Читать книгу The Third Man: Life at the Heart of New Labour - Peter Mandelson - Страница 8

The most fateful four hours of my political life were also the most surreal. They began on the afternoon of the first Thursday of October 2008, across a tray of sandwiches, yoghurt and slightly overripe bananas, with Gordon Brown in 10 Downing Street. They culminated in my return to the heart of government, at the behest of a Prime Minister who for much of the previous decade had denounced and denigrated me.

Our first quiet step towards reconciliation, the rekindling of a deep if damaged friendship, came seven months earlier and two hundred miles away. It was a crisp late-February morning in Brussels, my base as European Trade Commissioner since I had left front-line British politics in 2004. Gordon was on his first full-dress visit to the European Commission as Prime Minister. Before making his way to the imposing, glass-fronted headquarters of the Commission on the Schuman roundabout, he had arranged for us to talk briefly in the office of our permanent representative to the EU, Kim Darroch, down the road. It would be the first time Gordon and I had met since his truculent takeover from Tony Blair in Downing Street the year before. I was intrigued, expectant. And apprehensive. From the moment in 1994 when Tony had emerged as the irresistibly obvious choice to succeed John Smith as Labour Party leader, Gordon had convinced himself that I had schemed behind his back to deny him the job. As he surely must have recognised, that was unfair, and untrue. Yet in more recent years, as he and his allies waged their insurgency against Tony, he had come to view me as Tony’s staunchest defender and as a siren voice of alarm over how and where he was likely to lead New Labour.

I had spent the early months of Gordon’s premiership trying to keep my head down. But I was goaded during a Today programme interview shortly before he took over to observe a bit mischievously that while this might ‘come as a disappointment to him’, the new Prime Minister couldn’t actually fire me from my Commission post, because I had been appointed by the government to a full, five-year term. Yet I hastened to add a note of reassurance. I said I did not intend to seek a second term once my time in Brussels ended in November 2009. I assumed the new guard in Number 10 would recognise that I was playing an important role in delicate negotiations for a world trade agreement. I also knew that my ability to do the job well, and to finesse the interests of individual EU states along the way, would suffer if I were seen to lack the confidence of my own government. The more I could stay off Gordon’s political radar, the better, and my Today interview was a maladroit first move in achieving this.

Privately, I was still upset over the way he had treated Tony, and me. I not only resented the personal pain caused to me by his behaviour, and that of his parliamentary foot-soldiers and media briefers; in addition to their part in ending my own cabinet career, I felt they had kept Tony from delivering on key areas of New Labour’s policy promise to Britain. They had acted to weaken his room for manoeuvre and his legacy in government, well beyond the huge damage caused by the aftermath of the war in Iraq. But Gordon was now leader. I did not want to become a sulking, resentful presence, desperately clinging on to past bad feelings and finding fault in everything he did. At his first party conference as Prime Minister, in Bournemouth at the end of September 2007, I used an address to the modernisers’ policy group Progress not just to praise him for his part in the transition from one New Labour government to another, but to extol him as the man incomparably qualified to tackle the new challenges facing our country in the twenty-first century.

I spoke with more certainty than I actually felt – though neither I nor anyone else could have anticipated the vertiginous decline in Gordon’s fortunes that would begin within days of the conference ending. Still, the message of support was genuine. It was rooted not only in political calculation, or a desire to ward off trouble for myself in Brussels. Though my earlier doubts about Gordon’s fitness as Prime Minister remained, I wanted to be proved wrong. Before our spectacular falling-out, he had been my closest friend and ally in politics. I was intimately familiar not only with Gordon’s weaknesses, personal and political. I knew his strengths: intelligence, iron determination, and above all a grasp of the economic challenges that were increasingly threatening our country and the world.

By the time Gordon arrived in Brussels, the seriousness of the world economic crisis for Britain was becoming clearer. Fully-fledged recession was some months ahead, but the American sub-prime banking meltdown had claimed its first UK victim. The previous autumn, a run on the Newcastle-based bank Northern Rock had brought it to the brink of collapse. It was saved only by financial support from the Treasury. In the months that followed, Gordon and his Chancellor, Alistair Darling, tried desperately to find a private buyer for the bank. Only days before Gordon came to Brussels, they had given up, and taken Northern Rock into public ownership. I happened to believe they were right both to have worked for a private deal as the better option, and to have chosen nationalisation when that proved impossible.

The immediate problem for the Prime Minister was that he was now mired in a political crisis as well as an economic one. It had begun at party conference. While I was publicly on my best behaviour, I had seen it coming. For days, Gordon’s inner circle had been stoking up speculation that he was about to call an early general election. His first three months in power had gone extraordinarily well. He was confronted with a cattle-disease scare, but the effects had been less severe than at first appeared likely. Two attempted terror bombings had mercifully resulted in only a single death, of one of the terrorists. A spate of summer flooding was of course bad for those affected, but turned out to be less serious than feared. He had dealt with these potential crises in an assured way, and his supporters were hailing his strength and statesmanship. Going into conference, he was riding high in the opinion polls. But he was also an unelected Prime Minister – not just because our 2005 general election campaign had been under Tony’s banner and not his, but because he had not even faced a challenge for the succession inside Labour. Now, here was a chance for a mandate of his own.

But from the moment I’d seen the first of the media hype, I was almost sure it wouldn’t happen. Gordon – the Gordon I had known so well and worked with so closely since the 1980s – was a risk-averse politician. In 1992, he had shied away from fighting John Smith for the party leadership. After John’s death – in fairness because Gordon had finally realised he couldn’t possibly win – he had stepped back from challenging Tony for the leadership. Most of all, Gordon was cautious when it came to Britain’s voters.

As the pre-conference election speculation intensified, a number of the old Blairite stalwarts had phoned me in Brussels. What did I think? Would there be a snap election? ‘I’ve known Gordon for more than twenty years,’ I replied. ‘I can tell you when the date of the election will be – May 2010.’ Yet, by the time I arrived in Bournemouth a snap election was being touted as a foregone conclusion. When a reporter asked me to comment, I said the minimum I felt I could get away with. ‘I can see no reason,’ I replied, ‘why he shouldn’t call an election.’

Within days, it all went horribly wrong. I was back in Brussels, and the Tories were holding their own conference in Blackpool, when I suddenly saw TV pictures of the Prime Minister pitching up in Iraq, where he let out news of plans to begin reducing British troop levels. It immediately worried me. I had no way of knowing – at least until later – of the thinking behind Gordon’s visit to the front line. I did, however, know what it would look like: a publicity stunt during David Cameron’s conference, with our troops used as pre-electoral wallpaper. Then things got worse. Cameron’s Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, used the Tory conference to unveil a proposal to ease inheritance tax, trebling the threshold to £1 million. This was tailor-made to appeal to the aspirational voters of Middle England, who were not alone in feeling over-taxed as the signs of world recession intensified. They were the very voters who, by buying into Tony and New Labour, had helped give us three election victories. They were the voters Gordon needed, too. But they were the voters he understood least well, always a particular frustration for him because Tony connected with them so instinctively and so easily. To top it off, Cameron used his closing conference address to taunt the Prime Minister into action. Go on, he said. Call an election.

Gordon was torn. First, he ham-fistedly decided to steal Osborne’s inheritance-tax trick. Then, even before Alistair Darling had unveiled our version of it in the Pre-Budget Report – the series of government finance announcements made in the autumn prior to the spring budget – he announced that there would be no election after all. As if that were not damaging enough, he insisted that he had never been minded to call one in the first place. Having looked so assured as Prime Minister at the start of his time in office, Gordon was now portrayed – by Cameron, of course, but also by the media – as hapless and a ditherer. All the controversies and embarrassments that bedevil any government were fed into that narrative. Not only the serious issues that arose in the weeks after the party conference, like improperly declared Labour donations, or the loss of a set of computer disks containing millions of Revenue and Customs records, but even the frankly farcical. In December, European heads of state gathered in Lisbon to approve the amended EU constitutional treaty. Gordon, apparently fearing the political toxicity of the issue, at first feinted at staying away. He ended up managing not to have his cake or to eat it either. He went to the ceremony, but showed up only after the other heads of government had done their signing.

There was a further awkward moment when he arrived at Kim Darroch’s office some months later, at the end of February 2008, for what both of us must have feared could be a tense reunion. I was with Kim and a handful of aides when Gordon strode into the outer office. At first my old friend and more recent foe did not see me at all. After he had greeted everyone else in the room, I finally had to take the initiative. ‘Hello,’ I said. Gordon quickly replied: ‘Oh. Hi, Peter, hi. How are you doing?’ We made our way to Kim’s office, and settled into a pair of plush chairs in the centre of the room. I had expected that we would begin with trade, and we did. That was my job, after all. Our only real conversation since Gordon had moved into Number 10, a telephone call four months earlier, had been about the world trade talks. I was also fairly sure that both of us – by instinct, and from a sense of familiarity and partnership that went too far back to have disappeared entirely – would be unable to keep from talking about politics. Within barely a minute, we were not only discussing the big-picture issues Britain faced, we were talking about Gordon, about his government, and about the nose-dive in public support they were both suffering. It would be wrong to suggest that it was like the old days, as if the rift between us had not happened. But the conversation was easy, calm, and at times extraordinarily forthright – on both sides.

Gordon’s main concern, a theme to which he would return repeatedly in the months ahead, was that he was ‘not getting the communications right’ – not with the media, nor with the British people. My reply was that good communications required not just good, confident people and organisation, but clear, bold policy. ‘I’ve got all the policy, all the ideas,’ Gordon insisted. ‘I just can’t communicate it.’ I told him that was not always my impression. His policies had to be thought through. They had to be ‘prepared, bottomed out, agreed and owned by relevant ministers’. Instead, it seemed to me, he had been seduced by the idea that a constant stream of media announcements could take the place of hard policy. I told him he had to wean himself off these ‘announceables’. Policy was tough going, especially when it involved changing or reforming anything. You had to keep pushing uphill. Then people would start noticing that something serious was happening. That was where ‘communications success’ would come from. I was at pains to reassure him that there was still a real opportunity for him to regain the political initiative. The key, I said, was the economy. ‘You’ve got to present yourself as the guy with the experience, the big brain, to deal with the big problems,’ I told him. ‘That is your USP.’ The point I sought to make, as subtly as I could, was that David Cameron did have natural communications skills. Gordon’s task, one to which he ought to be genuinely well-suited, was to make it clear that his grasp and determination in dealing with the economic crisis stood in contrast to Cameron. He had to be able to portray the Tory leader as ‘the guy in short trousers, who’s good enough perhaps to lead a student protest, but certainly not to lead a country’.

Our talk had been scheduled to last for twenty minutes. By the time Gordon left for the Commission headquarters, behind schedule for his meeting with the Commission’s President, José Manuel Barroso, we had been talking for well over an hour. Gordon seemed more upbeat when we’d finished talking, and more focused on how to get a new hold on government. I felt oddly buoyed too. I realised that despite all that we had gone through, I still cared about him. I wanted him to succeed. And, if I’m honest, I was pleased he was seeking my views and advice on how to help rescue and repair the New Labour project that he and I and Tony had begun. It was also puzzling that he should start opening up to me in the way he had. Given all that had happened between us, he had reason to doubt whether he could trust me. Surely he had people around him in London he could rely on, without needing to talk to me?

Within days of Gordon’s return to London, leaving me in Brussels to wrestle with my trade negotiations, there were signs that our meeting had at least begun to repair our relationship – but also of how difficult it might be to break long habits of misunderstanding and mistrust. A first hint at reconciliation came just forty-eight hours later, when he phoned me from Number 10. It was ostensibly to say that he had enjoyed our talk, but mostly to discuss a speech he was giving a few days later, at Labour’s Spring Conference in Birmingham. I told him he needed to identify his strengths and play to them. People felt threatened by the economic storm clouds. He had had a decade’s experience as Chancellor. He was seen as having a command of economic policy. His task now, and his opportunity as well, was to explain what was really going on, and how he and his government would enable Britain to deal with the storm and to come to terms with the new economic order more widely, and indeed benefit from it. ‘People think GB is brainy, so he should turn it to his advantage,’ I scribbled on my notepad when we had finished speaking. ‘He should identify our national strengths and position, and set out an agenda to maximise these to our lasting gain.’ That, essentially, is what I said to him. It was also what he went on to say in Birmingham – sort of. The speech began well. Then it faded out. It started on the theme of ‘fulfilling our national ambitions’, then meandered, without any real emotional connection, into a patchwork of policy examples and occasionally catchy phrases. It lacked a central, driving political message, a coherent story of the difficulties Britain faced, how Gordon proposed to lead us past them, and why he was best-placed to do so. It would be several weeks before I next talked to Gordon. By that time, there would be a reminder of the old days, and the old mistrust as well.

After our meeting in Brussels, my press spokesman Peter Power, who had learned very adeptly to pick his way on my behalf between the shoals and currents of trade policy and UK domestic politics, was besieged by questions from the media. He fended them off with an admirably straight bat. The Prime Minister and Britain’s European Commissioner, he said, had had a ‘friendly’ discussion – about the world trade talks, about Britain’s place in Europe, and about domestic politics. When asked whether this meant I might now hope to stay on for a second EU term, Peter was understandably keen to find a way to dodge the issue. He opted not to be drawn, rather than reaffirming my Today programme pledge not to seek a further term. His reticence invited speculation that I was fishing for an invitation to stay on. When Gordon was asked to comment a few days later, he replied that I had done a good job in Brussels. His choice of tense unleashed a new spate of headlines. ‘Mandelson’s Hopes of Serving Second EU Term Crushed by Gordon Brown’, blared the Daily Mail. It seemed that old habits – mine, Gordon’s, the media’s – would die hard.

Gordon’s political problems were clearly on a downward spiral. Partly, as he had insisted to me, it was an image problem. Once the ‘iron’ Chancellor, and then briefly a breath of fresh air in Downing Street, he was now seen as a ‘dithering’ Prime Minister in political freefall. Worse, he had become not only a figure of disdain, but of ridicule. This sense was summed up by Vince Cable, then acting leader of the Liberal Democrats, standing up at Prime Minister’s Questions and deadpanning: ‘The House has noticed the Prime Minister’s remarkable transformation in the last few weeks – from Stalin … to Mr Bean.’

There were problems of policy substance, too. By far the most pressing was a legacy of Gordon’s final budget as Chancellor, three months before he had moved in next-door. As part of an eye-catching announcement reducing the standard tax rate to 20p, beginning in April 2008 – which meant now – he had axed the entry-rate 10p bracket. The unintended, and clearly unanticipated, effect was to damage those at the very bottom of the ladder just as the economic crisis was beginning to bite. The immediate result was the worst backbench rebellion Gordon had faced as Prime Minister. That subsided – only just – when he promised a package to compensate those who stood to lose out from the tax changes. This was the last thing we needed in the run-up to local elections across England and Wales on 1 May, and the results were disastrous. In the most high-profile contest, for Mayor of London, even Ken Livingstone could not stave off defeat to the Conservatives’ Boris Johnson. I won’t claim to have shed many tears for Ken. With an ego the size of the London Eye, and what I always felt was a facile populism, he had delighted in stirring up ‘real Labour’ opposition to Tony during our first years in government. Still, I recognised that his defeat was bad news. Even Ken’s image as a maverick, untainted by ordinary party constraints, had not saved him from falling victim to our declining fortunes. Nationally, we were not only outpolled by the Tories – by a margin of 44 per cent to 24 – we finished in third place, behind the Liberal Democrats.

I felt conflicted. Not about the results, of course. I was no less shaken than if Tony had still been in charge by our diminishing prospects of keeping David Cameron, short trousers or not, from ushering in a period of Conservative rule. Yet despite the renewed warmth I had felt for him in Brussels, I began to wonder whether even a more focused Gordon Brown, playing to his strengths, could really succeed in turning things round. I was by now intermittently back in touch with him by phone. Perhaps equally surprisingly, given Gordon’s role in hastening him out of Downing Street, so was Tony. Although now absorbed in his work on the Arab–Israeli conflict, his faith foundation and his business activities, Tony retained a train-spotter’s interest in British politics, however much, publicly, he wanted to keep out of it. He also cared about his own legacy, and how Labour was going to secure it and build on it. Like me, he wanted to offer support to Gordon, and I encouraged him to do so.

Tony phoned him in Downing Street the day after the local elections. He told him he had to push back, not to sound defeated, not to beat himself up. Yes, he said, he had to listen to what the public were saying. But what he really had to do – a message I was also conveying – was to reassert what government was doing, why it was doing it, and how it would improve Britain. He had to provide a clearer sense of direction, a strong reform programme. If he looked and sounded wounded, Tony told him, he would invite further attacks: ‘Be careful of what scent you give off.’ We both agreed, however, that Gordon was beginning to look bad, physically. Sleepless and grey. Fearful. On the ropes. No wonder everyone assumed that he was all of those things.

A few days after he had spoken to Gordon, Tony called me from the Middle East at my small, quirky Brussels flat, whose large windows I liked staring out of as I worked or talked on the telephone. He said he felt that while Gordon had the intelligence and the ideas, the drive and determination, to make a success of government, ‘none of that is the most important thing for a politician. It is intuition – what to do, when to do it, how to say it, how to bring people along.’ That, he felt, was Gordon’s problem. I agreed. Intuition, of course, was a political gift that Tony himself had in spades, and it had helped guide every step the three of us had taken in the long campaign to make Labour a party of government again.

After the local elections, Gordon scrambled to steady the wheel of what was beginning to look very much like a sinking ship. He brought forward his announcement of the government programme for the next Parliament. It proved to be a mishmash of the already known and the small-fry, and it was picked to pieces by the opposition, and even by some of the media pundits who at the height of Gordon’s war against Tony had cheered him on as Labour’s messiah-in-waiting. Nor was there any respite from Alistair Darling’s panicked ‘mini-budget’ in mid-May, in which he was forced to borrow £2.7 billion to cushion the effect of the 10p rate axe on at least some of the lowest-paid workers. In late May, Gordon faced a further electoral test, and a further body-blow. The death of one of my own early political allies, the indomitable Labour backbencher Gwyneth Dunwoody, forced a by-election in Crewe. The Tories cruised to victory in what should have been one of the safest of Labour seats, defeating Gwyneth’s own daughter by 8,000 votes. Gordon’s early contrast between his premiership and Tony’s was wearing perilously thin. The Brownite promise to an unsettled party had been that the Blair rollercoaster would be replaced by a calmer ride. Now it appeared we were going nowhere. Or very possibly off the rails.

In early June, Gordon called me again in Brussels. We agreed that I would come and see him at Downing Street when I was in London in the middle of the month. My role, if you could call it that, remained strictly informal. As far as I could tell, very few people knew I was back in touch with the Prime Minister. Sue Nye, Gordon’s office ‘gatekeeper’ and one of my oldest friends in politics, was in the loop. As for others in the inner circle, even those who knew Gordon and I were talking seemed puzzled about where this latest twist in our relationship was headed. That was understandable: so was I.

When I went to London, I arranged to have lunch with Jeremy Heywood the day before I was to meet Gordon. I wanted to bring myself up to date with how things were running in Number 10, and to see what I could do to help. Jeremy was now Permanent Secretary, Gordon’s top civil servant. In the early days of the Blair government he had been with Gordon at the Treasury, and before that, private secretary to Conservative chancellors. I had got to know him well when he moved to Number 10 and worked with Tony in 1999. When he arrived at the restaurant in the Royal Festival Hall, he was smiling. As he had been on his way out of Number 10, he said, Gordon had asked to see him. When he had explained that he was going to a lunch appointment, to meet me, Gordon had said he would join us – only to find that he couldn’t scramble his protection officers quickly enough. ‘The reason I made a point of mentioning you is that I’m still not sure just what your status is these days,’ Jeremy said. ‘I was afraid what Gordon might say if he found out. Now he says he wants to meet you this afternoon.’ I told him I had arranged to see Gordon the following day, but Jeremy replied: ‘He says he wants to meet you today, too.’ Looking back on it, I suppose that was when our real sense of reconnection began.

‘I’ve just been talking to Tony,’ Gordon said as I arrived in the upstairs study at Number 10 – Mrs Thatcher’s favourite room – from my lunch with Jeremy. I couldn’t help but chuckle. ‘Are things really that desperate?’ I asked.

‘Come on,’ Gordon replied with a broad smile. He told me he had read a speech I’d recently given in New York, on the need for new policies and institutions to address the challenges of the global economy, and said he wanted to find a time to talk further about what that meant not just for the EU, but for Britain. I felt flattered, which, I suspect, was his intention. Then, after only a short pause, he turned to a more immediate worry – his own political crisis. And he uttered four extraordinary words: ‘Can you help me?’

‘How?’ I asked, taken aback by his directness, and still feeling my way in this revived relationship.

‘By giving me your strategy,’ he said. ‘Only a few people in politics are strategists, and you are one of them. I need that. I need to know what you think of my situation.’

I had an instant in which to make up my mind how honest to be with him. I didn’t want to damage his confidence further, or put him off talking to me, but nor did I want to miss the chance to offer the kind of blunt advice I suspected he might not be getting from others. ‘Look, people have stopped listening to you,’ I said. ‘They’ve tuned out. They don’t know what you believe. They don’t know what your government is for. You have policies, but they don’t seem joined up.’ Gordon took this well, considering my directness, and replied by returning to his Brussels refrain. He did have ideas, he insisted. What he lacked was strategy. And he couldn’t communicate. ‘It seems,’ he sighed, ‘that you can be a good Prime Minister or a popular one, preferably both. But I’m neither.’

‘You’re a better Prime Minister than people think,’ I told him. I meant it, just as I genuinely felt that a Cameron government would be no better, and very likely worse, for Britain.

We spoke for well over an hour. It was not so much about what Gordon should do next. As I’d said in Brussels, the solution to that seemed to be straightforward, if not necessarily easy to achieve. It came down to developing the strong policy programme, and coherent message, his government seemed to lack. Mostly, however, we talked about how he had ended up where he was. ‘A lot of your problems,’ I said, ‘stem from not calling the election when you led everyone to think you were going to do so. It has meant everything you do is viewed through that negative lens.’ Gordon said he now realised he should have gone ahead. The political timing had been right, and with the economic crisis worsening, the opportunity was now gone. But he had been unsettled by last-minute poll figures in marginal constituencies. ‘They showed a very different picture from the national polls,’ he said. ‘They hadn’t presented it properly to me before.’ And the Tory inheritance-tax initiative had scared him off, too. He now saw that his copying of Osborne’s idea, and even more so his visit to the troops in Iraq, had made things worse.

But he had started so well in Downing Street that he had felt the run would never end. ‘I thought, because of my first few months, I was being seen as above politics,’ he said. ‘You inhaled your own propaganda,’ I replied. The image his media team had created around him at the start was bound to unravel. ‘All that stuff about single-handedly turning back the biblical plagues, the floods, the cattle disease and the terror bombers. Your people went around saying how strong you were, what a great, statesmanlike Prime Minister. They took their eye off what was happening in the real world.’ I felt almost cruel saying it.

Gordon was quiet for a few moments, and so was I. Finally, I said, with what I am sure he sensed was a genuine desire to help: ‘If you could start all over again, you would do things differently. You need a different way of working, a different rhythm, a different approach.’ I was not absolutely sure what that approach would be, but I was sure that the problem was not simply a matter of Gordon lacking the communications skills for modern politics, although that was what he always came back to. ‘I’m good at what politics used to be, about policies,’ he said. ‘But now people want celebrity, and theatre.’

‘Only up to a point,’ I replied. ‘Actually, it’s a lot simpler than that: they just want someone to make their lives better, someone they can believe, and believe in. If you can do that, they can dispense with celebrity.’

Gordon nodded. Then, after another period of silence, he turned to me quietly with the same four words with which he had begun. ‘Can you help me?’

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘We can try and work it out together.’ At that moment, I could feel my old sense of commitment to him welling up inside me. Suddenly it was nice to feel wanted, needed again.

The question was how to help. I think I had forgotten, over the years of estrangement, how extraordinarily complex a man Gordon was. He had huge strengths, and sometimes debilitating weaknesses. That was simply to say that, like the rest of us, he was human. With Gordon, however, the balance on both sides of the ledger had never quite been captured in the public image which ossified around him. Some bits of the caricature were accurate. Yes, he was bright. He was intensely, obsessively, political. He was fiercely ambitious – for himself, certainly, as his single-minded pursuit of Tony’s job had made clear, but also for the people of Britain. Yet all that was only part of the picture. At the height of the Brown–Blair civil war, I used to laugh at the media’s contrast between Blair as the headline-driven tactician and Brown as the ‘big-picture’ man, the strategist who looked beyond day-to-day trivialities and spin and focused on the issues that counted. As those who knew Gordon best and had worked with him closest could attest – and I had done both for as long as anyone in active politics – the truth was much more nuanced than that. Gordon did see the big picture, but he tended to create tactical opportunities, rather than a strategy to advance it. Tony, by contrast would conceive his strategy at the outset, and then paint a big picture in order to carry people with him.

It is true that Tony cared about the media. Both of us came to realise, the longer he was in power, that we had probably cared too much about what the daily papers and the TV news bulletins were saying. But even – indeed, particularly – in times of crisis, he never lost sight of the issues that mattered. He kept in mind the longer-term goal. Gordon, from the time I first started working with him in the 1980s, was transfixed by the media. He was also transfixed by the Tories. Tony, of course, also took on the Conservatives. The difference was that Gordon wanted to pulverise them, whereas Tony was more often content to outmanoeuvre them. Gordon’s life revolved too keenly around looking for opportunities to grab a front-page headline or top billing on the evening news with some carefully calibrated announcement or initiative. In some ways, he was a more innate politician than Tony. But he was also a more old-style politician. He had grown up in machine politics, in Scottish Labour. For him, politics was always a battle. He plotted a probing advance here, a flanking operation there. It was all planned to weaken rivals or enemies – sometimes in his own ranks, but ultimately the enemy that mattered most to him, and still did, was the Tories.

Yet it was Gordon the person, not Gordon the politician, who would matter most if he, our party and the government were to be pulled out of their tailspin. Despite my closeness to Tony, I had been much closer, much earlier, to Gordon when the three of us began the reforming crusade that would lead to New Labour. Gordon was the older of the two. He had deeper roots in Labour. He was the more driven political operator, the more obviously ambitious. He was the natural leader. That was one reason why Tony’s later ascendancy so hurt him, and so damaged the relationship between all three of us. On a human level, however, Gordon was buttoned up, less sure of himself – not of his political views, but of how he should handle himself in public. Tony was never clubbable in party-political terms. But he had a natural ease about him, a charm, an enjoyment of human contact. Gordon did not possess this easy manner.

I think Gordon’s uneasiness and vulnerability was part of what was now drawing me back to his side, part of what made me genuinely want to keep my word to him and to do what I could to help. It was not out of pity, though it did pain me to see him so bruised. Nor was it merely out of loyalty to New Labour, or my conviction that if Gordon and the government crashed to defeat it would be bad for Britain, although I felt both of these things. It was a sense of fellow-feeling. I had taken my share of knocks along the way as well.

Unlike Gordon, and much more like Tony, I was comfortable in social situations. I enjoyed other people’s company. I was at ease with most of them. Most of the time I was at ease with myself. I had interests and a life outside politics, especially now that I was in Brussels. But I too had had my periods of private doubt and private pain. I had endured, and only very slowly recovered from, the humiliation of being forced to leave the cabinet table not just once, but twice. The second exile had been particularly hard, because I had felt let down by colleagues, by Tony in particular. There had been other tough times as well. Over the years, I had become more thick-skinned. But what I had been through gave me an insight into Gordon’s crisis. He had reached out for help. The truth was that I had no idea whether that was something I, or anyone, could deliver.

When we met again in Downing Street the next day, I tried to get him to focus on the one area where the country clearly needed new policy certainty, and new leadership, and where he was well-placed to deliver. ‘It’s the world economy, stupid,’ I said, borrowing the Clinton campaign quip. ‘Your message has to be that we are steering through the worst and equipping people to benefit from the upturn, to make sure they, and the country as a whole, are not the losers.’

Almost as if a switch had been tripped, Gordon’s mood brightened. He spoke non-stop for five minutes, reeling off the challenges posed by the economic crisis, and the range of programmes – job creation, infrastructure, energy, education, science – needed to make Britain stronger when we got to the other side. He spoke of a redefined, less dominant role for government, providing a safety net for those in need, but above all encouraging aspiration and providing the skills and the conditions for all who worked hard to succeed. An empowering government. This was the Gordon I remembered from the 1980s, full of ideas, full of passion. It was also, I couldn’t help noting, remarkably similar to Tony’s policy agenda, which because of his deep frustration at his wait to take over, Gordon had done much to undermine, and had spent his early months in Number 10 distancing himself from.

‘You could have done all of this without dumping on the government of which you were a member for the last ten years,’ I said.

‘I never did that,’ he insisted.

‘Yes, you did. You couldn’t resist it. It was all that neurosis and pent-up anger about Tony, fanned by the people around you.’

He insisted that he had moved beyond all that now. I think we both knew, and Tony too, that some of the scars would always remain. But I sensed that he was right. The terrible political knocks he had taken, and the crisis facing the party to which all three of us had devoted our lives, made the old battles seem somehow irrelevant. As I left, Gordon put his hand on my shoulder. ‘The main thing,’ he said, ‘is that I want us to work together. I want to rebuild our friendship.’

Still not quite sure where all this was leading, I agreed to have dinner the following week with three of Gordon’s aides: his Europe adviser Stewart Wood, the long-standing Number 10 business policy adviser Geoffrey Norris, and his trusted former Treasury adviser Shriti Vadera, who had now become a minister. Knowing that Gordon wanted me to provide input from Brussels as their recovery project began, they urged me to do all I could to help. By the end of the evening I felt there was a real understanding of the problems Gordon faced, and a commitment to help turn things round, at least amongst some of those around him. He had changed, they insisted. ‘He realises how bad things are. He realises it’s personal, that he is the problem,’ one of them said. ‘He’s calmer than you would have expected. He’s mellowed a lot – maybe because of the children.’ They felt that Gordon’s strengths had yet to come through, above all his grasp of the economic crisis and his understanding of what had to be done. ‘But he doesn’t communicate easily, and the public aren’t responding.’ That may be, I said. ‘But if he hopes to get people to like him, or even listen, he has to speak in a language people understand, and to be seen as acting for the national interest, not party or political interest. He has to lead.’

With Parliament breaking up for the summer, Gordon’s first real shot to show that kind of leadership would come in the run-up to the party conference in the autumn, and that was what I urged him to focus on, especially as his problems steadily increased. The economy continued to worsen. Unemployment was rising. The property market was heading south. The political picture was, if anything, more discouraging. The ill-health and subsequent resignation of the Labour MP for Glasgow East, David Marshall, presented Gordon with a nightmare scenario: an end-of-July by-election not only in a safe Labour seat, but a Scottish Labour seat, in his own political back yard. Labour initially struggled even to find a candidate. When the votes were counted, we lost, on a massive 22 per cent swing, to the Scottish Nationalists.

Gordon was by then ostensibly on holiday by the Suffolk seaside. In fact, he was in nearly constant contact with aides, and increasingly with me. His mood was bleak. That was nothing compared to the rest of the party. A few days after the by-election defeat, Foreign Secretary David Miliband wrote a piece in the Guardian. The party must not succumb to ‘fatalism’, he said. Yes, we were down. We had made mistakes. We had waited too long to reform the NHS. We had won the war but lost the peace in Iraq. We had held power too tightly in Westminster, rather than devolving it to the people affected by what we decided. But we had accomplished much as well, and should not be shy of saying so. The next election was winnable, if we embarked on a new stage of New Labour to confront challenges that were different from those we had faced when we had first come to power. We had to deal with the economic crisis and equip people to emerge stronger when recovery came. We had, David argued, to give more control over the public services to those who used them. We had to build a sense of local empowerment and local society. David Cameron, he said, ‘may be likeable and sometimes hard to disagree with’, but he had no competing vision. He was ‘empty’.

On the face of it, the article was simply an elegantly argued rallying cry. It did not directly criticise Gordon, but it did something that was immediately over-interpreted: it did not mention him at all. When one front-page headline screamed ‘Labour at War’, David had himself photographed with a copy of the paper, on which he had scribbled the word ‘not’. His article was not, he insisted, the start of a leadership challenge.

Inevitably, however, with Labour’s poll ratings so low, media speculation began to build about Gordon’s prospects for hanging on as leader. The subject was becoming not just a source of speculation within the party, but a national talking point. When I next spoke to Tony, he was sombre about the chances for a political recovery. ‘It’s all very sad,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to help him, but without letting him lead us to disaster.’ He also left me with a request to keep in touch with David Miliband. I texted David. ‘How are you?’ I asked. He replied: ‘Large mountain ahead. Orienteering/climbing/planning skills much needed.’ I texted back: ‘Guides, sherpas available.’

David was aware how difficult it would be for the government to recover public support, and I wanted to lend my experience in helping to achieve this. But both of us were in difficult positions: David because, before deciding not to stand, he had been the one credible challenger to Gordon as leader when Tony left Number 10; and I because although I still had my taste for domestic politics, I wanted to tread very carefully, and not to interfere.

I was close to David, having first worked with him when he was a very young, and fearfully bright, policy adviser in the run-up to the 1997 election. I was certain that his newspaper article was at most an attempt to put down a marker, to open up a debate and inject new purpose into the government. I shared his hope that this would happen – it was what I had been talking to Gordon about. David and I shared something else, as well: alarm at the drift and decline since Gordon’s first few months in Downing Street. In this, he was reflecting a wider concern, in the party and in cabinet, over whether Gordon could lead a recovery. He told me he feared the Guardian piece had made him look divisive, but he still felt it had been the right thing to do. He had provided a ‘coherent message’ that many ministers felt was sorely lacking. He said there was no move to push Gordon out, but there was a lot of unease in the cabinet.

Tony was getting the same message. When we next spoke, he said his sense was of a fatalism enveloping Labour MPs: some thought Gordon was unsalvageable and should go, while others thought he was unsalvageable, but that they just had to accept it. I couldn’t help replying that if that was true, history might be tough on Tony: ‘You saved your own skin by constantly stringing Gordon along, and then landed him on the rest of us when you went.’ He said he was afraid that might be true. When he added that his real fear was that the British public had simply given up on Gordon, and that the party would sooner or later follow suit, I pointed out that he’d been there too. ‘The same would have been true of you after Iraq. The people stuck with you, but only just. That saved you. Otherwise, it would have been curtains.’ He replied: ‘I know.’

But I think both of us felt a desire, a duty, to help Gordon if we could. The key would be the party conference in September. Tony felt his chances of pulling through were not high, and that if he failed, a leadership change would become inevitable. I thought this judgement was right. ‘It’s not about loyalty to one man,’ he said. ‘It’s about loyalty to the Labour Party. It’s about saving the Labour Party. He has to completely rethink and reconnect. If he fails, it’s hopeless. He cannot stagger on. The public aren’t going to elect him for another five years.’ If Gordon failed, there was at least David. ‘He’s not perfect,’ Tony said, ‘but he has matured. He’s humble enough to listen. He has to keep going, be strong, show decisive leadership.’

Tony and David talked several times as the summer wore on. Tony became ever more impressed by David’s strength and political instincts. Gordon, he believed, had about a 20 per cent chance of pulling off an escape act and leading a real recovery in the autumn. Both of us had a duty to help him take that one last shot, but if he stumbled, Tony felt, there would have to be a leadership challenge.

In contrast to the last time David had been in the frame for a leadership challenge, when Tony stepped down, I had no intention of publicly expressing a view. When he phoned me in mid-August, I said that he appeared to be in a very different state of mind from the year before. ‘Not quite,’ he said. ‘I didn’t bottle it in 2007. I never intended to stand.’ What about other members of the cabinet, I asked. He said no one seemed in the mood to speak out unless they were sure others were going to join in: ‘There’s a lot of “After you, Claude” going on.’ David said there was no way of knowing how things would develop. He was anticipating the main argument Gordon and his allies would make to forestall a move: that the public wouldn’t wear a second unelected Labour Prime Minister. ‘If we do replace Gordon,’ he said, ‘we have to go for an election four to six months later. The moment you appear frightened of the voters, you’re finished.’

Whatever Gordon’s chances, I knew that he faced a steep climb, and that only by clearing his head and investing all his energies in an autumn recovery would he have any real chance of success. He was frustrated. He felt wronged. He was also obviously unsettled by the newspaper chatter about coups and conspiracies, and about David Miliband too. I tried to get him to put all that out of his mind. I was about to go on holiday myself, departing by easyJet for Naples to join Italian friends whose company I had enjoyed on Capri every summer since my first years in Brussels. When I called Gordon before leaving, to try to lift his spirits a bit, he was preoccupied with the party conference, above all with what we both knew could be his make-or-break speech. Though we spoke only in general terms at first, I told him the key was that it had to contain a personal appeal, to connect emotionally in a way he had so far been failing to do. It would have to provide the definition he had failed to offer when he moved into Number 10. I also urged him to seize the moment before conference by giving a few interviews in which he could set up his relaunch. He had to explain the lessons he had learned over the past few months, how his approach to the job would change, and how he would lead the government and the country forward. In other words, there had to be a genuine sense of reflecting and learning, almost of starting again.

During August, he became more and more anxious. He began to include me in daily, hour-long conference calls involving a tightly-selected group. How my participation did not become public, I will never know. I am also not sure how much help these calls were. Every morning on Capri I would sit in the shade, mobile pinned to my ear, and run through an array of ideas and themes for Gordon to put in his conference speech, and an accompanying policy document that would be published at the conference. As I later discovered, whatever we agreed in the morning would often be unravelled by further conference calls, with different participants, during the course of the day. So when we spoke again the next morning, we would often go back to square one and cover the same ground all over again. It was a cycle with which I became more and more frustrated, with nobody taking charge of the process on his behalf.

Gordon became jittery when I said that in his pre-conference interviews he would have to explain to people how his views of government, and his approach to it, had changed as a result of the difficulties he found himself in. ‘You mean Mea culpa?’ he asked, something we both knew would not come easily to him. No, I said. Just be honest. Give an account of why things had gone wrong. His message should be: ‘I have been able to reflect about what the country is going through, and about our response. These are real challenges, and I think we have to strengthen how we cope with them. This is what the government is going to do about it – this is where I was, and this is where I am now going.’

I also tried to steer him away from falling back on an urge to build the speech around a nuclear assault on David Cameron and the Tories – the ‘dividing-line’ approach he had first drummed into both me and Tony in the 1980s in his ceaseless quest for the killer opportunity to wrong-foot the Conservatives. ‘Dividing lines with the Tories can’t be your priority now,’ I said. ‘If you have any dividing line, it’s between the easier, simpler, original politics of New Labour when first elected, and the new politics of the economic crisis that we have to deal with now, and where the Tories offer nothing.’ He also had to be personal. Not soppy, not apologetic, but he had to reach out to the public, draw them in, and help them understand him better. Gordon warmed to that. He even drew a comparison between his past ‘struggles’ and those of Barack Obama – a parallel that I hoped, for his sake, would end up on the cutting-room floor.

Still, he was right to believe he had a compelling story to tell. He had struggled. With the loss of his eye. With the death of his and Sarah’s first child, Jennifer, in January 2002, ten days after her birth. And four years later, with the news that their youngest son, Fraser, had cystic fibrosis. ‘I have overcome setbacks and tests which I’ve had to struggle with,’ Gordon said. ‘My health, and my daughter, and my son.’ I sensed that this might indeed provide the emotional connection Gordon had so often lacked. It would ring true, because it was.

Gordon also called me separately at times to share his fears that moves were afoot to drive him out. During one call, he said he had heard that the former Blair cabinet heavyweight Charles Clarke was ‘putting pressure’ on David to ‘reveal his hand, be a candidate – saying he must do so or be discounted. They’re getting a letter together to say there must be change. They’re getting signatures for a coup.’ ‘Sounds familiar,’ I teased him, thinking back to previous attempts by Gordon’s own supporters to drive Tony from office. I told him there were no plots for a coup as far as I could tell, and there wouldn’t be as long as he focused on September and the conference, and got everything right.

He agonised, too, about his staff – and they about him. Now that I was in fairly regular contact with Gordon and his aides, I got both sides of the story. Gordon felt alone. He felt he needed to do too much – and very often, all – of the policy-making himself. He said, surprisingly, that was partly why it had occurred to him to bring me back into the mix, and that he had even toyed with contacting me much earlier, in May 2007, the month before he moved into Number 10, but had concluded that it would not have worked. Now he wished he had done.

In fact, as even his closest aides made clear to me, Gordon himself was a big part of the problem. At the Treasury he’d had a well-oiled machine, a group of experienced and gifted civil servants under the direction of a unique political ally, Ed Balls. Ed was so close to Gordon – so seamlessly identified not only with his thinking, but his ambitions – that he was Deputy Chancellor in everything but name. Now Ed was Children, Schools and Families Secretary. He was still very much part of the inner circle, but he was not based in Downing Street. He had a day job, and legitimate ambitions of his own. Running the government and the country was simply harder than running the Treasury. Shorn of Ed, Gordon lacked, or at least had not yet acquired, the new set of skills and staff members he needed. One of his closest advisers put it best: ‘Gordon is a hub-and-spoke operator. He’s the hub, and he works through lots of separate spokes, rather than an integrated machine.’ Another member of the team said: ‘He only trusts people in boxes, silos. He listens to them in that particular context, like he would use an electrician or bring in a plumber. He’s not geared to run a group that interacts, communicates with one another.’ They all agreed that there was no one – no Ed Balls – to pull things together for him, and that was the chief loss.

The more I spoke to Gordon, and to those around him, the more convinced I became that the key to any recovery was Gordon himself. With all his ideas, with all his passion, he seemed so distracted, so distressed, that I wondered whether he would be able to rise to the occasion at the party conference. It wasn’t just the politics he had to get right, I told him. Not even just the speech, though that would obviously be crucial. He had to look revived as well. I kept urging him to rest, spend time in the sun, exercise, eat well. ‘You’ve got to take care of yourself so that people get a different picture of you, as on top of the job rather than struggling with it,’ I said on one occasion. ‘If you look better on the outside, people will feel you’re more in control of things.’ I think he realised I was right.

Very quietly, he said: ‘It was all so wretched between us all – you, me, Tony. It was so wasteful! We could have achieved so much more. We still did a lot, though. Perhaps surprisingly.’

‘I agree,’ I replied. ‘What on earth were we doing? We doubted each other. We read everything into each other’s motives and actions.’

He was right, I said. ‘You saw everything we did through the prism of “We want to destroy you.” We saw everything you did through the prism of “You want to get Tony out.” It was a sort of mutually assured destruction.’

For my part, I couldn’t help but reflect on how different, and how much more fulfilling, my life had become since I had left front-line British politics. For a long time after my second defenestration, I had felt angry and resentful. Before I finally accepted that a third return to government was impossible, I had been fixated on finding a way back. I felt unfairly exiled. I felt incomplete without a seat at the cabinet table. That was no longer true. The new job had transformed me. On an unfamiliar and much wider stage, I had found myself bartering, bargaining and seeking common cause across over two dozen European states, and, in my role in the world trade talks, across the globe. I was still doing politics, but not politics as I’d known it. In the formative years of New Labour, ‘concession’ and ‘compromise’ had been almost dirty words. Rather than shying away from confrontation, we had sought it out, even orchestrated it. We were convinced that head-on battle was the only way the Labour Party would really change – and be seen to have changed. Our time in government should have altered that. In some ways, it did. Yet almost everything we accomplished in government, and the great deal we failed to achieve, was forged in combat – this time, between Gordon and Tony. My job in Brussels, in contrast, revolved around building relationships, alliances, coalitions. That was what had made it initially so challenging, and now so satisfying.

But the main reason I had come to enjoy my European ‘exile’ was personal. For the first time I could remember, I was out of the Westminster spotlight. For the best part of two decades, I had been defined by an increasingly malign media image. I was Machiavelli with a red rose. The Prince of Darkness. I had managed over time to come to terms with Mandelson the Media Caricature. I also realised that I had played a part in its creation. What had hurt most was the unbridled aggression with which the media sought out ‘stories’ to burnish the caricature, and to propel their narrative of what kind of politician and person I was. This had had a real and damaging effect on my career. It was certainly a central factor in my second resignation. Still, the media storm that had hastened my departure, however inaccurate or misleading, could at least have been seen as the press doing its job. The reporters and headline-writers were sinking their teeth into an issue relating to a public figure performing public duties. That was not the case with intrusion into my personal life, or the licence that reporters and photographers felt they had to stalk my every step, pick away at my every social engagement, home in on my every friendship and – as I could hardly help but recall on Capri – every holiday. I reflected, with a relief that would have been unimaginable in my higher-octane years in Westminster, that I was no longer news.

For equally unimaginable reasons, by the time my holiday was over, that assumption would turn out to be wrong. Three days remained before I was due back in Brussels. On the way, I was making a stopover on the Greek island of Corfu. Two months earlier I had received a phone call from Matthew Freud, the PR supremo married to Rupert Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth. Matthew had been one of the key advisers during my challenging stewardship of the Millennium Dome, and had become a good friend. I had also got to know Elisabeth well. Matthew was calling because he wanted me to come to Corfu for Elisabeth’s fortieth birthday party, which was being organised at the house there of my friends Jacob and Serena Rothschild. I imagined that it would be fun, and looked forward to spending a few days on the waterside estate, which I recalled with fondness and gratitude from the time I had spent there with Jacob and Serena after my first ejection from government. I looked forward too to seeing their son Nat, with whom I had also become close.

By the time I arrived it was Friday evening, just before the party was due to begin. The other guests – an array of yacht-borne Murdochs, and friends of both generations of Rothschilds – were already there. There was not a bed to sleep in at the Rothschild home. In part, as Nat explained to me with a smile, this was because one of his old Oxford friends was staying there: George Osborne, David Cameron’s closest political ally and Shadow Chancellor. Nat arranged for me to be billeted on a yacht belonging to another of his friends, the Russian industrialist Oleg Deripaska. I also knew Oleg, though not well, having met him previously through Nat. I was intrigued by his rags-to-riches story. Having begun life in a poor corner of rural Russia, he trained as a physicist, and had become a major businessman during the entrepreneurial free-for-all that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Not only had he become wealthy, he was also well-read, and voraciously interested in a constellation of social and economic ideas, as well as Russia’s future, which dominated his conversation. Despite later media suggestions that I had gone to Corfu to join Oleg for a holiday on his yacht, I barely saw him, except for an amusing episode in which, during an early-morning wander around his boat, I stumbled across a yoga session he and his wife were taking, and I happily joined in under the instruction of their teacher.

I knew George Osborne, too. We had never exchanged much beyond social pleasantries and that is all we did at the birthday party. It was not until the following evening, with repercussions that would emerge only later, that this changed. The remaining guests, about thirty of us in all, had arranged to assemble at a seaside taverna down the road from the Rothschilds’ house. I had fallen asleep in the evening sun, and arrived late. When I showed up, there were two vacant seats, one at each end of the table, and two simultaneous shouts of welcome. One was from Rebekah Wade, then editor of Rupert Murdoch’s Sun. The other was from George. I planted myself next to him, as he’d seemed the more insistent. For the next fifty minutes or so, we talked. By the time our remarks, or a skewed version of them, surfaced in the press a couple of months later, a central point would be lost.

Yes, we talked frankly, on both sides. But it was the kind of conversation political colleagues on opposite sides of the party fence have far more often than is sometimes realised. I had been one of the creators of New Labour, and the repositioning David Cameron and George were attempting with the Conservatives was in many ways being modelled on that. I was sceptical that they had learned the real lesson of New Labour: that it was not just about creating a new image, but required making tough policy changes and bringing the party behind them. But it was a fascinating and not unenjoyable chat, a bit like two golf pros comparing their swings. In fact, George did most of the talking. He spoke animatedly, initially about the Prime Minister. It was not just that he disliked Gordon Brown; he seemed consumed by his interest in what the Observer had once famously called Gordon’s ‘psychological flaws’. George recited a litany of slights he said he had suffered at Gordon’s hands in the months while he was shadowing him as Chancellor: Gordon had blanked him whenever they met; he had denied him the courtesy of advance copies of Treasury statements; on one occasion, George had phoned him only for Gordon to put the receiver down, or so he said. He was especially fascinated by the tensions between Gordon and Tony, saying that the ‘TB-GBs’ had made both him and David Cameron aware of the importance of sustaining their own relationship.

I listened. On occasion, I nodded. And yes, I added a brush-stroke or two to the psychological portrait George had obviously spent many months assembling. But I said nothing I hadn’t said to others at one time or another before. Nothing, in fact, I hadn’t said to Gordon. So it was difficult not to smile when, in George’s leaked version of our discussion which subsequently appeared in the press, I was said to have poured ‘pure poison’ about Gordon into his ear.

If anyone’s ear was scorched that evening, it was mine, as George expounded on what he saw as his and Cameron’s Conservative equivalent of our New Labour project. They had drained the Thatcherera ideology from the Tories, detoxified the party, he said, to make it electable. I said it had always been my understanding that the rising generation of Tory MPs and the current activists had grown up under Thatcher, and their thinking had been formed under her leadership. George said this was true only up to a point. The party was mainly made up of old people, not young people, most of whom were involved more for social than political reasons. In his own constituency, there were lots of divorcees, widows and widowers whose interest in the party was as a place to find companionship, or a partner. ‘They’re not interested in ideology,’ George said. ‘They’re interested in a Conservative Party that wins.’ His, and David Cameron’s, interest was also in a Tory Party that won.

When I returned to Brussels, I spoke to Tony on the telephone again. We both wondered whether Gordon had it in him to turn things round. My view was that neither of us could tell but that he had to be given the chance to try. Tony reflected on the messy way his own time in office had ended and Gordon’s had begun. It was not just the absence of the long-advertised ‘orderly transition’; what most upset him was that one result of Gordon’s final coup had been to short-circuit the ambitious policy review Tony had put in train to give a post-Blair government a fresh, but still New Labour, agenda. ‘It wasn’t my fault, the way he behaved,’ Tony grumbled. ‘I would have gone in 2004 if he’d worked with me, and if I didn’t believe the whole thing would be pulled apart by him and his people.’ He said he still felt Gordon had a great brain and energy. But, he added, ‘These have got to be directed at the right things. He’s got to go back to being New Labour.’

I don’t think either of us had any doubt that Gordon would return to London after the summer recess with a new determination to turn things round, but at the beginning, events did not help him. The trouble began, at least in Gordon’s mind, with the closest thing he had to an old friend, except for Ed Balls, in the cabinet. Alistair Darling – a Scot, a long-time admirer of Gordon, and his Chief Secretary at the Treasury after the 1997 election – was evidently feeling increasingly pessimistic about where the country was heading, from an already obvious economic downturn to something far worse, and, it seemed, frustrated at being constantly second-guessed by Number 10. He gave a long, and extraordinarily frank, interview to the Guardian writer Decca Aitkenhead at his holiday cottage in the Outer Hebrides. His remarks were not personally unkind towards Gordon, but he felt the country was ‘pissed off’ with the government: ‘We patently have not been able to get across what we are for, and what we are about.’ And he said he believed the recession would be ‘more profound and more long-lasting than people thought’. The economic straits Britain found itself in were ‘arguably the worst they’ve been in sixty years’.

The word ‘arguably’ disappeared from the quotes picked up by other newspapers and broadcasters when Alistair’s interview appeared. George Osborne had a field day, launching an assault on Gordon’s legacy as Chancellor and his ‘truthfulness’ as Prime Minister. Gordon was furious, because he felt Alistair’s comments were yet one more distraction from his hoped-for September recovery. When he called me, he was seething. I probably didn’t help things by questioning how he had allowed his media briefers to leak his plans to ‘go personal’ at the party conference – a bizarre theft of his own headlines that risked detracting from the impact of his speech when he made it. ‘I didn’t do that!’ he protested. ‘Well, somebody did,’ I said calmly, to which he replied: ‘OK. But we’re going from one improvisation to another. It’s ridiculous. I’ve got all these things to do, all this policy in my mind, but no means of communicating it.’ Then he got to what was really upsetting him. ‘That fucking Darling interview! It fucked up everything, absolutely everything, I wanted to do last week.’

None of us reckoned, however, on a series of events about to erupt five time zones away from Downing Street. They were hugely significant, an economic shock so seismic that they made Alistair’s interview seem understated. They began with the news that one of America’s most venerable investment banks, Lehman Brothers, might be going to the wall. Over the weekend, the US authorities scrambled to find a buyer. On Monday, Lehmans filed for so-called Chapter Eleven protection. It was the biggest bankruptcy in American history. World stock markets tumbled. Another British bank, HBOS, was soon showing signs of being in serious trouble. This was staved off by Gordon, who with a word in the ear of the Lloyds chairman Victor Blank encouraged a mega-merger between Lloyds and HBOS. By the end of the week, with the Labour conference convening in Manchester on Sunday, the economic news was becoming ever more worrying.

Gordon phoned me on Friday night. He said he had been trying to get me for two days – I had been at a climate change conference in Oslo, and had not been returning messages. He started by talking about his conference speech. It was clear the political ground had shifted. ‘Now,’ I told him, ‘you actually have something big to talk about in your speech. It really is the global economy, stupid.’

This was what we had been talking about since the summer. But now it was well and truly dramatised. The terrible crisis meant it was not just a theoretical and not just a political argument, but a real, immediate challenge. If Gordon got his message right, he had an opportunity to break through in a way he simply would not have been able to do before.

He agreed. ‘It’s not just about individuals and society. It must be markets as well,’ he said. His only doubt, one Tony would have found reassuringly New Labour, was how far he could go in attacking the markets. I reassured him that it wasn’t about attacking the markets, but individuals within them who had been acting irresponsibly, and that he should have no compunction about attacking them. But mostly what I told him was to put all his extraneous worries to one side: the so-called coups, Alistair’s interview. ‘Don’t, for God’s sake, let yourself get sidetracked,’ I said. ‘And don’t stop being prime ministerial.’

I was fairly certain now that, given the economic turmoil, Gordon had every chance of turning in a performance sufficient to save his job. Only a frontal assault from David Miliband was likely to spur rebellion, and that was not going to happen. For the media, however, the conference was shaping up as a tale of two speeches: David’s on the Monday, and Gordon’s on the Wednesday. David spoke eloquently, and ranged far beyond his brief as Foreign Secretary. In parts, he sounded very much like a leader-in-waiting. He echoed his July call for the party to choose hope, energy and new ideas over ‘fatalism’. But even without his unfortunate ambush by a photographer outside the conference hall, who snapped him grinning and holding a banana, David was not pushing for the leadership. Besides, there was no vacancy. Unless, of course, Gordon unravelled when he strode onto the stage.

He did the opposite. By some distance, it was the most powerful performance, the most effective message, he had delivered since his descent had begun a year earlier. It was personal. It connected. It had touches of self-deprecating humour. It played to his strengths. Galvanised by the magnitude of the new economic and financial crisis, he managed to produce what he had so far been failing to do. He offered a coherent reply to questions left unanswered for so long: What were the challenges Britain faced? What were the policies, vision and leadership needed to rise above them? And why was he the man to provide them? His most effective line, aimed at David Cameron, was: ‘I’m all in favour of apprenticeships. But let me tell you that this is no time for a novice.’ It was clever, it was simple, and it was what people wanted to hear.

I was back in Brussels when Gordon gave his speech, and was preoccupied with preparing for a trip to China and a speech of my own when I got there. Especially with the economic crisis deepening, I was keen to encourage expanding business and trade ties between the EU and the Chinese. But I was determined to press Beijing on our concerns about protectionist barriers, and China’s lacklustre attitude to enforcing intellectual-property rights. I watched Gordon’s address on television, however, and saw that it had gone well. I got two text messages that evening. The first was from one of the team at Number 10, saying very kindly that I’d made a ‘profound difference’ to Gordon’s performance. The second was from Sue Nye. ‘Gordon,’ it read, ‘says “thank you” for your help.’ As always with big set-piece speeches, especially Gordon’s, I was just one of many who had contributed. But it had been worth the effort. I told Gordon I felt it had been a good speech, the right message, effectively delivered, at the right time. What I didn’t say, in part because I was sure Gordon already knew and feared it, was that he had cleared only the first hurdle on the road to recovery.

By the time we next spoke, I was in Singapore, on my way home from Beijing. The call came in the early hours of the morning. He was upset by continued signs of discontent among an assortment of backbenchers, echoed by several former Blair cabinet ministers. There was a ‘plot’ to drive him out, he insisted: ‘The plotters are the problem.’ He singled out three former ministers as the alleged culprits: Stephen Byers, Alan Milburn and John Reid. ‘They are steering it,’ he said. ‘They had a plan, it misfired, and they failed. They wanted to wreck the conference, and they didn’t succeed.’

In fact, as far as I could tell, neither they nor anyone else had had some grand plan for conference Armageddon. At least for now, Gordon was safe. ‘You’re getting this out of proportion,’ I told him. ‘I don’t know why you’re so wound up.’ He was not wound up, he replied. But he was obviously distracted, and if he stayed that way, his conference escape could turn out to be no more than a very brief respite. ‘What you have to focus on now is the fact that we don’t have a strategy to win the next election,’ I told him. ‘The other stuff doesn’t matter. New Labour 1997 is not going to win it for us in 2010. It has to be renewed, reinvented. Nobody is doing that, and you have to focus on it.’

‘Can’t you do that?’ he asked, returning to a theme I thought we had finally got beyond in the summer. ‘I’ve got it intellectually,’ he said. ‘I’ve got the policies. I accept it’s different from 1997, and that now we’ve got to say what we’re doing next. But I just can’t turn it into a strategy.’

I put it to him directly: ‘You need a government team to do this. Perhaps you should wonder whether you may have contributed to making people feel less of a team. You have to rebuild it.’

‘I realise some in the cabinet feel ambivalent about me,’ he replied. ‘But others have got to show a lot more maturity.’

Sensing that we had taken this as far as we could for now, I said: ‘I have to show some maturity, and go to sleep.’

‘Why? Where on earth are you?’ asked Gordon, genuinely surprised.

‘Singapore,’ I said. ‘And it’s after 2 a.m.’ Gordon, profusely apologetic, and I, very tired, agreed to talk the following day.

When he phoned he was, at least briefly, in a brighter mood. ‘If it’s not after midnight, I guess I’m calling too early,’ he joked. But he remained unsettled. He was some distance from getting a hold on the team effort I’d been urging him to make his priority.

‘You get wound up about the wrong things and the wrong people,’ I said. I advised him not to make a big mistake in the cabinet reshuffle the press was now anticipating. I was worried about reports that he was planning to replace Alistair Darling with Ed Balls, which in the gathering economic crisis struck me as perverse. No matter how upset Gordon had been over his Chancellor’s interview, a vote of no-confidence in the Treasury was hardly going to help. ‘Some may think it odd,’ I said.

‘We’ll have to talk on a landline,’ Gordon replied, with a sudden air of mystery. ‘But I have a bigger plan than that – one which everyone will eventually say is good.’

‘A tactical nuclear explosion?’ I asked. At which, for the first time in ages, he laughed. He would say nothing more, beyond a suggestion that we talk again.

I was worried. From my experience, Gordon’s ‘big plans’ had a habit of creating as many problems as they solved. His conference speech would not in itself ensure that he and the government could recover, but it was a start. He had had one last chance at survival, and he had taken it. One more ‘big plan’ gone wrong would risk not just ending his short and unhappy premiership, it could leave the government, and the party, in even deeper crisis.

The next call from Downing Street came two days later. It was not from Gordon, but Jeremy Heywood. It began encouragingly enough, with an assurance that I would have an opportunity to weigh in with my views before the reshuffle warheads were launched. ‘I think Gordon will want to see you to discuss the reshuffle,’ he said. But then he too added, ‘He wants to do something quite big.’

‘In what way big?’ I pressed. He said that was something I would have to discuss with the Prime Minister. Apparently, Gordon wanted to do something that would affect me. This was getting more puzzling, and more worrying. I took it to be a suggestion of some root-and-branch reworking of the cabinet, with my job in Brussels offered as consolation prize to one of the victims. The prospect of my entering a truly final political exile came as a shock. It also seemed an odd way for Gordon to recognise the help I had tried to give him in his darkest hours. I did take comfort from the fact that I was better equipped to deal with being cast into the wilderness this time round. With my EU term ending in barely a year, I had begun to adjust to the notion of life beyond politics. But it was unsettling, and I said so. ‘He’d better not muck around with my job,’ I told Jeremy. ‘If this “big plan” involves getting rid of someone with a promise of my job, you should know I’ll be furious.’

‘It’s not that,’ he said. ‘We’ll talk again.’

The next call, on Wednesday, 1 October, was no more illuminating. This time it was from Gordon. ‘I’m going to do this reshuffle,’ he began. ‘I need to talk to you about it. I want to put an idea to you – something I hope you’ll go along with.’ He asked if I could come to see him in Downing Street the following morning. I said I would be in London anyway, for a briefing at the Treasury on the financial crisis, and I could see him after that. He seemed satisfied, but before hanging up he added very sternly: ‘Do not discuss this with anyone.’

‘Discuss what?’ I asked.

‘Nothing,’ he replied. ‘Just don’t discuss it.’ Since I had no idea what he was on about, that was easy enough to agree to.

Maybe my famed political antennae were not as good as they have been cracked up to be. Maybe Brussels had dimmed my Westminster instincts. Maybe, despite our recent rapprochement, I simply assumed that Gordon and I had fought so many battles that some sense of estrangement would always survive. In any case, when I discreetly entered Number 10 on the afternoon of Thursday, 2 October 2008 through the french windows at the back, near the Foreign Office, I was anticipating a conversation about the other potential jigsaw pieces in Gordon’s grand scheme. I took his and Jeremy’s hints at some role for me to mean, at most, another attempt to get me to play a part in forging the ‘strategy’ he desperately wanted. I had difficulty in seeing quite how that would work, but I was willing to listen, and to help if I could.

We met in the small wood-panelled dining room on the first floor. Gordon took a spoonful of yoghurt and unpeeled a banana. ‘I don’t like sandwiches,’ he said when I offered him the plate. Then he got down to business.

‘I need to do something big. I need you to join the government. I want you to help get us through the economic situation. You would do it at the Business Department, from the House of Lords.’

For a moment, I was stunned. I was also seized by panic at the prospect, even if Gordon genuinely felt he could make it work, of a return to the political jungle, and an end to a European sojourn that had turned out even better than I had expected. ‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘but I actually like my present job. I have things I want to finish. And I have my comfort zone.’ I had my work. My life. The protection I now felt I had from the frequent ghastliness of Westminster politics as I had come to know it. I had my travel, my friends. I was now on top of the Trade Commissioner’s job, and trying against all odds to play my part in rescuing hopes for a world trade deal, not to mention the intractable negotiations to update our trade relations in Africa, or the never-ending talks on Russia’s membership of the World Trade Organisation.

Gordon would not be dissuaded. He said the world trade deal was going nowhere fast – he had just been in Washington, and he was sure of that. I was pretty sure of it as well: its prospects were looking about as dire as Gordon’s before his conference speech.

‘Think of what you would be able to achieve back in the government,’ he persisted. ‘It’s a great opportunity.’ And he added: ‘We need you. We could work together.’

‘Well, it would certainly be a surprise for everyone,’ I laughed. Yet, except for the undeniable satisfaction I would take from an unlikely – more nearly, impossible – third return from the cabinet dead, I still found the idea unsettling. Gordon left me to ponder.

When he returned to the room, it was with Sue Nye in tow. He suggested that she and I speak. This was the start of a carousel of conversations, first with Sue, then with Jeremy Heywood, as Gordon departed and reappeared, joined the discussion and left the other two to urge me to see the logic of his proposal. It made sense from every angle, they insisted. It would be the right thing for Gordon, for the government, and for me. I was tempted. It was not merely the idea of returning to cabinet. At a time when Gordon and New Labour were in political crisis, and the country was facing an economic one, I did feel that I could play a part in making things better.

But for other reasons, I was still reluctant. Even in our resumed, long-distance relationship, I had been reminded that Gordon could be hair-raisingly difficult to work with. ‘It’s all too difficult,’ I told him. ‘I’ll have to talk to Reinaldo about it. He’ll hate the whole idea of becoming involved in British politics again – and the media. He’s suffered enough.’ Gordon replied that by all means I should call my partner, then hurriedly added: ‘If you want, I’ll talk to him.’ The moment passed. Gordon’s suggestion, like so much else when he was at his best, had been genuine, and generous. So too was his invitation to me to return to the top ranks of government.

I would not say no outright, I told him finally. I had to think it through. I also needed counsel from someone who knew both me and Gordon well, and whose instincts I had learned to trust. I said I wanted to discuss it with Tony. Gordon said that was fine, and we agreed that I would return by the end of the afternoon.

As soon as I left, I phoned Reinaldo. His reaction was not just surprise, but more nearly disbelief. Who could blame him? Yet as we talked through the obvious pitfalls, he came to the view that what mattered was whether the contribution I could make by returning to cabinet outweighed them. If I felt it did, I should do it. ‘But you’re right,’ he said, ‘to talk to Tony.’

When I arrived at Tony’s office in Grosvenor Square, he was in a meeting. As he ushered me in a few minutes later, it was apparent that Gordon had phoned ahead. Tony grasped my hand and laughed out loud. ‘You could not make it up!’ he said. But he added: ‘On the other hand, it has a certain logic. It’s a no-brainer. You belong in the government. The economic crisis is real. If the Prime Minister asks you to serve your country, you have to. It certainly wouldn’t look good if people got to know that you’d turned him down.’

‘He’s a nightmare to work with. It might be awful,’ I said.

‘It might be,’ Tony replied, ‘or it might not be. You don’t know. In the end, people will just say that you did your best.’

When I returned to Number 10, Gordon was waiting. ‘OK,’ I told him. ‘I’ll do it. I’m still not sure it’s the right thing for me to do. But I’ll do my best.’

‘It is the right thing,’ Gordon said. ‘I’m sure. You’ll see.’

As I left, I was in a daze. I did feel a sense of excitement, the surge of adrenalin I had almost forgotten in the gentler political climate of Brussels. The role Gordon had mapped out for me might turn out to be the most important and fulfilling of my political life. My new cabinet job would take me back to the now-renamed Department of Trade and Industry. It was the place where I’d cut my departmental teeth, where with a team of impressive civil servants I had done well, only to leave long before I had expected or hoped to. It meant that along with whatever ‘strategic’ role Gordon clearly wanted me to play, I would be at the heart of framing the government agenda where it mattered most: the economy.

I couldn’t help but smile at imagining what the media would make of my return. Outrageous? Astonishing? It was certainly both of those. But also risky? Ill-advised? Insane? I could only hope not. There was just one thing of which I was sure as I returned to my home off Regent’s Park, beyond the gaze or interest of reporters, at least until the news of the reshuffle became public. As so often when conflicting issues had to be weighed and a difficult decision made, Tony had been right. If the Prime Minister asks you to serve your country, you have to.

But I also knew that the reasons I had decided to come back, the reasons that in some ways I wanted to come back, were more complex than that. They had less to do with Gordon, or Tony, than with me. It is true that everything I had become as a politician had been marked by my relationship with New Labour’s two, very different, Prime Ministers. But the roots went back much further: to my time with Neil Kinnock, and with London Weekend Television’s Weekend World programme in the 1980s; to my experience in local government, the trade unions and youth politics in the Old Labour heyday of the 1970s; to my time at university. And to a bright white family home ten miles up the Northern Line from the Houses of Parliament, on a suburban street called Bigwood Road.