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Home , Gordon Brown, Harold Wilson, Hugh Gaitskell, James Naughtie, Robin Cook, Roy Jenkins

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CHAPTER ONE

A prudent background

ordon Brown’s father, in common with many members of his Ggeneration, had been horrified by the levels of and the degree of poverty that prevailed in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s. He welcomed the election of the Attlee Labour government in 1945. His second son, James , was born on 20 February 1951, eight months before the second Attlee government went down to defeat at the October 1951 General Election. The young Gordon’s formative years coincided with what used to describe as ‘thirteen wasted years of Tory misrule’. His father, a Church of Minister, was not politically active but inculcated into his second son a strong sense of social justice and civic duty. ‘He taught me to treat everyone equally, and that is something I have not forgotten,’ the future Chancellor observed.1 As a son of the manse, Gordon Brown was also brought up with a strong sense of the Protestant work ethic. Many Labour supporters were to be surprised in later years by the impression that, having poured scorn on the Conservatives in opposition, Brown seemed to accept much of the ‘Thatcherite Settlement’. The explanation is that, while there was certainly such a thing as ‘society’ in his Scottish upbringing, there was also an emphasis on those famous Victorian values of self-reliance and self-improvement that were an integral element in what became known as ‘’. On Brown’s Presbyterian obsession with the work ethic, a biographer has commented, ‘He honestly believes that K:/Books/1108jw/0470846976/ch01/text_s/c01.3d

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work is good for the soul, which should mean that his own is in no danger.’2 In the manse where he was brought up, prudence was indeed celebrated as one of the cardinal virtues. In years to come, those who came into contact professionally with Gordon Brown were to be impressed by the sense of industriousness that accompanied his prudent approach to life. The fact that he himself recalls a somewhat carefree childhood, in which the pursuit of the football ranked higher than the pursuit of his studies, is not inconsistent with his predisposition to hard work. In common with many highly gifted children and teenagers, he seems in those days to have displayed an air of ‘effortless superiority’ ^ not, in the pejorative sense, of looking down on lesser mortals, but in the way he could be obsessed by games and still produce first-class results in the examination hall. While not as precocious as John Stuart Mill ^ it was children’s books that he was memorising at the age of four, rather than Greek or Latin verse ^ the young Gordon, with his voracious appetite for ‘sums’, prompted one of his primary school teachers to recall, ‘I couldn’t keep Gordon in work. I was always having to give him more to do.’3 He proceeded from West (primary school) to . His academic brilliance coincided with a ‘forcing house’ experiment in the Scottish education system, which found him having to choose his future specialisation at the age of 12 (history) and going to university at 16, an age that, even at the time, he thought was too young. But the alternative was an extra year at school doing the same syllabus ^ after two years when he had proved everything he needed to with outstanding examination results. One of the defining traits of the ‘new’ Labour government of which Brown was to become such a powerful member was its obsession with ‘the media’. Gordon Brown’s interest in politics and the media date from his childhood, and in due course his main job before he embarked on a full-time political career was in the media. His own media ‘work experience’ began when he was nine, as sports reporter for his elder brother John’s handwritten Local News.At11 he was ‘sports editor’ for John Brown’s Gazette.

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The following year politics and the media were merging in the 12 year-old Gordon’s life. The enterprising Brown brothers were now calling their very local publication, Scotland’s Only Newspaper in Aid of the Freedom from Hunger Campaign. The Chancellor-in-the-making wrote an article predicting that ‘this year’ (1963) might be the Conservatives’ ‘last in office for a long time’.4 , at 69, was too old for the ‘responsible job’ of Prime Minister. Then came the 12 year-old’s early manifesto: ‘We should and must have a strong and reliable government, to promote our interests in Europe and the world. In Britain, too, we must have a less casual government that must take drastic measures in solving our unemployment, economic, transport and local government problems.’5 The boy’s concern about unemployment was father to the man’s obsession with ‘Welfare to Work’. There was also an early hint of the concept of ‘shared sovereignty’ and recognition that Britain needed to be part of a wider group: ‘Not long ago we were looked upon as a strong country: now our only hope of survival, in an age dominated by nuclear power, is to link with our stronger Western allies.’6 Brown was the undoubted ‘success’ of the school forcing system, although he said himself that ‘at 16 I had more problems than I had years’ and he felt a strong sense of unfairness about the way many other ‘guinea pigs’ fell by the wayside. ‘They pushed people too hard,’ he said. ‘The ignominy and rejection of failure (sic) could have been avoided.’ At 16 he was arguing for ‘respect for every individual’s freedom and identity, and the age-long quality of caring’.7,8 But at this stage no one was accusing him of being dour, or obsessed with work to the exclusion of play. A classmate recalled: ‘The whole school was an intellectual hot house at that time. But in our class, it was Gordon who set the pace, and the rest of us would do our best to keep up ... socially, as well as academically. He was so sharp. The banter and wisecracking that would go on between the boys was great. Gordon was always the quickest to come out with a funny line and would soon have the rest of us doubled over in laughter.’9 As Chancellor, Gordon Brown has persistently given the impression of being a man in a hurry, as well as a man with a mission. He can be

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impatient to the point of giving offence ^ a characteristic which, when manifested during meetings in Brussels, can feed suspicions of . But he often metes out the same treatment to his colleagues in the Cabinet, and I have personally seen him occupy himself with something completely different while ostensibly hosting one of his seminars at Number 11 . We shall see later that ‘something happened’ to him in 1992^94, when the shock of the election defeat of 1992 ^ the election the Tories should have lost ^ was followed by the death of John Smith in 1994 and the surge of support for in preference to Brown as Party leader. The darker, more complex Gordon Brown was not much in evidence during what were, at times, his riotous student days at University; neither did he appear to have a reputation for brusqueness in his early days in the Commons, from 1983. But in years to come many people who encountered him were to discover a complicated, brooding, even saturnine figure. His young brother Andrew has described him as having a ‘shy’ trait. To those with whom he feels relaxed he can be hugely entertaining company; and when he tries he can make very witty speeches to large audiences. But it undoubtedly suited him to cultivate a ‘dour’ image after 1992. There were two experiences in his student days that may partly serve to explain characteristics that were magnified by events in the 1990s. The first and most painful experience was his discovery, within days of arriving at Edinburgh University to read history, that a rugby injury earlier that year (1967) was causing him to lose the sight of his left eye. Within the next few years he also suffered a detached retina in his right eye. This eye was saved thanks to the latest laser technology, learnt in America by an Asian eye surgeon, Dr Hector Chowla, head of the eye department at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. ‘The clue to Gordon Brown,’ said a Labour Party insider, ‘is that he is naturally worried about losing his good eye. He is a politician in a hurry.’ has noted: ‘Everyone who knows him well recognises that his single-mindedness and relentless determination must in part be attributed to that trial in his late teens. For them, it explains elements in his character which sometimes

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seem impenetrable to outsiders.’10 It is interesting to note that his right eye was saved by a union of the health service and American technology. He was to preserve a close interest in the health service, and his Chancellorship was to be marked by a persistent search for new ideas from the USA. His first () term at Edinburgh was dominated by the vain attempts to save his left eye. While the Labour Chancellor of the day, , was fighting to stave off the of the pound that was eventually forced on him (and prompted his resignation), the 16 year-old Gordon Brown was, according to his memory of it, ‘required to lie completely horizontal and virtually stationary for a matter of months’ in the misplaced hope that ‘if the eye and retina remained completely still they would bond back’. It was a dispiriting, nay terrifying, time for the young student. Was the psychological impact that some close observers associate with his sense of urgency in later life overcome initially by his youthful spirits? After the first failed operation he bounced back into circulation, beginning his university work in spring 1968. An academic observer says he was ‘an important figure, even as an undergraduate. He was hugely popular, a natural politician: totally self-assured. He was good to everybody, and everyone wanted to know Gordon Brown. He was a bit like a figure’11 (which was not what Bill Clinton himself was like at Oxford around the same time, from all accounts ...). On the other hand, a flatmate ^ somewhat closer to home than his politics lecturer ^ maintains that Brown led ‘a quiet life’ for the first two years, ‘studying hard’, while others recall that he could be ‘a little dour’.12 Certainly, the more flamboyant period of his time at the University ^ his stint as ‘Student ’ ^ occurred after he had obtained his first degree in 1972 with flying colours. Brown took the Court of the University by storm. The principal, , had greeted him on his arrival as an undergraduate by proclaiming that he was the youngest Edinburgh student of the postwar era. On experiencing trouble from activist, Swann could hardly wait to take up his impending appointment as Chairman of the Governors of the

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BBC, leaving Edinburgh within the first year of Brown’s three-year term as Student Rector (1972^1975). The themes of Brown’s Rectorship were greater involvement of students in the running of the University and closer association of the University with the town. He defeated Swann’s attempt to unseat the Rector as Chairman of Court meetings with an interesting resort to the Royal Prerogative: the Chancellor of the University was the Duke of Edinburgh, and Brown’s girlfriend at the time was Princess Margarita of Romania, who happened to be the Duke’s goddaughter. The period spent as Student Rector went down in Brown’s mind as a chronicle of wasted time. Reflection on it almost certainly contributed to the subsequent dash for a political career. ‘I feel in retrospect I could have done more if I had stood for the local council instead of being Rector. It became a bit of a diversion.’13 But it is not entirely clear that the time was wasted: ‘It was quite a revelation to me to see how politics was less about ideals and more about manoeuvres.’14 A certain ‘blooding’ does seem to have taken place; no student of the former Student Rector’s subsequent political career could safely accuse him of knowing nothing about political manoeuvres. The idea of a Student Rector had been Brown’s own, but the first Student Rector stepped down early. What the entire episode showed was Brown’s remarkable flair for publicity. Reports of those early efforts of the Brown brothers at ‘local’ journalism had featured in the Scottish daily press, but one suspects that this was because the press’s attention had been drawn to them by the authors. Student Brown had, early on, embarrassed Principal Swann by revealing that the University had investments in South Africa’s mining companies; Swann was a prominent member of the anti- apartheid movement, and a spirited Brownian campaign forced the University to divest itself of the shares. When standing for the Rectorship against the industrialist Sir Fred Catherwood, Brown unearthed undeclared business interests ^ John Laing, the company for which Catherwood worked, was doing construction work on campus! These were early examples of the ‘investigative’ approach that the future Chancellor was to perfect on his way up the political

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ladder. Later, from the Opposition benches, he attracted attention by making capital out of a series of ‘leaks’ from the . Having been born shortly before Attlee lost the general election of 1951, Gordon Brown says that his earliest political memory is of being allowed to stay up late for the 1959 election, when the Conservatives under Macmillan retained office and , that early moderniser, was defeated. That was the ‘Never Had It So Good’ election. But after that Macmillan and the Conservatives lost their way. It was the Conservatives, under Macmillan, who became concerned about the British economy’s relatively poor performance vis-a'-vis our Continental neighbours in the early 1960s; they tentatively embarked on ‘indicative planning’ by setting up the National Economic Development Office, with a Council composed of employer, and government representatives. After Macmillan resigned because of ill-health in 1963, the Tories chose the 14th to succeed him. Home renounced his peerage and fought a by-election in Kinross and West Perthshire (a safe Conservative seat) as Sir Alec Douglas-Home. The 12 year- old Gordon Brown was on a family holiday in the area; he followed Home around and was ‘amazed and appalled’ that the candidate made ‘the same speech everywhere he went. I soon saw through the tricks that the politician got up to. I thought it was awful.’15 In those days the big economic issue on the doorstep of the Brown manse in Kirkcaldy, , was the decline of the textile and mining industries and consequent social problems. The National Economic Development Office and Council (‘Neddy’ as they became known) were supposed to address such issues, and the Department of Economic Affairs, set up by the government under Harold Wilson in 1964, was intended to take a long-term view of economic decline and try to redress the balance. As a young teenager Brown was among the millions who were glued to the satirical television programme That Was The Week That Was on Saturday nights. ‘TW3’, as it was known, was part of the culture that helped to destroy faith in the Conservatives’ ability to deal with Britain’s problems, economic and otherwise. The Macmillan=Home government was tired. It was time for a change.

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There was an atmosphere of excitement about the election of the Wilson government, with its promises to modernise the economy. Brown was hardly alone in being disappointed by the performance of the Labour governments of 1964^70. In 1971 his entry into student politics at Edinburgh was marked by an article for a university newspaper in which he ridiculed ‘promises and pledges’ made by student politicians, describing them as ‘words so devalued by Harold Wilson’. When one looks back on the British economy’s performance in 1964^70, the record does not look so bad, notwithstanding the problems associated with the strength of the trade unions ^ problems which were exacerbated by the commitment to what some economists described as ‘over-full employment’. The principal macroeconomic mistakes were probably, first, to aim, via the various National Plans, at growth targets (4% per year) which were over- ambitious and hence provoked ridicule; and, second, to postpone a necessary devaluation until 1967. After some nervous moments, the devaluation delivered the goods (i.e. faster growth of exports, slower growth of imports and a more balanced economy) and ’s brief Chancellorship of 1967^70 is widely considered to have been one of the most successful of the twentieth century. From the microeconomic point of view, however, new institutions such as the Wilsonian Industrial Reorganisation Corporation did not live up to expectations ^ although many of its members went on to make names for themselves in other areas of public life; and the government looked problems with the trade unions firmly in the face and blinked. Harold Wilson was surprised to lose the general election of 1970 and surprised to scrape home in the February election of 1974. The choice of deflationary measures rather than devaluation had been associated with a rise in unemployment from 391,000 to 599,000 between 1966 and 1967 (annual average). But unemployment had fallen in 1969 and Labour had been doing well in the opinion polls early in 1970. In Labour folklore the loss of the spring 1970 election is linked to Roy Jenkins’s ‘fiscally sound’ Budget of 1970. But, as

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Jenkins later pointed out, the Budget was popular with the public. It was the freakish impact of two imported ‘Jumbo Jets’ on the subsequent trade figures that led to headlines such as ‘Britain Back in the Red’ and put the nail in the coffin of Labour’s reputation for economic competence. Subsequent revisions were to show that the trade figures had been in surplus all along ^ but by the time the statisticians pronounced, the damage had been done and Labour was back in Opposition.16 The Conservatives, under , arrived in office aiming to reform the unions, and encourage market forces. They were hoping to avoid having to ‘bail out’ inefficient companies with taxpayers’ money. Their resolve was severely tested. At one stage they had to announce a rescue package for Rolls-Royce. Unemployment rose from around 600,000 in 1969^70 to 792,000 in 1971 and 875,000 in 1972. But these figures are annual averages. In the winter of 1971^72 unemployment was approaching the 1 million mark ^ a level at that stage unprecedented in postwar years. The views of the next Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer but one were not widely sought at the time, but Gordon Brown offered them to Edinburgh student readers. Brown had gone to during the 1971 summer vacation to visit the scene of the industrial dispute at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS). His verdict was ambivalent. Writing several months before the ‘U-turn’, Brown said, ‘Whatever happens, the Clyde workers will have made the point that the right to work forged in Beveridge’s time must be restated in Wilson’s super-efficient managerial society and Heath’s laissez-faire individualist nation.’ He said that demanding the right to work was ‘a new challenge to the pre-eminence of economic over social planning, and it may lead to a complete rethink of the managerial society with positive policies for workers’ control and participation.’ But he judged that the ‘work- in’ was ‘doomed to failure ... whatever happens, the old men of Clydeside will look back at the might-have-beens of 1971.’17 Ideas about ‘workers’ control’ were prominent on the left at the time, with Yugoslavia seen as a model. When I met Lord Macdonald,

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a future Minister in Tony Blair’s government, way back in those days, his conversation was full of the need for workers’ control. After trying to assist UCS, the Conservative Secretary for Trade and Industry, John Davies, lost patience with the firm and decided it should be liquidated. But unemployment rose to over 1 million in the winter of 1972 and the Chief Constable of Glasgow made a telephone call to the Prime Minister, in which he said that if the chaos surrounding UCS continued, he could no longer be responsible for public order in the city, where unemployment was exceptionally high. That widely proclaimed ‘U-turn’ was a seminal moment in Britain’s postwar . From then on the Heath government tried to cooperate with the unions and to use every weapon in its economic armory to combat unemployment. Fiscal policy was relaxed, so that public spending was encouraged instead of being cut back; the view was taken that, with the floating of the pound after the breakdown of the , the need no longer be a constraint; and wage agreements were linked to the cost of living index at just the time ^ the first oil crisis ^ when was accelerating, thereby aggravating the inflationary spiral. The stage was set for the reaction against consensus politics that took place within the Conservative Party when it went back into Opposition. For, despite his cultivation of the unions, Heath lost the spring election of 1974. The winter of 1973^74 had been a terrible period, with a protracted dispute between the government and the miners over a large wage claim, and industrial trouble that reduced the economy to a three-day week and a period of numerous power cuts. In the words of one senior civil servant, ‘We verged on anarchy’. The final straw was the miners’ strike, which precipitated the calling of a general election on the issue of ‘Who governs the country?’ The reaction to the high spending policies of the Heath government (mark two) was seen under the Thatcher governments from 1979 onwards. ‘She tries to think what Ted would have done, and does the opposite’ was the way one colleague described Mrs Thatcher’s approach.

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Gordon Brown was going to have to wait until 1983 before entering Parliament and coming to the attention of Party and country as a vigorous opponent of the deflationary policies known as ‘monetarism’ and of the widening social inequality associated with Thatcherism. But in the second half of the 1970s, while Labour was grappling with the most difficult economic situation since the austerity years after the Second World War, Brown was making his mark in Scottish politics, and attracting the attention of future Labour leaders. While still an undergraduate, Brown had delivered leaflets for during the 1970 election campaign. Cook had lost Edinburgh North, and in 1974 was contesting Edinburgh Central, which he won. The February election of 1974 brought Labour back to power, but without an overall majority. The October election gave it a small overall majority of four. In both campaigns Gordon Brown canvassed for Cook, who at 28 was five years his senior. The October 1974 election brought 11 members of the (SNP) to Westminster. Scottish nationalism was on the rise, and both the SNP and the Liberals were in favour of . In the end, James Callaghan, who took over as Prime Minister after Harold Wilson resigned in , had to give in to pressure for devolution in order to survive, such was the fragility of his majority. Callaghan was fighting on many fronts. Labour had inherited a rapidly deteriorating inflationary situation from Heath, and the inflationary trend was severely exacerbated by the ‘oil shock’ of 1974^75. The financial markets had lost confidence in sterling: Callaghan and his Chancellor were trying in 1976 to negotiate with the International Monetary Fund and to bring inflation (which averaged 24.2% in 1975) and public spending under control. Although the majority of Labour MPs were against devolution for Scotland, the promise of concessions to the devolutionists was the only way Callaghan could, by pacifying the Liberals and SNP, preserve his majority. In 1975 Gordon Brown had ridden the rising tide of the Scottish devolution movement by editing The Red Paper on

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Scotland, described by one biographer as ‘a collection of essays which was meant to be the socialist prospectus for a new Scotland’.18 In his introduction, The Socialist Challenge, he urged ‘the Labour Movement in Scotland’ to draw up ‘a coherent strategy with rhythm and modality to each reform to cancel the logic of capitalism’ (sic). There should be ‘phased extension of public control under workers’ self-management’. He criticised the SNP for policies that ‘reject class warfare’. He complained that it was ‘increasingly impossible to manage the economy both for private profit and the needs of society as a whole’. At this stage in his career he was working on his PhD thesis, The Labour Party and Political Change in Scotland, 1918^29, a study that was not completed until 1982 but which was already involving his emotions in the idealism and desire to change society of the early socialists. But he complained in the Red Paper that had altered over the years from a ‘moral imperative’ to a position where ‘Today, for many it means little more than a scheme for compensating the least fortunate in an unequal society’ ^ a quotation, ironically, which probably reflected the disappointment of Old or ‘real’ Labour supporters three decades later with the performance of the Blair=Brown governments. In 1976, while temporarily lecturing in politics at the University, Brown became prospective Labour candidate for Edinburgh South, at the age of 25. From 1976 to 1980 Gordon Brown commuted between Edinburgh and Glasgow, where he lectured at the Glasgow College of Technology for the Workers’ Educational Association. His lectures were on politics and Labour history, dovetailing neatly with his other academic task of those years, the long haul to complete his PhD thesis on the historical relationship between the trade unions and the Party. The admirer and student of the ‘Clydesiders’ of the 1920s and 1930s was now actively becoming a quintessential ‘machine’ politician himself. One biographer described him as devolution’s ‘leading advocate’,19 so it was perhaps not surprising that the energetic Scottish champion of the cause that was both constraining the Callaghan government and enabling it to hang on should have

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been made Chairman of the Scottish Labour Party’s Devolution Committee (in 1978). The man for whom he had campaigned several times, Robin Cook, was against devolution at the time and actively campaigning on the other side. John Smith was the Minister handling the devolution policy for Callaghan from the in . As James Naughtie has put it, ‘The agonies of the Callaghan government quickly matured Brown and a generation of young Scottish politicians.’20 And (Brown’s biographer) observes: ‘He was only 27, yet here he was in charge of delivering a central plank of Labour government policy for Scotland.’21 When the Labour Party returned to office in 1974 it had been against devolution. The rise of the SNP and Labour’s knife-edge majority in the Commons had changed the official policy but not the views of all Labour MPs. George Cunningham, MP for South West but a Scot, had successfully inserted into the 1977 Scotland Bill a clause requiring that, in the proposed referendum, 40% of the Scottish electorate, not just 40% of those turning out to vote, should approve the plan for a devolved assembly. The Scottish Labour Party was split and there was much disillusionment with the Callaghan government after the 1978^79 ‘’ (involving strikes and the breakdown of a government-imposed that had been aimed, with some success, at reducing inflation). Passions ran deep but there was something half-hearted about the campaign, with prominent Labour MPs such as and the rising star making trips to Scotland to oppose devolution. Brown was on a losing wicket and so was the Callaghan government. Only one-third of the electorate voted for devolution. After the result, the Conservatives, supported by the Liberals and SNP, called a vote of No Confidence in the Callaghan government, which the government lost. Mrs Thatcher and the Conservatives won the consequent general election of 3 May 1979. Thus, the immediate cause of the demise of the Callaghan government was not the ‘Winter of Discontent’ but the failure of its proposals for devolution. But in popular folklore it has become the former.

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Nevertheless, the Opposition was able to capitalise on the economic problems of Labour and to promise lower taxes into the bargain. Despite the fact that it had made serious efforts to come to grips with public expenditure and inflation after the loss of confidence which forced it to borrow from the International Monetary Fund in 1976, the Callaghan government was tired. Indeed, it can be argued that the sheer effort of trying to run the economy in those very difficult times made it almost inevitable that the Labour government would run out of steam. It is an ill wind that blows no losing politician any good. Labour lost the 1979 election, and Gordon Brown, aged 28 and standing for the first time, failed to win Edinburgh South, but he had already had a walk-on part on the Westminster stage, done his loyal best for the devolution Minister John Smith ^ who became his mentor ^ and attracted the attention of the man who was to be a leader when he finally arrived in Parliament in 1983. Neil Kinnock recalled: ‘He was on the other side from me on devolution, but we agreed on all other matters. He was a very bright, very pleasant young chap, with views close to mine on political questions. I would not claim him as a prote¤ge¤,butIwas pretty determined to ensure that I would give him any assistance I could.’22 In the Red Paper of 1975, Brown had indicated that he was not necessarily averse to the break-up of the UK. Robin Cook subsequently argued that Labour could not counteract the nationalist surge with a kind of ‘third-way’ solution. A close observer at the time commented that Brown’s support for the Callaghan government’s compromise devolution proposals showed that ‘there is a very, very powerful thread of pragmatism in Gordon Brown’s character ... [a] willingness to compromise in pursuit of a bigger objective.’ The speaker drew a parallel with the prudent ‘fiscal constraints’ that Brown adopted ‘willingly’ in the run-up to the 1997 general election ‘to abolish Labour’s tax-and-spend image and ensure victory.’23 We shall in due course examine whether that later episode of prudent pragmatism was in fact necessary. The pragmatism of the budding machine politician in the 1979 election campaign was

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shown by the way the young candidate, who was supported by a trade union, went out of his way to dismiss fashionable suggestions for taming the unions. ‘What we require is agreement and consultation, not legislative confrontation,’ he insisted.24 An interesting foretaste of the future Chancellor’s prudence was apparent in a statement he made on the eve of the ‘No Confidence’ vote. At a time when Labour was considered ‘soft’ on inflation and many non-monetarist economists considered the fight against unemployment to be more important than the fight against inflation, Brown said that a ‘No Confidence’ vote against the Callaghan government ‘would do nothing but harm to the fight against unemployment and inflation’25 (author’s italics). The Callaghan government had of course been fighting inflation ^ having reached a terrifying peak of 26.9% in August 1975, the rate fell to around 10% at the time of the 1979 election; but an attempt by Chancellor Denis Healey to impose a 5% ceiling on pay rises had proved too ambitious for the Labour Party’s paymasters, the trade unions. For all the earlier travails with inflation, with excessive public spending and with the financial markets and the IMF, Labour and the economy made a remarkable recovery in 1977 and 1978. Callaghan had hinted that there might be an October election. We shall never know what the result would have been, but many political analysts thought that the government was at least in with a chance. It was downhill all the way after the decision to postpone the election. Commenting on the defeat on 3 May 1979, Callaghan observed, ‘I’ll tell you what happened. We lost the election because people didn’t get their dustbins emptied, because commuters were angry about train disruption and because of too much trade union power. That’s all there is to it.’26 That had all happened during the so-called ‘Winter of Discontent’ that followed the October 1978 decision not to call a widely expected election. The myth has grown up that after the Thatcher government was elected on 3 May 1979 the British economy was magically transformed. But if it was indeed transformed ^ a thesis which is eminently contestable ^ this was a long time after 1979.

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The Conservatives arrived with a na|«ve belief in the magical powers of monetarism (control of the money supply) to defeat inflation. They took some bizarre decisions, including the near-doubling of VAT (from 8% to 15%), which had an immediate impact on the retail prices index. Within a year the rate of inflation had doubled, to 21.9% in May 1980. Until the of April 1982, Mrs Thatcher was the most unpopular Prime Minister since records began. To double both the rate of inflation and the level of unemployment was a difficult achievement, but Mrs Thatcher and her colleagues managed it. This constituted a remarkable rise in what economists call the ‘misery index’; and until the Falklands War the economic incompetence of the government exerted a far greater influence on the government’s popularity than the leftward march of the Labour Party, which was led by but heavily influenced by the strategy of and other left-wingers. The latter managed to increase the dominance of the extreme left via constitutional and procedural changes at both local and national level. I myself knew of a number of people who tried to enter Labour Party politics at the time but who were driven frantic by the spider’s web of arcane procedural rules, which was turning the Party into a kind of politburo. More basic, old-fashioned ‘machine’ politics were operating north of the border. Gordon Brown had become a member of the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU) in 1976; the TGWU was the power behind the Labour organisation in the new constituency of Dunfermline East, and also the biggest union in the local dockyard, which was in turn the biggest industrial employer in the whole of Scotland. Gordon Brown demonstrated all the natural political operator’s skills in the way he used his TGWU connections to weave his way into being adopted at the eleventh hour as parliamentary Labour candidate for the of Dunfermline East. He was good ^ he had become Chairman of the Scottish Labour Party earlier in 1983 ^ but safe seats do not descend from Heaven, even for the sons of Presbyterian Ministers. His talent was spotted by the TGWU and he made the most of their discovery. His fellow Scots at the time noted

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A PRUDENT BACKGROUND

that his approach to politics was becoming increasingly pragmatic ^ ‘He used to vote all over the place as his conscience dictated. Now he votes according to block considerations. He realises you can’t operate as an individual, however bright, in the Labour Party,’ a colleague observed at the time.27 While he was climbing further up the ladder of Scottish politics between the elections of 1979 and 1983, Gordon Brown also worked during most of that period for Scottish Television as a producer, journalist and current affairs editor. These were years when he honed his skills in the ‘sound-bites’ so beloved of New Labour in power 15 years later. ‘Social justice for consumers’ would be an apt summary of What’s Your Problem?, a weekly programme he edited. Rigs to Riches was what he called a programme about tax- dodging companies. On the eve of the 1983 election Brown gave a foretaste of his approach-to-come when he accused the Thatcher government of a ‘Watergate-style cover-up’, saying that Mrs Thatcher had ordered the destruction of documents outlining plans for cuts in social security benefits. (This concerned a study which, based on an unusually low assumption for the economy’s trend growth rate, indicated that the burden of future state pensions would be phenomenal. It was ‘destroyed’ because it offered Labour a chance to say that the was ‘not safe in the Conservative hands’.) But unemployment was the issue that most concerned the Brown family ^ father and sons: it was on Labour’s plans to cut unemployment from 3 million to 1 million in five years that Brown campaigned. Brownian prudence was seen in the way the candidate promised a ‘strong’ increase in public spending but also a ‘measured’ one. The Labour Party manifesto on which he campaigned promised exit from the European Economic Community, unilateral (the Rosyth dockyard in Brown’s constituency worked on Polaris nuclear submarines), extensive intervention in industry and the imposition of import controls. Intriguingly, Tony Benn, by far the biggest influence on the manifesto, confessed in his his view that ‘The wouldn’t implement it if they were elected.’

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THE PRUDENCE OF MR GORDON BROWN

As if the manifesto were not bad enough, the Labour Party vote was also seriously eroded by the breakaway Social Democrats (led by Roy Jenkins and ), who took a lot of disaffected Labour supporters with them. But then, it was because of the leftward shift of Labour that the SDP had been formed. Biographer Routledge notes that at a 1981 meeting of the Labour Party’s Scottish Executive, ‘Brown was the only speaker to state the obvious fact that winning the support of voters must be the overriding priority.’ Perhaps this ought to have been an ‘obvious fact’, but it was not obvious to many of the left-wingers dominating the Labour Party at the time. For them it would have been an important shift in policy.28 This was Brown the moderniser speaking. After his personal election victory in June 1983 he could fly down to London and join the effort to rescue the Party. But he could not possibly have known how long that effort would take.

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