I've had this in my draft folder for well over a year. Maybe I should have put "It was a dark and stormy night" as the first line and submitted it for the vignette contest. I think it's far-fetched but not impossible?
***
There had been talk, of course, about nominating a candidate of our own to stop Gordon.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. To understand why we had speculated about such a nomination, one has to go back to Tony's time as Prime Minister, when Gordon was his Chancellor. It was barely a secret that Gordon expected to succeed Tony, nor that their relationship was, at times, fraught. They achieved much together, more perhaps than any other Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer had previously. But despite his abilities, great as they were, those who knew Brown in private worried about his suitability for the role.
Gordon spent much of Tony's government paranoid. He worried that something would happen to prevent him from receiving what (he felt) his pact with Tony had guaranteed - that is, that Tony would step down and that Gordon would become Prime Minister - and he saw plots everywhere he looked. He thought Tony would reshuffle him, or simply carry on in the role indefinitely. He thought that junior ministers in the Treasury were Blairite plants, there to undermine him. He thought that nearly everyone in the Party who had anything approaching a career was planning to run against him when Tony stepped down. Had he been a more confident man, perhaps this wouldn't have mattered. But it was the behaviour that this paranoia provoked in him that gave us cause to cast our eyes elsewhere. He could - and the infamous leaked emails demonstrate this point amply - be bullying, both physically and verbally aggressive to his peers and to his subordinates. As a result, he made enemies far easier than he made friends, and it was clear to a number of those who he had identified as being 'solid Blair supporters' that their careers would be over when he became Prime Minister.
It was thought, therefore, that if it were possible, it would be advantageous to prevent Gordon from ever moving to 10 Downing Street. But it was not at all apparent who would be the best candidate against him: with Gordon having been the anointed heir to Blair for so long there had been no single anti-Gordon candidate for his opponents to coalesce around. Certainly the Socialist Campaign Group would want to put up a no-hope candidate of their own, if they could scrape the nominations together, but otherwise it was unclear who we could nominate. Various figures were mooted in the media: either of the Alans, Milburn or Johnson; young David Miliband; even Charles Clarke had been suggested (thankfully within the Party that had been recognised for the forlorn hope it was). We just didn't think that any of them would have the necessary support. It wasn't the nominations that worried us, we could pretty much guarantee those, but we knew there wasn't any point putting up a candidate if there was no chance they could win.
Then an episode of Newsnight aired, in which the American pollster Frank Luntz asked an audience which potential leadership candidates they preferred. John blew everyone, Gordon included, out of the water. We didn't take the results too seriously, but it got us thinking. Could John beat Gordon? We got to work - commissioning polls to test Luntz's findings, planting fluff pieces in the media to boost John's image, preparing for a campaign against Gordon.
Perhaps there was an issue in that none of us actually liked John. We didn't dislike him, not in the least, but none of us could claim to be friends of his. Indeed, we were hard pressed to name a single friend that John had in the House. Or even outside, to that matter. John was intensely private and solitary as an MP, and while he had worked well with others while in government, he didn't form personal relationships with his fellow members. What he was, in our minds, was a golem, like from Jewish mythology: a leader we could shape out of clay to do our bidding. Despite his past as a Marxist, there was never any impression that he had any strong ideological beliefs of his own, and in government he had been a willing recipient of the ideas of Tony and other advisors.
The only sticking point was John himself. He had privately chosen to stand down at the next election - largely as he believed that he had no future in a Brown government - and had become comfortable with the decision since he had made it. He expressed this to me when I first broached the prospect of his standing for leader, along with the normal talk of his having no ambitions in that direction. He said similar to others when they approached him. But it was Ruth who made the biggest inroads, as she convinced him to listen to actually listen to our proposals.
With a meeting agreed, what we wanted to do was overwhelm him: demonstrate convincingly to him that he had support; that he would win; and that if he didn't win, the country (and the Party) would be far worse off as a result. So we decided to get as many bodies in the room as possible (while trying to keep the meeting a secret from Gordon), we massaged the figures from our polling, and we made him feel like a king. The get-together was held at Milburn's London pad - no wine, of course, as John was a recovering alcoholic - on a Thursday evening, before we all returned home to our constituencies. I could not tell you what John thought of it all, but he told us at the end of the evening that we had given him a lot to think about. I must admit to being rather disappointed by his reaction: I had half-envisioned us carrying him aloft on our shoulders from the room straight to Downing Street. Instead we left feeling somewhat subdued, and thought that we had not convinced him and would be receiving a negative response in the coming days.
The next day, it transpired that Gordon had found out. I'm not sure who had told him about what was going on, but quite spectacularly he confronted John directly at his home in Airdrie, and unleashed an absolute torrent of abuse at him. Now, at the time John had the reputation of being Labour's 'attack dog', but in reality he often avoided confrontation, and it was quite exceptional to see him angry. Gordon though - he got under John's skin in just the right way. When John called me afterwards he was still fuming. It wasn't a long conversation, but the key message he wished to give me was clear: 'I'm in.'
***
While we had been confident that we would get the nominations, it was still a tighter thing than we would have liked. On paper we only needed 45 nominations, definitely an achievable figure. But we knew that we would need a good margin: the closer we were to 45 exactly, the more likely that we would enter into a prisoner's dilemma-type scenario, where the benefits for promising to nominate John but actually nominating Gordon instead were greater than the risk of nominating a candidate who might fall short of the necessary nominations. Additionally, despite our work, Gordon was still seen as the most likely victor in the leadership contest, so he was able to keep supporters who were aligned to our cause, with the promise of Gordon's future patronage as a reward.
During the run-up there was a lot of talk in the press about Charles Clarke and John McDonnell leeching away our support. It wasn't actually something we were worried about. Anyone on the left of the party enough to be supporting McDonnell was very unlikely to have ever been in our camp, and Charles' supporters just wanted anyone who wasn't Gordon, as long as that anyone wasn't John. Or the other John. We wanted to take our nominations from Gordon, because doing so would benefit us and hurt Gordon at the same time, so it was on those figures that we concentrated our attentions. We made sure that our 'big names' backing John were released as a trickle, after the initial heft of nominations to get the campaign underway. This meant that as the close of nominations drew closer we were able to have figures announce that they had been 'won over' by John's arguments, despite the fact that they had been behind him since even before he announced his candidacy.
When nominations closed on 17th May we had 96 nominations - not quite breaching the figure of 100 that we had hoped for, but still a great result in difficult circumstances. It had been clear before nominations even opened that Charles wouldn't even get close to the necessary number of nominations, and he threw his weight behind Gordon in a cynical bid to get a Cabinet post, and most of his supporters followed him, though we did pick up a couple. It was a more nail-biting time for John McDonnell, who was slowly creeping toward the magic number and appealed - in vain - to the NEC to have the deadline extended to allow him more time to gather nominations in the name of widening the debate. By 17th May he had 43 nominations, cruelly short. We had considered lending some nominees in order to ensure that he got on the ballot, because we thought it might be useful to have someone sap Gordon's support campaign from the left, but it was too important to us to ensure we gained as many nominations as possible to demonstrate that John [Reid] had sufficient support within the Party to lead it.
With nominations closed, the campaign proper could begin in earnest. We'd already been hitting the current affairs programmes - Sunday AM, the Today programme, This Week and the like - projecting some soft power, trying throw the focus onto areas where we knew Gordon was relatively weaker than John with the rank and file, and also getting John a bit of exposure to try and soften his 'attack dog' reputation to something approaching 'firm but fair'. We also wanted to move the narrative away from being 'Brownites against Blairites' - for one thing, being seen as the heirs to Blair's legacy was not going to be beneficial to John's campaign - so we emphasised our support across the Party by getting as much exposure for the 'Brownites' who were backing John.
The other benefit of this 'sofa strategy' was the pressure it put on Gordon. The more that John was appearing on people's television screens getting his message out there, the closer the polling was getting, and eventually Gordon was going to have to react. We all knew Gordon well, and we knew that while he was a top Chancellor, we knew that when it came to live performances he could come across as incredibly awkward, technical and dour. He had an uncomfortable interview with Andrew Marr on Sunday AM that - to us - showed the cracks beginning to emerge. Questions on the economy, foreign affairs, that sort of thing, with those he was looking statesmanlike, calm - a proper Prime Minister-in-waiting. It was when the line of questioning turned to John, to our campaign, that he looked less composed, his voice got lower, and began stammering at the start of sentences. Tell-tale signs, to the experienced Brown-watcher, that he was approaching that famous breaking point, where he could be enticed to snap. That was what we wanted to get on camera.
On the night of that special edition of Question Time we were feeling confident. That Gordon had agreed to take part showed that he thought things were getting close. If he had been far enough in front, he would have just refused to take part and soaked up any negatives resulting from it. Taking part though, that was a risk, and we thought there was a good chance of us getting a reaction out of him that we could just replay until the poll’s closed. Not only did John always bring out the worst in him, there was the feeling that he would be under attack as the front-runner, and having to interact with a studio audience, with their ill-informed views.
When the debate began, John was on scintillating form. He got two big rounds of applause for his opening statement alone. Gordon barely got a smattering when he finished, and that was about all the reaction he drew. The first audience question was supposedly on the economy, but it was worded in such a way that it was clearly about the European Union. We knew that if John was elected leader there was no way there could be a vote on the Treaty of Lisbon, but officially we were open to looking at the possibility for a referendum. Gordon had a similarly opaque public presentation on the Treaty. It was an area in which our policies were considerably similar. A second question on the economy – this time actually on the economy – allowed Gordon to stand on familiar territory, and speak confidently. We thought we had him when the questioner interrupted Gordon while he was talking about the strength of the British economy in order to inform him that she was a carer for a disabled relative and had to work two jobs on top of that, and that money lining the pockets of bankers wasn’t helping her – but Gordon remained calm, and replied sympathetically, and talked about how he would do more to create an economy that did benefit everyone. We had briefed John on the economy substantially, but it was always going to be a weaker area for him. He stuck to the key messages about incentivising job growth as well as wealth creation, but kept it short so we could move on. Finally, immigration came up. This, we felt, was our strong suit. We knew from focus groups that Gordon was seen as weak on immigration, and that this was one of John’s definite strengths. Regardless of what he would actually do, people instinctively projected onto John someone who would cut immigration and Sort Things Out.
This was when John really came to life. We knew that for a lot of those voting in the leadership election, immigration was a big concern. The great thing about it was that it transcended boundaries of categorisation. When people talked about the economy, they were actually thinking about how immigration affected it. When they talked about the National Health Service, they were actually thinking about the burden of treating immigrants. When they talked about housing, they were actually thinking about how immigrants ended up in houses and they didn't. So we had made immigration our central plank, and John was well-versed in the figures from working in the Home Office and had the rhetoric to match it. His answer drew the approval of the questioner, and some audience members were moved to applause. Gordon gave a neutral answer that would have comforted those who were fine with the state of immigration, but did nothing to win over anyone who was sceptical about his approach. But still he kept his cool, and frustratingly he continued to do so, on questions on Britain's commitments in Afghanistan, prisons, support for the arts, the health service, everything. David Dimbleby wrapped up, Gordon and John shook hands, and that was it. We had won the debate, and polling would confirm this, but crucially we were denied the 'Gotcha' moment. The number of people who would be influenced by such a dull debate was tiny, so we went away feeling depressed by what had happened.
When voting closed our spirits hadn't much risen. We were fully prepared for a close defeat, and were trying to take what comfort we could in the knowledge that Gordon might be influenced to take a more conciliatory approach to our side of the Party than he might otherwise. That said, some of those who had nominated John had lost their cool. We got word of at least a couple of MPs who had been contacting Gordon's team to try and sure up their future beyond the announcement. Fortunately, no one with anything approaching a profile jumped ship before the announcement. We had gone all-in for John, and would have to stick by him to the bitter end.
It's a good thing that the results and their announcement are so well-known, because incredibly I wasn't actually there when it all happened. My recollection is probably similar to anyone else who watched on television. In fact, I have never seen the live broadcast, only the edited highlights that were used on the news: Hazel Blears' jaw hitting the floor, Alan Milburn punching the air and nearly connecting with Geoff Hoon's chin, and, of course, Gordon's rictus smile, his overly-long handshake with John, and the new Leader of the Labour Party wiping a tear from his eye before delivering That Speech. We had actually rewritten his victory speech (in the event it would be needed) the night before, but thankfully John used neither the rewritten or the older version, and instead just spoke candidly about his own journey. I had never heard him speak about himself like that before, and I would only ever hear him do so once more.
