GORDON BROWN’S ear was pressed close to the telephone yesterday afternoon. As usual after a budget, he was calling friends to gauge reaction to his speech. Most performed as expected — soothing his angst and encouraging his optimism. More than ever during the weeks of uncertainty before the election, the Chancellor is relying on trusted sympathisers to steady his nerves.
Despite his supremely confident public manner, Mr Brown knows that in the early hours of May 6 his ambition to become prime minister will depend on an extraordinary cocktail of circumstances and people. Tilting the balance in his favour has become a desperate endeavour. Whatever the size of Labour’s majority, he senses the inevitability of bloodshed — either Tony Blair’s or his own.
Ever since the Chancellor committed himself last January to encourage Robert Peston to publish Brown’s Britain, a indictment of Mr Blair’s dishonesty, the two former friends have been irreconcilable. Accurately labelled as Mr Brown’s foundation for a showdown, the book confirmed Mr Blair’s worst fears. Reading the invented exchanges between himself and the Chancellor about his “promises” to resign, Mr Blair knew that his tolerance of Mr Brown ’s authoritarian diktats from the Treasury since 1997 — preventing reform of Britain’s health, education, transport and pensions services — had been folly. The division between the two is not merely personal but also ideological.
Despite the glory and gimmickry of yesterday’s speech, Mr Brown’s dogma and destabilisation is echoing louder than ever. After the election, the Chancellor will demand that Labour choose between himself and Mr Blair, and resolve their fundamental disagreement about the market versus state control. The destructive consequences are already obvious. While Mr Blair plots to create a post-election government without Mr Brown, his Chancellor is orchestrating a frenetic operation to reinvent himself to prepare the coup against Mr Blair.
Like a wish list, Mr Brown has been ticking off the interest groups in carefully contrived television appearances: child care, Africa, China, Britishness, science, the environment and yesterday the continuing blast of socialist re-distribution combined with global enterprise. The effect is bewildering. Rather than focus entirely on defending his own record, the Chancellor is engaged in a monumental make-over.
Cursed by the image of a dour Scotsman who flees from London at the first opportunity to escape the English, Mr Brown has been wooing the unfriendly natives south of the border.
Until recently, Mr Brown stubbornly refused to reveal his personal sentiments let alone expose his soul. Protected by complexity, he boxed his way out of corners by obfuscation, distortion, intimidation and silence. Forensic examination of all his utterances since he entered public life in the late 1970s revealed a fluent PR expert repetitively delivering crafted soundbites and then dashing back to the shadows. Girlfriends were concealed and friends were ordered not to speak. Any hint of intrusion into Mr Brown’s life produced a crisis. Yet suddenly, his privacy has been abandoned.
Instead of the traditional uniform – dark suit, white shirt and red tie — Mr Brown now parades in shirtsleeves and slacks. The dogmatist has been replaced by an unfussy socialite. To the casual viewer, it appears that he has dropped his mask to reveal the smiling friend of all the English social classes.
Sceptics may well ask, was the laughing Mr Brown filmed by Newsnight sauntering along the waterfront in Kirkcaldy, his home town, talking about the importance of trade and about history lessons at school finally the genuine man or the considered product of a publicist? The truth is a bit of both. The risk of self-exposure, Mr Brown calculates, will hasten Mr Blair’s departure and his own coronation if Labour’s majority is less than 50 or if there is a hung Parliament. His nightmare is a large majority and Mr Blair remaining as Prime Minister. In either event, by abandoning his mask, Brownism will for the first time be properly scrutinised, exposing a catalogue of costly errors, not least by the need to raise taxes, and endanger his bid for Labour’s leadership.
Pertinently, the microcosm of his socialist, statist prejudices which have blocked reform of health, education, transport and pensions services are reflected in his new passion and proposed cures for Africa. Just as in Britain, Mr Brown believes that the State handing out money is the cure for every evil.
Bereft of any experience of Africa, and after a mere six-day visit in February, Mr Brown presents himself as the continent’s saviour. (One can imagine his reaction if a Congolese politician, visiting Britain for the first time, lectured Mr Brown about the growing deficit.) Just as he boasted that the University for Industry and a range of other ultimately discarded but expensive measures would transform Britain, Mr Brown is convinced that he possesses the answer to Africa’s plight.
The fundamental weakness of Brown’s vision for both Africa and Britain is his conviction that the State knows best, an opinion disputed by Mr Blair. Mr Brown distrusts the market’s power to create wealth because in his personal and political life, he is an intemperate control freak. His personality flaws which barred his election as leader in 1994 have not disappeared but he hopes that the continuing makeover and the absence of a realistic rival will neutralise his antagonists in Westminster. His misfortune is that during the battle for power, his recent lust for the spotlight will rebound.
The battle for the succession is now under way. In the last weeks before the election, the Chancellor is not giving his rivals the opportunity to imagine a future Labour government without himself. In the interests of winning, his colleagues show remarkable self-restraint. The showdown will start on May 6. The exciting mystery is whether Gordon Brown has the courage to plunge the knife.
Tom Bower is the author of Gordon Brown (HarperCollins)
