My Life, Our Times

by Gordon Brown

  In 1971, as I prepared for my final year, my eye problems flared up again. In June, while playing tennis during a stay at a university study centre in the north of Scotland, I suddenly detected a blind spot – one part of the court where my right eye could not follow the ball. I finished the match, told no one that something was wrong and immediately went back to Edinburgh and the Royal Infirmary.

  This time the surgeon – the same consultant who had done the other three operations – did not have to tell me what was wrong. I knew I had a retinal detachment in my good eye. Having seen three operations fail in my left eye, I feared for the first time that I would end up losing my sight altogether. An emergency operation was scheduled for the next day. To my surprise, Dr Jackson – highly esteemed in his own right – said that this time he was not the best person to do the operation; the best hope was his young protégé, Hector Chawla. But Dr Chawla was about to go on holiday. He delayed his departure and saved my eye. Had I waited even a day in rushing to the Royal Infirmary, he would have been gone and I doubt that I would have any sight today.

  Hector had recently returned from a year in America and I was blessed to be the beneficiary of his newly acquired techniques. A lifelong friendship followed. Born in Scotland, the son of an Indian-Pakistani army doctor and a Scottish mother, Hector Chawla is a polymath, a writer of novels as well as the author of many books on the eye, and a world expert on the retina. Partly due to his breakthroughs, the success rate in reattaching retinas rose in forty years from 20 per cent to 90 per cent.

  Since then, my good eye has had its bad days. Every now and then the same symptom I experienced on the tennis court recurs and forces me back to the surgeon for further checks. When I woke up in Downing Street one Monday in September 2009, I knew something was very wrong. My vision was foggy. That morning, I was to visit the City Academy in Hackney to speak about our education reform agenda. I kept the engagement, doing all I could to disguise the fact that I could see very little – discarding the prepared notes and speaking extemporaneously. Straight afterwards, I was driven to the consulting room of a prominent eye surgeon at the Moorfields Eye Hospital in London.

  To my shock, in examining my right eye he discovered that the retina was torn in two places and said that an operation was urgently needed. He generously agreed to operate that Sunday. I asked him on the way out if my old friend, Hector Chawla – whom I had last seen briefly on the day he retired as a surgeon – could be invited to give his opinion too. I emailed Hector who was in France on holiday but he offered to come to the hospital that Sunday morning on his way back home.

  I was already prepared for surgery when Hector examined me and said he was convinced that the tears had not happened in the last few days. They were not new but long-standing. His advice was blunt. There was no point in operating unless the sight deteriorated further. Laser surgery in my case was more of a risk than it was worth. If my sight worsened, doctors would have to operate within the eye as before – not with a laser. Both surgeons agreed that this was not the time to operate.

  I am grateful that the retina has held to this day and I feel lucky beyond words. From that moment on a tennis court in 1971, when I thought it inevitable I would go blind, I have to date had forty-six years of vision. I would never again have perfect sight, not even in one eye, but the sight I have has got me through.

  Despite Jeremy Clarkson calling me a ‘one-eyed Scottish idiot’ (by no means the most offensive words uttered by the former Top Gear presenter), and Andrew Marr bizarrely suggesting in an interview in 2009 that my partial blindness would be a reason for standing down, I have always been open when asked about my eye injuries and never tried to hide them.

  Nonetheless, it was after losing the sight in my left eye, and then some of the sight in my right one, that I started to think more about my future. There were certain things I couldn’t or shouldn’t do – playing the sports I loved, and driving a car, despite having a licence – but I was not going to be deterred. Even if I felt fate had dealt me a hand I would not have chosen, my time in and out of hospital – and the fight for my eyesight – gave me a perspective that I still feel helps me to be more understanding of difficulties facing others in a far worse position than me. I have nothing but admiration for those like my friend David Blunkett, who has overcome the challenges of blindness with such distinction.

  For a while I thought my future lay in an academic life – lecturing and research. But I had come alive politically. Shocked by the levels of unemployment and deprivation in my home town and across the central belt of Scotland, I felt something had to be done to address these injustices. I dreamed there could be no greater privilege than representing my home area in the House of Commons.

  CHAPTER 2

  INTO PARLIAMENT

  My first elected office would not be in Parliament. In 1972, having graduated for the second time, I secured a bursary for a three-year postgraduate course. My tutor Paul Addison encouraged me to apply to his former college, Nuffield in Oxford, but by then I had agreed to stand as the student candidate for the vacant rectorship of Edinburgh University. It was a post previously held by five prime ministers – Gladstone, Rosebery, Lloyd George, Churchill and Baldwin – and usually reserved for the great and the good in their later years. The rector chaired the University Court and I had urged my fellow students to take the unprecedented step, theoretically possible because of a loophole in the rules, of electing one of their own. We had done exactly that when I was an undergraduate by electing a friend of mine, Jonathan Wills, and when he and other friends pressed me to stand one year later – and I then found out the university had sought legal advice to try to delay the election – I felt obliged to agree my name should go forward. I was elected rector for three years in November 1972.

  What I wrote of at the time as ‘the return to the libraries’ had begun. As a student of the 1960s, I and others had worried little about future careers: something that changed in the 1970s as growing economic pressures and the threat of graduate unemployment hit home. The political mood of students was best summed up as apathy punctuated by sit-ins. But even the protests were quite different from the heady days of the 1960s: less about the great issues of the day, such as apartheid, and more about mundane matters like student accommodation.

  I had become rector on a platform that called for the university to extend student representation, to build closer links to the local community in the extramural courses it offered and the research it did, and to tap the widest pool of talent by recruiting more students from poorer backgrounds. This final theme – widening university intake – was one to which I would regularly return. We did secure stronger student representation on the Court – and my younger brother Andrew, who became president of the Students’ Association, was one of the first to benefit. As an undergraduate I had successfully run a campaign to raise the wages of cleaners and catering staff, and I now called for non-academic staff to be represented on the university’s governing body. We pressed for more community representation on the Court and I nominated the secretary of the local residents’ society and chairman of the local trades council: they secured four and three votes respectively against nine each for the headmaster of a private school and a local businessman. Nevertheless, when I stood down from office in 1975, I was able to give an interview saying the Court was no longer ‘a rubber-stamp body’, and that while I kept ‘getting knocked back’ I was proud to be the only student chairman of a university governing body in the world.

  The rector was able to appoint one additional member of the Court. But when in the spring of 1973, I appointed Allan Drummond, the outgoing president of the Students’ Association – who had at one time organised a sit-in over student rents and the shortage of flats – the Court voted to debar him as unsuitable. And for good measure they also voted for a law change to prevent me being its chairman. Two High Court judges, both of whom sat on the Court, argued that it was within their rights to ban anyone they disliked. Indeed, when we
took them to Scotland’s supreme civil court, the Court of Session, it was almost impossible to find a lawyer among the Edinburgh legal establishment who would stand up to the judges by taking my case. This was the first time I saw the power of an establishment at work. When their case came to court they could cite only one precedent where a nominee had been refused membership of a public board because they were unsuitable: the Admiralty Board, which in the 1830s had barred a three-year-old. They were overruled by a fellow judge. And when university officials then tried to change the law to remove me as chair of the Court, they were overruled yet again, this time by the Privy Council. I’m told that Prince Philip, then chancellor of the university and formally consulted on their proposal, sided with me. We will never know why, but perhaps it was because he had been lobbied by a friend of mine and one of his royal cousins, Margareta, the crown princess of Romania, who studied alongside me at Edinburgh.

  There were further disputes, most notably in 1973 over an Association of Commonwealth Universities conference in Edinburgh at which Rhodesia and South Africa were to be represented. I argued successfully against their attending – and ironically debarred from the conference my father’s closest school friend, Robert Craig, who was principal of the still multiracial University of Rhodesia.

  While the title of rector is grand, the work is gritty. I spent many hours dealing with the minutiae of internal university matters. I found this particularly frustrating during the two general elections in 1974 – the first amidst the frenzy of a miners’ strike and the three-day work week. At the time, I was also, at least in theory, working on my PhD, while being employed as a part-time tutor and lecturer.

  My formal involvement in Labour Party politics had started when I joined the university Labour Club. It was a hive of activity. Through it, I met friends whom I still know today: Neil Davidson, now a member of the House of Lords; Ian Davidson, later a fellow MP; and George Foulkes, a popular and successful minister after 1997 in the Labour government. I canvassed for a twenty-four-year-old Robin Cook in the election he fought and lost in Edinburgh North in 1970. Then convener of the Edinburgh City Council Housing Committee, Robin was seen by me and many others as one of Labour’s brightest and most promising politicians. Friends at the outset and friends at the end, our political relationship was to endure through testing times in between.

  I became chairman of the Labour Club in 1971 and endeavoured to engineer a revival in its fortunes by separating us from the International Marxist Group and the Trotskyist factions. And then after I became rector I was, for a time, also a member of the Edinburgh Trades Council. I remember the very first time I was asked to stand as a Labour Party candidate. It was for a city council seat in the local elections in Edinburgh. The suggestion came from a trade union official. I was still a student and I replied honestly that I knew little about council funding and what were then rate-support grants. ‘Look, pal,’ he brusquely admonished me, ‘if we’re going to win the seat you wouldn’t be the candidate.’

  When the general election of February 1974 came along, I worked long hours to meet my rector’s responsibilities while serving as a ward organiser for Robin, who won Edinburgh Central, albeit with a small majority of 961. Although Labour polled 220,000 fewer votes than the Conservatives, the party managed to form the government in Britain’s first hung parliament since 1929.

  During the next few months, as everyone prepared for a second election, my university friend Ian Levitt, later to become the best researcher of twentieth-century Scottish social history, asked me to stand as a Labour candidate at the nomination conference in Edinburgh North. I thought it worth a try, not least to show I was around and to let people know I was interested in more than student politics. At the selection meeting I gave a fairly decent speech delivered without notes, but this was never good enough to take votes from my friend Martin O’Neill. However, I did help Robin defend his slim majority in the election of October 1974, working to get the vote out in one central Edinburgh ward – Gorgie and Dalry. Robin increased his majority to nearly 4,000, bucking the trend in Scotland towards the nationalists, who surprisingly secured eleven out of seventy-one seats. Labour, with a majority of only three seats, formed a precarious government.

  A further general election seemed likely, and the parties quickly got down to the business of putting in place parliamentary candidates. I was secretary of the Edinburgh South constituency when I was selected in April 1976. It was a close-run thing. I prevailed by just one vote over an opponent with more experience than me – and, for that, I was grateful to Nigel Griffiths, who eventually became the local MP. He had persuaded one of the few undecideds – and thus the single swing voter in the selection conference – by assuring him I would support a new sports centre for his ward inside the constituency. In the words of the former Massachusetts congressman and Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, all politics is local.

  My term as rector had come to an end the previous year, though I was still yet to complete my PhD, and I needed to get a job. I applied for three: Scottish research officer for the Labour Party, an organiser for the Workers’ Educational Association, and a lecturer at Imperial College London. None of them panned out. And I had burned my bridges with Edinburgh University, not least because when a part-time tutor I joined the protests against the conditions under which we worked. At twenty-four, in a year when unemployment was rising, I was out of work. Fortunately, a few months later, in early 1976, I was appointed to a lectureship at Glasgow College of Technology, later to become Caledonian University. The head of department who appointed me, David Donald, and his wife Christine would become lifelong friends. When I spoke at his funeral, I reminded his family that he had championed me over a favoured internal candidate who would go on to be a distinguished professor of politics and the author of scholarly works that won wide acclaim.

  As we digested the first onrush of the Scottish National Party and grappled with devolution, I edited The Red Paper on Scotland, persuading people as diverse in their political views as Robin, Jim Sillars, Vince Cable and Tom Nairn to contribute. At the Scottish Labour conference in 1976, held in Perth, I entered into perhaps the most divisive debate I had seen in Scotland – championing the case for devolution. A large number of Labour leaders whom I respected saw devolution as a diversion from the effort to secure a Labour government in the UK. In response, I argued that a commitment to devolution was rooted in Labour’s ideals, going all the way back to 1888 when Keir Hardie first committed Labour to ‘home rule all round’.

  The resistance inside the party was fierce. Later that year, I heard Neil Kinnock tell the Labour Party conference in Blackpool that some are born devolutionists, some achieve devolution, and the rest of us – 85 per cent of the people of this country – would have devolution thrust upon us. He was having none of it.

  Being a Labour candidate between 1976 and 1979 – out on the doorsteps every week – was, to put it mildly, hard going as the Labour government, engulfed by both inflation and recession, became increasingly unpopular and the SNP, the Conservatives and Liberals all rose in strength. In the May 1977 council elections, the SNP gained their first foothold in Labour’s traditional working-class constituencies. Glasgow was widely regarded as a write-off for Labour. When Donald Dewar took the nationalists on in the famous Glasgow Garscadden by-election of April 1978, everyone thought he faced a steep uphill climb. I saw Glasgow Garscadden as pivotal. If we could show that the SNP were not the progressive force they claimed to be, we could re-establish Labour in industrial Scotland. I enlisted as a foot solider in the campaign and, after lecturing each day in Glasgow, I spent the evenings canvassing. Donald, with his masterful debating skills and indefatigable campaigning, won the unwinnable election and forced the SNP onto the back foot.

  I might have joined Donald in Westminster earlier than I did. Another high-profile by-election loomed, in Hamilton, a constituency that ten years earlier had been carried by the SNP. The local Labour Party was anxious to avoid a repe
at of that fiasco. The party concluded that they needed someone who was both young and had Lanarkshire connections. My father, who had moved from Kirkcaldy to minister in Hamilton eleven years before, was a popular figure. More because of him than me, I looked like a viable candidate. I had spent a lot of time in Hamilton and knew many people in the town. The local councillor, Alex Reid, asked to see me personally. To my surprise he not only offered me his support but named all of the delegates who would back me, virtually guaranteeing the nomination.

  Events unfolded badly. My father was about to spend months laid up following a complicated gall bladder operation. He knew he was ill but didn’t tell me when the two of us spoke before the selection. I asked for his counsel about my standing. He had always been supportive, but on this occasion advised me not to run. When he was rushed to hospital, I decided it was not right to impose what would be a highly public and fraught election contest on him and my mother. George Robertson, a very good Labour candidate with more experience than me, went on to win the by-election. Nineteen years to the month after his victory, George was to sit with me in Tony Blair’s first Labour Cabinet and he would later serve as secretary general of NATO.

  The argument over devolution continued throughout the late 1970s and showed just how difficult it was to hold the Labour Party together. I was determined to push the case for what was then called a Scottish Assembly. And when, in 1978, it was decided to hold a referendum on this, I was chosen to chair Scottish Labour’s Devolution Committee.

  Despite Labour divisions, I threw myself into this new role: in the last seven days of the campaign, I addressed thirty meetings. I had also prepared one pamphlet which set out the Labour case for the new body and a second focused on what the new body could do. I wanted us to run as positive a case as possible on the difference a Scottish Assembly could make to people’s lives. I also chastised the Conservatives for turning their back on devolution, arguing that they were putting party politics before the constitutional future of the country and ‘playing into the hands of the extremists and wreckers who want to break up Britain’.