2007 – Gordon Brown Finally Moves Next Door and Still Looks Uncomfortable

The Man Who Waited Thirteen Years Discovers That Waiting Was the Easy Part

Gordon Brown Finally Moves Next Door and Still Looks Uncomfortable

The Man Who Waited Thirteen Years Discovers That Waiting Was the Easy Part

On 27 June 2007, Gordon Brown became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, thirteen years after the dinner at Granita at which he had agreed, or not agreed, or been promised, or had inferred, depending on whose account one accepts, that the leadership would eventually pass to him. The transition, when it finally came, was as uncontested as the waiting had been contested — Brown was the only serious candidate, unopposed in the Labour leadership election, arriving at Downing Street with a mandate that was less a democratic endorsement than an institutional recognition that the queue had reached his name.

His arrival was received with a cautious optimism that the preceding months of Blair transition chaos had made available. Brown was not Blair. He was serious where Blair had been charismatic, cautious where Blair had been bold, detailed where Blair had been visionary, and Scottish where Blair had been carefully ambiguous about his relationship with his northern origins. He offered, or was interpreted as offering, a different kind of leadership — more collegiate, more deliberate, less presidential, more focused on policy substance and less on the management of image that Blair’s Downing Street had practised with such skill and occasional excess.

The first weeks appeared to validate the optimism. Brown’s handling of the July 2007 terrorist attacks — a car bomb attack on Glasgow Airport, failed devices in London, the entire sequence managed by the new Prime Minister with a steadiness that confirmed his competence without revealing much about his personality — produced the brief sense that the transition had landed well and that the new government would govern differently from the old one in ways that the public would find reassuring.

The Northern Rock: The First Crack in the Wall

Northern Rock applied for emergency financial support from the Bank of England on 13 September 2007, having discovered that its business model — borrowing short-term on the wholesale money markets to fund long-term mortgage lending — was no longer functioning because the wholesale markets had frozen in response to the American subprime mortgage crisis that was beginning to travel through the global financial system with the speed of a contagion and the destructive power of a crisis that nobody had fully modelled.

The Bank of England’s support was not initially made public. When it became public, there was a bank run — the first bank run in Britain since the nineteenth century, photographs of queues outside Northern Rock branches circling the national consciousness as images so specifically Victorian in their form, so at odds with the modern financial system’s self-image, that they produced the disorientation of people discovering that something they had thought was a historical curiosity was, in fact, a present reality.

Alistair Darling, the new Chancellor, and Brown managed the Northern Rock crisis through a period of intense public and financial market anxiety, eventually announcing a government guarantee of Northern Rock deposits and then, in February 2008, nationalising the bank — a word that no Labour government had used without a preceding wave of ideological controversy since the 1970s, and that was now deployed as a crisis management tool rather than a socialist aspiration, which was either irony or pragmatism depending on one’s political starting point.

The Autumn Election That Wasn’t

The Brown honeymoon produced polls in September 2007 suggesting that Labour was ahead of the Conservatives by margins sufficient to produce a substantial parliamentary majority. The speculation about an early election — a snap election that would capitalise on the honeymoon and give Brown a mandate in his own right rather than Blair’s inheritance — reached its peak in early October, when Downing Street sources were briefing journalists about election planning and the political world had concluded that the announcement was imminent.

Brown announced on 6 October 2007 that there would be no autumn election, citing his wish to set out his vision for the country rather than the polls — a justification that was immediately and comprehensively disbelieved by everyone who had been tracking the internal polling that had shown the Conservative Party’s conference speech by David Cameron had significantly narrowed Labour’s lead. The decision not to call the election was a political miscalculation of serious consequence: it combined the loss of the potential electoral advantage with the reputational damage of appearing to have bottled it — to have prepared for a contest and withdrawn when the odds shifted.

The episode established the narrative of Brown’s premiership before it had properly begun — the narrative of a leader whose instincts were for caution rather than boldness, whose communications operation was less effective than his predecessor’s, and whose relationship with the media was characterised by a mutual suspicion that produced rather worse coverage than a more comfortable relationship would have generated. It was, in the language of political management, a bad week. It turned out to be the template for several more.

Ten Pence Tax: The Self-Inflicted Wound

Brown’s Budget of March 2007 — his last as Chancellor, delivered before he became Prime Minister — had abolished the ten pence starting rate of income tax as part of a simplification that reduced the basic rate from 22 to 20 percent. The abolition of the 10p rate affected the lowest-income workers who did not benefit from the basic rate reduction — approximately 5.3 million people on modest incomes who would be worse off under the change.

The political consequences of the 10p abolition — which had been hidden in the complexity of the 2007 Budget and only became apparent to its victims when their wage packets changed — arrived in 2008, producing a rebellion of Labour backbenchers that Brown was forced to manage with a retrospective compensation package that was more expensive than simply not abolishing the rate would have been and that demonstrated, with mathematical precision, the specific cost of a political error that requires correction.

The 10p episode was damaging not just because it affected millions of lower-income workers — the people Labour existed, in its own self-understanding, to protect — but because it confirmed the emerging narrative that Brown’s political instincts, so reliable in the specific domain of macroeconomic management, were less reliable in the broader domain of political judgement. The Chancellor who had delivered ten years of growth and stability was discovering that the Prime Ministership required skills that the Chancellorship had not fully developed.

The New Seriousness and Its Limitations

Brown had promised a new seriousness — the end of spin, the return of substance, government that engaged with the real concerns of real people rather than the management of image that had characterised the Blair years at their least inspiring. The promise was genuine. The delivery was constrained by the same media environment, the same twenty-four-hour news cycle, the same requirement to communicate as well as govern, that had made Blair’s spin operation necessary and that Brown’s more Calvinistic approach to communications could not dissolve by wishing it away.

The Prime Minister who moves next door after thirteen years of waiting finds that the view from the other side of the wall is different from the view he had been studying. The waiting was the easy part. The governing was what remained, and the governing was going to be conducted against a global financial backdrop that the preceding decade’s prosperity had not prepared anyone to manage — including the Chancellor who had governed the preceding decade’s prosperity and who was now, in a bitter irony, going to be judged not on the growth but on the crisis that followed it.

Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!

Gordon Brown became Prime Minister on 27 June 2007, succeeding Tony Blair after thirteen years as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Brown’s government handled terrorist attacks on Glasgow Airport in July 2007 during its first days. Northern Rock applied for emergency Bank of England support on 13 September 2007 and was nationalised in February 2008. Brown declined to call a snap general election in October 2007 following Conservative poll recovery, a decision widely interpreted as political misjudgement. The abolition of the 10p income tax starting rate, announced in the 2007 Budget, produced a Labour backbench rebellion in 2008 and required compensation payments. Alistair Darling served as Chancellor throughout Brown’s premiership. Brown lost the 2010 general election to David Cameron’s Conservatives, who formed a coalition with the Liberal Democrats.

ORIGINALY PUBLISHED: 27 June 2007 (London, UK)

Alan Nafzger

Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]