By ANTHONY SELDON and GUY LODGE Harriet Harman’s pivotal role in an attempted coup against Gordon Brown has been laid bare in an explosive book on New Labour. Miss Harman, then as now deputy party leader, encouraged and supported the bid by former ministers Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt. The revelations – in a book by respected political historians Anthony Seldon and Guy Lodge exclusively serialised in today’s Daily Mail – raise major questions about the loyalty of the woman who is now deputy to Labour leader Ed Miliband. It also reveals the treachery of Lord Mandelson, Jack Straw and Alan Johnson and a string of Cabinet ministers. It goes to the very heart of the plot to unseat Mr Brown. As 2009 drew to a close, the plotters decided to hold a secret meeting. But where? Anywhere in or near the House of Commons risked immediate exposure, and it was crucial that the Prime Minister should hear not a whisper about what they planned to do. Above all, he had to be kept in the dark about the identity of one of the ringleaders: Harriet Harman, the deputy leader of the Labour party and leader of the House of Commons, who sat beside Gordon Brown every week in the Commons at Prime Minister’s Questions and is to this day often described as a ‘personal friend’. Ringleader: Harriet Harman at Brown's side in the Commons like a loyal deputy, but she wanted him out of No10 Why, then, did Harriet risk inviting the plotters to meet at her own home in Woodbridge, Suffolk? Possibly, she thought that holding a dinner on New Year’s Eve would provide appropriate cover. More likely, she thought that few would suspect that the person whose loyalty to the Prime Minister should have been beyond question was harbouring his enemies under her roof. Among them was Patricia Hewitt — who was still bitter at being sacked as Health Minister by Brown in 2007 — a government minister and a former government minister. Their names might have come as a surprise to Gordon Brown, even though he was known to mistrust almost all of his colleagues except the Children, Schools and Families Secretary Ed Balls. Certainly, he would not have suspected that the most senior woman in the Labour party was preparing to plunge in the knife so close to an election. ‘The consensus was that, for the sake of our party, we needed to change the leader, and this was our last chance of doing it,’ recalls one of those present at Harman’s dinner. Everyone, including the hostess, was absolutely insistent that ‘we have to make a go and get rid of him’, recalls another guest. As Deputy Leader, she knew she was in a very delicate position. Although convinced she was acting in the Labour party’s interests, moving against a sitting prime minister and risking disruption so close to a general election was a potentially rash move. If anything went wrong, it could easily spell the end of her political career. Bitter: Sacked Labour minister Patricia Hewitt and overlooked minister Geoff Hoon who believed Gordon Brown was leading the party to electoral disaster According to one of the guests, she made it clear that ‘something had to be done’ and said she was ‘willing to confront Brown herself ’ — but the ground would have to be firmed up before she would consider taking such a giant step. In fact, the New Year’s Eve dinner was not the first time she had gathered conspirators at her home. The first meeting — at which former Transport Secretary Geoff Hoon was present — had been a few weeks earlier and had degenerated into a general moan about Brown rather than a concerted call to action. It too was at her house in Woodbridge. She had not invited any ministers because she knew they would be terrified that Brown might discover their identities. She had taken the precaution instead of inviting their parliamentary private secretaries to eat, drink and plot on their behalf. Meanwhile, Harman had been sounding out other members of the Cabinet, one by one. Such was the mood of paranoia that no minister was told which of his colleagues also felt Brown had to go. So how was the Prime Minister to be toppled? One of the plotters at the New Year’s Eve dinner mentioned that Hoon — a close ally of the Chancellor Alistair Darling — was preparing to write a rallying article that would criticise Brown’s leadership. In Hoon’s view, the Prime Minister was leading Labour towards electoral disaster. Like some of the other plotters, though, he was also motivated by a personal grudge — in his case, because he had been demoted from the Cabinet in the June 2009 reshuffle and then overlooked for the job of EU high representative in November. The same went for Harman, who believed that Brown had consistently failed to give her the trust and respect that she deserved in her elevated position. When it came to deciding who would coordinate the coup, Hewitt and Hoon were logical choices. For her own part, Hewitt knew she had a lot less to lose than her friend Harriet, whom she had known since they worked together at the National Council for Civil Liberties in the 1970s. Then the talk turned to which government ministers could be counted on to support the coup. The names mentioned included Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth, International Development Secretary Douglas Alexander, Secretary of State for Scotland Jim Murphy and the Foreign Secretary David Miliband. (In fact, the Prime Minister was already suspicious of Miliband. The previous August, he had confided to an aide: ‘If I could exchange all those brains for an ounce of loyalty...’) Unhappy: Labour Justice Secretary Jack Straw and Home Secretary Alan Johnson Others known to be unhappy with Brown were the Justice Secretary Jack Straw, Alistair Darling and Home Secretary Alan Johnson. Hewitt wondered about speaking to Straw, but decided that she did not know enough about where he stood. Alistair Darling, however, was being kept informed about all the details of the plot by his PPS Anne Coffey. All present knew that significant Cabinet support had to be secured if the coup were to succeed. But they agreed not to tell ministers any details — that way, if interrogated by Brown, they could say ‘hand on heart’ that they were not part of any ‘plot’. Needless to say, No 10 had no inkling of the treachery brewing in Suffolk. Not that Brown was at all complacent. Just the day before Harman’s dinner, another disaffected former minister, Charles Clarke, had posted a blog saying: ‘All the evidence suggests that Brown’s leadership reduces Labour’s support.’ Unknown to the Prime Minister, he had also worked on a plan for triggering a leadership election — and given a copy to Harriet Harman, who was ‘very interested’ in what he proposed. On New Year’s Eve, two backbenchers, Barry Sheerman and Greg Pope, released separate statements calling on Brown to resign and describing him as disastrously unpopular. These were mere sideshows, however, to the real battleground, which was soon being marshalled by Hewitt and Hoon. David Miliband, no less, had hinted to the plotters via intermediaries that he thought a leadership challenge should be launched at the very start of the New Year. There was clearly no time to be lost. But was Hoon’s newspaper article the right way to start? He was planning to use it to attack Gordon Brown and spell out his weaknesses. Hewitt suddenly got cold feet. If the plot failed, she warned, the Tories would plaster billboards up and down the country with quotes from the piece saying that Brown was unfit to be Prime Minister. In the first weekend of January, she met Hoon and Clarke to come up with an alternative. It was agreed that she and Hoon would write an open letter which would demand a vote of the Parliamentary Labour Party on the leadership issue. The result, they hoped, would be a ‘media firestorm’ that would give disillusioned Cabinet members the incentive to come out against Brown — who would then have to go for the sake of the party. Confrontation: Tessa Jowell urged Brown to think hard about quitting Downing Street Should they warn members of the Cabinet yet? Again, the plotters bottled out, reasoning that they couldn’t be 100 per cent certain whom to trust. The letter, they decided, would be released immediately after Prime Minister’s Questions, in order to avoid accusations that they’d tried to sabotage Brown’s weekly hand-to-hand combat with David Cameron. The night before, Harman warned one Cabinet minister that ‘something was about to happen’, and ‘not to come out and support Brown’ when it did. They agreed they had to tell him face-to-face that he needed to ‘think very hard about remaining as leader’. Jowell saw him at 6pm on Monday, January 4, expecting Straw to follow her at 7pm. She reportedly told Brown: ‘I want to see you because this is a conversation only you and I can have.’ He replied: ‘Let’s be clear, I’ve asked to see you.’ After bickering with him over who had requested the meeting, Jowell told Brown: ‘It’s not fair, but you’re costing the Labour Party a considerable degree of support.’ Piling on the agony, she continued: ‘Even at the end, Tony still had six people in Cabinet who would die for him; you have only one, Ed Balls. It’s not fair, but people don’t like you.’ He needed to think very hard about whether or not he should stand down, she said. But Brown saw her off, arguing that the Labour Party could fragment in six directions, and that only he could hold it together. And Straw? When Jowell called him that evening to see how his meeting had gone, he said he had been unable to raise the question of Brown’s future. ‘I ran out of time,’ he said lamely. Final moments: Prime Minister Gordon Brown, his wife Sarah and children John and Fraser, walk to his car,after he was finally ousted from Number 10 in May The action now shifted back to the main drama: the Hoon/Hewitt letter, which was fired off at 12.26pm on Wednesday, January 6. The email began: ‘Dear Colleague, As we move towards a General Election, it remains the case that the Parliamentary Labour Party is deeply divided over the question of the leadership ... We have ... come to the conclusion that the only way to resolve this issue would be to allow every member to express their view in a secret ballot.’ It ended: ‘Yours fraternally, Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt.’ PMQs had begun at Noon and Brown was having a good day, throwing Cameron off-balance with some repartee over a Tory proposal for a married couple’s allowance. Then the atmosphere began to change. Tory MPs had started picking up news of the letter on their BlackBerrys — and some were waving ‘bye-bye’ to Brown, who was completely unaware of what was going on. The Conservatives now had ample ammunition with which to humiliate the Prime Minister. A BlackBerry was quickly passed to Conservative backbencher Ann Winterton, who was due to ask a question, and an MP explained to her what was going on. Theo Bertram, who worked on Brown’s PMQ team, picks up the story: ‘If she had asked a question about the coup, it would have been a total disaster for GB. But she didn’t change course, and asked about wind farms instead. Tory ineptitude saved us from disaster.’ Back at No 10, Brown’s staff called Lord Mandelson, then Lord President of the Council (the fourth great office of state and a title now held by Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg), for advice when they found out about the letter. ‘Don’t over-react,’ he counselled. ‘You’ve got to be relaxed today.’ Reacting strongly, he said, would only give the coup credence, and putting anyone up to speak in support of Brown would be an error. The staff debated whether he was playing games with them, and decided he probably was. A senior aide reveals: ‘We decided that we wouldn’t take any notice of the advice he gave us.’ Discussion: Peter Mandelson spoke to his former leader Tony Blair who agreed they should not encourage a coup but neither squash it either That morning, Peter Mandelson also spoke to his former master, Tony Blair. They agreed that Mandelson should not positively encourage a coup, but neither should he ‘go into overdrive’ to squash it. On top of this, Mandelson was furious that Brown had failed to help him become the EU High Representative. The result was a prolonged strop: Mandelson no longer showed up for Monday afternoon strategy sessions at No 10 and refused to take Brown’s calls. In November, arch-plotter Charles Clarke had been to see Mandelson in his rooms at the Cabinet office and was gratified to be told: ‘Gordon will lose the election. I will not do anything to precipitate his departure, but, if others do, I will not intervene to defend him.’ He even told Clarke — who repeated it to Hewitt — that he thought it would be inappropriate for him to lead the coup himself because he was a member of the House of Lords. The effect of this on the plotters was electrifying, spurring them into action. It was, thought Hewitt, Hoon and Clarke, ‘a very significant shift’ in his position since the summer and ‘it certainly encouraged them to go ahead’, according to one of the plotters. In his recently-published memoirs, however, Mandelson claims he knew nothing of the planned coup. Whatever the case, on the day in question, he was asked by one of Brown’s staff whether he’d talk to the Prime Minister. His reply: ‘I’m in such a bad mood with him I’m not sure what I would say.’ Then he went out to lunch. In the afternoon — possibly scenting an opportunity — he relented. ‘If you get a grip on the election and do what I want, I’ll be there for you,’ he told Brown. Events unfolded very speedily after PMQs. Just after 1pm, Hoon went on Radio 4, calling for the leadership issue to be resolved and insisting that he hadn’t spoken to anyone in the Cabinet. (Harman’s bosom-buddy, Hewitt, could clearly not have made this claim.) At 1.26pm, Tony Lloyd, the chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party, said that calls for a leadership ballot had no support among backbenchers. By 2.15pm, the PLP issued a statement saying that a secret ballot would be ‘unconstitutional’. Even some of the backbenchers who weren’t huge fans of Brown began criticising Hoon and Hewitt, calling the plot ‘sour grapes’. Loyal: Brown's minister Ed Balls, but the Prime Minister had doubts about David Miliband Harman — who had been asked by a Downing Street aide to ‘speak for Gordon’ — now convened a meeting with Straw in her Commons office to discuss what they should do. Jowell had also been called by Brown’s team, but bluntly refused to make a public declaration of loyalty. Alan Johnson refused, too. Straw said he would put out a supportive statement, but then ‘disappeared for hours’. Members of the Cabinet were keeping a very deliberate silence. The plotters had instructed a number of them to keep quiet and not issue statements of support for the Prime Minister, so that ministers would have time, if they chose, to meet Brown and tell him it was time to go. As No 10 desperately tried to persuade the Cabinet to come out in public opposition to the plot, one of the most important meetings of Brown’s premiership was taking place in Harman’s office. She had convened a meeting with Straw to discuss what they should do. It dawned on them both that not enough ministers were willing to tell Brown to go. A third person — Alan Johnson — then joined them. He said later that he believed he was being sounded out by Harman and Straw to see if he wanted to become leader. No 10 was ‘extremely apprehensive’ about their request to see the Prime Minister, fearing they would tell him that he had to resign. Their sense of foreboding increased when Straw arrived in a dark hat and coat, looking like the Grim Reaper. The pair came not to bury Brown, however, but to extract concessions. Harman demanded that she be given a more clearly defined and high-profile role in the election campaign, while Straw emphasised the need to do more to reach out to marginal seats and to be more consultative. Brown could not believe his luck. When the doors to his No 10 den opened after their half-hour meeting, a ‘remarkably cheerful’ Brown emerged slapping Straw on his back, while Harman was actually smiling. No 10’s view was that the two plotters had ‘bottled it’ and were trying to extract something from Brown as a way of saving face. As one aide puts it: ‘They knew they’d f***ed it up and were looking for a way out.’ When his political team nervously asked Brown what he had conceded, he shrugged his shoulders to indicate: ‘No big deal.’ Support: Alistair Darling came out to back the Prime Minister At 5.01pm and 5.06pm, respectively, Johnson and Darling made supportive statements. At 5.28pm, five hours after the Hoon/Hewitt email, Straw at last took to the airwaves to defend Brown. At 6.25pm, Harman announced that ministers were ‘united in our determination to do what’s best for the country, which is for Labour, led by Gordon Brown, to win the general election’. The only one of the discontented heavyweights yet to speak up was David Miliband. Just before 7pm he was caught by the media on the steps of his home in North London, where he said that he supported the re-election of Gordon Brown’s government. He didn’t give an unequivocal statement of support to Brown’s leadership until the following day. Once the panic was over, the No 10 staff started unravelling the plot. Within 24 hours, they were sure that Harman had been the ringleader, mainly because of her close relationship with Hewitt (though, in public, Clarke received the blame). His biggest grouse with Brown, they felt, was the sidelining of his own advice in favour of that of Balls. (‘The one person Jack Straw would go out of his way to cause bodily harm to was Ed Balls,’ says an aide.) One week later, No 10 was ranking the Hoon/Hewitt coup as a mere ‘six’ on the Richter scale. They were wrong to do so. Had Harman and other big beasts spoken out, there is no doubt that Brown would have fallen. The plotters had very bad luck with the timing. The polls had moved towards Labour just before Christmas, and Brown had turned in a pugnacious performance at PMQs on the very day of the coup. Which had made it all the more important for Harman and Straw to step up to the mark. A disillusioned Hewitt says: ‘Frankly, it did not succeed because the various people who had told us they were willing to speak to Gordon to ask him to stand aside did not do it. If they had told me in the days before that they were not going to do it, then the coup would have been aborted.’ Hoon blamed himself for not talking to Cabinet ministers and thus building a head of steam. Harman herself, who had the most at stake, had simply never dared convene a meeting with Cabinet colleagues to thrash out a collective course of action. Indeed, one plotter suggests that the ‘climate of fear around Brown’ was the key factor that defused the coup, because it dissuaded Cabinet colleagues from discussing moves against him with one another. And, to be sure, fear for their jobs, their income and even their titles also weighed in the balance. So Brown survived, ultimately, because the forces of inertia were far stronger than the forces of revolution.Harriet the traitor: How Harman led plot to topple Gordon Brown
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Monday, 22 November 2010
Meanwhile, totally unknown to the plotters, another critical initiative was being hatched.
Straw, who was apparently still smarting at not having been made Deputy Prime Minister in the June reshuffle, had been talking privately with the Olympics minister Tessa Jowell about the ‘Brown problem’.
In truth, the relationship between Mandelson and Brown was at an all-time low.
Not only did Mandelson find Brown’s working practices chaotic, but they had also fallen out over the Prime Minister’s refusal to make public spending cuts.
But he didn’t. And he told Harman and Straw the coup was crazy and too late.
With Johnson so opposed, the PLP so dismissive and other Cabinet ministers so evasive, Harman and Straw came to the inevitable conclusion that the game was up.
So they decided to cut their losses by going to see Brown together.
It was felt she was obsessed by her position, and that she had never come to terms with Mandelson’s role, especially after his promotion to First Secretary of State.
Straw was also picked out by No 10 as a leading agitator.
Adapted from BROWN AT 10 by Anthony Seldon and Guy Lodge, published by Biteback on November 25 at £20. © Anthony Seldon and Guy Lodge 2010
To order a copy at £18 (p&p free), call 0845 155 0720.
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