Britannia Radio

Gordon Brown and His Secret Red Box Signing Room

By Iain Martin

Here’s another little historical detail that reveals quite a lot about the way in which Number 10 was run under Gordon Brown. Shortly after his boss David Cameron moved in, a key figure in the new government was astonished to discover from officials how Brown liked to deal with his ministerial papers of an evening.

Cameron, and Clegg, are pretty straightforwardly traditional when it comes to working their way through their red boxes every night. Each government minister is given a pile of papers to review, letters to read and sign and decisions to make. The papers are put inside one of the famous red boxes, which resemble large briefcases, and delivered to ministers’ homes so they can complete the day’s work as they watch one of their colleagues being beaten up on Newsnight. Cameron lives above the shop in Downing Street, but still opts to receive a red box.

Claims a Number 10 source: “The officials like David’s approach. He gets a red box in his flat, works his way through it until it’s empty, hands it over and gets another one the next evening. But that is not what Gordon did.”

Instead of a Red Box, I am told, Brown had a special signing room set aside in Number 10. If he was in London, officials would lay out on a large table the papers that various ministers, officials and departments wanted dealt with. Brown would scan this selection spread out one by one in front of him, review those that caught his attention and sign them with his black marker pen. But he would just leave the others. After he was done, an official would collect those papers that had been dealt with and find out what had been left behind on the “table of doom” because he didn’t like the look of it or couldn’t face making a decision.

The bad news then had to be broken to officials and ministers whose papers hadn’t got through. The papers he didn’t want to deal with might then be put back on the table the next day, and the day after that,  but it tended to leave issues in limbo for long periods and created confusion. The error-strewn letters to the bereaved families of troops killed in Afghanistan seem to have got snared up in another part of this botched process somehow, I am told.

It is another reminder that Brown arrived in Number 10 convinced that now that the flibbertigibbet showpony (as he saw it) Tony Blair was gone, the experts and serious people were moving in. So he never felt the need to ask anyone who could have been really blunt - Blair, Jonathan Powell, John Major or any of the ex-cabinet secretaries he might have called on for a frank chat — the basic questions: How do I do this? What worked for you?

He seems sure to have asked his Cabinet Secretary Gus O’ Donnell for pointers, but GOD (as some term him) is a wily soul. He had been permanent secretary in Brown’s Treasury and would have grasped right away that the way to deal with the new PM, if he wanted to live long and prosper, was not to tell him unvarnished truths about the limitations of his working style too often.

So Gordon had his signing room, and a string of experts brought in (such as Lord Carter) at the behest of Sarah Brown when she realized he was struggling to adjust. And then he had a communications “horse-shoe” of desks built in Number 12 Downing Street - complete with giant TV screens. And he based himself there, working harder and harder in an open-plan set-up that accentuated his obsession with rolling news and dominating the daily headlines. Faster and faster, round and round, went his government, as he tried to stop the slide in the polls.

I wonder if at any point he realized, towards the end, that all those stuffy old customs such as red-boxes and him working during the day in the sanctuary of his own quiet office in Number 10, were not weird impositions designed to make his life more difficult? Probably not, clearly he knew better.

Actually, these traditions had evolved over centuries as the best way for a Prime Minister to be informed but not swamped, to marshal his or her time and to maintain some order, discipline and structure. Used properly they aid decision-making. Most importantly they help keep the wheels of the Queen’s government turning.