The funniest thing about Andrew Rawnsley’s sustained onslaught on poor old Gordon Brown’s character is that the Prime Minister’s ratings in the opinion polls actually rose after they were published. (Well, the second funniest thing, actually. The funniest was the discovery that the staid Chancellor’s wife has a vocabulary like a Royal Navy stoker. She is an old Glasgow Herald columnist, for pity’s sake. Where can she have learned those dreadful words?)
The public reaction to Rawnsley’s accusations of bullying may have had something to do with the fact that we weren’t really learning very much that was new. Everyone has known for years that Brown has a foul temper when roused – and that the thing that roused him most was Tony Blair’s serial refusal to honour his pledge to make way for his Chancellor.
However, that doesn’t entirely account for the sharp fall in the Tory poll lead just after the Rawnsley “revelations”. That remarkable event seems to suggest that we Brits actually like to think that our rulers are, if not bullies, then certainly pretty robust characters. I imagine most of us have experienced bosses who shout, many of us have seen bits of office or factory equipment flying through the air and a few of us may even have witnessed the odd punch thrown. It certainly happened routinely in Fleet Street, where you would have been regarded as rather a wimp if you took it too much to heart.
In fact, most voters appreciate that almost all our recent prime ministers were – at least on Rawnsley’s rather wide definition of the word – bullies. Certainly Margaret Thatcher was. I still bear the scars of an occasion when she disliked something I had written, told me so in vigorous (although not obscene) language, and emphasised her points by stabbing me repeatedly in the chest with a steely finger.
But I didn’t think the worse of her for it. On the contrary, while I detested pretty well everything she stood for, I admired her brand of conviction politics and saw her minor physical assault on me as just another manifestation of it. My feeling was that it was a pity our lot hadn’t got equally steely fingers to back up equally firm convictions.
Ted Heath, similarly, was a considerable grump, although it was moderated by a genuinely lovable streak in private which made many of his victims forgive him. Contrary to widespread opinion, John Major had a vicious temper when crossed. And even Jim Callaghan could be fairly nasty early in his career – although, surprisingly, he mellowed once he reached Number 10. That was astonishing, seeing the appalling problems and the appalling people he had to deal with.
Harold Macmillan, of course, was a complete phoney – “the Old Actor-Manager”, as my friend Alan Watkins used to call him, put on his “unflappable” act while often flapping away like mad. One of those flaps led to the greatest act of bullying of his premiership – the so-called night of the long knives, in which he sacked nearly half his cabinet in one go. Jeremy Thorpe, the Liberal leader, remarked: “Greater love hath no man than that he lay down his friends for his life.”
But there was one Prime Minister in my long stint at Westminster who was very far from being a bully: Harold Wilson. Indeed, Harold was a victim of bullying for most of his two terms in Downing Street. The bully was his secretary, Marcia Williams, now Lady Falkender. She, not Wilson, was the one who threw things – and her tirades were legendary among all those within earshot.
Mind you, I suspect that Marcia was often right, and she frequently kept her boss up to the mark in matters of loyalty to good old Labour Party principles. She was one of the few people who dared tell him the truth when he’d made a bad speech. Perhaps matters would have been a good deal better now if Tony Blair had had a Marcia instead of an Alastair to bully him.
Coincidentally, Wilson’s very own Alastair Campbell died last month. A nice chap, Trevor Lloyd-Hughes was Downing Street press secretary in the early years of Harold’s first term. Like Alastair, he was a former
lobby journalist, in his case for Wilson’s local Liverpool newspaper. But he approached
his job more like a civil servant than as a journalist.
This meant that he was the very antithesis of a spin-doctor. He primly refused to get involved in low politics, leaving that sort of thing to people such as Gerald Kaufman, who was the junior lad in the Downing Street team. It was an arrangement which, frankly, didn’t work for either side. In the end, he went and was replaced by the much more muscular Joe Haines, who threw his weight around in a way which Campbell was to adopt and embellish more than 20 years later.
But back to the present. Wouldn’t it be a laugh if Labour did manage to hold more seats than the Tories and Gordon Brown was returned to Downing Street at the head of a minority government? What will Polly Toynbee say then, I wonder?
