BiteBack Publishing

Brown at 10 by Anthony Seldon and Guy Lodge, the definitive insider account of Gordon Brown’s premiership, will be published by Biteback in Autumn this year.

From the Independent, 29th July 2010

Brown’s decision to offer his own head stunned Clegg and made him realise, for the first time, that Brown was serious about trying to make a Lib-Lab pactwork

As the dust of the 2010 General Election began to settle in the early hours of the morning of Friday May 7th it became clear that the 2010 General Election had produced a hung parliament – the first in over 35 years. Following five days of negotiation a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government would be formed, the first peace-time coalition since the inter-war period. These were truly historic days; understanding what actually happened is therefore a matter of great importance.

It is well known that the Conservative and Liberal Democrat negotiating teams were locking horns on the Friday. Clegg had always said that he had a duty to speak to the largest party first. But we also know that Clegg was simultaneously engaging with Gordon Brown whom constitutional doctrine demanded stay on as Prime Minister until a new government was formed. Yet Gordon Brown’s role in these momentous days is in danger of being badly misrepresented. His role needs to be reappraised if the history of this period is to be accurately recorded.

It is said about Brown that, firstly, he was reluctant to resign – and secondly, according to Peter Mandelson, that it was Nick Clegg who finished Brown’s long political career by insisting that Brown go as part of any coalition deal between the two parties. Neither claim is right. Brown was of course desperate to keep Labour in power, and his nemesis, David Cameron, out of office. But he knew – and had known for a long time – that he himself would have to make the ultimate sacrifice. It was Brown who told Clegg that he was willing to fall on his sword to bring about a historic realignment of British politics, and not the other way around. Once he had secured the passage of an electoral reform bill, and thus his own place in history, Brown told Clegg he would depart the stage.

Brown and Clegg had their first telephone call on the Friday evening. On it Brown made clear to Clegg that he was completely committed to seizing the historic opportunity to build a progressive alliance. Do not, Brown said, ‘doubt our political will.’ Citing their ‘common cause on Europe’ Brown said ‘ideologically, there are no big differences between us’ and where policy differences did exist, on ID cards for example, Brown reassured Clegg that these could easily be dealt with. Brown also reiterated his commitment to electoral reform. Clegg gratefully told Brown ‘I think our two parties working together are much more likely to achieve real change’ than anything we can do with the Conservatives.

Policy differences were never going to be the issue. During this call Brown then said ‘there is something I need to speak to you about but I can only do it face-to-face’. Clegg was in no doubt what he meant: Brown accepted he was a stumbling block to any deal and he would have to go. The two leaders did not meet until late on Sunday morning after Brown had return from Scotland. At this stage the Liberal Democrats and Conservative negotiating teams had made significant progress in their talks, Cameron was sensing victory. To avoid the media glare they arranged to meet in the office of Sir Peter Ricketts, then permanent secretary at the Foreign Office. It was at this private meeting between the two leaders – billed later by Brown’s team as ‘The Ricketts Accord’ – that Brown told Clegg that he would resign in the autumn once he had steered a bill on electoral reform through the Commons. Brown claimed, reasonably, ‘I’m the only person who could get it through the Labour Party.’ He also knew it would provide him with the dignified exit he craved.

Brown’s decision to offer his own head on a plate stunned Clegg and made him realise, for the first time, that Brown was serious about trying to make a Lib-Lab pact work. Until then the Liberal Democrats, partly because of electoral arithmetic – Labour plus Liberal MPs did not muster a parliamentary majority – and also because of real concerns about that they would be damaged if seen to be propping up a losing Brown premiership, had not taken the option of working with Labour seriously. They hadn’t even bothered to write a separate policy document for their first negotiations with the Labour team when informal talks began on the Saturday: the original paper sent to Labour said they would ‘abstain on a vote on tax allowance for married couples, a policy clearly designed for the Conservatives.

Brown’s offer to resign transformed the dynamics of the negotiations. Paddy Ashdown began to believe that his life-long goal of healing the fracture between the two parties might be possible. Then on Sunday evening Brown and Clegg met again but this time they were joined by their lieutenants, Peter Mandelson and Danny Alexander. When Brown’s own position was discussed at this meeting he prevaricated. He refused to be as explicit as he had been when he Clegg in private earlier in the day. Why? Not because he had changed his mind but because he worried that the others in the room would leak the news. This apparent shift in position worried Clegg who wondered whether Brown meant what he said. On the Monday at 5pm Brown decided to make public his promise to Clegg, and resigned as Labour leader. His critics claimed it represented the last throw of the dice from a Machiavellian politician. In truth he had always planned to go. The effect was electric. As the Lib Dems announced they were opening formal talks with Labour the Conservatives slammed one of their big cards on the table: the offer of a referendum on AV.

For Brown, Andrew Adonis was the key figure in Labour’s negotiating team. He spoke to him constantly. To show how serious they were about political reform Adonis, at the behest of Brown, let it be known that Labour were open to the idea of holding a multi-question referendum containing not only an option for AV (which Labour would support) but also the Holy Grail for the Lib Dems: PR. Despite such a sweetener it became clear between the Monday and Tuesday that the Lib Dems were cooling on the idea of a deal with Labour. The Brown team were taken aback when the Lib Dems revealed that they had shifted their position on the deficit from that in their manifesto and were now calling for a more rapid fiscal consolidation. What explains this volte face? Incredibly the Labour camp received intelligence from Vince Cable, the Lib Dems shadow Chancellor, that his party had been personally lobbied by the Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, to adopt a much tougher position on spending cuts to placate the financial markets. When Brown challenged King on this directly later that evening however, the governor denied he had done so.

By lunchtime on the Tuesday Brown had concluded that the talks were going nowhere. He began to prepare to go to the Palace. He stalled because Clegg called him and pleaded with him not to go. Clegg insisted ‘I still think we can do a deal’. Brown said Clegg must break off talks with the Tories to prove he was serious but Clegg evaded and kept demanding more time. In their third call at just before 7pm Brown said ‘your time is up’.

At 7.20 pm Brown walked out onto Downing Street with his wife, Sarah, and his two sons. It was the boys’ idea to accompany their father: they had got used to watching history made outside No 10 and they now wanted to be a part of it themselves.

Writes author of Campaign 2010: The Making of the Prime Minister Nicholas Jones:

In his television documentary – Five Days That Changed Britain – the BBC’s political editor Nick Robinson chides himself for his failure to have predicted that in the event of an inconclusive general election David Cameron might attempt to establish a coalition government.

I too was taken totally by surprise by the boldness of Cameron’s ‘big, open and comprehensive’ offer to Nick Clegg and his skill in negotiating a deal that paved the way for a joint Conservative-Liberal Democrat administration.

But just like Robinson I too overlooked vital clues. In his case, the BBC’s political editor says senior Liberal Democrats did tell him during the campaign that they thought Cameron was capable of repeating Disraeli’s bold risk-taking and pulling off a post-election deal.

‘If only I’d listened more to those two Lib Dems, I would also have predicted Cameron’s boldness’, says Robinson.

Immediately I heard the election-night exit poll suggesting that the Conservatives would fall short of an overall majority I feared my book – Campaign 2010: The Making of the Prime Minister – was about to become a car crash for my publishers Biteback.

But as a drowning author I still had one straw to clutch to: the year I spent researching Cameron’s background and early career had convinced me that if anyone could pull off a last-minute sensation, it was the leader of the Conservative Party.

From the moment Cameron took the initiative the day after the election and made his offer to the Liberal Democrats, I had a feeling that he would still make it to 10 Downing Street and I held to that view despite Gordon Brown’s counter offer.

What had so impressed me about Cameron was that whenever the chips were down, he held his nerve and took a risk. Speaking without notes to the Conservatives’ 2005 party conference – his first-ever speech at a party conference – was a gamble for any leadership candidate.

Nor did he over react when Gordon Brown dithered about the on-off general election of 2007. Cameron then risked all in the immediate aftermath of the scandal about the abuse of MPs’ expenses in 2009 by standing up to the Tory grandees and insisting they repay excessive claims.

On the eve of Brown’s resignation as Prime Minister and the Queen’s summons to Buckingham Palace, Cameron was still not sure he could secure an agreement with the Liberal Democrats; he told Nick Robinson he remembered saying to his wife Samantha ‘it’s not going to happen, I am going to remain Leader of the Opposition’.

I find it comforting now to hear Cameron come across sounding so relaxed about such a knife-edge moment. Needless to say a nerve-wracked author had nothing like the composure of the Prime Minister to be!

Campaign 2010: The Making of the Prime Minister is available to buy here, priced £9.99

Biteback author David Torrance writes in the The Times (Scottish edition)

The beleaguered Scottish Tory Party would do well to revisit the writings of a largely-forgotten Conservative thinker. “Until our educated and politically minded democracy has become predominantly a property-owning democracy,” declared Noel Skelton in 1923, “neither the national equilibrium nor the balance of the life of the individual will be restored.”

With that, Skelton contributed an enduring concept to the modern political lexicon. The Unionist MP for Perth in the 1920s and early 30s said “property-owning democracy” was the cornerstone of the most important component of the party’s “view of life”. Later, this was interpreted as home ownership, characterised by Margaret Thatcher’s promotion of council house sales, although Skelton intended much more. He wanted individuals to have a stake in every layer of society, in government and industry as well as individual property. It was an influential idea. A trio of prime ministers – Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan and Sir Alec Douglas-Home – all pay homage to Skelton in their memoirs, while David Cameron is familiar with the phraseology, if not the man himself.

Winning Perth for the first time in 1922, Skelton said the duty of Conservatives was clear. “They must not only be Unionists on polling day but every day, and all the day.” He realised that the party could not regard any system of government “as necessarily permanent”. If there was to be “some devolution, some alteration in the present system”, he said in the early 1930s, Scotland would “come to that new duty and that new responsibility not as a minor member, not as inferior to England; she will come to it with a full knowledge of parliamentary life, and she will come because she is ready”.

He was, therefore, a Nationalist and a Unionist, Scottish and British, a political balancing act his successors have lost sight of. “If Conservatives are not to fight with one hand tied behind their backs, the active principles of Conservatism must be felt anew, thought anew, promulgated anew,” he proclaimed.

Not a bad mission statement for the modern Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party.

Skelton was the first to recognise the need to move beyond the party’s traditional association with privilege. The next Scottish Tory manifesto should emphasise what Skelton characterised as “fair play between all classes and the desire of each to farther the common weal”. His progressive Conservatism can, with a little refreshment, work again.

David Torrance’s biography, Noel Skelton and the Property-Owning Democracy, is available here, priced £25.00

Watch Deborah Mattinson discussing her new book Talking to A Brick Wall on BBC Parliament’s BOOKtalk with Mark D’Arcy. She covers all the twists and turns of the Brown premiership, the role and perceptions of focus groups among politicians and relationship between politicians and the voters.

Deborah Mattinson was Gordon Brown’s Chief Pollster.

The Daily Mail’s Annabel Venning looks at the secrets exposed by Michael Smith in his new book SIX: A History of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service:

The Rolls-Royce sped along the road through the woods outside Meaux, northern France. It was October 1914, two months after the start of World War I.
Driving the car was Alastair Cumming, a 24-year-old intelligence officer. Beside him sat his father, Mansfield Cumming, head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, who had come out to France to visit him. As well as their intelligence work, they shared a love of fast cars. Then, in an instant, the Rolls suffered a puncture. The car veered off the road, smashed into a tree and overturned, pinning Mansfield by the leg and flinging his son out onto his head. Hearing his son moaning, Mansfield tried to extricate himself from the wreckage and crawl over to him. Despite struggling, he couldn’t free his leg. And so, taking out his penknife, he began hacking through the tendons and bone until he had severed his lower leg and freed himself. He then crawled over to where Alastair lay and managed to spread his coat over his dying son. He was found, some time later, unconscious, by the body of his son. This act of extraordinary bravery, sacrifice and a willingness to use whatever means necessary, however unpleasant, to achieve an end, was to become a secret service legend…

To read more (and to find out how Rasputin really met his end) visit the Daily Mail website here.

SIX: A History of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service by Michael Smith is available to buy here.

Richard Cullen’s own investigation into the murder of Rasputin – Rasputin: The role of the British Secret Service in his torture and murder is also available to buy here.

What greater challenge could there be for a political enthusiast than to be given ten minutes to tell twenty sixth formers the ten most important facts about the 2010 general election?

Top of my list was a no brainer given the age of the audience. One in four of all 18-24 year olds commented on the election via social networking sites. Eighty per cent of them expressed an interest in political issues during the campaign. On polling day the turn out in their age group was up seven per cent on the 2005 general election, just one illustration of an unprecedented level of online interaction and participation. Old-style doorstep politics was overtaken by conversations via the web on sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the rest.

So another key fact was what I called the ‘online insurgency’: David Cameron’s air-brushed poster became the most mocked image of the campaign thanks to viral graffiti artists; Nick Clegg was supported by an online fightback when accused by the Daily Mail of a ‘Nazi slur’; and Gordon Brown’s disastrous ‘Bigotgate’ encounter became an online sensation.

But it was the three televised debates which were the election game changer – changing the dynamics of the way the campaign was reported. Without the three live confrontations between the leaders there would not have been ‘Cleggmania’ and Clegg would not have been able to command the Westminster stage as the kingmaker in the post-election hard bargaining that led to the formation of the UK’s first peace time coalition government since the 1930s.

Nicholas Jones was guest speaker at Overton Grange School in the London Borough of Sutton. He will be discussing his new book, Campaign 2010: The Making of the Prime Minister, at Gants Hill Library tonight at 7.30pm. Entry is £2.50 and you can book ahead on 020 8708 9206.

Campaign 2010: The Making of the Prime Minister is available to buy here.

The RSA recently played host to another brilliant Biteback event, with author of Talking to a Brick Wall… Deborah Mattinson taking to the stage to discuss her views on the role of focus groups, her analysis of the 2010 campaign and her opinion on where Labour, and the voter-politician relationship, can go from here. Joined by Guardian journalist Polly Toynbee and Tessa Jowell MP, the event was one of lively discussion and debate, which you can listen to here.

Talking to a Brick Wall: How New Labour stopped listening and why we need a new politics is available to buy here.

Recently Biteback author Francis Beckett presented his analysis of the babyboomers’ impact to an audience at the Royal Society of Arts. Why did sixties radicalism decay so quickly? How did we reach the situation where the benefits enjoyed by the babyboomers – free healthcare, schooling, university education, mortgages and pensions – are denied to the youth of today? Hear what Francis had to say by clicking here.

Francis Beckett’s What did the Baby Boomers ever do for us? is available to buy here.

Former BBC political correspondent, Nicholas Jones, will be discussing his new book, Campaign 2010: The Making of the Prime Minister at Gants Hill Library, on the evening of Wednesday 21st July, from 7.30pm, not Tuesday 20th as previously suggested.

The venue is Gants Hill, 490 Cranbrook Road, IG2 6LA. Nick’s talk will be followed by a Q&A, and copies of the book will be on sale on the night. Entry is £2.50. Book ahead on 02087089206.

Many thought the author Arthur Ransome was a Bolshevik. In truth he was a British spy who seduced Trotsky’s secretary

The Sunday Times, 18th July

There seemed little doubt that one of Britain’s national newspapers was harbouring a red agent. Not only that, but Arthur Ransome — later to be renowned as the author of Swallows and Amazons — was publishing one pro-Bolshevik piece after another with seeming impunity.

It was an outrage, in the eyes of several senior military intelligence officers, who lobbied Ransome’s bosses at The Daily News to have him sacked.

They were pounding on an open door. The editor and the newspaper’s owner, the chocolate magnate George Cadbury, were so incensed by the tone of Ransome’s reports that they had already tried to recall him.

Before he could pack up his office in Moscow, however, they had received an unexpected visit from Robert Bruce Lockhart, a senior British diplomat. Ransome, he informed them in a way that brooked no argument, was far too valuable to Britain where he was: he would have to stay.

Even today the novelist’s reputation remains clouded by the insinuation that he was a naive, overenthusiastic and potentially traitorous supporter of Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky, who had become key members of the new leadership under Vladimir Lenin after the 1917 October revolution. The truth, however, is that Ransome was a British spy.

After becoming his paper’s Moscow correspondent, he had sought out Trotsky, the Bolshevik foreign affairs commissar, for an interview. The request was duly granted, and the arrangements were made by Evgenia Shelepina, Trotsky’s attractive 23-year-old secretary.

Ransome, then separated from his wife, became romantically involved with her and soon found himself deeply in love. What Shelepina did not know, at least to start with, was that her new beau was actually agent S76, working for British intelligence. And although the love affair was genuine, it also provided him with a good excuse to spend a lot of time in Trotsky’s offices.

When she found out about her lover’s activities, Shelepina appears to have decided that love conquers all. Over the next six months she gave Ransome detailed information on the intentions of the Bolshevik leadership and its attitude towards Britain in particular, which he passed on to Ernest Boyce, the head of the British secret service in Russia.

By the middle of 1918 those spymasters were growing concerned about the risks Shelepina was running. Foreseeing trouble, Lockhart asked for her name to be put on Ransome’s passport as the author’s wife, since “her services to the allies have been considerable”.

Ransome, too, realised she needed to be removed from danger. So he persuaded a Bolshevik diplomat to give Shelepina a job in the Russian legation in Stockholm and then moved his own office to Sweden. It was an ingenious solution, which gave Shelepina and Ransome a good chance of escaping if the Russians realised what was going on, while granting them continued access to Bolshevik secrets.

Meanwhile, his bosses at The Daily News were smarting under the onslaught of yet another slew of Ransome’s pro-Bolshevik pieces. This time they agreed they had no choice but to bring him home. But yet again they received a visit — on this occasion from the actor and theatre impresario Harley Granville-Barker. Claiming to represent the War Office, he “implored” them to keep their correspondent in Sweden. Informed that the paper could no longer afford to pay the hotel accommodation of both Ransome and Shelepina, Granville-Barker — in fact a senior member of the secret service — told them the War Office itself would meet the couple’s bills.

Soon another problem arose: the quality of Ransome’s secret reports from Sweden was starting to flag. But S76 dug in his heels: he did not want to return to Moscow because of the danger that Shelepina might be exposed as a British agent.

It was time, his secret bosses decided, to sully Ransome’s public image back home even further. John Scale, the British secret service representative in Stockholm, persuaded the Swedish authorities to put the couple on a list of 13 “dangerous Bolsheviks” to be expelled from Sweden. Meanwhile, Lockhart arranged to give a well-publicised talk at King’s College London, where, in front of representatives of the right-wing press, he stridently denounced Ransome’s pro-Bolshevik reporting.

With his reputation as an “out-and-out Bolshevik” happily restored, Ransome agreed to return to Russia with Shelepina. The ruses had worked, and the journalist continued to burrow into the heart of the Bolshevik establishment, having regular meetings with Lenin himself.

“I even got a letter from Lenin authorising all the commissars to give me whatever information I might ask for,” Ransome said. “I was entirely uncontrolled.”

And he told Boyce: “There is no one else who can keep in such close touch with affairs there as I can. I am just as friendly with the leaders of the other parties inside Soviet Russia as with the Bolsheviks.”

By May 1920, though, Ransome was again becoming jittery about Shelepina’s safety. After so many years as a secret agent, he knew that the net could soon be closing in.

To his delight Shelepina persuaded the Bolsheviks to let her go to Britain — on the one condition that she had to smuggle in more than 1m roubles’ worth of precious gems to fund communist parties in Europe. No one knows exactly what happened to the gems, but they were almost certainly delivered — no doubt under the surveillance of the British secret service. Certainly, Shelepina’s later years were untroubled by Soviet hit squads.

There was, however, a more immediate problem: Ransome’s estranged wife, Ivy, refused to divorce him. Knowing that the British mores of the day would have made life intolerable for his mistress, Ransome decided they would have to live abroad. In the end they went to Estonia, where he continued to work as a journalist.

He remained in contact with his friends in the British secret service until at least 1922, providing them with further intelligence. One valuable piece of information he delivered was a list of the former tsarist officers serving in the Soviet forces who might make British agents.

In 1924, finally divorced and free to marry Shelepina, he brought her to Britain. Comfortably installed in the Lake District, where he wrote the series of children’s books that made his name, he gently discouraged all questions about his Bolshevik past until his death in 1967.

Six — A History of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, Part 1: Murder and Mayhem 1909-1939, by Michael Smith, is published by Dialogue at £19.99