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- [00:00]
Adam Fleming
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk.
- [00:06]
Podcast Advertiser/Announcer
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- [01:15]
Adam Fleming
Hello again. This is the second episode of this weekend's old newscast looking at the 2010 election. So Gordon Brown has bowed to the inevitable, fired the starting gun for for the vote. And now you will hear what happened when the battle buses hit the road in this episode of old Newscast Newscast,
- [01:33]
Nick Robinson
Newscast from the BBC.
- [01:35]
Gordon Brown
I'm asking you, the British people, for a clear and straightforward mandate.
- [01:40]
Joe Coburn
You're joking.
- [01:41]
Podcast Advertiser/Announcer
Gordon says Nick agrees with Gordon and
- [01:43]
Nick Robinson
Nick says Nick doesn't agree with Gordon.
- [01:44]
Joe Coburn
This area used to be full of businesses that made things.
- [01:47]
Adina Campbell
I strongly agree with you, Gene.
- [01:49]
Nick Robinson
It's been the most exciting, unpredictable election for a generation.
- [01:53]
Joe Coburn
I can't believe this.
- [01:55]
Adam Fleming
Hello, it's Adam in the Old Newscast. And to help me understand what went down on the campaign trail in 2010, I'm joined by Nick Robinson. Hello, Nick.
- [02:04]
Nick Robinson
Hello.
- [02:04]
Adam Fleming
And Joe Coburn is still here. Hello, Joe. So, Joe, you were on the Daily Politics with Andrew Neil.
- [02:09]
Joe Coburn
Yes.
- [02:09]
Adam Fleming
Nick, you were traveling the country on various battle buses, going to various places or not.
- [02:14]
Nick Robinson
Political editors don't do battle bus.
- [02:16]
Adina Campbell
Oh, okay.
- [02:16]
Nick Robinson
I was being very grand.
- [02:20]
Adam Fleming
Oh, yes, I remember that now. Yes, I remember. Yeah. Because your view was I'm here to take the aerial view of what's happening with the whole campaign. And you can't do that if you're on the conservative battle bus.
- [02:29]
Joe Coburn
Also, I think you joined us on the Daily Politics on various occasions.
- [02:32]
Nick Robinson
No, if you're politically, you try to get the big picture, work out what stories and bolt it all together, but obviously go out on the road from time to time the leaders for the big events.
- [02:41]
Adam Fleming
Now, what I've learned from doing these episodes of old newscast about elections is it's quite hard to do a timeline because all the events get jumbled up in our minds.
- [02:50]
Joe Coburn
Yes.
- [02:50]
Adam Fleming
Turns out some of the elections that we think were really important actually weren't very exciting election campaigns, so I think we should just take a bit of a meander around 2010. Where would you like to start with your meander?
- [03:03]
Joe Coburn
Well, one of the things that struck me when you asked me to come on newscast was that actually all three leaders, so Cameron, Clegg and Gordon Brown, none of them had fought an election as leader and I think in part that meant that the TV debates particularly were so interesting because they were all just newish. Now, Gordon Brown wasn't new. The electorate knew him, of course they did, because he had been Chancellor for X number of years and then Prime Minister. But for David Cameron and Nick Clegg, they really were quite new to the public, relatively speaking. And the TV debates, I don't know about you, Nick, we were so excited on the daily politics, we, you know, it was the first time obviously that they'd agreed to it and the lesson there was that as an incumbent who was struggling, let's put it that way, with Gordon Brown, it was telling that he agreed that they should happen because Blair had always said, no, no, no,
- [04:03]
Nick Robinson
no, no, just worth a little Cody Joe, that some of us had spent our entire careers arguing that these debates should take place.
- [04:09]
Joe Coburn
Yeah.
- [04:09]
Nick Robinson
So now if you look at it, you just assume, of course, they had in America, They've had lots of European countries, surely. But no, all Prime Ministers were of the same view, which is, if you're winning or you think you. Why on earth would you give your opponent that sort of coverage? So it was a moment of profound change. We thought there's an argument there rather less important than people have made out
- [04:31]
Joe Coburn
well in outcome terms. But you're absolutely right, the thing itself was huge and we really felt it and there really was a sort of frisson around it about their preparations. I can't remember. I don't know if you can, Nick, who. They used the three leaders as their sort of Gordon Brown for Nick Clare for their rehearsals. I always wanted to be in the room when those questions were being filed. Who was playing the bad David Cameron or the evil Gordon Brown as they were sort of doing those big rehearsals. And of course, the debates themselves, when they actually happen, were so fascinating that first One particularly because Nick Clegg lands, you know, on Planet Westminster election time. And the. I agree with Nick, as the other two were doing, but he managed to do, as you said, historically it was such a big thing and he took talking down the barrel. I remember we all thought, oh, he's talking straight at me. He knew the questioner's names. All these things we've all learned to do subsequently. And he made it so much more sort of relatable and personable and of course he had slightly less to lose. And the other thing I remember we were surprised about on the daily politics was that David Cameron didn't do that well in that first debate. He seemed terribly nervous and I think a bit wrong footed by Nick Clegg.
- [05:56]
Nick Robinson
Prior point he was there at all.
- [05:58]
Joe Coburn
Nick Clegg, Yeah.
- [06:00]
Nick Robinson
You see now we've got used to a format which is that there's a head to head, yeah. Between the leader of the Labour Party and the Conservative Party. One debate and then there's a debate with lots of leaders. In fact all of them. Then the issue always was how would you ever get agreement to have a debate? And at a time when there were three dominant parties, albeit that the SNP were a powerful force in Scotland, the way the broadcast says it was, the broadcasters, plural ITV and BBC thought they could get it past the parties and also get it past the lawyers. Because in the past these sorts of things had reached the courts was to include the leader of the third party. And there was a clear third party in a way that there is now in UK politics. This is a huge leg up for the leader of the Liberal Democrats. Now, as you say he was then young, charismatic and incredibly good communicator. Popular too. But the prior point is he was there on the stage with apparently equal status.
- [07:04]
Adina Campbell
Nick Clegg, was it? Adina? Sorry, in this echoey hall I couldn't hear. Yes, Adina, I think you're absolutely right. Our tax system is grotesquely unfair. I mean after 13 years of labour, who would have believed it that you would have now a tax system where a multimillionaire from the City of London pays a lower rate of tax on their capital gains, that's income to you or me than their cleaner does on their wages. After 13 years of labour we've got.
- [07:27]
Adam Fleming
And then that led to this thing called Cleggmania.
- [07:29]
Joe Coburn
Yes. I mean the interesting thing about Cleggmania and I was trying to think about how we approached it on the programme without making too much of it, because as we all know, even Then it was the first time we'd had these televised debates. How much weight could you actually put, put by those performances when it came to the outcomes? I mean, you know, we spend all our time, don't we, trying to sort of second guess and plot how people are going to vote. And the Clegg mania, as we all know, with hindsight, of course, the Liberal Democrats lost a few seats and the, and the sort of appeal of Nick Clegg went broad wide, but he didn't go perhaps as deep as we thought. But do you remember the polls? I mean, in the immediate aftermath they sort of soared up and the consequence of that many consequences was how much are we going to start playing up the Liberal Democrats? Now, as we know there are rules, aren't there, about how much time we can give each party. But there seemed to be a little bit of a momentum around Nick Clegg. But subsequently David Cameron and Gordon Brown then thought, well, hang on a second, we're not going to let this, you know, Blue Eyed star actually try and take the second debate. So they, they sort of came together over the issue of Trident, I think, and they tried a pincer movement on Nick Clegg, which worked to some extent, but it was just interesting how they reacted and how they obviously game planned it for the second debate.
- [09:03]
Adam Fleming
But the first debate was on the 15th of April and I had a very different experience from the rest of you because I wasn't in the spin room, I wasn't watching it at home or in a studio. I'd gone to Belfast to do a piece for the Daily Politics about how the general election was playing out in Northern Ireland, because UK general elections feel very different in Northern Ireland. Different political parties, lamp posts covered with hundreds of posters. That even feels physically different in the street. Then an Icelandic volcano erupted. Oh, gosh, of course. Which meant you couldn't fly anywhere for a couple of days. So it took me three days to get home from.
- [09:34]
Joe Coburn
You did well, if it only took
- [09:35]
Adam Fleming
three days and then a train and then it was very. Got the last, last spot on the ferry and so I had to listen to it on the radio. And so this massive, massive TV moment for me was a radio moment.
- [09:46]
Nick Robinson
But did it feel different, as if Clegg had done as well as people who watched on the TV thought, now
- [09:52]
Adam Fleming
I don't want to sound all like, oh, in JFK's debate with Nixon, people listening on the radio thought Nixon won because they couldn't see how handsome JFK was. But actually on the radio, Gordon Brown was More impressive because he was a good politician and I remember listening it to, and I did not experience the Nick Clegg bounce that people watching on
- [10:11]
Nick Robinson
tv incidentally, just a little historical coder, you know, the fashionable view now conventional wisdom is, ah, well, it was all a blip. So Clegg was briefly popular. There was Clegg mania, but as Joe has said, the Lib Dems then lost seats. I think this is to get it historically quite badly wrong. I do not think that Nick Clegg could ever have been Deputy Prime Minister if he hadn't appeared in those debates and appeared so impressively so. In other words, the ability of David Cameron. I know this is essentially for a future episode of Newscast or Old Newcastle, but the ability of David Cameron to suggest that Clegg became his Deputy Prime Minister in a coalition, I think was only popular because the country had been exposed at length to Nick Clerg. They knew who they were and they'd had a broadly positive reaction to him. So I think those debates actually did fundamentally change British politics.
- [11:05]
Adam Fleming
Yeah.
- [11:06]
Nick Robinson
Albeit that they didn't produce a large vote for the Liberal Democrats.
- [11:11]
Joe Coburn
That is interesting, actually, I hadn't quite thought of it in those terms, in terms of exposing and present Nick Clegg to the country. I suppose slightly differently at the time. And I know this is about the coalition talks, but I remember thinking, there is no way David Cameron is going to do a deal with Gordon Brown. And Nick Clegg was so much closer, just in the look, the approach, the wing of the party that he was in. And I didn't see the TV debates in that sense, but it's interesting to think of making it possible because of the electorate's response. Now, I'm also intri that you thought Gordon Brown was more impressive, because it brings me back to the messages that they were trying to get across, because Gordon Brown, when he called that election, it was, don't risk it, because if you remember, we, I think we had just come out of recession, we took a long time for the uk. The recession was deep as a result of the crash, only in the early part of 2010. And so I'm not sure the public really credited Gordon Brown. They might have done Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling with how they handled the crash, whether they credited them enough with the UK having come out of it. And so he was saying, we're on the road to recovery or something, don't risk it, you know, stick with us. And David Cameron's message was sort of finely tuned to really, you want another five Years of this guy. We're the change. And Nick Clegg, sort of, when the result came out, also was part of that change. It was totally new. It was a co. You were talking about coalition politics. And we'll go on to say how alien that was and everyone rushing to, in my case, books at home, the 1970s.
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Adina Campbell
Yeah.
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Joe Coburn
But the messaging was interesting because I also thought that David Cameron, for me, at that time, even before the TV debates, hadn't quite sealed the deal. He'd done so much, he detoxified the party. Him and George Osborne were good, they were slick. They had got their messaging on the economy and so on down to a T. And they looked a little bit more sort of with it than Gordon Brown, certainly. But I still didn't think he had sealed the deal. Now, that's not to say I knew he was going to be, you know, the largest party, but not a majority. But I sort of thought Gordon Brown and Labour could have still been the largest party.
- [13:39]
Nick Robinson
All elections between two big parties are always about the same. Two slogans, time for a change versus don't risk it. There are any two slogans. It doesn't matter where you are, who the parties are, what the leaders are, they'll all waffle on about, that's what it is. Time for Change, don't risk the change is what elections are essentially about. And I think the Labor Party had not convincingly won the economic argument. Gordon Brown felt desperately frustrated and I think probably does to this day, feels that everyone got it wrong and feels that political journalists like me got it very badly wrong. What do I mean by that? His argument was that the lesson of the 1930s was that you don't double down with austerity, you don't cut during a period of crisis, you invest, and that he had a plan that was not irresponsible, would not send boring through the roof, but would allow you to support growth. Ed Balls gave a very significant speech about that to Reuters some years later, when he was the Shadow Chaucer. Ed had been his chief economic advisor. But the argument that the Tories were landing, which is about the need for spending restraint, the need to cut, borrowing, the need for that word, austerity was the one that was being more successful. And Gordon hadn't even won the argument within his own party. So that I remember vividly on one occasion, the Prime Minister going on holiday, and I texted a man people may have heard of called Peter Mandelson, who was effectively Gordon Brown's deputy, to ask him whether he would make on air, an argument for the need to cut spending, which I knew he was making off air privately. Peter rushed at the chance because he thought he had to move the argument within the Labour Party to appearing to be more realistic. So Gordon had an argument, which I know he thinks now the country should have listened to him, they would have avoided the austerity years. But. But frankly, the country was not.
- [15:41]
Adam Fleming
Because where Labour had ended up, where. I remember there was a period where Gordon Brown even say. And we would say the C word, cuts, and the amount of effort his colleagues had to put into even getting him to acknowledge that maybe you could cut government spending by a little bit.
- [15:53]
Joe Coburn
Yeah.
- [15:54]
Nick Robinson
Well, I remember an interview on a train. We sometimes do that. You know, political leaders get called to go on a train with a Prime Minister or a leader in order to do an interview to that it's less time for them sitting on a train. And I had asked him to use the C word, the cuts word. Would he admit there was a need to restrain spending and cuts? And one of my questions was, prime Minister, people don't think you're being straight with them. At the end of this interview, he was white with rage. White with rage. How dare you. He said, suggest that I'm lying. Not on camera, I might stress, although he was so incautious. And part of the reason I tell you this story now is the cameras were still running. Yes, yes. If I'd wanted to. Yeah, I. I could have used it. He was utterly furious with that to the point that the indication was he would never speak to me again.
- [16:52]
Adam Fleming
Wow.
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Nick Robinson
About that. I mean, we are talking real rage. And it was a sign, really. I mean, maybe it was me. Maybe the questions are unfair. I don't think they were, in truth, but I think it was probably a sign of his just immense frustration that he thought the country was taking a wrong turn politically and economically. But he simply couldn't find a way to win that argument.
- [17:14]
Adam Fleming
And basically where they ended up was him and Darling promising to halve the deficit by the end of the Parliament. So the deficit being the gap between what you're having to spend and what you're having to borrow.
- [17:23]
Joe Coburn
And I was just about to say that they didn't articulate a message that would have run as a powerful counter to what the Conservatives were offering. And actually the reality post 2010 in the Coalition and during the coalition years was that Labour, then in opposition, would have, under Alastair Darling's commitment beforehand, they still would have cut what we call capital spending. I think there was this slight impression that they wouldn't have had to make the sorts of cuts that they would have invested, but even Alistair Darling had promised to reduce capital expenditure by quite a significant amount, which was exactly the criticism that was levelled at the Conservative and the coalition, sorry, government, that because of taking away so much capital investment and expenditure, that is what did for public services and the economy as a whole, it took demand out. But the problem by 2010 is that for Gordon Brown, I felt, and for the Labour government and the interviews you were doing, and it's so funny you mentioned the C word. You're absolutely right, and you too, is they didn't want to talk about cuts and they allowed, in some ways the Conservatives to totally capture, wrongly, as it turned out, in many ways, that argument. Not only did you crash the economy, you've maxed out the credit card. All these things that just weren't quite true. But in interviews that we were doing, once you started asking those sorts of questions, it became too technical and the audience, I got the feeling, just had sort of tuned out.
- [18:54]
Nick Robinson
Just remember how bold this was of the Conservatives, though. I mean, George Osborne, at the party conference before the 2010 election, promised, I use the word with a smile on my face, promised that we'd all have to work longer before we got the state pension. That's unheard of as a thing that you say at a party conference before an election. And so far from offering giveaways, although there was the promise about cutting inheritance, there was that, but it was offering something was a little bit hard to follow, perhaps quite hard to imagine that, you know, you're in your 30s now, that in your 60s you'll have to work longer. But nevertheless, this is the sort of proposal, by the way, that brought people onto the streets in France and meant that President Macron's been defeated. The Tories made a promise that they would make us all work longer, which would. It's just the sort of promise that treasury wants, love, because it saves vast sums of money in the long term, but nobody is hurting.
- [19:52]
Adam Fleming
Yeah.
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Nick Robinson
Today, and therefore it's much easier to do so. It was a really interesting political context and that's why this election actually matters hugely, because it set us on the course, which is the backdrop for the politics and economics that we're living through at the moment.
- [20:08]
Joe Coburn
Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, it is a very important election for precisely that reason. It really felt like a change was coming, to use the phrase again, not just politically but economically. What was to lead into the 2015 election, where funnily enough, the Conservatives were more surprised than anyone else that they won that small majority into the Brexit referendum, of the EU referendum. And I think for us, we were just getting. I remember on the Daily Politics with Andrew Neal, economics expert, of course, I was having to learn all sorts of terms that I perhaps wasn't that okay with, you know, from bank leveraging or leveraging with banks to all sorts of deficit and the difference between the debt and the deficit. In fact, there was a bond yield, a project bond, absolute gilts, all of this stuff. We were all, I think, educated about the economy, about the banking system in a way that for me, personally, I won't talk for others as political journalists,
- [21:09]
Adam Fleming
we weren't really, because there'd been 20 years of economic growth and you don't have to worry about those things when the economy is growing.
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Gordon Brown
No.
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Joe Coburn
And as a result of that, I have felt so much more comfortable actually dealing with these sorts of terms which have become terribly important, not just since the financial crash. And around that time.
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Adam Fleming
I just want to zoom in on a few particular things I remember so clearly. I remember the launch of the Conservative Party manifesto and it was at Batsy Power Station.
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Joe Coburn
Oh, yes.
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Adam Fleming
And it wasn't a classic manifesto. It was a sort of little blue book where on the front it said an invitation to join the government of Great Britain. Well, part of me thought, oh, wow, this is not the usual stuff of like a list of pledges. Maybe these people have got some amazing ideas for how you could change what governing is. Because actually the rest of the world is changing quite fast about how we interact with every. Everything else. But then you're like, no, hang on. We all these people are going to work in some very old buildings with some very archaic traditions. And actually, maybe things are not good. Maybe they're a little bit naive about how much you could change.
- [22:07]
Nick Robinson
I think totally flopped. It didn't mean. Anyway.
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Adam Fleming
But what they were getting at with the invitation to join the government of Great Britain was because Cameron's big idea, his big sort of cuddly idea, was the Big Society.
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Joe Coburn
Well, I was just about. So there were two things.
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Nick Robinson
It would have happened to them.
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Joe Coburn
And Nick, I don't know in the interviews that you were doing, but I remember we would ask Conservative minister after Conservative minister, in four words, describe what the Big Society is. And it would be sort of charities,
- [22:39]
Adam Fleming
but also families, but also not couldn't do it.
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Joe Coburn
And I thought. I remember Andrew and I sitting there because we used to chuckle. It was, you know, sort of funnel for us. No one thinks of the TV presenters, do they? But we would put this in a serious way too, if you can't describe what the Big Society is, because it sounds interesting and there was a sort of sense to it, but they couldn't really encapsulate what it was. And I felt again that it was a continuum of the greening of the Conservative Party. The hugger. Hoodie, Hugger, husky. Was it hugging both of them? Anyway, parts of the Conservative Party itself wasn't that comfortable with some of this, but the image that actually, I remember now we're talking about it from the election is the Labour Party poster with David Cameron sitting on the bonnet of a car. I thought, I think I've got. And they were trying to.
- [23:39]
Adam Fleming
It was Life On Mars. The TV show.
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Joe Coburn
Was it Ashes To Ashes? It was Ashes To Ashes and I think it was the detective, the slightly politically incorrect detective, and saying, don't let them take you back to the 1980s. Because it was set in the 1980s. High unemployment, social deprivation under Margaret Thatcher. And there was a. There was a sort of compelling vision about that. Except the Conservatives, very cleverly, I thought, used the same advert, but just said, it's time for a change. They used it against them. And I just remember, Fire up.
- [24:15]
Adam Fleming
The Quattro was a very good.
- [24:18]
Joe Coburn
Very good fire up. That's exactly right. And he's sitting there looking a little bit like a car salesman, David Cameron, but they just embraced it. Yeah.
- [24:25]
Adam Fleming
So there's then a huge episode from the 2010 election, which we haven't got to yet, but which came to kind of dominate the whole thing. And it was. Gordon Brown was in Rochdale and his aides bring him to meet a woman called Mrs. Duffy, because she wants to say something to him and she says something about migration and actually sort of. It's all got a bit garbled in history, but she talks about all these Eastern Europeans and then she says, where are they flocking from?
- [24:54]
Joe Coburn
Say anything about the immigrants, because you're saying that you're.
- [24:57]
Adina Campbell
You're.
- [24:58]
Joe Coburn
But all these Eastern Europeans, what are
- [25:00]
Gordon Brown
coming in, where are they flocking from? A million people come from here, but a million people, British people have gone into Europe. You know, you do know there's a lot of British people staying in Europe as well.
- [25:09]
Adam Fleming
But it's not necessarily that exchange that is the bombshell. It's Nick Gordon Brown's reaction after the exchange.
- [25:16]
Nick Robinson
I've already described the way in which Gordon, at the end of interviews, would walk off carrying his bike. Well, he did it all the time. And on this occasion he's miked up. So in other words, we've not got a camera operator with a boom, which we often get on when we're traveling on the road. He's actually agreed to wear a wired lapel mic with a little pack on his belt or in his pocket.
- [25:38]
Adam Fleming
So you can hear everything he's saying, everything he says.
- [25:41]
Nick Robinson
And he's forgotten he's done it.
- [25:42]
Joe Coburn
Right.
- [25:43]
Nick Robinson
So he's got in the car and the tape is still rolling.
- [25:48]
Gordon Brown
So disaster in it.
- [25:50]
Adam Fleming
Well, just
- [25:53]
Gordon Brown
should never have put me in my thumb with that woman. Whose idea was that?
- [25:57]
Nick Robinson
And now I can see, I think just ridiculous. I'm not sure if they'll go with that one.
- [26:07]
Gordon Brown
They will go with.
- [26:09]
Nick Robinson
What did she say?
- [26:10]
Gordon Brown
Everything. She just a sort of bigoted woman said she used to be ridiculous. I don't know why.
- [26:17]
Nick Robinson
Who was that bigoted woman that you put me with? That you put me with? Yeah. So it revealed two sides of Gordon, wasn't it? It was his view of her and her attitudes, but also blaming something else. Now, of course, it was embarrassing, incredibly embarrassing. He's insulted, you know, just an ordinary woman raising perfectly legitimate concerns. Let's just stress here, no racism or what Gillian Duffy said. Say anything. It's like, oh, we couldn't repeat it now. You could easily do so. But it reflected his anger and his inability to get what was happening. So in the way that the economy is the explanation for what ends up having it in the campaign. In other words, this economic story that had lasted several years, so too was immigration. We forget now because we tend to see immigration as a post Brexit story or a small boat story. The story then was about the decision of the Blair government in 2004 to allow Eastern Europeans who just joined the EU to come here, even when lots of other countries, Germany in particular, had said we won't do it, or at
- [27:30]
Adam Fleming
least we'll have a transition period before it happens.
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Nick Robinson
Exactly that. And as a result, one official forecast that suggested there could be as many as 50,000 people coming turned out to be slightly wrong by a factor of. Let me see if I can do the maths. Is it 20 to get to a
- [27:47]
Adam Fleming
million between 10 and 20?
- [27:48]
Nick Robinson
Yeah, yeah. Because it was roughly a million net. Now, what Mrs. Duffy was articulating is that sense of there's been incredibly rapid change. I'm worried about my grandchildren, my kids getting jobs or housing or access to health care. And it reflected Gordon Brown's reaction to it, a denial about the problem. I made a Panorama at the time in which I had a former Labour minister come on and saying, I can't get Gordon to recognize the numbers that are coming into my area. And it wasn't about opposition to foreigners. It was, my council needs more money to pay for building houses and so on. And that moment of denial from the prime minister and insulting someone who'd raised it mattered, of course, in itself, but it represented a story of the previous six years.
- [28:40]
Joe Coburn
It was the moment that is seared on everyone's memory who was involved in any way in that election.
- [28:49]
Adam Fleming
And I remember seeing. Because it happened just before the daily politics went on air.
- [28:53]
Joe Coburn
Well, I was just about to.
- [28:54]
Adam Fleming
Yeah, sorry.
- [28:55]
Joe Coburn
So we're all preparing.
- [28:56]
Adam Fleming
We're preempting it.
- [28:57]
Joe Coburn
We're all prepping. No, we're all preparing for the program. Some of us harder than others. Of course, we're all preparing for that
- [29:03]
Adam Fleming
program because you were on it.
- [29:06]
Joe Coburn
And this is all coming into us and in the way that Nick has so compellingly described all of those things and even more. But what really, really brought it home at a personal, individual level was Gordon Brown later going into the studio with Jeremy vine and having that interaction played back to him. And then what he had said. She was some kind of. Just some kind of bigoted woman. And the image of Gordon Brown with his head in his hands on the desk and us watching.
- [29:49]
Podcast Advertiser/Announcer
She not allowed to express her view?
- [29:50]
Gordon Brown
Do you want. Of course she's allowed to express her view. And I was saying that the problem was that I was dealing with a question that she raised about immigration. And I wasn't given a chance to answer it because we had a whole melee of press around her. But of course, I apologize if I ever said anything that has been offensive. And I would never put myself in a position where I would want to say anything like that about a woman I met. It was a question about immigration that really, I think, was annoying.
- [30:16]
Podcast Advertiser/Announcer
And you're blaming a member of your
- [30:17]
Nick Robinson
staff there, sue, is it?
- [30:18]
Gordon Brown
No, I'm blaming myself, and I blame myself for what is done. But you've got to remember that this was me being helpful to the broadcasters with my microphone on, rushing into the car because I had to get to another appointment. And they have choices to play my private conversation with the person who was in the car with me. I know these things can happen. I apologize profusely to the lady concerned. I don't think she is that. I think it was just the view that she expressed that I was worried about, that I couldn't respond to and
- [30:48]
Joe Coburn
Even now, I can feel, oh, my goodness, that level of cringe that sort of just saturated all of us, because it was his reaction to it, despite the fact that he'd been caught then on microphone saying what he did to a lifelong Labour voter. I mean, that was just an aside, but she was a lifelong Labour voter that said everything about him, in one sense, about the personal anguish that he was feeling. And that moment in the studio that we were all watching, it was so, in one way, so incredible. And in another, we then had to sort of respond to it and how we took it on. But just the one final thing is Nick's point. If you sort of push out, what it said was. It was the. It was the real. It was the sort of revelation that labor or certainly Gordon Brown couldn't have a conversation about immigration. They didn't know how to talk about it without thinking that they'd be accused of being racist.
- [31:54]
Adam Fleming
What's so amazing for me about that moment is the sliding doors moments within that story. So imagine Gordon Brown's aide hadn't stumbled upon Mrs. Duffy and thought this would be a great moment for the cameras. Gordon is really human, after all. And if he could just meet every single voter in Britain, they'd warm to him and realize that he's actually. He's a bit wooden, but he's. He cares. Imagine they just hadn't done that or they'd found someone else. And then this was in the era before all radio studios had cameras in them. So it was only the fact that one of our colleagues managed to get a camera into the Radio 2 studio in Manchester because it was down the line and labor hadn't wanted a camera in there, that it was only through the guile of one of our colleagues that that image exists.
- [32:32]
Nick Robinson
And what that reminds you of is that this wasn't a single moment. This was a rolling story over hours and days of which you were living. The Primus's discomfort. I mean, it's more than.
- [32:47]
Joe Coburn
Yeah, it was.
- [32:47]
Nick Robinson
That's not the word.
- [32:48]
Joe Coburn
It was horror and agony.
- [32:52]
Nick Robinson
And in a sense, that was something that told you something about him. But as Joe's saying, it also told you about his discomfort with the country that he couldn't find a way to say to Mrs. Duffy, Look, I get why you're worried about this. I understand that. You know, on the other hand, and I suspect you would have agreed if he'd said this, this. Yeah, a lot of Polish people are doing very important jobs, and you'll have people you work with and what we need to do is get your kids a cow's Laos or an apprenticeship or and so on. But it was a moment at which that inability to talk about immigration at all, now, of course, it was dead.
- [33:33]
Joe Coburn
He went back and talked to her, didn't he?
- [33:34]
Nick Robinson
Was forced to go.
- [33:35]
Podcast Advertiser/Announcer
Yeah.
- [33:37]
Joe Coburn
And I think that went, so they say, relatively well.
- [33:40]
Adam Fleming
And she did vote Labor.
- [33:41]
Joe Coburn
She did. And did they keep Rochdale?
- [33:44]
Adam Fleming
Yeah, yeah.
- [33:45]
Joe Coburn
So, you know, in that sense, he sort of repaired it. And that, of course, was in private, but he had that conversation. So it was possible. It sort of encapsulated so much, but in the end, again, did it make any impact on the outcome of the election? Probably not. Maybe at the margins. A few seats here and there, I don't know. Added to what people thought anyway about it, but it was unforgettable.
- [34:13]
Nick Robinson
Sorry. Losing my. Losing my ability to speak it in a way that brings me to kind of my view of elections overall. Okay. Which is, you know, did that moment lead to that?
- [34:24]
Adina Campbell
That's not.
- [34:24]
Nick Robinson
That's not how voters were. No, voters don't go. No, it's horrible to Ms. Duffy. I won't vote later.
- [34:30]
Joe Coburn
Yeah, exactly.
- [34:31]
Nick Robinson
Essentially, you wake up in the morning, many voters, at least some. And the older they are, the more likely this is. Although it's getting increasingly unlikely, wake up and think, I'm a Labor person, I'm a toreal reformer, whatever it is. But many people wake up and they. The key is, can I be fagged to vote? Do I feel good about voting for my party now? If all you do is just think, I really didn't like that moment, I won't bother. Do you know what? There's something good on the telly. Yeah, I'll watch that. Or it's raining outside. I'm not going to. So voting is a lot to do with whether you feel good about voting for your people or bad about voting your people, whether they're motivational level. So something like this can absolutely, in my view, can shift those things, but usually. Cause it's the accumulation of a story that's been building for a very long time.
- [35:18]
Joe Coburn
And I think that's absolutely right. It's just. It's trying to remember being in that moment at that time and how awful it felt and it was. It came back to me many years later at the party conference for Theresa May. Do you remember when everything started going wrong, the bits of the stage behind her started falling down. She lost her voice and it became a little bit of a symbol about Gordon.
- [35:47]
Nick Robinson
It's such a simple. It's such a simple. That I can use the story of Mrs. Duffy and do in talks I give after dinner talks or to businesses as a kind of symbol of when things go wrong. And obviously if you're young enough that you don't remember, it doesn't work. But. But the. I don't even have to say the name Mrs. Do I just go, do you remember Goldman?
- [36:08]
Adam Fleming
Yeah.
- [36:08]
Nick Robinson
People get the gag.
- [36:09]
Adam Fleming
Yeah.
- [36:10]
Nick Robinson
They know what's coming.
- [36:10]
Adina Campbell
Yeah.
- [36:11]
Nick Robinson
It was one of those things.
- [36:12]
Joe Coburn
It was. And I think afterwards the die was sort of cast anyway for all the reasons you said people were voting whichever way. And there was a little bit that was beginning to seep through, partly because of expenses, partly because of all the things we've talked about on this program that the smaller parties, you know, might, might be able to pick up a few seats for the first time that weren't tainted by this. They weren't associated with that. And although the Liberal Democrats did lose a few seats, as you say, they're then to enter government after 2010, there was a sense that some of these memories stayed attached to the individual parties for quite some time after 2010.
- [36:57]
Adam Fleming
Very good theory. Last question. History has now recorded it is that actually what Labour did quite well in that election was prevent the Tories from winning decisively. And I can't remember there's a name for the strategy and it's attributed to Peter Mandelson. Did you know that that's what going on at the time? Because I was too young and too green and too naive to do the three four dimensional chess to work out that that's what was going on.
- [37:22]
Joe Coburn
Yes, I think there was a sense I won't name the ministers, although Peter Mandelson might have been one of them that were beginning to say we're not going to win this election, but we think we can deprive the Conservatives of a majority. And I'm trying to remember how late that was into the campaign or even just before it, because obviously Gordon Branagh got to a stage where he had to call an election timing wise. So probably in the campaign. But there was a talk about the phrase I used earlier. He hasn't quite sealed the deal. We could be looking at a coalition while we were all swatting up on coalitions and if we deprive the Conservatives of a majority, it just proves that actually, although it was a very good result for David Cameron after all those years and a bad result for Gordon Brown, there could be a bit of room to maneuver in any talks if they were to happen. But as I say, I never saw Nick Clegg and Gordon Brown together, acting together in the way that I thought David Cameron would. But it was definitely being talked about.
- [38:33]
Nick Robinson
The talk of an uncertain election result was very open and was being encouraged by the Cabinet Secretary at the time, Gus o'. Donnell. Yes. He had had talks with the man from the palace because essentially it is the Queen, as she was then the late Queen, who would have to bring parties together in the event of an uncertain election result. So we were already seeing papers and getting briefings and talking to academics and look at the histories about it. But what's interesting is I didn't take that, that all that seriously in the sense that if you're political editor of the BBC, you basically do a 24 hour shift on general election because you're on the 10 o' clock news when polling closes, you do all night on the election program and then you pretty much stay up all day till the 10 o' clock news and you knack at yourself thinking, well, that's it, the new Prime Minister will arrive. I will do that piece on the 10 o' clock news and then I can sleep for the weekend.
- [39:33]
Adam Fleming
Yeah.
- [39:34]
Nick Robinson
Little did I know.
- [39:35]
Adam Fleming
Little did you realize.
- [39:36]
Joe Coburn
When did you sleep all the way through after that?
- [39:39]
Adam Fleming
2015.
- [39:41]
Nick Robinson
You can use this as a trail for the day. Yeah, but it isn't the old news. Little did I know, Adam, that I would do a 24 hour shift. I think I had one hour's sleep and I would then stay up for five consecutive days for the cause.
- [39:57]
Adam Fleming
This has been absolutely amazing. Thank you so much, Joe.
- [40:00]
Joe Coburn
You're very welcome. It's been lovely to be here.
- [40:02]
Adam Fleming
And thanks for taking us down memory lane again, Nick.
- [40:04]
Nick Robinson
Nostalgia. Marvellous, isn't it?
- [40:06]
Adam Fleming
It's a powerful drug. So next weekend, in the next batch of old newscasts, we will look at the crazy five days of coalition building that followed the 2010 election and which Nick was referring to there. In the meantime, newscast will return sort of as normal next week. We're going to be coming to you from the Edinburgh fringe. So there will be the same episodes of Newscast where we talk about that day's news with our friends from around the BBC. They will just have added sound effects and excitement and vibes from 200 newscasters who have joined us in the theater in Edinburgh. So speak to you very soon from Edinburgh. Bye bye.
- [40:47]
Nick Robinson
Newscast, Newscast from the BBC, you've come to the end of Newscast. Some people, and you know who I mean, might say you, you ooze stamina. Can I encourage you to subscribe on BBC Sounds and you can get in touch with us anytime. Email us@newscastbc.co.uk, you can WhatsApp us on 0301-239-480.
- [41:15]
Podcast Advertiser/Announcer
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