Rob Blackhurst

AK13

28/11/2003

Gordon Brown and Tony Blair are the Lennon and McCartney of politics, writes Rob Blackhurst.

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There comes a time in every failing partnership when bad blood can be hidden no longer. A time when two intellectual equals, at their professional peak, cannot occupy the same room without a coldness freezing the atmosphere. Such an unfavourable environment besieged the Beatles when they delivered their penultimate album, "Let it Be", 33 years ago. On its re-release this month, analogies with Blair and Brown - the Lennon and McCartney of politics - are striking. And ominous.

Back then, the mood in Abbey Road was black. Lennon and McCartney's partnership was floundering on John's obsession with Yoko Ono and Paul's new status as the group's de facto leader. Exhausted by bickering in endless "White Album" sessions, McCartney hoped the group would bond by playing live in a studio. The group reluctantly agreed to leave Abbey Road's wizardry for Twickenham studios but, after a week of palpably awful vibes under the unforgiving gaze of a TV crew, the sessions - and the tapes - were abandoned.

A few months later, Lennon embarked on what is best described as a deliberate sabotage of this McCartney project. Drafting in Phil Spector to add a sickly icing of strings and choirs to the deliberately lo-fi takes, Lennon overdubbed some vintage Liverpudlian sarcasm on some of his partner's most celebrated songs. He deflated the hymn-like "Let it Be" by announcing in a piping falsetto "now we'd like to do Hark the Angels Come" and immediately followed its celestial tone with "Maggie Mae", an uproarious knees-up about a Liverpool whore.

The mood in Downing Street today is a similar shade of Beatle black. The Blair and Brown faultline recently gave rise to a most public eruption when Tony refused to offer Gordon the NEC seat he desired. With McCartney waiting 23 years after Lennon's death to re-release "Let It Be" in his own image, stripped of orchestration and cleansed of Lennon's impish fingerprints, the question now is what fate faces Blair Brown partnership? Has it reached "Let It Be" levels of sabotage and pettiness?

The analogy runs deep. Both partners shared a vision that destroyed all before it. They took the roots of an American form - Rhythm and Blues for John and Paul: Clintonite policies for Tony and Gordon - and transplanted them into English soil. They achieved success young. The Lennon/McCartney songbook was complete before either reached 30, and, in a business where baldness and girth are usually respected, Blair and Brown won the two biggest Government majorities since the Reform Act when they were still in their forties.

Lennon was two years older than McCartney; Brown, two years older than Blair - enough distance to be contemporaries but to give the elder an advantage. All four men suffered thunderbolts in their formative years that galvanized their ambition. Both Lennon and McCartney lost their mothers as teenagers; a stroke incapacitated Blair's father when the future prime minister was only 11. Brown lost sight in one eye playing rugby for his school and feared he would go completely blind.

Both partnerships bonded through breathing the same air. John and Paul developed in the dingy fug of Hamburg nightclubs, sometimes playing for sixteen hours at a time, fuelled by huge quantities of amphetamines. When Tony and Gordon first entered the Commons together in 1983, they shared a windowless office and the Labour party was a beleaguered rump, bereft of ideas in the face of Thatcher's ideological challenge.

And, in both cases, it was the junior partner that unexpectedly seized the crown. Just as Lennon invited an awe-struck McCartney to join his band, Brown was in the thick of Labour party politics while Blair was still flouncing around in purple pantaloons and perfecting his Mick Jagger pout. As Blair's old flat-mate Charlie Falconer said: "Tony was mammothly dazzled by Brown's power. I don't think he ever thought at that stage that he would be leader of the party". Brown, with his superior understanding of journalism and dispatch box skill, made a greater mark on the Commons.

But things began to shift on Blair's appointment as shadow home affairs spokesman. After the Bulger murder, he revolutionized the Labour party's attitude towards law and order and found his true calling in the television studio in a way that he'd never done on the green benches. Meanwhile, the exchange rate mechanism (ERM) debacle bogged down Brown, leading to Rory Bremner lampoons about his wooden delivery of "long lists, short lists, depressing statistics and disturbing industry results".

For both partnerships, profound change occurred overnight with the sudden death of a father figure. The fatal overdose of manager Brian Epstein in 1967 plunged Lennon into a deep depression and allowed McCartney to impose his agenda on a listless band. Similarly, John Smith's death in 1993, which catapulted Blair into the leadership, left Brown much like Lennon, far more devastated than his younger partner. While Brown paid an emotional tribute to Smith's "fearless sense of duty", Blair was soon thinking of the succession. He later acknowleged: "I mean, you know, whatever one says - within moments of this happening, the world just moves on".

The speed of the changed roles meant the new leaders had to tiptoe around the slighted party. Lennon stopped contributing songs to Beatles albums like a sulking child: "if you didn't invite me on an album personally, if you three didn't say, write some more because we like your work, I wasn't going to fight", he told the others. Blair always seems to ministering Brown's bruised feelings, borne out by the emollient phraseology of the typed note setting out the Granita deal: "Gordon has taken, as he said he would, a decision which puts party unity and teamwork above ambition".

Like Lennon/McCartney, Blair and Brown have always had a hand in each other's best tunes. The slogan "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" might have showcased Blair's brilliant communication skills when he was shadow home secretary, but came straight from the lips of Brown.

Both partnerships could always achieve more together than apart. The alliance between McCartney's mainstream appeal and Lennon's musical adventurousness meant parents could enjoy the ragtime of "When I'm Sixty Four", while their offspring could skin up to "Tomorrow Never Knows". Equally, Blair and Brown's big tent still stretches from the moderate trade unions to the mondeo populated estates of the South East. Brown's genuflection to "social justice" reassures those that doubt whether Blair is a member of the Labour tribe. Blair's constant paeans to the private sector calm right-wing worries about "tax and spend".

They also compensate each other's personal flaws. Blair, as interested in the guitar and his large family as in politics, offsets Brown, the obsessive, a politician to his fingertips and steeped in Labour lore. Just as McCartney can seem inauthentic - "you're all pizzas and fairytales", Lennon once told him - the most dangerous accusation against Blair is that he is untrustworthy. Brown's high trust ratings have kept doubting Labour voters onboard.

In both these partnerships, disciples of either men have exaggerated the difference between them. Just as Lennon could write sensitive ballads and McCartney could flirt with the avant-garde, it was Red Gordon that pushed tube privatisation and it is Tory Blair welcoming Ken Livingstone back to the party bosom. As former minister Brian Wilson says: "What are Blairism and Brownism anyway? Some of the biggest ultra Lefties of the 1980s, when the lunatics came so close to taking over the asylum, have donned sharp suits, slithered through ideological hoops and proclaimed themselves undying Blairites."

Is there an incentive now for Blair and Brown to stay together? As Lennon and McCartney spent more time with their own entourages, retreated into families and fatherhood, their visions of the future diverged. In Brown's admission that he's a "father and that's what matters most", there could be a changed perspective that gives him the strength to break free.

But, just as Lennon and McCartney were a fraction of their creative force apart, so Blair and Brown would be equally diminished. A cabinet without Brown would be painted in managerial grey, while a Brown premiership would be prone to paranoia and factionalism. It is perhaps a fond hope that the Opposition threat under Michael Howard will persuade the two men that rows can only lead to mutually assured destruction - and to learn to let it be.