Power Trip

by McBride, Damian

  I arranged all Gordon’s earliest interviews in Maggie’s old study overlooking Horse Guards Parade. This gave the impression that Gordon had set up his office in the ‘Thatcher Room’, eschewing the sofas in Tony Blair’s den. In reality, I’d just put a phone, computer monitor, some old Cabinet papers and books on the desk for the sake of the cameras, but if any of the hacks had bothered to follow the wires on the phone or the computer, they’d have seen they weren’t connected to anything.

  After Gordon’s cancellation of his holiday to take personal charge of dealing with the foot-and-mouth crisis, the comparisons kept coming. Gordon was instinctively wary of the ‘up’ because of the inevitable ‘down’. He once chided me quite fiercely after I referred to the emerging idea of him acting as ‘father of the nation’, telling me: ‘Don’t ever say that to the press.’

  However, the ‘Thatcher thing’ appealed to him, and he talked with great animation and amusement about his first encounter with her after he became an MP in 1983, when she summoned him into her office in the House of Commons to ‘discuss’ one of his speeches, poured them both enormous whiskies, told him she thought it was a shame that such an intelligent young man should be so fundamentally wrong about every issue, gave him a half-hour lecture and sent him on his way.

  The idea started to percolate around Gordon’s staff – except Sue Nye, who was horrified by the whole thing, not least out of loyalty to Neil Kinnock – that Gordon and Sarah should invite Maggie for tea or dinner in Downing Street, but we needed some valid reason to do so, otherwise it would simply look like we were pushing the comparison and revelling in the discomfort it was causing Cameron.

  This is where I came in. I knew that one of the Sunday political editors was an acquaintance of Richard Stone, Maggie’s favourite artist, and, shooting the breeze in the pub one afternoon, we came up with the idea that Gordon could commission a portrait of her to hang in Downing Street. It wasn’t as simple as that though: we needed to explain why there should be a portrait of her as opposed to, say, Harold Macmillan or Clement Attlee; and we needed someone to pay for it.

  I had a good look round the Downing Street estate, and worked out that the only two portraits of twentieth-century politicians – beyond the standard photos of prime ministers and cartoons of chancellors on the respective main staircases of No. 10 and No. 11 – were a large photographic print of Churchill next door to the Cabinet room and a painting of Lloyd George in the No. 11 meeting room.

  This allowed me to argue a rationale for commissioning the portrait, on the basis that Lloyd George was the victorious PM at the end of the First World War, Churchill at the end of the Second, and Maggie at the end of the Cold War. A wealthy Tory benefactor was found to finance the painting, Richard Stone said he was willing, and we were able to present the whole proposal to Maggie’s office and invite her in to make it official. They were naturally delighted.

  We kept the whole visit as quiet as possible until the day, but when the news and photos emerged – with Cameron at the height of pressure within his own party over grammar schools and the sliding Tory poll ratings – all hell broke loose.

  While there were a few Tory commentators who criticised Gordon for ‘exploiting’ Maggie, and a lot of Labour voices furious at him for going anywhere near her, the general reaction from the media was that it was a fantastic coup for Gordon, a devastating (albeit silent) comment from Maggie on the Cameron project, and likely to prove a huge hit with swing voters. And so it proved: Labour’s lead, Gordon’s personal poll ratings, and the focus group reactions were beyond anything his pollsters, Deborah Mattinson and Stan Greenberg, had seen before or ever hoped for. If the snap election wasn’t a certainty before, it looked cast in iron after that day.

  On the day in question, as Maggie was saying hallo to some of the old ‘Garden Room girls’ who’d worked with her, Gordon asked me if I wanted to be introduced, given my Finchley history and the role I’d played in engineering the visit. I thought of my old mum and dad, I thought of the 1980s Irish hunger-striker Bobby Sands, I thought of the miners, and I said: ‘No, it’s OK.’ It was the only time during that whole episode when Sue Nye smiled at me.

  Nevertheless, when – shortly afterwards – we had the most serious of many overnight scares where rumours were flying around that Maggie had been taken seriously ill, and her office couldn’t be contacted, I was given the job of writing the media and parliamentary briefing note that we would use if Gordon, the family and the Palace decided she should have a state funeral. Someone else was given the opposite job of writing the explanation if we didn’t.

  In my briefing, I didn’t mention her gender on the grounds that I felt being the ‘first’ of anything shouldn’t be a qualification in itself; I didn’t mention how she changed the country, given the strength of feeling in many parts of it that she did so for the worse; and I didn’t mention the Falklands, on the grounds that John Major or Tony Blair shouldn’t then be expecting state funerals for the various wars they had prosecuted when there was no threat to Britain involved.

  I simply stuck to my Cold War argument that – like Winston Churchill before her – she had led Britain at a time of enormous peril for our country and the world during the fragile and unpredictable events of the 1980s and played a crucial role in our final victory. That, I thought, was an argument around which Gordon could rally most people, if definitely not all, in what would have been one of the most difficult decisions for a Labour Prime Minister to take.

  Thankfully, he never had to, and she not only enjoyed a few years more but was able to see Richard Stone’s portrait unveiled in No. 10 in November 2009, several months after my own departure from Downing Street.

  Needless to say, I wasn’t invited but the whole event was a sign of how things had changed in the space of two years. Gone were the comparisons between Gordon and Maggie, or her rumoured favourable view of him, and gone was the pressure on Cameron. Indeed, David Cameron was not only present at the unveiling, but requested to come in the back door of No. 10 so that there wouldn’t be a picture of him looking presumptuous on the doorstep a few months before he expected to be there not as a guest, but entering for the first time as Prime Minister.

  If you’d predicted that in mid-September 2007, I would have said you were mad.

  41

  TOO MANY MISTAKES

  Gordon had one very special phrase when in a particularly angry mood, rarely used because it could only be said when he was within punching distance of a chair, headrest, wall or other suitable, non-human surface. It would generally come at the end of a long day when every person he’d encountered had been utterly useless and everything he’d done had been a waste of time.

  He would sit silently reflecting on all this, then slowly punch the surface in front of him very hard three times, and utter the mantra: ‘Too. Many. Mistakes.’ If you were next to him, you just shut up and looked out of the window. There was literally nothing you could say which could help.

  The election that never was in autumn 2007 was the greatest misjudgement of Gordon’s long career, utterly changing the way he was perceived and defined, but it was the product of six other major mistakes, and it’s important to understand how cumulatively they turned the eventual, terrible decision he made into the only option he had.

  The fact is that we always envisaged an early election, by which I mean it was never the idea that Gordon would hang on until the last minute in 2010.

  The plan was that he’d come in, establish himself and the new, younger Cabinet; get a short-term bounce simply because he wasn’t Tony Blair; probably stabilise into level pegging with the Tories by the end of the year; and ride into an election in early 2008 appealing for his own mandate.

  That appeal – and remember, this was before the banks started collapsing – would couple the usual promises around economic stability and strong public services with a big aspiration agenda, the centrepiece of which would be the abolition of tuition fees and big cuts in inheritance tax and
stamp duty, and a major constitutional reform programme covering the House of Lords, the voting system, war powers and MPs’ outside income.

  That package would be designed to keep most of those who voted Labour in 2005 in the red camp, while trying to win back a lot of old Labour voters who’d gone Liberal Democrat because of Iraq. The best-case scenario was the same or a slightly larger majority. The worst-case scenario was a coalition with a Menzies Campbell-led Liberal Democrats, forged over the constitutional reform programme.

  What that plan didn’t envisage was that Gordon would have such a good start in the job and such a large bounce in the polls, without needing to announce any of those planned reforms.

  Accepted wisdom now says it was a massive mistake not to have ruled out an autumn election as soon as the speculation started. But the fact is Gordon’s pollsters, Deborah Mattinson and Stan Greenberg, were telling him this was a unique and unforeseen opportunity: his ratings and Labour’s were beyond anything they’d thought possible, and they would surely never get this good again.

  It may have been a mistake to let the speculation continue, but it would have taken Elijah’s foresight, Solomon’s wisdom and Job’s patience to say it at that stage.

  The first genuine, avoidable mistake, if we were ever going to go for it, was not announcing the election before the party conference season began, in order to catch Cameron and Osborne off guard, and set the agenda with our manifesto launch. The Tories were already panicking and we should have capitalised.

  Shortly before conference season, Gordon was in fantastic form at a party in Shoreditch House thrown by News International’s Les Hinton for his partner and adviser to Gordon, Kath Raymond. When Cameron, Osborne and Coulson came in – seeing Gordon surrounded by the great and good of the Murdoch empire – their faces collapsed.

  I winked at Coulson at the bar: ‘We’d better make the most of this, mate. It’s going to be all work the next few weeks.’ ‘Yeah?’ he said, trying to gauge whether I was serious. ‘We’ll see,’ I said.

  But the reason there was never a chance of us going for it before conference season was the worst one of all – money. We couldn’t call an election and still go ahead with conference as normal: MPs would all want to be in their constituencies instead; the TV companies wouldn’t be able to give it the blanket coverage they normally would; and ministers would be barred from making policy announcements. We desperately needed a ‘normal’ conference to raise the revenue required to finance the campaign, including the opportunity to schmooze wealthy donors. The party certainly couldn’t afford to refund all the members, media, businesses, charities and others who had already paid to attend or book rooms, receptions and advertising.

  This was one of many areas where Tony Blair had a huge advantage on Gordon: he was a highly proficient and effective fundraiser, even without the assistance of Lord Levy; Gordon was pretty hopeless. It was a strange paradox that the man who had no difficulty instructing presidents, premiers and sultans across the world to commit billions to the fight against poverty often felt simply too embarrassed to ask some millionaire businessman for a few bob.

  So the conferences went ahead, and – even though I was very conscious that the ‘will he, won’t he’ coverage of Bournemouth was a turn-off to the voters – it was easy to get carried away in the heady atmosphere, as even the right-wing press fawned over Gordon. People marvelled that not only did the Telegraph throw its first party at a Labour conference in living memory, but Gordon stayed for an hour, compared to barely ten minutes at The Guardian’s afterwards. Even ultra-Blairite special advisers said to me: ‘How have you managed this?’

  When the post-Bournemouth polls showed massive Labour leads, the narrative started to emerge from the Tories that their objective was now simply to eat into Labour’s majority, and show that some of the more prosperous south-east marginals which had stuck with Blair in 2005 were turning Tory, holding out the prospect of victory next time round. They knew as well as we did that, despite what was happening in the rest of the country, Gordon was still struggling to cut through to voters in those marginals, mainly because of their hostility over taxes and transport costs.

  At the same time, a narrative started to emerge from the left that, if he went for an election, Gordon would be gambling with the seats of MPs who’d been elected only two years previously, and in a very hard-fought election at that. Many argued that if Labour’s majority was reduced by even one seat, that gamble would be exposed as both a failure and a huge folly. When I ridiculed this idea in front of a group of colleagues, they all looked at me as if I didn’t get it, and Ian Austin – one of that 2005 intake – said: ‘They’re right, mate – Gordon would have to resign if that happened.’

  Letting that consensus take hold in the party, the media and in Gordon’s inner circle was the second massive mistake, and I take my share of the blame for that.

  We left ourselves in the ridiculous position whereby every private and public poll conducted in those weeks showed that Labour would win a clear majority, but that itself was not enough. When people later mocked Gordon, saying: ‘So you didn’t look at the polls, realise you were going to lose, and cancel the election?’ he was telling the truth when he said ‘No!’ We would always have won.

  But the same polls showed that Gordon was going to shed at least a few south-east and Midlands marginals. And once the consensus took hold that any reduced majority would mean Gordon had to resign, that became a larger and larger problem.

  On the Sunday of Tory party conference, 30 September 2007, around a dozen of Gordon’s close advisers gathered at Chequers for yet another discussion about the impending decision. For most of us, it was our first time there and Gordon started the day with a tour of the house and the gardens.

  It’s a beautiful warren of a building: a child’s dream, full of ancient, precious artefacts and military equipment, and made for playing hide and seek. Gordon and Sarah mainly used it at weekends to entertain other families with children: the kids would go swimming in the long, narrow pool, while their parents ate lunch.

  Gordon was very tickled showing us the Rubens painting The Lion and the Mouse, which Churchill decided one night needed a bit of work, touching up the mouse with some brighter colours so it was easier to pick out. As always when Gordon told anecdotes, he had to deal with heckling from the two Eds, and Miliband in particular was on fine form during the tour, mimicking a Jewish patriarch being shown round his grandson’s house: ‘Nice place you’ve got here, Gordon, nice bit of real estate.’

  Eventually, we got down to business. There was a clear hierarchy around the grand dining table. The main players were the Eds and Douglas; then the polling experts; then the party chiefs. Strange to say, some of Gordon’s longest-serving staff – the ones who worked with him day-in, day-out, like me, Sue and Jonathan Ashworth – were largely silent observers. Some of his most trusted advisers like Michael Ellam and James Bowler were excluded as civil servants.

  Gordon said: ‘Right, I want to go round and flush out all the reasons why we shouldn’t go for it.’ There was silence, eventually broken by Ed Balls: ‘Well, just to play devil’s advocate…’ One after another, those round the table offered desultory arguments against an early election.

  Douglas Alexander: ‘Voter registration’s going to be a problem – lots of kids who’ve just started at university won’t be registered to vote.’ Ed Miliband: ‘It’ll be dark in the mornings and the evenings – lots of people will just stay home rather than vote in the dark.’

  Gordon called a halt to the discussion, and moved on to all the reasons we should go for it, receiving a much more enthusiastic response. I made my one contribution to the discussion. ‘Well, from a media perspective, I think we’ve got to think about the reaction if we decide not to go for it now – they’ll absolutely slaughter us.’

  Ian Austin looked down the table at me and said: ‘Hold on, the worst possible reason to go for it is what happens if we don’t.’ There was a murmur of
assent. I remember immediately thinking: ‘Isn’t that the best possible reason to go for it?’, but I didn’t say it out loud and the moment passed.

  It seems inconceivable to me now that we didn’t have a more substantive discussion about the potential media reaction and the resulting impact on Gordon’s reputation if we didn’t go for it, but perhaps that simply reflected the fact that we all thought that we were. Nevertheless, it was the third major mistake and one I hold a great deal of responsibility for.

  The next day, George Osborne promised in his speech to the Tory conference that he would raise the inheritance tax (IHT) threshold to £1 million, paid for by a new levy on non-domicile residents.

  It was a sickening moment, first because we knew how popular it would be in those south-east marginals where our problem lay, but also because we’d come so close to neutralising IHT as an issue before then. Gordon had two options in his last Budget in March 2007: one to cut the basic rate of income tax by abolishing the 10p rate; the other to give married couples and civil partners a combined IHT threshold, effectively doubling their tax-free allowance.

  This was where the Budget scorecard process could occasionally work against good decision-making. The income tax proposal was relatively straightforward, whereas every time we looked at the IHT proposal, we came up with new reasons why it might not work: what about recently widowed individuals, what about war widows, what about non-married partners, how far back could you go if you wanted to make it retrospective, and how much more would that cost?

  We ended up convincing ourselves that there was too much risk of the IHT measure unravelling on the day, whereas the income tax cut was an easier sell, even if that also unravelled over time. It was the wrong call, and one of the other major mistakes that affected the election decision.