The shadow cabinet was recently given a presentation by Greg Cook, the Labour party's veteran in-house pollster, about why they lost the election. He identified the issues that hurt Labour, analysed variations in the results and answered their questions about which groups of voters they had most alienated. In an otherwise comprehensive postmortem, there was one huge hole in the middle of the discussion. "Did you talk about Gordon? How much his personal unpopularity contributed to the defeat?" I asked one of those at the presentation. "Oh no," she shuddered. "That's just not possible."
It was like this when they were in power. At his cabinets, it was absolutely forbidden to discuss in front of Gordon Brown his chronic failure to present a personality or fashion a vision with appeal to voters, his lack of capacity to run an orderly and collegiate government with a coherent long-term strategy and his crippling inability to remedy any of these flaws, whatever help he was offered. As a result, to use Alistair Darling's word, they were "fucked".
He has been gone from Number 10 for more than two months now and is rarely seen at Westminster. I'm not going to join those who attack him for his exile in Scotland. Some ex-prime ministers take years to get over being ejected; some never come to terms with the withdrawal of power. I don't blame him for holing up in Kirkaldy and trying to bury his anguish by sitting at his keyboard thumping out a tome on the financial crisis. But I do criticise his colleagues for continuing to flinch from confronting the truth about him. Labour will not understand why it lost unless part of the conversation is a discussion about why they ended up being led by someone who was defeated by so many of the challenges of leadership, why he took them to their second-worst mauling since the 1930s and why they allowed this to happen.
This silence about Gordon Brown is also the product of collective guilt. To start that conversation, they would first have to admit to the great cover-up about his character in which so many senior figures in the party were complicit for more than a decade. During the New Labour years, a few journalists strove to reveal the truth about the poisonous feuding that disfigured the government. It was all denied, of course, by Tony Blair, by Gordon Brown, by Alastair Campbell and by, oh yes, Peter Mandelson. We were disparaged as peddlers of "tittle-tattle". This accusation was sometimes even levelled by other journalists, usually the sort of commentator who adopts pomposity as a cover for his own inability ever to break significant stories. I always thought it did matter to report the internecine battles within the government, not least because they often paralysed Whitehall or led to bad decision-making that was to the detriment of both the country and New Labour itself.
There was unquestionably fault on both sides. But the greater part of the viciousness of the ugly Blair-Brown civil war was sourced in the Scotsman's consuming and utterly unreasonable resentment that he was not the leader. When he did finally lever out his rival, many of Brown's colleagues, even the prime minister he had putsched, prayed that he might be transformed for the better once his ambition was finally satisfied. The reverse proved to be the case as he was overwhelmed by a job that was much harder than he anticipated. As his premiership floundered, he became even more paranoid, chaotic and volatile.
Yet the cover-up persisted. When The End of the Party was published earlier this year, I gave great credit to Brown for his best moment as prime minister: saving the financial system from implosion. But it would not have been an honest book if it had not also chronicled his deranged and disloyal behaviour both as chancellor and prime minister. I was accused by Number 10 of publishing "malicious falsehoods". I was quite relaxed about that as I was also mainly amused when Peter Mandelson put himself in front of the cameras to suggest that a meticulously researched book was all made up. I was confident that only the terminally credulous would believe a word of his denials. Accustomed as I am to the mendacities of politicians, even I am now faintly staggered that at the very same time as Baron Mandelson was trying to dismiss my book as fiction, he was furtively rushing together his own "memoir" which confirms by repetition several of the episodes first revealed in The End of the Party.
In the version according to Mandelson, sometimes in his own words, and sometimes in words he attributes to Tony Blair or other members of the cabinet, Gordon Brown was "impossible", "nightmarish", "mad, bad, dangerous and beyond hope of redemption", "brutal", "back-stabbing" and "like something out of the mafioso".
The charge that Brown must answer is that he sabotaged two premierships: Blair's and then his own. But Blair and Mandelson are also in the dock. Mandelson quotes himself saying to Blair: "You are in danger of being blamed by history for saddling us with Gordon because of your own desire to keep buying him off to save yourself, and because of your failure to build up an alternative in the cabinet." Blair replies: "I fear you may be right."
If Blair thought that Brown was unfit to be prime minister – and there's now lots of evidence that this is precisely what Blair thought – he had an obligation to his party and his country to do something about it. At the very least, he should have, as he could have, ensured that there was a contest for the succession in 2007 rather than allow Brown to be crowned without proper scrutiny. It was one of Blair's most selfish acts and a gross dereliction of duty to swan off to make his millions while leaving his party and country to cope with the consequences of a Brown premiership.
Mandelson is guilty in a different way and he feels it. He admits towards the end of his book that every senior figure in the cabinet knew they were heading for a defeat he feared would be "colossal". Yet he gave shielding to Brown which helped to prevent him from being deposed and replaced with a leader who might have retrieved, or at least ameliorated, the situation. Part of his excuse is "selfish": "I did not want to be accused of 'treachery' all over again." To that you have to say that Peter Mandelson should have slit his wrists long ago if he is really that bothered about being regarded as treacherous. In any case, he owed a greater loyalty to the party he claims to love.
Their inaction led to the inevitable: a calamitous campaign, third place in all three TV debates, the Mrs Duffy debacle and everything else that flowed from having a leader whose dysfunctional character, physical and intellectual exhaustion and lack of either vision or communications skills were so painfully evident to the public. There would have been some risk in deposing him. But it is hard to believe that Alan Johnson or David Miliband or even Harriet Harman could have done worse and they might well have done better. Mandelson, who ran the campaign, believes Brown's personal unpopularity cost 20 to 30 Labour seats. Some pollsters put it higher at 40 seats or more. That could, and probably would, have made all the difference between the formation of a Lab-Lib government and the Con-Lib government that actually happened.
The temptation for Labour is to turn its eyes away from its tragic recent history because it is so excruciatingly painful to think about. That partly explains the vitriolic reaction from his colleagues to a Mandelson book that actually tells us very little that we didn't already know. Another reason this conversation is not happening is because it is so embarrassing for those contesting for the leadership. Andy Burnham was one of the nodding dogs who would declare to TV cameras that the cabinet had every confidence in Gordon Brown when the reverse was the case. Ed Balls ran the thuggish Brownite machine and the decade-long insurgency against Tony Blair to put his master in Number 10. Ed Miliband makes pious noises denouncing "factionalism" as if he is a saintly figure who never had anything to do with it. "The emissary from Planet Fuck" – as he was known among Blair's aides during the civil war – was at the heart of the Brown faction.
It is a bit tricky for David Miliband. He was one of the senior members of the cabinet who knew Brown was taking them to defeat and failed to act before it was too late. In mitigation, at least Miliband Senior is trying analyse why Brown did not renew Labour after Blair, but deepened its plight. "We lost many of our strengths – optimism born of clear strategy, bold plans for change and reform, a compelling articulation of aspiration and hope."
All that needs to be said and more. It is time for Labour to talk about Gordon. He was not the sole reason for their defeat, but he was an absolutely fundamental one. Until they face up to that, and to the collective misjudgment that made him their leader and then kept him there, they will still be telling themselves the same lies that landed them where they are now.
