Britain’s Leadership Battle Years in Making

The photographs of the two men from the old days look like weathered yearbook snapshots, two fresh-faced politicians elected together to Parliament in 1983, their hair a little too long. One of them, a young man named Tony Blair, is beaming broadly; the other, Gordon Brown, looks studious and serious.

They shared an office for a time, eventually collaborating in drafting a new vision of what Britain’s Labor Party should be, marrying its old trade union, socialist traditions with market principles. When the party leadership came up for grabs in 1994, both men wanted the job. Brown, especially, thought he had earned it.

“Basically, Brown was the senior partner. Brown had been in the party longer, had more sort of intellectual roots,” said Nick Kochan, coauthor of “Gordon Brown: The First Year in Power.” “Blair was Johnny-come-lately, trained as a barrister, had lots of charm and appeal and savoir-faire. Brown was rather retiring and awkward -- brainy, but bad at people.”

The two reportedly struck an agreement: Blair would take the party leadership -- and soon, the leadership of the country -- and Brown would inherit later, being granted responsibility for social and economic policymaking in the meantime.

More than a decade later, Brown tired of waiting. As chancellor of the exchequer -- Britain’s treasury chief -- he has been one of Blair’s most important allies and his most enduring rival during the prime minister’s nine years in office. But he finally struck last week, forcing Blair to announce his departure within the year.

The move left the Labor Party in chaos and virtually guaranteed that Blair’s final months in office would be marked by a bruising battle for leadership of the party both men helped to shape.

On Saturday, Blair appealed to the party to leave behind the vicious internal sniping of the last week and remake Labor’s message to suit a changed Britain.

“There was something sort of irredeemably old-fashioned about it, I’m afraid: the attacks on the leader, the leader responds.... The only thing we didn’t have was the smoke-filled room, and that’s because we banned those,” said Blair, whose entry into the room of party supporters was met with a standing ovation.

“We’re three years away from an election, and we can remake ourselves,” he said. “But we can only do it not by behaving like we did last week, but by behaving like we did when we were hungry for power, before 1997, when we understood that what mattered was the people and the country, not ourselves.”

The story of Blair’s last months as prime minister, like the years that preceded them, cannot be written without reference to his relationship with Brown, the brooding and brilliant son of a Scottish minister who both guided Blair’s Britain to economic vigor and waited resentfully in Blair’s shadow for the day he would be allowed to lead.

The political fortunes of Britain for years have depended on the interplay between these two powerful politicians who have worked closely together for two decades, sometimes while barely speaking to each other.

“Each of them and their acolytes spilling bile into the media [about each other] is pretty much normal behavior for them,” said Tony Travers, a professor of politics at the London School of Economics.

“At one level, they’re like an elderly married couple who kind of hover between a sort of final divorce, which would shock everybody, and occasionally getting back together and everything’s fine. There’s an element of can’t live with and can’t live without each other,” Travers said.

The marriage of opposites seemed to work. After Blair became prime minister in 1997, Brown proceeded to take expert command of the economy, handing over responsibility for interest-rate setting to the Bank of England and charting nine years of steady growth, while Blair focused on high-profile foreign policy initiatives and plunged into overhauling healthcare and education.

But well into his third term as prime minister, Blair had steadily refused to either step aside or set a date for when he planned to, leaving Brown, aides said, feeling frustrated and betrayed -- all the more so as the party’s poll numbers plummeted in the face of Blair’s increasingly unpopular alliance with the U.S. on the war in Iraq.

Brown’s supporters have been urging him to launch an attack on Blair for months. Blair’s backers warned that attacking the sitting prime minister of a successful party 16 months after he had been reelected would amount to political suicide for all involved.

“Blair’s star has really waned, ever since the end of the [initial phase of the Iraq] war and the failure to find any weapons of mass destruction. And yet each time it seemed to me there was a moment where Brown might have moved, he stood back,” Kochan said.

Even last week, he said, Brown fell short of demanding Blair’s immediate resignation, although reports have circulated of a private deal under which Blair would step down in the spring.

“Sometimes I think maybe the reason he doesn’t go for it is he’s not totally convinced that he’s a natural leader,” Kochan said. “Is Brown really convinced he’d be the right prime minister?”

Blair has never been troubled by such doubts, and even in the current crisis, with his party threatening open revolt, he has not been cowed, say those who know him. To the contrary, they said, Blair thrives on high drama.

“His adrenaline flows in helpful ways in his body. It’s fight and fight, not fight-or-flight,” said Anthony Seldon, headmaster of Wellington College and one of Blair’s biographers. “He also has a kind of Zen personality whereby he is able to be remarkably positive about events. To a remarkable degree, he is able to let things go and live in the present, without being dogged by regret. He just bounces back.”

In the end, Blair appears to have a kind of toughness, even ruthlessness, that Brown lacks, say many who know Blair. And he is buoyed in the current showdown, some suggested, by caring less about the consequences of the infighting.

“For Gordon Brown, the longer this civil war goes on, the more likely it is that Labor will lose the election. From Tony Blair’s point of view, it’s much less of a problem. Because the worst that could happen from his point of view is that Labor loses the election, and that in turn would suggest that he, Tony Blair, had been the magic ingredient that had won all the elections before,” Travers said.

“And it is just possible, although the Blairites would aggressively deny it, that Tony Blair thinks [Conservative Party leader] David Cameron might be a better long-term successor as prime minister than some of the Labor candidates on offer.”

Yet policy differences between Blair and Brown are not substantial. Both place greater value on transatlantic relations than on those with Europe.

“Brown will want to maintain the traditional British alliance with the U.S., and while he probably will not think the current policy on Iraq is sensible, until there is a change of U.S. presidents he won’t be able to do much,” said Patrick Dunleavy, a professor at the London School of Economics.

In general, Brown is thought to be to the left of Blair, more at home with labor-movement roots and slightly less committed to market-based solutions for base-line public services, including healthcare.

But because of the ghost of the Blair-Brown feud, the upcoming leadership contest will involve personalities as much as policy. Some Labor deputies have acknowledged reservations about whether Brown is up to the job, or have suggested, as Labor deputy Meg Hillier has, that Brown would need a good running mate.

“Politics is about communicating,” Hillier said. “Brown is very warm one-to-one, but you need someone who can go out and talk the language that people can understand on the street.”

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kim.murphy@latimes.com