My Life, Our Times Read online

  On my way out of the city, I visited one of Sheffield’s oldest businesses, Sheffield Forgemasters, whose steel-exporting business was threatened by the recession. The night before, Christina Scott, an incredibly diligent private secretary who went on to become governor of Anguilla, had sent me an email which summed up the state of the steel industry: ‘Corus’s Teesside plant is under threat from closure, with an announcement as early as tomorrow, with the potential loss of up to 3,000 jobs (and up to 8,000 in the supply chain).’ Luckily, we managed to head off these redundancies but only until December that year. I was, however, able to offer Forgemasters an £80 million government loan, a lifeline later rescinded by the incoming coalition government.

  As I travelled back from Sheffield, I read another email prepared that afternoon by Tom Fletcher about talks the next week involving all the Northern Irish parties, as well as the Taoiseach, Brian Cowen. The Good Friday Agreement was a historic achievement delivered, to his great and enduring credit, by Tony Blair. But in spite of the peace settlement – and perhaps also because of it – Northern Ireland was on the prime minister’s desk every day, every week and every month, and even ten years on it was a never-ending negotiation.

  Progress on the devolution of policing and justice – the final part of the Northern Ireland peace process – had stalled. While Westminster had legislated for the transfer of powers to a new justice ministry, the parties could not agree on who was to be the minister. The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) had dug in and said they would never allow Sinn Féin to occupy the Justice Ministry. This blanket rejection put the whole agreement in jeopardy. After a period of successful cooperation between the First Minister Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness, the Deputy First Minister, the new First Minister Peter Robinson and McGuinness rarely talked. Just a few weeks before, in March, at Massereene Barracks, two off-duty British soldiers had been shot dead and four people were seriously wounded. This tragic and depressing outbreak of violence reminded me once again of what Churchill had said nearly a century before: that God is always crying over Ireland. We knew that while officially the men of violence were reported to be in the low hundreds, the real figure was closer to 1,000. Shaun Woodward, our ever-vigilant and effective Northern Ireland Secretary, feared that, amid recriminations and bitterness at the top, Northern Ireland was descending yet again into ungovernability. In our view, the first step away from this was for the Alliance Party to take the Justice Ministry. My task was to lead all parties towards an agreement on this.

  I knew the negotiating formula from my time as chancellor. As usual, if there was to be a deal, everything had to be agreed, or nothing was agreed. Matters already on the agenda included – from the DUP – a new Parades Commission, a gratuity for thousands of part-time Reserves in the Royal Ulster Constabulary, a Police Museum and a bailout of the crisis-hit Presbyterian Mutual building society. And – from Sinn Féin – there were demands for a new Bill of Rights, support for the Irish language and pardons for past offences.

  The DUP negotiating tactic was one I was familiar with. When I met Peter Robinson, he would say, ‘But have you talked to Nigel Dodds? He has some real worries.’ And then when I met Nigel Dodds, the deputy leader, he would say, ‘You have to talk to Jeffrey Donaldson,’ now chief whip, who then referred me to Sammy Wilson, another senior DUP figure, who had been finance minister. And so it went on: never one negotiation but round after round of negotiations. No side felt the need to be pushed into a final decision on any one day; each calculated that they could gain more if they could hold out for many days. And yet almost as quickly as the two sides could walk out on each other, they could band together when it came to money. There was a famous story of the eighteenth chancellor visiting Ireland whose Treasury red box had blown open in a blast of wind, only to reveal he had nothing in it. No modern chancellor or prime minister could go to Belfast empty-handed and survive. As I joked with our team, referencing Tony Blair’s famous remark before the Good Friday Agreement: ‘I feel the hand of history on my shoulders, and the hand of Peter Robinson in my pocket.’

  I was dealing with another issue that, through a catalogue of errors, had become an embarrassment – the failure to accord Gurkhas a right of residence in the UK. This had sparked a campaign led by the actress Joanna Lumley, whose father had served as a regular officer with the Gurkhas. It was not lost on me that yet another Gurkha, loyally serving our country, had just been killed in Afghanistan by a suicide bomber. The Gurkhas’ campaign was the inevitable result of a misguided decision to restrict a right to residence only to those who had finished service after 1997. Consumed with the financial crisis, Iraq and Afghanistan, I had given the issue too little attention and the Home Office was worried about a surge in immigration if all the Gurkhas and their families could settle in Britain. I had not altered our position in time for a Commons vote, which we lost. But when I had met Joanna on the Wednesday of that week, I had resolved that a change of policy was right.

  I was now looking at an email from Joanna saying, ‘I wish we could have met sooner.’ Sadly, her supportive public and friendly private statements – and my relief that we were finally close to a solution – were undermined overnight when, unknown to me, Home Office letters prepared days before rejecting appeals from Gurkhas to enter the country, had landed on their doorsteps. So, as I returned from Yorkshire, I was having to pick up the pieces after a wave of hostile coverage. I was at least philosophical enough to remark that the overwhelming level of public support for the Gurkhas showed it was possible to persuade millions of the positive benefits of immigration. Within two weeks our new policy was announced. The Home Office had estimated that applications from soldiers, wives and children could go as high as 100,000. In the event, only 8,000 applied.

  By Friday evening I was back in Downing Street. Between making and taking phone calls from foreign leaders about the continuing fallout from the financial crisis and reviewing what might be recommended by the new Calman Commission for extending the powers of the Scottish Parliament, I held a strategy session on our election plans for June. In normal times, 8 May would have been the day after the local counts, but polling had been postponed so that local elections would coincide with those for the European Parliament. The month’s grace looked, on the face of it, like a small stroke of luck.

  In April, we were caught up in a storm that led to the resignation of one of my political advisers, Damian McBride. He had been a career civil servant in the Customs and Excise Department who had worked his way up on sheer ability to become a Downing Street media adviser. But on his own admission, in emails that he never expected to become public, he had smeared the Tory leadership with salacious personal attacks repeating gossip that had no basis in fact. After his resignation, he wrote a very honest and penitent book blaming only himself for what he called ‘the power trip’ he had been on; and to his credit he then spent two years working in his old secondary school and then another few years helping CAFOD, a world-renowned Catholic development charity.

  The grace period of four weeks saw things go backwards rather than forwards. I had thought our handling of the financial crisis would help us. In April, just before the McBride email fiasco, we had overseen a successful G20 summit in London, where – with Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, the Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, the UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon and others present – leaders had agreed to a British-initiated plan to underpin the world economy with $1.1 trillion of financial support. Now, in a series of phone calls in advance of meetings we would have at July’s G8 in Italy, I was trying to persuade leaders of the world’s main economies that we needed a second-stage push on growth. With a boost from the London agreement, the global economy was finally starting to turn around. But by then the Conservative opposition, who had been silent on the economy during the G20, mounted an escalating set of attacks.

  For them, the issue was no longer UK jobs and growth – growth, although returning, was still fragile – but the UK deficit. I was still worrying a
bout the threat of unemployment, mortgage repossessions and bankruptcies, which had been graphically brought home to me on Friday by the threat of another steel-industry closure. Yet now I was being asked all the time not about jobs – the media had virtually lost interest in that – but about the deficit and debt. Try as I did, I could not persuade the public that running a deficit at this time was critical to – and indeed the precondition of – sustained growth and continuing recovery from the recession, and therefore entirely rational. Neither could I persuade the Americans to join in the more radical pro-growth initiatives I was lobbying for as the agenda for September’s forthcoming Pittsburgh G20 summit. In April, coming out of the G20 London summit, we had thought we were winning the argument about how best to rescue our economy. By that Friday evening in May, I feared we were losing it.

  At the end of the day, Kirsty McNeill, my ever-alert and insightful adviser and speechwriter, who was always up to date on the concerns of the day, sent me a poem by the English poet Wendy Cope, a widely tipped contender to become Poet Laureate. It is a morality tale based on a tribute to the American baseball star, Ted Williams, and includes the lines:

  Watch the ball and do your thing.

  This is the moment. Here’s your chance.

  Don’t let anyone mess with your swing.

  Thinking ahead – perhaps to what I might say in my next speech – I replied: ‘Brilliant poem. We need a British version of it. Perhaps the image is – Don’t let anyone turn our strength into a weakness.’

  As prime minister, Disraeli found time not just to read poetry but to write it. Gladstone disappeared for weeks to translate Homer. Even amidst the carnage of the First World War, Asquith played long after-dinner games of bridge, and spent hours of his day writing love letters to a young nurse, with whom he was infatuated and who, to his desolation, eventually married one of his Cabinet colleagues. Even amidst the fiercest of fighting in the Second World War, Churchill was famous for his morning drinks and afternoon naps. Such was the leisurely pace of government even in the early 1960s that Harold Macmillan had time to read the works of Austen, Trollope, Scott, Dickens and Thackeray.

  As my diary of Friday 8 May reveals, none of that was now possible. What was new was the 24/7 news cycle; the speed at which, in this media-conscious age, decisions have to be made; the minute-to-minute focus on every aspect of a prime minister’s life; and an expectation that, even if every problem does not land on their desk, it is they who must respond. To the outsider, what I describe will look like a work schedule not only packed to breaking point, but with a pace that seems breathless, a weight and breadth of issues that is difficult to comprehend, yet alone control, and a speed at which you have to work and make decisions that almost defies belief. And although every day was different, this was not an abnormal day. Simply to recount the events of that day may give the impression that, as prime minister, I was overwhelmed. This was not how I felt at all. I relished everything – the meetings, the speeches, the preparatory reading, the strategising – and I felt in command, with one exception: my public communication.

  The world had changed dramatically since the time Winston Churchill spent twenty-one days away from London in the White House, or since the time embarrassing details of a presidential visit to the UK could go without comment – when, for example, John F. Kennedy arrived in London to visit Harold Macmillan and the prime minister was not waiting to greet him but in bed asleep. The president was parked in a waiting room and given a copy of The Times to read while he waited for Macmillan to dress. Today, if there was but a minute’s blip in the scheduling of a presidential visit, TV reporters outside would be declaring a crisis and the prime minister would be ridiculed – in the case of a Macmillan-type incident, told he was too old and worn out to retain office. But that day – and for years after – no one even knew that the prime minister had slept in. How things had changed. Each time I met President Obama, as I recount, every aspect of our encounter – the number of minutes we spoke, the time given to the press for questions, the length and warmth of the handshakes, even the presents we exchanged – was the subject of extensive reporting.

  Of equal significance is the speed at which decisions have to be made and communicated. When in 1949 the Labour government made its decision to devalue the pound, it set its announcement for three months ahead, so that the chancellor, Sir Stafford Cripps – then hospitalised in a Swiss sanatorium – could be informed in person. If a Cabinet today delayed announcing such a sensitive decision for more than a few hours, or even just a few minutes, markets would be in turmoil. More likely someone would have tweeted the decision within seconds of it being made.

  In this media-drenched world of the twenty-first century, prime ministers must be on guard all the time, ready to react and comment on a multiplicity of daily events, ranging from the most important to the most trivial. Unless you can offer a view on each and every issue of the day, you are immediately accused of indecisiveness. Your views are not just sought on political issues: you are pushed to venture opinions on sport, films, theatre, pop groups and even the soap operas that dominate evening TV. I was uniquely unqualified to comment on all of these subjects – with the exception of football. Indeed, on that Friday morning in May 2009, an article I had penned appeared in the Independent on my joy at the successes of my family’s two favourite local football teams, Raith Rovers, whom I support, and Cowdenbeath, my father’s team.

  But when I ill-advisedly ventured an opinion on any other aspect of popular culture, it usually backfired. I learned this the hard way when, just before I became prime minister, a casual question turned into a PR disaster. At the end of an interview for New Woman magazine there was a round of quick-fire questions. One was: did I prefer the Arctic Monkeys to James Blunt? Not knowing much about either, I said I preferred Coldplay, but added: well, the Arctic Monkeys would certainly wake you up in the morning. That throwaway remark led to a political storm: ‘Brown gets up to Arctic Monkeys’ the papers wrote, at which point all hell broke loose about me trying hard to present myself as someone I was not. A myth was born and years later I would chuckle when invited to present a lifetime achievement award to the group.

  The mystery of monarchy – and the success of what is called the dignified part of our constitution – is built on the Queen never venturing an opinion: indeed, the magic of monarchy is that no one really knows what the Queen thinks. But the modern prime minister has to have a view on everything and can never keep silent for long.

  This book is not only about the cacophony of decisions, crises and everyday rhythms of politics that I am describing through the kaleidoscope of one day’s events. It is about the great underlying questions that marked all my thirteen years in office. Across all the separate issues during my years in politics, I believe there is a common thread: a modern battle for Britain.

  At first and in the main, the task has been to build a prosperous and fair country. The question we come back to all the time is: what kind of Britain do we want to create? But at both the outset and in the twilight of my time, the questioning has been of a more existential nature. When I was first politically active, the overriding issue was the decline of Britain. Now, fifty years on, the issue is the very survival of the United Kingdom. Then we were dealing with the fallout from the end of empire and how Britain could reposition itself. Today we are threatened with the unravelling of the Britain we know – literally whether we can survive as one country – which was an unthinkable prospect just a generation ago. For increasingly there was, and is, something else that has clouded our public life and had to be confronted: the long shadow cast by the rise of nationalism.

  Every country depends for its sense of identity on a story about itself, a narrative that draws on history and reminds us of who we are and why we belong together. I have witnessed and indeed been part of many attempts to construct a post-imperial story, one that gives definition and purpose to a Britain rediscovering itself after two centuries of global hegemony.


  It was once said that in the Britain of the 1950s we managed decline, in the 1960s we mismanaged decline, and in the 1970s we declined to manage. It was this narrative, and the recognition we needed to change, which set the context for our application to join the European Economic Community, the rise of Mrs Thatcher, the advent of New Labour and the controversy over two political unions: Scotland’s place in the United Kingdom, and Britain’s place in the European Union. At different times, governments have tried to renew Britain by elevating the UK–US special relationship, asserting leadership in Europe, pioneering a monetarist revolution, and by creating a New Labour for a New Britain.

  By far the largest of the European empires, the British Empire also defined Britain’s identity and it follows that its end strained the bonds forged in the centuries-long historical experience that Scotland shared with England. As I can see from living in Fife, our sense of who we are is becoming more and more localised and inward-looking, even as our range of experience is becoming more and more global. The last thirty years have seen an explosion of interest in Scottish, as distinct from British, history. Scotland is in the process of rewriting its own story, and the same is true of England and Wales. In a world which is at the same time more globally connected and more locally focused, to be British seems to many less relevant.