A Journey (107 page)

Gordon is a strange guy. But by the end I had to come to see that this was not the fundamental problem. (He had and has a sort of endearing charm in the strangeness.) The fundamental problem was that he simply did not understand the appeal of New Labour, in anything other than a polling, ‘strategy’, election-winning sort of way. He could see that it worked, but not why it worked. He could understand its detailed policies, but not its emotional appeal.

So in all the meetings and constant interactions we had after the 2005 election, I could tell he thought these attempts by me to discuss policy were all tricks or devices to buy more time. On each occasion, he would agitate for a date; and I would say: well, what policy direction are you going to pursue? And he would treat that as if it were me being disingenuous or seeking an excuse to prevaricate. Or he would say to me: you’re doing this for your legacy, but not my interests; and I would say: but if the policies are right – say on academies or NHS reform or ID cards – it is in your interests that we do them. Anyway, there it is and no doubt he has a different take on it all.

I could see where it was all leading. The party, or a significant part of it, was hell-bent on change. I couldn’t realistically survive past mid-2007, not without a fight that would be potentially terminal for the government. I did toy with it, by the way. I had a feeling that my going and being succeeded by Gordon was also terminal for the government. But in the end, I considered it more important for the survival of the New Labour project that if it was to be terminal, it should be clear that it was his departure from New Labour, not my insistence on staying, that had done the damage. Clear to whom, though? And how clear? These were good questions and I was not fully capable of answering them.

However, by this time, I could tell it would be impossible to stay to 2008. The media –
Mail
,
Telegraph
,
Guardian
,
Independent
,
Mirror
, plus, in effect, the BBC – were emphatic: they wanted me out and him in, pretty much for the same reasons as the party, at least so far as the left media were concerned. The right wanted me out for other reasons too. Rupert Murdoch’s media were still broadly supportive, but even he, though not pushing for me to go, thought it was sensible I did and make way for Gordon.

So I knew that there were very good objective reasons for the party and, more important, the country, that I stay. I genuinely thought I had the right policy agenda for Britain’s future, and thought that Gordon didn’t. But, in a way that happens sometimes in politics, all this had been more or less swept away in the Gadarene rush for change.

When I got back to London from the lecture in York on 5 September, I brought together the key people and also took soundings from Alastair, Anji, Peter and other long-time close associates. The next day I met Gordon. We sat out on the terrace of Number 10, my favourite meeting place when the weather was good. We had one of those conversations that we had begun to have in the past couple of years, one that takes place on two levels. One is spoken; the other unspoken. Both are equally clear.

He said, in effect, there were other letters on the way. Spoken (him): I know nothing of the details and have had no part in them. Unspoken: You have left me with no choice, I just don’t trust you to go.

He had me trapped, and he knew it. But also, in a curious way, he would then need me. And I knew that. It was impossible for me to stay, but it was essential to him that he was not the obvious organiser of my leaving.

Spoken (me): I will make it clear that this conference will be my last. Unspoken: Push me too hard and I will finger you for the coup.

He did argue about the date and I was vague; but I was also determined not to set a precise time right there and then. If I did so, I knew I would be out within weeks. It was going to be a struggle to stay in any event.

I was very calm. Some in my inner circle still tried to argue I should fight him, but I said it was not possible to do it. We would have to allow this to happen with good grace. We would have to use the time to put in place the remaining reforms and to set out a clear and intelligent future programme. Above all, we had to keep the New Labour flame alive. I considered it 90 per cent inevitable he would take over. I agreed it would not work. It was crucial, however, our disloyalty to him could not be blamed.

Tom Watson had been told by the chief whip either to remove his name from the letter calling for me to resign, or to resign from the government himself. News of his resignation was in the media already. I smacked him very hard in my response.

I have heard from the media that Tom Watson has resigned. I had been intending to dismiss him but wanted to extend to him the courtesy of speaking to him first. Had he come to me privately and expressed his view about the leadership that would have been one thing. But to sign a round robin letter, that was then leaked to the press, was disloyal, discourteous and wrong. It would therefore have been impossible for him to remain in government.

It was unusually brutal, but at the time I felt he deserved it. Actually, later I felt sorry for him and regretted I had done it. The trouble with a lot of the younger ones who should have been supportive – Chris Bryant, Siôn Simon and others – is that they just hadn’t thought it all through. They got a little intoxicated with the excitement of changing leader and playing a part in it all. They didn’t mean it maliciously really. They genuinely thought it was right that I be changed – and so it was, sometime before the fourth election. But, as I say, change to what? That bit was just never, deep down, explained in the way it should have been and had to be, for the purpose of serious political decision-making.

The next day, 7 September, I alighted on an easy enough way of taking the sting out of it all. I had a visit to Quintin Kynaston School in St John’s Wood. I had been there earlier in my premiership, and had watched it develop and succeed. The headmistress, Jo Shuter, was a thoroughly sensible sort and she wouldn’t mind me using the visit to make a statement. I went with Alan Johnson, who had always been loyal and in whose company I felt it easier to speak.

The events of the past days had been, naturally, very big news and there was a definite sense of a party in rebellion, a government in disarray and a prime minister at bay. Some in the party blamed me for not going. Some were outraged at the disloyalty. Most were kind of bewildered and wanted it all to be stopped, and with as much dignity as we could muster.

I began by apologising on behalf of the party, which I thought appropriate. I made it clear I wasn’t going to set a precise date now, but I said that the upcoming party conference would be my last. I also gave a warning shot across the bows of those who thought an assumed succession for Gordon was a good thing. One really bad aspect of the whole business was the notion of his entitlement to the job. I was sure the public would not see it like that, and though it was almost certainly going to be him, they would resent any idea that it was somehow per se legitimate. It would have to be managed carefully. ‘I also say one other thing after last week: I think it is important for the Labour Party to understand, and I think the majority of people in the party do understand, that it’s the public that come first and it’s the country that matters and we can’t treat the public as irrelevant bystanders in a subject as important as who is their prime minister. So we should just bear that in mind in the way that we conduct ourselves in the time to come.’

The statement took the heat out of it all. The next day, a group of middle-ground people – i.e. those who didn’t consider themselves really either Brownites or Blairites – sent a statement to Ann Clwyd as chair of the PLP, welcoming my statement and, in effect, making it clear I should determine the precise date of departure.

At the weekend, the
Sunday Times
had the story that Gordon and Tom Watson had met at Gordon’s house before the letter was sent. I reined back my folk who wanted to go into ‘kill’ mode on it. Of course, I never had any doubt that Gordon did not merely know of it all but had organised it; however, I had taken my decision to try to leave on terms that no one could say had caused this disunity, and if that meant an orderly transition to Gordon, so be it.

If someone came forward to challenge him, that might be a different matter. But if it was inevitable, then let it happen decently and without rancour. As with all TB/GB decisions from first to last, I can’t be sure I did the right thing in taking such a view, but I did take it and for the reasons given.

A few days later, I spoke at a conference in London for the Progress organisation, which I had high hopes of transforming into a serious New Labour policy think tank. It had good young people who were onside with what we were trying to achieve. The left had its own group in Compass, which basically wanted an Ed Balls/GB type of leadership. They were active and smart but hopelessly wedded to a politics that simply had no prospect of ever winning an election. They had plenty of energy, however, and they were organised. My folk tended to be great with the middle-ground electorate and resounded with a sense of the intellectual future of the party, but in organising, caballing, scheming and plotting, they were, like me, in the introduction class for primary school.

Part of the worst aspect of the GB modus operandi was the rehabilitation of old-style trade union fixing and activist stitch-ups. All great fun for those who like that sort of thing – and this was very much part of the Nick Brown/Tom Watson/Charlie Whelan psyche – but completely hopeless in terms of where a modern political party had to be to get anywhere with the right policies and have a hope of winning.

Progress were decent people, but they fast got tricked into this beguiling notion that they had to be a force for unity at a political and organisational level, whereas actually all they needed to do was to strike out with a sound, future-oriented policy agenda and leave political organising alone. The result, as GB’s team intended, was that at the very moment they should have been seeking to define the next leader’s programme, they became neutered under the pretence of being for ‘unity’.

Of course, to be fair, as some of those closest to me pointed out, this was to a large extent my own fault and born of my insistence that I could not be seen to disrupt Gordon’s ascent to the pinnacle. I would constantly stress that New Labour was a joint project with Gordon, which was somewhat beyond what the facts would bear. But I was still trying to co-opt him to the programme and hoping he might accept it, if only
faute de mieux
. Not unnaturally, this left people much confused.

Once I had cast the die, so to speak, it brought a type of relief to the situation; and it reignited an intense sense of urgency in myself. The GB folk calmed down. They had won, though they remained distrustful and I knew would look for a way to bring the date forward. My people were sad, but not as demoralised as they might be. I had to work hard at keeping their energy levels up; but I was thoroughly motivated myself and passed some of that on to them.

After what had been a pretty astonishing week I then went on a trip to Beirut and the Middle East. When I returned to Chequers on 14 September, to lick my wounds and work out my strategy for the remaining time in office, I had much to contemplate. Chequers in September is always a good place to be. The weather tends to be rather benign at that time of year, so there was plenty of sitting out in the grounds.

I had more or less settled into a pattern of living there at weekends. I would work hard in the morning, exercise in the afternoon. A stiff drink and a good supper. Early to bed.

The relationship between alcohol and prime ministers is a subject for a book all on its own. By the standards of days gone by I was not even remotely a toper, and I couldn’t do lunchtime drinking except on Christmas Day, but if you took the thing everyone always lies about – units per week – I was definitely at the outer limit. Stiff whisky or G & T before dinner, couple of glasses of wine or even half a bottle with it. So not excessively excessive. I had a limit. But I was aware it had become a prop.

As you grow older, your relationship with alcohol needs to be carefully defined. When young, you do drink to excess at points, but you go days without it. As you get on in life, it easily becomes a daily or nightly demand that your body makes on you for relaxation purposes. It is a relief to pressure. It is a stimulant. It can make a boring evening tolerable. But it plays a part in your life.

I could never work out whether for me it was, on balance, a) good, because it did relax me, or b) bad, because I could have been working rather than relaxing. I came to the conclusion – conveniently you might think – that a) beat b). I thought that escaping the pressure and relaxing was a vital part of keeping the job in proportion, a function rather like my holidays. But I was never sure. I believed I was in control of the alcohol. However, you have to be honest: it’s a drug, there’s no getting away from it. So use it with care, maybe; but never misunderstand its nature and be honest about its relationship to your life.

I took a few days to prepare my conference speech – the very last I would give to the Labour Party, which I had led for over twelve years by then – and also to reflect and work out my game plan. There could be no easing up, for sure. There were multiple challenges. The media would want me to go earlier, partly because they were impatient for change, partly because it was a sport to them to see if they could score a victory and push me out before my due time. OK, they knew that in one sense I was going involuntarily, but in another, it was too close to being my call, not theirs, for their comfort. We could circle each other, clash with each other, but that was on equal terms. They thought it would be great to get the better of me one last time and force the departure.