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The future for Britain's PM-in-waiting

Andrew Rawnsley

Finally Gordon Brown is alone at the top after the extraordinary years of the double act. He must use his freedom carefully.

— PHOTO: AFP

AN ERA ENDS: A picture dated March 5, 2007, shows Prime Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown leaving 10 Downing Street after a press conference.

SAY WHAT you like — or don't — about Tony Blair, he has always been superb at choreography, a maestro of the entrances and exits of politics. On the night of his first landslide victory, he did not rush straight to the stage when he arrived among the ecstatic throng partying on London's South Bank. He waited in an anteroom at the Royal Festival Hall in order to time his appearance before the crowd so that the sun would be rising over the Thames just as he delivered the line "a new dawn has broken."

As at the sunrise, so at its setting. He tried to squeeze every last drop of dramatic juice out of his resignation statement. Flying north of London to make the speech in Trimdon, he created a reverse echo of the journey he took in the small hours of the morning when he had just been elected as Prime Minister. The speech he delivered to the Labour Club in his constituency was classic Third Way Blair.

He was simultaneously defiant and apologetic, aggrandising and self-deprecating, authentic and manipulative, rueful and proud as he defended his record while acknowledging that many were disappointed by it. It reminded us again what a consummate performance we have witnessed over the past decade.

There was a brief and dry-eyed meeting of the Cabinet beforehand at which the outgoing Prime Minister amused some of his colleagues by reassuring them that when he got to Trimdon Labour club he would indeed announce a timetable for his departure — a joke especially intended for the benefit of Gordon Brown.

Twenty four hours later, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and Prime Minister-all-but-elect was standing before us at a design centre in London to offer a striking contrast with the man he will succeed. After a decade of covertly and not so covertly campaigning for Number 10, the Chancellor is now liberated to be open about his ambitions for himself and his plans for the country. After all those frustrating years spent kicking the furniture in the waiting room, there is no doubt that he will take over once Mr. Blair has made his farewell call on the Queen on June 27.

There may or may not be a token challenge from the Campaign Group left. Either way, it will be road-kill for the Brown juggernaut.

As a witness to his campaign launch, I thought it showed further evidence that he has been successfully working on himself to sound less lecturing and domineering and more accessible and conversational. He had a new haircut and a more relaxed smile. Rightly, his speech did not look inward to the Labour party. He sought to reach outward to the country that he will soon be leading. The style was fine; there was sufficient substance for the moment. With seven weeks to go before he takes over at Number 10, he will not want to play all his cards at once. But it was one of those occasions that proves the rule that you haven't properly experienced a political event unless you have seen it on television. It looked bad on TV because of the basic presentational error of allowing Mr. Brown's face obscured by an autocue so that he appeared to be addressing the nation from the other side of frosted glass.

He will never be as accomplished at the performance arts of politics as Mr. Blair has been. What some will regard as an obstacle, Mr. Brown will try to flip into a virtue. "I have never believed presentation should be a substitute for policy," he told us. Just in case we didn't see what and who he was getting at, he added: "I do not believe politics is about celebrity."

Extraordinary partnership

Mr. Brown and Mr. Blair have been each other's foils now for a decade. We are witnesses not just to the end of a premiership, but to the finale of an extraordinary double-act. For all the turbulence of their relationship, they have been twinned at the top for longer than any other Prime Minister and Chancellor in nearly two centuries.

They have been the Jacob and Esau, the Lennon and McCartney, the alpha and omega of this government. For more than a decade, this relationship has transfixed the political world as it has obsessed the two men themselves. They have probably thought about each other more than they have their own wives. This extraordinary duelling duo have been each other's best friends, bitterest rivals, worst enemies, most useful sounding boards, and sharpest goads. It has been a partnership both fantastically productive and incredibly destructive. Some of the Blairites have already made up their minds that Mr. Brown cannot win the next general election. Some of the most ardent Brownites can see almost nothing good in the departing Prime Minister.

I reckon their feelings for each other are much more complicated, a tangle of fascination and frustration, loathing and admiration. Mr. Brown has paid generous tribute to Mr. Blair's achievements as a leader. Mr. Blair returned the compliments by finally giving an unequivocal endorsement to the Chancellor as his successor. In a funny sort of way, I think they were both being sincere.

Much has been written, not least by myself, about the damage done to this government by their feuds — the sapping of morale and unity, the squandering of energy and purpose, the poisoning of relationships as Number 10 and the Treasury turned into warring camps between TB and GB.

But even their struggles could have a beneficial political effect for the government. As the two men battled it out over the euro or public services, they marginalised the Tories by making it seem like all the significant arguments were being conducted within the government. They have been each other's alibis for failure and each other's shields in a crisis. Mr. Brown's increases in taxes on the middle classes were softened by Mr. Blair's ability to appeal to them. The crash in Mr. Blair's personal standing caused by the Iraq war would have been more disastrous for the government had it not been for the prosperity presided over by Mr. Brown.

A double-act will now become a solo performance. Mr. Brown will be alone at the top, a wholly novel and bracing experience for both himself and the country. The bipolar world of Mr. Blair and Mr. Brown will be replaced by the unipolar world of Mr. Brown alone.

To an extent, of course, he will still not entirely escape being defined in relation to the man he replaces. To a degree, he will seek definition from the contrasts he strikes with Mr. Blair from the hints of a different approach to foreign policy to the suggestion of changes in the way we are governed.

He talked little about his own record at his campaign launch and repeatedly about the "new challenges" which would face "a new government" as if he had temporarily forgotten that he has been Chancellor for a decade.

Ambiguity of national mood

Getting this calibration right is complicated by the complexity and ambiguity of the national mood. The pollsters tell us that the country is hugely disappointed after 10 years of Mr. Blair. The voters have just administered a severe beating to Labour in a real ballot. And yet, at the same time, pollsters also tell us that a majority of the country think that Mr. Blair has been a good Prime Minister overall.

Mr. Brown will want to be both a break with the things people don't like about Mr. Blair and a continuation of what people did like about Mr. Blair. So he went out of his way to say: "I was one of the founders of New Labour with Tony Blair." The first day of his campaign swung among the swing voters in marginal constituencies in the south of England, the seats such as Basildon and Stevenage that Labour must hold on to have a chance of winning a fourth election.

In much less clement weather than the sunshine which greeted this government in 1997, Mr. Brown has to try to reconstruct the electoral coalition that won power for Labour in the first place. The Prime Minister-presumptive speaks of wanting to create a "government of all the talents." He promises to "listen and learn," his cover version of an old Blair tune. Cabinet colleagues laugh cynically and scan the skies for squadrons of flying pigs when they hear Mr. Brown pledging to run a "humble" government that seeks "consensus." Humility and consensuality have not been the hallmarks of the way he has treated his colleagues over the past decade. Seeing will be believing. What he is trying to do — what he has to do if Labour is to win the next election — is to re-erect the "Big Tent" that won them power in the first place.

"I want a debate across the country about our constitutional arrangements," remarked Mr. Brown, an ambitious conversational gambit with Britain. Whether most of the country wants to join in is another matter.

Being a political anorak myself, I am extremely interested in his ideas for increasing the accountability of those with power over us. It's a good idea to publish a draft legislative programme for consultation in advance of the Queen's Speech. We need a better ministerial code. I'm engaged with the idea of giving to the Commons some of the powers over war and peace and public appointments that is wielded by the American Congress. The challenge will be to make constitutional reform matter to people who are neither anoraks nor Liberal Democrats. The ungilded slogan of his campaign tour — "Gordon Brown for Britain" — is illustrative of an approach that will be consciously more austere.

For our edification, Mr. Brown proudly displays the "moral compass" that he says he inherited from his parents. It is evidently imperative for him to address the sleazy reputation that this government has acquired over the Blair years. Along with Iraq and spin, sleaze has been the big corroder of trust in this government. I offer this caution to him. While he has try to present himself as a clean skin, he needs to take care that he doesn't make promises that will come back to mock him. Mr. Blair once foolishly claimed that his government would be "purer than pure" — a phrase for which he has been ceaselessly jeered ever since he failed to learn the lessons of the Ecclestone affair. There never has been an administration of saints. All governments have their scandals. A Brown cabinet will be most unusual if its moral compass is always pointing true.

Broken dreams

Many of the political epitaphs of Mr. Blair have concentrated on the dashed hopes and broken dreams of the past 10 years. The man himself now acknowledges that 'great expectations' were aroused which were "too high."

Mr. Brown has this problem in reverse. Expectations of this government are now extremely low. When the voters develop a poor opinion of the capacity of government to deliver, they tend to vote for less of it. That is the opportunity that the Tories will seek to exploit. That is the fundamental challenge that Mr. Brown must conquer. He must do so without the man with whom he has been so tempestuously and successfully partnered for so many years. Mr. Brown is now totally free. And he is very alone. He's going to get the absolute power he always wanted — and with it all the incredible responsibility.

— © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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