It is now established in that nether world somewhere between the media myth-making machine and the public imagination that Gordon Brown is a brooding paranoid who cannot control his temper. John Major tucked his shirt into his underpants; Gordon Brown pushes secretaries out of chairs. Some stories stick to politicians not because people know they are true but because people want them to be true.
It no longer matters what the Downing Street spinners say in response to the claims of rough-housing in the Prime Minister’s bunker. Enough people from the inside have talked to journalists about Brown’s fits of anger for the Westminster village to know that Andrew Rawnsley’s book paints a picture of life around the Prime Minister that’s not a million miles from reality.
Is he a bully? Not exactly. As one former minister told me this week, ‘Yes, he is susceptible to rages. He is petulant and childish. But a bully, no. To be a bully you need to recognise that someone else is in the room.’ Gordon Brown, he said, lacked the human empathy to be a bully.
A close political ally who worked in No. 10 for several months said he had never once seen the Prime Minister humiliate a junior member of staff and that he only flew off the handle when he was angry at himself or his most trusted aides. This seems to be the agreed line, promoted most vigorously by John Prescott and Peter Mandelson.
Ever since Brown entered No. 10 Downing Street, we have been told that we needed to get to know the real Gordon Brown. Now we are asked to accept his tantrums as evidence of passion rather than abuse.
How has it come to this? Part of the answer is that the job of Prime Minister is a unique one. Gordon Brown is not the first to be prone to paranoia and he will not be the last to suffer the indignity of those he works with telling tales to journalists behind his back. But there is more to it than that. There is something about this that is peculiar to Gordon because of the culture of threat he has allowed to develop around him.
The reality is that we will never know the real Gordon Brown, because he is constitutionally incapable of projecting his own personality without the help of a fiercely loyal cabal of human ciphers. His greatest weakness has always been allowing those who speak on his behalf too long a leash. One eminent Labour peer, who worked closely with Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, once told me that Gordon Brown’s biggest problem was that he chose to surround himself with people who were ‘not good citizens’.
When he was in an intense period of internal opposition just after the 2005 election, I was always amazed by the latitude he gave others to brief on his behalf against Cabinet colleagues and political enemies. This tendency carried on long after he entered No. 10.
As Alistair Darling so eloquently put it in his Sky News interview on Tuesday, Gordon Brown is quite capable of allowing the ‘forces of hell’ to be unleashed, even against his friends. Rawnsley’s picture of the fury of Darling and his wife at their betrayal over the summer of 2008 is entirely accurate. There was a concerted attempt by the Prime Minister’s anointed ‘bad citizens’, Damian McBride and Charlie Whelan, to destroy the Chancellor for telling the truth about the gravity of the recession to Guardian interviewer Decca Aitkenhead.
Thinking about the events of the past week, I recalled an encounter with one of Gordon Brown’s closest allies at the Labour party conference in 2008, just after the summer of hate. I had written a blog which ended by saying that I had experienced at first-hand the ‘inept mafioso tactics of Brown’s political gangsters’. One morning I was approached by Ian Austin, the dapper MP for Dudley, who placed his face about an inch from mine and whispered, ‘What’s this about gangsters?’ I asked him to step off my toes and suggested that someone watching us might think he had made my point for me.
I explained that Charlie Whelan, who had re-emerged as the Prime Minister’s assassin-in-chief in his new role as political director at the Unite union, had threatened to have me fired from my job as the political editor of the New Statesman. My crime had been to make a television programme that was critical of Labour’s mayoral candidate Ken Livingstone. Whelan, a charmless mockney stage villain at the best of times, had publicly vowed that he would have words with the magazine’s owner, the millionaire MP Geoffrey Robinson, to have me removed from the job — though I have no evidence to suggest that Whelan followed through on the threat. None of this points directly at the door of the Prime Minister. Indeed, Geoffrey Robinson took the trouble to write a letter to the Times to deny Brown’s role in my removal. But it gives a sense of the culture that he allowed to develop around him.
Given the fact that the Prime Minister probably does throw more than newspapers across his office, it is remarkable that he manages to inspire such loyalty in those close to him. Some, like Ed Miliband and Tom Watson, are even quite nice people. His tragic — and potentially fatal — weakness is that he allows those he trusts to second-guess his will and to act on his behalf. Unfortunately, his ‘bad citizens’ do not always have the interests of the Prime Minister at heart. The reason many in Westminster (Labour MPs as well as hostile political journalists) are prepared to think the worst of Gordon Brown is that he permits this to happen.
The Prime Minister has issued a statement saying that he never instructed his aides to brief against Alistair Darling. This makes things even worse. If the ‘forces of hell’ were acting as rogue agents, why did the Prime Minister lack the authority to stop them?
Martin Bright is political editor of the Jewish Chronicle.
Comments