even so, as the conference season ended Mr Brown was still being urged by his closest allies to take the plunge and finish off Mr Cameron. But Mr Brown’s pollsters, Deborah Mattinson and Stan Greenberg, who only weeks before had told him that he would win an election, began to back off. On the Thursday night figures such as Ed Balls went off to their constituencies certain that an election would be announced within days.
The next day Mr Brown digested with his advisers the results of a poll of marginal constituencies taken after the conference. It suggested that the Tory conference had gone down well, particularly the inheritance tax cut. Mr Greenberg insisted that Mr Brown could still win, but he might not win well. For Mr Brown, whose only reason for going early was to increase his majority, that was devastating news and he went cold on the idea. Ministers who had been keen on a poll suddenly retreated. Having allowed his team to stoke speculation, a humiliated Mr Brown finally bottled it and called off the election the next day. His only real chance of winning in his own right had gone and his tight group of advisers, who had been with him throughout his Treasury days, were torn apart by the episode. Long friendships ended, never to be repaired, and loyal workers such as Spencer Livermore found themselves taking the blame.
In the years that followed it is the decision that Mr Brown and his allies most regret. Most believe it is certain that he would have won then against the inexperienced Mr Cameron. It was only months into the Brown premiership but, viewed today, it was the beginning of the end. Britain was to have more than two further years of financial crisis and Mr Brown was to survive three serious attempts to oust him from office but something happened during that period that caused the country and some of his friends, however reluctantly, to doubt Mr Brown’s capacity to win. For the band of Brownites who had stuck by the former Chancellor throughout his long period in office it was never to be the same.
Mr Brown was pitched into a series of financial earthquakes that brought out the best in him. History may judge his decision to nationalise Northern Rock early in 2008 to have been a success. His rescue of banks including Royal Bank of Scotland through taking a massive taxpayer stake in them may ultimately be seen to have saved the whole industry, with the taxpayer eventually making a profit. His handling of the G20 world summit over the banking crisis won plaudits from around the world. But at home Mr Brown was on a permanently downward spiral and it was a tribute to his prodigious resilience that he staggered on.
It was one of his last decisions as Chancellor, the abolition of the 10p rate of tax, that came back to haunt him. That part of his last Budget was largely ignored at the time because, with a typical Brown flourish, he had announced a cut in income tax, but the move hit millions of low-paid workers and, confronted by a mass backbench uprising, Brown had to ask his Treasury successor Alistair Darling to come forward with a mini-Budget to put it right.
In the summer of 2008, after dismal by-election defeats, Mr Brown faced his first serious coup attempt. MPs, many of them former Blair supporters, took to the airwaves to call for a leadership contest but no Cabinet ministers joined the rebellion and he survived. He was, though, was skating on thin ice and even his closest advisers realised that he badly needed to shore up his position. He did it in the most surprising way. For some months he had been talking to Peter Mandelson again. Mr Mandelson, in Brussels serving a stint as a commissioner, was worried about the survival of his new Labour project. The Prime Minister shocked him by asking him to come back to the Cabinet for the third time. He bit off Brown’s hand and came back as a peer, Business Secretary and a host of other things. He was to be with Mr Brown to the end, finally running the election for him. The move was a masterstroke, virtually killing any chance that a Blairite would stand against Brown.
In June 2009, after terrible local elections, James Purnell, the Work and Pensions Secretary, resigned with an attack on the Prime Minister. Crucially David Miliband, as he had the previous year, failed to follow him over the top with Lord Mandelson warning him it would be disastrous. Again Mr Brown pulled through, but with more and more Labour MPs admitting privately that an election could not be won under him. Finally, in January 2010 Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt, both former Cabinet ministers, mounted yet another unsuccessful putsch. No one who mattered followed them but the delay as ministers laboured to voice support spoke volumes. Somehow, Mr Brown made it through to the general election. He fought a strangely subdued campaign that he brought to life only with passionate speeches towards the end. The result was better than most in Labour had expected but it was a defeat for which Mr Brown took responsibility.
Mr Brown’s allies had always confided that if he felt at any time that his party would benefit from his departure he would go. His and their judgment was always that Labour would not be helped at all by the spectacle of a leader being forced out so close to an election. But on the night of the second television debate during the election campaign, Mr Brown told his closest political ally and friend, Ed Balls, that he would resign if Labour failed to get the highest number of seats and his continued presence was a block to a power-sharing deal.
As the results came in on Thursday night and Friday morning perhaps the biggest surprise was how well Labour had done. Topping 250 seats exceeded the expectations of most party strategists, the pollsters and the bookmakers. The better-than-expected showing followed a campaign in which Mr Brown was himself the reason massive numbers of voters gave to Labour candidates for not voting for their party. He was “cyanide on the doorstep”, in the words of one unkind Labour minister. After the election, many Labour figures pondered whether if any other leader had been at the top of the party Labour would now be in its fourth term in a row.
Among Labour people it was a weekend of “if onlys”. If only Mr Blair had taken on Mr Brown in a contest in 1994 after John Smith died and beaten him. Mr Blair would never then have had that sense of obligation to Mr Brown that in the end made him give way to him. If only Mr Blair had called Mr Brown’s bluff and demoted him from the Treasury in the second term. If only Mr Blair had not announced before the 2005 election that it would be his last as leader. If only in 2006 Mr Blair had changed his mind, seen off the Brownite plot against him, and stood again in 2010.
On that dramatic Monday after the election Mr Brown announced plans to quit, as he had told friends he would. He called the cameras to Downing Street and said that he would stand down within months. He first told Nick Clegg. In so doing he removed the biggest obstacle to Mr Clegg doing a deal with Labour, if his attempts to wring further concessions from the Conservatives bore no fruit. As it happened, it was a final throw of the dice for Mr Brown and Labour and it did not work. Mr Clegg went with the Conservatives, even though he tried to keep open the prospect of a deal with Labour to the last. Mr Brown’s Monday gambit was designed to give Labour its only chance of staying in power and it meant that when he finally resigned the next day he could go with dignity.
Exactly 1,048 days after he first kissed hands, Mr Brown was on his way back to the Palace to tender his resignation to the Queen, the eleventh prime minister to have done so. As he did so he could have been forgiven for wondering if his own and Labour’s fortunes would have been better served if he had contained his ambitions. With Sarah by his side he left the stage saying that he had learnt about the very best in human nature and “a fair amount too about its frailties, including my own”. The words spoke volumes. In those long years at the Treasury, getting Mr Brown to admit to mistakes, or even to human fallibility, was an impossible task. During his much shorter term as Prime Minister, Mr Brown seemed to learn much more about himself. He left the front line believing that Britain had become a better place during the Labour years. But no one is tougher on himself than Mr Brown. He will agree with the verdict that his years in No 10 did not live up to what had gone before. Philip Webster was Political Editor of The Times throughout the new Labour years
Names of the dead were read to a silent Commons (#ulink_27a86276-6d14-53b8-bee9-5fb03d2dde28)
Deborah Haynes
Defence Editor
British deaths on the front line were greater during the last Parliament than in any other since the Korean War. The toll, 369 service personnel, coupled with public anger over a lack of helicopters and armoured vehicles for troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, helped to draw the military into the political debate in a way not seen for a generation.
It did not happen straight away. Britain was a country at war on two fronts for most of the five years, but servicemen and women returning home would find themselves bemused at how little attention their efforts received. There was an underlying sense of disconnect between the politicians in Whitehall and the soldiers, sailors and airmen fighting and dying on their behalf in Helmand province and across southern Iraq. The sight of Tony Blair and after him Gordon Brown sporting flak jackets, helmets, sand-coloured boots and wide smiles on fleeting visits to fortified bases in both warzones did little to change this impression.
The political-military divide was further hindered by the rotation of four different defence secretaries in five years. Des Browne, who held the post from May 2006 until October 2008, was simultaneously made Secretary of State for Scotland when Mr Brown became Prime Minister, an appointment that many in the military saw as an insult, confirming their suspicion that the Government had failed to attach sufficient importance to its Armed Forces.
Mounting questions about the legality of the Iraq campaign, however, coupled with revelations in the media about the state of medical care for wounded troops, inadequate equipment on the front line and a litany of other shortfalls, began to create awkward political questions for ministers to answer. Driving home this sense of unhappiness, General Sir Richard Dannatt, then the head of the Army, broke with a tradition that frowns upon serving officers criticising the government and gave warning in September 2007 that the presence of British Forces in Iraq was worsening local militia attacks. He also spoke out on other emotive topics, such as inadequate accommodation for soldiers, unfair pay and the need for more boots on the ground in Afghanistan. Retired military chiefs added their voices to the chorus of complaints, with high-profile figures such as General Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank, a former chief of the defence staff, becoming a regular critic of Mr Brown, who was accused of cutting the defence budget during a time of war.
The mood of blame and betrayal differed sharply to the plaudits that Margaret Thatcher earned when she took Britain to war in 1982 to recover the Falkland Islands from Argentina. That successful campaign, despite the loss of 255 British lives, helped her to secure a landslide victory in a general election the following year. In contrast, the invasion of Iraq and its bloody aftermath, while defended by military commanders and politicians at the time, cast a shadow over the 2005-10 Parliament that did not disappear when Tony Blair stepped down. Instead, the Government’s conduct in siding with the United States over Iraq began to be scrutinised in the Chilcot inquiry, set up to learn lessons from the Iraq campaign.
The previous Parliament also oversaw the deployment of British Forces into southern Afghanistan on a mission that was supposed to be about reconstruction but evolved into the bloodiest combat operation for the British military in decades. The punishing toll of casualties in Helmand over four summers belatedly captured people’s attention back in Britain. Every week at Prime Minister’s Questions the names of the dead were read out to a silent Commons, while television screens across the country tuned in to watch crowds line the street of a town called Wootton Bassett as convoys carrying the bodies of repatriated service members were escorted from a nearby military airbase. The reality of soldiers with missing limbs, horrific scars and the less obvious but equally debilitating problem of mental disorders also awoke a sense that Britain was at war and more needed to be done to help the Armed Forces. The Government came under increased scrutiny.
Public outrage at the continued use of Snatch Land Rovers, dubbed “mobile coffins” by the soldiers who used them because of their inability to protect against roadside bombs, was one of the emotive issues that changed the relationship between the military and the politicians. So, too, did anger at an inadequate pool of Chinook helicopters, which was forcing British troops to move by road, making them more vulnerable to improvised explosive devices, the biggest killer of British Forces in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The criticism added to a growing perception that the Government had tried to fight “Blair’s wars” on a peacetime budget. Even coroners were calling into question how frontline soldiers were being kitted and trained. To their credit, ministers responded to urgent requests from commanders on the ground, with the Treasury signing off on new, improved armoured vehicles and helicopters in record time. The damage, however, had already been done and repeated assurances that no request had been turned down rang hollow amid the belief that the military had never been properly funded in the first place.
The issue became hugely sensitive, with the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats keen to knock Labour’s record, while the Government was anxious to demonstrate that it was doing everything possible to improve the situation. Highlighting the politicisation of what should be a military matter, a decision to replace the Snatch Land Rover with 200 new vehicles was revealed while Mr Brown was on a trip to Afghanistan. He embarked on the March visit immediately after giving evidence at the Chilcot inquiry in which he delivered a strong defence of his military spending record. He was, however, later forced to make an embarrassing correction to his evidence.
As well as requiring more of the Government, the growing political awareness and appreciation of defence also prompted the politicians to look more closely at how the Ministry of Defence conducted itself. The Defence Select Committee and the National Audit Office produced damning reports on its procurement record, with billions of pounds wasted on delayed projects.
Under Bob Ainsworth, Labour’s final Defence Secretary, the MoD published a Green Paper that set the scene for a long-overdue Strategic Defence Review, although it was left to the Lib-Con coalition to implement. The failure to conduct a review sooner – the last one was in 1998, before the world-changing terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – was regarded as another legacy of Labour’s inability to understand the military and, arguably, a failure of commanders to push for it. As a result, many of the long-term programmes to which the MoD was committed, such as two new aircraft carriers, planes to fly off them, and scores of additional fast-jets, were seen as out-dated and no longer suited to equip Britain for the wars of the future with only limited resources available.
Separately, a realisation of cash shortages in MoD coffers to look after wounded personnel and veterans prompted the creation of a number of new military charities on top of the established organisations to raise extra money for serving and former members of the Armed Forces. They moved quickly to capitalise on the sudden, public appreciation of the military, with The Sun newspaper backing a charity called “Help for Heroes” that ran a hugely successful campaign selling blue and red wrist bands as well as a host of other money-raising events that further boosted the profile of the military.
Joanna Lumley added an unlikely dimension to the relationship between MPs and the military when she fronted a bid to secure Gurkha veterans with at least four years’ service in the British Army the right to resettle in Britain.
It was not just the Armed Forces that were in focus. The Times ran a campaign in 2007 to urge the Government to help hundreds of Iraqi interpreters who were facing death at the hands of militiamen in Iraq because of their association with the British military. In response, Mr Brown created a scheme to relocate the interpreters and their families in Britain or give them a cash payment.
Another unfortunate legacy was a growing pile of lawsuits against the Ministry of Defence ranging from allegations of torture and abuse by Iraqi detainees to claims of negligence by the families of soldiers who died in Snatch Land Rovers. This costly process will take a long time to resolve.
The increased awareness of the military among the public and politicians during the last Parliament failed to translate into a heightened interest in the general election. Military insiders had hoped that a debate would take place about what sort of country Britain aspires to be: does the nation want to maintain its costly but influential place on the top table as a nuclear power alongside the United States or is it happy to downgrade to a less-significant player?
This fundamental question was left to be answered in the Strategic Defence Review. Aligned to this will be the extent of expected cuts in the defence budget, which will affect the scope of future operations, from the size of the Armed Forces to the weapons at their disposal. Unlike the first half of the previous century, the number of MPs with military experience remained low, although the new Parliament has the highest tally in at least the past two decades – 19 Conservative MPs and one from Labour, according to Byron Criddle, of the University of Aberdeen. Despite a shortage of hands-on experience, MPs look set to retain their rekindled appreciation of the military, at least for as long as British troops are deployed in Afghanistan.
Armed Forces Day, created by Mr Brown in June 2007, created an annual programme of events to celebrate all three services nationwide. The real test of Britain’s relationship with its military, however, will occur in the decades ahead.
Hail and a fond farewell to the dearly departed (#ulink_d984a7af-755a-55cf-bc77-fcaa83c13b5c)
Ann Treneman
