Profie: Charlie Whelan

CHARLIE Whelan can be a brute – someone who knows his way around power and is not afraid to use it. Yet, despite all that, there has been something oddly reassuring about his re-emergence over the course of the last week.

For everybody in the Westminster political village, Whelan's return – grinning and spinning at the centre of the political spotlight – represents something of a return to order. It is almost as if the body politic has said: "Charlie's back. We know where we are now. We know what sort of election this is going to be."

On the surface, Whelan is merely the political director of the Unite union. This is the union representing many of the British Airways staff who this weekend have gone on strike. But Whelan is no ordinary political director. Beneath that facade, he is one of the Prime Minister's closest confidantes, a devoted Brownite, a top political schemer and now one of Labour's chief election strategists.

Between 1992 and 1999 Whelan was Gordon Brown's chief spin doctor. He was to Brown the Chancellor what Alastair Campbell was to Prime Minister Tony Blair. He was at the heart of the Labour project (if not quite the New Labour project) through the late 1990s, past the landmark 1997 election victory and into government.

Whelan was seen – by friends and foes alike – as a consummate political operator. He was always fiercely loyal to Brown, ruthless when it came to Brown's opponents, and a dedicated and polished media manager who worked every hour he could to smooth the path for his boss.

So he is not just Unite's political director and he is not just in the limelight because of the BA strike. Interest has bubbled around Whelan because he is back in politics and, crucially, because he is back at Brown's side at a crucial electoral moment, just as he was in 1997.

Despite his union credentials, Whelan's background is some distance from Labour's traditional working-class roots. Born in Surrey, the son of a Tory-supporting civil servant, Whelan went to a secondary modern and then to Ottershaw, a state-run boarding school which saw itself as a minor public school.

He was into mass popular politics even then. He once provoked a strike after a pupil was sent home for not having a haircut.

He studied politics at the City of London Polytechnic before his brief stint as a foreign exchange dealer – which he hated. In 1981, though, he started as a union official. Whelan was also a member of the Communist Party, and he still praises both the fighters of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War and Che Guevara whenever he gets the chance.

As a union official in the Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union, Whelan became a protg of Jimmy Airlie – the charismatic Clydeside shipworkers' leader who found fame with Jimmy Reid in the UCS work-in in the early 1970s. Whelan was then given his grounding in the tough world of Labour politics by union leaders like Gavin Laird and Bill Jordan, with the union traditionally occupying a role on the right wing of the Labour movement.

His talent was spotted by Peter Mandelson – later to become one of the bitterest foes of both Brown and Whelan – and he became Brown's spin doctor in 1992, just as Brown inherited the role of shadow chancellor from John Smith. In the five years before Labour's success in the 1997 election, the MP and his spinner formed a close personal bond.

Whelan brought with him a fierce work ethic and an attention to detail that created the perfect platform for Brown to excel. Whelan could also be just as hard as Campbell when it came to squeezing the press, often making profanity-laden phone calls to harassed correspondents from just outside the Red Lion pub in Whitehall.

He is very sociable but he is also a sharp and aggressive operator, just as likely to scream abuse to a contact as he is to buy one a drink.

In Labour, he's treated with respect, not just because of his political nous but also because he has always been prepared to stand up to Lord Mandelson. Whelan resigned as Brown's spin doctor in 1999 following revelations about the secret loan from Geoffrey Robinson to Peter Mandelson that forced the departure of both men as ministers. He hated being forced out of political life and was in the wilderness for eight long years.

During that time Whelan spent much of his time fishing the Spey from his retreat in the Highlands near Grantown-on-Spey. Rather like the salmon he sought, Whelan surfaced occasionally, fleetingly, but disappeared from view again just as quickly. But he still found the time to get involved in local campaigns. One of the most recent was to take public issue with Scottish Water's plans to tap into the Spey's underground reservoir.

The draw of politics was too great, however, and in 2007 he was back in London, working for Unite, now the biggest and most powerful union in Britain. Three years on, the reason he is back on our TV screens is because the cosy relationship between Unite and the Labour Party has been thrust to the top of the political agenda once again, and Whelan finds himself personifying some of the most pertinent political issues of the moment, brought into focus by the BA dispute.

There have been reports about Unite candidates being parachuted into constituencies despite strong local objections, and tales of in-fighting over undue union influence at the top of the party. Whelan has also made it clear that he will use union power to counter David Cameron's Ashcroft-funded assault on the marginal constituencies. He is going to send Unite members into these same constituencies to ring other union members and get them all out on the street, matching the Tories blow for blow.

Perhaps inevitably, this has led to comparisons between Whelan and the controversial Lord Ashcroft. Whelan is typically dismissive of this notion. "All this money is individual donations from millions of working people in this country, so it's insulting to say that is comparable to Ashcroft," he said last week.

It was classic Whelan, the spin doctor who is not just unafraid of difficult questions but someone who seeks them out, eager for the chance to hit back hard.

Most of the time now, the 56-year-old Whelan spends Monday to Thursday in London, returning to Scotland on Fridays. He still loves the life of a country gentleman – walking and fishing – which he first enjoyed with his partner Philippa, also a union official, in the late 1990s.

Brown may be reassured to have Whelan back by his side as he prepares to face the biggest test of his political career, but the public may not be so comfortable to see him there. Where Brown sees an old friend, the public may see the face of excessive union power and a reminder of New Labour in-fighting at its worst. Even within Labour itself the jury is still out on whether he is an asset or an election-losing liability.