Читать книгу Whatever it Takes: The Real Story of Gordon Brown and New Labour - Steve Richards, Steve Richards - Страница 9

Politicians and journalists enjoy speculating about possible future leaders. The speculation can be fun, mischievous, or highly significant, sometimes a combination of all three. Who will lead next? In the early to mid-1990s the question was asked persistently in relation to the Conservative party and its leader, John Major. Potential candidates in the cabinet struck poses, conscious that they might be called upon to shaft their precarious leader or to take part in a contest if a vacancy arose. Attention was focused in particular on the ambitions of Ken Clarke, Michael Heseltine and Michael Portillo.

Yet it was the Labour party that made a change suddenly. The suddenness was the key, determining the course of events for another decade at least.

No one was ready for John Smith to die when he did. Between July 1992 and the early summer of 1994 there was a universally held assumption that Smith would lead his party into the next election. The assumption is the most important factor in understanding the high politics of Labour in these seemingly subdued two years and the reaction of almost violent intensity from Brown when he realized he was not going to be the successor. During these years the Conservatives were exhausted by government and yet energized by factional rows over almost everything. Labour was complacently calm, sleepwalking, as one anxious MP put it.

Smith was a new leader, popular within parts of his party and to some extent with the broader electorate. He combined the reassuring presence of a country solicitor with an egalitarian resilience that seemed willing to take on disapproving voters in England. He was a lively performer in the Commons, witty and sure-footed. Most important of all, he possessed a serene self-confidence.

Smith’s press secretary, David Hill, who went on to work for Tony Blair, told me he had seen such unflappability in only one other senior politician, President Mitterrand, a Socialist who had won elections in France against what seemed to be the prevailing mood of the times. Hill was not spinning on behalf of his leader. He meant it and he was right. Blair, Brown and their impatient allies recognized the complacency that such self-confidence could induce. They were less ready to acknowledge that Smith possessed a sense of perspective and proportion when seemingly overwhelming crises erupted.

The key to Smith’s calm was that, unlike so many of his confused and bewildered colleagues, he had been a minister. Smith was in the cabinet for the final phase of Jim Callaghan’s government up to 1979. Power did not seem so elusive and mysterious for a Labour politician who had experienced it. For everyone else around him, power seemed as awesomely distant as the moon.

Before Smith secured the leadership his name topped any poll of potential leaders by an intimidating margin. Not surprisingly, after he won the 1992 leadership contest by a landslide, there was no feverish, highly charged speculation between politicians and political journalists over who should lead Labour in the immediate future. Such musings would have been fantastical. Not even the most attention-seeking columnist sought to make waves by asserting that Labour would have a new leader by the mid-1990s. He or she would have attracted derision rather than attention.

There were, as there always are, predictions in newspapers about future leaders. Those forecasts focused on Gordon Brown and, with an increasing intensity, Tony Blair. With accidental and mischievous timing, a flattering profile of Blair appeared in the Sunday Times on the day after Smith had been elected. Amidst the glowing prose and rock star-like photographs spanning several pages, the writer, Barbara Amiel, suggested that Labour should have opted for Blair as its leader rather than Smith.

Such words can have an intoxicating impact on the subject of the profile, on his or her admirers, and on the media that feeds on speculation about potential leaders, but the timing on the weekend Labour had elected a new leader meant that her flattery did not fuel questions about a sudden change. It would have made no sense: ‘Smith wins by a landslide! It’s time for Blair!’ The Sunday Times had thrown the equivalent of a tiny pebble into a calm sea.

Blair had hit upon a third way in nurturing his profile: articles about his leadership qualities at a time when there was no serious speculation about the top job. He became a potential leader when there was apparently no chance of becoming an actual leader in the near future. This was a dream contrivance, as a profile can build quietly and without too much destructive intensity.

No one accused Blair of making a destabilizing bid for the leadership. Instead there was a polite hum of approval around him and low-level doubts about Brown, who continued to alienate colleagues with his single-minded possessiveness over economic policy and his introspective rudeness. In their different ways both of them could cope with this polite approval, these negative whispers. They could get on with their lives and more or less sustain their own political friendship.

The hyperactive shadow chancellor read with irritable wariness the glowing profiles of Blair, but he was playing a much longer game, assuming that when there was next a leadership contest he would be established as the senior figure who had transformed Labour’s economic policy. He had topped shadow cabinet polls. He had been an acting shadow chancellor and now held the senior post permanently. He assumed he was in a different league to his friend, partly because he was. Even during this period Brown assumed that Blair would be a supremely important colleague when he himself became leader.

How closely Brown and Blair worked together between 1992 and the early summer of 1994 is illustrated by their quick responses in the immediate aftermath of Labour’s fourth defeat. Their instincts were to meet up without delay and decide how they should respond to the latest electoral calamity. They gathered several times over the postelection weekend at the home of the Newcastle MP Nick Brown, later to be identified as one of Brown’s closest confidants, the personification of a ‘Brownite’, scheming loyally for his man against Blair. In this more delicately harmonious phase he was now a junior partner in the joint Blair/Brown post-election dance. Peter Mandelson joined them too, wondering what should happen next.

What Blair thought should happen next is part of the early New Labour mythology. During their exhausted and yet curiously energized exchanges over those dark days in April 1992, Blair urged Brown to stand for the leadership. For a brief period Blair was intensely persistent. An adviser to Brown who witnessed one exchange when the two of them had returned to Westminster the following week says: ‘They almost came to blows on it. Tony was adamant about it. He really wanted Gordon to stand.’

Here was an early example of Blair forming a simplistic view about a situation and then acquiring a conveniently passionate conviction. On a far grander scale he displayed precisely the same characteristics in relation to Iraq more than ten years later. By 1992 Blair’s political character was taking shape.

Brown thought briefly about standing for the leadership, agonized a little given the persuasive force of his friend, his own intense ambition and his tendency to agonize over everything, and then sensibly decided not to do so. Several people who knew both of them well at the time suggest that it was when Brown made what appeared superficially to be a cowardly decision that Blair wondered for the first time whether his older friend was suited for the top job. Did he really have the drive and courage to seize the day? Brown’s apparent dithering in 1992 was cited privately by several of Blair’s aides in the summer of 1994 when their man did go for the leadership as a contrast to Brown’s ‘failure’ to do so two years earlier.

The dynamics of this fleeting moment of imprecise ambition are important. The exchanges and the calculations are emblematic of much that was to follow – the awkward dilemmas, the gestures of mutually well-meaning and disingenuous support, the careful positioning and the rest. They were all playing their part as early as 1992, and already Blair rather than Brown was proving to be an inadvertently masterful choreographer.

Blair wanted a so-called ‘modernizer’ to lead the party, or at least become deputy leader, at such a precarious moment and assumed with a slightly self-interested and yet genuine sincerity that Brown should be the man. Often for Blair convenience and conviction marched together as a monolithic force. At this point in 1992 he had an almost exaggeratedly high regard for Brown, reflecting his unusually generous attitude to big political figures anywhere. He tended to view anyone from the past or present who had been successful in winning elections with excessive awe, whether from the left or the right. Here was another apolitical New Labour characteristic from the Blairite perspective, an admiration for winners. When he first became Prime Minister he lavished indiscriminate homage on virtually any foreign leader on the basis that he or she had won an election. Every now and again in this early phase Blair told friends that he considered Brown to be a strategic genius. He would carry on making this flattering observation for quite a few years to come, although emphatically not by the end. In the darkness of 1992 part of Blair thought unequivocally that Brown should stand for the leadership and that if he did so he would win, at which point Labour could modernize with the two of them at the top.

But Blair was capable of being disingenuous while he was being sincere, a baffling, contradictory combination that gave him his distinct genius. Without quite realizing it, but almost doing so, he was urging his friend to incur a humiliation. Brown would have lost a leadership contest in 1992. When Kinnock stood down Smith was the clear favourite to win. As Brown told Blair, the only way he could enter the race would be with the objective of destroying Smith, exposing him ruthlessly as a vote loser, out of touch with voters. This would have been destructive, risky and an act of betrayal to someone who was still, in spite of the growing mutual mistrust, a close friend. Probably Smith would still have won, but as a damaged leader and with Brown looking fruitlessly reckless.

Brown was not being pathetically cautious, but simply wise in recognizing that this was not the moment to stand against a soaring favourite who happened to be a friend and who would make him a powerful shadow chancellor. Brown calculated that as shadow chancellor he would have a fair amount of influence over economic policy, although part of Blair’s strident advocacy was based on a concern that Smith would stick with the policies associated with the shadow budget. He repeated to Brown several times: ‘If you want freedom to change the economic policies you need to be leader, and not the shadow chancellor below a leader who was responsible for those economic policies.’ Blair had managed almost to define the situation as one in which Brown had acted weakly in accepting the role of shadow chancellor.

The angry exchanges over the leadership also proved that Blair regarded Brown still as the senior partner after the 1992 election. There was no talk of Blair standing as the candidate. Brown suggested that Blair might stand for the deputy, but their joint assumption was that only one would go for the top job: Brown.

The dynamics of their relationship pointed in that direction. When senior journalists went to see Blair up until the early summer of 1994 and their conversation veered on to complex matters of policy, Blair quite often told them: ‘Speak to Gordon about that one.’ Blair had witnessed at closer quarters than anyone else how Brown had risen suddenly to the challenge of becoming a stand-in shadow chancellor when Smith had a heart attack in 1988. He had taken part in a legion of conversations in which Brown cut through the seemingly impenetrable complexities of positioning and policy making. Quite often, like the journalists, Blair had been to see Gordon about that too. On this basis, a shared political past, their common assumption in 1992 was that Brown would be leader.

When the two of them worked in a cramped office at Westminster after the 1983 election Brown talked often to Blair about the media, how to frame a speech with a single message in mind, targeting newspapers, different bulletins. Briefly Brown had been a BBC producer in Scotland. He did not understand the rhythms of news anywhere near as well as he liked to think, but he knew more than his new colleague. Blair shared his fascination with the relationship between politics and journalism and had already written several articles for newspapers and the New Statesman magazine, but he began his parliamentary career as more of a novice. Soon Blair became the dazzling communicator, but Brown arrived at Westminster understanding more clearly that dealing with the media was a form of political art.

Together they watched bulletins, commenting on the ineptitude of Labour’s presentation. Nearly always at this stage Brown led the conversation. ‘The message is wrong. that will alienate most voters … we will be savaged for this tomorrow in the papers.’ Blair noted admiringly that Brown was nearly always proved right in his analysis of how the media would report Labour’s initiatives. Brown was also writing speeches, putting out press releases at first mainly aimed at the Scottish media long before he was on the front bench. He was also completing his biography of Maxton. He arrived with contacts across the Labour party. Throughout the 1980s Brown was not the senior and weightier figure by a tiny margin, but by a significant distance.

This was also Peter Mandelson’s view at the time. No wonder both Brown and Blair were excited by the arrival of Mandelson as Labour’s Director of Communications in the mid-1980s. Soon after his appointment Brown and Blair noticed an improvement in the way Labour’s message was projected, especially on television bulletins, but also in the largely hostile newspapers. Their conversations became a little more upbeat and positive as they watched TV reports with the intensity of a director watching an edit of a new film. ‘That’s a better backdrop … Neil [Kinnock] is much clearer … the papers will like that … it’s good it’s so high up the running order.’ They both knew who had made the difference. Brown assumed that Mandelson, as well as Blair, would be an important figure when he fought a leadership contest at some future unspecified date.

But then on the morning of 12 May 1994 John Smith died suddenly of a heart attack. He had been leader for less than two years. His death transformed the political situation in lots of different ways.

Almost certainly if Smith had continued to lead Labour he would have won the forthcoming election and would have been a more rooted, solid prime minister compared with the insecure and media-obsessed Blair and Brown. How long England and its media would have tolerated a Scot with egalitarian instincts and outdated communication skills is much harder to predict, but for a time at least there probably would have been a clearer sense under Smith that the centre left had prevailed in an election than there was when New Labour and its big tent of support seized their ambiguous moment in 1997. It is also possible that Blair, Brown and some others might have grown in government under Smith, gaining ministerial experience and acquiring more political self-confidence by the time there was another vacancy at the top. Smith would have had the sense and resilience to let his cabinet breathe a little. Instead Blair and Brown moved into power with no ministerial experience. They had not watched at close quarters while a prime minister and chancellor handled the economy or, crucially, interpreted sensitive intelligence. They had no idea what it was like to run a big spending department.

Smith was complacent about the narrow appeal in England of a Labour party dominated still by activists from local government and the trade unions and he underestimated comically the ways in which political parties needed to adapt to the modern media. Suddenly the path was clear for half-formed politicians neurotically determined to purge their party of its past without being entirely sure about what should follow their cathartic moves.

Within minutes of Smith’s death it was clear that from Brown’s perspective the sudden vacancy for the leadership could not have arisen at a worse time. Virtually all Brown’s public statements on economic policy had been aimed at the wider electorate and not at the Labour party members who would have a vote in the contest. In contrast Blair’s reputation was soaring at a point when there were questions whirling around the media and in sections of his party about how Labour could appeal to resistant voters in England.

In his biography of Brown, Robert Peston argues that the shadow chancellor could have won a contest against Blair if he had decided to stand in 1994. Paul Routledge makes the same case in his earlier biography, the first written about Brown. Routledge put the argument with such intensity that his book became the cause of a decisive split between Blair and Brown when they were in government.

Although misplaced, this was the determined view of Brown’s closest allies, who urged him to step forward and exploit his stronger base in the party. They were deceiving themselves out of loyalty to Brown and a sudden wariness about what Blair would do if he became leader. In the real world an unstoppable momentum was propelling Blair towards the leadership on the day of Smith’s death. It did not take the scheming of Peter Mandelson or of anyone else. The broadcasting outlets and newspapers exploded with voices from the Labour party and beyond arguing that Blair should be the next leader. Opinion polls of Labour voters and the wider electorate conveyed the same message. In effect Blair was unofficial leader by the evening of Smith’s death.

The suddenness of the changed situation gave Brown and his entourage no time to acclimatize. This is a partial justification for the delusional, self-absorbed and clumsily brutal response to the soaring rise of Blair. Obviously Brown was shocked and upset that a close friend had died. Equally obviously he wondered about what would happen next politically. There was a part of him that assumed Mandelson and Blair would be in touch at some point during the morning to discuss his candidacy for the leadership – another mistaken assumption. There were discussions, but none conducted on the certain basis he would be the candidate supported by the other two.

Brown’s sense of betrayal was immediate, intense and irrational. Most ambitious politicians are able to accept defeat, or what in this case was an implied defeat, in a leadership contest and get on with their careers fairly calmly. Even the hungriest recover quickly. Michael Heseltine had wanted to be prime minister since his student days at Oxford. After failing to win in 1990 he settled down to the less glamorous mission of finding an alternative to the poll tax as John Major’s Environment Secretary. The nearest this big, complicated, exuberant and shy figure achieved to his ambition was standing in for John Major at Prime Minister’s Question Time.

Brown could not settle down, and did not do so for another thirteen years. When he realized that Blair would wear the crown, his response was extraordinary. In a way that combined an insecure sense of entitlement, frustrated ambition, wilful competitiveness and, importantly, an underestimated principled conviction, Brown went about securing ownership over the future direction of the party and its policies as compensation. He assumed the role of leader in waiting the moment the new leader was elected. In the depths of his despair during those defining early summer weeks of 1994, Brown hit upon his own third way. He would not stand for the leadership but he would seek to lead. He would follow his third way with a constant resilience until he finally became leader in 2007.

Brown’s frustrated personal ambition and his factionalized feuding in the years that followed have already filled shelves of books. One of his concerns has received less attention, but it partly explains why he responded in the way he did. It relates to Brown’s assessment of Blair and of what he might do if he was left unchecked as leader. Publicly Brown has rarely hinted at his views of Blair. Away from his inner court he was discreet in private as well, but as early as 1994 he had genuine worries about what Blair would do to the Labour party and the country at a rare moment of heightened political opportunity. Brown’s critics will argue that it was very convenient for him to discover principled concerns to justify what they regard as his acts of treacherous betrayal, but in being so doggedly, selfishly determined, Brown unquestionably saved the new leader from himself at certain points and also secured the freedom to be, sometimes, a reforming chancellor. Of course at the same time Brown also pioneered the famously destructive factionalism of which he was a victim as much as Blair, but there was some important purpose behind the manoeuvring which was not fully explored at the time or since.

With some evidence to justify his views, Brown had come to regard Blair as a superficial policy maker, more interested in process than in the building up of detailed policies with the aim of reaching specified objectives. He feared that Blair regarded policy decisions as little more than symbols to help him produce changes in the political choreography, and that it was the shape and pattern of politics that interested him. In Brown’s view Blair would be excited by a policy that showed Labour had ‘changed’. He would be less interested in the implementation of policies in the hope of achieving measures that brought about social justice, or higher levels of investment in public services. He had seen no evidence that Blair was gripped by the issues that interested him: economic policies, reforms that helped to address poverty and created the structures that gave even the poorest the chance to fulfil their potential, Brown’s subterranean narrative and the reason why he was in politics.

In his obdurate disdain, Brown underestimated the potential importance of Blair’s fascination with choreography, the possibility of progressives uniting in some form of anti-Tory force to shape a ‘century for radicals’ as Blair called it, and also in an entirely different context the scope for change in Northern Ireland. But he had a sound cause for concern. The divide between them was not so much at this stage one of left and right, but between the superficial, inexperienced policy maker and one who had begun to reshape Labour’s economic policies with specific social objectives in mind. Blair’s close allies argued then and continued to argue that it was Brown who was the short-term headline grabber, the figure who acted solely for his own interests and ambition. He was more than capable of acting in this way and became even more capable in his later years, but at this stage of their respective careers Brown was delving deep into economic policy making. Blair was floating nearer the surface, showing a forensic concern about the need for Labour to change and scrapping policies that had been so electorally harmful. But Blair had no view on economic policy. He knew what he was opposed to – the old ‘tax and spend’ policies advanced by Labour – but was less clear what he was in favour of in ways that marked a difference with the Conservatives. Indeed there never was a ‘Blairite’ economic policy. The ubiquitous adjective was never applied even by ardent admirers to the key policy area, the one that drives everything else.

Brown’s main aim in the build-up to their famous meeting at the Granita restaurant in Islington in May 1994 was to make sure he had control over the policies he cared about and input into decisions that related to the highly charged choreography, including front-bench reshuffles, relations with other parties and electoral reform. Contrary to mythology he did not go to the Islington restaurant seeking a deal over when Blair would hand over the leadership to him. Apart from anything else he was by then a traumatized and battered politician. He knew high politics could never be planned so neatly. Indeed he was living through a traumatic period that demonstrated how easily assumptions and ambitions could be blown apart by an unexpected event. By the time of Granita he had already received a commitment from Blair that as leader he would back him as the successor.

As far as Brown was concerned the meeting was about control. In particular he was worried about what Blair might say or do as leader on taxation and welfare reform. He lived in genuine and not opportunistic fear that Blair would make a speech, for example, that ruled out increasing the overall burden of taxation without thinking through the longer-term consequences and in a way that would have wrecked Brown’s medium-term plans to raise taxation stealthily in order to pay for improvements in public services. He arrived at Granita seeking political space for himself and a degree of ideological incarceration for his young friend who was about to become a mighty leader.

During their relatively brief dinner at the Islington restaurant Brown was broodingly determined. Blair sought to be solicitously accommodating. Ed Balls joined Brown for the first course, almost as if Brown could not bear to enter the restaurant alone. He needed a protective layer to deal with his new friend for the first time in a transformed situation in the way he needed protection when implementing discreetly a left-of-centre policy. Suddenly Blair was the potential leader and near-certain prime minister. Brown was negotiating for the runner-up’s consolations.

Brown found it almost unbearable, even though Blair gave him everything he asked for. There was no small talk and no laughter. Brown made his demands and insisted that they be formalized. Blair said he would be happy to do so and added casually as an extra layer of reassurance that he would want to be leader for ten years at the most. He became expansive on the subject. No one should do it for as long as ten years. He had talked about it with ‘Cherie and the kids’. He would be in the pressure cooker for less than ten years.

Later Cherie was furious when she realized that Brown had taken this as a commitment, a pledge. ‘Why did you tell him that?’ she asked Blair more than once that summer and over the next decade. Quite unnecessarily, Blair made the timing of his departure an issue even before he had been elected leader.

A briefing paper was drafted immediately after the meeting by Peter Mandelson. It stated that Blair was committed to Brown’s ‘fairness agenda – social justice, employment opportunities and skills’. In a copy obtained by the Guardian in May 2003 Brown had scrawled across one sentence ‘has guaranteed this will be pursued’, an acid intervention that suggested Brown had doubts about Blair’s commitment to his ideas, and an early sign of the ideological tension that was to erupt fully during Labour’s explosive second term in power. A transaction had taken place between the two of them, and it was over policy.

There was no formal agreement over the timing of any handover, but during the 2001 election campaign the television executive and close friend of Blair’s Barry Cox gave me his assessment of the forthcoming second term: ‘Tony is relaxed about the outcome of the election. This time he knows he is going to win with a fairly big majority. But he is really worried about Gordon. When Gordon realizes that Tony has no intention of going in less than ten years he knows Gordon will explode. He is not sure how to handle it.’

The casual reassuring aside made unnecessarily in the summer of 1994 had become a trap for Blair and a lifeline for Brown as ambition ate away at him. But the essence of the Granita deal lay deeper. Brown’s main concern was not about precisely when Blair would stand down, although he seized on Blair’s remarks about the length of time he envisaged doing the job and clung to the words with a neurotic ardour for years to come. Brown went to Granita with more immediate ambitions. The deal was about the balance of power between them.

This notorious meeting was even more important than mythology suggests. Already it has been the subject of a TV drama and formed the centrepiece of many accounts of the period. The exchanges were more epic than even the fictional drama conveyed. In the space of an hour and a half Blair made commitments that Brown chose to regard as carved in tablets of stone. In the years that followed Brown would exclaim regularly to his inner court in relation to Blair: ‘He’s broken the Granita deal!’, especially when Blair instigated a cabinet reshuffle without consulting him.

Why did Blair give away so much in 1994 at a point when he was walking on water, widely regarded as the next prime minister before he had even won the leadership contest, easily the most lauded politician in the United Kingdom?

According to his close courtiers at the time there were many thoughts whirling around Blair’s mind. He knew Brown wanted the leadership more than he did and that he had turned previous assumptions on their head. In negotiations Brown could be intimidating at the best of times. This was Brown’s worst of times. It was a testament to Blair’s growing steeliness that he was able to withstand the onslaught at all. Above all, though, Blair needed Brown. The shadow chancellor was the key architect in terms of economic policy. Take him out of the equation and Labour would be left without a strategy for the economy. In addition, and importantly at this stage, Blair admired how Brown had revised the party’s policies. He was content to give him wider powers because he assumed they were thinking along similar lines.

Looking back many years later, a Brown ally noted that both men were desperately naive in assuming that any arrangement between the two of them could be formalized: ‘Tony Blair should never have given Gordon Brown what he asked for and Gordon Brown should never have believed that he would get it.’ But the Brownite ally also pointed out the context: ‘In the spring of 1994 we didn’t know there would be three terms of a Labour government. We were in opposition. We had not won an election. Modernization hadn’t begun. We were not sure what kind of party it would become. We didn’t know whether or not we would win the next election or when it would be.’

Here were two ambitious politicians, used to losing elections, mapping a precarious path that might have led to another election defeat or to a victory fairly soon. Both were on the pessimistic side even when polls were pointing to a landslide in the build-up to 1997. They had no idea they would be taking this agreement into power with massive majorities. For Blair the deal became an irksome ball and chain. For Brown it was a source of destructive hope.

For both it was also unavoidable. Although he would still have won, Blair did not want to fight a contest against Brown any more than Brown wanted to take on Blair. Their venture was too fragile, too dependent on a projection of assertive, and to some extent illusory, self-belief rather than actual deeply held confidence. It would not have survived a battle between the tentative co-architects. They thought Labour might lose the next election if only one of them stood. They feared even more the destructive impact of a public duel between them.

The deal at Granita was necessary for both of them even though it was a way of avoiding hard choices. Neither of them had to define clearly what they stood for and where they differed as a result of Granita. New Labour was born formally in an Old Labour backstage deal, an agreement that allowed it to escape clearer public definition. If there had been a contest between them, both would have been compelled to highlight the main difference: Brown stood to the left of Blair. Both would rather have died than have engaged in such a revealing battle. They preferred to be submerged in the comfort of apolitical terms and never engage in a candid public dialogue about where they stood in relation to each other.

For a party seeking to govern, the dynamics were more extraordinary, two individuals dividing up the spoils as if no other figure or institution mattered. That was the point. On this the lofty assumptions of Blair and Brown were right. They were taking over a party and they could choose to act as they wished.

One of Brown’s defining characteristics in public and in private was that he never stopped. Monumental setbacks came and went. Triumphs were passing moments before he moved on to the next challenge. I have met few politicians with such relentless stamina. Tony Benn was another who kept going in the face of defeat, often to the fury of his colleagues. Margaret Thatcher was another, but she was more sustained by political highs. There are not many. In February 2010 Brown spoke to the interviewer Piers Morgan about dealing with ‘pain’ in his life, but said that he always ‘fell forward’, a revealing phrase. In a life punctuated by almost unbearable pain he was speaking specifically about the summer of 1994 when he lost out on the leadership to Blair.

After Brown announced that he would not stand for the leadership he did not skip a beat before planning with his small group how he would shape the next phase.

The resolutions made by Brown over this crucial period were a reflection of his complex personality and came to give it sharper definition over the next decade. To some extent they shaped the debate within the Labour party, or at least at the top of New Labour, which was where the only debates were permitted to take place.

First Brown resolved to take full control over economic and welfare policy as had been discussed at Granita. As the economy and welfare touched upon virtually all aspects of domestic policy, he was making an unprecedented resolution. No other shadow chancellor had sought or acquired such spectacular dominance.

For Brown this was the weighty compensation that occasionally lifted his summer gloom. In spite of his friendship with Smith, Brown never knew for sure how much space he enjoyed in relation to economic policy. Now he knew. The terrain was his alone. Even in this, the sunnier uplands of his thoughts, Brown harboured doubts. His press secretary, Charlie Whelan, told me in the autumn of 1994: ‘Gordon knows Tony won’t always give him this power. It’s bound to change.’ But Brown was determined to make it as difficult as possible for Blair to drop his guarantee. As far as he was concerned this was a permanent commitment.

Brown’s small team, already introverted, became much more insular after the summer of 1994, almost as a collective act of defiance, like mourners gathering to protect for ever the one who has been left behind. Together they had been through the trauma of betrayal as they irrationally saw it. As far as they were concerned their leader was Brown. Their man, a natural leader, had made the sacrifice of not standing for leadership, elbowed aside by a figure who was a relative lightweight. From now on, and with a greater intensity than before, they worked for Brown and viewed with raging suspicion the activities of those who were closer to Blair.

Until this point there had been no ‘Brownites’ or ‘Blairites’. It was Brown’s response to the leadership trauma that invited those imprecise labels. He needed a court although he was not king. Indeed he needed one because he was not king. As some of his closest allies admitted many years later, Brown’s response at least in this respect was ‘immature’. That is a mild description. Brown was childlike in his need to have ‘his’ people around him as an alternative court to Blair’s.

In particular, and famously, Mandelson became an enemy. Brown could not fully understand why Blair had let him down. He did not even try to understand Mandelson’s reasons for supporting Blair. When Brown sensed early on that Mandelson was not fully behind his candidacy he lapsed into fuming despair and wrongly spied his fingerprints on every front-page news story that favoured Blair. The two of them did not have a civil, relaxed conversation again until Brown became Prime Minister. Like many others Mandelson became a ‘Blairite’ first and foremost because Brown would have nothing to do with him. Up to the early years of the Labour government Mandelson rather nobly told journalists that Brown was the only leader to replace Blair ‘in spite of all the obvious problems with Gordon’, but as far as Brown and his entourage were concerned there was not a millimetre of space for rapprochement of any sort. Soon Mandelson ceased to make even the qualified case for Brown as successor.

The divide was to have profound practical implications, the first example of New Labour’s capacity to become utterly dysfunctional. Blair’s dependence on Mandelson and Brown’s unyielding hostility meant that from the start there were two separate empires. The arrangements were always bizarre, but especially so during the 1997 election campaign. One senior figure who worked in the party’s Millbank headquarters says: ‘On one level it is a miracle we won that election. Peter and Gordon were supposed to be running the campaign but they did not talk to each other. They worked on either side of the main newsroom. Gordon was openly contemptuous of anyone who worked with Peter. It was unbelievable.’

The divide was even greater during the 2001 campaign, although Mandelson had a much lower profile. By then anyone in the Blairite court was sidelined by Brown. New Labour was widely praised for its professionalism, especially when it came to winning elections. But the professionalism was accompanied by the amateurish trappings of a feud.

The choreography of the divide in various buildings was highly significant and destructive, not least when Brown and his entourage took over Number Ten in the summer of 2007, marginalizing those who had worked for Blair when they might have learnt invaluable lessons about how to run the Downing Street machinery. They chose not to learn.

The formation of the Brownite court was not solely the equivalent of an emotional, cathartic scream. It had one important function. The courtiers and their king were seeking ways of prevailing over the more rootless Blair, knowing that no other individual or institution in the newly servile party was big enough to do so. Their court became the Resistance, the only form of accountability in a party that had lost the will or nerve to scrutinize the leadership. This became increasingly important in government.

Another important consequence that arose from the summer of 1994 was to have a profound impact on Brown’s political reputation. The shadow chancellor was determined not to play the political martyr any more than was absolutely necessary in the future. In ways that his internal enemies continued to underestimate, he would still take tough decisions in relation to the economy, ones that sections of his party would not like. But he would also make sure that he was identified with the more immediately popular policies as well. Often in the years that followed Brown alienated colleagues through claiming association with popular policies and disappearing when there was a crisis of any sort. Angry ministers suggested that Brown was a coward who could not cope with trouble. Columnists closer to the Blairite court compared him to Macavity the mystery cat, nowhere to be seen when the going got tough.

Brown viewed the situation from a different perspective. He had taken all the knocks transforming Labour’s economic reputation and had lost out on the leadership. He would continue to take them in the future, but from the summer of 1994 onwards he wanted to be more directly associated with palatable policies as well, and he was not going to go out of his way to defend Blair at all times, especially when he disagreed with the policies being pursued. Already he felt a martyr. There were limits to his martyrdom, not least because he wanted to be in a better place the next time a vacancy for the leadership arose. He did not want to be caught out again. In effect his leadership campaign began on the hot summer’s day he stood aside for Blair in 1994.

Brown’s failure to secure the leadership, the crushing of misguided assumptions, had one final consequence. The loss drove Brown into acts of treacherous collusion. With a ruthless precision and transparent lack of subtlety he chose to be friendly with those frontbenchers who had their doubts about Blair. Already he was watching carefully, sniffing out potential allies on the front bench and in the media for the struggles ahead and when the time arrived for the next leadership contest. Before long there would be ‘Brownite’ journalists as well as ‘Brownite’ MPs, a distinction that led to even more ‘Blairite’ journalists in response.

During the run-up to the 1997 election Brown became friendly with Clare Short, someone who was popular in the party at the time, seen as principled but expedient enough to dance to New Labour’s tunes. Brown recognized that as a leading figure on the centre left, Short would be a useful ally in a future leadership contest and possibly in some of the internal battles he knew he would be fighting over policy.

In July 1996 Short gave a dramatic interview to me that marked the end of the New Labour truce, one in which every member of the shadow cabinet had paid public homage to Blair. Feeling sore after a reshuffle in which she was demoted, Short condemned the ‘people in the dark’ behind Blair, arguing that the likes of Mandelson and Alastair Campbell were bringing out the worst in Blair, giving the impression that Labour had changed, when it had not. She described the idea that the party had changed as ‘a lie’. When the interview was published it led every news bulletin and was the main front-page news story in every newspaper. Mandelson alerted Blair and Campbell, who were both on holiday. In Blair’s absence Mandelson had been put in charge of the party machine. He warned senior party workers: ‘This interview could lose us the election!’ Alert to every danger he added: ‘She’s broken the spell.’ With typical mischief he then went on to ask me what time of day she had given the interview. I told him it was mid-afternoon the week before. ‘Exactly …’ he replied with a knowing smile, implying that Short was drunk. She was not. She knew what she was doing, attacking Blair’s leadership without attacking Blair directly.

Only one shadow cabinet member knew about the interview in advance. Over a glass of wine one evening at Westminster, Short told Brown what she had said and told him that there would be trouble. There was a pause after which Brown replied cheerfully: ‘Well I will be up in Scotland when it is published and will be out of it. Leave it to Mandelson to sort out!’

Nonetheless the level of disloyalty at this point is easily overplayed. Brown sought always to be co-leader and to be in a strong position as the leader in waiting, and yet he shared Blair’s hunger to win the next election. Their project to modernize Labour was about to be implemented. They had talked for years, now they had the power to act unimpeded. Brown was never, even at his angriest, a wholly destructive force. Part of him was always calculating how Labour could win, what needed to be said and done to challenge the Conservatives who he never forgot were the main opposition. In one of the many twists in the complex range of intense relationships at the top of New Labour, Brown helped to write Blair’s victory speech in 1994. Here is Philip Gould, someone who was to become a ‘Blairite’, reflecting on Brown’s commitment to the wider cause:

Anyone who doubts GB’s stoicism should have seen him late on the evening of 20 July 1994 the day before Blair was officially declared leader. Tony’s acceptance speech was not finished and Gordon was working on it in his office in Millbank. If you want to know what real loyalty is it is this: Gordon Brown late in the evening, cursing, muttering, arms flailing as he punched words into the computer, writing the speech that just a few weeks earlier he believed he would be making himself.

It seemed entirely natural to Brown to keep on working for the bigger victory. It was often written of him that he was neurotically, furiously obsessed about Blair being leader. Often it was the opposite extreme. He almost forgot that Blair was in charge. Shortly after the 1997 election Brown produced a document on economic policy. Ed Balls told him that Blair wanted to write the introduction. Brown looked genuinely surprised as well as annoyed. ‘Why does he want to do that?’ he asked Balls. The adviser had to remind the Chancellor that Blair was the Prime Minister.

In their private exchanges Brown continued to behave as if he rather than Blair was the senior figure, not as a conscious act of dominance but because that was what came naturally to him. In the spring of 1996 I was in Brown’s office one morning when his phone rang. Brown picked up the receiver and rattled off a series of instructions about how to handle Prime Minister’s Question Time scheduled for that afternoon. ‘If Major says that ask him why he had not acted earlier. If he did act earlier ask him why it made no difference. No, don’t go in that direction. We will get him on incompetence.’ After a few abrupt exchanges he put the phone down. I could hear Blair’s voice on the other end seeking advice, but after the call Brown did not tell me who it was. He never showed off to journalists about the influence he wielded (in contrast to Mandelson, who in company would announce when Blair was on the line before he picked up the receiver) and was nearly always discreet about what he thought of Blair. But he was quite capable of showing his fuming impatient disdain directly to the leader, almost choosing to forget that Blair had leapfrogged over him.

The period between 1994 and 1997, the nervous march towards power, is pivotal in understanding the strengths and weaknesses of New Labour and the differences at this stage between Blair and Brown.

From the beginning the two of them and their close allies were all that mattered. The rest of the shadow cabinet had no more than walk-on parts, and some of them were lucky even to get that rather unflattering role. The most graphic demonstration of their subservience arose at the launch of Labour’s ‘Road to the Manifesto’ document in 1996. When Blair, Brown and Margaret Beckett (the token woman who did not speak a word during the press conference) walked on to the stage the rest of the shadow cabinet stood to applaud. They were the audience, in some ways more passive observers than some of the highly influential political journalists who were also at the event.

Blair was a spectacularly successful leader of the opposition, engaging, focused, self-disciplined. His genius was to make defensively pragmatic leadership seem like a great radical crusade, although the contrast was bound to fuel disillusionment later when ecstatic voters began to take note of the fearful pragmatism.

In one particular area Blair’s task was easier than Brown’s. Blair inherited a large number of policies from Smith’s leadership. They ranged from a commitment to hold a referendum on electoral reform for the Commons to the introduction of a minimum wage. Blair’s main role was to revise some policies, drop others and make sense of them all to a largely right-wing media grown disillusioned with John Major’s government. He also sought to prove that his party had changed with his successful campaign to scrap Clause Four of Labour’s constitution and in his close dealings with the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Paddy Ashdown. This was an immense task, but one based largely on inherited policies.

Blair could compartmentalize his time ruthlessly, a great strength. In the build-up to the 1997 election, over one short recess he examined every policy in detail to analyse whether it could withstand the scrutiny of an election campaign and made changes if he concluded it could not. The controversial proposal to offer a referendum on the introduction of a Scottish parliament arose from this important exercise. Blair returned to Westminster and told his aides: ‘I just can’t see how we can argue that our election victory can be regarded as a mandate for such a precise and historic change … and how can we offer a referendum on the Euro on the grounds that it is a constitutional matter when we’re not offering one on a new parliament?’ In opposition Blair was alert to any inconsistencies in policy. In power coherence and consistency became more challenging. When David Cameron became leader of the Conservative party in 2005 he and his allies, in their emulation of New Labour, assumed that the earlier project flourished largely through spin and presentation. They were wrong. It was partly a product of forensic policy examination.

But Brown went one stage further in policy making, his distinct achievement. He did not only have the task of revising existing policies, but of raising a whole new sructure on that ground.

After Blair became leader, Brown’s liberating torment was evident at virtually every political event, free to develop economic policy while his former junior partner basked in leadership. In September 1994 Blair and Brown spoke at a gathering of business leaders held at the National Film Theatre on the South Bank, an appropriately artful backdrop for a significant act of political repositioning.

The two of them arrived together in the leader’s official car. When the car halted close to the NFT Blair strode out in front with an authoritative verve to greet the organizers, leaving Brown and Whelan to walk sheepishly several yards behind. Brown looked almost baffled by Blair’s assertion of leadership. I asked Whelan how Brown felt on occasions like this when Blair was so demonstratively the man at the helm. Whelan was capable of candour. ‘Gordon bloody hates it. Of course he does.’

But Blair was keeping to his guarantee. Brown had the space to do what he and his small team wanted. At the NFT Brown proclaimed the first of his famous dividing lines. There would be many more such divides to come, but this was the one that started to address ‘tax and spend’, the issue on which Labour lost elections. Brown declared that ‘Old Labour was a party of high taxation and high spending. New Labour will be the party of fair taxation and productive spending.’ In the speech he argued that the Conservatives had wasted public money on failed policies that had led to a lot of ‘unproductive spending’, not least on social security payments that arose unavoidably when the economy was under-performing.

In his first big statement on economic policy since the death of Smith, Brown had framed the public debate with political cunning. In effect his pitch was once more focused on the managerial divide between competence and incompetence. He argued that the Tories had been incompetent and therefore had no choice but to waste money on unproductive spending. Labour would be competent and therefore have more money to use for vaguely defined productive spending. The divide was aimed at exposing the Tories and purging any lingering sense that Blair and Brown would tax and spend recklessly. It was also perfectly timed. The economy was starting to grow. The recession had passed. Whichever party won the next election, there would be money for ‘productive spending’ and less need to spend so much on welfare payments. It was also at this conference that Brown hailed the ‘endogenous growth theory’ in which policies that promoted openness, competition, change and innovation would promote growth. Balls had inserted the theory without wondering whether his audience or the wider public would have a clue what was meant. Blair would not have been so complacent. In fact it meant a lot as far as Brown was concerned, as he sought ways to achieve growth so that he would not need to raise taxes in ways that he feared would lose Labour elections.

Such was the uncritical euphoria around the leadership of Blair at the time that virtually no one in the media asked too many questions about what precisely the distinction would be between fair and high taxation. Some might have argued that ‘high’ taxation on the wealthy was a fair means to raise some much-needed cash, but few bothered making that case in the buzz of the changing political situation. Within the Labour party the only divide that seemed to matter was a conveniently chronological one between the past and the present, the old and the new.

A few weeks later at Labour’s conference Brown developed the other side of his argument, one that would sustain him for fourteen years and had been his main theme when he wrote Maxton’s biography:

The big idea is people’s potential. The big idea is that people have big ideas, huge talents, overlooked abilities, and it is by liberating people’s potential that we build the dynamic market economy we need.

A dynamic market economy would provide the cash that would give less wealthy people the chance to fulfil their potential. As they fulfilled potential they would contribute to a booming economy.

This was the Brownite/New Labour accommodation. It would dance with the City in order to achieve left-of-centre goals. The dance came to a shattering end eventually, but in the mid-1990s, with public services in a dire state and much higher taxes close to being a political taboo, there was no other pre-election route available. The context was Labour’s defeat in 1992. Those who voted in the 1992 election are as much to blame as Brown. The voters and those who mediate politics for them are big players in the New Labour story. We are the ones who define how much space political leaders have. It is the only power we possess.

In January 1997 Brown stunned his interviewer, James Naughtie on the Today programme, by declaring that under Labour there would be no changes to the top or basic rate of income tax for an entire parliament and that a newly elected Labour government would stick to the Conservatives’ spending plans for two years. It was an extraordinary moment, so unexpected that the programme’s editor kept to schedule and ended the interview on time instead of giving the obviously startled Naughtie time to explore the implications.

Still there was plenty of time for exploration. Later that day Brown delivered a speech to accompany the announcement:

We want to send the clearest possible signal that we want to encourage employment and work, not penalize it … because we want to encourage work, and after 22 tax rises since 1992 which have hit hard-working families, I want to make clear that a Labour government will not increase the basic rate of income tax. It is because we understand the importance of work that there will be no return to penal marginal rates at the top.

In the build-up to the announcement Brown’s instinct had been to propose a new top rate of tax for very high earners, a policy he finally implemented in very different circumstances when he was Prime Minister. Whelan told journalists this would happen when Labour was first elected: ‘We have got to do something to show we are Labour.’

Neurotically conscious of Labour’s extreme vulnerability in relation to tax, Blair was determined to block Brown. In the autumn of 1996 when they were battling over the issue, Blair’s press officer, Tim Allan, offered an article to the New Statesman under the name of the Labour MP Kim Howells, arguing that a top rate would not raise any additional revenue and would alienate some middle-England voters. Here was an early example of Blair being sometimes willing to challenge Brown over economic policy. He prevailed on this one and later Brown was to concede that Blair had been right. It was a concession rarely made in the years to come.

The publicly declared policy on ‘tax and spend’ was widely hailed at the time as a masterstroke. The newspapers were reassured. The Conservatives were thrown into even more disarray. Labour’s lead in the polls soared. And yet the seemingly bold announcement encapsulated the timid narrowness of Blair/Brown’s short-term ambitions. Like so much else that was projected as bold, it was cautious. By the start of 1997 the Conservative government was falling apart, giving Labour more scope than Blair or Brown had dared to realize.

By accepting spending limits that the Conservative Chancellor, Ken Clarke, had described as ‘eye-wateringly tight’, Brown and Blair had little scope to challenge the Tory government on the funding of public services. They were not planning to invest very much either, so they could make no case about the lack of investment, the great hidden issue of British politics in the 1990s. Instead they conveyed the false impression that with the addition of a few pennies here and there, public services would be transformed. From a practical perspective it meant that desperately needed investment in public services was postponed to a point of even greater crisis at the turn of the century. Such was the euphoria around Blair that voters were convinced: the NHS would be saved and schools rebuilt without having to spend any more money.

When Brown became Chancellor he seemed awesomely powerful, the mighty figure in the Treasurer who was co-leader of the government. He was powerful in relation to the Prime Minister, but in terms of policy he had deliberately made himself the least powerful chancellor in modern history. He had no control over interest rates, no power to put up income tax, and for two years no authority to increase overall public spending. When he became shadow chancellor he chose to become constrained in what he said. As Chancellor he tied himself in chains so that voters, the financial markets and the media knew he could not be recklessly free.

But always with Brown, at least in this phase of his career, the subterranean narrative was the driving force. There was a degree of thought-through purpose behind the extreme prudence. In his revealing book, one of the most important in the bulging New Labour bibliography, the former Treasury Minister Geoffrey Robinson described what motivated Ed Balls in his policy making. Robinson could have as easily been writing about Brown:

Important though his contributions were in economic terms, his deep concern on poverty, redistribution and fairness in society will be seen as more important in due course. Those issues are what motivate him. Getting the economics right is just the means to do something effective about them.

Robinson in the early years was a key policy maker in Brown’s team. He was a great admirer of Brown’s but enthused even more about Balls, recognizing in the youthful adviser an unusual talent for linking strategy to complex detail in ways that could re-establish Labour’s credibility with business leaders while staying rooted firmly in the left of centre. Robinson was pointing towards the big difference between Brown and Blair.

For the remaining years in opposition Brown spent a lot of time on policy detail, an arduous and unglamorous task, but the most important part of the politician’s repertoire. Blair worked on existing ones or got others to do so – devolution was one that demanded considerable work. David Miliband described the process to me as bomb proofing, ensuring that every single policy presented in the forthcoming campaign was credible and part of a coherent narrative. In the build-up to the 2010 election David Cameron and George Osborne showed less interest in policy detail. When Cameron was asked how he planned to implement his tax cuts for married couples he insisted that the details would come later. Blair and Brown were not allowed such lenience.

Brown asked Geoffrey Robinson to work on refining the Private Finance Initiative. Once Brown and Blair had cordoned off their tax-raising options they had to look elsewhere for ways of investing in Britain’s decaying hospitals. The Private Finance Initiative became one option, hugely controversial and expensive but arguably unavoidable. Hospitals were built or improved in the early years of the Labour government through the PFI. They would not have been built otherwise in the timid ‘tax and spend’ climate of the times. Later many columnists on the left and right condemned the use of PFI, but again few among them would have supported a Labour manifesto in 1997 advocating tax rises to pay for new hospitals. Once again, culpability for the extravagantly wasteful PFI is widespread. We wanted new hospitals. We did not want to pay for them.

Later Robinson and Balls worked closely on the details of the one-off windfall tax on the profits of the privatized utilities, Brown’s popular tax. Over time New Labour’s critics saw only spin in virtually everything that Blair and Brown announced. It was always more complicated than that, and the hard grind that prepared for the one-off tax is a good example of the other side of the story.

A former chairman of Jaguar Cars, Robinson was a wealthy Labour MP who, when he was in London, lived in a suite at the Grosvenor House Hotel overlooking Hyde Park. He also owned glamorous homes in Tuscany and the South of France. One evening in October 1994 Robinson bumped into Brown during a vote in the Commons and told him how impressed he was at the way the shadow chancellor had handled the leadership issue. With an uncharacteristic candour Brown admitted he had not had much choice in the matter. The two talked for some time about the political situation. In every campaign since his mid-teens Brown was ruthlessly alert to potential useful allies. He recognized that Robinson’s links with business would be extremely useful. Robinson also understood economics and had practical experience in business. Soon they became close allies. Robinson worked even more closely with Balls.

Robinson arranged for the accountants Arthur Anderson to prepare the details of how a windfall tax would be implemented and the likely level of revenue that would flow from the measure. The hired specialists showed in considerable detail how the tax could raise £6 billion to finance a ‘welfare to work’ programme and improve some hospital buildings. The ultra-cautious Brown insisted that they aim only for £5 billion and did not make excessive claims about what it could achieve. Separately Balls worked on other discreet revenue-raising measures.

In the early spring of 1997, shortly after Brown had played his ‘tax and spend’ ace on the Today programme, the shadow cabinet member Michael Meacher declared in an interview with a naive candour: ‘We have ruled out increases in income tax but there are plenty of other taxes we could put up.’ When he read the interview Brown was livid: inadvertently Meacher could have brought down with a single sentence the entire fragile tax-and-spend edifice. Meacher was right. Balls and Ed Miliband were looking in detail at other ways in which a Labour government might find some cash.

The media was so excited about Meacher’s comments that he chose to hide in his shed in order to escape the attention of journalists on his doorstep. On his mobile phone, surrounded by gardening equipment, he expressed his bewilderment to friends: ‘I did not break with party policy,’ he declared.

That was precisely the point. Meacher had given away too much about party policy. From that moment the decent well-meaning left-winger was doomed. Although a member of the shadow cabinet, he was not appointed to the cabinet in 1997. His punishment extended way beyond exile in his shed.

Apart from his search for a few stealth taxes, Balls was preparing for prudence, the stability from which he and Brown could pursue some limited social democratic objectives. It was during this period that Brown concocted his famous golden rules in which he would borrow for investment only over the economic cycle and would ensure that public debt was held at a ‘stable and prudent level’. The rules became famous for being implemented rigidly at first, manipulated in times of some difficulty and then spectacularly cast aside in the autumn of 2008. They played an important part, though, both in conveying a sense of trust in the early years and in providing a framework.

The fiscal rules were another reason why Labour won in 1997 with the biggest landslide since the Second World War and also with the widest range of self-imposed constraints. Business leaders were reassured. Voters who had dismissed Labour in 1992 as reckless tax-and-spenders were able to support the party. Tory-supporting newspapers could hardly believe their luck. They could back Labour and still have a government seemingly committed to the orthodoxies of recent years.

Labour won power bound hand and foot to prudence.

Albeit heavily manacled, Brown had made his Herculean leap. In the space of five gruelling years he had more or less achieved what appeared to be impossible when he became shadow chancellor. Assisted by the exhausted, divided Conservative government and the broad appeal of Tony Blair, he had made Labour appear the more competent party in relation to the economy.

Brown remained the ultimate student politician, basing his activities and approach on the many successful campaigns he led at Edinburgh University when he was always leader of a small gang, scheming and campaigning around the clock. There was an unconscious macho swagger as the group gathered in the evening, often in Robinson’s suite of rooms at the Grosvenor House Hotel. They watched football together on TV and reviewed where they stood politically over a beer at the end of the day.

Robinson described the roles well. Whelan could be gregariously charming over a cigarette and a glass of wine. He cultivated political editors and columnists who were or would become closer to Brown’s cause than Blair’s. He acted as he saw fit, but did so with Brown’s approval. Brown always stood by him. Brown expected loyalty as a matter of course, but always reciprocated, taking assiduous care to promote and protect allies, more so than Blair, who was relatively casual and careless in his treatment of political friends. Whelan was not to last long in power, but others from a similar mould followed. Brown saw politics as a noble battle, but he took the fighting more seriously than any other contemporary politician. Sometimes the fights were necessary, occasionally they were acts of assertiveness, a substitute for Blair’s powers of patronage, and often they were merely habitual, the ugly side of Brown’s politics.

There was never a pause in the fight, even on the night of Labour’s landslide election win in 1997. The Conservatives had been defeated overwhelmingly, but for Blair and Brown the real battle had only just begun. It was between themselves, a clash of ambition, ideology and strategic will that could never be submerged even when the duo had cause to celebrate glorious victories.