In the room where it happened: how the Blair and Brown documentary was made

At a Strand Group event at King’s College London this week, one of the programme makers discussed the thinking behind condensing 13 years of government into five hours of TV. John Rentoul was there

Blair & Brown: The New Labour Revolution, on BBC2 (BBC/Getty/Johnny Eggitt/AFP)

Liz Mermin, the director of episode two of Blair & Brown: The New Labour Revolution, which covered the 1997 election victory and the peace settlement in Northern Ireland, discussed the unusual conditions in which the series was made. First, the programmes were made without knowing if Gordon Brown would take part. Then, “just as he said yes, finally” at about this time last year, the second lockdown started.

That is why, as one of the consultants on the project, along with Professor Jon Davis and Mary Ann Sieghart, I saw several rough cuts of episodes without Brown. They lacked the tension of the central relationship, with Brown represented onscreen by Ed Balls, Charlie Whelan, Stewart Wood, Tom Fletcher and Sue Nye.

Without Brown, the series would have been more about the exceptionalism of Blair’s premiership, with an invisible force offscreen exerting a mysterious pull on events, and the Brown government even more of a coda at the end.

When Brown did agree, Mermin said, “it completely transformed the series – all those wonderful voices had to make way”. There was one more moment of offscreen drama when Steve Condie, the series producer who was going to be interviewing Brown, “got a phone call the night before saying that Brown had changed his mind”, said Mermin. “Luckily, Steve talked him round.”

Unfortunately, Condie couldn’t attend the event at King’s College London, having gone down with Covid, but Mermin explained the effect of Brown taking part: “We had to go back and revisit it because that relationship became the core of the series.” All the episodes had to be recast, pushing a number of stories and interviewees down the priority order. Thus, for example, the story of the Kosovo conflict was left out. It was not only a dramatic tale in itself, of Tony Blair rallying Nato to make a stand against a dictator bent on “ethnic cleansing”, but was significant in explaining the hubris of the decision to join the US invasion of Iraq.

But in the end, it had to go, along with a line from Blair about how in 1999 he had suggested to Alastair Campbell making a speech along the lines of: “We are still a young government; we have made some mistakes; but we’re still learning all the time.” Campbell said: “You can’t say that! People will panic.”

Mermin made no apology for the focus on the central relationship, although she accepted that it meant that many policy questions could not be covered in depth. Both Blair and Brown understood the machinery of government, she said, and believed in incremental change: “Incremental change and moderate improvement don’t make for great television – it’s hard to do that kind of thing justice; people like big, dramatic stories.”

She also responded to a question from the audience about the scarcity of critical voices in the series. It does include William Hague, Michael Howard, Diane Abbott and Clare Short, but she said that the drama works better if it is restricted to the “people in the room” when the big decisions were taken. Condie used the same technique in Thatcher: A Very British Revolution, interviewing the politicians, officials and advisers who were “in the room”, without commentary, and using archive footage, to tell the big story through a series of smaller stories.

Ed Balls gave his view from the other side of the camera, saying that he had been interviewed for 10 hours over four days. He said that when he watched the programmes, he was just as eager as anyone else to find out what he had said. There would have been more of him onscreen if Brown had not appeared, but he didn’t seem to mind that so much of him ended up on the digital cutting room floor – he said he had spoken to Anji Hunter, Campbell and others, and they had all been interviewed for almost as long.

Balls even spoke for his fellow interviewees when he said: “We all ended up feeling very relieved with the honest, open and fair way the film was made.”

That was tactful of him, as one of the striking things about the reaction to the TV series has been how the partisanship between Blairites and Brownites is still alive. Some Blairites have complained that Brown was trying to get a bigger role in the programme by agreeing to take part at the last moment; some Brownites think that their man’s period as prime minister deserved longer than half of one episode in the five-part series.

Personally, I think the producers got the balance about right, and the best thing about the series is that by allowing those who were “in the room” to tell their story, it allowed the viewers to make up their own minds.

As a result, it has not only reminded a lot of people who had forgotten what a successful Labour government looks like, but it has even become part of today’s politics. In the row about ethical standards triggered by the failed attempt to save Owen Paterson from suspension, Alastair Campbell said to a Conservative MP on the BBC: “You lot would have watched that Blair-Brown documentary and thought, ‘Why did those blokes resign? They did far less than anything our lot are getting away with.’”

A video of the Strand Group event, “The making of ‘Blair & Brown: The New Labour Revolution’”, will be available here shortly