Granita

[After John Smith’s sudden death in 1994, Cherie urges her husband to stand for the leadership, against Gordon Brown if necessary]

“Listen, Tony. This is your moment. You’ve got to take it. Who dares wins.”

He just sat slumped in the passenger seat with his eyes closed and said, “I know.” But it was with no sense of triumph or eager anticipation. It was more resignation: “I know.” . . . I knew that time was of the essence. My fear was that Gordon would just move in, and it would be a fait accompli, and I knew Tony was the right person for the job. By the next general election there would be people voting who had never known a time when the Tories weren’t in power. The new leader had to be someone they could relate to. Tony had always been more appealing to the general public than Gordon, and more grounded in the realities of everyday life. What could be more grounding than bringing up a young family? Ironically, Tony was always saying: “Gordon, if you really want to be leader, you need to get married.” Yet he also felt it was a mark of how honourable Gordon was that he didn’t marry just for appearances. On the other hand, if he had, in my view, he would inevitably have been a more rounded person, with another dimension to his life.

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Nothing would happen until after the funeral, so to that extent discussions would be ongoing, but we all had to know if Tony was going to stand . . . . . . My own belief is that he decided to go for it straight away. For him, the real question was not, would he stand, but how to reconcile Gordon, in order to preserve the modernisers’ ticket. What he most feared was that if both of them stood, the modernisers would lose out through squabbling among themselves. Tony’s main aim over those next few days was to persuade Gordon to give way to him.

Getting Gordon to stand aside was no easy task. First, he was the more senior. Secondly, he obviously had his supporters just as Tony had. One of the key players, of course, was Peter Mandelson. That first night I remember sitting in our kitchen and asking Tony, “And what about Peter? What does he think?” and Tony saying with a sigh: “Peter is very conflicted.” I wish now that Peter’s ambivalence had been better known at the time, because Gordon’s conviction that Peter was instantly in our camp destroyed their relationship.

[After the funeral] . . .

As the week went on Tony clearly had the momentum and I was coming to the view that, if Gordon wanted to stand, he should just let him.

“You’ll win anyway,” I said. “So don’t come to a deal. Just let him lose.” But Tony said no. The modernisers were a team, he said, and this was a team effort.

Back in London there was yet another meeting with Gordon. It was at Lyndsey’s [Cherie’s sister’s] house in Richmond Avenue, just round the corner – one of the conditions of these meetings was that no one should see Gordon coming to our house. This was the meeting where essentially it was agreed that Tony would stand unopposed and Gordon would be Chancellor; that they would work together and that Gordon would support him, and the aim would be to reform the Labour Party and take power.

It was always a given that they would work in tandem and that when Tony stood down Gordon would take over. Tony also made it clear to Gordon that he had no intention of staying leader for ever and that when he did stand down he would support Gordon as his natural successor, assuming they worked well together as PM and Chancellor in the meantime.

As far as I know the timing was never discussed but when Tony left for Lyndsey’s, I made my position perfectly clear, even if I framed it as a joke. “If you agree with Gordon that you’re going to do this for one term only, don’t come back home. Because that’s just ridiculous.”

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