Читать книгу Whatever it Takes: The Real Story of Gordon Brown and New Labour - Steve Richards, Steve Richards - Страница 10

On election night in May 1997 most of the country seemed to be dancing the night away, or at least staying up to watch the election results, cheering joyfully when Tory cabinet ministers fell. Even some of those who did not vote Labour, most of the electorate, succumbed to the mood quickly. Polls showed that Labour’s popularity soared once the votes had been cast. By the summer and autumn of 1997 the party was breaking all records in terms of opinion-poll leads, suggesting that some of those who had supported the Conservatives in the election or who had not voted were also enthused.

The mood was too excitable, at odds with the ambiguous nature of a limited turning point. Labour had achieved an unprecedented landslide, but it was based on a cautious incremental programme. The result was historic, but not the manifesto that produced it. The year 1997 was not a watershed like 1945 or 1979, with elections that heralded deep, almost revolutionary change as governments shaped and followed the zeitgeist of their times. For varying and contradictory reasons voters had put in place a government resolved to show that it was different from previous Labour administrations and in some ways in tune with the orthodoxies that had shaped the previous eighteen years of Conservative rule. ‘We were elected as New Labour. We will govern as New Labour,’ Blair declared pre-emptively outside Number Ten as he arrived for the first time as Prime Minister.

By 1997 Brown’s reputation was rising again in the Labour party and beyond. He had travelled his first full circle: hailed as a formidable reformer in 1992, he was seen that way again as he headed for the Treasury. The phase in between, when he was so unpopular he would not have won a contest in a parish council, had passed. It would soon return. There were other circles to complete, but as Labour returned to power most newspapers and his party recognized the contribution he had made to the landslide. At any rate they cheered the public narrative, the emphasis on prudence and stability.

On this night in May 1997 Brown relished the fact that an electoral barrier had been overcome, but straight away there were more battles to be fought. According to his close allies he felt no sense of euphoria on election night. The victory was a brief pause before the next stage of the eternal political journey. There were pressing problems on his mind and he wanted them sorted fast.

From election night onwards this was the battle as Brown saw it. He had stamina, resilience, limitless willpower, the strength to threaten near-fatal trouble for the government if he chose to do so. Blair had the mighty powers of prime-ministerial patronage. In theory at least Blair could appoint and sack who he wished.

As Chancellor Brown had no equivalent powers, at least in terms of ministerial appointments. In theory at least, like the rest of the government he was dependent on the patronage of Blair. All he had to cling to was the so-called Granita deal and the fact that he had a plan for the economy whereas no one else in the government, Blair included, had given any significant thought to economic policy. Brown had not let them, but his possessiveness remained an easy excuse on their behalf to abstain from deep thinking on the subject.

In the early morning of 2 May Brown briefly joined the celebrations at the Royal Festival Hall. Revealingly, the jubilation was fuelled by disbelief. Along with several other journalists, I had a ticket for the event and soon after arriving bumped into David Miliband, dancing along to ‘Things Can Only Get Better’, Labour’s anthem for the campaign. Seeing Miliband on the dance floor was quite a shock, but his words were more revealing. He looked up and joked: ‘I am sure we will all wake up in the morning and find that the Tories have won again.’

From the start there was a collective fear that they were dreaming. The fear never died. They could not quite believe that the Tories were no longer an invincible force. From the beginning nearly all of them felt like impostors disturbing the natural order of things. Already those at the top of New Labour had acquired a reputation for arrogance, but the opposite was closer to the truth. In their insecurity they were never arrogant enough in imposing or even articulating an alternative vision after eighteen years of Conservative rule.

The insecurity persisted. I recall one social gathering on a Saturday evening in north London halfway through Labour’s second term after the party had won another landslide in 2001. Those around the dinner table included a cabinet minister, the owner of an independent TV production company, two newspaper columnists and an influential economist. Along with the cabinet minister nearly all those around the heaving dinner table were Labour supporters at a time when the government had been in power for several years. The question of the evening was: How do we get a progressive consensus when the right is so powerful in Britain? Even when the left of centre wielded considerable power it did not dare to recognize the changed situation, or at least the potential for change.

In 1997, alone of the shadow cabinet, Brown had been able to choose his Treasury team and inform them in advance which ministerial jobs they would be taking up. Geoffrey Robinson for example informed Ian Hargreaves, his editor at the New Statesman, that Brown had made him Paymaster General long before the general election had even been called.

They huddled together in a corner of the Royal Festival Hall for an hour. One of those who knew members of the inner court well described the gloomy mood. ‘They were bad times for Gordon and his senior allies. They weren’t celebratory because of what was going on behind the scenes, the battles with Tony.’ Those battles included who would be appointed to the cabinet and the roles of Brown’s senior courtiers.

There was also another twist at the Royal Festival Hall, additional cause for the introspective tension on what should have been a night of celebratory euphoria. In fact it was the voters who were euphoric. Senior New Labour figures who had waited eighteen years for such a moment were miserable. Shortly after Brown arrived Cherie Blair marched up to him and accused him of being disloyal to her husband. According to one onlooker she exclaimed, ‘You can’t accept Tony won the leadership can you?’ The same observer claimed she was ‘staggeringly rude’. This was to become a pattern. In the winding corridors that connected Numbers Ten and Eleven Downing Street Cherie would challenge Brown whenever she got the chance. In contrast to her husband’s calmer manner, she could not resist a cathartic blast.

Brown’s wife, Sarah, was also the occasional victim of sharp and sometimes insensitive onslaughts from Cherie. The two wives could not have been more different in personality, although they had similar experiences of following a career and bringing up families at the centre of power. Cherie was outgoing and had a famously skittish exuberance. She had been wary of Brown from the 1980s when he shared an office with Blair. Brown was not part of their social circle in Islington and there were no common ties between her and him beyond politics. Her wariness deepened after 1994 when she saw how he reacted to Blair’s victory in the leadership contest. She expected loyalty to ‘my husband’. In his own way Brown assumed quite genuinely he was displaying a form of loyalty, at least to the Labour party, which is why he was taken aback whenever Cherie went for him. He was always surprised to discover that people felt angry or upset by his behaviour, an uncanny lack of self-awareness.

Sarah was more introverted than Cherie and avoided confrontation in any form. Her background was in marketing and she had met Brown when working on various projects for the Labour party where she also advised on PR for the New Statesman. They started going out when Brown was shadow chancellor. Those who knew her well were never entirely sure whether her more retiring personality was moulded by shyness or aloofness. Either way, Sarah did not go for open confrontation. Sometimes Cherie did.

Someone who knew the Browns well says: ‘Gordon and Sarah took it personally when Cherie attacked them. She said horrible things – things that got in your head.’ On more than one occasion Sarah was reduced to tears following an exchange with Cherie. Tony witnessed some of the outbursts and according to Brown’s allies appeared to be embarrassed by them. If he was, he chose to do nothing about them. The outbursts continued for the next decade and extended to other members of the Brownite entourage, especially to Ed Balls. Cherie loathed Balls, perhaps as much as she loathed Brown.

Given the degree to which power in this particular government resided in the hands of two individuals, any event or relationship that reinforced the divide between them tended to have further ramifications. Brown’s self-absorbed and immature response to the 1994 leadership drama sowed the seed for the creation of Brownites and Blairites. Cherie’s aggressive loyalty to Tony fuelled the factionalism. Gordon and his inner court felt under attack from Cherie at times, and that, in a strange and destructive way, vindicated their need to form a separate court in the first place.

As far as they were concerned Brown and his inner court were to remain as distinct as they had been in opposition. They were not to be swamped by senior civil servants at the Treasury, the machinery of government or the clamouring ambitions of those more closely identified with Blair. The separation was not just an act of ambitious vanity, although this was a factor, but arose from a sense that they had a plan, a clear direction in which they wanted the government to move. They were not sure whether it would work, or whether Blair and his entourage would be supportive, but they intended to attempt it.

After a few hours’ sleep Brown went to see Blair briefly in Number Ten. The two of them walked alone in the garden on an unusually hot and sunny day for early May. The two of them were at the top of the government, buttressed by the biggest majority since the Second World War – quite a leap from the dingy office they shared at the start of their parliamentary career in 1983 and from the last Labour government that collapsed eighteen years earlier with no majority at all.

But both of them were businesslike. In markedly different ways both Blair and Brown had a rare capacity to focus on what needed to be done in any circumstance and to cut themselves off from some of the noisy distractions of politics. In the years that followed, outsiders who worked on projects with both of them, or one of them separately, tended to notice this quality more than any other, and were pleasantly surprised by their insight. They had read in the media endless cynical assessments about the duo, and then came face to face with their ability to compartmentalize and think with clarity even in the thick of a thousand other crises and internal rows.

On the Friday after the election Brown discussed briefly the logistics of his planned bombshell announcement about the independence of the Bank of England. Blair moved on to an issue that he and his press secretary, Alastair Campbell, had discussed separately and intensely on several occasions. He pressed again for Brown to sack his press secretary, Charlie Whelan.

The suggestion revealed much about the new and inexperienced government that was the source of much euphoric hope around the country. Most obviously Blair wanted Whelan sacked because he regarded him as a loose cannon, capable of firing on colleagues as much as on the opposition. But Blair’s concern went beyond Whelan’s unpredictable behaviour. He and Campbell had resolved to make the presentation of policy as central as its implementation. Campbell was explicit about this in a statement he delivered to departmental press offices in the first full week of power. Blair and Campbell had watched and benefited from the chaotic management of news under the Major administration. They were determined to control the message centrally, and their desire to do so was not a marginal issue but at the heart of Blair’s thinking about how he would be Prime Minister. Not surprisingly therefore, Campbell was keen to have Whelan out of the way in order to prevent conflicting messages emerging from Number Ten and the Treasury.

Later Blair and Campbell were to admit that in the early months – and arguably years – in office they retained the mindset of opposition, almost mistaking a favourable media report on an initiative for the successful implementation of policy. But their focus was not as trivial at it might appear to be. They recognized the power of the media in shaping the perception of a government and considered the need for a coherent message to be one of the new administration’s main objectives.

There was also another reason for Blair placing Whelan at the top of his prime-ministerial hit list. He wanted to break up Brown’s separate court. As far as Blair was concerned there was room for only one Prime Minister – a perfectly reasonable line to take, not least from the person who happened to reside in Number Ten. Blair knew that if he did not make a move right away it would be too late and a pattern would be established in government that followed what had happened in opposition with an alternative power base at the Treasury.

Predictably Brown was resistant, and Blair did not push it hard either, claiming that his concern was solely one about the government having a clear message. Alert to any attempt at challenging his empire, Brown saw in this move a first attempt to put him in his place. Blair had a press secretary, but apparently he was not allowed one. Brown regarded the suggestion as an attempt by Number Ten to seize control of the media agenda, whereas he had every intention of making his own distinctive mark in that area.

The quick exchange between two exhausted individuals in the immediate aftermath of a historic victory was tense, fuelled by mutual suspicion, and yet as they addressed issues related to internal factionalism they also managed briefly to discuss a historic policy as they geared up to make the Bank of England independent. There were to be many more such exchanges, angry, awkward, media-obsessed and humourless, although both of them possessed a sharp, humanizing sense of the ridiculous.

Two questions arise from their first exchange as rulers in a landslide government. Why did Blair not insist on getting his way – an echo of his weakness at Granita? Was Brown justified in refusing to become in effect a mere cabinet minister without his own courtiers around him?

The answer to the first question is fairly straightforward. In spite of his towering popularity, Blair did not feel strong enough to antagonize Brown, nor at this stage was he inclined even to try. He knew they had to find a way of working together and was not going to blow the relationship apart on Day One. He thought it was worth giving the future of Whelan a try partly because he wanted to send a signal to Brown that he was on his case and would not tolerate divergent briefings, but he never expected Brown to give in.

The answer to the second question is more complicated. On one level Brown’s determination to have his own people working for him rather than for Blair or for the government as a whole was self-indulgent, divisive and grandiose. Yet as a new Chancellor he was under immense pressure to prove that Labour could be trusted to run the economy, a challenge almost as great as the one facing Blair as the incoming Prime Minister. In addition Brown was pioneering economic policy single-handedly. Only his immediate entourage understood his distinct New Labour strategy: a reassuring public narrative and the implementation of some social democratic policies by stealth. He needed them. In such a context he was justified in having his people around him even if their subsequent behaviour vindicated Blair’s concerns.

Their meeting lasted little more than half an hour. Soon Brown left Blair’s small empire in Downing Street and headed for his mighty institution in Whitehall. When Brown arrived at the Treasury he was greeted by 200 cheering civil servants. Those who were settling in at Number Ten watched warily as Brown was met by a noisy euphoria. Some of them suspected Whelan of orchestrating the move to convey a sense that here was an alternative centre of power with its own emperor. Whelan denied this, pointing out that he would have been in no position in advance to instruct senior Treasury officials to act in a certain public way. Yet the symbolism was striking. Blair had been cheered into Number Ten earlier in the day. Brown had been cheered into the Treasury. The two of them were operating from different centres now, with their own distinct resources.

Brown’s reputation remained high in the early years of the government partly because he had worked out a detailed plan that he more or less kept to. As John Prescott joked privately in the early autumn of 1997, most of the government had ‘hit the ground reviewing’. There were hundreds of policy reviews instigated as an alternative to policy making. Prescott had certainly launched several in his grand, newly created, dysfunctional Department of Transport, Environment and the Regions, otherwise known as the department with responsibilities that interested neither Blair nor Brown. Misguidedly the duo had no interest in transport, even though so many voters needed to travel. On this Prescott was way ahead of them. But they gave him no space to move in.

As a whole the government conveyed a deceptive impression of hyperactivity, but much of the ministerial energy was sapped by their instinct to kick decisions into the long grass.

In contrast, Brown started to implement policies in ways that gave the otherwise tentative administration much-needed momentum. Indeed one of the lessons of Brown’s tenure at the Treasury is that the policies that sprang from arduous preparation in advance tended to endure while those announced more superficially, with the aim of outmanoeuvring the opposition or buttressing his own position, quickly fell apart. Brown’s experience proved that hard work behind the scenes on making policy nearly always pays off. Superficial initiatives usually rebound on their political creators. Towards the end he became more attracted to the superficial.

Brown’s early policy making after the 1997 election also challenges another of the main accusations made against him by his internal opponents and the Conservatives. Soon Blairites accused Brown of being too cautious and lacking political courage. They felt this passionately and with sincerity. They were not making it up in an attempt to find artificial causes for their disdain. But they were wrong.

It is true that Brown could be paralysing in his caution over day-today decisions. His ministerial critics witnessed many examples of disproportionate hesitancy. They drew too sweeping a conclusion from the dithering, failing to recognize the bravery of Brown’s longer-term objectives, probably because economic policy was cordoned off from the rest of the government. Brown’s critics had not been allowed to interfere with, or debate, the programme for the economy, so they took what happened more or less for granted.

This was highly unusual. Normally economic policy was the main subject of internal debate within a government. In the 1970s at least half the cabinet had firm and conflicting ideas. During the early 1980s the debate between wets and dries in Margaret Thatcher’s first government was over economic policy. John Major’s government was torn apart by disagreements over the Euro, partly an economic matter. Under New Labour Brown did economic policy, bestowing on the rest of them the luxury of taking growth for granted while they explored other ideas – such as ‘choice’ in public services – on the assumption that as if by magic plenty of money would be available for their schemes.

In the early years Brown was bold in two respects. He showed a determination to challenge Treasury orthodoxy and some of the powerful individuals in the mightiest Whitehall department. That took quite a lot of courage from someone with no previous ministerial experience of any kind. Second, some of the policies involved considerable risks, although they were risks of a very limited kind.

Balls had written a detailed paper on the Bank’s independence as early as 1995, gripped by the need as he saw it ‘to sort out the Bank’. He was a powerful persuader. During a meeting with senior Labour strategists in March 1995 he put the case strongly that in a global market: ‘There is little any national government – and particularly a Labour government in a small country like Britain – can achieve by manipulating interest rates in the short or medium term. Stability and credibility are all.’

That was the aim: to acquire a reputation for stability and credibility in order to gain the freedom to act in other areas, such as increasing public spending, without being swallowed alive by the markets, business leaders and the media, the fate of previous Labour governments.

In May 1995, Brown gave a strong public hint about the direction in which he was heading. In a speech he spoke of the need to ‘remove the suspicion that short-term party-political considerations are influencing the setting of interest rates’. As a Chancellor he would ‘consider whether the operational role of the Bank of England should be extended beyond its current advisory role in monetary policy making’. He praised the ‘openness of debate and decision making which occurs in the US and the internal democracy of decision making of Germany’s Bundesbank and the targets set by the New Zealand government’. We journalists should have guessed which way he was heading.

Balls tried to combine the best of these international models in his proposals. In his 1995 paper he argued that the monetary policy committee should decide interest rates, the Bank’s regulatory role should be hived off and the Chancellor should appoint the monetary policy committee and set the inflation target. That is what happened in 1997.

To their credit, and much more closely than Blair and his policy-making allies, the Brownites were concerned with the issue of accountability: which institution was accountable to whom?

It was the source of many rows between Prime Minister and Chancellor and is at the heart of virtually every debate in relation to the delivery of public services. To take an example from Cameron’s preparations for power, in the build-up to the 2010 election the Conservatives held a series of energetic seminars on their plans for what they called a post-bureaucratic age. But they hit upon a problem: if the state withdraws and allows smaller groups such as co-operatives or housing estates to run their affairs, to whom are the smaller groups accountable? There was no clear answer, and quite often by the end of their seminars the Conservatives had appointed ten thousand new bureaucrats to run their post-bureaucratic age.

In the case of the Bank, free to act on his own in the luxurious space of opposition when few were following what he was up to, Balls addressed the issue of accountability in relation to independence with considerable skill, giving away power but ensuring that ultimately the elected Chancellor pulled the strings in terms of appointments and setting the overall objectives of the Bank.

Although Balls had been advocating the radical move since at least 1995, it was only on the final Monday of the 1997 election campaign that Brown confirmed he would implement the policy. He returned to London from his constituency and headed straight for the comfort of Geoffrey Robinson’s suite at the Grosvenor House Hotel. Apparently speaking as if he had a thousand other thoughts on his mind, he told Balls he had decided to make the Bank independent as his first big policy announcement. Balls and Robinson assumed, probably accurately, that his diverted air was more to do with the fact that he could not quite believe what he was saying. The two of them sought out Balls’s 1995 paper and got down to work in the remaining few days of opposition.

The speedy, ruthless manner in which the deed was done was part of the political bravery. There was no one else in the 1997 cabinet, including Blair, who would have been qualified to make such a sweeping change in relation to the Bank, or would have dared to do so. The new Prime Minister was wholly supportive of the move, but that is slightly different from making it.

Brown decided in the final weekend of the campaign not only to go ahead with the move, but to do so straight away. He realized that there would be only one real opportunity to act from a position of perceived strength, and that was at the very beginning. Any time after that and critics would detect the move as a sign of weakness, a sense that a Labour government was failing again.

In order to prevail on this and other matters, Brown and Balls were ready to take on the mighty mandarins if they had to. Balls met the Permanent Secretary, Sir Terry Burns, once a week for six months before the election, an assiduous cultivation. But he and Brown were suspicious of Burns, regarding him as someone who had been too ‘cliquey’ with Nigel Lawson and Ken Clarke, two long-serving Conservative chancellors. They were ready to form their own allies within the Treasury against the Permanent Secretary.

Balls sensed that Burns in particular felt a personal investment in the previous Tory strategy for the economy, but moved quickly to assert his – and therefore Brown’s – authority. Quickly Balls acquired other allies in the Treasury. There was Steve Robson, the architect of railway privatization, who was according to Brown’s allies ‘at daggers drawn’ with Burns because of various battles in the past. Another senior official, Nigel Wickes, had fallen out with Burns. Soon Gus O’Donnell joined them at the Treasury. O’Donnell had been John Major’s press secretary, but such was his unthreatening demeanour and calm authority that he moved effortlessly to serving the Labour government. His love of sport helped too. O’Donnell talked football and cricket with Major when the Prime Minister was in the depths of gloom. He calmed down Brown sometimes with a talk about football of which Brown had an encyclopedic knowledge and could recite team sheets from decades ago.

There was a pattern forming. Wherever Brown and his inner court went they formed a faction, making alliances with a few trusted figures. The factions were partly defined by a perception that enemies lurked all around. In terms of the Labour party the Blairites were their main enemy. The Brownites extended political friendship to those who shared their grievances, worries and desire to prevail. In the Treasury Burns was seen as an obstacle to progress, along with a few other senior officials who appeared to form an allegiance with the long-serving Permanent Secretary. So the Brownites became closer to those officials who shared their doubts about Burns.

At times they had an exaggerated, destructive sense of the barriers placed in front of them, the enemies that had to be addressed, and the alliances they needed against common enemies. Once more the criticism was often made of Brown and Balls, in the media and beyond, that their politics were fuelled by an insecure paranoia.

There was something in the charge, but like the other criticisms about Brown’s caution and cowardice it tended to ignore the wider context. In this case they were entering the Treasury with a series of radical plans, unsure whether they would have the support of the Prime Minister and for different reasons the Permanent Secretary. They were in a critical position, one that needed to be reinforced by ruthless politics and an acute awareness over who they could trust. Brown’s reliance on a few close allies and the lack of people-management skills that accompanied such introverted dependency became a much bigger and less excusable flaw when he was Prime Minister. As a Chancellor determined to impose an agenda on a doubtful Prime Minister, he needed a faction and would have found one forming even had he sought – as he did not – to avoid such divisiveness.

In 1997 Brown was determined to break through resistance from the Treasury and to some extent transform its role. In the run-up to the election he published in draft form a new mission statement for the Treasury. As well as low inflation and sustainable growth he made the reduction of poverty an explicit objective for the department. According to one of Brown’s allies the impact inside the Treasury was ‘massive’.

Senior officials took mission statements seriously. The inclusion of poverty as an issue meant they had to make room for new dimensions, analysing more closely the consequences of their policies on the least well off. The same applied to Brown’s focus on public services. Treasury officials did not have to only decide the sums for each department, but had to focus relentlessly also on agreed outcomes, on how the money was going to be spent, and over longer timescales, in an attempt to avoid the short-term frenzy of the annual public spending round. This was quite a leap for officials brought up on the need to balance books or adapt to an imbalance in the books. Brown wanted the Treasury to be more creative. He was pioneering a cultural revolution in the department while giving away conventional powers such as the setting of interest rates.

Brown was perceived as anti-reform when he had reformed the Treasury, a department intimidating in its determined conservatism. The debate should have been about what constituted appropriate reforms. But from 2001 Blair framed another apolitical debate: ‘Reform or anti-reform’.

On the Sunday after the election Brown gave Burns the shock of his career when he handed over a letter in which he outlined on what terms he was giving away the power to set interest rates. The letter reflected Balls’s interwoven layers of accountability, stating that ‘the monetary policy of the Bank of England will be to deliver price stability (as defined by the government’s inflation target) and without prejudice to this objective to support the government’s economic policy including its objectives for growth’. Brown retained the powers to appoint the Governor and members of the monetary policy committee, obviously an extremely important form of patronage, although limited in the sense that Brown could not be seen disturbing the natural order of things too greatly in terms of appointing close allies. Brown set the inflation target at 2.5 per cent, with explanations demanded if the figure was significantly above or below that limit.

As part of their factionalized thinking, Brown and Balls also had doubts about Eddie George, the Governor of the Bank, whom they were empowering with their new policy. These doubts were more than reciprocated when Brown told George a few days later that the Bank would lose its role of monitoring the financial health of banks. As part of a period of frenetic early activity, on 18 May Brown announced that a newly established Financial Services Authority rather than the Bank of England would become the new independent regulator for the City.

The separation of powers became the subject of intense controversy more than a decade later when the scale of risks being taken by banks was disastrously revealed. Because of the epoch-changing recession that began in 2008, the establishment of the FSA became a ticking time bomb. In his party conference speech in the autumn of 2008 the Conservative leader David Cameron argued that it was this act more than any other that had led to the catastrophic regulatory failures. By the spring of 2009 the focus became more intense as several banks verged on bankruptcy, admitting that they had taken too many risks. What was the regulator doing? Why did Brown remove the powers from the Bank of England?

The questions whirled noisily around, the volume rising as some of those who had furiously disapproved of the move at the time spoke up claiming vindication more than a decade later. For Brown the questions became a form of torture in the winter of 2009.

But like the related policy to make the Bank independent, the new separation of powers was implemented more subtly than the chorus of retrospective indignation allowed in 2009. Because the policy had been thought through in opposition and had not been thrown together to chase a media headline, the complex issues of accountability, and which body answered to whom, had to some extent been addressed. Brown and Balls appointed two deputy governors of the Bank, one in charge of monetary policy, the other a link between the Bank and the new regulator, the Financial Sevices Authority. There was always a formalized link between the two bodies. It was too easy for the Bank to complain later that it had been sidelined.

In addition the Bank of England had been a poor regulator, presiding over several high-profile collapses in the 1980s and 1990s, including Johnson Matthey, BCCI and Barings. The new structure was not in itself responsible for the colossal errors in regulation that were to continue for the next decade.

As in his abrupt dealings with Burns, Brown had shown courage in his approach to Eddie George. In removing the Bank’s regulatory powers Brown could easily have provoked a sensationally high-profile resignation. Indeed, George fleetingly contemplated a dramatic departure and almost admitted as much in public.

Brown was often underestimated and overestimated simultaneously. The verve with which he seized the moment in 1997 was seriously underplayed by his internal critics at the time and subsequently. But the degree to which he was being heroically radical was overstated in the days that followed his announcement of the Bank’s independence and since.