Distinguished Global Leader

Scotland's one and only (as far as I'm aware) Distinguished Global Leader in Residence - also known as Gordon Brown MP - has been back in the headlines recently.

The former Labour leader and Prime Minister was giving evidence at the Leveson Inquiry - into phone hacking and press standards.

By all accounts Gordon Brown gave the distinct impression that butter wouldn't melt in his mouth - and that he was the victim of a terrible conspiracy - instead of just being exposed as pretty much useless when he finally landed the top job.

Here's an interesting article from the Sunday Times which lays bare the feuding at the heart of the last Labour government - tales that were always denied until Labour lost the 2010 general election - then everyone started writing books that confirmed how awful things really were.

Oh, Gordon, you can’t be serious

The former PM’s apparent fluid relationship with the truth resurfaced last week. Is he a liar, a fantasist or just in denial?

Isabel Oakeshott and Mark Hookham

When Gordon Brown gave evidence to the Leveson inquiry last week, there were gasps of disbelief at Westminster. In offices around the House of Commons, Labour MPs and political journalists were dumbstruck as the former prime minister denied aspects of his premiership that are so well documented and were so widely experienced that to suggest they had not happened seemed to be rewriting history.

Staring at his desk and fiddling nervously with his ear, Brown could not quite look Robert Jay QC, his inquisitor, in the eye as he denied his aides had exploited the media to try to force Tony Blair from office. He then dismissed as “tittle-tattle” any suggestion that his former special advisers Charlie Whelan and Damian McBride had ever behaved improperly.

Jaws dropped at Westminster as Brown claimed he never knew what his notorious apparatchiks got up to during their long-running campaign to install him as prime minister in place of Blair and crush all opposition to his regime once he reached No 10.

“I couldn’t believe what I was hearing,” said Peter Watt, former general secretary of the Labour party. “Everyone who was around at the time knows it’s true.”

When Brown publicly denied that he had considered calling an early election in October 2007, he gained a reputation for having a fluid relationship with the truth in his public utterances. Now his reputation is on the line over his testimony delivered under oath. Lord Justice Leveson said before he began his inquiry that when he eventually reported, he would criticise those individuals who he felt had misled him.

An examination of the evidence — from insider accounts of Brown’s regime, including the autobiographies of several of his closest colleagues, as well as testimony to Leveson by other Labour figures — raises the question of whether Brown was deceiving, deluded or in denial when he took the stand.

Since Labour lost power, Brown has rarely been seen at Westminster. These days he is an isolated figure, barely in contact even with those who were his closest allies while he was chancellor and prime minister, so there was widespread interest in how he would handle his appearance before Leveson.

At first it seemed he might approach it with dignity as he talked in his opening statement of an “enforced period of reflection” since Labour was ousted and the importance of a free and independent press. When the questioning by Jay began, however, his tone changed. He began by contradicting evidence given by other witnesses and denying activities that were witnessed or experienced by numerous MPs and journalists during his reign.

Doubts about the credibility of his evidence began when he was questioned about a telephone conversation with Rupert Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of News Corporation, owner of this newspaper, in autumn 2009. According to evidence given by Murdoch, they spoke after The Sun’s dramatic shift of support to the Conservatives during the Labour party conference that September. Murdoch says Brown threatened to “make war” on his company in revenge.

Last week Brown denied they spoke about The Sun’s switch. “This is the conversation that Mr Murdoch says happened between him and me — where I threatened him and where I’m alleged to have acted in an unbalanced way. This conversation never took place,” he said, adding that the only conversation he had had with Murdoch during that period was about The Sun’s coverage of the war in Afghanistan. The Cabinet Office said on Friday that a check on calls made through the Downing Street switchboard backed Brown’s claim.

In his evidence to the inquiry Lord Mandelson, the former Labour cabinet minister, said he remembered Brown telling him about a conversation with Murdoch when they discussed The Sun’s decision to back the Tories. “I cannot remember being told by Mr Brown what he said . . . but I know what he said to me about Rupert Murdoch’s reaction,” Mandelson told Leveson. So unless both Murdoch and Mandelson are lying or mistaken, a conversation of some sort about The Sun’s switch did take place.

Brown was then questioned about the role of special advisers at Westminster, in particular his former spokesmen Whelan, who was forced to resign in 1999 for allegedly leaking information about Mandelson’s home loan, and McBride, his spokesman when he became prime minister, who was also forced to quit in a scandal. Brown was asked about the evidence of Alastair Campbell, Blair’s former spin chief, who said there had been a “real problem” with Whelan’s behaviour.

Instead of accepting Whelan was notorious at Westminster for his briefings against MPs and his pugnacious style, Brown launched into a long denial, bizarrely claiming his political advisers always “worked through the head of communications, who was a civil servant”. He said even off-the-record briefings by advisers had to be cleared by mandarins. “They had to go through the civil service head,” he said.

To the dozen or so favoured lobby reporters regularly on the receiving end of such briefings — often late at night in a pub — the idea that they were sanctioned by any civil servant is laughable. Both Whelan and McBride were so trusted by their boss they appeared to have been given a free rein. Although Brown probably did not know precisely what they were up to, he can have been in little doubt that it involved making mischief on his behalf.

In the memoirs of Alistair Darling, formerly a close ally of Brown, he says Brown operated like Henry II. “He didn’t order the knights to go and kill [Thomas] Becket but they believed they had his blessing to do so,” wrote Darling.

When quizzed about this description at Leveson, Brown said: “These sound very dramatic comments. No, they’re not near the mark at all. Quite wrong and quite the opposite of what actually happened.”

One of Brown’s aides at the time struggled to hide his embarrassment when asked about this aspect of Brown’s evidence last week. “None of us knew exactly what Damian was up to. Gordon had so many aides he couldn’t have kept tabs on their movements all the time. But the idea everything went through the head of comms . . . uh, well,” he tailed off.

Before Brown became prime minister the chief target of his briefing machine was Blair. When asked by Jay whether his aides were “involved in using the media to force or attempt to force Mr Blair’s resignation”, Brown looked distinctly uncomfortable. “I would hope not,” he replied. Pressed, he repeated the line, adding he had “no evidence of that” and would not have authorised such behaviour.

In fact, towards the end of the Blair years, when Brown was desperate to hasten his departure, lobby reporters regularly received briefings and leaks, including restricted documents, from Brown’s inner circle, designed to undermine the prime minister. Naturally, the journalists were grateful and protected the leakers in return.

Once their master was installed in No 10, McBride and a number of other aides turned their fire on ministers who were perceived to be disloyal or to pose a threat to Brown. Among those who witnessed this ruthless operation was Harriet Harman, now deputy Labour leader.

According to Darling’s autobiography, in October 2008 she overheard McBride briefing against her at a party conference and was so incensed she told Brown she would report the adviser to the cabinet secretary unless he was reined in.

Even if Brown was initially blissfully ignorant of McBride’s ways, as time went by others told him what was going on.

In his autobiography Mandelson describes McBride as Brown’s attack dog, a description that has been repeated by umpteen Labour figures. The former business secretary writes that the spin doctor “developed a reputation for briefing against anyone who was perceived to threaten his boss’s interests” — a suggestion Brown last week dismissed as “tittle-tattle” despite identical claims by other insiders.

In his book Darling tells how “the briefing machine at No 10 and Gordon’s attack dogs” turned on him after he gave an interview to The Guardian describing the recession as “arguably . . . the worst downturn there has been in 60 years”. Brown was incandescent and Darling has told how it was “like the forces of hell being unleashed on me”.

He writes: “For days after the Guardian piece ran, journalists told us they were being told repeatedly that I had made a hash of it. Well-sourced speculation that I was about to be reshuffled began to appear in the media.” Darling tells how he confronted Brown and was stonewalled: “He said he was not responsible for it; it was nothing to do with him.”

While Brown suggested last week he would never have treated Darling badly — “he was a friend as well as a colleague”, Darling blames him for what happened, saying in his book that their once close relationship would “never be the same again”. Harman and Darling were not the only ministers to confront Brown about McBride’s behaviour. In his book Brown at 10, the political historian Anthony Seldon claims Douglas Alexander and Ed Miliband, members of Brown’s cabinet, “joined forces” to complain, telling Brown: “You can’t have the prime minister’s press spokesman calling the chancellor a ‘c***’ in bars.”

When questioned about this and another warning from Jacqui Smith, the former home secretary, Brown replied huffily: “Oh, I can’t remember all these things.”

In his evidence to the Leveson inquiry, Miliband said: “On Damian McBride, when I was a cabinet minister I did raise a specific concern that I had with Mr Brown, I believe in September 2008, about some of Mr McBride’s activities.”

Seldon says in his book that some ministers felt Brown “acted in a mafia boss’s manner, pretending to have no knowledge of the unsavoury acts done in his name”. But he adds: “McBride himself had no doubts about the truth. ‘You prove your loyalty to GB by your brutality,’ he believes.”

While members of Brown’s inner circle repeatedly warned him about McBride, demanding he be moved, Brown refused all entreaties to act until April 2009, when his hand was forced. Leaked emails between McBride and another apparatchik, Derek Draper, discussing plans for a smear campaign against Tory MPs and their wives, exposed the spin doctor’s modus operandi.

There were many other victims of this operation, including Ivan Lewis, a former health minister, who was targeted in autumn 2008 after suggesting Labour seemed “out of touch”. A highly embarrassing story appeared in the News of the World and in The Mail on Sunday, suggesting he had “bombarded” a young female aide with suggestive phone messages.

In his book about the rise and fall of new Labour, The End of the Party, Andrew Rawnsley, the Observer political columnist, describes how the story was “planted” by No 10 aides. Lewis himself has never publicly accused Brown’s inner circle of being behind it but let it be known at the time that he was in no doubt about the source.

This weekend Labour MPs and activists are debating why the former prime minister talked such apparent nonsense at Leveson.

Watt, who was in charge of the Labour party machine in 2006 and 2007, had a ringside seat during two of the most turbulent Blair-Brown years and is astonished by Brown’s claims. “His evidence was utterly bizarre. It was such common knowledge that Gordon and Gordon’s people were briefing against their opponents and against Tony that for him to deny it seemed unbelievable,” he said last week.

Is the former prime minister a liar, a fantasist or in denial? Watt says Brown finds it “virtually impossible to admit mistakes”.

A former minister believes Brown has persuaded himself he is a victim: “He feels he was awfully treated by the press. He is very, very sore. He does not feel he is the guilty party.”

McBride leapt to his former boss’s defence last week. He said Brown was correct to assert that he and Whelan did not brief anonymously at his instigation. He also described Darling’s Henry II analogy as “total nonsense. I’m afraid Alistair — with whom I was previously very close — was lulled into a total paranoia about this kind of thing”.

Of Seldon’s quote about proving loyalty through brutality, McBride said: “I’ve never said those words and I don’t believe them to be true. I’d have sued Seldon for falsely attributing that to me if I had any reputation to protect.”

Whelan chose to shut his ears. “Sorry, been fishing all week so not up with news,” he said.