My Life, Our Times Read online

  I was born about forty years before the World Wide Web, and arrived in Parliament twenty years before the advent of Twitter. During my time as an MP I never mastered the capacity to leave a good impression or sculpt my public image in 140 characters. It is impossible to imagine Clement Attlee – notoriously terse and unforthcoming, yet the power behind Labour’s transformation of Britain in the years 1945 to 1951 – remotely fitting in as a politician in our Internet age. Nor perhaps Margaret Thatcher, whose appeal was based on her determination and her ideology. Despite her strategists’ best efforts to present her as the housewife balancing the nation’s family budget, her stock-in-trade was her near-dogmatic certainty that she was right. I met Lady Thatcher on a number of occasions, and the very idea that she could contain her thoughts to 140 characters is preposterous. The Lady was not for tweeting. But I should have been.

  Today’s social-media focus on the ‘me’ and the ‘now’ may be obscuring a vital truth and another lesson I discuss in the pages that follow: that a leader succeeds only if he or she creates a talented and effective team. No matter the spin, leaders cannot succeed as a one-man – or one-woman – band, and they will fail unless those around them are convinced that they are working in a worthwhile cause.

  One of the memorabilia in No. 10 is a piece of moon rock gifted by the Americans, and when I spoke to my staff I often highlighted John F. Kennedy’s visit to what is now called the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where he asked everyone there what they did. He talked to an engineer, a research scientist, a manager and several astronauts. Then he came to a lady who happened to be the cleaner. He asked her what she did. ‘I’m helping put a man on the moon,’ she proudly replied. She had been captivated by a strong sense of what a group of people could achieve by working together. And where I succeeded, I did so – and did so only – thanks to a loyal, dedicated and hard-working team, and the team spirit and sense of common purpose that we built.

  My purpose in politics was getting things done. I start in the pages that follow with a description of an ordinary day in the life of a prime minister in office, and a scene-setting account of the forces at work that necessitated, challenged and complicated the work that we did.

  In the subsequent chapters, I discuss how, during our time in government, we tried to reach for what Sarah called ‘the high-hanging fruit’ – tax credits to eradicate family poverty; Sure Start and Child Trust Funds to give every child the right to the best start in life; the New Deal on jobs to renew the idea of a full-employment Britain; the refinancing of the then down-at-heel but precious NHS; the pension credit to ensure even the poorest pensioner has dignity and security in retirement; and radical changes that, in different but often complementary ways, Tony Blair and I pioneered to drive opportunity in education and make our public services personal services too.

  I write frankly about the tragic conflict and the post-conflict tragedy in Iraq, and the long and endlessly frustrating intervention in Afghanistan. I write too of the challenges of writing off unpayable African debt, of creating a G20 group of world leaders to revive the world economy, and of striving to deliver the radical changes I saw – and still see – as fundamental to the global financial order.

  Where in my life and our times I made a difference, and where I fell short, is for the reader to decide.

  INTRODUCTION

  You do not usually wake up to news of four deaths of people for whom you feel responsibility; or to a newspaper allegation that you are corrupt; or to a denunciation by a predecessor.

  Friday 8 May 2009 might seem at first sight an unusual day. It was tragic. But such were the dramas and controversies in my three years as prime minister that it was not so out of the ordinary: it was just part of the messy, untidy tapestry that defines the work of modern government and, in the case of a country permanently at war from 2001 to 2014, inevitably heart-rending too.

  As was normal, I got up at around 5 a.m. and, as I tried to do on as many weekdays as possible, I ran for half an hour on the treadmill I had installed in the Downing Street flat we occupied at No. 11.

  Before 6 a.m. I was at my desk in the downstairs, open-plan office we had created in No. 12 Downing Street. The No. 10 clerks brought me breakfast from Downing Street’s basement café. I found throughout my thirteen years as chancellor and prime minister that an early start was the best way to prepare for the long day ahead. I used the time before the staff arrived to organise my thoughts for speeches, articles and the succession of meetings that usually occupied every hour of the working day when I was in No. 10 and the Treasury. Or, if I was about to travel on a visit out into the country or overseas, I could use the time to leave instructions on what needed to be done.

  While I used a small private office to entertain visitors, I preferred to work from a desk surrounded by the private secretaries and political advisers. And that morning I was typing out changes and corrections to two important speeches I would make the following Monday and Tuesday. A speech was, for me, usually the culmination of a hundred drafts constantly rewritten, updated and refined. On Monday, I would speak in Harrogate to the Royal College of Nursing Congress – I would be the first prime minister to address that prestigious nursing conference – and on Tuesday I would speak on law and order, and launch the next wave of our partnerships between the police and the public aimed at cutting crime. No Labour prime minister could be silent for long on how we sought to improve on our party’s greatest achievement – the NHS, the most-loved institution of our country. And no prime minister of any party could fail to reinforce the message on law and order that the first duty of government was the security of the people.

  But nothing can ever prepare you for what I was about to be told.

  To end the previous day reading a note that there had been yet another death in the eight-year-old war in Afghanistan was wrenching enough. But to start the next day being told we had lost three more men in two further attacks – miles apart from each other in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province – was not only heartbreaking: it was so shocking that they needed a full inquiry and explanation.

  Sergeant Sean Binnie, who had been shot early on the Thursday, was from the Black Watch, 3rd Battalion, the Royal Regiment of Scotland. He had attended school in my home town of Kirkcaldy. I had gone to bed thinking of his wife who had just received the news of her husband’s death at 4.15 that afternoon, and of a Scottish family who had lost their son. He had died from an enemy gunshot wound in a firefight near Musa Qala, a Taliban stronghold that we were now trying to control.

  As the hours passed, further notes were put before me – tragic news from the front that three more brave men had died. I was to be told later that two soldiers – Sergeant Ben Ross of the Royal Military Police and Corporal Kumar Pun from the Gurkhas – had been murdered by a suicide bomber the night before while on routine patrol miles away in Gereshk. And late that Thursday evening, in yet another part of the province of Helmand – just outside a key stronghold, Sangin, where we had been taking heavy losses – a fourth soldier, Rifleman Adrian Sheldon, was blown up by the most common weapon the Taliban were deploying to murderous effect: an improvised explosive device which had been planted on the road ahead of the Jackal vehicle he was driving.

  I recalled what the then Defence Secretary had said three years before, when we first moved in to protect Helmand: that we might leave without ever a shot being fired. Sadly, the opposite had happened: Helmand had turned into a killing field. Less than a month later, on 6 June 2009, I had these sacrifices in mind when I spoke on Normandy beach, with presidents Barack Obama and Nicolas Sarkozy, in commemoration of the sixty-fifth anniversary of D-Day. I was addressing our Afghan and Iraq heroes as well as our Second World War ones when I said that ‘the threads of your lives … are already woven into the fabric of the world’. The losses hurt even more because we had left Iraq permanently a week earlier and were hoping that, with the end of one war and the redirection of resources to Afghanistan, we would begin to see a reduction
in fatalities. In fact, we were to lose 456 of our best soldiers in Afghanistan by October 2015.

  War seemed always with us. Lady Eden said of the Suez conflict in 1956, when we were up against President Nasser’s Egypt, that she sometimes felt as if the Suez Canal was flowing through the No. 10 drawing room. During the three years I was prime minister, Lashkar Gah, Musa Qala, Kandahar, Sangin, Marjah and Nad-e Ali were names I woke up to most mornings as news of casualties on the Afghan front flowed in. Almost every day in the three years from June 2007 was filled with reports of death or woundings, raids or bombings, ebbs and flows – but mainly the ebbs of a conflict that even the mightiest armies of the world could not bring to a successful conclusion.

  That day, as I digested the latest news I felt nauseous: I thought of the families across Britain – mothers, fathers, wives, sons and daughters – who were about to receive a visit; of the moment when the doorbell rings and they already sense the terrible news they are about to be told. I thought of the sheer chaos of war – the mud, the scratched gravel paths, the exposed roads that I myself had travelled on during many visits to the quagmire Afghanistan had become. Going through my head were the images of those dedicated young men, getting up that day, with no sense of the fate that would befall them. And then you think of their colleagues, now grieving because they will never see their friends again, but who have to dust themselves down and continue to put their own lives at risk. War is always grim and never truly glorious. And it is impossible to separate two emotions: the pride you have in the service our forces have given to the nation, and the sense of obligation you feel to ensure that young lives have not been sacrificed in vain.

  We were at a delicate point in the Afghan war. Having identified the critical border between Afghanistan and Pakistan as the ‘epicentre of world terrorism’, we were waiting on an American decision by President Obama on a new troop surge in that area. An email I was reading that morning from Tom Fletcher, my diligent and highly intelligent foreign affairs private secretary, set out how we would prepare the ground with Pakistan’s new president, Asif Ali Zardari, Benazir Bhutto’s widower.

  But, just at this point, I was also having to rebut an allegation by the Daily Telegraph. The night before, I had been alerted to questions from the Telegraph about a new series they were doing on MP’s expenses. Until I saw the first editions, with the front-page photos of my brother and me under the headline ‘The Truth About the Cabinet’s Expenses’, I did not know the full gist of their allegations. It turned out to be a fabricated charge that I was claiming House of Commons expenses to pay cash to my brother under the guise of submitting bills for cleaning my flat. The Telegraph had not bothered to check the real facts in the claims forms given to them by their whistle-blower: that all the money had gone to the cleaner; that these were expenses solely for cleaning my flat; and that all my brother and I had done was join together to pay her one lump sum to make sure she had enough overall income – when our two payments were taken together – to qualify for National Insurance and a state pension. There was nothing untoward in what we had done and everything we did was to keep our cleaner within the law.

  The expenses crisis had been a slow-burner. Its roots lay in the Freedom of Information Act 2000, and the requirement that came into force in 2005 on public authorities to divulge, if asked, where money had been spent. With its introduction came the inevitable request for disclosure of MP’s expenses claims – what was received to cover food, accommodation and travel when on official business away from home. There had been court actions and parliamentary debates, including an attempt I had made to impose tougher new rules which MPs foolishly voted down. However, just as the authorities were preparing to release more information in the summer of 2009, the Telegraph was offered a computer disc containing the full files, with further details, paying £110,000 to a whistle-blower. There then followed an entirely justifiable outpouring of public anger about out-of-touch and, in some cases, corrupt MPs who had let the country down.

  After more than a quarter of a century in Westminster politics that had seen everything from suicides to sex scandals and stories of money in brown paper envelopes being passed to MPs in exchange for asking parliamentary questions, it was hard to be surprised any more. Yet, as the scale of wrongdoing by MPs on their expenses claims dawned on me, I felt angry and ashamed.

  That morning I had in my email inbox a note done at midnight after a phone around of members of the Cabinet. We had asked them to agree to publish their complete expenses claims immediately. Most were happy to, but because two or three objected it was impossible to go ahead.

  Some say that as prime minister I should not have been so deeply involved in what was a matter for the whole Commons and not just the government. But I was stunned by some of the over-the-top claims MPs had made. This new scandal went to the heart of an already threadbare trust in politics.

  The Telegraph’s article about me, however false, was a distraction on a morning when my attention was on the fallen soldiers. You think that you can put the episode down to politics – a right-wing paper choosing to hit at you simply because you are a Labour prime minister – and indeed that morning, as I flicked through the pages of the Telegraph, I found an opinion column carrying a highly personal attack on me from John Major. But it all leaves a terrible taste. Suddenly you must be on guard. My wife Sarah had inadvertently submitted the same receipt twice – making a double claim on a quarterly electricity bill. The money had immediately been paid back but the story also threatened to be headline news. In the atmosphere that was about to pervade Westminster, a small oversight could be magnified into a major offence.

  At my instruction, members of my team spent most of Friday retrieving obscure documents to prove we were telling the truth about expenses claims that had been submitted years before. We even had to contact the cleaner, who had long since left our employment, and check her contract and National Insurance registration. We had to show that, while originally from the Philippines, she was a British citizen paying tax and National Insurance. Yet, whatever steps you take to clear your name, the mud sticks and the damage is done.

  Keen to see an immediate correction of the Telegraph’s story, I asked to speak to its editor, Will Lewis. By the time the call from him came through I was on a train headed for Bradford. I was standing in the cramped space between two carriages that were bouncing up and down as passengers squeezed by on their way to the buffet bar. It seemed absurd that I was having to clear my name on a mobile phone halfway up the line to Yorkshire. I asked why I was the person they were choosing to target when there was nothing untoward in what I had done. ‘It’s because you’re prime minister,’ he said. ‘We had to start at the top.’ ‘Even if there’s nothing wrong?’ I replied. They had to back down. On Sunday, an editorial in the Telegraph’s sister paper carried the headline ‘Gordon Brown: no suggestion of impropriety’. On Monday, they had to publish a grudging correction described as a ‘clarification’.

  I was travelling to Bradford to be present at the unveiling of a memorial in honour of Sharon Beshenivsky, a local police officer who had been fatally shot at the scene of an armed robbery in 2005, aged only thirty-eight. In front of a large crowd which had assembled in the open air, I paid tribute to her as ‘a wonderful wife, a wonderful mother, a wonderful servant of the community, a courageous woman’. Events as poignant as this move you to tears – the sacrifice of heroes like Sharon and the pain and resilience of the family she had left behind who were now struggling to get by. It was one of the most emotional moments of my prime ministership. The crowd fell silent when Sharon’s ten-year-old son was introduced by his father and said he knew his mother ‘would be very proud’.

  I recall many instances of pride and emotion during the years I was in government. Almost all of them involved people who would consider themselves ordinary members of the public who had done extraordinary things. Families of the war dead came to Downing Street and Sarah and I talked with them about their losses.
One or two had set up charities in honour of their loved ones and we tried to support their efforts. I recall too meeting cancer patients with only weeks to live who had asked to see me because they were determined to press for improvements in the treatment of others and so give meaning to the last days of their lives.

  Some time before, I had visited one of the oldest surviving First World War veterans on the day of his hundredth birthday. He had been in the trenches at the age of seventeen and gassed in 1917. He had outlived all his children. And I will never forget the look I saw on the faces of those who were given long-overdue veterans’ medals for their service in the armed forces. In my time in office I presented hundreds of such medals and had written a book of essays, Wartime Courage, that celebrated heroism and raised money for veterans’ charities. The Bevin Boys – young men conscripted to work in the coal mines after 1943 – were also recognised, the first official acknowledgement of what they had done for their country. Perhaps most moving of all was the joyous reaction of now elderly women, who in the Second World War had served in the Women’s Land Army, coming to Downing Street to finally receive medals that honoured a unique but previously unheralded contribution during ‘our finest hour’.

  If my visit to Bradford had been to commemorate and honour the past, my next visit of the day to another Yorkshire city, Sheffield, was all about the future – performing the opening ceremonies for some of our newest educational investments: an academy school and a Sure Start children’s centre. My good friend Ed Balls, our dynamic and reforming Children’s Secretary, himself an MP for a Yorkshire constituency who had worked with me since my days as shadow chancellor, was present for both. Before formally opening the £27 million new academy in Sheffield, I walked in on a GCSE maths class – joking about the training I might have benefited from in their subject before being chancellor – and then chatted to pupils during their art lessons and watched budding musicians in the school’s recording studio. After this, visiting the superbly equipped play facilities at the Aughton Early Years Centre, Ed and I marked the opening of what was now the 3,000th Sure Start children’s centre under our government. I talked of the ‘real and lasting impact they can have on families by providing them with services which can transform children’s lives’.