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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