The Third Man: Life at the Heart of New Labour
The Third Man: Life at the Heart of New Labour
Peter Mandelson
The number one bestselling memoir of one of New Labour’s three founding architects, now with a revealing new chapter updating this e-book edition.Peter Mandelson is one of the most influential politicians of modern times. ‘The Third Man’ is his story – of a life played out in the backroom and then on the frontline of the Labour Party during its unprecedented three terms in government.Much of the book is devoted to the defining political relationships of Peter Mandelson’s life – with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Charting what he terms the ‘soap-opera’ years of the Labour government, his book continues to ruffle feathers with an updated preface bringing the story up to the tempestuous present.
THE THIRD MAN
Life at the Heart of New Labour
PETER MANDELSON
Copyright (#ulink_2fc3e3ee-3aa7-54e1-a3c7-c3aa1eec46b3)
HarperPress
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Published by HarperPress in 2010
Copyright © Peter Mandelson 2010
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780007395286
Ebook Edition © JULY 2010 ISBN: 9780007395316
Version: 2016-09-29
To my parents, Mary and Tony,who gave me my values and thebest upbringing anyone couldwish for
Contents
Cover (#uac02f699-213d-5040-b1ef-51ee2b747065)
Title Page (#uf24589fe-5199-5634-b5b4-4fcbdcb84148)
Copyright (#u80a213ee-22ee-5b39-9e0b-9880770b3fde)
Dedication (#u1cad147e-229d-57f3-9932-20a4aa20a32a)
List of Illustrations (#u54592dcf-40e9-5860-b6d0-5af9cadfe87c)
Introduction (#uf11aeba5-d781-56cb-af33-d1c0b22031c8)
1. ‘Can You Help Me?’ (#ue1a8a7ea-5b83-5996-a76f-2115466ed736)
2. Born into Labour (#u6bb44bf6-8a3a-5189-b2e2-32893144e489)
3. A Brilliant Defeat (#u961b4dec-11e8-5cea-b27c-3fe31c10aade)
4. The Three Musketeers (#u6da53539-1b31-5b88-b461-c1b747e8c998)
Photographic Insert (#litres_trial_promo)
5. An Impossible Choice (#litres_trial_promo)
6. Being Peter (#litres_trial_promo)
Photographic Insert (#litres_trial_promo)
7. Being Fired (#litres_trial_promo)
8. Fighting, Not Quitting (#litres_trial_promo)
9. Back in the Shadows (#litres_trial_promo)
10. Trading Places (#litres_trial_promo)
Photographic Insert (#litres_trial_promo)
11. Comeback Kid (#litres_trial_promo)
12. The End of New Labour? (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
List of Illustrations (#ulink_ecf3376f-8b1a-5825-8ea2-9b6f66457b14)
My maternal grandfather, Herbert Morrison, at the May Day parade in Hyde Park, 1939. (© Popperfoto/Getty Images)
My father and mother with my paternal grandfather, Norman Mandelson.
The budding young spin-doctor? On the phone, next to my father.
At Hendon County Grammar school.
With my mother and brother Miles at the Aldermaston anti-nuclear march in the 1960s.
With Gershom Nyaranga, Rural Dean of Musoma, Tanzania, 1972.
In my bedroom study in Princes Street, Oxford, 1976.
The Weekend World team at LWT. (© ITV/Rex Features)
Admiring the red roses with Tony Blair at the Labour Party conference in Blackpool, 1990. (© John Voos/The Independent)
Keeping a watchful eye on the platform at the same conference with Julie Hall and Philip Gould. (© John Voos/The Independent)
With Neil Kinnock in Clapham, south London, July 1990. (© Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)
The Labour candidate for Hartlepool in the 1992 general election. (© Trevor Humphries/Financial Times)
At the dedication of a bench to the memory of my father, Hampstead Garden Suburb, 1991. (© Nigel Sutton)
Fielding calls from the press on an early portable phone in my beloved home at Foy, Herefordshire. (© Paul Felix/Rex Features)
Key members of the shadow cabinet economic team, 1992. (© John Stillwell / PA Archive/Press Association Images)
With a group of school children in Hartlepool.
With guest speaker Mo Mowlam and friends at a constituency summer barbeque in Hartlepool.
With Prince Charles at a reception in St James’s Palace.
Planning the 1997 general election campaign with Margaret Beckett, Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. (© Tom Stoddart/Getty Images)
New Labour’s kings of spin: with Alastair and David Hill prior to our 1997 election manifesto launch. (© Fiona Hanson/PA Archive/Press Association Images)
A new dawn: the election victory party at the Royal Festival Hall on the morning of 2 May 1997. (© Brian Harris/Rex Features)
Minister without Portfolio: outside the Cabinet Office on my first day at work.
At the Millennium Dome site with Chris Smith, Michael Heseltine, Tony Blair and John Prescott. (© John Stillwell/PA Archive/Press Association Images)
John Prescott in conversation with his mate ‘Peter’. (© Ben Curtis/ PA Archive/Press Association Images)
Relaxing in the company of Sabrina Guinness and Mick Jagger.
With Bobby and Jack on the steps of Hillsborough Castle.
At Stormont with Tony and Bill Clinton, December 2000.
The Queen visits Hillsborough. Housekeeper Olywn McCarthy keeps hold of Bobby.
Making my resignation statement outside Number 10 after leaving the government for the second time, January 2001. (© Alastair Grant/AP/Press Association Images)
With Tony in Hartlepool, September 2001. This was the first time we had been photographed together since my second resignation. (© Owen Humphreys/PA Wire/Press Association Images)
Supporting the campaign for justice for the families of the victims of the Omagh bombing, 2000. (© Topfoto.co.uk)
With my constituency agent, Steve Wallace, in Hartlepool.
Anxiously awaiting the result at the Hartlepool count on the night of the 2001 general election. (© Carl Rutherford/PA Archive/Press Association Images)
Jubilation with my supporters after my victory is announced. (© Ian Hodgson/Reuters/Corbis)
At the Progressive Governance Conference in London, 2003 with President Lula of Brazil, Tony and President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa.
With Tony at the EU–China political summit in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. (© Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP/Press Association Images)
Arriving at the WTO talks in Geneva, July 2008. (© Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images)
Irish farmers protesting in Dublin against the proposed WTO deal. (© Collins Photo Agency, Dublin)
‘Cashmering my way into Number 10’ on my return to government for the third time, October 2008. (© Fiona Hanson/PA Wire/Press Association Images)
At the Cabinet table with Alan Johnson, David Miliband, Alistair Darling, Douglas Alexander and Ed Balls. (© Anthony Devlin/AP/ Press Association Images)
Gordon and I see the funny side during a question-and-answer session with local business people in Kent on 21 October, shortly after I rejoined the government. (© Gareth Fuller/PA Wire/Press Association Images)
Resplendent in my robes on the occasion of my introduction to the House of Lords, with Roger Liddle. (© Gary Lee/Photoshot)
On a return visit to Brussels, with the President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso.
In a military aircraft during my visit to Iraq, April 2009. (© Peter Nicholls/The Times)
Comeback kid: delivering my speech to the Labour Party conference, September 2009. (© Mirrorpix)
The Mirror headline the next day summed up the mood of delegates in the hall. (© Mirrorpix)
Dancing with Hannah Rita-Mackenzie in the Blackpool Tower Ballroom during the general election campaign, April 2010. (© Graeme Robertson/Guardian News & Media Ltd 2010)
On our final day in Downing Street with Douglas Alexander, Alastair, Gordon and Ed Balls. (© Martin Argles/Guardian News & Media Ltd. 2010)
Introduction (#ulink_0f5904b5-f8d1-5d70-b329-4aa75f7c40d4)
This may seem an odd admission from someone who once embodied New Labour’s reputation for spin and control freakery, but almost everything about this book is different from what I had imagined it would be.
Alongside Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, I helped to found the modernising project that became New Labour, and to win the party an unprecedented three terms in government. I was not just a witness to, but a participant in, the highs and the lows of those years. In the early days of our modernising project, journalists dubbed us ‘The Three Musketeers’, and the remarkable bond that linked Tony, Gordon and me was at the heart of all that we achieved, and failed to achieve.
When I decided to call this book The Third Man, it was not out of feigned modesty. No matter how influential each of us was, at different times and in different circumstances, in the creation and achievements of New Labour, there is an obvious distinction between us. Tony, and then Gordon, became leader of our party and Prime Minister of our country. By contrast, through much of our time in government, my influence was exercised largely behind the scenes, sometimes even in the shadows – another reason why the title’s echo of Graham Greene’s story of post-war Vienna seemed appropriate.
I first met Tony and Gordon in 1985, when I started work as Labour’s youthful campaign director at the party headquarters in Walworth Road and they were recently-elected MPs. I have a clear recollection of when I first brought the three of us together as a team. I was looking ahead to the coming general election in 1987, and had already identified both of them as very gifted politicians – they shared an appetite for hard work, a deftness for identifying political opportunities, and an ability to communicate with an electorate that was still very sceptical about Labour. Above all, they were attuned to voters’ feelings rather than simply to what our activist base wanted to hear. The role I had in mind for them was to work with me to develop campaign grenades for us to lob at the Tories when the election was called.
The two of them needed little encouragement. In the coming months we prepared our lines of attack, and when the election starting pistol was fired, I scheduled a press conference to enable them to release the first salvo. It turned out to be both the first and the last such occasion. Chaired by the sometimes acerbic but media-savvy frontbencher Gerald Kaufman, the event was organised so that Gordon would launch the initial attack on the Tories, before Tony stepped in to finish them off. Instead, he came close to finishing off his own political career almost before it had begun. Momentarily departing from the prepared script, he described Mrs Thatcher as ‘unhinged’. The journalists’ ears pricked up at the sound of the Prime Minister, then at the height of her powers, apparently being described as deranged or worse. To his credit, Tony’s antennae, even then, were in full working order. He quickly spotted the danger, and glanced at me from the platform with a pained expression that I was to become very familiar with in the years to come. It was ITN’s super-sharp political editor at the time, Michael Brunson, who leapt on the gaffe. ‘That’s a good line to lead the Ten with,’ he said, smiling, to me when I went over to the press pack to see what story they were likely to report. I managed to get Tony off the hook, telling Michael firmly that ‘unhinged’ did not mean mad, that it was Mrs Thatcher’s policies that Tony was describing, not her mental state, and that anyway, it would not be fair to embarrass a newcomer who was sure to be going places, and was therefore someone Michael would want to befriend.
This was the sort of incident that helped establish my reputation as Britain’s original ‘spin doctor’, someone who could ‘fix’ the news, or write the next day’s headlines. The Conservatives feared me, and inside the Labour Party some revered me, while others loathed me, depending on their political standpoint. It was no secret which side of the modernising argument I was on. Unfortunately, transforming the Labour Party would prove an altogether much harder and lengthier process than squaring hard-nosed political journalists, but at least from that time the identities of those who would lead the modernising pack began to be established.
From the outset, I knew that much of this book would centre on the defining relationships of my political life, with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. As I wrote, and relived my life in the Labour Party, I found myself recalling some of the despair I occasionally felt during the 1980s: the lurking, ever-present thought that our party might never form a government again, and the sheer hunger and drive this instilled in me to ensure that it did not happen.
I found that same hunger in Tony and Gordon, the two people who gave me most hope in those wilderness years that Labour’s best days might yet be ahead of it. It was not a hunger for office for its own sake, but for a modernised Labour Party that would build a more humane, tolerant and socially just country than the one we were living in during the 1980s and early 1990s.
The three of us became like brothers. The force of our personalities, and the desire for change that we shared with the team of political professionals we built together – people like Philip Gould and Alastair Campbell – would help to take us back into government and keep us there for a longer period than any in Labour’s history. We transformed our party’s attitudes to the economy, to markets, to state ownership, to defence, to business, to the trade unions, to tax and spending, to public service reform, and to individual rights and responsibilities. In doing so, we defined New Labour, and reconnected the party with the broad mainstream of modern Britain.
In government, this modernising project helped create the fairer, more generous, more open-minded Britain that will be our legacy. We have a record that I am proud of. Our public infrastructure – the essential services we all rely on – was rebuilt: the days of winter crises and longer waiting times in our National Health Service, and the crumbling school buildings that we inherited on coming into office, now seem like something from another era. Faster treatment for serious diseases such as cancer has saved lives, and the NHS is more patient-focused than at any time since its birth. Our unprecedented investment in schools and universities was combined with far-reaching reform to widen educational opportunity at every level, in particular during the crucial early years. We irreversibly improved attitudes to the work–family balance, acted successfully to bring about peace in Northern Ireland, significantly reduced crime, increased support for families with children, and promoted more tolerant attitudes on race, gender and sexuality. All of these achievements were possible only because of the project to which Tony, Gordon and I dedicated our political lives: fundamental change to the Labour Party.
In writing this book, I knew there would be no way to avoid describing the occasional soap-opera aspects of our relationship. I am conscious that my diaries and contemporaneous notes, on which this account is based, have focused disproportionately on the frustrations, arguments and disagreements we had, rather than on those areas on which we did agree and which, as a government, were the basis of our long-term achievements. Inevitably with such a close-knit group of strong personalities, there were family feuds, tensions and differences of opinion – sometimes of epic proportions, sometimes, in retrospect, far too petty. These were magnified and fed by the burgeoning twenty-four-hour news culture, the development of which accelerated during our time in office. But more often than not, particularly in the earlier years, the tensions between us were a source of strength for New Labour. And in the end, through all the strains, we held together – unlike Thatcher, Howe and Lawson, unlike the SDP’s Gang of Four, and even, going back further, the Labour trio of Crosland, Jenkins and Healey.
If any of us had reason to split from the others and break up the team, it was me. I became the meat in the sandwich in the struggle that developed between the other two. My falling-out with Gordon after John Smith’s death, when Tony rather than Gordon became party leader, would lead to my exclusion from government for lengthy periods, blighting my ministerial career. Yet I remained close to Tony, and I finally made up with Gordon.
Whatever my other failings, I am a loyal person, and I rate loyalty above all other qualities. There were many times in my political life when it would have been simpler for me either to keep my head down, or to change sides at an opportune moment. It would have been advantageous for me to desert Tony when he was battling for survival against Gordon’s drive to accelerate his departure and succeed him as Prime Minister. And I would have been applauded by many in my party if, later on, I had deserted Gordon when it was clear that he could not win re-election. Perhaps it is a fault to cling too dogmatically to an idea or a policy, but not, in my view, to a person to whom you have made a commitment.
The reason I did not waver in my support for Tony is that I believed in him, his political outlook and his skills as a leader. The more pressure he came under, the more steadfast I became, overcoming my feelings that at times he had let me down. Tony was not perfect. Notwithstanding the steel he showed towards me, he did not always enforce his will sufficiently with others to get the policy changes he wanted. But his personal conviction, and sense of right and wrong, were unflagging. He had great leadership qualities, and it was always impressive to see how he would manage to defeat his opponents more often than not by means of intelligent planning and calculation, rather than employing less subtle tactics.
The reasons I came back to Gordon in late 2008, rejoining the government even though I was enjoying my life and my fulfilling job as the EU’s Trade Commissioner, were that he needed me – always a nice feeling to have – and that I wanted to serve the country I love. I felt that I could make a difference when the financial crisis struck, and I strongly supported the policies Gordon was pursuing. I know that, later on, some people in the party felt that by bolstering Gordon’s position and keeping him in place, I contributed to our electoral defeat. One reason I did not take action was partly selfish: I did not want to be accused of ‘treachery’ all over again. But also, I was never convinced, so near the election and in the absence of an obvious consensual alternative, that a change of leadership could have been easily, bloodlessly or quickly achieved, or that having three different Prime Ministers in a single Parliament would have been an electoral asset. And I never gave up the hope that Gordon would be rewarded at the polls for his efforts in preventing a painful economic recession from turning into something far worse.
One of the things for which I have attracted criticism from the media is my circle of friends. I admit that I am drawn to individualists, to people whose achievements and strong personalities make them interesting company. I am more interested in what people do and think than their ideologies, and I judge them by their character, by their personal qualities, rather than by how they are perceived. There is no escaping the fact that people who are successful in politics, business, journalism, fashion or the arts give off energy, have thought-provoking insights and attract dynamic company around them. I enjoy this, and have a wide range of friends and acquaintances, mostly outside politics. I make no apology for that. I am a restless soul.
As I began writing this book during my final period in Brussels, I was uncertain about how much personal and political detail I should, or could, include. New Labour was, after all, still in power, and I was keen to avoid anything that might harm or embarrass the government, or Gordon or Tony. Or, frankly, myself. But the book I have written turned out to be neither trimmed nor self-censored. For one thing, I recognised that doing so would have made it not only less truthful, but also less rounded and less compelling. My time in Brussels changed the tone and the breadth of the book I have written. Away from the pressure-cooker of Westminster, I was able to establish a new distance from the events of which I had been a part. I also became more relaxed personally, more self-confident politically, and much less interested in the spin and the message-control which, for both good and ill, had defined my early years as a Labour moderniser.
The result is that I have ended up by writing what I believe to be a frank and truthful account of my political life. Unlike those in politics who appear able to go with the flow, I am not a neutral figure. I do not remember a moment when I have not been fighting for something or against something, or simply fighting back against the tumult engulfing me. While I am capable of changing my views, I am rarely without a view. Ever since I entered politics, I have stood for certain principles, and I have had a particular political outlook. I am on the centre-left, but I have always been open to fresh ways of implementing the progressive values I hold. The more involved I became in writing this account, the more I realised that I am anything but a mere fence-sitting chronicler of New Labour, or of the characters and relationships at its core.
The main sense, though, in which the book has turned out differently from what I had anticipated has less to do with my own choices or judgements than with what Harold Macmillan famously described as the determining force in politics: ‘Events, dear boy, events.’ As I began writing in earnest, I felt oddly liberated by no longer being directly part of the story I was setting out to tell. Tony had left office. Gordon was in Number 10. I was in Brussels, out of front-line British politics altogether. But then, suddenly and astonishingly, events took an unexpected turn. Not only did I find myself returning as a participant, rather than an observer. Once again I was at the heart of the story.
1 (#ulink_da37012d-43fd-51e2-8cf6-ce295b6ac9ff)
‘Can You Help Me?’
The most fateful four hours of my political life were also the most surreal. They began on the afternoon of the first Thursday of October 2008, across a tray of sandwiches, yoghurt and slightly overripe bananas, with Gordon Brown in 10 Downing Street. They culminated in my return to the heart of government, at the behest of a Prime Minister who for much of the previous decade had denounced and denigrated me.
Our first quiet step towards reconciliation, the rekindling of a deep if damaged friendship, came seven months earlier and two hundred miles away. It was a crisp late-February morning in Brussels, my base as European Trade Commissioner since I had left front-line British politics in 2004. Gordon was on his first full-dress visit to the European Commission as Prime Minister. Before making his way to the imposing, glass-fronted headquarters of the Commission on the Schuman roundabout, he had arranged for us to talk briefly in the office of our permanent representative to the EU, Kim Darroch, down the road. It would be the first time Gordon and I had met since his truculent takeover from Tony Blair in Downing Street the year before. I was intrigued, expectant. And apprehensive. From the moment in 1994 when Tony had emerged as the irresistibly obvious choice to succeed John Smith as Labour Party leader, Gordon had convinced himself that I had schemed behind his back to deny him the job. As he surely must have recognised, that was unfair, and untrue. Yet in more recent years, as he and his allies waged their insurgency against Tony, he had come to view me as Tony’s staunchest defender and as a siren voice of alarm over how and where he was likely to lead New Labour.
I had spent the early months of Gordon’s premiership trying to keep my head down. But I was goaded during a Today programme interview shortly before he took over to observe a bit mischievously that while this might ‘come as a disappointment to him’, the new Prime Minister couldn’t actually fire me from my Commission post, because I had been appointed by the government to a full, five-year term. Yet I hastened to add a note of reassurance. I said I did not intend to seek a second term once my time in Brussels ended in November 2009. I assumed the new guard in Number 10 would recognise that I was playing an important role in delicate negotiations for a world trade agreement. I also knew that my ability to do the job well, and to finesse the interests of individual EU states along the way, would suffer if I were seen to lack the confidence of my own government. The more I could stay off Gordon’s political radar, the better, and my Today interview was a maladroit first move in achieving this.
Privately, I was still upset over the way he had treated Tony, and me. I not only resented the personal pain caused to me by his behaviour, and that of his parliamentary foot-soldiers and media briefers; in addition to their part in ending my own cabinet career, I felt they had kept Tony from delivering on key areas of New Labour’s policy promise to Britain. They had acted to weaken his room for manoeuvre and his legacy in government, well beyond the huge damage caused by the aftermath of the war in Iraq. But Gordon was now leader. I did not want to become a sulking, resentful presence, desperately clinging on to past bad feelings and finding fault in everything he did. At his first party conference as Prime Minister, in Bournemouth at the end of September 2007, I used an address to the modernisers’ policy group Progress not just to praise him for his part in the transition from one New Labour government to another, but to extol him as the man incomparably qualified to tackle the new challenges facing our country in the twenty-first century.
I spoke with more certainty than I actually felt – though neither I nor anyone else could have anticipated the vertiginous decline in Gordon’s fortunes that would begin within days of the conference ending. Still, the message of support was genuine. It was rooted not only in political calculation, or a desire to ward off trouble for myself in Brussels. Though my earlier doubts about Gordon’s fitness as Prime Minister remained, I wanted to be proved wrong. Before our spectacular falling-out, he had been my closest friend and ally in politics. I was intimately familiar not only with Gordon’s weaknesses, personal and political. I knew his strengths: intelligence, iron determination, and above all a grasp of the economic challenges that were increasingly threatening our country and the world.
By the time Gordon arrived in Brussels, the seriousness of the world economic crisis for Britain was becoming clearer. Fully-fledged recession was some months ahead, but the American sub-prime banking meltdown had claimed its first UK victim. The previous autumn, a run on the Newcastle-based bank Northern Rock had brought it to the brink of collapse. It was saved only by financial support from the Treasury. In the months that followed, Gordon and his Chancellor, Alistair Darling, tried desperately to find a private buyer for the bank. Only days before Gordon came to Brussels, they had given up, and taken Northern Rock into public ownership. I happened to believe they were right both to have worked for a private deal as the better option, and to have chosen nationalisation when that proved impossible.
The immediate problem for the Prime Minister was that he was now mired in a political crisis as well as an economic one. It had begun at party conference. While I was publicly on my best behaviour, I had seen it coming. For days, Gordon’s inner circle had been stoking up speculation that he was about to call an early general election. His first three months in power had gone extraordinarily well. He was confronted with a cattle-disease scare, but the effects had been less severe than at first appeared likely. Two attempted terror bombings had mercifully resulted in only a single death, of one of the terrorists. A spate of summer flooding was of course bad for those affected, but turned out to be less serious than feared. He had dealt with these potential crises in an assured way, and his supporters were hailing his strength and statesmanship. Going into conference, he was riding high in the opinion polls. But he was also an unelected Prime Minister – not just because our 2005 general election campaign had been under Tony’s banner and not his, but because he had not even faced a challenge for the succession inside Labour. Now, here was a chance for a mandate of his own.
But from the moment I’d seen the first of the media hype, I was almost sure it wouldn’t happen. Gordon – the Gordon I had known so well and worked with so closely since the 1980s – was a risk-averse politician. In 1992, he had shied away from fighting John Smith for the party leadership. After John’s death – in fairness because Gordon had finally realised he couldn’t possibly win – he had stepped back from challenging Tony for the leadership. Most of all, Gordon was cautious when it came to Britain’s voters.
As the pre-conference election speculation intensified, a number of the old Blairite stalwarts had phoned me in Brussels. What did I think? Would there be a snap election? ‘I’ve known Gordon for more than twenty years,’ I replied. ‘I can tell you when the date of the election will be – May 2010.’ Yet, by the time I arrived in Bournemouth a snap election was being touted as a foregone conclusion. When a reporter asked me to comment, I said the minimum I felt I could get away with. ‘I can see no reason,’ I replied, ‘why he shouldn’t call an election.’
Within days, it all went horribly wrong. I was back in Brussels, and the Tories were holding their own conference in Blackpool, when I suddenly saw TV pictures of the Prime Minister pitching up in Iraq, where he let out news of plans to begin reducing British troop levels. It immediately worried me. I had no way of knowing – at least until later – of the thinking behind Gordon’s visit to the front line. I did, however, know what it would look like: a publicity stunt during David Cameron’s conference, with our troops used as pre-electoral wallpaper. Then things got worse. Cameron’s Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, used the Tory conference to unveil a proposal to ease inheritance tax, trebling the threshold to £1 million. This was tailor-made to appeal to the aspirational voters of Middle England, who were not alone in feeling over-taxed as the signs of world recession intensified. They were the very voters who, by buying into Tony and New Labour, had helped give us three election victories. They were the voters Gordon needed, too. But they were the voters he understood least well, always a particular frustration for him because Tony connected with them so instinctively and so easily. To top it off, Cameron used his closing conference address to taunt the Prime Minister into action. Go on, he said. Call an election.
Gordon was torn. First, he ham-fistedly decided to steal Osborne’s inheritance-tax trick. Then, even before Alistair Darling had unveiled our version of it in the Pre-Budget Report – the series of government finance announcements made in the autumn prior to the spring budget – he announced that there would be no election after all. As if that were not damaging enough, he insisted that he had never been minded to call one in the first place. Having looked so assured as Prime Minister at the start of his time in office, Gordon was now portrayed – by Cameron, of course, but also by the media – as hapless and a ditherer. All the controversies and embarrassments that bedevil any government were fed into that narrative. Not only the serious issues that arose in the weeks after the party conference, like improperly declared Labour donations, or the loss of a set of computer disks containing millions of Revenue and Customs records, but even the frankly farcical. In December, European heads of state gathered in Lisbon to approve the amended EU constitutional treaty. Gordon, apparently fearing the political toxicity of the issue, at first feinted at staying away. He ended up managing not to have his cake or to eat it either. He went to the ceremony, but showed up only after the other heads of government had done their signing.
There was a further awkward moment when he arrived at Kim Darroch’s office some months later, at the end of February 2008, for what both of us must have feared could be a tense reunion. I was with Kim and a handful of aides when Gordon strode into the outer office. At first my old friend and more recent foe did not see me at all. After he had greeted everyone else in the room, I finally had to take the initiative. ‘Hello,’ I said. Gordon quickly replied: ‘Oh. Hi, Peter, hi. How are you doing?’ We made our way to Kim’s office, and settled into a pair of plush chairs in the centre of the room. I had expected that we would begin with trade, and we did. That was my job, after all. Our only real conversation since Gordon had moved into Number 10, a telephone call four months earlier, had been about the world trade talks. I was also fairly sure that both of us – by instinct, and from a sense of familiarity and partnership that went too far back to have disappeared entirely – would be unable to keep from talking about politics. Within barely a minute, we were not only discussing the big-picture issues Britain faced, we were talking about Gordon, about his government, and about the nose-dive in public support they were both suffering. It would be wrong to suggest that it was like the old days, as if the rift between us had not happened. But the conversation was easy, calm, and at times extraordinarily forthright – on both sides.
Gordon’s main concern, a theme to which he would return repeatedly in the months ahead, was that he was ‘not getting the communications right’ – not with the media, nor with the British people. My reply was that good communications required not just good, confident people and organisation, but clear, bold policy. ‘I’ve got all the policy, all the ideas,’ Gordon insisted. ‘I just can’t communicate it.’ I told him that was not always my impression. His policies had to be thought through. They had to be ‘prepared, bottomed out, agreed and owned by relevant ministers’. Instead, it seemed to me, he had been seduced by the idea that a constant stream of media announcements could take the place of hard policy. I told him he had to wean himself off these ‘announceables’. Policy was tough going, especially when it involved changing or reforming anything. You had to keep pushing uphill. Then people would start noticing that something serious was happening. That was where ‘communications success’ would come from. I was at pains to reassure him that there was still a real opportunity for him to regain the political initiative. The key, I said, was the economy. ‘You’ve got to present yourself as the guy with the experience, the big brain, to deal with the big problems,’ I told him. ‘That is your USP.’ The point I sought to make, as subtly as I could, was that David Cameron did have natural communications skills. Gordon’s task, one to which he ought to be genuinely well-suited, was to make it clear that his grasp and determination in dealing with the economic crisis stood in contrast to Cameron. He had to be able to portray the Tory leader as ‘the guy in short trousers, who’s good enough perhaps to lead a student protest, but certainly not to lead a country’.
Our talk had been scheduled to last for twenty minutes. By the time Gordon left for the Commission headquarters, behind schedule for his meeting with the Commission’s President, José Manuel Barroso, we had been talking for well over an hour. Gordon seemed more upbeat when we’d finished talking, and more focused on how to get a new hold on government. I felt oddly buoyed too. I realised that despite all that we had gone through, I still cared about him. I wanted him to succeed. And, if I’m honest, I was pleased he was seeking my views and advice on how to help rescue and repair the New Labour project that he and I and Tony had begun. It was also puzzling that he should start opening up to me in the way he had. Given all that had happened between us, he had reason to doubt whether he could trust me. Surely he had people around him in London he could rely on, without needing to talk to me?
Within days of Gordon’s return to London, leaving me in Brussels to wrestle with my trade negotiations, there were signs that our meeting had at least begun to repair our relationship – but also of how difficult it might be to break long habits of misunderstanding and mistrust. A first hint at reconciliation came just forty-eight hours later, when he phoned me from Number 10. It was ostensibly to say that he had enjoyed our talk, but mostly to discuss a speech he was giving a few days later, at Labour’s Spring Conference in Birmingham. I told him he needed to identify his strengths and play to them. People felt threatened by the economic storm clouds. He had had a decade’s experience as Chancellor. He was seen as having a command of economic policy. His task now, and his opportunity as well, was to explain what was really going on, and how he and his government would enable Britain to deal with the storm and to come to terms with the new economic order more widely, and indeed benefit from it. ‘People think GB is brainy, so he should turn it to his advantage,’ I scribbled on my notepad when we had finished speaking. ‘He should identify our national strengths and position, and set out an agenda to maximise these to our lasting gain.’ That, essentially, is what I said to him. It was also what he went on to say in Birmingham – sort of. The speech began well. Then it faded out. It started on the theme of ‘fulfilling our national ambitions’, then meandered, without any real emotional connection, into a patchwork of policy examples and occasionally catchy phrases. It lacked a central, driving political message, a coherent story of the difficulties Britain faced, how Gordon proposed to lead us past them, and why he was best-placed to do so. It would be several weeks before I next talked to Gordon. By that time, there would be a reminder of the old days, and the old mistrust as well.
After our meeting in Brussels, my press spokesman Peter Power, who had learned very adeptly to pick his way on my behalf between the shoals and currents of trade policy and UK domestic politics, was besieged by questions from the media. He fended them off with an admirably straight bat. The Prime Minister and Britain’s European Commissioner, he said, had had a ‘friendly’ discussion – about the world trade talks, about Britain’s place in Europe, and about domestic politics. When asked whether this meant I might now hope to stay on for a second EU term, Peter was understandably keen to find a way to dodge the issue. He opted not to be drawn, rather than reaffirming my Today programme pledge not to seek a further term. His reticence invited speculation that I was fishing for an invitation to stay on. When Gordon was asked to comment a few days later, he replied that I had done a good job in Brussels. His choice of tense unleashed a new spate of headlines. ‘Mandelson’s Hopes of Serving Second EU Term Crushed by Gordon Brown’, blared the Daily Mail. It seemed that old habits – mine, Gordon’s, the media’s – would die hard.
Gordon’s political problems were clearly on a downward spiral. Partly, as he had insisted to me, it was an image problem. Once the ‘iron’ Chancellor, and then briefly a breath of fresh air in Downing Street, he was now seen as a ‘dithering’ Prime Minister in political freefall. Worse, he had become not only a figure of disdain, but of ridicule. This sense was summed up by Vince Cable, then acting leader of the Liberal Democrats, standing up at Prime Minister’s Questions and deadpanning: ‘The House has noticed the Prime Minister’s remarkable transformation in the last few weeks – from Stalin … to Mr Bean.’
There were problems of policy substance, too. By far the most pressing was a legacy of Gordon’s final budget as Chancellor, three months before he had moved in next-door. As part of an eye-catching announcement reducing the standard tax rate to 20p, beginning in April 2008 – which meant now – he had axed the entry-rate 10p bracket. The unintended, and clearly unanticipated, effect was to damage those at the very bottom of the ladder just as the economic crisis was beginning to bite. The immediate result was the worst backbench rebellion Gordon had faced as Prime Minister. That subsided – only just – when he promised a package to compensate those who stood to lose out from the tax changes. This was the last thing we needed in the run-up to local elections across England and Wales on 1 May, and the results were disastrous. In the most high-profile contest, for Mayor of London, even Ken Livingstone could not stave off defeat to the Conservatives’ Boris Johnson. I won’t claim to have shed many tears for Ken. With an ego the size of the London Eye, and what I always felt was a facile populism, he had delighted in stirring up ‘real Labour’ opposition to Tony during our first years in government. Still, I recognised that his defeat was bad news. Even Ken’s image as a maverick, untainted by ordinary party constraints, had not saved him from falling victim to our declining fortunes. Nationally, we were not only outpolled by the Tories – by a margin of 44 per cent to 24 – we finished in third place, behind the Liberal Democrats.
I felt conflicted. Not about the results, of course. I was no less shaken than if Tony had still been in charge by our diminishing prospects of keeping David Cameron, short trousers or not, from ushering in a period of Conservative rule. Yet despite the renewed warmth I had felt for him in Brussels, I began to wonder whether even a more focused Gordon Brown, playing to his strengths, could really succeed in turning things round. I was by now intermittently back in touch with him by phone. Perhaps equally surprisingly, given Gordon’s role in hastening him out of Downing Street, so was Tony. Although now absorbed in his work on the Arab–Israeli conflict, his faith foundation and his business activities, Tony retained a train-spotter’s interest in British politics, however much, publicly, he wanted to keep out of it. He also cared about his own legacy, and how Labour was going to secure it and build on it. Like me, he wanted to offer support to Gordon, and I encouraged him to do so.
Tony phoned him in Downing Street the day after the local elections. He told him he had to push back, not to sound defeated, not to beat himself up. Yes, he said, he had to listen to what the public were saying. But what he really had to do – a message I was also conveying – was to reassert what government was doing, why it was doing it, and how it would improve Britain. He had to provide a clearer sense of direction, a strong reform programme. If he looked and sounded wounded, Tony told him, he would invite further attacks: ‘Be careful of what scent you give off.’ We both agreed, however, that Gordon was beginning to look bad, physically. Sleepless and grey. Fearful. On the ropes. No wonder everyone assumed that he was all of those things.
A few days after he had spoken to Gordon, Tony called me from the Middle East at my small, quirky Brussels flat, whose large windows I liked staring out of as I worked or talked on the telephone. He said he felt that while Gordon had the intelligence and the ideas, the drive and determination, to make a success of government, ‘none of that is the most important thing for a politician. It is intuition – what to do, when to do it, how to say it, how to bring people along.’ That, he felt, was Gordon’s problem. I agreed. Intuition, of course, was a political gift that Tony himself had in spades, and it had helped guide every step the three of us had taken in the long campaign to make Labour a party of government again.
After the local elections, Gordon scrambled to steady the wheel of what was beginning to look very much like a sinking ship. He brought forward his announcement of the government programme for the next Parliament. It proved to be a mishmash of the already known and the small-fry, and it was picked to pieces by the opposition, and even by some of the media pundits who at the height of Gordon’s war against Tony had cheered him on as Labour’s messiah-in-waiting. Nor was there any respite from Alistair Darling’s panicked ‘mini-budget’ in mid-May, in which he was forced to borrow £2.7 billion to cushion the effect of the 10p rate axe on at least some of the lowest-paid workers. In late May, Gordon faced a further electoral test, and a further body-blow. The death of one of my own early political allies, the indomitable Labour backbencher Gwyneth Dunwoody, forced a by-election in Crewe. The Tories cruised to victory in what should have been one of the safest of Labour seats, defeating Gwyneth’s own daughter by 8,000 votes. Gordon’s early contrast between his premiership and Tony’s was wearing perilously thin. The Brownite promise to an unsettled party had been that the Blair rollercoaster would be replaced by a calmer ride. Now it appeared we were going nowhere. Or very possibly off the rails.
In early June, Gordon called me again in Brussels. We agreed that I would come and see him at Downing Street when I was in London in the middle of the month. My role, if you could call it that, remained strictly informal. As far as I could tell, very few people knew I was back in touch with the Prime Minister. Sue Nye, Gordon’s office ‘gatekeeper’ and one of my oldest friends in politics, was in the loop. As for others in the inner circle, even those who knew Gordon and I were talking seemed puzzled about where this latest twist in our relationship was headed. That was understandable: so was I.
When I went to London, I arranged to have lunch with Jeremy Heywood the day before I was to meet Gordon. I wanted to bring myself up to date with how things were running in Number 10, and to see what I could do to help. Jeremy was now Permanent Secretary, Gordon’s top civil servant. In the early days of the Blair government he had been with Gordon at the Treasury, and before that, private secretary to Conservative chancellors. I had got to know him well when he moved to Number 10 and worked with Tony in 1999. When he arrived at the restaurant in the Royal Festival Hall, he was smiling. As he had been on his way out of Number 10, he said, Gordon had asked to see him. When he had explained that he was going to a lunch appointment, to meet me, Gordon had said he would join us – only to find that he couldn’t scramble his protection officers quickly enough. ‘The reason I made a point of mentioning you is that I’m still not sure just what your status is these days,’ Jeremy said. ‘I was afraid what Gordon might say if he found out. Now he says he wants to meet you this afternoon.’ I told him I had arranged to see Gordon the following day, but Jeremy replied: ‘He says he wants to meet you today, too.’ Looking back on it, I suppose that was when our real sense of reconnection began.
‘I’ve just been talking to Tony,’ Gordon said as I arrived in the upstairs study at Number 10 – Mrs Thatcher’s favourite room – from my lunch with Jeremy. I couldn’t help but chuckle. ‘Are things really that desperate?’ I asked.
‘Come on,’ Gordon replied with a broad smile. He told me he had read a speech I’d recently given in New York, on the need for new policies and institutions to address the challenges of the global economy, and said he wanted to find a time to talk further about what that meant not just for the EU, but for Britain. I felt flattered, which, I suspect, was his intention. Then, after only a short pause, he turned to a more immediate worry – his own political crisis. And he uttered four extraordinary words: ‘Can you help me?’
‘How?’ I asked, taken aback by his directness, and still feeling my way in this revived relationship.
‘By giving me your strategy,’ he said. ‘Only a few people in politics are strategists, and you are one of them. I need that. I need to know what you think of my situation.’
I had an instant in which to make up my mind how honest to be with him. I didn’t want to damage his confidence further, or put him off talking to me, but nor did I want to miss the chance to offer the kind of blunt advice I suspected he might not be getting from others. ‘Look, people have stopped listening to you,’ I said. ‘They’ve tuned out. They don’t know what you believe. They don’t know what your government is for. You have policies, but they don’t seem joined up.’ Gordon took this well, considering my directness, and replied by returning to his Brussels refrain. He did have ideas, he insisted. What he lacked was strategy. And he couldn’t communicate. ‘It seems,’ he sighed, ‘that you can be a good Prime Minister or a popular one, preferably both. But I’m neither.’
‘You’re a better Prime Minister than people think,’ I told him. I meant it, just as I genuinely felt that a Cameron government would be no better, and very likely worse, for Britain.
We spoke for well over an hour. It was not so much about what Gordon should do next. As I’d said in Brussels, the solution to that seemed to be straightforward, if not necessarily easy to achieve. It came down to developing the strong policy programme, and coherent message, his government seemed to lack. Mostly, however, we talked about how he had ended up where he was. ‘A lot of your problems,’ I said, ‘stem from not calling the election when you led everyone to think you were going to do so. It has meant everything you do is viewed through that negative lens.’ Gordon said he now realised he should have gone ahead. The political timing had been right, and with the economic crisis worsening, the opportunity was now gone. But he had been unsettled by last-minute poll figures in marginal constituencies. ‘They showed a very different picture from the national polls,’ he said. ‘They hadn’t presented it properly to me before.’ And the Tory inheritance-tax initiative had scared him off, too. He now saw that his copying of Osborne’s idea, and even more so his visit to the troops in Iraq, had made things worse.
But he had started so well in Downing Street that he had felt the run would never end. ‘I thought, because of my first few months, I was being seen as above politics,’ he said. ‘You inhaled your own propaganda,’ I replied. The image his media team had created around him at the start was bound to unravel. ‘All that stuff about single-handedly turning back the biblical plagues, the floods, the cattle disease and the terror bombers. Your people went around saying how strong you were, what a great, statesmanlike Prime Minister. They took their eye off what was happening in the real world.’ I felt almost cruel saying it.
Gordon was quiet for a few moments, and so was I. Finally, I said, with what I am sure he sensed was a genuine desire to help: ‘If you could start all over again, you would do things differently. You need a different way of working, a different rhythm, a different approach.’ I was not absolutely sure what that approach would be, but I was sure that the problem was not simply a matter of Gordon lacking the communications skills for modern politics, although that was what he always came back to. ‘I’m good at what politics used to be, about policies,’ he said. ‘But now people want celebrity, and theatre.’
‘Only up to a point,’ I replied. ‘Actually, it’s a lot simpler than that: they just want someone to make their lives better, someone they can believe, and believe in. If you can do that, they can dispense with celebrity.’
Gordon nodded. Then, after another period of silence, he turned to me quietly with the same four words with which he had begun. ‘Can you help me?’
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘We can try and work it out together.’ At that moment, I could feel my old sense of commitment to him welling up inside me. Suddenly it was nice to feel wanted, needed again.
The question was how to help. I think I had forgotten, over the years of estrangement, how extraordinarily complex a man Gordon was. He had huge strengths, and sometimes debilitating weaknesses. That was simply to say that, like the rest of us, he was human. With Gordon, however, the balance on both sides of the ledger had never quite been captured in the public image which ossified around him. Some bits of the caricature were accurate. Yes, he was bright. He was intensely, obsessively, political. He was fiercely ambitious – for himself, certainly, as his single-minded pursuit of Tony’s job had made clear, but also for the people of Britain. Yet all that was only part of the picture. At the height of the Brown–Blair civil war, I used to laugh at the media’s contrast between Blair as the headline-driven tactician and Brown as the ‘big-picture’ man, the strategist who looked beyond day-to-day trivialities and spin and focused on the issues that counted. As those who knew Gordon best and had worked with him closest could attest – and I had done both for as long as anyone in active politics – the truth was much more nuanced than that. Gordon did see the big picture, but he tended to create tactical opportunities, rather than a strategy to advance it. Tony, by contrast would conceive his strategy at the outset, and then paint a big picture in order to carry people with him.
It is true that Tony cared about the media. Both of us came to realise, the longer he was in power, that we had probably cared too much about what the daily papers and the TV news bulletins were saying. But even – indeed, particularly – in times of crisis, he never lost sight of the issues that mattered. He kept in mind the longer-term goal. Gordon, from the time I first started working with him in the 1980s, was transfixed by the media. He was also transfixed by the Tories. Tony, of course, also took on the Conservatives. The difference was that Gordon wanted to pulverise them, whereas Tony was more often content to outmanoeuvre them. Gordon’s life revolved too keenly around looking for opportunities to grab a front-page headline or top billing on the evening news with some carefully calibrated announcement or initiative. In some ways, he was a more innate politician than Tony. But he was also a more old-style politician. He had grown up in machine politics, in Scottish Labour. For him, politics was always a battle. He plotted a probing advance here, a flanking operation there. It was all planned to weaken rivals or enemies – sometimes in his own ranks, but ultimately the enemy that mattered most to him, and still did, was the Tories.
Yet it was Gordon the person, not Gordon the politician, who would matter most if he, our party and the government were to be pulled out of their tailspin. Despite my closeness to Tony, I had been much closer, much earlier, to Gordon when the three of us began the reforming crusade that would lead to New Labour. Gordon was the older of the two. He had deeper roots in Labour. He was the more driven political operator, the more obviously ambitious. He was the natural leader. That was one reason why Tony’s later ascendancy so hurt him, and so damaged the relationship between all three of us. On a human level, however, Gordon was buttoned up, less sure of himself – not of his political views, but of how he should handle himself in public. Tony was never clubbable in party-political terms. But he had a natural ease about him, a charm, an enjoyment of human contact. Gordon did not possess this easy manner.
I think Gordon’s uneasiness and vulnerability was part of what was now drawing me back to his side, part of what made me genuinely want to keep my word to him and to do what I could to help. It was not out of pity, though it did pain me to see him so bruised. Nor was it merely out of loyalty to New Labour, or my conviction that if Gordon and the government crashed to defeat it would be bad for Britain, although I felt both of these things. It was a sense of fellow-feeling. I had taken my share of knocks along the way as well.
Unlike Gordon, and much more like Tony, I was comfortable in social situations. I enjoyed other people’s company. I was at ease with most of them. Most of the time I was at ease with myself. I had interests and a life outside politics, especially now that I was in Brussels. But I too had had my periods of private doubt and private pain. I had endured, and only very slowly recovered from, the humiliation of being forced to leave the cabinet table not just once, but twice. The second exile had been particularly hard, because I had felt let down by colleagues, by Tony in particular. There had been other tough times as well. Over the years, I had become more thick-skinned. But what I had been through gave me an insight into Gordon’s crisis. He had reached out for help. The truth was that I had no idea whether that was something I, or anyone, could deliver.
When we met again in Downing Street the next day, I tried to get him to focus on the one area where the country clearly needed new policy certainty, and new leadership, and where he was well-placed to deliver. ‘It’s the world economy, stupid,’ I said, borrowing the Clinton campaign quip. ‘Your message has to be that we are steering through the worst and equipping people to benefit from the upturn, to make sure they, and the country as a whole, are not the losers.’
Almost as if a switch had been tripped, Gordon’s mood brightened. He spoke non-stop for five minutes, reeling off the challenges posed by the economic crisis, and the range of programmes – job creation, infrastructure, energy, education, science – needed to make Britain stronger when we got to the other side. He spoke of a redefined, less dominant role for government, providing a safety net for those in need, but above all encouraging aspiration and providing the skills and the conditions for all who worked hard to succeed. An empowering government. This was the Gordon I remembered from the 1980s, full of ideas, full of passion. It was also, I couldn’t help noting, remarkably similar to Tony’s policy agenda, which because of his deep frustration at his wait to take over, Gordon had done much to undermine, and had spent his early months in Number 10 distancing himself from.
‘You could have done all of this without dumping on the government of which you were a member for the last ten years,’ I said.
‘I never did that,’ he insisted.
‘Yes, you did. You couldn’t resist it. It was all that neurosis and pent-up anger about Tony, fanned by the people around you.’
He insisted that he had moved beyond all that now. I think we both knew, and Tony too, that some of the scars would always remain. But I sensed that he was right. The terrible political knocks he had taken, and the crisis facing the party to which all three of us had devoted our lives, made the old battles seem somehow irrelevant. As I left, Gordon put his hand on my shoulder. ‘The main thing,’ he said, ‘is that I want us to work together. I want to rebuild our friendship.’
Still not quite sure where all this was leading, I agreed to have dinner the following week with three of Gordon’s aides: his Europe adviser Stewart Wood, the long-standing Number 10 business policy adviser Geoffrey Norris, and his trusted former Treasury adviser Shriti Vadera, who had now become a minister. Knowing that Gordon wanted me to provide input from Brussels as their recovery project began, they urged me to do all I could to help. By the end of the evening I felt there was a real understanding of the problems Gordon faced, and a commitment to help turn things round, at least amongst some of those around him. He had changed, they insisted. ‘He realises how bad things are. He realises it’s personal, that he is the problem,’ one of them said. ‘He’s calmer than you would have expected. He’s mellowed a lot – maybe because of the children.’ They felt that Gordon’s strengths had yet to come through, above all his grasp of the economic crisis and his understanding of what had to be done. ‘But he doesn’t communicate easily, and the public aren’t responding.’ That may be, I said. ‘But if he hopes to get people to like him, or even listen, he has to speak in a language people understand, and to be seen as acting for the national interest, not party or political interest. He has to lead.’
With Parliament breaking up for the summer, Gordon’s first real shot to show that kind of leadership would come in the run-up to the party conference in the autumn, and that was what I urged him to focus on, especially as his problems steadily increased. The economy continued to worsen. Unemployment was rising. The property market was heading south. The political picture was, if anything, more discouraging. The ill-health and subsequent resignation of the Labour MP for Glasgow East, David Marshall, presented Gordon with a nightmare scenario: an end-of-July by-election not only in a safe Labour seat, but a Scottish Labour seat, in his own political back yard. Labour initially struggled even to find a candidate. When the votes were counted, we lost, on a massive 22 per cent swing, to the Scottish Nationalists.
Gordon was by then ostensibly on holiday by the Suffolk seaside. In fact, he was in nearly constant contact with aides, and increasingly with me. His mood was bleak. That was nothing compared to the rest of the party. A few days after the by-election defeat, Foreign Secretary David Miliband wrote a piece in the Guardian. The party must not succumb to ‘fatalism’, he said. Yes, we were down. We had made mistakes. We had waited too long to reform the NHS. We had won the war but lost the peace in Iraq. We had held power too tightly in Westminster, rather than devolving it to the people affected by what we decided. But we had accomplished much as well, and should not be shy of saying so. The next election was winnable, if we embarked on a new stage of New Labour to confront challenges that were different from those we had faced when we had first come to power. We had to deal with the economic crisis and equip people to emerge stronger when recovery came. We had, David argued, to give more control over the public services to those who used them. We had to build a sense of local empowerment and local society. David Cameron, he said, ‘may be likeable and sometimes hard to disagree with’, but he had no competing vision. He was ‘empty’.
On the face of it, the article was simply an elegantly argued rallying cry. It did not directly criticise Gordon, but it did something that was immediately over-interpreted: it did not mention him at all. When one front-page headline screamed ‘Labour at War’, David had himself photographed with a copy of the paper, on which he had scribbled the word ‘not’. His article was not, he insisted, the start of a leadership challenge.
Inevitably, however, with Labour’s poll ratings so low, media speculation began to build about Gordon’s prospects for hanging on as leader. The subject was becoming not just a source of speculation within the party, but a national talking point. When I next spoke to Tony, he was sombre about the chances for a political recovery. ‘It’s all very sad,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to help him, but without letting him lead us to disaster.’ He also left me with a request to keep in touch with David Miliband. I texted David. ‘How are you?’ I asked. He replied: ‘Large mountain ahead. Orienteering/climbing/planning skills much needed.’ I texted back: ‘Guides, sherpas available.’
David was aware how difficult it would be for the government to recover public support, and I wanted to lend my experience in helping to achieve this. But both of us were in difficult positions: David because, before deciding not to stand, he had been the one credible challenger to Gordon as leader when Tony left Number 10; and I because although I still had my taste for domestic politics, I wanted to tread very carefully, and not to interfere.
I was close to David, having first worked with him when he was a very young, and fearfully bright, policy adviser in the run-up to the 1997 election. I was certain that his newspaper article was at most an attempt to put down a marker, to open up a debate and inject new purpose into the government. I shared his hope that this would happen – it was what I had been talking to Gordon about. David and I shared something else, as well: alarm at the drift and decline since Gordon’s first few months in Downing Street. In this, he was reflecting a wider concern, in the party and in cabinet, over whether Gordon could lead a recovery. He told me he feared the Guardian piece had made him look divisive, but he still felt it had been the right thing to do. He had provided a ‘coherent message’ that many ministers felt was sorely lacking. He said there was no move to push Gordon out, but there was a lot of unease in the cabinet.
Tony was getting the same message. When we next spoke, he said his sense was of a fatalism enveloping Labour MPs: some thought Gordon was unsalvageable and should go, while others thought he was unsalvageable, but that they just had to accept it. I couldn’t help replying that if that was true, history might be tough on Tony: ‘You saved your own skin by constantly stringing Gordon along, and then landed him on the rest of us when you went.’ He said he was afraid that might be true. When he added that his real fear was that the British public had simply given up on Gordon, and that the party would sooner or later follow suit, I pointed out that he’d been there too. ‘The same would have been true of you after Iraq. The people stuck with you, but only just. That saved you. Otherwise, it would have been curtains.’ He replied: ‘I know.’
But I think both of us felt a desire, a duty, to help Gordon if we could. The key would be the party conference in September. Tony felt his chances of pulling through were not high, and that if he failed, a leadership change would become inevitable. I thought this judgement was right. ‘It’s not about loyalty to one man,’ he said. ‘It’s about loyalty to the Labour Party. It’s about saving the Labour Party. He has to completely rethink and reconnect. If he fails, it’s hopeless. He cannot stagger on. The public aren’t going to elect him for another five years.’ If Gordon failed, there was at least David. ‘He’s not perfect,’ Tony said, ‘but he has matured. He’s humble enough to listen. He has to keep going, be strong, show decisive leadership.’
Tony and David talked several times as the summer wore on. Tony became ever more impressed by David’s strength and political instincts. Gordon, he believed, had about a 20 per cent chance of pulling off an escape act and leading a real recovery in the autumn. Both of us had a duty to help him take that one last shot, but if he stumbled, Tony felt, there would have to be a leadership challenge.
In contrast to the last time David had been in the frame for a leadership challenge, when Tony stepped down, I had no intention of publicly expressing a view. When he phoned me in mid-August, I said that he appeared to be in a very different state of mind from the year before. ‘Not quite,’ he said. ‘I didn’t bottle it in 2007. I never intended to stand.’ What about other members of the cabinet, I asked. He said no one seemed in the mood to speak out unless they were sure others were going to join in: ‘There’s a lot of “After you, Claude” going on.’ David said there was no way of knowing how things would develop. He was anticipating the main argument Gordon and his allies would make to forestall a move: that the public wouldn’t wear a second unelected Labour Prime Minister. ‘If we do replace Gordon,’ he said, ‘we have to go for an election four to six months later. The moment you appear frightened of the voters, you’re finished.’
Whatever Gordon’s chances, I knew that he faced a steep climb, and that only by clearing his head and investing all his energies in an autumn recovery would he have any real chance of success. He was frustrated. He felt wronged. He was also obviously unsettled by the newspaper chatter about coups and conspiracies, and about David Miliband too. I tried to get him to put all that out of his mind. I was about to go on holiday myself, departing by easyJet for Naples to join Italian friends whose company I had enjoyed on Capri every summer since my first years in Brussels. When I called Gordon before leaving, to try to lift his spirits a bit, he was preoccupied with the party conference, above all with what we both knew could be his make-or-break speech. Though we spoke only in general terms at first, I told him the key was that it had to contain a personal appeal, to connect emotionally in a way he had so far been failing to do. It would have to provide the definition he had failed to offer when he moved into Number 10. I also urged him to seize the moment before conference by giving a few interviews in which he could set up his relaunch. He had to explain the lessons he had learned over the past few months, how his approach to the job would change, and how he would lead the government and the country forward. In other words, there had to be a genuine sense of reflecting and learning, almost of starting again.
During August, he became more and more anxious. He began to include me in daily, hour-long conference calls involving a tightly-selected group. How my participation did not become public, I will never know. I am also not sure how much help these calls were. Every morning on Capri I would sit in the shade, mobile pinned to my ear, and run through an array of ideas and themes for Gordon to put in his conference speech, and an accompanying policy document that would be published at the conference. As I later discovered, whatever we agreed in the morning would often be unravelled by further conference calls, with different participants, during the course of the day. So when we spoke again the next morning, we would often go back to square one and cover the same ground all over again. It was a cycle with which I became more and more frustrated, with nobody taking charge of the process on his behalf.
Gordon became jittery when I said that in his pre-conference interviews he would have to explain to people how his views of government, and his approach to it, had changed as a result of the difficulties he found himself in. ‘You mean Mea culpa?’ he asked, something we both knew would not come easily to him. No, I said. Just be honest. Give an account of why things had gone wrong. His message should be: ‘I have been able to reflect about what the country is going through, and about our response. These are real challenges, and I think we have to strengthen how we cope with them. This is what the government is going to do about it – this is where I was, and this is where I am now going.’
I also tried to steer him away from falling back on an urge to build the speech around a nuclear assault on David Cameron and the Tories – the ‘dividing-line’ approach he had first drummed into both me and Tony in the 1980s in his ceaseless quest for the killer opportunity to wrong-foot the Conservatives. ‘Dividing lines with the Tories can’t be your priority now,’ I said. ‘If you have any dividing line, it’s between the easier, simpler, original politics of New Labour when first elected, and the new politics of the economic crisis that we have to deal with now, and where the Tories offer nothing.’ He also had to be personal. Not soppy, not apologetic, but he had to reach out to the public, draw them in, and help them understand him better. Gordon warmed to that. He even drew a comparison between his past ‘struggles’ and those of Barack Obama – a parallel that I hoped, for his sake, would end up on the cutting-room floor.
Still, he was right to believe he had a compelling story to tell. He had struggled. With the loss of his eye. With the death of his and Sarah’s first child, Jennifer, in January 2002, ten days after her birth. And four years later, with the news that their youngest son, Fraser, had cystic fibrosis. ‘I have overcome setbacks and tests which I’ve had to struggle with,’ Gordon said. ‘My health, and my daughter, and my son.’ I sensed that this might indeed provide the emotional connection Gordon had so often lacked. It would ring true, because it was.
Gordon also called me separately at times to share his fears that moves were afoot to drive him out. During one call, he said he had heard that the former Blair cabinet heavyweight Charles Clarke was ‘putting pressure’ on David to ‘reveal his hand, be a candidate – saying he must do so or be discounted. They’re getting a letter together to say there must be change. They’re getting signatures for a coup.’ ‘Sounds familiar,’ I teased him, thinking back to previous attempts by Gordon’s own supporters to drive Tony from office. I told him there were no plots for a coup as far as I could tell, and there wouldn’t be as long as he focused on September and the conference, and got everything right.
He agonised, too, about his staff – and they about him. Now that I was in fairly regular contact with Gordon and his aides, I got both sides of the story. Gordon felt alone. He felt he needed to do too much – and very often, all – of the policy-making himself. He said, surprisingly, that was partly why it had occurred to him to bring me back into the mix, and that he had even toyed with contacting me much earlier, in May 2007, the month before he moved into Number 10, but had concluded that it would not have worked. Now he wished he had done.
In fact, as even his closest aides made clear to me, Gordon himself was a big part of the problem. At the Treasury he’d had a well-oiled machine, a group of experienced and gifted civil servants under the direction of a unique political ally, Ed Balls. Ed was so close to Gordon – so seamlessly identified not only with his thinking, but his ambitions – that he was Deputy Chancellor in everything but name. Now Ed was Children, Schools and Families Secretary. He was still very much part of the inner circle, but he was not based in Downing Street. He had a day job, and legitimate ambitions of his own. Running the government and the country was simply harder than running the Treasury. Shorn of Ed, Gordon lacked, or at least had not yet acquired, the new set of skills and staff members he needed. One of his closest advisers put it best: ‘Gordon is a hub-and-spoke operator. He’s the hub, and he works through lots of separate spokes, rather than an integrated machine.’ Another member of the team said: ‘He only trusts people in boxes, silos. He listens to them in that particular context, like he would use an electrician or bring in a plumber. He’s not geared to run a group that interacts, communicates with one another.’ They all agreed that there was no one – no Ed Balls – to pull things together for him, and that was the chief loss.
The more I spoke to Gordon, and to those around him, the more convinced I became that the key to any recovery was Gordon himself. With all his ideas, with all his passion, he seemed so distracted, so distressed, that I wondered whether he would be able to rise to the occasion at the party conference. It wasn’t just the politics he had to get right, I told him. Not even just the speech, though that would obviously be crucial. He had to look revived as well. I kept urging him to rest, spend time in the sun, exercise, eat well. ‘You’ve got to take care of yourself so that people get a different picture of you, as on top of the job rather than struggling with it,’ I said on one occasion. ‘If you look better on the outside, people will feel you’re more in control of things.’ I think he realised I was right.
Very quietly, he said: ‘It was all so wretched between us all – you, me, Tony. It was so wasteful! We could have achieved so much more. We still did a lot, though. Perhaps surprisingly.’
‘I agree,’ I replied. ‘What on earth were we doing? We doubted each other. We read everything into each other’s motives and actions.’
He was right, I said. ‘You saw everything we did through the prism of “We want to destroy you.” We saw everything you did through the prism of “You want to get Tony out.” It was a sort of mutually assured destruction.’
For my part, I couldn’t help but reflect on how different, and how much more fulfilling, my life had become since I had left front-line British politics. For a long time after my second defenestration, I had felt angry and resentful. Before I finally accepted that a third return to government was impossible, I had been fixated on finding a way back. I felt unfairly exiled. I felt incomplete without a seat at the cabinet table. That was no longer true. The new job had transformed me. On an unfamiliar and much wider stage, I had found myself bartering, bargaining and seeking common cause across over two dozen European states, and, in my role in the world trade talks, across the globe. I was still doing politics, but not politics as I’d known it. In the formative years of New Labour, ‘concession’ and ‘compromise’ had been almost dirty words. Rather than shying away from confrontation, we had sought it out, even orchestrated it. We were convinced that head-on battle was the only way the Labour Party would really change – and be seen to have changed. Our time in government should have altered that. In some ways, it did. Yet almost everything we accomplished in government, and the great deal we failed to achieve, was forged in combat – this time, between Gordon and Tony. My job in Brussels, in contrast, revolved around building relationships, alliances, coalitions. That was what had made it initially so challenging, and now so satisfying.
But the main reason I had come to enjoy my European ‘exile’ was personal. For the first time I could remember, I was out of the Westminster spotlight. For the best part of two decades, I had been defined by an increasingly malign media image. I was Machiavelli with a red rose. The Prince of Darkness. I had managed over time to come to terms with Mandelson the Media Caricature. I also realised that I had played a part in its creation. What had hurt most was the unbridled aggression with which the media sought out ‘stories’ to burnish the caricature, and to propel their narrative of what kind of politician and person I was. This had had a real and damaging effect on my career. It was certainly a central factor in my second resignation. Still, the media storm that had hastened my departure, however inaccurate or misleading, could at least have been seen as the press doing its job. The reporters and headline-writers were sinking their teeth into an issue relating to a public figure performing public duties. That was not the case with intrusion into my personal life, or the licence that reporters and photographers felt they had to stalk my every step, pick away at my every social engagement, home in on my every friendship and – as I could hardly help but recall on Capri – every holiday. I reflected, with a relief that would have been unimaginable in my higher-octane years in Westminster, that I was no longer news.
For equally unimaginable reasons, by the time my holiday was over, that assumption would turn out to be wrong. Three days remained before I was due back in Brussels. On the way, I was making a stopover on the Greek island of Corfu. Two months earlier I had received a phone call from Matthew Freud, the PR supremo married to Rupert Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth. Matthew had been one of the key advisers during my challenging stewardship of the Millennium Dome, and had become a good friend. I had also got to know Elisabeth well. Matthew was calling because he wanted me to come to Corfu for Elisabeth’s fortieth birthday party, which was being organised at the house there of my friends Jacob and Serena Rothschild. I imagined that it would be fun, and looked forward to spending a few days on the waterside estate, which I recalled with fondness and gratitude from the time I had spent there with Jacob and Serena after my first ejection from government. I looked forward too to seeing their son Nat, with whom I had also become close.
By the time I arrived it was Friday evening, just before the party was due to begin. The other guests – an array of yacht-borne Murdochs, and friends of both generations of Rothschilds – were already there. There was not a bed to sleep in at the Rothschild home. In part, as Nat explained to me with a smile, this was because one of his old Oxford friends was staying there: George Osborne, David Cameron’s closest political ally and Shadow Chancellor. Nat arranged for me to be billeted on a yacht belonging to another of his friends, the Russian industrialist Oleg Deripaska. I also knew Oleg, though not well, having met him previously through Nat. I was intrigued by his rags-to-riches story. Having begun life in a poor corner of rural Russia, he trained as a physicist, and had become a major businessman during the entrepreneurial free-for-all that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Not only had he become wealthy, he was also well-read, and voraciously interested in a constellation of social and economic ideas, as well as Russia’s future, which dominated his conversation. Despite later media suggestions that I had gone to Corfu to join Oleg for a holiday on his yacht, I barely saw him, except for an amusing episode in which, during an early-morning wander around his boat, I stumbled across a yoga session he and his wife were taking, and I happily joined in under the instruction of their teacher.
I knew George Osborne, too. We had never exchanged much beyond social pleasantries and that is all we did at the birthday party. It was not until the following evening, with repercussions that would emerge only later, that this changed. The remaining guests, about thirty of us in all, had arranged to assemble at a seaside taverna down the road from the Rothschilds’ house. I had fallen asleep in the evening sun, and arrived late. When I showed up, there were two vacant seats, one at each end of the table, and two simultaneous shouts of welcome. One was from Rebekah Wade, then editor of Rupert Murdoch’s Sun. The other was from George. I planted myself next to him, as he’d seemed the more insistent. For the next fifty minutes or so, we talked. By the time our remarks, or a skewed version of them, surfaced in the press a couple of months later, a central point would be lost.
Yes, we talked frankly, on both sides. But it was the kind of conversation political colleagues on opposite sides of the party fence have far more often than is sometimes realised. I had been one of the creators of New Labour, and the repositioning David Cameron and George were attempting with the Conservatives was in many ways being modelled on that. I was sceptical that they had learned the real lesson of New Labour: that it was not just about creating a new image, but required making tough policy changes and bringing the party behind them. But it was a fascinating and not unenjoyable chat, a bit like two golf pros comparing their swings. In fact, George did most of the talking. He spoke animatedly, initially about the Prime Minister. It was not just that he disliked Gordon Brown; he seemed consumed by his interest in what the Observer had once famously called Gordon’s ‘psychological flaws’. George recited a litany of slights he said he had suffered at Gordon’s hands in the months while he was shadowing him as Chancellor: Gordon had blanked him whenever they met; he had denied him the courtesy of advance copies of Treasury statements; on one occasion, George had phoned him only for Gordon to put the receiver down, or so he said. He was especially fascinated by the tensions between Gordon and Tony, saying that the ‘TB-GBs’ had made both him and David Cameron aware of the importance of sustaining their own relationship.
I listened. On occasion, I nodded. And yes, I added a brush-stroke or two to the psychological portrait George had obviously spent many months assembling. But I said nothing I hadn’t said to others at one time or another before. Nothing, in fact, I hadn’t said to Gordon. So it was difficult not to smile when, in George’s leaked version of our discussion which subsequently appeared in the press, I was said to have poured ‘pure poison’ about Gordon into his ear.
If anyone’s ear was scorched that evening, it was mine, as George expounded on what he saw as his and Cameron’s Conservative equivalent of our New Labour project. They had drained the Thatcherera ideology from the Tories, detoxified the party, he said, to make it electable. I said it had always been my understanding that the rising generation of Tory MPs and the current activists had grown up under Thatcher, and their thinking had been formed under her leadership. George said this was true only up to a point. The party was mainly made up of old people, not young people, most of whom were involved more for social than political reasons. In his own constituency, there were lots of divorcees, widows and widowers whose interest in the party was as a place to find companionship, or a partner. ‘They’re not interested in ideology,’ George said. ‘They’re interested in a Conservative Party that wins.’ His, and David Cameron’s, interest was also in a Tory Party that won.
When I returned to Brussels, I spoke to Tony on the telephone again. We both wondered whether Gordon had it in him to turn things round. My view was that neither of us could tell but that he had to be given the chance to try. Tony reflected on the messy way his own time in office had ended and Gordon’s had begun. It was not just the absence of the long-advertised ‘orderly transition’; what most upset him was that one result of Gordon’s final coup had been to short-circuit the ambitious policy review Tony had put in train to give a post-Blair government a fresh, but still New Labour, agenda. ‘It wasn’t my fault, the way he behaved,’ Tony grumbled. ‘I would have gone in 2004 if he’d worked with me, and if I didn’t believe the whole thing would be pulled apart by him and his people.’ He said he still felt Gordon had a great brain and energy. But, he added, ‘These have got to be directed at the right things. He’s got to go back to being New Labour.’
I don’t think either of us had any doubt that Gordon would return to London after the summer recess with a new determination to turn things round, but at the beginning, events did not help him. The trouble began, at least in Gordon’s mind, with the closest thing he had to an old friend, except for Ed Balls, in the cabinet. Alistair Darling – a Scot, a long-time admirer of Gordon, and his Chief Secretary at the Treasury after the 1997 election – was evidently feeling increasingly pessimistic about where the country was heading, from an already obvious economic downturn to something far worse, and, it seemed, frustrated at being constantly second-guessed by Number 10. He gave a long, and extraordinarily frank, interview to the Guardian writer Decca Aitkenhead at his holiday cottage in the Outer Hebrides. His remarks were not personally unkind towards Gordon, but he felt the country was ‘pissed off’ with the government: ‘We patently have not been able to get across what we are for, and what we are about.’ And he said he believed the recession would be ‘more profound and more long-lasting than people thought’. The economic straits Britain found itself in were ‘arguably the worst they’ve been in sixty years’.
The word ‘arguably’ disappeared from the quotes picked up by other newspapers and broadcasters when Alistair’s interview appeared. George Osborne had a field day, launching an assault on Gordon’s legacy as Chancellor and his ‘truthfulness’ as Prime Minister. Gordon was furious, because he felt Alistair’s comments were yet one more distraction from his hoped-for September recovery. When he called me, he was seething. I probably didn’t help things by questioning how he had allowed his media briefers to leak his plans to ‘go personal’ at the party conference – a bizarre theft of his own headlines that risked detracting from the impact of his speech when he made it. ‘I didn’t do that!’ he protested. ‘Well, somebody did,’ I said calmly, to which he replied: ‘OK. But we’re going from one improvisation to another. It’s ridiculous. I’ve got all these things to do, all this policy in my mind, but no means of communicating it.’ Then he got to what was really upsetting him. ‘That fucking Darling interview! It fucked up everything, absolutely everything, I wanted to do last week.’
None of us reckoned, however, on a series of events about to erupt five time zones away from Downing Street. They were hugely significant, an economic shock so seismic that they made Alistair’s interview seem understated. They began with the news that one of America’s most venerable investment banks, Lehman Brothers, might be going to the wall. Over the weekend, the US authorities scrambled to find a buyer. On Monday, Lehmans filed for so-called Chapter Eleven protection. It was the biggest bankruptcy in American history. World stock markets tumbled. Another British bank, HBOS, was soon showing signs of being in serious trouble. This was staved off by Gordon, who with a word in the ear of the Lloyds chairman Victor Blank encouraged a mega-merger between Lloyds and HBOS. By the end of the week, with the Labour conference convening in Manchester on Sunday, the economic news was becoming ever more worrying.
Gordon phoned me on Friday night. He said he had been trying to get me for two days – I had been at a climate change conference in Oslo, and had not been returning messages. He started by talking about his conference speech. It was clear the political ground had shifted. ‘Now,’ I told him, ‘you actually have something big to talk about in your speech. It really is the global economy, stupid.’
This was what we had been talking about since the summer. But now it was well and truly dramatised. The terrible crisis meant it was not just a theoretical and not just a political argument, but a real, immediate challenge. If Gordon got his message right, he had an opportunity to break through in a way he simply would not have been able to do before.
He agreed. ‘It’s not just about individuals and society. It must be markets as well,’ he said. His only doubt, one Tony would have found reassuringly New Labour, was how far he could go in attacking the markets. I reassured him that it wasn’t about attacking the markets, but individuals within them who had been acting irresponsibly, and that he should have no compunction about attacking them. But mostly what I told him was to put all his extraneous worries to one side: the so-called coups, Alistair’s interview. ‘Don’t, for God’s sake, let yourself get sidetracked,’ I said. ‘And don’t stop being prime ministerial.’
I was fairly certain now that, given the economic turmoil, Gordon had every chance of turning in a performance sufficient to save his job. Only a frontal assault from David Miliband was likely to spur rebellion, and that was not going to happen. For the media, however, the conference was shaping up as a tale of two speeches: David’s on the Monday, and Gordon’s on the Wednesday. David spoke eloquently, and ranged far beyond his brief as Foreign Secretary. In parts, he sounded very much like a leader-in-waiting. He echoed his July call for the party to choose hope, energy and new ideas over ‘fatalism’. But even without his unfortunate ambush by a photographer outside the conference hall, who snapped him grinning and holding a banana, David was not pushing for the leadership. Besides, there was no vacancy. Unless, of course, Gordon unravelled when he strode onto the stage.
He did the opposite. By some distance, it was the most powerful performance, the most effective message, he had delivered since his descent had begun a year earlier. It was personal. It connected. It had touches of self-deprecating humour. It played to his strengths. Galvanised by the magnitude of the new economic and financial crisis, he managed to produce what he had so far been failing to do. He offered a coherent reply to questions left unanswered for so long: What were the challenges Britain faced? What were the policies, vision and leadership needed to rise above them? And why was he the man to provide them? His most effective line, aimed at David Cameron, was: ‘I’m all in favour of apprenticeships. But let me tell you that this is no time for a novice.’ It was clever, it was simple, and it was what people wanted to hear.
I was back in Brussels when Gordon gave his speech, and was preoccupied with preparing for a trip to China and a speech of my own when I got there. Especially with the economic crisis deepening, I was keen to encourage expanding business and trade ties between the EU and the Chinese. But I was determined to press Beijing on our concerns about protectionist barriers, and China’s lacklustre attitude to enforcing intellectual-property rights. I watched Gordon’s address on television, however, and saw that it had gone well. I got two text messages that evening. The first was from one of the team at Number 10, saying very kindly that I’d made a ‘profound difference’ to Gordon’s performance. The second was from Sue Nye. ‘Gordon,’ it read, ‘says “thank you” for your help.’ As always with big set-piece speeches, especially Gordon’s, I was just one of many who had contributed. But it had been worth the effort. I told Gordon I felt it had been a good speech, the right message, effectively delivered, at the right time. What I didn’t say, in part because I was sure Gordon already knew and feared it, was that he had cleared only the first hurdle on the road to recovery.
By the time we next spoke, I was in Singapore, on my way home from Beijing. The call came in the early hours of the morning. He was upset by continued signs of discontent among an assortment of backbenchers, echoed by several former Blair cabinet ministers. There was a ‘plot’ to drive him out, he insisted: ‘The plotters are the problem.’ He singled out three former ministers as the alleged culprits: Stephen Byers, Alan Milburn and John Reid. ‘They are steering it,’ he said. ‘They had a plan, it misfired, and they failed. They wanted to wreck the conference, and they didn’t succeed.’
In fact, as far as I could tell, neither they nor anyone else had had some grand plan for conference Armageddon. At least for now, Gordon was safe. ‘You’re getting this out of proportion,’ I told him. ‘I don’t know why you’re so wound up.’ He was not wound up, he replied. But he was obviously distracted, and if he stayed that way, his conference escape could turn out to be no more than a very brief respite. ‘What you have to focus on now is the fact that we don’t have a strategy to win the next election,’ I told him. ‘The other stuff doesn’t matter. New Labour 1997 is not going to win it for us in 2010. It has to be renewed, reinvented. Nobody is doing that, and you have to focus on it.’
‘Can’t you do that?’ he asked, returning to a theme I thought we had finally got beyond in the summer. ‘I’ve got it intellectually,’ he said. ‘I’ve got the policies. I accept it’s different from 1997, and that now we’ve got to say what we’re doing next. But I just can’t turn it into a strategy.’
I put it to him directly: ‘You need a government team to do this. Perhaps you should wonder whether you may have contributed to making people feel less of a team. You have to rebuild it.’
‘I realise some in the cabinet feel ambivalent about me,’ he replied. ‘But others have got to show a lot more maturity.’
Sensing that we had taken this as far as we could for now, I said: ‘I have to show some maturity, and go to sleep.’
‘Why? Where on earth are you?’ asked Gordon, genuinely surprised.
‘Singapore,’ I said. ‘And it’s after 2 a.m.’ Gordon, profusely apologetic, and I, very tired, agreed to talk the following day.
When he phoned he was, at least briefly, in a brighter mood. ‘If it’s not after midnight, I guess I’m calling too early,’ he joked. But he remained unsettled. He was some distance from getting a hold on the team effort I’d been urging him to make his priority.
‘You get wound up about the wrong things and the wrong people,’ I said. I advised him not to make a big mistake in the cabinet reshuffle the press was now anticipating. I was worried about reports that he was planning to replace Alistair Darling with Ed Balls, which in the gathering economic crisis struck me as perverse. No matter how upset Gordon had been over his Chancellor’s interview, a vote of no-confidence in the Treasury was hardly going to help. ‘Some may think it odd,’ I said.
‘We’ll have to talk on a landline,’ Gordon replied, with a sudden air of mystery. ‘But I have a bigger plan than that – one which everyone will eventually say is good.’
‘A tactical nuclear explosion?’ I asked. At which, for the first time in ages, he laughed. He would say nothing more, beyond a suggestion that we talk again.
I was worried. From my experience, Gordon’s ‘big plans’ had a habit of creating as many problems as they solved. His conference speech would not in itself ensure that he and the government could recover, but it was a start. He had had one last chance at survival, and he had taken it. One more ‘big plan’ gone wrong would risk not just ending his short and unhappy premiership, it could leave the government, and the party, in even deeper crisis.
The next call from Downing Street came two days later. It was not from Gordon, but Jeremy Heywood. It began encouragingly enough, with an assurance that I would have an opportunity to weigh in with my views before the reshuffle warheads were launched. ‘I think Gordon will want to see you to discuss the reshuffle,’ he said. But then he too added, ‘He wants to do something quite big.’
‘In what way big?’ I pressed. He said that was something I would have to discuss with the Prime Minister. Apparently, Gordon wanted to do something that would affect me. This was getting more puzzling, and more worrying. I took it to be a suggestion of some root-and-branch reworking of the cabinet, with my job in Brussels offered as consolation prize to one of the victims. The prospect of my entering a truly final political exile came as a shock. It also seemed an odd way for Gordon to recognise the help I had tried to give him in his darkest hours. I did take comfort from the fact that I was better equipped to deal with being cast into the wilderness this time round. With my EU term ending in barely a year, I had begun to adjust to the notion of life beyond politics. But it was unsettling, and I said so. ‘He’d better not muck around with my job,’ I told Jeremy. ‘If this “big plan” involves getting rid of someone with a promise of my job, you should know I’ll be furious.’
‘It’s not that,’ he said. ‘We’ll talk again.’
The next call, on Wednesday, 1 October, was no more illuminating. This time it was from Gordon. ‘I’m going to do this reshuffle,’ he began. ‘I need to talk to you about it. I want to put an idea to you – something I hope you’ll go along with.’ He asked if I could come to see him in Downing Street the following morning. I said I would be in London anyway, for a briefing at the Treasury on the financial crisis, and I could see him after that. He seemed satisfied, but before hanging up he added very sternly: ‘Do not discuss this with anyone.’
‘Discuss what?’ I asked.
‘Nothing,’ he replied. ‘Just don’t discuss it.’ Since I had no idea what he was on about, that was easy enough to agree to.
Maybe my famed political antennae were not as good as they have been cracked up to be. Maybe Brussels had dimmed my Westminster instincts. Maybe, despite our recent rapprochement, I simply assumed that Gordon and I had fought so many battles that some sense of estrangement would always survive. In any case, when I discreetly entered Number 10 on the afternoon of Thursday, 2 October 2008 through the french windows at the back, near the Foreign Office, I was anticipating a conversation about the other potential jigsaw pieces in Gordon’s grand scheme. I took his and Jeremy’s hints at some role for me to mean, at most, another attempt to get me to play a part in forging the ‘strategy’ he desperately wanted. I had difficulty in seeing quite how that would work, but I was willing to listen, and to help if I could.
We met in the small wood-panelled dining room on the first floor. Gordon took a spoonful of yoghurt and unpeeled a banana. ‘I don’t like sandwiches,’ he said when I offered him the plate. Then he got down to business.
‘I need to do something big. I need you to join the government. I want you to help get us through the economic situation. You would do it at the Business Department, from the House of Lords.’
For a moment, I was stunned. I was also seized by panic at the prospect, even if Gordon genuinely felt he could make it work, of a return to the political jungle, and an end to a European sojourn that had turned out even better than I had expected. ‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘but I actually like my present job. I have things I want to finish. And I have my comfort zone.’ I had my work. My life. The protection I now felt I had from the frequent ghastliness of Westminster politics as I had come to know it. I had my travel, my friends. I was now on top of the Trade Commissioner’s job, and trying against all odds to play my part in rescuing hopes for a world trade deal, not to mention the intractable negotiations to update our trade relations in Africa, or the never-ending talks on Russia’s membership of the World Trade Organisation.
Gordon would not be dissuaded. He said the world trade deal was going nowhere fast – he had just been in Washington, and he was sure of that. I was pretty sure of it as well: its prospects were looking about as dire as Gordon’s before his conference speech.
‘Think of what you would be able to achieve back in the government,’ he persisted. ‘It’s a great opportunity.’ And he added: ‘We need you. We could work together.’
‘Well, it would certainly be a surprise for everyone,’ I laughed. Yet, except for the undeniable satisfaction I would take from an unlikely – more nearly, impossible – third return from the cabinet dead, I still found the idea unsettling. Gordon left me to ponder.
When he returned to the room, it was with Sue Nye in tow. He suggested that she and I speak. This was the start of a carousel of conversations, first with Sue, then with Jeremy Heywood, as Gordon departed and reappeared, joined the discussion and left the other two to urge me to see the logic of his proposal. It made sense from every angle, they insisted. It would be the right thing for Gordon, for the government, and for me. I was tempted. It was not merely the idea of returning to cabinet. At a time when Gordon and New Labour were in political crisis, and the country was facing an economic one, I did feel that I could play a part in making things better.
But for other reasons, I was still reluctant. Even in our resumed, long-distance relationship, I had been reminded that Gordon could be hair-raisingly difficult to work with. ‘It’s all too difficult,’ I told him. ‘I’ll have to talk to Reinaldo about it. He’ll hate the whole idea of becoming involved in British politics again – and the media. He’s suffered enough.’ Gordon replied that by all means I should call my partner, then hurriedly added: ‘If you want, I’ll talk to him.’ The moment passed. Gordon’s suggestion, like so much else when he was at his best, had been genuine, and generous. So too was his invitation to me to return to the top ranks of government.
I would not say no outright, I told him finally. I had to think it through. I also needed counsel from someone who knew both me and Gordon well, and whose instincts I had learned to trust. I said I wanted to discuss it with Tony. Gordon said that was fine, and we agreed that I would return by the end of the afternoon.
As soon as I left, I phoned Reinaldo. His reaction was not just surprise, but more nearly disbelief. Who could blame him? Yet as we talked through the obvious pitfalls, he came to the view that what mattered was whether the contribution I could make by returning to cabinet outweighed them. If I felt it did, I should do it. ‘But you’re right,’ he said, ‘to talk to Tony.’
When I arrived at Tony’s office in Grosvenor Square, he was in a meeting. As he ushered me in a few minutes later, it was apparent that Gordon had phoned ahead. Tony grasped my hand and laughed out loud. ‘You could not make it up!’ he said. But he added: ‘On the other hand, it has a certain logic. It’s a no-brainer. You belong in the government. The economic crisis is real. If the Prime Minister asks you to serve your country, you have to. It certainly wouldn’t look good if people got to know that you’d turned him down.’
‘He’s a nightmare to work with. It might be awful,’ I said.
‘It might be,’ Tony replied, ‘or it might not be. You don’t know. In the end, people will just say that you did your best.’
When I returned to Number 10, Gordon was waiting. ‘OK,’ I told him. ‘I’ll do it. I’m still not sure it’s the right thing for me to do. But I’ll do my best.’
‘It is the right thing,’ Gordon said. ‘I’m sure. You’ll see.’
As I left, I was in a daze. I did feel a sense of excitement, the surge of adrenalin I had almost forgotten in the gentler political climate of Brussels. The role Gordon had mapped out for me might turn out to be the most important and fulfilling of my political life. My new cabinet job would take me back to the now-renamed Department of Trade and Industry. It was the place where I’d cut my departmental teeth, where with a team of impressive civil servants I had done well, only to leave long before I had expected or hoped to. It meant that along with whatever ‘strategic’ role Gordon clearly wanted me to play, I would be at the heart of framing the government agenda where it mattered most: the economy.
I couldn’t help but smile at imagining what the media would make of my return. Outrageous? Astonishing? It was certainly both of those. But also risky? Ill-advised? Insane? I could only hope not. There was just one thing of which I was sure as I returned to my home off Regent’s Park, beyond the gaze or interest of reporters, at least until the news of the reshuffle became public. As so often when conflicting issues had to be weighed and a difficult decision made, Tony had been right. If the Prime Minister asks you to serve your country, you have to.
But I also knew that the reasons I had decided to come back, the reasons that in some ways I wanted to come back, were more complex than that. They had less to do with Gordon, or Tony, than with me. It is true that everything I had become as a politician had been marked by my relationship with New Labour’s two, very different, Prime Ministers. But the roots went back much further: to my time with Neil Kinnock, and with London Weekend Television’s Weekend World programme in the 1980s; to my experience in local government, the trade unions and youth politics in the Old Labour heyday of the 1970s; to my time at university. And to a bright white family home ten miles up the Northern Line from the Houses of Parliament, on a suburban street called Bigwood Road.
2 (#ulink_8ef4af3f-cf05-5132-a0b2-9c48a7aa97e6)
Born into Labour
Big Wood seemed much bigger to me as a child than it does now. It began at the top of our road, three minutes’ walk from our door. At the other end was an even larger expanse of green, the extension to Hampstead Heath, which bordered the neighbourhood where I spent the first two decades of my life. Hampstead Garden Suburb was the creation of Dame Henrietta Barnett, a Christian social reformer who believed that mixed communities with the feel of a country village would soften and ultimately heal the hostility of urban life. At the turn of the last century, after many years of charity work in the East End of London, she enlisted the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens and the utopian town planner Raymond Unwin to make her vision a reality.
The Suburb was less posh and intellectually self-important than Hampstead proper, which lay just over a steep incline and a mile or two nearer the centre of London. Under the Suburb’s original planning rules, there were no fences or walls between properties, only hedgerows. No shops were permitted within its boundaries. And no pubs. While the social activist in Dame Henrietta must have understood the attraction of a comradely pint at the end of a working day, the Christian in her could not abide the idea. The roads were wide, and trees were everywhere, bursting with white and pink and purple in springtime. It was a place designed for walking, and letting one’s eyes tilt skywards. The Suburb was centred on a lovely church square – St Jude’s C of E on one side, the Methodists opposite – and the adjacent girls’ school Dame Henrietta created, and which bears her name. For families, the Suburb was ideal. As a child, I loved it – an ardour that briefly dimmed when, as a teenager, I found it a bit too quiet and confining, but which I have since rediscovered. It was in London, yet not quite of it.
It was, however, very much a part of Labour London. Hampstead was home to Hugh Gaitskell and Michael Foot, but we had our share of luminaries too, notably Harold and Mary Wilson. They were near neighbours, just around the corner, and good friends. Their boys, Robin and Giles, were a little older than me and my elder brother Miles – Mary very kindly passed Giles’s rather scratchy Cub Scout jersey on to me when it was time for me to join the local pack attached to the Methodist church. My most vivid early political memory is from a few days before my eleventh birthday, when I watched the Wilsons negotiate a gaggle of camera crews and reporters, including the famous American broadcaster Walter Cronkite, as they left for Downing Street after the 1964 election.
A year later, the Wilsons invited us to Number 10 to watch Trooping the Colour. It would be ridiculous to suggest that as I walked wide-eyed through the famous black door I imagined I would return forty-five years later to watch the same ceremony as a senior minister, alongside another Labour Prime Minister. But I can’t deny that I was dazzled. Marcia Williams, Harold’s trusted political secretary, fed me large quantities of triangular smoked-salmon sandwiches and asparagus rolls. She even took my hand and led me into the Cabinet Room, and briefly planted me in the Prime Minister’s chair. I was conscious of feeling somehow special. Conscious, too, that part of that feeling had to do with the fact that my bond with Labour really began with my family. My mother was the only child of Herbert Morrison, the founding General Secretary of the Labour Party in London, a minister in Ramsay MacDonald’s 1929 government, and the first Labour leader of the London County Council in the 1930s. He served as Home Secretary in Churchill’s wartime cabinet, and was the organising force behind the manifesto and the election campaign that delivered Labour’s startling 1945 landslide, becoming Deputy Prime Minister and later Foreign Secretary in the Attlee government. As we left the Cabinet Room, Marcia introduced me to another guest sitting in the hallway, Clement Attlee himself. ‘This is Herbert’s grandson, Clem,’ she said. The former Prime Minister, either through advanced age or because he and my grandfather had not exactly been bosom buddies, looked at me briefly before grunting something inaudible.
My mother cared passionately about the issues that drove politics: I remember joining her on a march against Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech when I was fourteen. But her experience of the way politics had come to dominate her father’s life, often crowding out both her and her mother, left her with a lifelong dislike of the exposure that goes with public life. As a young girl, she told her father to keep her out of his ‘beastly politics’. My father’s connection with Labour was less genetic than my mother’s, but in many ways stronger. Unlike her, he was fascinated by politicians, and by the bustle of energy and argument that surrounded them. By the people who surrounded them, too. He was good friends with Marcia Williams, and became especially close to the quiet, stoical Mary Wilson, as she and I have always recalled whenever our paths have crossed since.
His own starting point was traditional, Old Labour politics. Maybe this was because his views were formed in the post-war years, when the division between Labour and the Tories was starker and simpler than it has since become. Maybe part of it came from his own DNA. He was born in Pinner, an outer London suburb not exactly famous for politics, or much of anything else. But his ancestral roots went back to the nineteenth-century Jewish community in Poland, then under Russian rule. His great-grandfather Nathan was said to have been involved in an anti-tsarist plot, and to have escaped retribution only by fleeing one step ahead of the secret police.
There is a temptation to suggest that my father inherited Nathan’s streak of rebelliousness and Jewish activism. Somehow, though, I suspect not. He never hid his Jewishness – indeed, he could hardly have done so. He spent nearly all of his working life as the legendarily smooth, gregarious and popular advertising manager of London’s Jewish Chronicle, the world’s oldest Jewish newspaper. Yet he remained a strident non-believer. I cannot recall his ever walking the short distance to Hampstead Garden Suburb synagogue, even on the Jewish New Year or at Yom Kippur; he certainly never took me there. Religion never figured in our lively dinner table discussions, although politics invariably did.
I suppose I was, however, dimly aware of my refracted Jewishness. Most Fridays I would have dinner with my friend Caroline Wetzler and her family, observing a form of Jewish family routine. Another of my closest childhood friends was Keren Abse, daughter of the poet and playwright Dannie Abse and niece of the outspoken Jewish Labour MP Leo Abse. I would occasionally go with my father to the offices of the Jewish Chronicle in Furnival Street, just off Holborn. His army of advertising salesmen and administrators were unfailingly deferential to him, and unfailingly kind to me. But my main Jewish Chronicle memory was when the man in charge of ad layout, Nat Goldstein, took Miles and me to the Hammersmith Odeon one evening shortly after my twelfth birthday, for a Beatles concert. I did not enter a synagogue until more than three decades later, for the wedding of my wonderfully loyal long-time executive assistant, Maree Glass. The ceremony was extraordinarily beautiful. I also found it oddly, and a bit regretfully, alien.
My mother and Miles, but especially my father and I, followed Labour’s internal debates and its battles with the Tories the way football fanatics would fixate on Cup runs or local derbies. Labour was not just our ‘team’, however. That does not capture the depth of the attachment: among our happy quartet of atheists at 12 Bigwood Road, Labour was more nearly a religion.
From childhood, it was certainly mine. Even before Harold Wilson left for Downing Street, I remember rushing home from school to listen to the results of the final ballot from which he emerged as Labour leader after Hugh Gaitskell’s death, then racing into the kitchen to tell my mother the good news. She never became carried away by such things. At election time, I would set out on canvassing missions around the Suburb – beginning, I am told, by tricycle at the tender age of six. Once, I even embarrassingly knocked on the door of Manny Shinwell, Defence Minister alongside my grandfather in the post-war government, to remind him to vote.
What I most absorbed from both of my parents was their love for each other, and for Miles and me. Both my mother and father had been married before. They met after the war at the London advertising agency Dorlands, where my mother, who had worked with the Quaker refugee service in the war years, had a job as a secretary, while my father was on one of the ad account teams. It appears to have been love at first sight, but it was complicated by the fact that my father was still married. My mother had divorced her first husband, the son of the Agriculture Minister alongside Herbert Morrison in the cabinet. My grandfather had been unhappy enough about that first marriage, feeling that my mother, then only nineteen, was far too young. She and my father kept their liaison pretty much secret until he was divorced from his first wife.
Even then, however, the idea of my mother having married as a teenager, divorced soon afterwards, and then married another divorcee did not exactly please her father, to put it mildly. I don’t know whether he had moral objections, but what is clear is that he did not relish the possibility of any gossip or criticism that might encroach on what mattered most to him: his political career. As a young boy, I would come to feel pride, respect and sometimes awe at my grandfather’s political status and accomplishments. Those feelings never entirely left me as I made my own way into national politics, but as I approached my teens, I also became aware of the effects of his all-consuming political ambition on those around him, above all on my mother. He visited us when he was able to drive himself across London from his home in Eltham, but his second wife did not make it easy, as she wanted to cut him off from his family and past friends. When he died in March 1965, a few months after I turned eleven, the first we knew of it was from a newsflash that interrupted the Saturday-evening film on ITV. My mother tried not to show her hurt, but I am sure she felt it as acutely as I did. She arranged for me to be excused from school to attend my grandfather’s funeral: my abiding memory of the occasion is of George Brown, then Labour’s voluble deputy leader, telling me off for my politically inappropriate dress sense – I was wearing a blue tie.
The authority in our family came from my mother. She was by far the quieter of my parents, but she was a source of unquestioned support for all of us. She had an elegance, almost a regality about her: my childhood friends and I called her ‘Duchess’. That is how I remember her to this day. But she had steel. Never raising her voice, she instilled in Miles and me a sense of good manners, of propriety, right and wrong. Her silent opprobrium when we strayed beyond the boundaries was far more effective than any scolding or punishment would have been.
My father was in many ways her opposite. Though his real name was George, he was universally known as Tony, ever since he had served as an officer in the Royal Dragoons during the war. He dressed impeccably, and had the bearing of a City gent rather than an advertising salesman. He had a wonderful, waspish sense of humour and fun, and revelled in being with people, until he shut the front door behind him each evening and propped himself up on his bed, smoking his pipe, surrounded by his books and newspapers. In his later years he became a Suburb personality as chairman of the residents’ association. He sallied forth almost daily, walking stick in hand, sometimes with his wartime binoculars around his neck, to ensure that Dame Henrietta’s sylvan planning restrictions were surviving the era of two-Volvo families and paved-over front gardens.
As a child, I remember feeling slightly embarrassed at times by the showman in my father. As an adult, however, I would come to recognise that much of my own political passion and public personality came from him. My brother Miles, who is four years older than me, and was always more tranquil and reflective, saw this earlier and more keenly than I did. Having gone on to qualify as a clinical psychologist, he contributed his insights into how each of our family jigsaw pieces fitted together for a biography the journalist Donald Macintyre wrote about me in the 1990s. They were striking and, I am sure, accurate. Miles was always much more like my mother, he observed, while I am more like my father. But growing up, the attachments we formed with our parents were a mirror image of this. I was much closer to my mother, rather doting on her, and Miles to my father.
Perhaps because my father and I were alike in so many ways, there was a certain friction between us. Especially where politics was concerned – and more than ever when my first-hand experience of Labour in the 1980s convinced me that the party had to take on the hard left if it was to survive. Even before then, it was clear that his view of Labour and mine were likely to diverge. I remember the two of us visiting a Suburb neighbour named Hans Janitschek on a bright Sunday morning in 1972. Janitschek was an Austrian writer who was then Secretary General of the Socialist International. A modern European Social Democrat, I remember him saying that he feared Labour was risking a ‘dangerous’ swerve to the left. Harold Wilson had lost the 1970 general election, and Tony Benn and his allies had led a successful campaign to get Labour’s National Executive Committee to adopt a leftist policy programme. Harold evidently concluded that since the party wasn’t going to re-enter government anytime soon, there was no particular urgency about taking them on. Janitschek was convinced – rightly, of course – that this inaction would come back to haunt Labour, and that sooner or later a battle over policy and ideology would have to be fought. I listened intently as my father not only defended Harold’s apparent insouciance, but said that he felt the socialist ideologues should be given latitude and tolerance. For him, that was part of what being Labour was all about.
I loved both of my parents dearly. Even now, two decades after my father’s death and four years after my mother’s, there is barely a day when I don’t think of them. My mother’s memory, especially, still lives with me. But my father’s too. Events in my life, in politics, the places I go, often rekindle recollections of them. In the waning days of Gordon Brown’s government, I was in Regent’s Park for an early-morning stroll when I saw a man with a cane trying to make his way up one of the paths. My mind instantly flashed back to the array of walking sticks my father kept in the front hall, and the old army greatcoat he used to throw over his shoulders as he ventured out in his role as one-man Suburb conservation force. I smiled at the image. He was so full of life and energy and élan, so passionate about what he believed in. He was such a presence. And, as Miles still reminds me, so much like the person and politician I became.
In many ways, we led a charmed childhood. My Euro-enthusiasm as a politician grew from roots planted then. From the time I was a small child, my parents took us on summer holidays in Europe. Every August we would go somewhere new: Ibiza, Brittany, Italy and Elba. We would stay either on campsites or in an inexpensive pension or hotel. I remember one year we camped in the grounds of a monastery in Tuscany. A group of monks stood watching the silhouette of my mother inside her tent as she combed her waist-length hair. For a few years we shared our holidays with an American family we had met, from San Francisco. They had three boys, and together the two families travelled round in a – very crowded – VW camper van.
When I was ten, we settled into a pattern of going to Spain’s Costa Brava every summer. It was nowhere near as built-up then as it is now. We stayed a few miles down the coast from Rosas, at a place called Almadraba which consisted of a few dozen very basic chalets tucked away from the beach. Over dinner, my mother and father would give Miles and me a half-glass of wine, and very occasionally a tiny portion of Cointreau with ice as a nightcap. If I remember rightly, I drank more than Miles. Perhaps in part because of this distinctly Continental introduction to alcohol, I now drink only in moderation: wine and whisky.
Another effect of our Spanish summers proved slightly more painful. With light-coloured skin like my mother, and the more cavalier attitude towards such things that I got from my father, I would invariably neglect the sun lotion and quickly burn to a bright red. I still do when I’m not careful. Nor was my immersion in the sporting life of the Costa Brava especially successful. For two years running I tried – and failed – to learn how to water-ski, as everyone on the beach watched my repeated humiliation. I finally abandoned my efforts.
While the summers on the Costa Brava were idyllic for me as a child, politically, of course, Spain was no idyll. Franco was in power, and I am not sure how my parents reconciled our holidays there with their solid Labour sympathy for the republican side in the civil war. I do remember that we mollified my grandfather by bringing him a box of his favourite cigars after each holiday. He would drive over for Saturday lunch to collect them on our return.
The Suburb may have been created as a socially mixed urban utopia, but by the time I was born half a century later, it was decidedly middle-class. The more thrusting families aspired to send their children to the nearby four-hundred-year-old Highgate School, or to University College School in Hampstead. Although my parents might have been able to afford the fees, it would not have occurred to them to enrol us anywhere but at a state school. Anyway, they preferred to spend their money on our budget summer holidays in Europe. After Miles and I left Garden Suburb Primary, a short walk away on the other side of Big Wood, we moved on to Hendon County Grammar School. Under its dauntingly traditionalist head teacher, E.W. Maynard Potts, it was intellectually rigorous, and very strict. I did well academically. I enjoyed learning from, and on occasion jousting with, most of my teachers, especially about politics. I remember bringing a geography lesson to a standstill as our teacher, Mr Chapman, and I argued about the implications of the collapse of Barbara Castle’s trade-union reform White Paper, In Place of Strife. He said the retreat was a political disaster. I knew he was right, of course, but loyally defended the government’s corner.
I made some extraordinarily close friendships at school, above all with Keren Abse and a Hendon boy named Stephen Howell, who shared my teenage enthusiasm for all things political, and who remains close to me today. The two of them used to kid me about being something of a Labour anorak. Not only was I by now thoroughly conversant with the policy debates in the party, but particularly on long car journeys, I played what we called the ‘constituency game’. Boringly, and at length, I would try to name the sitting Labour MP for every constituency they could think of. Nevertheless, we became an inseparable trio. When we were sixteen, Steve’s grandmother and aunt, both Hendon Labour activists, suggested that we rekindle the dormant local branch of the Young Socialists. I became chairman, Steve the secretary, and Keren the slightly less politically obsessive glue that held our founding cell together. By the time of our inaugural meeting in March 1970, we had cajoled two dozen others to enlist in the cause. My mother no doubt shuddered at the thought that I might end up joining the breed she so disliked, and become a politician. If so, she didn’t show it. She provided a warm welcome to my comrades in arms, complete with egg-and-tomato sandwiches and hot chocolate, for our after-school meetings. She typed out our slightly overblown screeds for the monthly YS newsletter, and remained unruffled when the three of us were summarily thrown out of Hendon Town Hall during the 1970 election campaign for heckling the Conservative candidate. After the election, which ended in a Tory victory and brought Edward Heath into Downing Street, she even joined us on a demonstration against the new government’s Industrial Relations Bill. Mr Potts was less sanguine, threatening to expel me for my unruly activism. He was deterred only by the intervention of a strong-willed, and thoroughly Labour, school governor.
My politics began spilling into my school life, to Mr Potts’s alarm. In common with other grammars, Hendon County had found itself caught up in the Labour government’s campaign to end the 11-Plus examination and move to comprehensive secondary schooling. Mr Potts was dead against this, and was horrified when Steve, Keren and I joined with our YS comrades in campaigning for an end to selection and a merger with a nearby secondary modern. He denounced us to a school assembly as ‘industrial militants trying to tear apart the fabric of our school community’ – before taking early retirement, possibly to escape the spectre of the advancing Communist hordes.
When Steve and I became prefects in the lower sixth, we found ourselves at odds with the new head teacher. This time it was over our support for a move to open up the prefects’ room to all sixth-formers, liberalise the school-uniform rules and abolish the prefects system in favour of an elected school council. For me, like my parents, the joy of politics has always been in battles of principle. In this case, it meant the dilemma of abandoning the prospect of my becoming Head Boy, with all its attendant privileges. I did end up as the first head of an elected school council instead. I confess that this brought out a less attractive aspect of my future political personality, a quality Tony Blair would call my ‘imperiousness’. I was quite the disciplinarian, sometimes unbearably bossy towards pupils in the lower forms. Still, my wider political focus remained on the world of Labour politics. In one of my more portentous YS editorials, I even sounded a clarion defence of Clause IV – the socialist economic creed that I would back Tony in ditching a quarter of a century later. I did say, however, that such high-sounding words were pointless unless our brave band of student socialists was organising and acting in the real world. We all actively supported the campaign against apartheid and subscribed to Amnesty International, and in two summer holidays I volunteered in the offices of the National Council for Civil Liberties, the forerunner of Liberty, dealing with cases usually arising from allegations of rough justice at the hands of the police.
Midway through the sixth form, Keren, Steve and I opted for a distinctly unreal world: the Young Communist League. Keren went first. The Young Communists appealed to her rebelliousness, with the added attraction, she said, that the boys were cuter. Steve and I agreed to join her at what turned out to be their annual meeting, in a rambling house in West Hampstead. As we started going to occasional branch meetings, we wound down our YS branch early in 1971. Our main formal YCL activity was to try, with indifferent success, to flog the Morning Star on Friday evenings outside Kilburn tube station. Steve and I did become stewards at the YCL national congress, at which Keren was a delegate, and was denounced as a bourgeois turncoat for speaking out against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
The biggest impact the YCL made on my life was when news got round that a local youth club was losing its premises in a church, and was eyeing a disused four-storey Victorian pub, the Winchester Arms in Swiss Cottage, as a replacement. The pub had been purchased by Camden Council years before, and left empty. I volunteered to join the members of the youth club in occupying this wonderful building and setting to work on converting it, while I negotiated with the council for a short-term lease. The project consumed the attention of my whole family. The youth leader, Graham Good, and his partner Brenda, took up residence in my parents’ home, and my father became the project’s legal trustee. The refitted building survives as a popular youth club, under voluntary rather than Communist management, to this day.
As A-levels approached, I turned my mind to life after Hendon County. With Mr Potts barely acquiescent, I had been encouraged by my economics master, Mr Brown, to apply for a place to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. Much to my surprise, I succeeded. But the closer the prospect of starting there became, the more nervous I was. There was little university, much less Oxbridge, background in my family – although Miles had broken the mould by excelling at Nottingham, and going on to Liverpool. I felt too young, too Hampstead Garden Suburban, to go up to Oxford straight away, and persuaded the college to allow me to delay a year, convincing them that I would benefit from living and working in Tanzania, where Julius Nyerere was championing a distinctly African system of village-based socialism which he called Ujamaa.
Finding a placement was not easy. Over a period of many months, I wrote dozens of letters to the government, charities, churches and voluntary organisations, all to no avail. Eventually, luck struck. One evening I heard a radio interview with the Bishop of Stepney, Trevor Huddleston, previously a bishop in southern Tanzania, and a Nyerere enthusiast who as a young pastor had been booted out of South Africa for his stand against apartheid. I wrote to him, and he invited me to see him at his home in Commercial Road. We talked for nearly an hour, during which I imagine I impressed him more by my enthusiasm than by any special knowledge or qualifications I might bring to rural Tanzania. But he generously arranged for me to work with Anglican missions in the north of the country – and even more generously, I would later discover, to pay for my room and board.
In September 1972 I boarded a flight to Nairobi, from where I would make the short turbo-prop hop to Musoma in north-western Tanzania, with a feeling of adventure and excitement. When I arrived at the Buhemba rural aid station, amid rolling hills and sweeping valleys hundreds of miles from Tanzania’s coastal capital of Dar es Salaam, I was struck by the simple beauty of my new, very un-Suburb, breeze-block home. I shared it with a VSO and a Canadian volunteer. It was lit by kerosene lamps, and we had a small gas cooker and an outdoor latrine.
Soon, however, a sense of loneliness and isolation set in. I wondered how on earth I was going to survive a year of this. Even if I were one of life’s great natural linguists, which I am not, mastery of Swahili would have been a stretch. Over time, I did acquire a rudimentary competence, but thankfully most of the Tanzanians in the mission spoke English. They helped me, and teased me, over my initial difficulties. I had no obvious common ground with the assortment of New Zealand missionaries who ran the station, kind as they were. Nothing in my upbringing had prepared me to embrace the bedrock of religious belief and purpose that defined their lives. With each passing week, however, I began to feel more a part of things. When I was not working, I wrote scores of letters home to Bigwood Road, to Steve and Keren and other friends, and of course to Bishop Huddleston. They replied with letters of their own and an endless supply of books.
We started work early each morning, and finished in midafternoon, amid the heat of the approaching southern hemisphere summer. I planted endless gum trees, determined to stay one step ahead of the rabbits as they devoured the saplings. I built chicken coops. I painted houses. I helped in the mission office, sorting the huge pile of unfiled invoices. I also spent hours talking, and listening, to the Tanzanians with whom I was working. I travelled to Nairobi to buy agricultural spare parts and, nearer home, to Musoma to stay with a charming if slightly eccentric missionary couple, the aptly named Merry and Beatrice Hart.
After four months, I left to work at the missionary-run Murgwanza Hospital in Ngara, on the far side of Lake Victoria near the border with Rwanda and Burundi. A typical day would begin at the concrete slab that served as an operating table for the ebullient English missionary doctor, Arthur Adeney. I would pump anaesthetic ether from a cylinder into a patient with a torn limb, a broken bone, or a burst appendix. If things got complicated, Arthur would have me read him the relevant passages from his university anatomy textbook while I tried to maintain my attention on the pump. The rest of my day was devoted to the dozens of young children in the hospital’s orphanage. I can still almost feel the two young sisters who waited for my arrival every afternoon clinging to me, and vividly remember their wailing when it was time for me to leave.
I thought, read and wrote a great deal during my time in Tanzania. Much of what preoccupied me was politics. This was long before the era of the internet or the mobile phone. What news we got came from the BBC World Service, the beginning of my love affair with the BBC. I read books and pamphlets by Nyerere and his TANU party thinkers, as well as other African authors. I read political novels, like Emile Zola’s Germinal and William Morris’s utopian socialist fantasy News from Nowhere. I read about Christianity, and remember being especially moved by the theologian Michael Green’s passionate statement of belief in Christ’s resurrection, Man Alive. It helped me to understand, and even at times to feel a part of, the fervency, commitment and simple goodness of the missionaries whom I was working and living with, and coming to admire. In my letters home, I tried to come to terms with what this new wash of knowledge and experience meant about the easier life I had lived, and the easier choices I had made, before living in Africa. There were times when I felt caught up in the promise of Nyerere’s Tanzanian socialism. At others, I felt swept away by the shared purpose of the missionaries – almost, but never quite, fetching up in the arms of the organised Church.
My final work in Tanzania was at the Isamilo primary school in Mwanza. It was the hardest and most demanding of all. I taught every subject to a class of forty youngsters. Teaching had seemed so easy when I was on the receiving end, but now, no matter how hard I tried, I felt there was always a child I could not reach, or a bit of knowledge I could not convey. It left me with an undying admiration for those who have a natural talent for teaching.
In the end, I also learned something else about myself. Africa would for ever be a part of my life, including but beyond the campaigning against apartheid that involved my whole family. But I knew my real home was in Britain – the country, the culture, the politics in which I had grown up. I ended my eleven months away more rounded, wiser, more grown-up – and with far more questions than answers. One of my many long letters to Steve, written shortly before my return, probably captured this best: ‘Sometimes, I reason that Tanzanian socialism is tremendous, and the only hope for development, but that socialism in England would be wholly impractical. And that we are living in an ideological cloud-cuckoo land in which England no more has a socialist future than it will fly in the air … And then I think there is a lot wrong; much injustice and unnecessary poverty and human suffering, and that something must be done about it. But how? Through the Labour Party in Parliament … or yet more words and demonstrations?’ All I knew for sure was that, anxious though I was to get home, I would feel very different when I got there from when I had left.
I was certainly no less confused when I arrived at St Catherine’s in the autumn. But the tug of politics was stronger than ever, now with a pulsating African and international dimension. Whatever I had seen and written home about to Steve and the others, it never seriously occurred to me that my political home could be anywhere other than the Labour Party. This was reinforced by the influence of a small group of second-year PPE friends with whom I soon became close. Like them, I was uneasy about taking the predictable path for a would-be Labour politician at Oxford: the Union, or the Labour Club. The first of these I neither joined nor attended. It seemed full of self-serving careerists and preening would-be Cabinet ministers – although none of them, in fact, would end up fulfilling their ambitions. The Labour Club was going through one of its periodic periods of tension between right and left, social democrats and traditionalists. This time, the right was winning. Strange as it may seem in the light of the battles I would later fight, my heart was with the traditionalists. Rather than join, I helped set up an alternative Oxford Labour Students Association. Yet although I was a member of the executive, I spent fairly little time there. With my PPE friends – Michael Attwell, who went on to a career in television; Dick Newby, who would leave Labour to join the SDP and become a Liberal Democrat peer; and the future international trade unionist David Cockroft – I became much more involved in matters overseas. I joined the United Nations Youth and Students Association, as well as a group called Young European Left. In my first year I was especially active in the political causes of southern Africa. Every week, without fail, I would travel to London, helping to organise campaigns in support of the SWAPO insurgents in Namibia, even raising £12,000 to buy a Land Rover for them.
Academically, I rather lost my footing. I suppose I assumed I would always be able to muddle through. But at the end of year one I actually failed my preliminary exam in politics, to the amazement of my tutor, Wilfrid Knapp. To this day, I am not quite sure how I managed to pass philosophy and economics; certainly my tutors, John Simopoulos and Nicholas Stern, later of climate-change fame, were not confident that I had applied myself sufficiently to their subjects. I was suddenly faced with the prospect of not only failing to excel at Oxford, but failing to clear the first hurdle. I returned early in the autumn to retake the politics exam, and for all of September I had the best time of my life at Oxford, thoroughly immersed in all the books I was supposed to have read the previous year. I was especially engrossed by analytical tomes and biographies from post-war French politics.
I passed my prelim, but while the chastening fear of being tossed out of Oxford made me conscious of needing to rein in my political activities, I never really learned that lesson completely. In my second year I became president of the Junior Common Room, which took up considerable time, though it also marked the beginning of an enduring friendship with the college’s Master, the historian Alan Bullock. Through the Young Fabians I became involved in the British Youth Council, an umbrella organisation of voluntary youth and student organisations. Each of these experiences played a role in how I did politics, and what I did in politics, after Oxford. But if I had it to do over again, there is no doubt that I would concentrate on academic matters. Every time I speak to someone who is about to go up to Oxford, or any other university, I try to pass on that lesson. Forget the politics, I tell them. And the socialising. Forget stuff like the JCR. Forget student activism. The academic opportunity – the chance to read and write, think and learn – in this artificial laboratory of the mind is the one thing that will not come your way again.
I did socialise, but not in the conventional Oxford way – the fancy-dress dinners and large college balls. I would sometimes go out with one or all of my trio of PPE friends to eat and to talk. I also became close to a lovely, warm and, to me, exotic girl named Venetia Porter, one of the first intake of young women at St Catherine’s. Venetia was studying Arabic. She had grown up in Beirut, and then moved to London, where she had gone to the French Lycée. Her parents, whom I would sometimes visit with her, were separated, and also fascinatingly different. Her father, Robert Porter, was chief economist at the Ministry of Overseas Development, and was not only good company but an occasional source of rescue and support during my economics revision. Her mother was the famous, and delightfully unconventional, dress designer Thea Porter. It was she who gave me my first taste of London Bohemian life, at the Colony Room Club in Soho, where she was a member. Venetia and I were more curious observers than participants, but the Colony included an extraordinary cast of characters, and was a world away from Junior Common Room.
For a year I shared a house with Venetia and an Arabic Studies friend. It had that special, run-down quality of Oxford student lets, but it was cosy in its own way, and Venetia’s company always brightened things up. During study breaks for her, or political breaks for me, we would cook dinner, eat out or go to parties, where we danced and danced. We even enrolled in a rock ‘n’ roll class at a dancing studio across from Balliol, on Broad Street. In my final period in government thirty years later, I would cause considerable media mirth by suggesting myself as a candidate for Strictly Come Dancing. Had the producers taken me up on the idea, I suppose I would have had to come clean about my formal training.
At the end of year two, an opportunity arose to visit Venetia’s childhood city, and the wider Middle East. In my study of economics and politics, I was spending a lot of time focusing on the region. Through my UN Association work I met Lord Caradon, Britain’s UN Ambassador in the 1960s, and he organised a sponsored fact-finding trip through the Middle East during the summer. I almost didn’t make it. As term was ending, I suddenly fell ill with a form of sleeping sickness. As far as the doctors could surmise, I had probably picked it up in Africa, perhaps while rashly swimming in Lake Victoria, a notorious incubator for bilharzia, or when, in Ngara, I had waded through a swamp, swatting off tsetse flies, into Rwanda. Whatever the cause, I found myself in bed in Bigwood Road, unable to get up for nearly a month. At the suggestion of Venetia’s mother, my father took me to see a homeopath in Welbeck Street. It seemed to help, a bit. But it was mainly my determination not to miss the Middle East trip that gave me the energy to make my way to Heathrow.
As I set off, I carried with me the echoes of my father’s emotional ties with Israel. Even the most unobservant or deracinated British Jew felt a bond with the Jewish state. Especially having lived through the period of the Holocaust and Israel’s post-war creation, my father was no exception. The only time during my childhood when I can recall him being explicitly, overtly Jewish was when I was thirteen – during the pre-emptive Six-Day War that Israel launched against Egypt, Jordan and Syria after Nasser’s forces had begun massing on the Sinai border. In October 1973, just as I was starting at Oxford, Syria and Egypt joined in a surprise attack on Israel timed to coincide with the Jewish festival of Yom Kippur. Israel prevailed again, but this time it was a much more costly and close-run battle. My own views were broadly pro-Israel, but my St Catherine’s PPE friends had exposed me to the Arab side of the argument, and especially to the Palestinian cause.
My first stop was Egypt, followed by Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and finally Israel. Since the Arab League had helped set up the tour, I managed to see a range of government officials, and King Hussein of Jordan’s brother, the then Crown Prince Hassan. But the most memorable part of the trip was in Beirut, shortly before the civil war broke out between right-wing Christian militias and the pro-Palestinian Muslim left. Since their expulsion from Jordan after the 1970 civil war there, the political seat of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah and the other Palestinian military groups had been in Lebanon. I had a fascinating lunch with the Guardian’s Beirut correspondent, the quietly spoken yet passionately pro-Palestinian David Hirst. I also visited one of the Palestinian refugee camps along the road to Beirut airport, just inland from the Mediterranean.
That evening I wrote home: ‘The conditions are as gruesome as reported. Thousands of people living in unbearably cramped conditions … Of course, they will not leave the camps until they are given the opportunity to return to Palestine. It is the middle-aged and younger ones who seem most committed to return to Palestine. They are good-humoured, patient and with a will of steel. It is a desperate situation.’ I recognised that Israel’s situation was not easy either. I certainly did not take a ‘return to Palestine’ to mean the end of Israel, any more than my father did. But that the Palestinians had a national identity, and national cause, of their own seemed to me unarguable. When I returned to England I wrote an article for the Jewish Chronicle. Its message seems pretty unexceptional now, but it was less so then, especially for an Anglo-Jewish community audience. It was that until there were two states, one Israeli and the other Palestinian, there would never be peace for either people.
Back at Oxford, I again found myself practising politics as much as studying it. Labour had returned to power, as a minority government, the previous year, and although I was not yet sure exactly what I would do after university, I knew I wanted a future that involved working with Labour – or ideally in Labour – and shaping its policy. Having become more deeply involved in the British Youth Council, I became its vice-chairman in early 1976, and national chair two years later. Beyond the invigorating policy work we did, the BYC brought me into contact with a number of people who would influence me in one way or another throughout my political life. None was more dazzling to me at the time than Shirley Williams, Education Secretary in Jim Callaghan’s government, who had been a political protégée of my grandfather and who I first met at a conference on ‘young people in post-industrial society’ at Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire. Shirley was bright, attractive, and had the extraordinary talent of both talking and listening to young would-be politicians as if they were the fully finished article. She was also a modern, outward-looking, pro-European Labour politician who knew where and how elections were won – by appealing to mainstream voters on the centre ground. When I had shied away from joining the Labour Club on arriving at Oxford, it was because of the sterile stand-off between careerists on the ‘right’ and ‘left’ of the party. Shirley was no conventional right-winger. She seemed to epitomise a liberal, thinking core in the party that recognised a need to combine our traditional values with policies that were relevant to a changing world.
As BYC head, I also met and worked with leaders of the National Union of Students. The NUS chair when I first got involved was a burly lad who had grown up down the road from me in Hampstead Garden Suburb. I had known Charles Clarke and his brothers, but not to speak to: they were Highgate School boys. The more I worked with Charles in my BYC role, the more I liked him. I worked even more closely with one of his NUS colleagues, the then-Communist and future journalist David Aaronovitch. He was engaging, funny, and obviously clever enough to accomplish anything he set his mind to. But it was Charles with whom I would interact most often and most closely in later years: first, by Neil Kinnock’s side in the 1980s, and then in government, in New Labour.
My first job after university was in a distinctly Old Labour environment. I knew that if I wanted a future in the Labour Party, the most realistic route was through the trade union movement. Without the help of Alan Bullock, I would not have got the post I did six months after leaving Oxford. At the time, he was chairing a government inquiry on industrial democracy. It is hard to say whether it was behind or ahead of its time. One of the less fruitful concessions made to the trade unions, it proposed installing union representatives on the boards of British companies. The idea never caught on. But one of the inquiry panel’s members was the head of the TUC’s economic department, David Lea, and Alan successfully put in a word for me.
Congress House in Great Russell Street was more than just a union headquarters, and the economic department was more than a policy talking-shop. Listening as my new department bosses peremptorily demanded to talk with this Labour Cabinet minister or that, or acting as designated note-taker in an endless series of bargaining meetings between trade union general secretaries and senior ministers, I had a crash course in how power was then wielded inside Labour. It left an indelible impression on me, and a lesson in how not to run the country. The process was a product of a ‘corporatist’ approach in which government, business and trade unions carved up the decision-making and attempted to run the economy – investment, prices and incomes – among themselves. It was an idea whose time had gone, if it ever arrived.
The government was struggling, not least with controlling wages and inflation. It was a battle that had already seen Denis Healey forced to go to the IMF for a bailout, and that would end two years later in the Winter of Discontent and the arrival in Downing Street of Mrs Thatcher. Congress House routinely demanded policy tradeoffs for any government move to put the economy in order. Almost invariably, it got them. The TUC–Labour Liaison Committee was effectively the executive committee of government. Great Russell Street virtually shared sovereignty with Downing Street. More often, it seemed to be calling the shots.
This might have been heady stuff had I seen my future as a trade union power-broker. But the claustrophobic life of the TUC was not for me. Although I worked hard, my heart was in my role with the BYC. I had researched and written a BYC policy report called ‘Youth Unemployment: Causes and Cures’, and was a founding member of a pressure group we helped set up called Youthaid, which was intent on getting the government to do more to help the young unemployed. We called for more intervention to ensure that school-leavers had relevant training and skills, and that the national economy prioritised securing them jobs.
The beginning of the end of my glittering career in the trade union movement came when I and two colleagues were asked by the Prime Minister’s political adviser, Tom McNally, now a Liberal Democrat peer and government member, to come to Number 10 to discuss the BYC report with Jim Callaghan. This was my first visit to the Cabinet Room since I had strayed into it during my youthful excursion to view Trooping the Colour, and the Prime Minister and the other ministers with him were polite and receptive to our proposals. It was also my first encounter with Albert Booth, then the Employment Secretary, who would later employ me as his research assistant. My invitation to Number 10 put the TUC headquarters into a major tailspin. If anyone went to talk policy in Downing Street, they made it clear, it should be the top union brass, certainly not some young scribe from the economic department. Responsibility for youth unemployment policy belonged to the TUC’s Organisation Department. Before long, it was clear that I would have to choose between my union job and youth politics.
With the approach of the World Youth and Student Festival in Cuba in the summer of 1978, I handed in my notice. The idea of lending the presence of the flower of British youth to a transparent Soviet-bloc propaganda exercise was always going to be controversial, and we debated for months whether or not to attend. In the end we decided that our independent, Western, non-Communist voice should receive a hearing, although the Conservatives on the BYC voted against. There was considerable media criticism of our plans to participate, but the Foreign Secretary, David Owen, gave us a nod of approval, and Charles Clarke, freshly graduated from the NUS, took up residence in Havana as a member of the preparatory committee. I headed the national delegation with an NUS leader who soon became a friend, Trevor Phillips.
We went. We saw. We did not exactly conquer. Yet Trevor and I did manage to cajole, convince, outmanoeuvre or outvote a sizeable pro-Soviet – in some cases, pro-Stalinist – core in the British delegation, whose fervour was being whipped up by a slightly older ‘visitor’ to the festival, the Yorkshire miners’ union leader Arthur Scargill. Cuba was also my first experience of dealing with the press. The term ‘spin doctor’ did not exist then, and even if it had, I could hardly have imagined that one day I would come to embody it. Yet each day I would go to the Havana Libre hotel to brief British journalists on our pro-freedom, pro-human-rights agenda. It was there that I learned three basic rules of spin-doctoring that remained with me. Don’t overclaim. Be factual. And never arrive at a briefing without a story.
Most of the critics back home ended up being supportive, and not a little surprised by how well the British delegation had acquitted itself. The Foreign Office, too. Our trip had begun with a huge opening ceremony at Havana’s main stadium. As we entered I was asked to hold our large Union Jack banner while its bearer blew his nose. At that very moment an official appeared and led me away to a designated area where I was obliged to hold it aloft for an agonising three and a half hours while Fidel Castro delivered one of his shorter addresses. The visit ended with a reception at the British Embassy in Havana.
When I got back home, I was jobless. But not idle. Not only was I still national chair of the BYC, but once again Alan Bullock came to my rescue, fixing me up with a research project at the Aspen Institute in Berlin, on youth unemployment across Europe. I also moved house, swapping the lodger’s room I had taken in Hackney after university for a tiny flat in Kennington, in south London, from where I watched the unhappy unravelling of the Callaghan government as the May 1979 general election approached.
I loved my little studio apartment. It also turned out to be life-changing politically. Occupying a much larger flat in the same block was Roger Liddle, whom I met through the local Labour Party branch. We not only struck up an instant rapport – his knowledge of, and commitment to, Labour equalled my own – but began a lifelong collaboration in politics. Roger held out the added fascination of being a political adviser to a real-life cabinet member, the Transport Secretary William Rodgers. As the election drew nearer, the question was how long Roger, or his boss, or any Labour minister, would still have a job. The omens were dire. The IMF bailout, and then the union chaos that I had watched at first-hand in the run-up to the crippling strikes of the Winter of Discontent, had left Labour stumbling towards the finishing line.
I was at the Aspen Institute in the week of the election, and arrived back at Heathrow on the morning after. Labour’s defeat, however unsurprising, was depressing enough for me on its own. But on the tube from the airport I saw a story in the Stop Press of the late edition of the Evening Standard that hit me even harder. Shirley Williams, a kind of political pin-up in my eyes since I had first met her, had lost her seat. For me, Shirley represented everything in the Labour Party that I admired, and wanted to follow. I was so shocked by her defeat that I dropped my duty-free bag, and the bottle of wine inside it shattered on the carriage floor.
After the defeat, Roger and I commiserated with each other about the advent of a right-wing Tory government under Margaret Thatcher. We also talked, often long into the night, about the prospect of Labour finding a way back to national power. In Lambeth, where we lived, Labour appeared headed in the opposite direction. ‘Red’ Ted Knight had become council leader the year before. He was very much part of the hard-left vanguard about which Hans Janitschek had warned, and Harold Wilson had dithered, in the early 1970s. Ted favoured ever-higher council rates for an ever-growing series of spending commitments, as the Tory government steadily drained resources from local services.
The council ward where Roger and I lived, Princes, was dominated by Trotskyites. If Lambeth was to become a model for the future of the Labour Party, we would surely be settling in for a long, perhaps permanent, spell out of power. I remember being warned by a local Labour activist as we canvassed in a local estate one Sunday morning that the party must at all costs avoid ‘compromising with the electorate’. My local comrades had absolutely clear views. Criminals were victims of the capitalist system. The police were agents of repression. Riots were popular uprisings against capitalist injustice.
Often Roger and I would go out to the local pub with members of the beleaguered Labour mainstream to lick our political wounds. When a council seat suddenly became vacant at the end of 1979 in Stockwell, one of the few wards where moderates still had a wafer-thin majority, I was narrowly selected to stand for Labour. For the next two and a half years, along with my fellow Stockwell moderate Paul Ormerod, I was part of Ted Knight’s increasingly Soviet-style Labour group on the council. I suppose on some level I saw this as a first, small step towards a more grown-up role in Labour. My grandfather had been born in Lambeth, and began his political life as a councillor. There was still a Herbert Morrison primary school in Stockwell, and the rather down-at-heel Lord Morrison of Lambeth pub. However complex my views about my grandfather as a person, given the effects of his political life on my mother, I had grown up aware of his opinions and achievements, and admiring them. The defining battle in the Labour Party during the late 1920s and 1930s had pitted him against Ernest Bevin. While Bevin was a down-the-middle trade union man, my grandfather argued robustly – too robustly for Bevin – that to become a party of government, Labour had to represent more than just the unions, more indeed than just the working class. It had to be national, not sectional, and appeal to the growing middle class.
That fight was clearly still not won, certainly not in Lambeth. Mostly, my time as a councillor was an education. I was not a terribly effective brake on the Labour group’s march to the drumbeat of revolution, although I did rise briefly to the dizzying office of chairman of the Town Planning Applications Subcommittee. That was only for a year, and only because one of Ted’s lieutenants was in the lavatory as the Labour group was balloting on that minor post.
I rarely broke ranks on council votes, if only because I recognised that our divisions would be the Tories’ gain. In our internal caucuses, however, I was much more forthright. I argued that our far-left rhetorical indulgence would do little to improve the lot of the residents who had voted for us, but would slowly, surely convince most of them that we didn’t care about, or understand, their lives. Ted would almost invariably open the next meeting by glaring in turn at me and the other recalcitrants, and saying: ‘Certain comrades are misperceiving the situation …’ The atmosphere was very intimidating. The hard left was not only hard in its politics, it was even harder on those who didn’t toe the line.
After the 1981 Brixton riots, I could hold my tongue no longer. Ted called for the police to withdraw from the streets, accusing them of ‘concentration camp’ tactics of surveillance. Asked for a comment by a local reporter, I replied: ‘Given the choice between having the Labour Party and Ted Knight in the borough, or the police, 99 per cent of the population would vote for the police.’ I joined my two fellow Stockwell Labour councillors in a broader attack a few months later. ‘The Labour group has conspicuously failed to convince its electorate that maintaining its high level of expenditure is desirable or practical,’ we said. ‘The publicity-seeking statements of the council’s leader have come to symbolise the waywardness and irrelevance of the Labour Party for working-class people.’
Part of the reason for my more open frustration over the excesses of the far left was that, for the first time, I had become involved in national Labour politics. In the autumn of 1980 I was hired as a researcher by the Shadow Transport Secretary Albert Booth. I was followed into the opposition offices only weeks later by Charles Clarke, who went to work for Neil Kinnock, then Shadow Education Secretary. The idea of working at this level of Labour politics, even as a lowly researcher, was exciting in itself. But before I took up my role, a generous gift from Roger elevated it to an entirely different level. When the Tories won the election, he had taken with him several boxloads of the policy papers he had accumulated at the Department of Transport. This wasn’t strictly legal, and I only hope the statute of limitations on whatever crime he committed has long since lapsed. The effect on me, as I read folder after folder, was electrifying. I still remember the thrill I felt at being able to see how policy was made, the way in which different options were evaluated, advanced or abandoned. It was the first time I had seen the raw material of government. It not only fascinated me, it made me want to be a part of it, and all the more upset at those in the party who were making the likelihood of a future Labour administration ever more remote.
I enjoyed my eighteen months in the shadow cabinet corridor at the Commons. Albert Booth was an engineering draughtsman who had entered Labour politics as a Tynemouth councillor, and had become MP for Barrow-in-Furness in north-west England. He was also a favoured protégé of Michael Foot, who succeeded Jim Callaghan as Labour leader a few weeks after I started in my job. On the day of Michael’s victory, I remember Frank Dobson, later Tony Blair’s Health Secretary, standing in the doorway of the modest office Albert and I shared and punching the air with excitement. ‘Michael’s done it!’ he shouted with joy. ‘We’re on our way!’ Where to, exactly, remained to be seen.
I worked hard in my role, both for Albert and with his slightly rambunctious number two on the front bench, the Hull MP John Prescott. Albert and John, like Michael Foot, were on the moderate, Tribunite left of Labour. They were also disinclined, and by this time probably unable, to take on the rising influence of Tony Benn and the more assertive far left. At party conference just days before I began my job, Benn had brought delegates surging to their feet with his vision of what a Labour government would do, within days, once it got rid of Thatcher and the Tories: nationalise industries, pull out of Europe, abandon the nuclear deterrent and shut down the House of Lords. I wanted to get Thatcher and the Tories out no less than Tony Benn did, but I couldn’t imagine that was the way to do it.
I gravitated towards a much more experienced researcher down the hallway from our office named David Hill, and his boss, the Shadow Environment Secretary Roy Hattersley, as well as to Shadow Foreign Secretary Peter Shore and his researcher David Cowling. Together, we helped to organise the Labour Solidarity Campaign, run by the indefatigable Mary Goudie, which was intended as a counterweight to the Bennites, to give heart to the moderates and keep them in the party. With David Cowling and an intelligent, iconoclastic and occasionally irritatingly self-possessed Labour MP named Frank Field, I also joined efforts to press for a change in the Labour rulebook. Well before it became a cause célèbre for New Labour modernisers, we pressed for the introduction of one-member-one-vote democracy in the party.
There was also a familiar re-education in the power of the unions. Albert’s portfolio meant dealing with endless disputes involving the railway workers, and I vividly recall a slightly surreal morning when Albert and I were called in to see Michael Foot. He suggested we all go off to Rail House in Euston and try to get the chairman of British Rail, Peter Parker, to compromise with the rail drivers’ union in their dispute over ‘flexible rostering’, a fancy term for more time off for the same pay. The three of us piled into a taxi at the Commons with Michael’s dog, for some reason, yapping at his ankles. We drew up at Rail House to the surprise and bemusement of all, went in to see Peter Parker, and spectacularly failed to get him to agree to the train drivers’ demands.
By this time, some at the top of the party had had enough of Labour’s drift into the vote-losing wilderness, and were especially alarmed at the growing prospect of the Bennites driving Labour ever further out of the mainstream. Six months after I started working for Albert, four leading Labour lights broke away to form the new Social Democratic Party. Former Foreign Secretary David Owen was one of the ‘Gang of Four’, as were Roy Jenkins, the former Home Secretary who had just completed his term as President of the European Commission, and Roger Liddle’s former boss, Bill Rodgers. The cabinet minister whom I had most admired, Shirley Williams, was the fourth.
Years later, when I was fighting my campaign for selection as a Labour parliamentary candidate, supporters of my main rival would spread the rumour that I too had come close to joining the SDP. That was not quite true, but I did share much of their vision of what a modern left-of-centre party should be, that it should fight for fairness and opportunity, appeal to the centre ground and stand up for national rather than sectional interests. These would become New Labour principles, too. I fully understood the reasons Roger joined Bill Rodgers in the SDP, not just because of their personal friendship, but because both were acting from the values that had brought them into a different Labour Party in the first place. But the ‘religion’ of Labour had come to me too early in life, and was too much a part of me, for me to go with him. The SDP breakaway did have a major impact on me. The decision I faced, however, was not whether to abandon Labour, but how best to continue fighting for a modern, moderate Labour Party against the challenge of the infantile but hard-nosed left.
In fact, there was one point at which I did feel very close to having to leave Labour. It came six months after the SDP had formed, when Tony Benn contested the deputy leadership against Denis Healey, the former Chancellor who was carrying the hopes of the moderates. I still remember arriving in Brighton for the party conference on a Sunday evening at the end of September, when the result would be announced. Many of my Labour friends, and many Labour MPs, were collectively holding their breath. I got the sense that they had not unpacked their bags, and that if Benn won they would simply leave for London, and very probably leave the party as well. I believe that a Benn victory would have led to a kind of tectonic political shift. The moderate, sensible centre of Labour, including many trade unionists, who like my grandfather saw us as a party of government, could very well have left en masse for the Social Democrats, and reformed the Labour Party in that shell. Frankly, I suspect that I would have joined them. A Benn victory would have sealed the ascendancy of the left, and set us on a path towards extremism, unelectability and irrelevance. Denis Healey won, but by less than 1 per cent of the vote. That meant the Labour Party I loved was not dead. But it was still on life support.
The immediate political decision I had to take was really no decision at all. An election for my Lambeth council seat was approaching, but I no longer had the stomach for my role as designated class enemy in Ted Knight’s political fiefdom. Both of my parents had taken pride in my first step on the political ladder, my father in particular, although he was maddeningly prone to telling me I was being too hard on ‘Red’ Ted when I brought back stories of the latest council excesses. They had also taken pride in my work with Albert Booth, but even my father recognised that Labour, in its current state, did not offer much cause for optimism. My mother, in her common-sensical way, pointed out that the party probably wouldn’t be able to offer her son a stable source of income in the foreseeable future. Perhaps, she suggested gently, it might be time for me to find a ‘real’ job.
I did. I finally left my job with Albert Booth in early 1982 – not for another party, but for what Charles Clarke described, rather disparagingly, as the ‘media route’. The most serious current affairs department in British commercial TV, at London Weekend Television, was advertising for additional staff. Trevor Phillips was already working there, and my other old BYC friend David Aaronovitch and I both applied. David got the plum job, at Brian Walden’s flagship Weekend World. One need only look at David’s later career as a political writer on national newspapers to see that it was the right call. I was hired too, beginning as a researcher on The London Programme, but following David some months later into Weekend World.
In between, I was assigned to the team covering the London battlegrounds in the 1983 general election. Much as I wanted to see Labour back in Downing Street, it was obvious that we were going to lose. The country was finally coming out of a brutal recession, and Mrs Thatcher was riding on the crest of victory in the Falklands War. Our manifesto was essentially an expanded version of Tony Benn’s battle cry to the 1980 party conference, with the additional promise of sky-high taxes for good measure. ‘The longest suicide note in history,’ it was called by Gerald Kaufman, the witty, waspish and wise Manchester MP who would become an ally in efforts to move Labour back towards the mainstream. In fact, the manifesto wasn’t all that long. But it was suicidal. We were not merely defeated, we were routed. In Labour’s worst result since the First World War, we haemorrhaged three million votes, and gifted the Tories a Commons majority of 144 seats.
Working for television turned out to be a – arguably the – major turning point in my political career. The knowledge I picked up of politics from the other side of the camera demystified the whole process for me. In covering the election, I got a close-up look at the Labour campaign machine, if you could call it that. It was fascinating, if hugely disheartening, and would soon prove indispensable in framing my own efforts to head off a similar débâcle for Labour next time round. I also made good and lasting friends, including John Birt, then LWT’s Director of Programmes, and Robin Paxton, a senior Weekend World editor who would play a critical role when I went to work for Labour again.
Two of the final programmes I produced drew me steadily in that direction. The first came in the wake of the 1983 election collapse. It was about Neil Kinnock, the Welsh MP I had got to know when I was working for Albert, and Neil was Shadow Education Secretary. After the election he had replaced Michael Foot as Labour leader, and he had begun the work of trying to rescue and rebuild the defeated and dejected party. The second was more broadly about the changing political landscape, exploring signs of disillusionment with Mrs Thatcher, the emergence of the SDP, and the prospects for a Labour revival. Watching tapes of these programmes now, I am struck by my underlying optimism. Naïvety, perhaps, would be a better word. I truly believed that Neil’s leadership could mark at least the start of Labour’s comeback. I felt a growing desire to come back myself as well.
My return began in a restaurant in Pimlico, shortly after Weekend World went off the air for its summer break. During my three years at LWT, I had remained in touch with Charles Clarke, and every six months or so we had lunch together. He was still with Neil. When we met in the summer of 1985, I told him how much I missed fulltime politics. He suggested I help out in a forthcoming parliamentary by-election in the Welsh constituency of Brecon and Radnor. ‘It’s in the neighbourhood,’ he added, referring to a little two-up, two-down cottage I had purchased the year before near the Welsh border. If nothing else, television paid better than politics. My salary had risen to the princely sum of £31,000, and a return to Labour, no matter what role I played, would pay nothing like that amount. That I never gave this much thought was a measure of the eagerness I felt to be part of the party’s recovery and reconstruction.
I had already planned to be at the cottage for the summer, and I leapt at the opportunity to help out in the campaign. When I arrived, however, it was not really a campaign. There were lots of people at the local HQ, but no single person in charge, no strategy, no plan of action. I was deputised to accompany our candidate, Richard Willey. A writer and educationist, he was the son of the long-serving Sunderland MP and future Labour chairman Fred Willey – also a distinguished resident of Hampstead Garden Suburb. Richard and I immediately took to each other. I helped plan his appearances and speeches, advised him on how to handle himself with the local press, and kept his spirits up as we travelled around the large constituency. All of this was good experience that would come in handy in my later political life.
It was a solid, professional campaign, eventually. It also ended in defeat. The Tories lost the seat, but by a narrow margin we were outpolled by the Liberal candidate. The turning point came a few days before the election, and probably should have served as a warning as I embarked on my return to active Labour politics. With the miners’ strike only recently over, Arthur Scargill publicly demanded that a future Labour government release all those who had been detained during the strike, and reimburse the union for all the money it had cost.
I was not to be deterred, however. Charles told me during a campaign visit that the Publicity Director at national party headquarters had left, and was to be replaced by an overall Director of Campaigns and Communications. It seemed like the perfect job for me. When I told him I wanted to go for it, Charles said that by all means I should do so. He added, however, that there would be other strong candidates. I later discovered that despite this note of caution, Charles argued my case strongly with Neil. The evening before the selection meeting in front of Labour’s full thirty-member National Executive Committee, Neil made it clear to colleagues that I was his preferred choice.
Roy Hattersley, now his deputy and Shadow Chancellor, also backed me to the hilt. I had remained in touch with Roy during my time at LWT. After the 1983 election I had spent most of my free hours helping David Hill organise and support Roy’s campaign for the leadership. I saw him as a more experienced and more rounded figure than Neil, and a better bulwark against the Bennites. I had a further referee in John Prescott, who provided a supportive reference, although with a cryptic handwritten postscript: ‘Peter will do the job fine, as long as he keeps his nose out of the politics.’
I got the job, but only just. A mere handful of votes decided it. Two NEC members in particular would go on to help not just me but the broader push for change in Labour: the Crewe MP Gwyneth Dunwoody, who was in charge of the publicity subcommittee, and a forward-looking trade union leader named Tom Sawyer, General Secretary of Labour by the time of the 1997 election.
In my presentation to the NEC, I had echoed the optimism I felt in my final months at LWT. I argued that in the two years since our general election drubbing, the popular mood had begun to change. There was a new scepticism about the Tory government. If Labour could project a more popular, relevant, united message – and modernise its communications ideas and strategies – we would have an opportunity to recover momentum, and power. I genuinely believed this. Yet nothing in my apprenticeship since leaving Oxford – my experience of the TUC, ‘Red’ Ted and Lambeth, my work with Albert Booth or Weekend World – had prepared me for how difficult it would prove, or how long it would take.
3 (#ulink_901883b3-98a3-55ba-aa02-16bc34480b02)
A Brilliant Defeat
From the outside, 150 Walworth Road, near the Elephant and Castle in south London, was a handsome, red-brick battleship of a building. On the inside, it perfectly mirrored the party for which it was the national headquarters. The cramped offices, smoky hallways and paper-strewn conference rooms were disjointed and dishevelled. So was the machinery through which Labour made and presented what passed for policy. My cubbyhole consisted of a wobbly chair, a dodgy-looking three-legged table wedged up against the filing cabinet to balance it, a World War II-vintage intercom, and a dying spider plant on the windowsill behind me.
Barely two years had passed since our collapse at the polls. Michael Foot had retreated to the backbenches. He took the blame for the rout, but it more properly belonged to the party’s real masters: the Trotskyite entryists organised in Militant, and the ‘softer’, or at least subtler, leftists whom Tony Benn had been rallying ever since we lost power in 1979 – in fact, ever since we had lost power under Harold Wilson in 1970. The idea of Labour as a party of government, with any regard for what voters might actually feel, had been abandoned. Neil Kinnock, however, was now leader, and it was clear he saw the need for change.
A few days before I started work in October 1985, Neil had shown the flair, and the guts, that this was surely going to require. At the party conference in Bournemouth he had thundered against the hard-left Labour council in Liverpool, the epitome of how out of touch we had become. As I heard him speak, I couldn’t help but think back to Ted Knight and the Socialist Republic of Lambeth. ‘I’ll tell you what happens with impossible promises,’ Neil had said. ‘You start with farfetched resolutions. They are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and you go through the years sticking to that – outdated, misplaced, irrelevant to real needs. You end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council – a Labour council – hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers. I’m telling you – and you’ll listen – you can’t play politics with people’s jobs, and with people’s services!’ How long had I waited for a Labour leader to say that? The fight was on for a Labour Party that again served, and connected with, the interests of the people of Britain. A few weeks short of my thirty-second birthday, I was excited to become a part of it.
I arrived at Walworth Road with two all-consuming aims. The first was to do well at my new job. Despite my brave, and evidently successful, effort to sound supremely self-confident before the interview panel, I feared that I was supremely unqualified. Three years’ experience producing cerebral political television would not necessarily equip me to manage all of Labour’s day-to-day communications with an almost universally hostile press. It certainly hadn’t given me the skills or the experience to handle the other half of my brief: every aspect of the party’s campaigning, from pamphlets, posters and policy launches to preparations for a general election that was probably less than two years away. My other goal was to play my part in ensuring that Neil Kinnock’s vision of Labour, not Tony Benn’s or Ted Knight’s, won out. That would turn out to be harder still.
Tony Benn’s Bristol South-East constituency had been abolished by boundary changes before the 1983 election, and he had failed to be selected for the replacement seat, so it had been left to Party Chairman Eric Heffer to carry the Bennite banner in the contest for leader. With Labour still in collective shock from the scale of our defeat, Neil trounced Heffer. His only serious challenger, Roy Hattersley, was from the right of the party. But Benn was back now, having been returned to the Commons in a by-election at Chesterfield in March 1984, and was de facto leader of a vocal leftist core on the NEC. The traumatic year-long miners’ strike had also hurt Labour, and Neil. The party was again associated in the public mind with the vote-killers of 1983: ideological infighting, rhetorical excesses and trade union militancy. Neil would later say he wished he had got on top of the issue at the start, by denouncing the NUM for having failed to hold a proper national ballot. Instead, he was left twisting in the wind, feeling he couldn’t support the strike, and couldn’t disavow it either. The only benefit from his months of agony was that he and those around him had used the period to plan for a fightback against the far left, and a determined effort to reposition the party. Neil’s assault on Militant at the party conference had been the first step.
It is difficult to convey, twenty-five years on, how enormous the obstacles were. The Bennites and their fellow travellers were not the only barrier to the huge repair job we faced. Their Old Socialist certitudes had a resonance that went beyond their core supporters. Even many who understood that a state-run economy, unquestioned support for the unions or unilateral nuclear disarmament were impractical in late-twentieth-century Britain – and that they were certainly a guarantee that we would not get back into government – felt them to be somehow authentically Labour. With the radical conservatism of Mrs Thatcher taking hold in Downing Street, and Ronald Reagan’s in the White House, they felt almost automatically that we should be on the other side of the argument.
And it was an argument. Since September 1981 a group of passionately anti-nuclear women had planted themselves in a ‘peace camp’ at the RAF base at Greenham Common in Berkshire, in protest against the US Cruise missiles that were stationed there. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was enjoying a new lease of life. Mrs Thatcher was not only standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Reagan in agreeing to base US nuclear missiles in Britain. As she embarked on large-scale privatisation of the core of the old state economy, and curbed trade union strike powers, the default position for many in Labour was that whatever the Tories were for, we must be against. I understood this impulse. From my own Labour background, I knew it was part of the glue that held the whole party together. I recalled my own childhood experience of the annual disarmament marches from the nuclear research base at Aldermaston to Trafalgar Square. My family never marched, but in our own Labour Suburb way, we would pack my father’s Sunbeam with a roast-chicken picnic, drive to the outer reaches of the capital and watch as the throng made its way towards its final rallying point.
The problem was that a modern, relevant Labour Party could not operate on atavistic instinct. We could not make policy on the simple basis that everything that the Tory government – a comfortably re-elected Tory government – did was wrong. That risked not just failing to take on board policies that might be right, but could leave us opposing policies of far greater benefit to our own voters than anything we were offering. That was clearly the case with Mrs Thatcher’s programme to allow millions of council tenants to buy their own homes.
The structure of the party, too, was unrecognisably different then. As leader, Neil was in charge. Up to a point. The National Executive Committee, and indeed party conference, nowadays hold only nominal sway over policy. The trade unions wield nothing like the block-vote power they did then. But when I moved into my tiny third-floor office at Labour HQ, their influence was very real. The NEC, in particular, was the final voice on everything from paperclips to policy on nuclear weapons.
My immediate boss was the party’s new General Secretary, Larry Whitty. Over time, Larry and I would develop a good working relationship, but at the beginning we were on different wavelengths. A lifelong trade union man, he had a sentimental attachment to many of the policies and practices of Labour as it then was, and felt a kind of deference towards Tony Benn. I had been, at best, his second choice for the job. He had hoped for Nita Clarke, Ken Livingstone’s press chief at the Greater London Council, and would almost surely also have preferred David Gow, the Scotsman’s labour correspondent. At least Larry did not share the hostility of many others in Labour to modern communications techniques, which were seen as somehow Tory, and unclean. But he did worry that the changes I might bring about in Labour’s policy presentation would impact on the policies themselves, and that I would tread on the toes of those formally in charge of making them in the NEC. He was nervous that, as John Prescott had warned, I would ‘put my nose in the politics’. In this, Larry got me absolutely right.
Despite my private doubts, from the moment I arrived at Walworth Road I projected a sense of confidence. Partly, this was bravado. Partly, it was because I knew that any chance of my succeeding depended on it. But in one crucial sense I was confident. I was absolutely secure in my conviction that as long as we were saddled with the policies, the mindset and the public image that had led to our débâcle in 1983, Labour would never again be a party of government. And I was absolutely determined to help pull us back from oblivion. I may have lacked experience, even skills, at the start. But I did know what was wrong. Most of Britain’s voters, and almost all of the media, disliked us. Worse, they had simply stopped listening to what we said, or at least taking it seriously. My work in television had given me insight into and experience of modern communications. My job, which I set out to accomplish with a drive that sometimes bordered on obsession, was to make everything about Labour look and sound modern too.
I began, as I did whenever I embarked on a new job throughout my political life, by learning what I didn’t know, focusing on the most pressing problems, and taking early steps to fix them. I was very fortunate to know – or at least to have met – someone who I hoped could help me with all of this. I was first brought together with Philip Gould by Robin Paxton when I was at Weekend World. Philip was ‘in advertising’, Robin told me. He was clever, and a passionate Labour supporter. We met briefly before I left LWT, at a dinner hosted by Philip’s then girlfriend, an up-and-coming publisher named Gail Rebuck. In the intervening year, life had changed for all of us. The small firm Gail had co-founded, Century Press, had done so well that it took over the larger, better-known Hutchinson. She and Philip had married. Philip had set up his own communications consultancy. And I was at Walworth Road. Now, we arranged to talk again, over dinner at Robin’s home in Islington.
With his mop of long hair and oversized glasses, Philip made an extraordinary impression. I don’t know whether it was shyness or single-mindedness, but he barely made eye contact as he expounded for well over an hour on what was wrong with Labour’s image, presentation and political strategy, and how to begin fixing them. I had no way of knowing at that point where Philip might fit into that process, but in advance of our meeting he had sent me an eleven-page letter about how he might help me overhaul Labour’s presentational machinery. We discussed it at Robin’s dinner, and in much greater detail in the days that followed. A few weeks later, I took my first big decision. With a cheque for £600, a sizeable chunk of my budget, I commissioned Philip to conduct a stock-take of Labour’s communications and campaigning. Larry, to my relief, signed off on the idea. It would prove to be the best investment I ever made.
The party already had a contract with a public opinion agency, MORI. Our pollster-in-chief was its American-born chairman, Bob Worcester. His role was essentially to poll, crunch the numbers, deliver and explain the results. Philip was different. He reached beyond traditional opinion polls, assembling ‘focus groups’ to explain why people felt as they did about a policy issue or a political party, how this fitted into what they valued or wanted in their lives, and what it might take to change their minds. He gave Labour, and British politics, its first taste of rigorous, American-style political consultancy. By the time he delivered his sixty-four-page report in December, I knew what its main thrust would be, as I had been among the three dozen people – including Larry and senior colleagues at Walworth Road, and other figures in politics, the media and marketing – to whom he spoke in preparing it. He and I were meeting regularly. The core challenge was obvious to both of us. Labour had to stop seeing communications as something we did with, or to, ourselves. We could no longer, as my canvassing colleague in that council estate in Lambeth had put it, ‘refuse to compromise with the electorate’.
Looking back on the notes of my early conversations with Philip, I am struck not only by my concern about the obvious policy vulnerabilities that had hurt us in 1983. I felt there was a deeper problem: our inability to meet people’s concerns on basic issues affecting their daily lives: health, social services, housing benefits, the economy – and crime, or as I put it to Philip, ‘making people secure in their homes and on the streets’. We could produce policy reports, or catchy ideological prescriptions, but even our traditional supporters were no longer listening. Significant numbers of the ‘working class’ had turned away from Labour and backed the SDP in 1983. Many more had supported Mrs Thatcher. Faced with a choice between a dogmatic, ideologically pure socialism or a Prime Minister, even a Tory Prime Minister, who had allowed them to buy their council houses, it was no choice at all. ‘It’s not just a question of having a neat little formulation extracted from some document placed before the Home Policy Committee of the NEC, or some neat way of saying “You’re number one with Labour”,’ I wrote to Philip. ‘We can’t just get an NHS ambulance with a sticker saying “I Love the Welfare State” and launch a charter. People are not idiots.’
The stock-take report was blunt in its diagnosis and unflinching in its prescription. Knowing I would have to get it through the NEC, I made the language a bit more diplomatic in parts. But I left the core message unaltered. We were so bad at communicating with voters, so seemingly uncaring about what they thought or wanted, that we had become unelectable. No longer could the NEC, the leader’s office and the shadow cabinet haphazardly combine to produce press releases and policy documents, schedule press conferences and public meetings, and await Bob Worcester’s monthly reports in the preposterous expectation that we were on our way back. My office would become the central focus for all party communications. I would be supported by a new organisation we called the Shadow Communications Agency. Run by Philip and me, it would draw on the expertise of outside advertising and marketing professionals who volunteered their services. Also involved would be Labour’s advertising partner, the BMP agency of Chris Powell, older brother of Tony Blair’s future chief of staff, Jonathan. The SCA’s first task would be another stock-take, this time examining ‘every aspect of Labour’s corporate appearance’. Instead of relying on grassroots leaflet and sticker campaigns to get our message across, everything we said from now on would be decided and measured against one, revolutionary, objective: to win votes.
By the time I started at Walworth Road, Labour had ceded this kind of political marketing to the Tories. Larry’s predecessor as General Secretary, Jim Mortimer, had been scathing about the Conservatives’ 1983 campaign, vowing that we would never prostitute ourselves to the idea of presenting politicians and policies ‘as if they were breakfast food or baked beans’. It was a view that resonated with most of the party when I arrived. Not only was it naïve about modern politics, it was wrong about what motivated me. I did believe that there were parallels between political parties and the business and consumer world. Both had ‘products’: in our case, they were called policies, rooted in values. Both competed in the marketplace: in our case, the ultimate test of consumer judgement was a general election. For political parties as much as businesses, if you forgot your customers, if you were unaware of how they were changing and failed to communicate with them properly, they would soon forget you.
Still, our ‘product’ was different, and the difference mattered. I was driven by the conviction that a more modern, in-touch Labour Party would not just be more likely to win an election, but would lead to a fairer, more broadly based, more socially engaged and economically successful government than the Tories. It would be better for Britain. I have no doubt that I would have been good at marketing breakfast food or baked beans – or even the Tories – but I could never have contemplated doing so. The tools of communication might be the same; the aim, the ‘product’, and the driving political purpose were wholly different.
Making a start on getting Labour’s message heard, and making it worth hearing, was exhilarating. But the early months were sometimes brutally difficult. Politically, my position was delicate, to say the least. Neil and Roy had backed me for the job of Director of Campaigns and Communications, but I had been parachuted in, at what must have seemed an obscenely young age, to head one of the three key departments, and I felt that the veteran party operators heading the other two – Geoff Bish for policy, and Joyce Gould for organisation – although outwardly welcoming, viewed me with a mixture of suspicion and envy.
I did have some allies. Before I’d been hired, Neil had installed Robin Cook, the young Scottish MP who had run his leadership campaign, in the new post of ‘Campaign Coordinator’, reporting to the shadow cabinet. Robin had set up something called the Breakfast Group, which brought together pro-Labour figures from the advertising and marketing world to advise on modernising our approach. I saw the party’s situation as even more dire than Robin did, and with Philip and the SCA, I wanted to go further and faster. That produced tension, at least on Robin’s side. I vividly recall an early weekend brainstorming session. Robin was there, countryside-dapper in a silk waistcoat, florid shirt and corduroy trousers. He was not hostile to what I was proposing, but there was an unmistakable frisson in his comments. A sense of ‘Who’s in charge here? I’m the elected politician. I’m the shadow cabinet’s Campaign Coordinator. I’m Neil’s mate. Here’s this ex-television kid, who has come in and started auditing, stock-taking, questioning things, challenging them.’ It was understandable. Robin had put the foundation stones in place. Now, I seemed to be taking over the construction.
There was tension of a different sort with the other key member of Neil’s team who was already involved in remaking Labour’s communications and image. Patricia Hewitt, who had narrowly failed to be elected as an MP, was Neil’s press secretary. She was only five years older than me, but she had been involved in campaign work since her early twenties, having begun as press officer for Age Concern before moving on to head the National Council for Civil Liberties. I was a bit in awe of her. She had had two years of battlefield experience in trying to get the media to take a kinder, or at least less unkind, view of Neil and of Labour, and had drawn up a range of campaigning plans, including a project to target key seats at the next election. If I wanted to go further and faster than Robin, Patricia seemed to want to go further and faster yet. With the best of intentions, she not only encouraged me but actively drove me on.
By early 1986 I was working flat out. There were two parts to my job, and two parts to my day. I would spend the mornings at Walworth Road, and was always at my precariously balanced desk by 7.30. There, my focus was campaigning, specifically a major social policy launch that had been agreed – but not planned out, designed or organised – before I arrived. Neil had set the tone. Rather than settle for the familiar NEC emphasis on ‘fairness’, he had insisted that it bring in the theme of ‘freedom’ as well. He recognised that Mrs Thatcher had succeeded in making freedom, a classic liberal value, an asset for the Conservatives. We had to start reclaiming it. But what policies would we actually be promoting? How would we present them? What would the posters and the pamphlets look like? How, and where, would we organise the launch event?
I had been at my job long enough to know what the NEC would expect. We would invite the media to one of our down-at-heel conference rooms in Walworth Road, hand out a dense tome on Labour’s policies, display the leaflets and stickers we were distributing to party cadres around the country – and assail the heartless Tories. The assumption, or the hope, would be that if only we could drive home the fact that we cared more than the Conservatives, the voters would care more about us.
I was absolutely determined that the campaign, the first test of the new approach and new structure I was trying to put in place, would be unrecognisably different. The problem was that I had done nothing remotely similar before. I did not fear that I’d end up with something worse than our normal fare. Leafing through sheafs of our recent policy material, with its tired and predictable slogans and uninspiring artwork, I did not believe that was possible. I did fear that whatever I attempted might be neutered by the NEC. Or that it might disappoint Neil, and even more so, Patricia. Working at an increasingly fevered pace with Philip, the SCA, the designers and printers, I sometimes felt overwhelmed by the need to get every one of hundreds of details right, and by anxiety over how much could go wrong.
The second part of my day was spent on the other side of the Thames. After a late, quick lunch, often at a very lively but now defunct pizzeria in the Elephant and Castle called the Castello, I would drive to the House of Commons and base myself in Neil’s office. My job there was to patrol the top-floor offices of the parliamentary press gallery. It seems amazing to me now, but along with Patricia I was wholly responsible for making Labour’s case to the media, and through them to the country. It was the start of my career as a spin doctor. Yet ‘spinning’ does not begin to capture the difficulty, bordering on impossibility, I found in securing anything more than the most occasional word of praise for Labour. Virtually all the newspapers looked upon 1980s Labour as hopelessly extreme in its policies, out of touch with the country, and hobbled by internal bickering. Since that was largely true, there were limits to what I could do to convince the reporters otherwise. I tried, but mostly my job was damage control. It was frustrating, and it was exhausting.
My refuge was the cottage in Foy on the River Wye in Herefordshire that I had bought while I was at LWT. Set in a lovely, secluded spot on a horseshoe-shaped bend in the river, it was what you might call ‘compact’. There was a small sitting room and an even smaller dining room on the ground floor, and three tiny bedrooms upstairs. A bathroom had been built off the back. It was also the most wonderful home I have ever owned. I bought a slightly battered, blue-velvet suite of furniture for downstairs, and within a couple of months I had the wall between the two downstairs rooms knocked through to make a living-and-dining area, and installed a big brick hearth. There was an antique-looking dial phone whose cord stretched just far enough for me to sit with it on the step outside the front door. I also acquired a – barely – portable phone, one of those contraptions with a huge battery pack you had to sling over your shoulder wherever you went.
I drove up to Foy every weekend, often with friends, sometimes alone. I would read, listen to music, watch TV, cut the grass, dig the garden, build bonfires. I would also work, often trying somehow to get a positive story about Labour, or much more frequently to soften a damaging one, in the all-important Sunday papers. Every Saturday I would wake up and steel myself for the task of spending half the morning phoning round all the Sunday papers’ political journalists. Then I would go into the nearby town of Ross, where I would do a supermarket shop before taking my regular seat at a wonderful Hungarian restaurant called Meaders, for my favourite dish of layered meat and cabbage. Back at the cottage, I would try to watch whatever classic movie the BBC had on in the afternoon, then fall into a deep sleep before working in the garden or going for a walk while I prepared myself mentally for the first editions of the Sunday papers.
Usually I knew what disturbing bit of Labour news was coming, because a reporter would have phoned for a comment earlier in the day. It was often an assault on Neil’s moves to expel Militant members from the party, or an alleged split on some policy or another. Occasionally I would be asked what the party thought about the latest far-left pronouncement by Ken Livingstone, or even Ted Knight. Every week, for hours on end, I had to hose down stories or stop the forest fires spreading to other papers or broadcasters. It was relentless, lonely and dispiriting work, and almost always involved arguing hard with whoever was on the line. I constantly had to make snap judgements, in an unremittingly hostile environment.
I was on the way back from Foy in a driving rainstorm one Sunday afternoon, six weeks before our ‘Freedom and Fairness’ launch, when all the pressures of the job – working out what to do, the antagonism of the press, the sheer scale of the task of somehow making Labour credible again, the expectations of Neil and Patricia, and myself – finally came to a head. As the rain beat against the windscreen, I was alarmed to feel tears starting to roll down my cheeks. For weeks, I had been finding it hard to sleep through the night. I would get off to sleep all right, but always awoke long before dawn, feeling very anxious. Unable to get back to sleep, I would arrive very early at the office. By nine o’clock I would feel completely worn out, and my head would be aching; I seemed to live on paracetamol. I would somehow force myself through the day, trying to focus on meetings, campaign planning, dealing with the press, just to get through to the evening. I would reach home late, and go to bed feeling simultaneously washed out and tightly wound up.
I believed passionately in what I was doing in my new job, but as the weeks passed, I just could not see how I would handle all the obstacles, anticipate everything that might go wrong. I could not see light at the end of the tunnel. As I drove towards London that Sunday afternoon through heavy traffic, anticipating another week of struggle and sleeplessness, I suddenly felt unable to cope. I was just not sure I could stay the course. I was due to attend a concert that evening at the Royal Festival Hall with an old London Labour friend, Illtyd Harrington, deputy head of the GLC before he and the rest of the sane tendency were pushed out by Ken Livingstone. When I arrived, visibly stressed and out of breath, on the terrace outside the Festival Hall, Illtyd took one look at me and said, ‘Peter, what’s wrong?’ All the pent-up worries came rushing out. Illtyd told me that if I wanted to see my efforts at Walworth Road succeed, the first thing I had to do was take care of myself. He made me promise to see his doctor, Denis Cowan, the following day.
Dr Cowan was reassuring. There was nothing seriously wrong with me, he said. It was just the inevitable result of steadily building pressure, the demands of the job and the demands I was putting on myself. He prescribed three weeks of self-discipline, and sleep. I must arrive at Walworth Road no earlier than 9.30 a.m., leave at 5 p.m. sharp, take no work home with me, and be in bed by ten. He also prescribed sleeping pills for several weeks. I was very reluctant to take them. When I was growing up, medicine was rather frowned upon at Bigwood Road: getting my mother to dispense as much as an aspirin took some persuasion. But I followed Dr Cowan’s advice to the letter. Within a few weeks I dispensed with the tablets, and the crisis passed.
My recovery, and Labour’s too, really began ten days before the grand policy launch, with a campaign of another sort. It was the first by-election on my watch, in Fulham, caused by the death of the sitting Conservative MP. At least in this battle I had some handson experience, from Brecon and Radnor. But I knew it would be the first test of the kind of modern campaigning machinery I had put in place with Philip and the SCA, and that sceptics and critics on the NEC would be keenly eyeing both the campaign and the result. There seemed to be little realistic prospect that we would win. Worse, with the Tory government growing increasingly unpopular, many pundits seemed to think the likeliest winner was the SDP, whose candidate was none other than my old south London friend Roger Liddle.
I think that only a few weeks earlier I could not have faced the challenge. But I knew we had to make every effort to at least make the election close. With Philip’s constant encouragement, we organised a campaign for our candidate, Nick Raynsford, that was eye-catching, simple and, it turned out, extraordinarily effective. Both the Conservative, Matthew Carrington, and Roger lived outside the constituency – to be fair, in Roger’s case this was only by a matter of a few miles – but all our campaign literature was dominated by an engaging photograph of our prospective MP framed by one, strikingly presented slogan: ‘Nick Raynsford Lives Here’. The fact that local Labour supporters throughout the constituency began taping the image to their front windows made the effect especially powerful and amusing.
On the night of the election, 10 April 1986, Labour took the seat from the Tories. Roger finished a fairly distant third. This personal embarrassment for me was made even more difficult by the fact that Roger’s wife, Caroline, was also a good friend from my days in youth politics. When she spotted me at the election count, she gave me what my mother would have called ‘an old-fashioned look’. I could hardly blame her. I was sad that Roger had lost, and resigned to the likelihood that it would be some time before my friendship with him and Caroline could be repaired. At the same time, I was elated that our revamped campaigning team had met its first obstacle, and convincingly and unexpectedly cleared it.
Then came the ‘Freedom and Fairness’ launch. We had been working for months to make it unmistakably new, and it was. The result was a campaign document that not only included the kind of policy pledges expected of Labour, like increased child benefit, educational subsidies for young people and new housing opportunities, but was also about making individuals freer in their day-to-day lives. We promised a greater say for patients in the NHS, and set out measures against vandalism and crime. The design, too, was sleeker, friendlier on the eye. The SCA had given the brief to Trevor Beattie, whose talent for finding eye-catching, if sometimes controversial, ways to grab the public’s attention would later produce Wonderbra’s ‘Hello Boys’ ads. Instead of our old-style Labour stickers, we minted metal badges in edgy black, grey and silver.
In what would become a pattern for many of the changes we went on to make, I had a brief moment of drama with Neil as the posters and media packs were going to the printers. Three days before the launch, he called me in and exclaimed, ‘Where does it say “Labour’s Freedom and Fairness Campaign”? What’s this “Putting People First”? Where’s the title?’ Feeling much better, more confident – and more rested – than I had for some time, I assured him that both freedom and fairness were still at the centre of the campaign. What we had done was to bring together real policy ideas to put those values into practice. Just like the imagery and artwork, the point was to move beyond talking in a political language that would pass most people by, and, yes, to say directly that we were ‘putting people first’. As delicately as I could, I reminded Neil that he had signed off on every creative stage of the campaign along the way. Besides, I said, not quite truthfully, it was almost surely too late to change. But Neil was adamant. In the end, literally almost as the presses were beginning to roll, I arranged for the printers to include the words ‘Labour’s Freedom and Fairness Campaign’, in small letters, along the side of each poster and pamphlet.
The most striking change was the site of the launch. It was not in a scruffy room at Walworth Road, but in the International Press Centre near Fleet Street. By the time we got there, Neil had been won over to the idea, and the design, of the campaign. He was typically fluent and forceful in tying together the policy prospectus with the themes of freedom and fairness. A small girl whose parents had agreed for her to be featured as the main image in our publicity material had come to the launch, and Neil – wonderfully, spontaneously – lifted her aloft. The photographers loved it.
Less enthusiastic was Eric Heffer, who had turned up unexpectedly and stood scowling at me from the back of the room. ‘It’s disgraceful,’ he muttered. When I failed to reply, he continued: ‘It’s more than disgraceful. It’s disgusting! The NEC never approved this. Where’s the Red Flag? What is “Putting People First”?’ Stalking out, he delivered a parting shot. This was not the Labour Party he had joined, he fumed. It was just one of a series of heartening reviews. From the other end of the political horizon Norman Tebbit, the Tory Chairman, issued a blistering condemnation of our ‘slickness’. The press, too, sat up and took notice. Not only were there warm responses from our own camp, the Guardian and Tribune; the Economist saw the choice of venue as a sign that Labour was determined ‘never again to look dowdy or old-fashioned’. Even the FT nodded approvingly.
Heffer was right about one thing: I had never sought detailed NEC approval for the new approach and the new look. I knew I would never have got it. At the very minimum, there would have been endless debate over every dot and comma. The most that would have come out of it was a hugely scaled-down version that would not have had anything like the same impact. I did, of course, have the NEC’s endorsement for the central themes of freedom and fairness. I reassured Larry Whitty, as I had told Neil, that our job had simply been to find a new and effective way to get people to listen to that message.
This would set the pattern for much of my future dealings with Larry and the NEC. I recognised that they were my bosses, and was careful to follow the letter of their directives. But I hoped, and became increasingly confident, that by pushing the limits of the spirit of their decisions we could make a major impact on how the party and its policies were seen. I discovered one important tactic early on. When I received an especially heavy-handed policy pronouncement – on the economy, on trade unions, on defence – for our latest party publicity, I would have the text squeezed onto the right-hand side of the page. I would then sit down with the increasingly enthusiastic and hard-working team around me at Walworth Road, people like Jim Parish, Anna Healy and Jackie Stacey, and go through every vote-losing word, picking out the most attractive-sounding phrases – about growth and prosperity rather than state control, or support for a strongly defended Britain rather than unilateral disarmament – and highlighting them in big, attractive type in the wide margin.
Over time, I would find myself applying similar methods to almost every aspect of our presentation and communications. I remember one major policy pronouncement, otherwise fairly forward-looking, in which the NEC instructed us to insert the text of our socialist credo, Clause IV. It did go in, but not in the document that I initially released to the media, only on the inside cover when it was printed. I could do little about the rousing rendition of ‘The Red Flag’ that closed the Labour conference, but I could try to ensure that it was not the lasting image voters kept in their minds. In this, I usually failed, but sometimes I would be able to choreograph the final speeches so that the concluding hymn would come after live TV coverage had ended. If we couldn’t change the policy, at least we could change the way we were seen.
The reporters I dealt with every day were less easily finessed. They knew it was policies that ultimately mattered, and that ours hadn’t changed. My daily, and often nightly, dealings with the press did become less wearing, however. Their copy was still almost unremittingly hostile, but personal relationships were being built up. I was their one-man, one-stop source for what Labour was doing, thinking and saying. In that sense, they needed me. It went without saying that I needed them if our public image was ever going to change. Some of the journalists were simply cynical hacks with a settled, utterly negative, view of Labour dictated by their news desks. It was a narrative they knew by heart, and could write up almost automatically before heading off for a drink at the Press Bar or in Strangers, the meeting place for MPs and others on the Thames side of the Houses of Parliament. The facts, and what I or anyone else at Labour said, didn’t really matter to them.
My reputation for toughness, or worse, with the press began with journalists like that in these early days. But many of the more serious, and more influential, writers and broadcasters were at least open-minded. I think they also had a bit of sympathy for my plight as I struggled to find ways to give Labour a new, more reasonable face. Most weeks I would have lunch with one or another of these reporters – sometimes, at their invitation and on their expenses, at one of the fancier restaurants around Westminster, but more often in the Commons press cafeteria. I kept telling myself that over time, if and when Labour had a better story to tell, they would help us tell it.
Even in this part of my job, I sometimes had to look over my shoulder. The first problem involved Rupert Murdoch’s stable of British newspapers – The Times and Sunday Times, the News of the World and the Sun. After prolonged and fruitless negotiation, Murdoch had forced through the introduction of new technology, over the protests of striking print union workers, and opened up a new plant in Wapping. His titles continued to publish, with most journalists crossing increasingly violent and heavily policed picket lines. The NEC voted in a ban on any contact with reporters from the Murdoch papers. It was the classic 1980s Labour response. Not only was it on the wrong side of where most voters thought we should be, but in theory it would keep me from talking to the very journalists I needed if I was to have any hope of improving the party’s image. At the news conference at which I announced the NEC boycott, I duly asked the Times and Sun reporters to leave the room. I felt ridiculous. I also realised that to do otherwise would have been the equivalent of handing in my notice.
However, I made it a point privately to continue briefing, and talking to, the Murdoch journalists. In the Fulham by-election, that was obviously not going to be sufficient. Once the campaign got under way, reporters would build their day around each of the three parties’ main news conferences. They were not going to have the time – or presumably the desire – to oblige me by sharing a private Castello pizza to receive my daily spin on the campaign. If we wanted our side of the story to appear in Murdoch’s papers, we would have to include their journalists in our news conferences. Making common cause with Patricia Hewitt, and with the support and understanding of Larry Whitty, I persuaded the NEC to suspend its boycott for the duration of the campaign. As I had hoped, it was then quietly forgotten.
The ‘Freedom and Fairness’ launch was never going to be enough fundamentally to change Labour’s look or its image. The next step was more audacious, and had a more far-reaching effect. In Philip’s stock-take, we had told the NEC that we planned to review ‘every aspect of Labour’s corporate appearance’. Though I imagine most members glossed over this bit of advertising-speak, there was never any doubt in my mind where the remake had to begin. The defining core of our image was our fluttering red flag. Eric Heffer, as an NEC member, had seen the report when it came up for approval, but neither he nor the other sceptics would have imagined that we would actually go ahead and fold up the red flag. Had he realised this at the ‘Freedom and Fairness’ launch, he might literally have combusted. For months, we worked at finding a new logo. It was Neil who first suggested borrowing a symbol from the Scandinavian social democrats: a red rose. We all liked the idea, and I consulted the design expert Michael Wolff, of Wolff-Olins fame, who recruited the artist Philip Sutton. The rose evoked England’s gardens. It suggested growth in fresh soil. Sunlight. Optimism. The challenge was to ensure that it would pass muster – with Neil, but above all with the NEC – in time for party conference at the end of September.
In July, Patricia, Philip, Michael Wolff and I went to see Philip Sutton in his studio in south London. Hanging up on clothes pegs on a washing line running along the studio walls were scores of images of different roses. Over a stretch of two hours, we went around the room, gradually narrowing down our search for the perfect rose and agreeing a shortlist of half a dozen prototypes. Three weeks later the artwork had been refined on each of them, and we had to decide from a final batch of three. I picked what I thought was the best, and it went to Neil for his approval. He loved it – or almost: he wanted the stem shortened.
On the eve of conference, however, came a familiar last-minute hesitation. I had already got the design through the NEC publicity subcommittee. It was chaired by my early Walworth Road ally Gwyneth Dunwoody, who deftly and deliberately underplayed the significance of the party’s new symbol. It was just a ‘campaign logo’, she said. We had also designed a conference wallet to contain every delegate’s papers. It was salmon pink, emblazoned with the red rose and the word ‘Labour’ in big, bold letters. Now I was summoned to see Neil in his Commons office. His wife Glenys was there too, looking upset and worried. Neil was holding up one of our salmon-pink wallets. ‘Do you really think the mineworkers’ delegation are going to prance around conference holding this? They’re not going to be caught dead with these things,’ he said. ‘You can’t do it. There’ll be a riot.’ This time, it really was too late to change. I persuaded him it would be all right on the night.
It was. The entire backcloth of the conference platform in Blackpool was adorned with the new logo in all its glory. The red rose was printed on everything capable of taking its imprint. For Labour to pack away the red flag, as the fury of Eric Heffer and others soon made clear, was like Nike dumping its swish, or McDonald’s chopping down the golden arches. The red flag symbolised everything Labour represented in the public mind: socialism, nationalisation, state control. Everything, that is, that voters now liked least and mistrusted most about us. The red rose wasn’t just a design change: it represented a transformation in how the party would present itself. It had real impact, reinforced by our now ubiquitous new strapline, recognising the need to put people, not the party, first.
The change did generate comment and controversy in our ranks, though not in anything like the way Neil and Glenys had feared. Delegates eagerly collected their conference folders, taking two or three at a time, briefly raising the spectre that we might run out. If they were left on seats, they were stolen. In some cases, money changed hands amongst ardent collectors. That the media were excited – and through them the country – was not only important in itself, it had an immediate effect on the morale of party members. Here was Labour doing something well and eye-catching, beating the Tories at their own game.
On the final day of conference I brought a huge box of fresh red roses, minus their thorns, onto the stage for Neil and Glenys to throw to the delegates. There was a roar of delight. Catching sight of my broadcasting officer Tony Beeton, who would tragically die in the Paddington rail disaster in October 1999, I suggested that he and his tiny son Piers join Neil on the platform. Spotting the young child, Neil’s instinctive response was as it had been at the ‘Freedom and Fairness’ launch: he clutched Piers in one arm and held up one of the – long-stemmed – roses in the other, to shouts and cheers from the hall. It was an extraordinarily uplifting moment. At least briefly, I even allowed myself to indulge in the fantasy that it might provide a springboard for the general election, due in eighteen months but likely to come earlier.
We had had a good year. With Philip’s research suggesting that many voters saw Mrs Thatcher as polarising and divisive, we had actually arrived at conference with a small lead in the opinion polls. I knew Labour’s problems went much deeper, however. Branding, image, marketing, could do only so much. It was the product that ultimately mattered – especially if the product was a set of policies on which voters would decide what kind of future they wanted, and what kind of government they trusted to deliver it. The main reason we had lost in 1983 wasn’t that our campaign was amateurish and outdated – that had merely helped turn a defeat into a drubbing. It was our policies. We were in favour of nationalised industries, strike-prone trade unions and unilateral disarmament. We were against the free market, privatisation and widened share ownership, and even allowing council tenants to buy their properties. When it came time to choose, millions fewer opted for us than for the Tories, and we had only just edged out the SDP.
Our image and packaging were finally changing. Our product – as resolution after resolution at the party conference made clear – was not. Nor, much beyond Neil and his shadow cabinet allies, did there seem to be a huge appetite for change. Modernising Labour’s appearance and image was difficult enough. Getting any fundamental policy change through the morass of ideological bickering in the NEC, not to mention the trade unions or leftist local parties, was not just a matter of changing Labour’s landscape. It was more like draining a swamp.
After our conference our polling numbers lifted, but they fell off as attention turned to the Tories, who were busy getting into their pre-election stride with an array of new policies entitled ‘The Next Steps Forward’. Still, I entered 1987 feeling relatively upbeat. It was far too late for us to perform major surgery on our policies, but I was confident that we now had assets which could at least make this battle different from 1983. With our new communications operation, my hope was to emphasise what had changed in Labour. I hoped to build on our new image by promoting Neil as a different kind of Labour leader.
I had no doubt about the strengths of the people working most closely around him – Patricia Hewitt, and his chief of staff Charles Clarke, who I had known well since our days in student politics in the 1970s. As we geared up for election year, there was a real sense of shared purpose: to build a professional campaign around Neil as a leader who was showing vision and courage in modernising Labour, and could bring similar qualities to Downing Street. I believed this to be true. Although I had never managed anything remotely on this scale, I felt a new level of confidence about my grasp of modern campaigning methods, and in the team we had in the SCA and at Walworth Road. Within days of returning from our ‘red rose’ conference, we began planning for the general election campaign. Ultimately, dozens of people would be involved. Some of them – Charles, Patricia, David Hill, Chris Powell at BMP and of course Philip Gould – would go on to play important roles with New Labour a decade later. But the main connecting line was in the mechanics of the campaign we devised.
When we began mapping things out in the autumn of 1986, Patricia was not officially at work: she had just had her first child and was on maternity leave. Philip and I would gather around her kitchen table, with Patricia holding her baby daughter in her arms. Some of the features of the 1987 campaign looked new only in the hidebound context of the Labour Party. They were basic, common-sense changes in image, advertising and presentation. That alone would make a difference, but what was really new was the degree of detail, coordination and control we wired in from the start. We began with our ‘warbook’, although we didn’t give it that name until the process became political orthodoxy in the 1990s: an outline of our own and other parties’ strengths and weaknesses, and a point-by-point plan of how to make the most of each of them. Then came what was probably the most lastingly important innovation. We began setting out a ‘grid’ – a day-by-day map of the entire campaign, with a single policy issue and related narrative as well as a pre-planned visual context, to provide a compelling image for TV news and the following day’s papers. It was all bound together by Philip’s input – the most sustained, detailed and nuanced research and analysis the Labour Party had ever seen.
In February, however, things began to go wrong. On the surface, all was still to play for. Though we no longer led in the polls, we were trailing the Tories by only a point or two, and were comfortably clear of the SDP in third place. With the economy recovering, however, a Tory policy prospectus promising growth, reduced taxes and low inflation would be a tough case to answer. While Neil’s identity as a new kind of leader was gaining traction, so were escalating Tory assaults on Labour’s ‘loony left’. Worse, voters were about to be reminded of it all over again. The occasion was a by-election in Greenwich, prompted by the death of the veteran Labour MP Guy Barnett. Labour had held the seat for four decades – even, with a reduced majority, in 1983. If we had tapped into Philip’s bank of research in picking Guy Barnett’s prospective successor, we surely would have won. But under NEC selection rules, with a strong boost from her National Union of Public Employees sponsors, the nod went to Deirdre Wood, Greenwich’s representative on the London Education Authority.
Deirdre had history in Ken Livingstone’s GLC. She was realistic enough to recognise the difficulties her candidacy presented us with in the run-up to a general election. When she met Neil after she’d been selected, she told him, ‘Don’t worry, I won’t drop you in it.’ She didn’t. She didn’t propose nationalising Greenwich, or declaring London a nuclear-free zone. But with the Daily Mail taking the lead, there was an orgy of ‘exposés’, with spurious allegations about her private life and even mockery of her looks. It was a sustained assault which on more than one occasion reduced Deirdre to tears.
In 1983, Guy Barnett had a 1,200-vote edge over the Conservatives, with the SDP in third place. This time, the Tories concluded early on that they were unlikely to win. The SDP ran the candidate they had recently picked for the general election: an attractive, softly-spoken market researcher named Rosie Barnes, whose husband was a local councillor who organised her campaign. The SDP’s Liberal allies sensed that Deirdre’s selection made us vulnerable, and flooded the constituency with canvassers. As the campaign neared its end, our polling suggested that the Tories were encouraging tactical voting as well. Days before the vote on 26 February, we still held a lead. But it was tiny. The night before the election, journalists phoned me with advance word on the next morning’s coverage. The Tories had essentially conceded defeat, and the SDP were making a late surge. As the polls opened, I phoned Charles. ‘We’re going to lose,’ I said. ‘Heavily.’ When we did, by almost 7,000 votes, it was as if everything we had so painstakingly built up had crumbled away on that by-election dawn.
Before long there was a string of further setbacks, unlucky events and own-goals. The most serious involved our most difficult policy problem: defence. In 1986, Neil had gone to Washington, where he managed to deflect the embarrassment of failing to meet President Reagan by saying he’d be back before the election. Since our disarmament policy would commit a Labour government to breaking ranks with America and NATO, the last thing we needed was a tête-à-tête at the White House. I and others, including Shadow Foreign Secretary Denis Healey, tried to talk Neil out of going. He was insistent. He had said he would visit before the election. Not to do so would look weak. I was left to record in my diary the vain hope that Reagan would either fall ill, or for some reason be unable to find time for a meeting before the trip took place. The President was in robust health. When Neil arrived in the Oval Office the meeting was bad enough, with a series of predictably chilly exchanges. Then Reagan’s spokesman emerged with a politically damning account for reporters. He said the President had not even needed the allotted half-hour to tell Britain’s Labour leader that his policies would undermine the Western alliance. Even a friendly feature by one of our few supporters in the travelling press, the Mirror’s Alastair Campbell, could not curb the damage. A Gallup poll at the end of the month had us not only trailing the Tories, by nearly ten percentage points, but in third place, behind the Liberal-SDP Alliance.
I did my best to put a positive spin on it. I phoned the Press Association’s man in the Commons, Chris Moncrieff, and portrayed Neil’s surprisingly resilient remarks after the White House snub as stage one in a carefully planned ‘April fightback’ ahead of the election campaign. There was no such plan, much less any sign of a fightback. But it was one of those phrases that somehow take on a life of their own. By mid-month, although the polls gave the Tories a widening lead, we were at least back in second place. I knew we could still fall back. Although I told reporters that the polls showed that we were ‘back on course, and contending for power’, I truly believed only the first of these claims. ‘What I really feel,’ I wrote in my diary one evening in April, ‘is that we are back on course to remain in existence.’
When the election was announced on the second Monday of May, with polling day set for 11 June 1987, I felt more confident than I had a few weeks earlier. From command central in Walworth Road, I found myself working eighteen-hour days to keep on top of every facet of the campaign: speeches and appearances by Neil and others; decisions on advertising, posters and party TV messages; how and what we were briefing to the media. Philip’s daily cull and analysis of the opinion data was indispensable. As the campaign hit the road, I was in constant contact by primitive mobile phone with Patricia and, at key moments, with Neil.
Our frontman at news conferences and briefings was Bryan Gould, who had succeeded Robin as the shadow cabinet’s campaign chief. Born in New Zealand, Bryan had studied at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, become a television presenter, and had gone into the Commons in 1974. We hit it off immediately. He was articulate, self-assured, quick-witted and very good company, and I soon became good friends with both him and his wife Gill. He was also a huge asset to the campaign. His encounters with the media were amazing to behold. Entering the room with a few hastily scribbled talking points, he seemed capable of answering even the least anticipated question with fluency and lucidity.
Our first few days were steady rather than spectacular. Though even that represented a huge advance over 1983, it did nothing to cushion the blow of the first opinion polls. In two of them, we were back in third place. But soon, our carefully primed campaign engine got up to speed. Neil did too. His breakthrough moment came at the Welsh Labour conference in Llandudno in mid-May. He had been up much of the night fine-tuning a speech on a theme he had often promoted: freedom and opportunity. The words were strong, the argument deftly made. But the speech did not really take flight until he launched into a passionate, personal broadside against unfairness in Britain. ‘Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university?’ he began. ‘Why is Glenys the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it because our predecessors were thick? Did they lack talent? Those people who could sing, and play, and recite and write poetry; those people who could make wonderful, beautiful things with their hands? Those people who could dream dreams, and see visions? Was it because they were weak – those people who could work eight hours underground, and then come up and play football? Does anybody really think that they didn’t get what we had because they didn’t have the talent, or the strength, or the endurance, or the commitment?’ Of course not, he said. ‘It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand!’ There were not the conditions that allowed people who were free under British law truly to live that freedom.
Even watching on the TV at Walworth Road, I felt the power of his words. I knew that Neil on this form – genuine, spine-tinglingly eloquent, and speaking on the kind of social issues where the Tories were most vulnerable – would be key to the campaign. The imperative was to improve his connection with voters. We had already decided that our first broadcast of the campaign would focus on him. We had put it in the hands of a remarkable film-maker, the Chariots of Fire director Hugh Hudson. I’d first met Hugh the previous summer. He was one of a number of talented figures who wanted to do what they could personally to help revive and modernise Labour. Through the first part of the 1980s, such approaches had been routinely rebuffed or ignored. Eager to get Hugh involved, I asked him to produce a video of the autumn party conference. It was powerful, subtle, engaging, and perfectly captured the new ‘red rose’ image we were trying to bring to the party.
Before the campaign started, Patricia and I asked him to turn his artistry to Neil, in a party political broadcast. The aim was to confront his media image as weak, woolly and indecisive, and to project his personal and political strengths. When I first saw what Hugh had come up with, at a late-evening screening two days before it aired, I knew it had done the job. The media dubbed it ‘Kinnock: the Movie’. It opened with a fighter jet morphing into a seagull above the bluffs of south Wales. Using footage from interviews we had Alastair Campbell do with Neil, his family and leading party figures, Hugh created a portrait of a leader whose bedrock beliefs drove him to help others, and who had the determination and strength to turn his beliefs into action. The film segued into his assault on Militant at the 1985 conference. The climax was built around the Llandudno speech. The final scene showed Neil and Glenys walking hand-in-hand along the seacoast. It was breathtaking. The only question was what words we would put up at the end. Usually, it would be the campaign slogan or the Labour logo. When the screening was over I turned to Betty Boothroyd, a sympathetic NEC member and future Speaker of the Commons, who had wandered in to watch. She said, gratifyingly, that she had loved it. ‘What about ending the film with something besides the word “Labour”?’ I asked her. ‘Would it work to just put “Kinnock”?’ She agreed. Later, I would be criticised by some of her NEC colleagues for ‘personalising’ the campaign. I was guilty as charged. Amid all our policy ‘negatives’, Neil was one of our few potential positives.
The aims of our campaign had been to build up his stock as a new kind of leader, and in effect to camouflage most of the policy prospectus on which we were asking voters to put him into Downing Street. To a remarkable degree, we succeeded. In vision and planning, management and mechanics, our campaign made the vaunted Tory machine look staid, slow, stodgy. The day before the election, the New York Times wrote of how dramatically things had changed. Struck by the contrast between the Thatcher rallies staged by the Tories’ presentation supremo, Harvey Thomas, and our Hugh Hudson broadcasts, it concluded: ‘In 1979 and 1983, Mr Thomas’s rallies were the splashiest events around, yielding strong television images that helped establish the Conservatives’ primacy as the party with the most polished communications operation. But this year, the slickness of Mr Hudson’s films demonstrated Labour’s ability to beat the Conservatives at their own game.’ The article quoted a top London advertising executive as saying that we had ‘rattled the Conservative campaign, forcing them to spend valuable time repudiating Labour claims instead of concentrating on Tory successes’. It also praised the way in which we had managed to use the rallies we staged for Neil to ‘divert attention from defence to issues like health care, pensions and education – on which Mrs Thatcher, despite her lead in the polls, has been on the defensive’.
Realistically, however, our main rival was not Mrs Thatcher or the Tories. We were battling for second place, against the Liberal-SDP Alliance. In 1983 we had beaten them by only two percentage points, and well under a million votes. Even after our ‘April fightback’, the polls had intermittently shown us as neck-and-neck with the Alliance, or at times behind them. We faced the real prospect of finishing in third place. By polling day, I knew we had at least faced down that threat. From early in the campaign, especially since the Kinnock movie, we had drawn ahead. As I sat in Walworth Road on election night, the only question in my mind was by how much. I was exhausted. In one sense, it was lucky we had never really had a chance of defeating the Conservatives. By the end of the campaign I was so spent, emotionally and physically, that I had literally nothing left for the final sprint.
Bizarrely, there was a brief moment on election day when there was a suggestion that we might even win. Vincent Hanna, the BBC political correspondent, phoned me early in the evening. In a conspiratorial whisper, he said: ‘Peter, it’s Vincent. I have some very interesting information seeping out about the exit polls. You might just be in for a pleasant surprise.’ Swearing me to secrecy, and saying he could not go into detail, he continued: ‘You may want to get your “plan B” ready.’ I was intrigued, or more nearly astonished. I thanked him, but said: ‘For God’s sake, don’t tell Neil. It’ll get him all wound up.’
As Vincent had hinted, the first Newsnight prediction was for a hung Parliament. I still frankly didn’t believe it – I remember turning to Philip and saying, ‘If only …’ The exit poll corrected itself, and the Conservatives won, as we’d both known they would. Mrs Thatcher got a Commons majority of 102. Still, that was down by forty-two seats on 1983. We had gained twenty seats, and cantered home well ahead of the SDP-Liberal Alliance, by eight percentage points and nearly three million votes. We had survived. We had won the battle of the opposition. If the Greenwich trend had continued, we might well not have done.
I retreated to Foy that weekend. I was a tangle of emotions. The campaign had been more wearing than anything I had ever done in my life. I had never directed anything like it before, and had no benchmark against which to judge what I was doing. Every day was virgin territory. If it had not been for the two Goulds, Bryan and Philip, I am sure I would not have been able to carry it off. Never did I have more reason to be grateful for their support than on the first Saturday of the campaign, when I was suddenly confronted with the personal cost of my more prominent political role. The News of the World, Britain’s highest-circulation Sunday paper, was planning to use its front page next day to tell the country about my private life. I had never cloaked this in secrecy: I simply regarded my life outside politics as having no relevance to my public role. It didn’t preoccupy me, and I did not see why it should concern anyone else. The News of the World chose not only to target me, but to make personal allegations about Roy Hattersley and the Liberal Party leader, David Steel, as well.
I had been with my partner at the time for nearly ten years. He had also briefly been involved with a woman friend, with whom he had fathered a wonderful son – to whom not only his mother, but the two of us were devoted. What angered me was that the newspaper had decided to publicise this as well: identities, details, photographs and all. On Alastair Campbell’s advice, I telephoned the editor, David Montgomery, and told him that if he really wanted to ‘reveal all’ about me, he could go ahead, but including the name of the three-year-old boy involved, or his mother, would be an utterly unjustified violation of their rights to privacy. Montgomery was cold, monosyllabic, and seemingly could not have cared less. He shrugged off my request, and went ahead. Alastair, who was by my side throughout, shared my disgust.
I was told later that the News of the World ‘bombshell’ had been discussed with the Conservative Party’s high command. The Tories apparently saw this as a legitimate way of taking me out of the campaign. If so, it failed. I was fortunate that the pace and demands of the election left me little time to brood on what had happened. The rest of the media, in any case, ignored the News of the World’s prurience. But it couldn’t help but affect the way I felt about and responded to other media intrusions into my private life. It made me more determined than ever not to make concessions to those who are interested in the irrelevances of the bedroom over the Cabinet Room. This was nearly twenty-five years ago. Thankfully, the world has moved on, and with it, journalistic standards.
With the election over, I took comfort from knowing how much ground we had reclaimed since the chaos and crisis of the spring. The campaign had been a watershed for Labour. It had shown to the party, and the numerous sceptics in the media, that we could compete with the Tories in using the tools of modern political communications to get our voice through to voters. We were at least back in the game. It had been transformational for me as well. As the central figure in the Walworth Road operation, I was always going to receive more media attention than before. If it had all gone haywire, I would have got the blame.
In the final days, the young political editor of the Observer wrote the first major profile of me to appear in the national press. I knew Robert Harris only professionally then, though he would later become one of my closest friends. His piece highlighted the differences in Labour’s campaigning and communications since 1983. In explaining the role I had played, the obstacles I had had to overcome and the artifice I had occasionally had to use to get our changes through, he also unwittingly coined a label – sometimes useful politically, often uncomfortable personally – that would stick with me for the rest of my public life: the ‘Machiavelli’ of Walworth Road. Coming from him, this was not meant as an insult, and the rest of the profile was very generous, both about the campaign and my part in it.
After election day, there was far more praise than criticism, some of it from unexpected quarters. Tony Benn said we had run Labour’s best campaign since 1959, the one in which he had pioneered groundbreaking TV messages of his own. The review that most touched me, however, was a note Larry Whitty left on my desk the morning after the election. ‘Just in case it may on occasion have seemed I felt differently,’ he said, ‘can I record that I believe your efforts, political judgement and imagination have made this the most effective campaign the party has ever waged. Well done – and thanks.’
Still, in the end, as Private Eye put it, we had achieved a ‘brilliantly successful election defeat’. The feeling that weighed most heavily on me was that when the votes were counted, we had lost. Again. The sense of frustration and failure gnawed at me in the days, weeks and months that followed as I contemplated what Labour’s third straight defeat meant for the party’s, and my, future. The reasons we had lost were clear. I singled out ‘the three Ds: Deirdre, defence and disarray’. However alluringly alliterative, that told only part of the story. To have any hope of getting back into government, we would have to completely revisit the range of policies where we were simply, fatally, out of touch with the electorate: unemployment and health, education, crime, and of course economics, finance and taxation.
The election result also taught me something else. It was about people’s feelings and beliefs, and how they projected these onto those who stood for the highest office. The electorate intensely disliked many aspects of the Labour Party. As for Neil Kinnock, while people felt that he was right to stand up to the hard left, to reform Labour and make its policies more centrist, they also had a feeling that he was not very prime ministerial, that he was uncertain what he believed in, and that his wordiness masked a lack of knowledge. While many voters had a visceral dislike of Mrs Thatcher, and believed that her policies were divisive, were destroying industry, generating unacceptable social costs and harming public services, they nevertheless felt that she was strong, was probably what the country needed, that they should continue taking the medicine, and anyway, that there was no real alternative. For voters, feelings prevail over beliefs. People may be torn between their head and their heart, but ultimately it is their gut feeling that is decisive: they vote for the candidate who elicits the right feelings, not necessarily the one who presents the right arguments. Ideally, of course, that should be the same person. This lesson would shape what I thought and did over the next two decades, because it ingrained in me just how subtle political communications are – and how complicated elections are to run.
In the eighteen months or so after the election, I gradually lost heart that this would happen with the necessary urgency. Intellectually, Neil understood the need for change. The trouble was that his heart, and more so his soul, weren’t in the scale of change needed. Labour had to find ways of appealing to voters far beyond our old, loyalist core. We had to have something to say not only to the have-nots in society, but to the haves – a group of which Thatcherite Britain’s ‘new working class’ either already had, or aspired to, membership. At times, Neil talked the talk. ‘But,’ I reflected in a diary note after the election, ‘he is too much of a socialist, and he hates the idea of being seen by the party as anything different. That is where he gets the power and the passion of his performance.’ I knew Neil could inspire. The question, especially on the tough policy decisions we had to confront, was whether he could lead the profound change that was clearly needed.
Hoping to prod him and others into action, I commissioned Philip and the SCA to begin a thorough examination of the state of mind of Britain’s voters: what they valued in their lives and in their government; why they supported Labour or the Tories or the Alliance; what had convinced them, or might convince them, to switch sides. We had never done anything on this scale before. Nor had any other British political party. Patricia, as usual, jumped into the driving seat of a process that would end up taking four months to complete, drawing not only on polling and focus groups, but the work of experts in charting political, economic and social trends. That was step one. Step two would be to apply the lessons to policy. We needed an issue-by-issue policy review. This would not have happened without Tom Sawyer, the deputy leader of the public service union NUPE, whose position on the NEC had earlier contributed to the two-vote majority that got me my job. He went to Neil with the idea of a policy review immediately after the election, and convinced him to support it. What shape it would take, how far it would go, remained to be seen. But at least a mechanism would be in place.
The landmark public attitudes report was called ‘Labour and Britain in the 1990s’, and when I got the draft after the party conference in the autumn, it was even more sobering than I had expected. Its findings were presented to a joint session of the NEC and the shadow cabinet in November. Over two decades, our share of the vote had fallen by nearly 20 per cent, while Tory support had remained steady. Even more disturbing were the findings about why people voted as they did. In the case of the Conservatives, it was their tougher, more aspirational appeal. But more than a quarter of Labour’s shrinking base said they remained with us only out of residual loyalty. Among those who had abandoned us, there was a remarkable consistency in the reasons they said had driven them away. ‘Extremism’ came top, followed by the dominance of the trade unions, our defence policy, and finally ‘weak leadership’. It was not just the well-off who didn’t like us, but in an increasingly mobile economy, the role of manual work was decreasing. Share ownership and home ownership were rising, and more voters had the kind of aspirations which they said made them reluctant to elect a Labour government. We were becoming less and less popular, less and less relevant. In its X-ray of the British electorate, the SCA report had now told us why. Our image unsettled and alienated voters, our organisation and leadership dented their trust. Our policies clashed with their hopes not only for the country, but for themselves.
I still have my notes of the presentation meeting. Tony Benn called the report ‘useful’, but said the voters had simply been duped by rightwing ‘media propaganda’, and that Labour’s job now was ‘to change their attitudes through our campaigning’. In other words, ‘don’t compromise with the electorate’. Ken Livingstone said we had been too busy ‘reassuring international bankers so they’ll now vote for us’ to develop and present a strong, socialist alternative to Mrs Thatcher’s running of the economy. He also said we had shamelessly gone along with media attacks on the hard left, instead of defending them. Still, by far most of those in the room clearly understood the seriousness of the message in the research report, and the need for us to reconnect as a party with what voters actually wanted in their lives and from their government. What mattered was what they would do about it.
The short answer turned out to be not much. The policy review, which would not finally be published until two years after the election, had all the trappings of a serious exercise. I certainly spun it in the press gallery as the start of a real change, saying that nothing would be off limits. Seven committees, each chaired by the relevant shadow minister and an NEC member, were tasked to look at every major policy area. But while Neil set out a general vision of change, he made surprisingly little personal input to the process. He didn’t meet the chairs or want to float ideas. Neither arguing for nor rejecting anything, he seemed to be leaving the outcome up to the individual groups and shadow ministers. With no pressure to be radical, almost all of the review groups played it safe. There was one significant exception: Gerald Kaufman, who was now Shadow Foreign Secretary. He knew what he wanted, knew what Labour needed, and showed every sign of being determined to get it: a jettisoning of unilateral nuclear disarmament. As for the rest, they largely tinkered: except for Shadow Chancellor John Smith’s group, which committed Labour to higher taxes, by including a whole raft of new benefits pledges.
My confidence that we would rise to the challenge had been eroding for many months. In the aftershock of the election, there was a lot of talk about ‘change’. But not only was there a lack of real action, Neil’s position with senior shadow cabinet colleagues appeared to have weakened. I had a startling insight into the depth of the discontent in an uncomfortable midnight encounter with Neil’s two most influential colleagues. I was in Edinburgh for the international television festival two months after the election, and John Smith and his wife Elizabeth had very kindly invited me to stay with them. When I arrived after dinner on the first night, Elizabeth had gone to bed. I was greeted not only by John, but by the party’s deputy leader, Roy Hattersley, and their shadow cabinet colleague, the Glasgow MP Donald Dewar. With the three of them seated in a kind of horseshoe formation around me, it felt like a courtroom drama.
John and Roy did most of the talking. They were scathing about Neil, blaming my ‘image-making’ for propping up a leader who they were convinced was not up to the job. John conceded that Neil had proven a formidable party manager, and ‘infighter’, in dismembering Militant. But that was pretty much it. He was aloof, abstract, and a nightmare to deal with on any issue of substance. John’s view was that Neil didn’t have an ‘intellectual interest’ in policy. No matter how glowing the reviews he’d received during the campaign, he was ‘all froth’. Roy piled in, saying that Neil suffered from ‘a lack of assurance, a feeling of being beleaguered and being out of his depth’. That, Roy believed, was because he was.
It was deeply unpleasant, and I did not know how to respond. Neil was party leader. I felt admiration for him because of what he had been put through, and loyalty to him as someone who had at least begun to revive the party. I thought John, Roy and Donald were being harsh and unfair, and I told them so. I also pointed out that while Neil’s speeches may have been ‘froth’, without that froth we would not only have lost the election, we would have been left for dead.
The main senior figure advocating real, if undefined, change was Bryan Gould. At my urging, he had publicly said that Labour had to develop ‘policies for the 1990s’. But he was paying a price, in the shape of a whispering campaign against him. He was naïve, it was said. An upstart. The more he pressed for greater influence, the more difficult his position became. It culminated in his proposal to challenge Roy for the deputy leadership at the beginning of 1988. I knew how much Bryan wanted the job, but I could not support him. Neil was dead against the distraction of a contest, and I shared that view. The party was divided enough without another full-scale power struggle, in which it was certain that Eric Heffer would also join the fray. Besides, I was a Labour Party official. Both the leader, and of course the current deputy, wanted Bryan to reconsider. I did the only thing I reasonably could: I talked him out of standing, averting political bloodshed but introducing a lasting strain in our relationship.
I began to wonder whether I should shift my focus outside the party. At one point, I even applied for a job as Director of Communications at the BBC. But I wasn’t offered it, and I very much doubt that I would have accepted it if I had been. Having returned to Labour at a time that the party had begun to change, I could not see myself baling out before the process was over, one way or the other. Still, I found myself trying to work around Neil to present a public image of a party ready for fundamental change. I retained a real respect for him, and a warmth that had nothing to do with politics. Neil could be awkward in his relationships, but he had an enormous capacity for kindness, and one instance in particular touched me in a way I have never forgotten.
It was in the spring of 1988, nearly a year after the election. I was called out of an NEC meeting to take an urgent call from my brother in my office. My father had been under the weather for a couple of weeks with a chest infection. Neither of us had been unduly worried, but I spoke daily either to my mother or Miles about how he was getting on. When it became apparent that he was not improving, our family GP had referred him to the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead. My father and I had found a new closeness over the past year or so. The grating of our unacknowledged similarities had receded, and I was much more able to recognise and appreciate the flair, the assurance, the sense of caring about politics and people which I had got from him, while he was able to show the pride he felt in what I had accomplished, and the work I was doing. The previous summer, he had come down to spend a day in Foy. He arrived with a lovely blue ceramic ashtray, decorated with a red rose, which I still have. I cooked him trout and salad and new boiled potatoes. We walked and talked, and then he slept before I drove him back to the station. I had every expectation that we would have further time to look back, and forward, together.
But now, Miles was phoning with bad news. The ‘chest infection’ was being treated, but the hospital had done tests. My father had cancer, and the prognosis was not good. I could not help the tears coming as I sat, holding the phone, before I replaced the receiver. Whether it was by means of telepathy I don’t know, but Neil appeared at my side, put his arm round my shoulder and cradled my head in his arms. It would be difficult, he said, but love for a father is a source of strength. ‘You’ll get through. We’ll make sure you get through.’ My father died without warning two weeks later, from a heart attack. It was months before I was over the first, terrible sense of loss – thinking of the things my father had said, the clothes he wore, the jokes we had shared, his pipe, the conversations we had or that I wished we had had. The deeper, duller throb went on for much longer.
At work, I looked for whatever examples and agents of real change I could find. I still dutifully briefed the media about Neil’s speeches and over-egged the odd policy document, but I was spending much more of my time trying to boost the image of the few Labour MPs who seemed to understand that we had to reform radically or face terminal decline. In my search for articulate, forward-looking Labour spokesmen to deliver a message that would at least sound new on radio and television, I was increasingly drawn to two bright young MPs who had been elected in 1983, and had been inseparable allies ever since. They shared a remote rabbit-warren of a parliamentary office. Both were forceful, effective communicators, and both believed that Labour had to do more – much more – if it was ever again going to get a chance to govern. The senior member of the partnership, a couple of years older and with the longer political CV, was a thirty-six-year-old Scottish MP named Gordon Brown. His ally and protégé was an Oxford-educated barrister, representing Sedgefield in northern England, called Tony Blair.
I had first got to know them before the election. We were all in our thirties, and were excited to be part of the post-1983 rebuilding project. We were young enough to hope still to be in command of our senses by the time Labour finally got back into government. The initial attraction for me was that here were two MPs who possessed a quality all too rare on the Labour benches: they had an understanding of, and a facility for, modern communications. It was natural that I should want to use their talents to help get Labour’s message across, and that they should see a re-energised Walworth Road as an asset.
After the election defeat, this coincidence of interests gradually became something much more than that: a partnership, a trio, a team. In contrast to the detachment and drift of Neil’s office, Gordon and Tony conveyed focus, and exuded energy. Constantly batting ideas off each other, positioning and planning, they were like a pair of very close, if unidentical, twins. Tony had the sunnier disposition. He had an easiness about him, a facility for engaging in serious politics without appearing to take the stakes, or himself, too seriously. He had a gift for putting others at their ease, even other politicians. People liked him, and wanted to be liked by him. In a different way, Gordon had that quality too. For me, he certainly did. We had much in common. Like me, he had resolved at a young age to entwine his life with Labour. Like me, he was the political equivalent of a football anorak. An intricate map of Prime Ministers and pretenders past, of alliances and feuds, triumphs and failures, speeches and manifestos, was implanted in both of us like a memory chip.
Although all three of us sensed by early in 1988 that Labour was not going to win the next election without something dramatic happening, I think that the realisation affected Gordon and me a bit differently than it did Tony. While he was frustrated, and sometimes angry, about the party’s failure to put itself back in the running for government, for us, there was a deeper, more personal, almost existential, feeling of despair.
There was another bond with Gordon as well. I was spending almost all my waking hours trying to find ways of getting Labour’s message into the newspapers or onto the radio or television, and through them to voters. That was not just my job, it was a fixation. For Gordon, it was nearer an obsession. It needed not be about some grand policy announcement – it rarely was. It was not done in any expectation of our winning the major arguments, much less an election, against Mrs Thatcher. But Gordon plotted a ceaseless campaign of guerrilla strikes against the Tories. He was constantly reading ministerial statements, dissecting policy proposals, culling potentially damaging leaks of internal documents. Then, sometimes acting by himself, sometimes through Tony, and increasingly often in league with me, he would zero in on just the right newspaper or broadcaster, just the right news cycle, to strike the blow. For Gordon, this was deadly serious. He viewed the Tories not only as political opponents, but as a battlefield enemy. We might not be able to kill them, but he hoped, wound by wound, to bring them to their knees. His eye for tactical opportunities was extraordinary, and he showed a master craftsman’s delight and eagerness in trying to initiate Tony and me into the secrets of the trade.
For the first time I heard him expound on his core principle of political battle, and it would resurface many times, in many contexts, later on. Essentially, his argument was that our own policies weren’t necessarily key to scoring a communications or campaigning success – which was fortunate, because our own policies were hardly putting us in a strong position. The key, Gordon said, was to identify, magnify and exploit ‘dividing lines’ with the Tories. I became an eager co-conspirator. Given the challenge of finding a way to market the pabulum of the policy review, I began to see Gordon’s endless schemes to annoy the Tories as invaluable in my efforts to keep Labour in the public eye. His relentless urge to attack also gave me a sense that Labour had not given up the fight.
I saw Tony, too, as a huge asset, especially in conveying a sense of newness in Labour on television. Even before I arrived at Walworth Road, I remember having been bowled over by an appearance he made on the BBC’s Question Time. He was accusing the Conservatives of undermining civil liberties, but it wasn’t the substance of his message that most struck me, timely and apt though it was. I was impressed by his freshness, his fluency, his ability to talk politics in words that connected in a way so many of our frontbenchers seemed to find it difficult to do. I was keen to find ways of turning this to Labour’s wider benefit, by steering high-profile TV invitations his way.
My increasing promotion of Tony’s and Gordon’s media profiles did not escape the notice of some of their more senior colleagues. The first time I put Tony on breakfast TV, to rebut Tory economic policy before the 1987 election, I felt almost as if I’d taken my life in my hands. He was at that time a junior spokesman in Roy’s Shadow Treasury team. That afternoon, a redoubtable and undeniably more senior member, the Thurrock MP Oonagh McDonald, pinned me up against a wall behind the Speaker’s chair in the Commons. When Roy wasn’t available for an interview, she thundered, she was next in line. Did I understand? What on earth had I been playing at by putting Tony up instead? I assured her that there would be plenty of future opportunities for everyone, but I couldn’t help adding, ‘Tony was very good, wasn’t he?’ It was not what Oonagh wanted to hear.
Gordon’s first real chance to shine came a year and a half after the 1987 defeat, and it happened by accident. Both he and Tony had risen up the ranks since the election. Still too junior to be perceived as a threat to those at the top, and too bright and effective to be ignored, they were voted into the shadow cabinet. Tony was Shadow Energy Secretary, while Gordon was Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, under John Smith. By the time we arrived in Brighton for the party conference at the end of September 1988, I was not alone in having marked them out as faces for the future. For Gordon, the time frame was about to shorten dramatically. Two days after conference, John suffered a serious heart attack which meant that he would need several months’ rest before returning to work. On paper, Bryan Gould should have been in line to fill in for him. With his responsibility for Trade and Industry, he held the second-top economic brief in the shadow cabinet. But Gordon made it instantly clear that he was able, and ready, to fill the breech. Since no one with influence went to bat for Bryan, the arrangement was nodded through. I am sure that they, like me, felt that while Gordon lacked John’s political weight and dispatch-box experience, he had the intellect and policy grasp to be capable of holding the fort. Within weeks, however, he faced a first major test: replying for Labour to the government’s autumn financial statement.
It had all the marks of a distinctly unequal fight. In the Conservative corner, Nigel Lawson had been Chancellor since 1983. He was two decades older than Gordon, and had been in the Commons a decade longer. He had steadily lowered income tax, and since 1986 had built an economic recovery into an income and consumer boom. There were signs of trouble, however. Inflation was rising, and interest rates, which stood at 14 per cent, even more worryingly. Though this was Gordon’s first big set-piece parliamentary encounter, he at least had a strong argument to make, ‘dividing lines’ to exploit, a target to attack. That he would make his points effectively was something I never doubted: he, and Tony and I, had worked on rehearsing and refining them.
When he rose to face Lawson, he did much more than that. He spoke with confidence, vigour and verve. Lawson’s great economic expansion, he said, was mere sleight of hand, based on irresponsible levels of borrowing. ‘It is a boom based on credit,’ he said. Warning of trouble ahead, he ridiculed the Conservatives’ efforts to insist that all would be well despite their failure to live up even to their own economic forecasts. Then came the killer line, as Lawson sat grimacing, like an elephant improbably brought down by a mosquito: ‘The proper answer is to keep the forecasts and discard the Chancellor!’ When he had finished, to shouts of support from the Labour benches, I went up to the press gallery to gauge the reaction. I didn’t need to tell them Gordon had done well; they had seen it for themselves. But I felt we had witnessed something of real significance to Labour in this David and Goliath drama. ‘Today,’ I told them, ‘a star was born.’ The reason the Guardian’s Ian Aitken and others echoed the phrase the following morning was because all of us recognised that it rang true.
Part of what drew me to Gordon and Tony, and drew us together, was simply the way they did politics. So much of the Labour Party seemed weighted down by torpor and an acceptance of defeat. Morale reached a new low the week after Gordon’s Commons breakthrough, with a particularly painful by-election defeat in the ostensibly safe seat of Glasgow Govan. We lost it, with a swing of 33 per cent, to the Scottish Nationalists. Neil was feeling so despondent that for a brief period he even began speaking of stepping aside the following summer. I was feeling equally down. A fortnight later, I boarded a train north with Tony to join him at a meeting with his constituents. The contrast could hardly have been greater. Watching him use his mixture of intellect, humour and charm to communicate – with voters was like getting a blood transfusion.
The growing bond between Tony, Gordon and me was not only about politics. On policy, we also found much common ground. The specifics of the new Labour platform we envisaged would not take shape until much later. But we knew absolutely what had to go: the statist, unilateralist and class-defined prospectus that had lost us three straight elections and was surely going to lose us a fourth.
Two late-night entries in my diary, six months apart in 1988, chart the depth of my frustration and my growing certainty about what needed to be done. The first followed the NEC’s approval of the initial policy review reports. It reflected my relief at the vote, and my admiration for Neil’s role in arguing for and mobilising the support needed to secure it. But I worried about what hadn’t been accomplished, the risks we had failed to take, and where we might go from here. ‘The problem is that for all Neil’s courage and strength of leadership, he is let down by his lack of self-confidence and his seeming lack of interest in the detail of policy,’ I wrote. ‘It shows not so much in what he says and does, but in what he fails to articulate and to achieve.’ There was an ‘awful’ implication in this. I had begun to suspect that the country might never view Neil as prime ministerial material. He would end up being both ‘the hero and the fall-guy of history. The likelihood at the moment is that he will be the leader who restored and rebuilt the Labour Party but who could not clinch victory.’
The second snapshot is from a few days after my trip to Tony’s constituency in Sedgefield. ‘Increasingly,’ I wrote, ‘my role is revolving around the strong future leaders – Gordon Brown and Tony Blair – and the political nourishment and companionship I get from this group. They have such political gifts, and they know that on the present course we shall remain out of office for a generation. I have now become determined to be part of that successor generation. All my political ambition has returned with the challenge that they hold out.’
While I had not yet shared this with Neil, or even Charles Clarke, I knew something else as well. If I wanted to be part of creating a truly revived Labour Party, I could not do it from where I was – as a headquarters man, whatever the range of my influence. Like Gordon and Tony, I needed to be on the front line. I needed to resume a course I had abandoned, in disgust at the shambolic extremism of London Labour politics. I would seek election as a Labour Member of Parliament.
4 (#ulink_d00d0b36-fbb9-57b3-92e2-2d832d9e52f3)
The Three Musketeers
My search for a seat in the Commons need not have ended my role in organising Neil Kinnock’s last realistic chance to become Prime Minister. But it did. By the time of the next election, my relations with Neil would be much more distant, while with Charles Clarke they were badly strained. With Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, however, they were not only closer: the three of us had become a political partnership, convinced that the party had to transform itself if it was to have any hope of returning to government. We were also fairly sure that neither Neil nor his likely successor, John Smith, could deliver that change.
I first broached the subject of looking for a parliamentary seat with Patricia Hewitt at the start of 1989. She smiled, an increasingly rare occurrence. Far from trying to argue me into staying the course with Team Kinnock, she had given up trying to convince herself. Working in the leader’s office, she was even more frustrated than I was about the prospects for the policy changes needed for renewal. With criticism of his leadership rising, Neil was in brooding, bunker mode. A change had come over Charles as well. His ebullient, can-do confidence was less in evidence, as was the banter with which he had always entertained, and sustained, the Kinnock operation – ‘Why, it’s Jolly Pierre!’ he would invariably greet me in my first years at Walworth Road. While I had undoubtedly become a bit less jolly myself, Charles’s morale had clearly suffered from the strain of projecting and promoting, protecting and preserving, Neil’s leadership against critics within Labour, and the media without.
Neil mistrusted, feared, and often despised the press, and would be upset by every unfriendly headline. He was using Patricia less and less, but blamed her when things went wrong – with sometimes distressing results that Charles did little or nothing to alleviate. She had begun helping Clive Hollick, a business supporter of Labour who headed the Mills & Allen billboard giant, in his efforts to equip the party for government over the longer term. Mrs Thatcher had entered Downing Street in 1979 with the core of a programme and a political identity – built, with Keith Joseph, largely on the work of a US-style think tank called the Centre for Policy Studies. There was no left-of-centre equivalent. With Clive’s backing, that was remedied, with the establishment of the Institute for Public Policy Research. Shortly after we spoke, Patricia left to become Deputy Director of the IPPR.
I mentioned my plans to Charles a few days later. He asked me to take Patricia’s place as Neil’s press secretary, an offer he repeated several times in the weeks ahead. No doubt naïvely, I did believe I might succeed in using day-to-day contact with Neil to engage him more deeply in the plans we needed to put in place to win the next election. But I had a caveat. I told Charles that if I made the move, I would want to keep open the option of going for a seat in the Commons. He insisted that that wouldn’t work, and he was right. Patricia’s place eventually went to Julie Hall – a bright, charming ITN reporter who became a close friend, and later the wife, of my most gifted protégé at Walworth Road, Colin Byrne.
I turned my attention to securing real change through the policy review, which was due to be published in the spring. At the end of January, I accompanied Gerald Kaufman on a trip to Moscow for the overseas equivalent of the ‘Freedom and Fairness’ launch. It was an intricately choreographed event, designed to pave the way for us to abandon one of our most entrenched, and electorally perverse, policies: unilateral nuclear disarmament. Gerald and I took with us the trade union leader Ron Todd, a long-time supporter of unilateralism whose presence would be important in making the shift credible.
As we had anticipated, Gerald was told in his meetings with Soviet officials that even the Kremlin saw Labour’s unilateral disarmament policy as an unhelpful distraction. They were also dismissive of the idea of bilateral arms talks, the halfway house favoured by some on the left. The Soviets wanted Britain involved in a multilateral disarmament process, alongside their talks with the Americans, a position they helpfully made clear to the travelling British press. Gerald held a press briefing in front of Lenin’s tomb in Red Square at which he took the first step towards abandoning unilateralism, by steering the reporters away from expecting separate arms talks between Moscow and a future Labour government. Gerald then left, for personal rather than political reasons: one of his more endearing quirks as Shadow Foreign Secretary was his ambition to sample the finest local ice cream on all his travels. For reasons that were never entirely clear, he had decided that Moscow’s best was to be found in the GUM department store, across Red Square. I followed up his remarks with further, off-the-record briefing that delivered the message more directly. Unilateralism, I said, was dead. When we finally released the policy review in May, it was. Labour would remain committed to disarmament, but ‘in concert with action taken by the superpowers’.
The policy review was called ‘Meet the Challenge, Make the Change’. With the exception of Gerald’s bold move on defence, it might more accurately have been entitled ‘Skirt the Challenge, Hint at Change’. There were a few significant changes, notably a retreat from the Bennite dream of reversing all Mrs Thatcher’s privatisations. But on finance, John Smith’s domain, we did not manage to jettison our high-tax, high-spending reputation. The booklet was glossy enough, the presentation sufficiently polished, to make some impact: for the first time since the run-up to the 1987 election, one of our internal polls even showed us leading the Tories. It also provided a platform for organising our campaign for the June European elections.
In the wake of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in April 1986, environmental issues would play a major role, leading to predictions that the Green Party might have a singificant effect on the outcome. Many in Labour were arguing for us to adopt a raft of new environmental policies, looking to the possibility of a longer-term ‘red–green’ alliance against the Tories if the Greens’ impact continued to grow. Though I was open to this, I came to believe that it should not be at the expense of a realistic energy policy, including a commitment to nuclear power. I was especially influenced in this by Jack Cunningham, a shadow cabinet minister whose constituency included the nuclear plant at Sellafield. He quite rightly feared that if we came out against nuclear energy he would lose his seat. In the event, I used my campaign briefings to make it clear that we would not close Sellafield, and left others, especially Robin Cook, to court the green vote by implying that we might well do so. With Colin Byrne and Philip Gould helping me plot the overall strategy of the campaign, I also played the policy review for all it was worth, which is to say I trumpeted the changes on defence and nationalisation, and skirted over the rest. I worked as hard as I had since 1987, coordinating campaign events, orchestrating media appearances and briefings.
Against resistance from most of the shadow cabinet, Neil and I insisted on retaining Bryan Gould as the main face of the campaign. Not only was he a proven performer, he was broadly Eurosceptic, and thus perfectly placed to play on the Tories’ internal divisions over the EU. As Bryan’s partner in presentation I chose Mo Mowlam, a young MP from the 1987 intake, a Political Science PhD with a sharp sense of humour and an in-your-face frankness about her. Mo was excited at being given her chance to shine. Afterwards, quite unnecessarily, she even went out and bought me a gift, a combination radio and television that would have pride of place in my constituency home throughout my period as an MP. Mo and I became good friends, and she and Bryan formed an effective team. Surpassing all expectations, Labour picked up fourteen seats in the European elections, while the Tories lost fourteen. It was the first election of any kind since 1974 in which we had defeated them. The Greens took about 15 per cent of the vote, though the first-past-the-post system meant they got no seats.
Despite media talk of a Labour revival, however, I suspected it was a false dawn. Judging by Neil’s mood, and Charles’s, so did they. In many ways, however, I was now enjoying my work at Walworth Road. The early fears that I wouldn’t be up to it were gone. I had assembled a talented, and committed, team, and the changes we had made to Labour’s public face – how our literature and launches looked, how we organised election campaigns – were now embedded. Our party and its policies may not yet have been modern in any real sense, but our communications were. I was even enjoying my role as the spokesman – or more often the stage manager, interpreter and spinner – for Labour in the media. Not everybody in the media enjoyed me quite so much, but I did build working relationships, even very friendly relations, with many journalists.
Ultimately, however, I saw my role as using any tool at my disposal to ensure that Labour, and Neil, were presented in the best possible light. I paid special attention to television coverage, because of its importance and immediacy, and because my time at LWT had given me first-hand experience of the mechanics of the medium. If that sometimes meant cold-shouldering those who made Labour look bad, I saw that too as part of my job. This stored up bad blood that would do me damage in the future.
I did sometimes have to use more direct measures. Before finalising the policy review, we had launched a nationwide publicity tour called ‘Labour Listens’. The idea was for a rotating cast of shadow cabinet ministers to hold meetings in which the audience would tell us what they wanted to see reflected in a future Labour manifesto. My touchingly naïve hope was that thousands of voters would take the opportunity to do so, and that their common-sense messages would prod the party towards changes in policy. In fact, it was a disaster. It began in Brighton, with Roy Hattersley chairing the panel. A Steve Bell cartoon in the Guardian captured the atmosphere perfectly: politicians rabbiting on in front of an audience that was snoring, or in some cases dying of boredom.
The nadir came in Birmingham, where, in front of a grand total of twenty people and a local television crew, the shadow ministers made their opening pitch and then asked for questions. A few hands went up. One belonged to an odd-looking woman who was wearing a very tall hat made of newspapers. I sent a note up to Ann Taylor, the senior shadow cabinet member on the platform, saying under no circumstances should she be called on. But before long, our lady of the newspapers was the only one with her hand up. As she began her incomprehensible question, I deliberately tripped over the wire linked to the TV crew’s sound system, apologising profusely to the cameraman as I regained my balance. ‘Labour Listens’ was not seen or heard from again. Still, despite the occasional rows and setbacks, and my frustration that we did not have a more attractive message to convey, I liked what I was doing. I felt it was important, and that I was good at it.
I did not, however, think that over the longer term I could best help promote a changed Labour Party from Walworth Road. I did not intend to leave soon. And not completely, since I still held out some hope of applying the experiences and lessons of 1987 to organising a ‘brilliantly successful’, yet victorious, campaign next time round. But I believed victory would be a tall order. Though my role had given me an increasingly prominent public profile, my ability to influence the change that mattered most – in Labour’s policies – was limited. I was certain that I would feel more fulfilled personally in the Commons, and that I could make a more useful contribution to turning the party round from there. My aim was, alongside Gordon and Tony, to become part of a new generation of MPs who would complete the work Neil had begun and bring a genuinely modernised Labour Party back into government.
The three of us were already working together. I began turning increasingly to Gordon and Tony as front-rank Labour spokesmen. Oonagh McDonald was no longer around, having lost her seat in the 1987 election, but other senior, or rising, MPs and shadow cabinet colleagues resented the profile they were getting. The fact is that they were the most effective and convincing means of getting Labour’s message across. They helped me as well, encouraging me in my efforts to gain selection as a Labour parliamentary candidate. Gordon’s role was largely tactical. Having come from the tough school of Scottish Labour politics, he was an endless source of advice on navigating the eddies of local party, and trade union, influence. Tony provided the critical, on-the-ground, support. He was convinced I would make an ideal candidate for Hartlepool, a north-east seat adjacent to his own, and when he learned that the sitting MP, Ted Leadbitter, had decided to step down, he took me to meet him. Our talk was warm and engaging, but inconclusive. It turned out that a key group of local party leaders had decided to sound out another, undeniably high-profile, aspirant: Glenda Jackson. I spoke to Glenda. Though no one had yet contacted her about Hartlepool, she was aware of the interest, and I told her that if she wanted to go for the seat, I’d defer to her. I meant it. I also sensed she would be happier with a London seat, as soon turned out to be the case.
Once that became clear, I threw my energies into trying to win support, both in the constituency and with the critically important trade unions. Masterminding my campaign was an astute and talented local party member, Bernard Carr, whose political skills were exceeded only by his ability to conjour up delicious meals. It was not easy at first. Although the national exposure I had got at Walworth Road was in one sense a big advantage, it was not without its downsides. My rivals for the nomination were understandably keen to paint me as an outsider, out of touch both politically and socially with the largely working-class constituency I wanted to represent. They especially delighted in dragging up, and embellishing, a media myth about me from a by-election campaign a few years earlier. In its final form it had me strutting into a Hartlepool fish-and-chip shop and mistaking mushy peas for guacamole. For the record, I have never mixed up the two. And I quite like mushy peas. In fact it was an American intern working for Jack Straw who had made the error.
While the invented version of this story didn’t help, as I began spending more and more time in Hartlepool, I found it to be the exact opposite of its parochial media stereotype. The scores of people I met during my bid to become the prospective parliamentary candidate in 1989, and the many thousands more I would meet as their MP, were almost without exception outward-looking and open-minded. And much too canny to be taken in by the guacamole story. The choice of candidate was to be made in mid-December, and I still have the outline speech that Gordon hammered out for me on his office typewriter as the basis of my presentation to the selection meeting. The theme was hardly revolutionary, but it was modernising in the sense that it championed social justice without linking it to higher taxes, ‘matching unused resources with unmet needs’. I think that what most won the day was my genuine enthusiasm both for serving the future interests of Labour nationally, and Tony-style, for engaging with and listening to my constituents.
During the run-up to the vote I had said that the first thing I would do if I were selected was to buy a home in Hartlepool, and I soon found a comfortable four-bedroom house on Hutton Avenue, near the civic centre in the heart of the town. It cost a little under £90,000. My mother helped with the deposit, and I took out a mortgage for much of the balance. The only sadness was that, to make ends meet, I would have to sell my wonderful little cottage in Foy.
In London, my living arrangements were also in flux. I was lodging in the Islington home of one of my closest political friends and her family. Sue Nye had worked as a ‘garden girl’, one of the Downing Street secretaries, for Jim Callaghan, moving with him into opposition, and had gone on to play a steadily more senior role with Michael Foot and now Neil. Her husband, the Goldman Sachs chief economist Gavyn Davies, was high-powered and wealthy. He was also informed and astute about politics, warm and generous and utterly without pretension. They offered me a room in their home until I could find a more permanent base, which I did when I bought a small flat in neighbouring Wilmington Square the following year. But my focus had begun to shift away from the capital, towards Hartlepool and the north-east.
On the day of my selection, Tony was in Sedgefield giving a speech. It would mark the beginning of his emergence as a politician whose weight and prominence in the party were equal to, and eventually greater than, Gordon’s. None of us realised this at the time. Weeks earlier, Gordon had finished first in the elections for the shadow cabinet, and was rewarded with a departmental role of his own, as Trade and Industry spokesman. The increasingly settled view was that he was future leadership material. Tony’s shadow cabinet brief had changed as well: he was now Employment spokesman. He spotted early on that the party’s support for the European ‘social chapter’ meant that a Labour government would have to abandon its backing for arrangements under which employees could be required to be members of a designated trade union. He also had the modernising instinct to make a virtue out of necessity. As I was addressing the selection meeting, Tony was telling his constituency party that Labour would no longer back the so-called ‘closed shop’. He spoke, almost literally, to three people and a dog. But by pre-arrangement with Colin, I made sure the media were primed to give Labour’s most serious policy shift since Gerald’s move on defence the prominence it deserved. The TV bulletins and newspaper headlines unsettled the unions and the Labour left, but gave encouragement to the growing band of ‘modernisers’ in the party. They also raised Tony’s profile in much the same way Gordon’s showdown with Nigel Lawson had done for his a year earlier. Before long he too would find himself being talked about as a future leader.
I was hugely excited by my selection as a candidate, and even more so at the prospect, in a solid Labour seat, of becoming an MP. But while I knew I would now be spending at least a couple of days each week in Hartlepool, I assumed that I would continue my work at Walworth Road. Within days, however, I realised that Neil, and particularly Charles, wanted me out. Neil was relaxed when I told him I intended to apply for the seat, because he assumed I wouldn’t get it. ‘I should not be hopeful, kid,’ he told me. ‘I wish you well, because I want you to have what you’ve set your heart on. But Hartlepool won’t have you. I know what sort of party it is.’ At first, neither he nor Charles seemed bothered by my increasingly frequent trips to the north-east to drum up support for my candidacy. I was still in London for any major media or campaign event, and in touch with journalists by phone when I was away, and Colin was doing an excellent job anchoring the operation during my absences. But when I won the selection, Neil was shocked, and Charles’s attitude hardened. ‘Betrayal’ was the first word to cross Neil’s lips, I was later told. ‘I should have known Peter would have conducted this like a military operation, every door knocked on, no stone left unturned, the charm turned on,’ he apparently said when he had calmed down a bit. ‘He deserves it, but it’s left us in the shit.’ On the Monday after my selection, Charles called me into the Shadow Cabinet Room in the opposition leader’s suite in the Commons. ‘I have never known Neil so angry over anything,’ he said. ‘You cannot stay. You’ll have to leave, and we’ll find someone to replace you.’ He added that if it were up to him, I would be clearing out my desk that day.
For four years, I had worked side by side with Charles. We could not have been closer politically. I had always viewed the challenge of overhauling Labour’s image as inseparable from promoting Neil as leader, often at the cost of friction with the NEC. I recognised that in fighting for my own seat, I was going to be less directly involved in the next election campaign, but I knew I could still help, and had assumed that, in some capacity, I would do so. To be told to clear my desk, without a successor or any continuity in place, struck me as rash and irresponsible. When I told Julie about my talk with Charles, she was alarmed at the idea of my packing up and going. So were Sue and others in the office. Philip was even more upset.
When they made their views known to Neil, he decided I should stay on until party conference the following autumn. Charles acquiesced. He recognised the advantages of my staying put for now, but was resolutely opposed to my having any role in the general election. He vetoed fresh appeals from Philip as the campaign drew nearer. I am sure that he understood my desire to stand as an MP. It was a desire he shared, and would later fulfil, and I suspect this may explain why he reacted so strongly to my doing so now. He also saw my decision as an act of flight, undermining Neil’s last realistic shot at power.
For a while, it looked very realistic indeed. Mrs Thatcher was being battered by protests against her Community Charge, or ‘poll tax’. She was in lethal cabinet combat with her Chancellor Nigel Lawson over whether Britain should join the Exchange Rate Mechanism, a system whereby currencies’ exchange rates were fixed within a series of narrow bands, linked to the German mark, intended to stabilise currency swings in preparation for a single European currency. Lawson wanted Britain to join. Mrs Thatcher did not, and had put him in his place by bringing in his rival Alan Walters as her economic adviser, a move that eventually provoked his resignation. In March 1990 I helped mount a by-election campaign against the Tories in Mid-Staffordshire, which we won with a 21 per cent swing, essentially by making it a referendum on the poll tax. In May, we made further gains in the local elections. By the end of the party conference season in the autumn – and the end of my five years at Labour headquarters – two separate polls showed us with a double-digit lead over the Tories.
I left Walworth Road in October 1990. Neil had the good grace to join me at a farewell reception for journalists, and he and Julie Hall presented me with my farewell gift: a huge portion of fish and chips, and mushy peas, all wrapped in a copy of that morning’s Daily Mirror. A few days later, Philip and Julie drove down with me to Foy for one of my final weekends before the cottage was sold. As Charles must have suspected, I continued to speak with Philip, and received summaries of his polling and focus group data, his analysis and strategy memos.
I had hoped that my job at Walworth Road would go to David Hill, Roy’s chief lieutenant. I felt his experience, seriousness and good relations with the media would mesh with Colin’s youthful energy and flair. That idea foundered on Neil’s unwillingness to have a ‘Hattersley man’ running the show. When I then lobbied for Colin to be promoted, Neil was supportive, and voted for him on the NEC. But his own staff spread the word that Colin was too close to me, encouraging NEC members to go for John Underwood, a former TV reporter who they thought would be a safer, and more easily manageable, pair of hands. Underwood saw the job very much in traditional Labour terms. Instead of acting as a change-maker, or in fact personally promoting Neil, he worked in concert with other shadow cabinet and NEC members, whatever shade of opinion they held. He and I overlapped for my final months. He lasted in the job for about a year, and when he decided to leave, in mid-1991, David was finally brought in.
I had been gone only a few weeks when the entire political landscape suddenly changed. After another test of wills over European monetary union – this time with her Deputy Prime Minister, Geoffrey Howe – Mrs Thatcher was challenged for the leadership by Michael Heseltine. She won the first ballot, but not convincingly enough to ward off a second vote. Initially, she said she would contest it, and win. Yet when one minister after another told her the game was up, she accepted the inevitable. On 22 November she announced that she was resigning as Prime Minister. Heseltine, having wielded the knife but failed to finish the job, could not strike again, and by the end of the month John Major – with just three months as Foreign Secretary, and a year as Chancellor – became leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister.
Neil was ecstatic. ‘It’s fantastic, kid,’ he beamed when I saw him a few days later. He had always felt rather intimidated by Mrs Thatcher, and had feared that Heseltine – rather than the untested, unpolished and uncharismatic Major – would follow her. I believed that Heseltine would have suited us in the long run. I thought he was too mercurial, too impulsive, too flawed a politician to unite his party behind him. Whatever John Major’s weaknesses, I felt he was sure to benefit simply from not being Mrs Thatcher, a leader the country had always respected more than liked. I also thought that we had made Major’s job easier: by focusing so much of our political fire on Mrs Thatcher, we had made her the issue with voters, rather than developing the policies necessary to defeat the Tories. I did not, however anticipate how strong Major’s political position would become in his early months in office. Domestically, he was the un-Thatcher; abroad, like Mrs Thatcher in the Falklands, he had a good war: the joint US and British operation in January 1991 to force Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi troops out of Kuwait.
Far from being at the centre of Labour’s response, I was now out of a job. My time at Walworth Road had transformed my political life. When I arrived, I was a junior producer of high-brow political television. Though it had not always been easy, I had acquired the tools of modern political communications and campaigning, and applied them in a way that had transformed Labour’s approach and image. At first, leaving was a shock. It was as if I’d run a marathon, or stepped out of the ring after a fifteen-round fight, to find that once the adrenalin rush subsided I was left with the aches and pains, and no new challenge to work for.
But the period before the general election would broaden and invigorate me in other ways. My first bit of good fortune was to have Dennis Stevenson as a friend. Though he was nearly a decade older than me, I had got to know him when I was chairman of the British Youth Council and he was head of one of its member organisations, the National Association of Youth Clubs. He became something of a mentor, first in my youth activity and then on every step of my political and professional life. Bright, cultured, generous with his time, he gave unfailingly wise advice on how Labour might modernise its economic policy and detoxify its image with the business community. Now he offered me a four-day-a-week position at the business consultancy he had created, SRU. As in my early days at LWT, I probably learned more than I contributed. I did work hard on a number of projects that were certainly a change from Walworth Road. For one client, I travelled to Denmark and the Netherlands to explore the market for chilled desserts. I was determined to pull my weight, especially since Dennis had agreed to let me build my schedule around my commitments in Hartlepool. Dennis, his high-octane partners like the London style guru Peter York, and their clients opened up a window on the business world. I got additional work with the help of another friend, the founding Weekend World editor John Birt, who was now Deputy Director-General of the BBC. I took on a part-time consultancy advising the corporation on how the different parties’ policies might affect it after the election.
My most important new connection with an old friend was political. Roger Liddle and I had drifted apart since the mid-1980s, first because I had moved away from Kennington, and then because we found ourselves on different sides of the Labour–SDP schism. The Fulham by-election had been painful for both of us, and especially for his wife Caroline. While we had had almost no contact since then, it was typical of him that when I came under attack during my selection campaign in Hartlepool, he leapt to my defence. I was accused of having come close to abandoning Labour and joining the SDP at its birth in 1981, but Roger, who had been part of the many hours of late-night discussions I had had with close friends at the time, refuted the suggestion.
When I was selected he sent me a note of congratulations, and we began to see more of each other. He was still in the SDP, or more accurately in the now merged Liberal Democrats, but he was starting to drift back towards Labour, or at least to see the possibility of accomplishing within a new kind of Labour Party the social democratic project that had inspired his original breakaway. He had set up a consultancy firm called Prima Europe, specialising in advising businesses on the implications of British and European regulation, and he now offered me a small, part-time role which I gratefully accepted. Roger would become a constant presence in my political life. Over the two decades that followed, I can honestly say that between them, he and Philip Gould informed every political, strategic or policy judgement I made. Early on in politics I had developed an ability to make decisions and stick with them. I also knew the importance of getting the decisions right. I invariably relied on Philip and Roger to reach a settled point of view.
By late 1991, I was concentrating on winning my own seat in Hartlepool. My direct involvement in preparations for Labour’s general election campaign was limited to a detailed note, at David Hill’s request, on the lessons to be learned from 1987 – ranging from the need to keep a tight day-to-day hold on events, messages and media coverage, to the imperative of avoiding burn-out in the final stages by setting aside time simply to sleep, as well as having a final-week campaign plan. I continued to talk to Philip regularly, and, if much less often, to Neil. I desperately wanted him to be successful. He had worked and driven himself hard, and taken political risks, to make Labour electable. But at Walworth Road, the unsettled aftermath of the Underwood interregnum had left Colin both exhausted and sceptical about whether there was any real will to win. Before long, he resigned too.
In October, I went to see Neil and Glenys at their home in Ealing. I could see a new desperation in Neil. He was very nervous about the coming election, and said he felt an inability to ‘find words’ for his speeches – an especially painful anxiety for a leader who relied so much on his oratory. He felt he was losing the battle against his poor image, and was upset at the favourable press Major was getting. As we talked, Glenys suddenly interjected: ‘Why don’t you have Peter back to organise things and get a better press?’ If there was any doubt of how low Neil’s self-confidence had sunk, it was clear in his reply. He couldn’t bring me back, he said, ‘because of the Mandelson myth, and what everyone will say about him pulling the strings and controlling me’. I left disappointed not so much by my own inability to help Neil, as by the growing feeling that no one could do so. He seemed isolated, down. It was as if the fight had gone out of him.
For a while, there were murmurings among Labour MPs, shadow cabinet ministers and the unions about replacing Neil. Some union leaders began quietly to canvass the option of John Smith becoming leader before the election. Gordon and Tony even went to see John to gauge his intentions. He replied that he was not interested. He said he did not think we had any chance of winning with Neil, but that he was not going to take the risk of taking aim at him and missing. So Neil survived the talk of rebellion.
My view was that even under a new leader, we would have a hard time winning. With the exception of our abandonment of unilateralism and a partial retreat on nationalisation, our policies simply hadn’t changed enough since 1983. With John’s commitments to £3 billion in increased pension and child benefits in the policy review, we would also be going into the election on a platform of higher taxes. And since he had pledged to unveil a fully-fledged ‘shadow budget’ before voting day, tax was sure to become a major issue. As the campaign approached, John finalised a package that would increase National Insurance contributions for anyone earning more than £21,500 a year. It was a formula for alienating voters of almost every class and background.
Neil knew this was trouble. He tried, but failed, to get John to scale down his proposals, and at least to phase in the NI increase. I am sure even John recognised the danger, but he felt it was outweighed by the loss of trust he would risk by a last-minute change to his tax or spending plans. Gordon, Tony and I also felt the tax issue would greatly hurt our chances in the election. But although it didn’t really register with me at the time, there was a nuance of difference in the reasons each of them objected. Gordon favoured John’s plans for increases in state help for pensioners and struggling parents. His problem was practical and tactical: how to pay for them, and how and when to announce and implement them. While Tony saw welfare increases as a commendable long-term goal, he felt that Labour’s priority must be to demonstrate to middle-class voters, and to our traditional working-class supporters who aspired to be middle-class, that we would not raise their taxes. We had to show we were on their side. That outweighed all other considerations for him. To the extent that I thought about the discrepancy, I put it down to the fact that Gordon’s political position was more delicate than Tony’s. His roots, like John’s, lay in Scottish Labour. Now that he was Shadow Trade and Industry Secretary, he held the senior economic portfolio next to John, making any appearance of disagreement with him out of the question.
There were growing strains in his relationship with John. Gordon’s rise through the party’s ranks had caused suspicions in the Smith camp that he might become a rival for the succession if we lost the election. These were being fed by Gordon’s oldest and bitterest Scottish Labour rival, Robin Cook. John got the head of the GMB union, John Edmonds, to phone me in Hartlepool late one Friday night with the aim of putting Gordon in his place. ‘I gather the mice are playing,’ he began. When I replied that I had no idea what he was on about, he said: ‘I hear you and others are trying to push Gordon. This isn’t helpful.’ I wasn’t, and I told him so. In fact, Gordon, Tony and I were all sceptical about whether John could deliver the change Labour needed. We had been talking, if only in speculative terms, about the merits of a ‘modernisers’ challenge’, with Gordon going for the leadership and Tony as deputy. The Edmonds phone call was obviously intended to pre-empt any such move.
It was followed, days later, by a more explicit signal. On the shuttle flight down from Edinburgh to London, John turned to Gordon and asked point-blank whether he would try for the leadership. Feeling cornered, Gordon answered in the only way he felt he could: ‘No, absolutely not.’ ‘Good,’ said John, ‘because it would not help our friendship if you did.’ Gordon was so worried about the veiled threat that he asked me to ensure that his undertaking to John appeared in print. I obliged, and later in the week a columnist duly reported that should Labour lose the coming election, Gordon would not be a candidate for the leadership against John. Nobody assumed that Neil would stay.
This did not keep Gordon from making his misgivings about the shadow budget plans clear to John. Short of going public, though, he was never going to be able to force a change. The Tories had no need for such scruples. On 10 March, the day before Major called the election, the Tories’ final budget took aim at our obvious vulnerability on taxes. Lawson’s successor as Chancellor, Norman Lamont, announced a new 20p income tax band.
To many in Labour, and to at least some in the media, we still had every chance of winning the election. We had a small lead in the opinion polls, even after the budget. The Tories had been in power for thirteen years. The economy was in the deepest recession for decades. Our manifesto was more voter-friendly than in 1987. But not by much. When the NEC met to sign off on it, Neil mustered a majority against a series of motions from Tony Benn, Dennis Skinner and their allies: a call for an explicit reference to socialism, a vow not to impose pay restraint, and a demand to phase out private beds in NHS hospitals.
Our campaign strategy was to play things safe, not to screw up, and to cling on to our poll lead until the finish line. David Hill did a highly professional job at Walworth Road, while Philip was an even more important mainstay than in 1987. We had a few mishaps, but none of them fatal. After the campaign was over, the media and many inside Labour singled out Neil’s final, prematurely triumphal rally in Sheffield as crucial to the result. I never believed that. Nor did Philip’s later research bear it out. It was our tax and spending plans, made starkly clear in John’s shadow budget a few days before the election – and the way that message played into a wider image of Labour as too extreme, too much of a risk, to be trusted in Downing Street – that sealed our fate.
My own campaign involved making my case to the voters of Hartlepool. Just because I was standing in a safe Labour seat didn’t mean it was fail-safe. I highlighted local issues, above all the need for investment and economic growth in a town still feeling the effects of the post-war decline of its staple industries. I also raised what would soon become a distinctly New Labour priority: the need for even a left-of-centre party to get serious about crime, and tougher on criminals. The personal high point for me was when my mother, always reluctant to venture into the political limelight, joined me on the campaign. The political high point was my result. The Tories added 1,000 votes, or 1 per cent of the electorate, to their 1987 tally. Our vote rose by more than 3 per cent, to nearly 52 per cent.
Still, I had no doubt by election day that Britain as a whole was going to vote in a fourth-term Tory government, and the national results were indeed the worst of all worlds for us. We had lost. But we had picked up forty seats, bringing our total to 229. The Tories, on 376 seats, had lost forty-two. The Lib Dems, with twenty-two, were two seats down on 1987. Though John Major would still have a comfortable Commons majority, the election had been close enough for many in Labour to feel we were almost
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Peter Mandelson
The number one bestselling memoir of one of New Labour’s three founding architects, now with a revealing new chapter updating this e-book edition.Peter Mandelson is one of the most influential politicians of modern times. ‘The Third Man’ is his story – of a life played out in the backroom and then on the frontline of the Labour Party during its unprecedented three terms in government.Much of the book is devoted to the defining political relationships of Peter Mandelson’s life – with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Charting what he terms the ‘soap-opera’ years of the Labour government, his book continues to ruffle feathers with an updated preface bringing the story up to the tempestuous present.
THE THIRD MAN
Life at the Heart of New Labour
PETER MANDELSON
Copyright (#ulink_2fc3e3ee-3aa7-54e1-a3c7-c3aa1eec46b3)
HarperPress
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
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London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
Published by HarperPress in 2010
Copyright © Peter Mandelson 2010
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
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HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780007395286
Ebook Edition © JULY 2010 ISBN: 9780007395316
Version: 2016-09-29
To my parents, Mary and Tony,who gave me my values and thebest upbringing anyone couldwish for
Contents
Cover (#uac02f699-213d-5040-b1ef-51ee2b747065)
Title Page (#uf24589fe-5199-5634-b5b4-4fcbdcb84148)
Copyright (#u80a213ee-22ee-5b39-9e0b-9880770b3fde)
Dedication (#u1cad147e-229d-57f3-9932-20a4aa20a32a)
List of Illustrations (#u54592dcf-40e9-5860-b6d0-5af9cadfe87c)
Introduction (#uf11aeba5-d781-56cb-af33-d1c0b22031c8)
1. ‘Can You Help Me?’ (#ue1a8a7ea-5b83-5996-a76f-2115466ed736)
2. Born into Labour (#u6bb44bf6-8a3a-5189-b2e2-32893144e489)
3. A Brilliant Defeat (#u961b4dec-11e8-5cea-b27c-3fe31c10aade)
4. The Three Musketeers (#u6da53539-1b31-5b88-b461-c1b747e8c998)
Photographic Insert (#litres_trial_promo)
5. An Impossible Choice (#litres_trial_promo)
6. Being Peter (#litres_trial_promo)
Photographic Insert (#litres_trial_promo)
7. Being Fired (#litres_trial_promo)
8. Fighting, Not Quitting (#litres_trial_promo)
9. Back in the Shadows (#litres_trial_promo)
10. Trading Places (#litres_trial_promo)
Photographic Insert (#litres_trial_promo)
11. Comeback Kid (#litres_trial_promo)
12. The End of New Labour? (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
List of Illustrations (#ulink_ecf3376f-8b1a-5825-8ea2-9b6f66457b14)
My maternal grandfather, Herbert Morrison, at the May Day parade in Hyde Park, 1939. (© Popperfoto/Getty Images)
My father and mother with my paternal grandfather, Norman Mandelson.
The budding young spin-doctor? On the phone, next to my father.
At Hendon County Grammar school.
With my mother and brother Miles at the Aldermaston anti-nuclear march in the 1960s.
With Gershom Nyaranga, Rural Dean of Musoma, Tanzania, 1972.
In my bedroom study in Princes Street, Oxford, 1976.
The Weekend World team at LWT. (© ITV/Rex Features)
Admiring the red roses with Tony Blair at the Labour Party conference in Blackpool, 1990. (© John Voos/The Independent)
Keeping a watchful eye on the platform at the same conference with Julie Hall and Philip Gould. (© John Voos/The Independent)
With Neil Kinnock in Clapham, south London, July 1990. (© Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)
The Labour candidate for Hartlepool in the 1992 general election. (© Trevor Humphries/Financial Times)
At the dedication of a bench to the memory of my father, Hampstead Garden Suburb, 1991. (© Nigel Sutton)
Fielding calls from the press on an early portable phone in my beloved home at Foy, Herefordshire. (© Paul Felix/Rex Features)
Key members of the shadow cabinet economic team, 1992. (© John Stillwell / PA Archive/Press Association Images)
With a group of school children in Hartlepool.
With guest speaker Mo Mowlam and friends at a constituency summer barbeque in Hartlepool.
With Prince Charles at a reception in St James’s Palace.
Planning the 1997 general election campaign with Margaret Beckett, Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. (© Tom Stoddart/Getty Images)
New Labour’s kings of spin: with Alastair and David Hill prior to our 1997 election manifesto launch. (© Fiona Hanson/PA Archive/Press Association Images)
A new dawn: the election victory party at the Royal Festival Hall on the morning of 2 May 1997. (© Brian Harris/Rex Features)
Minister without Portfolio: outside the Cabinet Office on my first day at work.
At the Millennium Dome site with Chris Smith, Michael Heseltine, Tony Blair and John Prescott. (© John Stillwell/PA Archive/Press Association Images)
John Prescott in conversation with his mate ‘Peter’. (© Ben Curtis/ PA Archive/Press Association Images)
Relaxing in the company of Sabrina Guinness and Mick Jagger.
With Bobby and Jack on the steps of Hillsborough Castle.
At Stormont with Tony and Bill Clinton, December 2000.
The Queen visits Hillsborough. Housekeeper Olywn McCarthy keeps hold of Bobby.
Making my resignation statement outside Number 10 after leaving the government for the second time, January 2001. (© Alastair Grant/AP/Press Association Images)
With Tony in Hartlepool, September 2001. This was the first time we had been photographed together since my second resignation. (© Owen Humphreys/PA Wire/Press Association Images)
Supporting the campaign for justice for the families of the victims of the Omagh bombing, 2000. (© Topfoto.co.uk)
With my constituency agent, Steve Wallace, in Hartlepool.
Anxiously awaiting the result at the Hartlepool count on the night of the 2001 general election. (© Carl Rutherford/PA Archive/Press Association Images)
Jubilation with my supporters after my victory is announced. (© Ian Hodgson/Reuters/Corbis)
At the Progressive Governance Conference in London, 2003 with President Lula of Brazil, Tony and President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa.
With Tony at the EU–China political summit in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. (© Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP/Press Association Images)
Arriving at the WTO talks in Geneva, July 2008. (© Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images)
Irish farmers protesting in Dublin against the proposed WTO deal. (© Collins Photo Agency, Dublin)
‘Cashmering my way into Number 10’ on my return to government for the third time, October 2008. (© Fiona Hanson/PA Wire/Press Association Images)
At the Cabinet table with Alan Johnson, David Miliband, Alistair Darling, Douglas Alexander and Ed Balls. (© Anthony Devlin/AP/ Press Association Images)
Gordon and I see the funny side during a question-and-answer session with local business people in Kent on 21 October, shortly after I rejoined the government. (© Gareth Fuller/PA Wire/Press Association Images)
Resplendent in my robes on the occasion of my introduction to the House of Lords, with Roger Liddle. (© Gary Lee/Photoshot)
On a return visit to Brussels, with the President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso.
In a military aircraft during my visit to Iraq, April 2009. (© Peter Nicholls/The Times)
Comeback kid: delivering my speech to the Labour Party conference, September 2009. (© Mirrorpix)
The Mirror headline the next day summed up the mood of delegates in the hall. (© Mirrorpix)
Dancing with Hannah Rita-Mackenzie in the Blackpool Tower Ballroom during the general election campaign, April 2010. (© Graeme Robertson/Guardian News & Media Ltd 2010)
On our final day in Downing Street with Douglas Alexander, Alastair, Gordon and Ed Balls. (© Martin Argles/Guardian News & Media Ltd. 2010)
Introduction (#ulink_0f5904b5-f8d1-5d70-b329-4aa75f7c40d4)
This may seem an odd admission from someone who once embodied New Labour’s reputation for spin and control freakery, but almost everything about this book is different from what I had imagined it would be.
Alongside Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, I helped to found the modernising project that became New Labour, and to win the party an unprecedented three terms in government. I was not just a witness to, but a participant in, the highs and the lows of those years. In the early days of our modernising project, journalists dubbed us ‘The Three Musketeers’, and the remarkable bond that linked Tony, Gordon and me was at the heart of all that we achieved, and failed to achieve.
When I decided to call this book The Third Man, it was not out of feigned modesty. No matter how influential each of us was, at different times and in different circumstances, in the creation and achievements of New Labour, there is an obvious distinction between us. Tony, and then Gordon, became leader of our party and Prime Minister of our country. By contrast, through much of our time in government, my influence was exercised largely behind the scenes, sometimes even in the shadows – another reason why the title’s echo of Graham Greene’s story of post-war Vienna seemed appropriate.
I first met Tony and Gordon in 1985, when I started work as Labour’s youthful campaign director at the party headquarters in Walworth Road and they were recently-elected MPs. I have a clear recollection of when I first brought the three of us together as a team. I was looking ahead to the coming general election in 1987, and had already identified both of them as very gifted politicians – they shared an appetite for hard work, a deftness for identifying political opportunities, and an ability to communicate with an electorate that was still very sceptical about Labour. Above all, they were attuned to voters’ feelings rather than simply to what our activist base wanted to hear. The role I had in mind for them was to work with me to develop campaign grenades for us to lob at the Tories when the election was called.
The two of them needed little encouragement. In the coming months we prepared our lines of attack, and when the election starting pistol was fired, I scheduled a press conference to enable them to release the first salvo. It turned out to be both the first and the last such occasion. Chaired by the sometimes acerbic but media-savvy frontbencher Gerald Kaufman, the event was organised so that Gordon would launch the initial attack on the Tories, before Tony stepped in to finish them off. Instead, he came close to finishing off his own political career almost before it had begun. Momentarily departing from the prepared script, he described Mrs Thatcher as ‘unhinged’. The journalists’ ears pricked up at the sound of the Prime Minister, then at the height of her powers, apparently being described as deranged or worse. To his credit, Tony’s antennae, even then, were in full working order. He quickly spotted the danger, and glanced at me from the platform with a pained expression that I was to become very familiar with in the years to come. It was ITN’s super-sharp political editor at the time, Michael Brunson, who leapt on the gaffe. ‘That’s a good line to lead the Ten with,’ he said, smiling, to me when I went over to the press pack to see what story they were likely to report. I managed to get Tony off the hook, telling Michael firmly that ‘unhinged’ did not mean mad, that it was Mrs Thatcher’s policies that Tony was describing, not her mental state, and that anyway, it would not be fair to embarrass a newcomer who was sure to be going places, and was therefore someone Michael would want to befriend.
This was the sort of incident that helped establish my reputation as Britain’s original ‘spin doctor’, someone who could ‘fix’ the news, or write the next day’s headlines. The Conservatives feared me, and inside the Labour Party some revered me, while others loathed me, depending on their political standpoint. It was no secret which side of the modernising argument I was on. Unfortunately, transforming the Labour Party would prove an altogether much harder and lengthier process than squaring hard-nosed political journalists, but at least from that time the identities of those who would lead the modernising pack began to be established.
From the outset, I knew that much of this book would centre on the defining relationships of my political life, with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. As I wrote, and relived my life in the Labour Party, I found myself recalling some of the despair I occasionally felt during the 1980s: the lurking, ever-present thought that our party might never form a government again, and the sheer hunger and drive this instilled in me to ensure that it did not happen.
I found that same hunger in Tony and Gordon, the two people who gave me most hope in those wilderness years that Labour’s best days might yet be ahead of it. It was not a hunger for office for its own sake, but for a modernised Labour Party that would build a more humane, tolerant and socially just country than the one we were living in during the 1980s and early 1990s.
The three of us became like brothers. The force of our personalities, and the desire for change that we shared with the team of political professionals we built together – people like Philip Gould and Alastair Campbell – would help to take us back into government and keep us there for a longer period than any in Labour’s history. We transformed our party’s attitudes to the economy, to markets, to state ownership, to defence, to business, to the trade unions, to tax and spending, to public service reform, and to individual rights and responsibilities. In doing so, we defined New Labour, and reconnected the party with the broad mainstream of modern Britain.
In government, this modernising project helped create the fairer, more generous, more open-minded Britain that will be our legacy. We have a record that I am proud of. Our public infrastructure – the essential services we all rely on – was rebuilt: the days of winter crises and longer waiting times in our National Health Service, and the crumbling school buildings that we inherited on coming into office, now seem like something from another era. Faster treatment for serious diseases such as cancer has saved lives, and the NHS is more patient-focused than at any time since its birth. Our unprecedented investment in schools and universities was combined with far-reaching reform to widen educational opportunity at every level, in particular during the crucial early years. We irreversibly improved attitudes to the work–family balance, acted successfully to bring about peace in Northern Ireland, significantly reduced crime, increased support for families with children, and promoted more tolerant attitudes on race, gender and sexuality. All of these achievements were possible only because of the project to which Tony, Gordon and I dedicated our political lives: fundamental change to the Labour Party.
In writing this book, I knew there would be no way to avoid describing the occasional soap-opera aspects of our relationship. I am conscious that my diaries and contemporaneous notes, on which this account is based, have focused disproportionately on the frustrations, arguments and disagreements we had, rather than on those areas on which we did agree and which, as a government, were the basis of our long-term achievements. Inevitably with such a close-knit group of strong personalities, there were family feuds, tensions and differences of opinion – sometimes of epic proportions, sometimes, in retrospect, far too petty. These were magnified and fed by the burgeoning twenty-four-hour news culture, the development of which accelerated during our time in office. But more often than not, particularly in the earlier years, the tensions between us were a source of strength for New Labour. And in the end, through all the strains, we held together – unlike Thatcher, Howe and Lawson, unlike the SDP’s Gang of Four, and even, going back further, the Labour trio of Crosland, Jenkins and Healey.
If any of us had reason to split from the others and break up the team, it was me. I became the meat in the sandwich in the struggle that developed between the other two. My falling-out with Gordon after John Smith’s death, when Tony rather than Gordon became party leader, would lead to my exclusion from government for lengthy periods, blighting my ministerial career. Yet I remained close to Tony, and I finally made up with Gordon.
Whatever my other failings, I am a loyal person, and I rate loyalty above all other qualities. There were many times in my political life when it would have been simpler for me either to keep my head down, or to change sides at an opportune moment. It would have been advantageous for me to desert Tony when he was battling for survival against Gordon’s drive to accelerate his departure and succeed him as Prime Minister. And I would have been applauded by many in my party if, later on, I had deserted Gordon when it was clear that he could not win re-election. Perhaps it is a fault to cling too dogmatically to an idea or a policy, but not, in my view, to a person to whom you have made a commitment.
The reason I did not waver in my support for Tony is that I believed in him, his political outlook and his skills as a leader. The more pressure he came under, the more steadfast I became, overcoming my feelings that at times he had let me down. Tony was not perfect. Notwithstanding the steel he showed towards me, he did not always enforce his will sufficiently with others to get the policy changes he wanted. But his personal conviction, and sense of right and wrong, were unflagging. He had great leadership qualities, and it was always impressive to see how he would manage to defeat his opponents more often than not by means of intelligent planning and calculation, rather than employing less subtle tactics.
The reasons I came back to Gordon in late 2008, rejoining the government even though I was enjoying my life and my fulfilling job as the EU’s Trade Commissioner, were that he needed me – always a nice feeling to have – and that I wanted to serve the country I love. I felt that I could make a difference when the financial crisis struck, and I strongly supported the policies Gordon was pursuing. I know that, later on, some people in the party felt that by bolstering Gordon’s position and keeping him in place, I contributed to our electoral defeat. One reason I did not take action was partly selfish: I did not want to be accused of ‘treachery’ all over again. But also, I was never convinced, so near the election and in the absence of an obvious consensual alternative, that a change of leadership could have been easily, bloodlessly or quickly achieved, or that having three different Prime Ministers in a single Parliament would have been an electoral asset. And I never gave up the hope that Gordon would be rewarded at the polls for his efforts in preventing a painful economic recession from turning into something far worse.
One of the things for which I have attracted criticism from the media is my circle of friends. I admit that I am drawn to individualists, to people whose achievements and strong personalities make them interesting company. I am more interested in what people do and think than their ideologies, and I judge them by their character, by their personal qualities, rather than by how they are perceived. There is no escaping the fact that people who are successful in politics, business, journalism, fashion or the arts give off energy, have thought-provoking insights and attract dynamic company around them. I enjoy this, and have a wide range of friends and acquaintances, mostly outside politics. I make no apology for that. I am a restless soul.
As I began writing this book during my final period in Brussels, I was uncertain about how much personal and political detail I should, or could, include. New Labour was, after all, still in power, and I was keen to avoid anything that might harm or embarrass the government, or Gordon or Tony. Or, frankly, myself. But the book I have written turned out to be neither trimmed nor self-censored. For one thing, I recognised that doing so would have made it not only less truthful, but also less rounded and less compelling. My time in Brussels changed the tone and the breadth of the book I have written. Away from the pressure-cooker of Westminster, I was able to establish a new distance from the events of which I had been a part. I also became more relaxed personally, more self-confident politically, and much less interested in the spin and the message-control which, for both good and ill, had defined my early years as a Labour moderniser.
The result is that I have ended up by writing what I believe to be a frank and truthful account of my political life. Unlike those in politics who appear able to go with the flow, I am not a neutral figure. I do not remember a moment when I have not been fighting for something or against something, or simply fighting back against the tumult engulfing me. While I am capable of changing my views, I am rarely without a view. Ever since I entered politics, I have stood for certain principles, and I have had a particular political outlook. I am on the centre-left, but I have always been open to fresh ways of implementing the progressive values I hold. The more involved I became in writing this account, the more I realised that I am anything but a mere fence-sitting chronicler of New Labour, or of the characters and relationships at its core.
The main sense, though, in which the book has turned out differently from what I had anticipated has less to do with my own choices or judgements than with what Harold Macmillan famously described as the determining force in politics: ‘Events, dear boy, events.’ As I began writing in earnest, I felt oddly liberated by no longer being directly part of the story I was setting out to tell. Tony had left office. Gordon was in Number 10. I was in Brussels, out of front-line British politics altogether. But then, suddenly and astonishingly, events took an unexpected turn. Not only did I find myself returning as a participant, rather than an observer. Once again I was at the heart of the story.
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‘Can You Help Me?’
The most fateful four hours of my political life were also the most surreal. They began on the afternoon of the first Thursday of October 2008, across a tray of sandwiches, yoghurt and slightly overripe bananas, with Gordon Brown in 10 Downing Street. They culminated in my return to the heart of government, at the behest of a Prime Minister who for much of the previous decade had denounced and denigrated me.
Our first quiet step towards reconciliation, the rekindling of a deep if damaged friendship, came seven months earlier and two hundred miles away. It was a crisp late-February morning in Brussels, my base as European Trade Commissioner since I had left front-line British politics in 2004. Gordon was on his first full-dress visit to the European Commission as Prime Minister. Before making his way to the imposing, glass-fronted headquarters of the Commission on the Schuman roundabout, he had arranged for us to talk briefly in the office of our permanent representative to the EU, Kim Darroch, down the road. It would be the first time Gordon and I had met since his truculent takeover from Tony Blair in Downing Street the year before. I was intrigued, expectant. And apprehensive. From the moment in 1994 when Tony had emerged as the irresistibly obvious choice to succeed John Smith as Labour Party leader, Gordon had convinced himself that I had schemed behind his back to deny him the job. As he surely must have recognised, that was unfair, and untrue. Yet in more recent years, as he and his allies waged their insurgency against Tony, he had come to view me as Tony’s staunchest defender and as a siren voice of alarm over how and where he was likely to lead New Labour.
I had spent the early months of Gordon’s premiership trying to keep my head down. But I was goaded during a Today programme interview shortly before he took over to observe a bit mischievously that while this might ‘come as a disappointment to him’, the new Prime Minister couldn’t actually fire me from my Commission post, because I had been appointed by the government to a full, five-year term. Yet I hastened to add a note of reassurance. I said I did not intend to seek a second term once my time in Brussels ended in November 2009. I assumed the new guard in Number 10 would recognise that I was playing an important role in delicate negotiations for a world trade agreement. I also knew that my ability to do the job well, and to finesse the interests of individual EU states along the way, would suffer if I were seen to lack the confidence of my own government. The more I could stay off Gordon’s political radar, the better, and my Today interview was a maladroit first move in achieving this.
Privately, I was still upset over the way he had treated Tony, and me. I not only resented the personal pain caused to me by his behaviour, and that of his parliamentary foot-soldiers and media briefers; in addition to their part in ending my own cabinet career, I felt they had kept Tony from delivering on key areas of New Labour’s policy promise to Britain. They had acted to weaken his room for manoeuvre and his legacy in government, well beyond the huge damage caused by the aftermath of the war in Iraq. But Gordon was now leader. I did not want to become a sulking, resentful presence, desperately clinging on to past bad feelings and finding fault in everything he did. At his first party conference as Prime Minister, in Bournemouth at the end of September 2007, I used an address to the modernisers’ policy group Progress not just to praise him for his part in the transition from one New Labour government to another, but to extol him as the man incomparably qualified to tackle the new challenges facing our country in the twenty-first century.
I spoke with more certainty than I actually felt – though neither I nor anyone else could have anticipated the vertiginous decline in Gordon’s fortunes that would begin within days of the conference ending. Still, the message of support was genuine. It was rooted not only in political calculation, or a desire to ward off trouble for myself in Brussels. Though my earlier doubts about Gordon’s fitness as Prime Minister remained, I wanted to be proved wrong. Before our spectacular falling-out, he had been my closest friend and ally in politics. I was intimately familiar not only with Gordon’s weaknesses, personal and political. I knew his strengths: intelligence, iron determination, and above all a grasp of the economic challenges that were increasingly threatening our country and the world.
By the time Gordon arrived in Brussels, the seriousness of the world economic crisis for Britain was becoming clearer. Fully-fledged recession was some months ahead, but the American sub-prime banking meltdown had claimed its first UK victim. The previous autumn, a run on the Newcastle-based bank Northern Rock had brought it to the brink of collapse. It was saved only by financial support from the Treasury. In the months that followed, Gordon and his Chancellor, Alistair Darling, tried desperately to find a private buyer for the bank. Only days before Gordon came to Brussels, they had given up, and taken Northern Rock into public ownership. I happened to believe they were right both to have worked for a private deal as the better option, and to have chosen nationalisation when that proved impossible.
The immediate problem for the Prime Minister was that he was now mired in a political crisis as well as an economic one. It had begun at party conference. While I was publicly on my best behaviour, I had seen it coming. For days, Gordon’s inner circle had been stoking up speculation that he was about to call an early general election. His first three months in power had gone extraordinarily well. He was confronted with a cattle-disease scare, but the effects had been less severe than at first appeared likely. Two attempted terror bombings had mercifully resulted in only a single death, of one of the terrorists. A spate of summer flooding was of course bad for those affected, but turned out to be less serious than feared. He had dealt with these potential crises in an assured way, and his supporters were hailing his strength and statesmanship. Going into conference, he was riding high in the opinion polls. But he was also an unelected Prime Minister – not just because our 2005 general election campaign had been under Tony’s banner and not his, but because he had not even faced a challenge for the succession inside Labour. Now, here was a chance for a mandate of his own.
But from the moment I’d seen the first of the media hype, I was almost sure it wouldn’t happen. Gordon – the Gordon I had known so well and worked with so closely since the 1980s – was a risk-averse politician. In 1992, he had shied away from fighting John Smith for the party leadership. After John’s death – in fairness because Gordon had finally realised he couldn’t possibly win – he had stepped back from challenging Tony for the leadership. Most of all, Gordon was cautious when it came to Britain’s voters.
As the pre-conference election speculation intensified, a number of the old Blairite stalwarts had phoned me in Brussels. What did I think? Would there be a snap election? ‘I’ve known Gordon for more than twenty years,’ I replied. ‘I can tell you when the date of the election will be – May 2010.’ Yet, by the time I arrived in Bournemouth a snap election was being touted as a foregone conclusion. When a reporter asked me to comment, I said the minimum I felt I could get away with. ‘I can see no reason,’ I replied, ‘why he shouldn’t call an election.’
Within days, it all went horribly wrong. I was back in Brussels, and the Tories were holding their own conference in Blackpool, when I suddenly saw TV pictures of the Prime Minister pitching up in Iraq, where he let out news of plans to begin reducing British troop levels. It immediately worried me. I had no way of knowing – at least until later – of the thinking behind Gordon’s visit to the front line. I did, however, know what it would look like: a publicity stunt during David Cameron’s conference, with our troops used as pre-electoral wallpaper. Then things got worse. Cameron’s Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, used the Tory conference to unveil a proposal to ease inheritance tax, trebling the threshold to £1 million. This was tailor-made to appeal to the aspirational voters of Middle England, who were not alone in feeling over-taxed as the signs of world recession intensified. They were the very voters who, by buying into Tony and New Labour, had helped give us three election victories. They were the voters Gordon needed, too. But they were the voters he understood least well, always a particular frustration for him because Tony connected with them so instinctively and so easily. To top it off, Cameron used his closing conference address to taunt the Prime Minister into action. Go on, he said. Call an election.
Gordon was torn. First, he ham-fistedly decided to steal Osborne’s inheritance-tax trick. Then, even before Alistair Darling had unveiled our version of it in the Pre-Budget Report – the series of government finance announcements made in the autumn prior to the spring budget – he announced that there would be no election after all. As if that were not damaging enough, he insisted that he had never been minded to call one in the first place. Having looked so assured as Prime Minister at the start of his time in office, Gordon was now portrayed – by Cameron, of course, but also by the media – as hapless and a ditherer. All the controversies and embarrassments that bedevil any government were fed into that narrative. Not only the serious issues that arose in the weeks after the party conference, like improperly declared Labour donations, or the loss of a set of computer disks containing millions of Revenue and Customs records, but even the frankly farcical. In December, European heads of state gathered in Lisbon to approve the amended EU constitutional treaty. Gordon, apparently fearing the political toxicity of the issue, at first feinted at staying away. He ended up managing not to have his cake or to eat it either. He went to the ceremony, but showed up only after the other heads of government had done their signing.
There was a further awkward moment when he arrived at Kim Darroch’s office some months later, at the end of February 2008, for what both of us must have feared could be a tense reunion. I was with Kim and a handful of aides when Gordon strode into the outer office. At first my old friend and more recent foe did not see me at all. After he had greeted everyone else in the room, I finally had to take the initiative. ‘Hello,’ I said. Gordon quickly replied: ‘Oh. Hi, Peter, hi. How are you doing?’ We made our way to Kim’s office, and settled into a pair of plush chairs in the centre of the room. I had expected that we would begin with trade, and we did. That was my job, after all. Our only real conversation since Gordon had moved into Number 10, a telephone call four months earlier, had been about the world trade talks. I was also fairly sure that both of us – by instinct, and from a sense of familiarity and partnership that went too far back to have disappeared entirely – would be unable to keep from talking about politics. Within barely a minute, we were not only discussing the big-picture issues Britain faced, we were talking about Gordon, about his government, and about the nose-dive in public support they were both suffering. It would be wrong to suggest that it was like the old days, as if the rift between us had not happened. But the conversation was easy, calm, and at times extraordinarily forthright – on both sides.
Gordon’s main concern, a theme to which he would return repeatedly in the months ahead, was that he was ‘not getting the communications right’ – not with the media, nor with the British people. My reply was that good communications required not just good, confident people and organisation, but clear, bold policy. ‘I’ve got all the policy, all the ideas,’ Gordon insisted. ‘I just can’t communicate it.’ I told him that was not always my impression. His policies had to be thought through. They had to be ‘prepared, bottomed out, agreed and owned by relevant ministers’. Instead, it seemed to me, he had been seduced by the idea that a constant stream of media announcements could take the place of hard policy. I told him he had to wean himself off these ‘announceables’. Policy was tough going, especially when it involved changing or reforming anything. You had to keep pushing uphill. Then people would start noticing that something serious was happening. That was where ‘communications success’ would come from. I was at pains to reassure him that there was still a real opportunity for him to regain the political initiative. The key, I said, was the economy. ‘You’ve got to present yourself as the guy with the experience, the big brain, to deal with the big problems,’ I told him. ‘That is your USP.’ The point I sought to make, as subtly as I could, was that David Cameron did have natural communications skills. Gordon’s task, one to which he ought to be genuinely well-suited, was to make it clear that his grasp and determination in dealing with the economic crisis stood in contrast to Cameron. He had to be able to portray the Tory leader as ‘the guy in short trousers, who’s good enough perhaps to lead a student protest, but certainly not to lead a country’.
Our talk had been scheduled to last for twenty minutes. By the time Gordon left for the Commission headquarters, behind schedule for his meeting with the Commission’s President, José Manuel Barroso, we had been talking for well over an hour. Gordon seemed more upbeat when we’d finished talking, and more focused on how to get a new hold on government. I felt oddly buoyed too. I realised that despite all that we had gone through, I still cared about him. I wanted him to succeed. And, if I’m honest, I was pleased he was seeking my views and advice on how to help rescue and repair the New Labour project that he and I and Tony had begun. It was also puzzling that he should start opening up to me in the way he had. Given all that had happened between us, he had reason to doubt whether he could trust me. Surely he had people around him in London he could rely on, without needing to talk to me?
Within days of Gordon’s return to London, leaving me in Brussels to wrestle with my trade negotiations, there were signs that our meeting had at least begun to repair our relationship – but also of how difficult it might be to break long habits of misunderstanding and mistrust. A first hint at reconciliation came just forty-eight hours later, when he phoned me from Number 10. It was ostensibly to say that he had enjoyed our talk, but mostly to discuss a speech he was giving a few days later, at Labour’s Spring Conference in Birmingham. I told him he needed to identify his strengths and play to them. People felt threatened by the economic storm clouds. He had had a decade’s experience as Chancellor. He was seen as having a command of economic policy. His task now, and his opportunity as well, was to explain what was really going on, and how he and his government would enable Britain to deal with the storm and to come to terms with the new economic order more widely, and indeed benefit from it. ‘People think GB is brainy, so he should turn it to his advantage,’ I scribbled on my notepad when we had finished speaking. ‘He should identify our national strengths and position, and set out an agenda to maximise these to our lasting gain.’ That, essentially, is what I said to him. It was also what he went on to say in Birmingham – sort of. The speech began well. Then it faded out. It started on the theme of ‘fulfilling our national ambitions’, then meandered, without any real emotional connection, into a patchwork of policy examples and occasionally catchy phrases. It lacked a central, driving political message, a coherent story of the difficulties Britain faced, how Gordon proposed to lead us past them, and why he was best-placed to do so. It would be several weeks before I next talked to Gordon. By that time, there would be a reminder of the old days, and the old mistrust as well.
After our meeting in Brussels, my press spokesman Peter Power, who had learned very adeptly to pick his way on my behalf between the shoals and currents of trade policy and UK domestic politics, was besieged by questions from the media. He fended them off with an admirably straight bat. The Prime Minister and Britain’s European Commissioner, he said, had had a ‘friendly’ discussion – about the world trade talks, about Britain’s place in Europe, and about domestic politics. When asked whether this meant I might now hope to stay on for a second EU term, Peter was understandably keen to find a way to dodge the issue. He opted not to be drawn, rather than reaffirming my Today programme pledge not to seek a further term. His reticence invited speculation that I was fishing for an invitation to stay on. When Gordon was asked to comment a few days later, he replied that I had done a good job in Brussels. His choice of tense unleashed a new spate of headlines. ‘Mandelson’s Hopes of Serving Second EU Term Crushed by Gordon Brown’, blared the Daily Mail. It seemed that old habits – mine, Gordon’s, the media’s – would die hard.
Gordon’s political problems were clearly on a downward spiral. Partly, as he had insisted to me, it was an image problem. Once the ‘iron’ Chancellor, and then briefly a breath of fresh air in Downing Street, he was now seen as a ‘dithering’ Prime Minister in political freefall. Worse, he had become not only a figure of disdain, but of ridicule. This sense was summed up by Vince Cable, then acting leader of the Liberal Democrats, standing up at Prime Minister’s Questions and deadpanning: ‘The House has noticed the Prime Minister’s remarkable transformation in the last few weeks – from Stalin … to Mr Bean.’
There were problems of policy substance, too. By far the most pressing was a legacy of Gordon’s final budget as Chancellor, three months before he had moved in next-door. As part of an eye-catching announcement reducing the standard tax rate to 20p, beginning in April 2008 – which meant now – he had axed the entry-rate 10p bracket. The unintended, and clearly unanticipated, effect was to damage those at the very bottom of the ladder just as the economic crisis was beginning to bite. The immediate result was the worst backbench rebellion Gordon had faced as Prime Minister. That subsided – only just – when he promised a package to compensate those who stood to lose out from the tax changes. This was the last thing we needed in the run-up to local elections across England and Wales on 1 May, and the results were disastrous. In the most high-profile contest, for Mayor of London, even Ken Livingstone could not stave off defeat to the Conservatives’ Boris Johnson. I won’t claim to have shed many tears for Ken. With an ego the size of the London Eye, and what I always felt was a facile populism, he had delighted in stirring up ‘real Labour’ opposition to Tony during our first years in government. Still, I recognised that his defeat was bad news. Even Ken’s image as a maverick, untainted by ordinary party constraints, had not saved him from falling victim to our declining fortunes. Nationally, we were not only outpolled by the Tories – by a margin of 44 per cent to 24 – we finished in third place, behind the Liberal Democrats.
I felt conflicted. Not about the results, of course. I was no less shaken than if Tony had still been in charge by our diminishing prospects of keeping David Cameron, short trousers or not, from ushering in a period of Conservative rule. Yet despite the renewed warmth I had felt for him in Brussels, I began to wonder whether even a more focused Gordon Brown, playing to his strengths, could really succeed in turning things round. I was by now intermittently back in touch with him by phone. Perhaps equally surprisingly, given Gordon’s role in hastening him out of Downing Street, so was Tony. Although now absorbed in his work on the Arab–Israeli conflict, his faith foundation and his business activities, Tony retained a train-spotter’s interest in British politics, however much, publicly, he wanted to keep out of it. He also cared about his own legacy, and how Labour was going to secure it and build on it. Like me, he wanted to offer support to Gordon, and I encouraged him to do so.
Tony phoned him in Downing Street the day after the local elections. He told him he had to push back, not to sound defeated, not to beat himself up. Yes, he said, he had to listen to what the public were saying. But what he really had to do – a message I was also conveying – was to reassert what government was doing, why it was doing it, and how it would improve Britain. He had to provide a clearer sense of direction, a strong reform programme. If he looked and sounded wounded, Tony told him, he would invite further attacks: ‘Be careful of what scent you give off.’ We both agreed, however, that Gordon was beginning to look bad, physically. Sleepless and grey. Fearful. On the ropes. No wonder everyone assumed that he was all of those things.
A few days after he had spoken to Gordon, Tony called me from the Middle East at my small, quirky Brussels flat, whose large windows I liked staring out of as I worked or talked on the telephone. He said he felt that while Gordon had the intelligence and the ideas, the drive and determination, to make a success of government, ‘none of that is the most important thing for a politician. It is intuition – what to do, when to do it, how to say it, how to bring people along.’ That, he felt, was Gordon’s problem. I agreed. Intuition, of course, was a political gift that Tony himself had in spades, and it had helped guide every step the three of us had taken in the long campaign to make Labour a party of government again.
After the local elections, Gordon scrambled to steady the wheel of what was beginning to look very much like a sinking ship. He brought forward his announcement of the government programme for the next Parliament. It proved to be a mishmash of the already known and the small-fry, and it was picked to pieces by the opposition, and even by some of the media pundits who at the height of Gordon’s war against Tony had cheered him on as Labour’s messiah-in-waiting. Nor was there any respite from Alistair Darling’s panicked ‘mini-budget’ in mid-May, in which he was forced to borrow £2.7 billion to cushion the effect of the 10p rate axe on at least some of the lowest-paid workers. In late May, Gordon faced a further electoral test, and a further body-blow. The death of one of my own early political allies, the indomitable Labour backbencher Gwyneth Dunwoody, forced a by-election in Crewe. The Tories cruised to victory in what should have been one of the safest of Labour seats, defeating Gwyneth’s own daughter by 8,000 votes. Gordon’s early contrast between his premiership and Tony’s was wearing perilously thin. The Brownite promise to an unsettled party had been that the Blair rollercoaster would be replaced by a calmer ride. Now it appeared we were going nowhere. Or very possibly off the rails.
In early June, Gordon called me again in Brussels. We agreed that I would come and see him at Downing Street when I was in London in the middle of the month. My role, if you could call it that, remained strictly informal. As far as I could tell, very few people knew I was back in touch with the Prime Minister. Sue Nye, Gordon’s office ‘gatekeeper’ and one of my oldest friends in politics, was in the loop. As for others in the inner circle, even those who knew Gordon and I were talking seemed puzzled about where this latest twist in our relationship was headed. That was understandable: so was I.
When I went to London, I arranged to have lunch with Jeremy Heywood the day before I was to meet Gordon. I wanted to bring myself up to date with how things were running in Number 10, and to see what I could do to help. Jeremy was now Permanent Secretary, Gordon’s top civil servant. In the early days of the Blair government he had been with Gordon at the Treasury, and before that, private secretary to Conservative chancellors. I had got to know him well when he moved to Number 10 and worked with Tony in 1999. When he arrived at the restaurant in the Royal Festival Hall, he was smiling. As he had been on his way out of Number 10, he said, Gordon had asked to see him. When he had explained that he was going to a lunch appointment, to meet me, Gordon had said he would join us – only to find that he couldn’t scramble his protection officers quickly enough. ‘The reason I made a point of mentioning you is that I’m still not sure just what your status is these days,’ Jeremy said. ‘I was afraid what Gordon might say if he found out. Now he says he wants to meet you this afternoon.’ I told him I had arranged to see Gordon the following day, but Jeremy replied: ‘He says he wants to meet you today, too.’ Looking back on it, I suppose that was when our real sense of reconnection began.
‘I’ve just been talking to Tony,’ Gordon said as I arrived in the upstairs study at Number 10 – Mrs Thatcher’s favourite room – from my lunch with Jeremy. I couldn’t help but chuckle. ‘Are things really that desperate?’ I asked.
‘Come on,’ Gordon replied with a broad smile. He told me he had read a speech I’d recently given in New York, on the need for new policies and institutions to address the challenges of the global economy, and said he wanted to find a time to talk further about what that meant not just for the EU, but for Britain. I felt flattered, which, I suspect, was his intention. Then, after only a short pause, he turned to a more immediate worry – his own political crisis. And he uttered four extraordinary words: ‘Can you help me?’
‘How?’ I asked, taken aback by his directness, and still feeling my way in this revived relationship.
‘By giving me your strategy,’ he said. ‘Only a few people in politics are strategists, and you are one of them. I need that. I need to know what you think of my situation.’
I had an instant in which to make up my mind how honest to be with him. I didn’t want to damage his confidence further, or put him off talking to me, but nor did I want to miss the chance to offer the kind of blunt advice I suspected he might not be getting from others. ‘Look, people have stopped listening to you,’ I said. ‘They’ve tuned out. They don’t know what you believe. They don’t know what your government is for. You have policies, but they don’t seem joined up.’ Gordon took this well, considering my directness, and replied by returning to his Brussels refrain. He did have ideas, he insisted. What he lacked was strategy. And he couldn’t communicate. ‘It seems,’ he sighed, ‘that you can be a good Prime Minister or a popular one, preferably both. But I’m neither.’
‘You’re a better Prime Minister than people think,’ I told him. I meant it, just as I genuinely felt that a Cameron government would be no better, and very likely worse, for Britain.
We spoke for well over an hour. It was not so much about what Gordon should do next. As I’d said in Brussels, the solution to that seemed to be straightforward, if not necessarily easy to achieve. It came down to developing the strong policy programme, and coherent message, his government seemed to lack. Mostly, however, we talked about how he had ended up where he was. ‘A lot of your problems,’ I said, ‘stem from not calling the election when you led everyone to think you were going to do so. It has meant everything you do is viewed through that negative lens.’ Gordon said he now realised he should have gone ahead. The political timing had been right, and with the economic crisis worsening, the opportunity was now gone. But he had been unsettled by last-minute poll figures in marginal constituencies. ‘They showed a very different picture from the national polls,’ he said. ‘They hadn’t presented it properly to me before.’ And the Tory inheritance-tax initiative had scared him off, too. He now saw that his copying of Osborne’s idea, and even more so his visit to the troops in Iraq, had made things worse.
But he had started so well in Downing Street that he had felt the run would never end. ‘I thought, because of my first few months, I was being seen as above politics,’ he said. ‘You inhaled your own propaganda,’ I replied. The image his media team had created around him at the start was bound to unravel. ‘All that stuff about single-handedly turning back the biblical plagues, the floods, the cattle disease and the terror bombers. Your people went around saying how strong you were, what a great, statesmanlike Prime Minister. They took their eye off what was happening in the real world.’ I felt almost cruel saying it.
Gordon was quiet for a few moments, and so was I. Finally, I said, with what I am sure he sensed was a genuine desire to help: ‘If you could start all over again, you would do things differently. You need a different way of working, a different rhythm, a different approach.’ I was not absolutely sure what that approach would be, but I was sure that the problem was not simply a matter of Gordon lacking the communications skills for modern politics, although that was what he always came back to. ‘I’m good at what politics used to be, about policies,’ he said. ‘But now people want celebrity, and theatre.’
‘Only up to a point,’ I replied. ‘Actually, it’s a lot simpler than that: they just want someone to make their lives better, someone they can believe, and believe in. If you can do that, they can dispense with celebrity.’
Gordon nodded. Then, after another period of silence, he turned to me quietly with the same four words with which he had begun. ‘Can you help me?’
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘We can try and work it out together.’ At that moment, I could feel my old sense of commitment to him welling up inside me. Suddenly it was nice to feel wanted, needed again.
The question was how to help. I think I had forgotten, over the years of estrangement, how extraordinarily complex a man Gordon was. He had huge strengths, and sometimes debilitating weaknesses. That was simply to say that, like the rest of us, he was human. With Gordon, however, the balance on both sides of the ledger had never quite been captured in the public image which ossified around him. Some bits of the caricature were accurate. Yes, he was bright. He was intensely, obsessively, political. He was fiercely ambitious – for himself, certainly, as his single-minded pursuit of Tony’s job had made clear, but also for the people of Britain. Yet all that was only part of the picture. At the height of the Brown–Blair civil war, I used to laugh at the media’s contrast between Blair as the headline-driven tactician and Brown as the ‘big-picture’ man, the strategist who looked beyond day-to-day trivialities and spin and focused on the issues that counted. As those who knew Gordon best and had worked with him closest could attest – and I had done both for as long as anyone in active politics – the truth was much more nuanced than that. Gordon did see the big picture, but he tended to create tactical opportunities, rather than a strategy to advance it. Tony, by contrast would conceive his strategy at the outset, and then paint a big picture in order to carry people with him.
It is true that Tony cared about the media. Both of us came to realise, the longer he was in power, that we had probably cared too much about what the daily papers and the TV news bulletins were saying. But even – indeed, particularly – in times of crisis, he never lost sight of the issues that mattered. He kept in mind the longer-term goal. Gordon, from the time I first started working with him in the 1980s, was transfixed by the media. He was also transfixed by the Tories. Tony, of course, also took on the Conservatives. The difference was that Gordon wanted to pulverise them, whereas Tony was more often content to outmanoeuvre them. Gordon’s life revolved too keenly around looking for opportunities to grab a front-page headline or top billing on the evening news with some carefully calibrated announcement or initiative. In some ways, he was a more innate politician than Tony. But he was also a more old-style politician. He had grown up in machine politics, in Scottish Labour. For him, politics was always a battle. He plotted a probing advance here, a flanking operation there. It was all planned to weaken rivals or enemies – sometimes in his own ranks, but ultimately the enemy that mattered most to him, and still did, was the Tories.
Yet it was Gordon the person, not Gordon the politician, who would matter most if he, our party and the government were to be pulled out of their tailspin. Despite my closeness to Tony, I had been much closer, much earlier, to Gordon when the three of us began the reforming crusade that would lead to New Labour. Gordon was the older of the two. He had deeper roots in Labour. He was the more driven political operator, the more obviously ambitious. He was the natural leader. That was one reason why Tony’s later ascendancy so hurt him, and so damaged the relationship between all three of us. On a human level, however, Gordon was buttoned up, less sure of himself – not of his political views, but of how he should handle himself in public. Tony was never clubbable in party-political terms. But he had a natural ease about him, a charm, an enjoyment of human contact. Gordon did not possess this easy manner.
I think Gordon’s uneasiness and vulnerability was part of what was now drawing me back to his side, part of what made me genuinely want to keep my word to him and to do what I could to help. It was not out of pity, though it did pain me to see him so bruised. Nor was it merely out of loyalty to New Labour, or my conviction that if Gordon and the government crashed to defeat it would be bad for Britain, although I felt both of these things. It was a sense of fellow-feeling. I had taken my share of knocks along the way as well.
Unlike Gordon, and much more like Tony, I was comfortable in social situations. I enjoyed other people’s company. I was at ease with most of them. Most of the time I was at ease with myself. I had interests and a life outside politics, especially now that I was in Brussels. But I too had had my periods of private doubt and private pain. I had endured, and only very slowly recovered from, the humiliation of being forced to leave the cabinet table not just once, but twice. The second exile had been particularly hard, because I had felt let down by colleagues, by Tony in particular. There had been other tough times as well. Over the years, I had become more thick-skinned. But what I had been through gave me an insight into Gordon’s crisis. He had reached out for help. The truth was that I had no idea whether that was something I, or anyone, could deliver.
When we met again in Downing Street the next day, I tried to get him to focus on the one area where the country clearly needed new policy certainty, and new leadership, and where he was well-placed to deliver. ‘It’s the world economy, stupid,’ I said, borrowing the Clinton campaign quip. ‘Your message has to be that we are steering through the worst and equipping people to benefit from the upturn, to make sure they, and the country as a whole, are not the losers.’
Almost as if a switch had been tripped, Gordon’s mood brightened. He spoke non-stop for five minutes, reeling off the challenges posed by the economic crisis, and the range of programmes – job creation, infrastructure, energy, education, science – needed to make Britain stronger when we got to the other side. He spoke of a redefined, less dominant role for government, providing a safety net for those in need, but above all encouraging aspiration and providing the skills and the conditions for all who worked hard to succeed. An empowering government. This was the Gordon I remembered from the 1980s, full of ideas, full of passion. It was also, I couldn’t help noting, remarkably similar to Tony’s policy agenda, which because of his deep frustration at his wait to take over, Gordon had done much to undermine, and had spent his early months in Number 10 distancing himself from.
‘You could have done all of this without dumping on the government of which you were a member for the last ten years,’ I said.
‘I never did that,’ he insisted.
‘Yes, you did. You couldn’t resist it. It was all that neurosis and pent-up anger about Tony, fanned by the people around you.’
He insisted that he had moved beyond all that now. I think we both knew, and Tony too, that some of the scars would always remain. But I sensed that he was right. The terrible political knocks he had taken, and the crisis facing the party to which all three of us had devoted our lives, made the old battles seem somehow irrelevant. As I left, Gordon put his hand on my shoulder. ‘The main thing,’ he said, ‘is that I want us to work together. I want to rebuild our friendship.’
Still not quite sure where all this was leading, I agreed to have dinner the following week with three of Gordon’s aides: his Europe adviser Stewart Wood, the long-standing Number 10 business policy adviser Geoffrey Norris, and his trusted former Treasury adviser Shriti Vadera, who had now become a minister. Knowing that Gordon wanted me to provide input from Brussels as their recovery project began, they urged me to do all I could to help. By the end of the evening I felt there was a real understanding of the problems Gordon faced, and a commitment to help turn things round, at least amongst some of those around him. He had changed, they insisted. ‘He realises how bad things are. He realises it’s personal, that he is the problem,’ one of them said. ‘He’s calmer than you would have expected. He’s mellowed a lot – maybe because of the children.’ They felt that Gordon’s strengths had yet to come through, above all his grasp of the economic crisis and his understanding of what had to be done. ‘But he doesn’t communicate easily, and the public aren’t responding.’ That may be, I said. ‘But if he hopes to get people to like him, or even listen, he has to speak in a language people understand, and to be seen as acting for the national interest, not party or political interest. He has to lead.’
With Parliament breaking up for the summer, Gordon’s first real shot to show that kind of leadership would come in the run-up to the party conference in the autumn, and that was what I urged him to focus on, especially as his problems steadily increased. The economy continued to worsen. Unemployment was rising. The property market was heading south. The political picture was, if anything, more discouraging. The ill-health and subsequent resignation of the Labour MP for Glasgow East, David Marshall, presented Gordon with a nightmare scenario: an end-of-July by-election not only in a safe Labour seat, but a Scottish Labour seat, in his own political back yard. Labour initially struggled even to find a candidate. When the votes were counted, we lost, on a massive 22 per cent swing, to the Scottish Nationalists.
Gordon was by then ostensibly on holiday by the Suffolk seaside. In fact, he was in nearly constant contact with aides, and increasingly with me. His mood was bleak. That was nothing compared to the rest of the party. A few days after the by-election defeat, Foreign Secretary David Miliband wrote a piece in the Guardian. The party must not succumb to ‘fatalism’, he said. Yes, we were down. We had made mistakes. We had waited too long to reform the NHS. We had won the war but lost the peace in Iraq. We had held power too tightly in Westminster, rather than devolving it to the people affected by what we decided. But we had accomplished much as well, and should not be shy of saying so. The next election was winnable, if we embarked on a new stage of New Labour to confront challenges that were different from those we had faced when we had first come to power. We had to deal with the economic crisis and equip people to emerge stronger when recovery came. We had, David argued, to give more control over the public services to those who used them. We had to build a sense of local empowerment and local society. David Cameron, he said, ‘may be likeable and sometimes hard to disagree with’, but he had no competing vision. He was ‘empty’.
On the face of it, the article was simply an elegantly argued rallying cry. It did not directly criticise Gordon, but it did something that was immediately over-interpreted: it did not mention him at all. When one front-page headline screamed ‘Labour at War’, David had himself photographed with a copy of the paper, on which he had scribbled the word ‘not’. His article was not, he insisted, the start of a leadership challenge.
Inevitably, however, with Labour’s poll ratings so low, media speculation began to build about Gordon’s prospects for hanging on as leader. The subject was becoming not just a source of speculation within the party, but a national talking point. When I next spoke to Tony, he was sombre about the chances for a political recovery. ‘It’s all very sad,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to help him, but without letting him lead us to disaster.’ He also left me with a request to keep in touch with David Miliband. I texted David. ‘How are you?’ I asked. He replied: ‘Large mountain ahead. Orienteering/climbing/planning skills much needed.’ I texted back: ‘Guides, sherpas available.’
David was aware how difficult it would be for the government to recover public support, and I wanted to lend my experience in helping to achieve this. But both of us were in difficult positions: David because, before deciding not to stand, he had been the one credible challenger to Gordon as leader when Tony left Number 10; and I because although I still had my taste for domestic politics, I wanted to tread very carefully, and not to interfere.
I was close to David, having first worked with him when he was a very young, and fearfully bright, policy adviser in the run-up to the 1997 election. I was certain that his newspaper article was at most an attempt to put down a marker, to open up a debate and inject new purpose into the government. I shared his hope that this would happen – it was what I had been talking to Gordon about. David and I shared something else, as well: alarm at the drift and decline since Gordon’s first few months in Downing Street. In this, he was reflecting a wider concern, in the party and in cabinet, over whether Gordon could lead a recovery. He told me he feared the Guardian piece had made him look divisive, but he still felt it had been the right thing to do. He had provided a ‘coherent message’ that many ministers felt was sorely lacking. He said there was no move to push Gordon out, but there was a lot of unease in the cabinet.
Tony was getting the same message. When we next spoke, he said his sense was of a fatalism enveloping Labour MPs: some thought Gordon was unsalvageable and should go, while others thought he was unsalvageable, but that they just had to accept it. I couldn’t help replying that if that was true, history might be tough on Tony: ‘You saved your own skin by constantly stringing Gordon along, and then landed him on the rest of us when you went.’ He said he was afraid that might be true. When he added that his real fear was that the British public had simply given up on Gordon, and that the party would sooner or later follow suit, I pointed out that he’d been there too. ‘The same would have been true of you after Iraq. The people stuck with you, but only just. That saved you. Otherwise, it would have been curtains.’ He replied: ‘I know.’
But I think both of us felt a desire, a duty, to help Gordon if we could. The key would be the party conference in September. Tony felt his chances of pulling through were not high, and that if he failed, a leadership change would become inevitable. I thought this judgement was right. ‘It’s not about loyalty to one man,’ he said. ‘It’s about loyalty to the Labour Party. It’s about saving the Labour Party. He has to completely rethink and reconnect. If he fails, it’s hopeless. He cannot stagger on. The public aren’t going to elect him for another five years.’ If Gordon failed, there was at least David. ‘He’s not perfect,’ Tony said, ‘but he has matured. He’s humble enough to listen. He has to keep going, be strong, show decisive leadership.’
Tony and David talked several times as the summer wore on. Tony became ever more impressed by David’s strength and political instincts. Gordon, he believed, had about a 20 per cent chance of pulling off an escape act and leading a real recovery in the autumn. Both of us had a duty to help him take that one last shot, but if he stumbled, Tony felt, there would have to be a leadership challenge.
In contrast to the last time David had been in the frame for a leadership challenge, when Tony stepped down, I had no intention of publicly expressing a view. When he phoned me in mid-August, I said that he appeared to be in a very different state of mind from the year before. ‘Not quite,’ he said. ‘I didn’t bottle it in 2007. I never intended to stand.’ What about other members of the cabinet, I asked. He said no one seemed in the mood to speak out unless they were sure others were going to join in: ‘There’s a lot of “After you, Claude” going on.’ David said there was no way of knowing how things would develop. He was anticipating the main argument Gordon and his allies would make to forestall a move: that the public wouldn’t wear a second unelected Labour Prime Minister. ‘If we do replace Gordon,’ he said, ‘we have to go for an election four to six months later. The moment you appear frightened of the voters, you’re finished.’
Whatever Gordon’s chances, I knew that he faced a steep climb, and that only by clearing his head and investing all his energies in an autumn recovery would he have any real chance of success. He was frustrated. He felt wronged. He was also obviously unsettled by the newspaper chatter about coups and conspiracies, and about David Miliband too. I tried to get him to put all that out of his mind. I was about to go on holiday myself, departing by easyJet for Naples to join Italian friends whose company I had enjoyed on Capri every summer since my first years in Brussels. When I called Gordon before leaving, to try to lift his spirits a bit, he was preoccupied with the party conference, above all with what we both knew could be his make-or-break speech. Though we spoke only in general terms at first, I told him the key was that it had to contain a personal appeal, to connect emotionally in a way he had so far been failing to do. It would have to provide the definition he had failed to offer when he moved into Number 10. I also urged him to seize the moment before conference by giving a few interviews in which he could set up his relaunch. He had to explain the lessons he had learned over the past few months, how his approach to the job would change, and how he would lead the government and the country forward. In other words, there had to be a genuine sense of reflecting and learning, almost of starting again.
During August, he became more and more anxious. He began to include me in daily, hour-long conference calls involving a tightly-selected group. How my participation did not become public, I will never know. I am also not sure how much help these calls were. Every morning on Capri I would sit in the shade, mobile pinned to my ear, and run through an array of ideas and themes for Gordon to put in his conference speech, and an accompanying policy document that would be published at the conference. As I later discovered, whatever we agreed in the morning would often be unravelled by further conference calls, with different participants, during the course of the day. So when we spoke again the next morning, we would often go back to square one and cover the same ground all over again. It was a cycle with which I became more and more frustrated, with nobody taking charge of the process on his behalf.
Gordon became jittery when I said that in his pre-conference interviews he would have to explain to people how his views of government, and his approach to it, had changed as a result of the difficulties he found himself in. ‘You mean Mea culpa?’ he asked, something we both knew would not come easily to him. No, I said. Just be honest. Give an account of why things had gone wrong. His message should be: ‘I have been able to reflect about what the country is going through, and about our response. These are real challenges, and I think we have to strengthen how we cope with them. This is what the government is going to do about it – this is where I was, and this is where I am now going.’
I also tried to steer him away from falling back on an urge to build the speech around a nuclear assault on David Cameron and the Tories – the ‘dividing-line’ approach he had first drummed into both me and Tony in the 1980s in his ceaseless quest for the killer opportunity to wrong-foot the Conservatives. ‘Dividing lines with the Tories can’t be your priority now,’ I said. ‘If you have any dividing line, it’s between the easier, simpler, original politics of New Labour when first elected, and the new politics of the economic crisis that we have to deal with now, and where the Tories offer nothing.’ He also had to be personal. Not soppy, not apologetic, but he had to reach out to the public, draw them in, and help them understand him better. Gordon warmed to that. He even drew a comparison between his past ‘struggles’ and those of Barack Obama – a parallel that I hoped, for his sake, would end up on the cutting-room floor.
Still, he was right to believe he had a compelling story to tell. He had struggled. With the loss of his eye. With the death of his and Sarah’s first child, Jennifer, in January 2002, ten days after her birth. And four years later, with the news that their youngest son, Fraser, had cystic fibrosis. ‘I have overcome setbacks and tests which I’ve had to struggle with,’ Gordon said. ‘My health, and my daughter, and my son.’ I sensed that this might indeed provide the emotional connection Gordon had so often lacked. It would ring true, because it was.
Gordon also called me separately at times to share his fears that moves were afoot to drive him out. During one call, he said he had heard that the former Blair cabinet heavyweight Charles Clarke was ‘putting pressure’ on David to ‘reveal his hand, be a candidate – saying he must do so or be discounted. They’re getting a letter together to say there must be change. They’re getting signatures for a coup.’ ‘Sounds familiar,’ I teased him, thinking back to previous attempts by Gordon’s own supporters to drive Tony from office. I told him there were no plots for a coup as far as I could tell, and there wouldn’t be as long as he focused on September and the conference, and got everything right.
He agonised, too, about his staff – and they about him. Now that I was in fairly regular contact with Gordon and his aides, I got both sides of the story. Gordon felt alone. He felt he needed to do too much – and very often, all – of the policy-making himself. He said, surprisingly, that was partly why it had occurred to him to bring me back into the mix, and that he had even toyed with contacting me much earlier, in May 2007, the month before he moved into Number 10, but had concluded that it would not have worked. Now he wished he had done.
In fact, as even his closest aides made clear to me, Gordon himself was a big part of the problem. At the Treasury he’d had a well-oiled machine, a group of experienced and gifted civil servants under the direction of a unique political ally, Ed Balls. Ed was so close to Gordon – so seamlessly identified not only with his thinking, but his ambitions – that he was Deputy Chancellor in everything but name. Now Ed was Children, Schools and Families Secretary. He was still very much part of the inner circle, but he was not based in Downing Street. He had a day job, and legitimate ambitions of his own. Running the government and the country was simply harder than running the Treasury. Shorn of Ed, Gordon lacked, or at least had not yet acquired, the new set of skills and staff members he needed. One of his closest advisers put it best: ‘Gordon is a hub-and-spoke operator. He’s the hub, and he works through lots of separate spokes, rather than an integrated machine.’ Another member of the team said: ‘He only trusts people in boxes, silos. He listens to them in that particular context, like he would use an electrician or bring in a plumber. He’s not geared to run a group that interacts, communicates with one another.’ They all agreed that there was no one – no Ed Balls – to pull things together for him, and that was the chief loss.
The more I spoke to Gordon, and to those around him, the more convinced I became that the key to any recovery was Gordon himself. With all his ideas, with all his passion, he seemed so distracted, so distressed, that I wondered whether he would be able to rise to the occasion at the party conference. It wasn’t just the politics he had to get right, I told him. Not even just the speech, though that would obviously be crucial. He had to look revived as well. I kept urging him to rest, spend time in the sun, exercise, eat well. ‘You’ve got to take care of yourself so that people get a different picture of you, as on top of the job rather than struggling with it,’ I said on one occasion. ‘If you look better on the outside, people will feel you’re more in control of things.’ I think he realised I was right.
Very quietly, he said: ‘It was all so wretched between us all – you, me, Tony. It was so wasteful! We could have achieved so much more. We still did a lot, though. Perhaps surprisingly.’
‘I agree,’ I replied. ‘What on earth were we doing? We doubted each other. We read everything into each other’s motives and actions.’
He was right, I said. ‘You saw everything we did through the prism of “We want to destroy you.” We saw everything you did through the prism of “You want to get Tony out.” It was a sort of mutually assured destruction.’
For my part, I couldn’t help but reflect on how different, and how much more fulfilling, my life had become since I had left front-line British politics. For a long time after my second defenestration, I had felt angry and resentful. Before I finally accepted that a third return to government was impossible, I had been fixated on finding a way back. I felt unfairly exiled. I felt incomplete without a seat at the cabinet table. That was no longer true. The new job had transformed me. On an unfamiliar and much wider stage, I had found myself bartering, bargaining and seeking common cause across over two dozen European states, and, in my role in the world trade talks, across the globe. I was still doing politics, but not politics as I’d known it. In the formative years of New Labour, ‘concession’ and ‘compromise’ had been almost dirty words. Rather than shying away from confrontation, we had sought it out, even orchestrated it. We were convinced that head-on battle was the only way the Labour Party would really change – and be seen to have changed. Our time in government should have altered that. In some ways, it did. Yet almost everything we accomplished in government, and the great deal we failed to achieve, was forged in combat – this time, between Gordon and Tony. My job in Brussels, in contrast, revolved around building relationships, alliances, coalitions. That was what had made it initially so challenging, and now so satisfying.
But the main reason I had come to enjoy my European ‘exile’ was personal. For the first time I could remember, I was out of the Westminster spotlight. For the best part of two decades, I had been defined by an increasingly malign media image. I was Machiavelli with a red rose. The Prince of Darkness. I had managed over time to come to terms with Mandelson the Media Caricature. I also realised that I had played a part in its creation. What had hurt most was the unbridled aggression with which the media sought out ‘stories’ to burnish the caricature, and to propel their narrative of what kind of politician and person I was. This had had a real and damaging effect on my career. It was certainly a central factor in my second resignation. Still, the media storm that had hastened my departure, however inaccurate or misleading, could at least have been seen as the press doing its job. The reporters and headline-writers were sinking their teeth into an issue relating to a public figure performing public duties. That was not the case with intrusion into my personal life, or the licence that reporters and photographers felt they had to stalk my every step, pick away at my every social engagement, home in on my every friendship and – as I could hardly help but recall on Capri – every holiday. I reflected, with a relief that would have been unimaginable in my higher-octane years in Westminster, that I was no longer news.
For equally unimaginable reasons, by the time my holiday was over, that assumption would turn out to be wrong. Three days remained before I was due back in Brussels. On the way, I was making a stopover on the Greek island of Corfu. Two months earlier I had received a phone call from Matthew Freud, the PR supremo married to Rupert Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth. Matthew had been one of the key advisers during my challenging stewardship of the Millennium Dome, and had become a good friend. I had also got to know Elisabeth well. Matthew was calling because he wanted me to come to Corfu for Elisabeth’s fortieth birthday party, which was being organised at the house there of my friends Jacob and Serena Rothschild. I imagined that it would be fun, and looked forward to spending a few days on the waterside estate, which I recalled with fondness and gratitude from the time I had spent there with Jacob and Serena after my first ejection from government. I looked forward too to seeing their son Nat, with whom I had also become close.
By the time I arrived it was Friday evening, just before the party was due to begin. The other guests – an array of yacht-borne Murdochs, and friends of both generations of Rothschilds – were already there. There was not a bed to sleep in at the Rothschild home. In part, as Nat explained to me with a smile, this was because one of his old Oxford friends was staying there: George Osborne, David Cameron’s closest political ally and Shadow Chancellor. Nat arranged for me to be billeted on a yacht belonging to another of his friends, the Russian industrialist Oleg Deripaska. I also knew Oleg, though not well, having met him previously through Nat. I was intrigued by his rags-to-riches story. Having begun life in a poor corner of rural Russia, he trained as a physicist, and had become a major businessman during the entrepreneurial free-for-all that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Not only had he become wealthy, he was also well-read, and voraciously interested in a constellation of social and economic ideas, as well as Russia’s future, which dominated his conversation. Despite later media suggestions that I had gone to Corfu to join Oleg for a holiday on his yacht, I barely saw him, except for an amusing episode in which, during an early-morning wander around his boat, I stumbled across a yoga session he and his wife were taking, and I happily joined in under the instruction of their teacher.
I knew George Osborne, too. We had never exchanged much beyond social pleasantries and that is all we did at the birthday party. It was not until the following evening, with repercussions that would emerge only later, that this changed. The remaining guests, about thirty of us in all, had arranged to assemble at a seaside taverna down the road from the Rothschilds’ house. I had fallen asleep in the evening sun, and arrived late. When I showed up, there were two vacant seats, one at each end of the table, and two simultaneous shouts of welcome. One was from Rebekah Wade, then editor of Rupert Murdoch’s Sun. The other was from George. I planted myself next to him, as he’d seemed the more insistent. For the next fifty minutes or so, we talked. By the time our remarks, or a skewed version of them, surfaced in the press a couple of months later, a central point would be lost.
Yes, we talked frankly, on both sides. But it was the kind of conversation political colleagues on opposite sides of the party fence have far more often than is sometimes realised. I had been one of the creators of New Labour, and the repositioning David Cameron and George were attempting with the Conservatives was in many ways being modelled on that. I was sceptical that they had learned the real lesson of New Labour: that it was not just about creating a new image, but required making tough policy changes and bringing the party behind them. But it was a fascinating and not unenjoyable chat, a bit like two golf pros comparing their swings. In fact, George did most of the talking. He spoke animatedly, initially about the Prime Minister. It was not just that he disliked Gordon Brown; he seemed consumed by his interest in what the Observer had once famously called Gordon’s ‘psychological flaws’. George recited a litany of slights he said he had suffered at Gordon’s hands in the months while he was shadowing him as Chancellor: Gordon had blanked him whenever they met; he had denied him the courtesy of advance copies of Treasury statements; on one occasion, George had phoned him only for Gordon to put the receiver down, or so he said. He was especially fascinated by the tensions between Gordon and Tony, saying that the ‘TB-GBs’ had made both him and David Cameron aware of the importance of sustaining their own relationship.
I listened. On occasion, I nodded. And yes, I added a brush-stroke or two to the psychological portrait George had obviously spent many months assembling. But I said nothing I hadn’t said to others at one time or another before. Nothing, in fact, I hadn’t said to Gordon. So it was difficult not to smile when, in George’s leaked version of our discussion which subsequently appeared in the press, I was said to have poured ‘pure poison’ about Gordon into his ear.
If anyone’s ear was scorched that evening, it was mine, as George expounded on what he saw as his and Cameron’s Conservative equivalent of our New Labour project. They had drained the Thatcherera ideology from the Tories, detoxified the party, he said, to make it electable. I said it had always been my understanding that the rising generation of Tory MPs and the current activists had grown up under Thatcher, and their thinking had been formed under her leadership. George said this was true only up to a point. The party was mainly made up of old people, not young people, most of whom were involved more for social than political reasons. In his own constituency, there were lots of divorcees, widows and widowers whose interest in the party was as a place to find companionship, or a partner. ‘They’re not interested in ideology,’ George said. ‘They’re interested in a Conservative Party that wins.’ His, and David Cameron’s, interest was also in a Tory Party that won.
When I returned to Brussels, I spoke to Tony on the telephone again. We both wondered whether Gordon had it in him to turn things round. My view was that neither of us could tell but that he had to be given the chance to try. Tony reflected on the messy way his own time in office had ended and Gordon’s had begun. It was not just the absence of the long-advertised ‘orderly transition’; what most upset him was that one result of Gordon’s final coup had been to short-circuit the ambitious policy review Tony had put in train to give a post-Blair government a fresh, but still New Labour, agenda. ‘It wasn’t my fault, the way he behaved,’ Tony grumbled. ‘I would have gone in 2004 if he’d worked with me, and if I didn’t believe the whole thing would be pulled apart by him and his people.’ He said he still felt Gordon had a great brain and energy. But, he added, ‘These have got to be directed at the right things. He’s got to go back to being New Labour.’
I don’t think either of us had any doubt that Gordon would return to London after the summer recess with a new determination to turn things round, but at the beginning, events did not help him. The trouble began, at least in Gordon’s mind, with the closest thing he had to an old friend, except for Ed Balls, in the cabinet. Alistair Darling – a Scot, a long-time admirer of Gordon, and his Chief Secretary at the Treasury after the 1997 election – was evidently feeling increasingly pessimistic about where the country was heading, from an already obvious economic downturn to something far worse, and, it seemed, frustrated at being constantly second-guessed by Number 10. He gave a long, and extraordinarily frank, interview to the Guardian writer Decca Aitkenhead at his holiday cottage in the Outer Hebrides. His remarks were not personally unkind towards Gordon, but he felt the country was ‘pissed off’ with the government: ‘We patently have not been able to get across what we are for, and what we are about.’ And he said he believed the recession would be ‘more profound and more long-lasting than people thought’. The economic straits Britain found itself in were ‘arguably the worst they’ve been in sixty years’.
The word ‘arguably’ disappeared from the quotes picked up by other newspapers and broadcasters when Alistair’s interview appeared. George Osborne had a field day, launching an assault on Gordon’s legacy as Chancellor and his ‘truthfulness’ as Prime Minister. Gordon was furious, because he felt Alistair’s comments were yet one more distraction from his hoped-for September recovery. When he called me, he was seething. I probably didn’t help things by questioning how he had allowed his media briefers to leak his plans to ‘go personal’ at the party conference – a bizarre theft of his own headlines that risked detracting from the impact of his speech when he made it. ‘I didn’t do that!’ he protested. ‘Well, somebody did,’ I said calmly, to which he replied: ‘OK. But we’re going from one improvisation to another. It’s ridiculous. I’ve got all these things to do, all this policy in my mind, but no means of communicating it.’ Then he got to what was really upsetting him. ‘That fucking Darling interview! It fucked up everything, absolutely everything, I wanted to do last week.’
None of us reckoned, however, on a series of events about to erupt five time zones away from Downing Street. They were hugely significant, an economic shock so seismic that they made Alistair’s interview seem understated. They began with the news that one of America’s most venerable investment banks, Lehman Brothers, might be going to the wall. Over the weekend, the US authorities scrambled to find a buyer. On Monday, Lehmans filed for so-called Chapter Eleven protection. It was the biggest bankruptcy in American history. World stock markets tumbled. Another British bank, HBOS, was soon showing signs of being in serious trouble. This was staved off by Gordon, who with a word in the ear of the Lloyds chairman Victor Blank encouraged a mega-merger between Lloyds and HBOS. By the end of the week, with the Labour conference convening in Manchester on Sunday, the economic news was becoming ever more worrying.
Gordon phoned me on Friday night. He said he had been trying to get me for two days – I had been at a climate change conference in Oslo, and had not been returning messages. He started by talking about his conference speech. It was clear the political ground had shifted. ‘Now,’ I told him, ‘you actually have something big to talk about in your speech. It really is the global economy, stupid.’
This was what we had been talking about since the summer. But now it was well and truly dramatised. The terrible crisis meant it was not just a theoretical and not just a political argument, but a real, immediate challenge. If Gordon got his message right, he had an opportunity to break through in a way he simply would not have been able to do before.
He agreed. ‘It’s not just about individuals and society. It must be markets as well,’ he said. His only doubt, one Tony would have found reassuringly New Labour, was how far he could go in attacking the markets. I reassured him that it wasn’t about attacking the markets, but individuals within them who had been acting irresponsibly, and that he should have no compunction about attacking them. But mostly what I told him was to put all his extraneous worries to one side: the so-called coups, Alistair’s interview. ‘Don’t, for God’s sake, let yourself get sidetracked,’ I said. ‘And don’t stop being prime ministerial.’
I was fairly certain now that, given the economic turmoil, Gordon had every chance of turning in a performance sufficient to save his job. Only a frontal assault from David Miliband was likely to spur rebellion, and that was not going to happen. For the media, however, the conference was shaping up as a tale of two speeches: David’s on the Monday, and Gordon’s on the Wednesday. David spoke eloquently, and ranged far beyond his brief as Foreign Secretary. In parts, he sounded very much like a leader-in-waiting. He echoed his July call for the party to choose hope, energy and new ideas over ‘fatalism’. But even without his unfortunate ambush by a photographer outside the conference hall, who snapped him grinning and holding a banana, David was not pushing for the leadership. Besides, there was no vacancy. Unless, of course, Gordon unravelled when he strode onto the stage.
He did the opposite. By some distance, it was the most powerful performance, the most effective message, he had delivered since his descent had begun a year earlier. It was personal. It connected. It had touches of self-deprecating humour. It played to his strengths. Galvanised by the magnitude of the new economic and financial crisis, he managed to produce what he had so far been failing to do. He offered a coherent reply to questions left unanswered for so long: What were the challenges Britain faced? What were the policies, vision and leadership needed to rise above them? And why was he the man to provide them? His most effective line, aimed at David Cameron, was: ‘I’m all in favour of apprenticeships. But let me tell you that this is no time for a novice.’ It was clever, it was simple, and it was what people wanted to hear.
I was back in Brussels when Gordon gave his speech, and was preoccupied with preparing for a trip to China and a speech of my own when I got there. Especially with the economic crisis deepening, I was keen to encourage expanding business and trade ties between the EU and the Chinese. But I was determined to press Beijing on our concerns about protectionist barriers, and China’s lacklustre attitude to enforcing intellectual-property rights. I watched Gordon’s address on television, however, and saw that it had gone well. I got two text messages that evening. The first was from one of the team at Number 10, saying very kindly that I’d made a ‘profound difference’ to Gordon’s performance. The second was from Sue Nye. ‘Gordon,’ it read, ‘says “thank you” for your help.’ As always with big set-piece speeches, especially Gordon’s, I was just one of many who had contributed. But it had been worth the effort. I told Gordon I felt it had been a good speech, the right message, effectively delivered, at the right time. What I didn’t say, in part because I was sure Gordon already knew and feared it, was that he had cleared only the first hurdle on the road to recovery.
By the time we next spoke, I was in Singapore, on my way home from Beijing. The call came in the early hours of the morning. He was upset by continued signs of discontent among an assortment of backbenchers, echoed by several former Blair cabinet ministers. There was a ‘plot’ to drive him out, he insisted: ‘The plotters are the problem.’ He singled out three former ministers as the alleged culprits: Stephen Byers, Alan Milburn and John Reid. ‘They are steering it,’ he said. ‘They had a plan, it misfired, and they failed. They wanted to wreck the conference, and they didn’t succeed.’
In fact, as far as I could tell, neither they nor anyone else had had some grand plan for conference Armageddon. At least for now, Gordon was safe. ‘You’re getting this out of proportion,’ I told him. ‘I don’t know why you’re so wound up.’ He was not wound up, he replied. But he was obviously distracted, and if he stayed that way, his conference escape could turn out to be no more than a very brief respite. ‘What you have to focus on now is the fact that we don’t have a strategy to win the next election,’ I told him. ‘The other stuff doesn’t matter. New Labour 1997 is not going to win it for us in 2010. It has to be renewed, reinvented. Nobody is doing that, and you have to focus on it.’
‘Can’t you do that?’ he asked, returning to a theme I thought we had finally got beyond in the summer. ‘I’ve got it intellectually,’ he said. ‘I’ve got the policies. I accept it’s different from 1997, and that now we’ve got to say what we’re doing next. But I just can’t turn it into a strategy.’
I put it to him directly: ‘You need a government team to do this. Perhaps you should wonder whether you may have contributed to making people feel less of a team. You have to rebuild it.’
‘I realise some in the cabinet feel ambivalent about me,’ he replied. ‘But others have got to show a lot more maturity.’
Sensing that we had taken this as far as we could for now, I said: ‘I have to show some maturity, and go to sleep.’
‘Why? Where on earth are you?’ asked Gordon, genuinely surprised.
‘Singapore,’ I said. ‘And it’s after 2 a.m.’ Gordon, profusely apologetic, and I, very tired, agreed to talk the following day.
When he phoned he was, at least briefly, in a brighter mood. ‘If it’s not after midnight, I guess I’m calling too early,’ he joked. But he remained unsettled. He was some distance from getting a hold on the team effort I’d been urging him to make his priority.
‘You get wound up about the wrong things and the wrong people,’ I said. I advised him not to make a big mistake in the cabinet reshuffle the press was now anticipating. I was worried about reports that he was planning to replace Alistair Darling with Ed Balls, which in the gathering economic crisis struck me as perverse. No matter how upset Gordon had been over his Chancellor’s interview, a vote of no-confidence in the Treasury was hardly going to help. ‘Some may think it odd,’ I said.
‘We’ll have to talk on a landline,’ Gordon replied, with a sudden air of mystery. ‘But I have a bigger plan than that – one which everyone will eventually say is good.’
‘A tactical nuclear explosion?’ I asked. At which, for the first time in ages, he laughed. He would say nothing more, beyond a suggestion that we talk again.
I was worried. From my experience, Gordon’s ‘big plans’ had a habit of creating as many problems as they solved. His conference speech would not in itself ensure that he and the government could recover, but it was a start. He had had one last chance at survival, and he had taken it. One more ‘big plan’ gone wrong would risk not just ending his short and unhappy premiership, it could leave the government, and the party, in even deeper crisis.
The next call from Downing Street came two days later. It was not from Gordon, but Jeremy Heywood. It began encouragingly enough, with an assurance that I would have an opportunity to weigh in with my views before the reshuffle warheads were launched. ‘I think Gordon will want to see you to discuss the reshuffle,’ he said. But then he too added, ‘He wants to do something quite big.’
‘In what way big?’ I pressed. He said that was something I would have to discuss with the Prime Minister. Apparently, Gordon wanted to do something that would affect me. This was getting more puzzling, and more worrying. I took it to be a suggestion of some root-and-branch reworking of the cabinet, with my job in Brussels offered as consolation prize to one of the victims. The prospect of my entering a truly final political exile came as a shock. It also seemed an odd way for Gordon to recognise the help I had tried to give him in his darkest hours. I did take comfort from the fact that I was better equipped to deal with being cast into the wilderness this time round. With my EU term ending in barely a year, I had begun to adjust to the notion of life beyond politics. But it was unsettling, and I said so. ‘He’d better not muck around with my job,’ I told Jeremy. ‘If this “big plan” involves getting rid of someone with a promise of my job, you should know I’ll be furious.’
‘It’s not that,’ he said. ‘We’ll talk again.’
The next call, on Wednesday, 1 October, was no more illuminating. This time it was from Gordon. ‘I’m going to do this reshuffle,’ he began. ‘I need to talk to you about it. I want to put an idea to you – something I hope you’ll go along with.’ He asked if I could come to see him in Downing Street the following morning. I said I would be in London anyway, for a briefing at the Treasury on the financial crisis, and I could see him after that. He seemed satisfied, but before hanging up he added very sternly: ‘Do not discuss this with anyone.’
‘Discuss what?’ I asked.
‘Nothing,’ he replied. ‘Just don’t discuss it.’ Since I had no idea what he was on about, that was easy enough to agree to.
Maybe my famed political antennae were not as good as they have been cracked up to be. Maybe Brussels had dimmed my Westminster instincts. Maybe, despite our recent rapprochement, I simply assumed that Gordon and I had fought so many battles that some sense of estrangement would always survive. In any case, when I discreetly entered Number 10 on the afternoon of Thursday, 2 October 2008 through the french windows at the back, near the Foreign Office, I was anticipating a conversation about the other potential jigsaw pieces in Gordon’s grand scheme. I took his and Jeremy’s hints at some role for me to mean, at most, another attempt to get me to play a part in forging the ‘strategy’ he desperately wanted. I had difficulty in seeing quite how that would work, but I was willing to listen, and to help if I could.
We met in the small wood-panelled dining room on the first floor. Gordon took a spoonful of yoghurt and unpeeled a banana. ‘I don’t like sandwiches,’ he said when I offered him the plate. Then he got down to business.
‘I need to do something big. I need you to join the government. I want you to help get us through the economic situation. You would do it at the Business Department, from the House of Lords.’
For a moment, I was stunned. I was also seized by panic at the prospect, even if Gordon genuinely felt he could make it work, of a return to the political jungle, and an end to a European sojourn that had turned out even better than I had expected. ‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘but I actually like my present job. I have things I want to finish. And I have my comfort zone.’ I had my work. My life. The protection I now felt I had from the frequent ghastliness of Westminster politics as I had come to know it. I had my travel, my friends. I was now on top of the Trade Commissioner’s job, and trying against all odds to play my part in rescuing hopes for a world trade deal, not to mention the intractable negotiations to update our trade relations in Africa, or the never-ending talks on Russia’s membership of the World Trade Organisation.
Gordon would not be dissuaded. He said the world trade deal was going nowhere fast – he had just been in Washington, and he was sure of that. I was pretty sure of it as well: its prospects were looking about as dire as Gordon’s before his conference speech.
‘Think of what you would be able to achieve back in the government,’ he persisted. ‘It’s a great opportunity.’ And he added: ‘We need you. We could work together.’
‘Well, it would certainly be a surprise for everyone,’ I laughed. Yet, except for the undeniable satisfaction I would take from an unlikely – more nearly, impossible – third return from the cabinet dead, I still found the idea unsettling. Gordon left me to ponder.
When he returned to the room, it was with Sue Nye in tow. He suggested that she and I speak. This was the start of a carousel of conversations, first with Sue, then with Jeremy Heywood, as Gordon departed and reappeared, joined the discussion and left the other two to urge me to see the logic of his proposal. It made sense from every angle, they insisted. It would be the right thing for Gordon, for the government, and for me. I was tempted. It was not merely the idea of returning to cabinet. At a time when Gordon and New Labour were in political crisis, and the country was facing an economic one, I did feel that I could play a part in making things better.
But for other reasons, I was still reluctant. Even in our resumed, long-distance relationship, I had been reminded that Gordon could be hair-raisingly difficult to work with. ‘It’s all too difficult,’ I told him. ‘I’ll have to talk to Reinaldo about it. He’ll hate the whole idea of becoming involved in British politics again – and the media. He’s suffered enough.’ Gordon replied that by all means I should call my partner, then hurriedly added: ‘If you want, I’ll talk to him.’ The moment passed. Gordon’s suggestion, like so much else when he was at his best, had been genuine, and generous. So too was his invitation to me to return to the top ranks of government.
I would not say no outright, I told him finally. I had to think it through. I also needed counsel from someone who knew both me and Gordon well, and whose instincts I had learned to trust. I said I wanted to discuss it with Tony. Gordon said that was fine, and we agreed that I would return by the end of the afternoon.
As soon as I left, I phoned Reinaldo. His reaction was not just surprise, but more nearly disbelief. Who could blame him? Yet as we talked through the obvious pitfalls, he came to the view that what mattered was whether the contribution I could make by returning to cabinet outweighed them. If I felt it did, I should do it. ‘But you’re right,’ he said, ‘to talk to Tony.’
When I arrived at Tony’s office in Grosvenor Square, he was in a meeting. As he ushered me in a few minutes later, it was apparent that Gordon had phoned ahead. Tony grasped my hand and laughed out loud. ‘You could not make it up!’ he said. But he added: ‘On the other hand, it has a certain logic. It’s a no-brainer. You belong in the government. The economic crisis is real. If the Prime Minister asks you to serve your country, you have to. It certainly wouldn’t look good if people got to know that you’d turned him down.’
‘He’s a nightmare to work with. It might be awful,’ I said.
‘It might be,’ Tony replied, ‘or it might not be. You don’t know. In the end, people will just say that you did your best.’
When I returned to Number 10, Gordon was waiting. ‘OK,’ I told him. ‘I’ll do it. I’m still not sure it’s the right thing for me to do. But I’ll do my best.’
‘It is the right thing,’ Gordon said. ‘I’m sure. You’ll see.’
As I left, I was in a daze. I did feel a sense of excitement, the surge of adrenalin I had almost forgotten in the gentler political climate of Brussels. The role Gordon had mapped out for me might turn out to be the most important and fulfilling of my political life. My new cabinet job would take me back to the now-renamed Department of Trade and Industry. It was the place where I’d cut my departmental teeth, where with a team of impressive civil servants I had done well, only to leave long before I had expected or hoped to. It meant that along with whatever ‘strategic’ role Gordon clearly wanted me to play, I would be at the heart of framing the government agenda where it mattered most: the economy.
I couldn’t help but smile at imagining what the media would make of my return. Outrageous? Astonishing? It was certainly both of those. But also risky? Ill-advised? Insane? I could only hope not. There was just one thing of which I was sure as I returned to my home off Regent’s Park, beyond the gaze or interest of reporters, at least until the news of the reshuffle became public. As so often when conflicting issues had to be weighed and a difficult decision made, Tony had been right. If the Prime Minister asks you to serve your country, you have to.
But I also knew that the reasons I had decided to come back, the reasons that in some ways I wanted to come back, were more complex than that. They had less to do with Gordon, or Tony, than with me. It is true that everything I had become as a politician had been marked by my relationship with New Labour’s two, very different, Prime Ministers. But the roots went back much further: to my time with Neil Kinnock, and with London Weekend Television’s Weekend World programme in the 1980s; to my experience in local government, the trade unions and youth politics in the Old Labour heyday of the 1970s; to my time at university. And to a bright white family home ten miles up the Northern Line from the Houses of Parliament, on a suburban street called Bigwood Road.
2 (#ulink_8ef4af3f-cf05-5132-a0b2-9c48a7aa97e6)
Born into Labour
Big Wood seemed much bigger to me as a child than it does now. It began at the top of our road, three minutes’ walk from our door. At the other end was an even larger expanse of green, the extension to Hampstead Heath, which bordered the neighbourhood where I spent the first two decades of my life. Hampstead Garden Suburb was the creation of Dame Henrietta Barnett, a Christian social reformer who believed that mixed communities with the feel of a country village would soften and ultimately heal the hostility of urban life. At the turn of the last century, after many years of charity work in the East End of London, she enlisted the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens and the utopian town planner Raymond Unwin to make her vision a reality.
The Suburb was less posh and intellectually self-important than Hampstead proper, which lay just over a steep incline and a mile or two nearer the centre of London. Under the Suburb’s original planning rules, there were no fences or walls between properties, only hedgerows. No shops were permitted within its boundaries. And no pubs. While the social activist in Dame Henrietta must have understood the attraction of a comradely pint at the end of a working day, the Christian in her could not abide the idea. The roads were wide, and trees were everywhere, bursting with white and pink and purple in springtime. It was a place designed for walking, and letting one’s eyes tilt skywards. The Suburb was centred on a lovely church square – St Jude’s C of E on one side, the Methodists opposite – and the adjacent girls’ school Dame Henrietta created, and which bears her name. For families, the Suburb was ideal. As a child, I loved it – an ardour that briefly dimmed when, as a teenager, I found it a bit too quiet and confining, but which I have since rediscovered. It was in London, yet not quite of it.
It was, however, very much a part of Labour London. Hampstead was home to Hugh Gaitskell and Michael Foot, but we had our share of luminaries too, notably Harold and Mary Wilson. They were near neighbours, just around the corner, and good friends. Their boys, Robin and Giles, were a little older than me and my elder brother Miles – Mary very kindly passed Giles’s rather scratchy Cub Scout jersey on to me when it was time for me to join the local pack attached to the Methodist church. My most vivid early political memory is from a few days before my eleventh birthday, when I watched the Wilsons negotiate a gaggle of camera crews and reporters, including the famous American broadcaster Walter Cronkite, as they left for Downing Street after the 1964 election.
A year later, the Wilsons invited us to Number 10 to watch Trooping the Colour. It would be ridiculous to suggest that as I walked wide-eyed through the famous black door I imagined I would return forty-five years later to watch the same ceremony as a senior minister, alongside another Labour Prime Minister. But I can’t deny that I was dazzled. Marcia Williams, Harold’s trusted political secretary, fed me large quantities of triangular smoked-salmon sandwiches and asparagus rolls. She even took my hand and led me into the Cabinet Room, and briefly planted me in the Prime Minister’s chair. I was conscious of feeling somehow special. Conscious, too, that part of that feeling had to do with the fact that my bond with Labour really began with my family. My mother was the only child of Herbert Morrison, the founding General Secretary of the Labour Party in London, a minister in Ramsay MacDonald’s 1929 government, and the first Labour leader of the London County Council in the 1930s. He served as Home Secretary in Churchill’s wartime cabinet, and was the organising force behind the manifesto and the election campaign that delivered Labour’s startling 1945 landslide, becoming Deputy Prime Minister and later Foreign Secretary in the Attlee government. As we left the Cabinet Room, Marcia introduced me to another guest sitting in the hallway, Clement Attlee himself. ‘This is Herbert’s grandson, Clem,’ she said. The former Prime Minister, either through advanced age or because he and my grandfather had not exactly been bosom buddies, looked at me briefly before grunting something inaudible.
My mother cared passionately about the issues that drove politics: I remember joining her on a march against Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech when I was fourteen. But her experience of the way politics had come to dominate her father’s life, often crowding out both her and her mother, left her with a lifelong dislike of the exposure that goes with public life. As a young girl, she told her father to keep her out of his ‘beastly politics’. My father’s connection with Labour was less genetic than my mother’s, but in many ways stronger. Unlike her, he was fascinated by politicians, and by the bustle of energy and argument that surrounded them. By the people who surrounded them, too. He was good friends with Marcia Williams, and became especially close to the quiet, stoical Mary Wilson, as she and I have always recalled whenever our paths have crossed since.
His own starting point was traditional, Old Labour politics. Maybe this was because his views were formed in the post-war years, when the division between Labour and the Tories was starker and simpler than it has since become. Maybe part of it came from his own DNA. He was born in Pinner, an outer London suburb not exactly famous for politics, or much of anything else. But his ancestral roots went back to the nineteenth-century Jewish community in Poland, then under Russian rule. His great-grandfather Nathan was said to have been involved in an anti-tsarist plot, and to have escaped retribution only by fleeing one step ahead of the secret police.
There is a temptation to suggest that my father inherited Nathan’s streak of rebelliousness and Jewish activism. Somehow, though, I suspect not. He never hid his Jewishness – indeed, he could hardly have done so. He spent nearly all of his working life as the legendarily smooth, gregarious and popular advertising manager of London’s Jewish Chronicle, the world’s oldest Jewish newspaper. Yet he remained a strident non-believer. I cannot recall his ever walking the short distance to Hampstead Garden Suburb synagogue, even on the Jewish New Year or at Yom Kippur; he certainly never took me there. Religion never figured in our lively dinner table discussions, although politics invariably did.
I suppose I was, however, dimly aware of my refracted Jewishness. Most Fridays I would have dinner with my friend Caroline Wetzler and her family, observing a form of Jewish family routine. Another of my closest childhood friends was Keren Abse, daughter of the poet and playwright Dannie Abse and niece of the outspoken Jewish Labour MP Leo Abse. I would occasionally go with my father to the offices of the Jewish Chronicle in Furnival Street, just off Holborn. His army of advertising salesmen and administrators were unfailingly deferential to him, and unfailingly kind to me. But my main Jewish Chronicle memory was when the man in charge of ad layout, Nat Goldstein, took Miles and me to the Hammersmith Odeon one evening shortly after my twelfth birthday, for a Beatles concert. I did not enter a synagogue until more than three decades later, for the wedding of my wonderfully loyal long-time executive assistant, Maree Glass. The ceremony was extraordinarily beautiful. I also found it oddly, and a bit regretfully, alien.
My mother and Miles, but especially my father and I, followed Labour’s internal debates and its battles with the Tories the way football fanatics would fixate on Cup runs or local derbies. Labour was not just our ‘team’, however. That does not capture the depth of the attachment: among our happy quartet of atheists at 12 Bigwood Road, Labour was more nearly a religion.
From childhood, it was certainly mine. Even before Harold Wilson left for Downing Street, I remember rushing home from school to listen to the results of the final ballot from which he emerged as Labour leader after Hugh Gaitskell’s death, then racing into the kitchen to tell my mother the good news. She never became carried away by such things. At election time, I would set out on canvassing missions around the Suburb – beginning, I am told, by tricycle at the tender age of six. Once, I even embarrassingly knocked on the door of Manny Shinwell, Defence Minister alongside my grandfather in the post-war government, to remind him to vote.
What I most absorbed from both of my parents was their love for each other, and for Miles and me. Both my mother and father had been married before. They met after the war at the London advertising agency Dorlands, where my mother, who had worked with the Quaker refugee service in the war years, had a job as a secretary, while my father was on one of the ad account teams. It appears to have been love at first sight, but it was complicated by the fact that my father was still married. My mother had divorced her first husband, the son of the Agriculture Minister alongside Herbert Morrison in the cabinet. My grandfather had been unhappy enough about that first marriage, feeling that my mother, then only nineteen, was far too young. She and my father kept their liaison pretty much secret until he was divorced from his first wife.
Even then, however, the idea of my mother having married as a teenager, divorced soon afterwards, and then married another divorcee did not exactly please her father, to put it mildly. I don’t know whether he had moral objections, but what is clear is that he did not relish the possibility of any gossip or criticism that might encroach on what mattered most to him: his political career. As a young boy, I would come to feel pride, respect and sometimes awe at my grandfather’s political status and accomplishments. Those feelings never entirely left me as I made my own way into national politics, but as I approached my teens, I also became aware of the effects of his all-consuming political ambition on those around him, above all on my mother. He visited us when he was able to drive himself across London from his home in Eltham, but his second wife did not make it easy, as she wanted to cut him off from his family and past friends. When he died in March 1965, a few months after I turned eleven, the first we knew of it was from a newsflash that interrupted the Saturday-evening film on ITV. My mother tried not to show her hurt, but I am sure she felt it as acutely as I did. She arranged for me to be excused from school to attend my grandfather’s funeral: my abiding memory of the occasion is of George Brown, then Labour’s voluble deputy leader, telling me off for my politically inappropriate dress sense – I was wearing a blue tie.
The authority in our family came from my mother. She was by far the quieter of my parents, but she was a source of unquestioned support for all of us. She had an elegance, almost a regality about her: my childhood friends and I called her ‘Duchess’. That is how I remember her to this day. But she had steel. Never raising her voice, she instilled in Miles and me a sense of good manners, of propriety, right and wrong. Her silent opprobrium when we strayed beyond the boundaries was far more effective than any scolding or punishment would have been.
My father was in many ways her opposite. Though his real name was George, he was universally known as Tony, ever since he had served as an officer in the Royal Dragoons during the war. He dressed impeccably, and had the bearing of a City gent rather than an advertising salesman. He had a wonderful, waspish sense of humour and fun, and revelled in being with people, until he shut the front door behind him each evening and propped himself up on his bed, smoking his pipe, surrounded by his books and newspapers. In his later years he became a Suburb personality as chairman of the residents’ association. He sallied forth almost daily, walking stick in hand, sometimes with his wartime binoculars around his neck, to ensure that Dame Henrietta’s sylvan planning restrictions were surviving the era of two-Volvo families and paved-over front gardens.
As a child, I remember feeling slightly embarrassed at times by the showman in my father. As an adult, however, I would come to recognise that much of my own political passion and public personality came from him. My brother Miles, who is four years older than me, and was always more tranquil and reflective, saw this earlier and more keenly than I did. Having gone on to qualify as a clinical psychologist, he contributed his insights into how each of our family jigsaw pieces fitted together for a biography the journalist Donald Macintyre wrote about me in the 1990s. They were striking and, I am sure, accurate. Miles was always much more like my mother, he observed, while I am more like my father. But growing up, the attachments we formed with our parents were a mirror image of this. I was much closer to my mother, rather doting on her, and Miles to my father.
Perhaps because my father and I were alike in so many ways, there was a certain friction between us. Especially where politics was concerned – and more than ever when my first-hand experience of Labour in the 1980s convinced me that the party had to take on the hard left if it was to survive. Even before then, it was clear that his view of Labour and mine were likely to diverge. I remember the two of us visiting a Suburb neighbour named Hans Janitschek on a bright Sunday morning in 1972. Janitschek was an Austrian writer who was then Secretary General of the Socialist International. A modern European Social Democrat, I remember him saying that he feared Labour was risking a ‘dangerous’ swerve to the left. Harold Wilson had lost the 1970 general election, and Tony Benn and his allies had led a successful campaign to get Labour’s National Executive Committee to adopt a leftist policy programme. Harold evidently concluded that since the party wasn’t going to re-enter government anytime soon, there was no particular urgency about taking them on. Janitschek was convinced – rightly, of course – that this inaction would come back to haunt Labour, and that sooner or later a battle over policy and ideology would have to be fought. I listened intently as my father not only defended Harold’s apparent insouciance, but said that he felt the socialist ideologues should be given latitude and tolerance. For him, that was part of what being Labour was all about.
I loved both of my parents dearly. Even now, two decades after my father’s death and four years after my mother’s, there is barely a day when I don’t think of them. My mother’s memory, especially, still lives with me. But my father’s too. Events in my life, in politics, the places I go, often rekindle recollections of them. In the waning days of Gordon Brown’s government, I was in Regent’s Park for an early-morning stroll when I saw a man with a cane trying to make his way up one of the paths. My mind instantly flashed back to the array of walking sticks my father kept in the front hall, and the old army greatcoat he used to throw over his shoulders as he ventured out in his role as one-man Suburb conservation force. I smiled at the image. He was so full of life and energy and élan, so passionate about what he believed in. He was such a presence. And, as Miles still reminds me, so much like the person and politician I became.
In many ways, we led a charmed childhood. My Euro-enthusiasm as a politician grew from roots planted then. From the time I was a small child, my parents took us on summer holidays in Europe. Every August we would go somewhere new: Ibiza, Brittany, Italy and Elba. We would stay either on campsites or in an inexpensive pension or hotel. I remember one year we camped in the grounds of a monastery in Tuscany. A group of monks stood watching the silhouette of my mother inside her tent as she combed her waist-length hair. For a few years we shared our holidays with an American family we had met, from San Francisco. They had three boys, and together the two families travelled round in a – very crowded – VW camper van.
When I was ten, we settled into a pattern of going to Spain’s Costa Brava every summer. It was nowhere near as built-up then as it is now. We stayed a few miles down the coast from Rosas, at a place called Almadraba which consisted of a few dozen very basic chalets tucked away from the beach. Over dinner, my mother and father would give Miles and me a half-glass of wine, and very occasionally a tiny portion of Cointreau with ice as a nightcap. If I remember rightly, I drank more than Miles. Perhaps in part because of this distinctly Continental introduction to alcohol, I now drink only in moderation: wine and whisky.
Another effect of our Spanish summers proved slightly more painful. With light-coloured skin like my mother, and the more cavalier attitude towards such things that I got from my father, I would invariably neglect the sun lotion and quickly burn to a bright red. I still do when I’m not careful. Nor was my immersion in the sporting life of the Costa Brava especially successful. For two years running I tried – and failed – to learn how to water-ski, as everyone on the beach watched my repeated humiliation. I finally abandoned my efforts.
While the summers on the Costa Brava were idyllic for me as a child, politically, of course, Spain was no idyll. Franco was in power, and I am not sure how my parents reconciled our holidays there with their solid Labour sympathy for the republican side in the civil war. I do remember that we mollified my grandfather by bringing him a box of his favourite cigars after each holiday. He would drive over for Saturday lunch to collect them on our return.
The Suburb may have been created as a socially mixed urban utopia, but by the time I was born half a century later, it was decidedly middle-class. The more thrusting families aspired to send their children to the nearby four-hundred-year-old Highgate School, or to University College School in Hampstead. Although my parents might have been able to afford the fees, it would not have occurred to them to enrol us anywhere but at a state school. Anyway, they preferred to spend their money on our budget summer holidays in Europe. After Miles and I left Garden Suburb Primary, a short walk away on the other side of Big Wood, we moved on to Hendon County Grammar School. Under its dauntingly traditionalist head teacher, E.W. Maynard Potts, it was intellectually rigorous, and very strict. I did well academically. I enjoyed learning from, and on occasion jousting with, most of my teachers, especially about politics. I remember bringing a geography lesson to a standstill as our teacher, Mr Chapman, and I argued about the implications of the collapse of Barbara Castle’s trade-union reform White Paper, In Place of Strife. He said the retreat was a political disaster. I knew he was right, of course, but loyally defended the government’s corner.
I made some extraordinarily close friendships at school, above all with Keren Abse and a Hendon boy named Stephen Howell, who shared my teenage enthusiasm for all things political, and who remains close to me today. The two of them used to kid me about being something of a Labour anorak. Not only was I by now thoroughly conversant with the policy debates in the party, but particularly on long car journeys, I played what we called the ‘constituency game’. Boringly, and at length, I would try to name the sitting Labour MP for every constituency they could think of. Nevertheless, we became an inseparable trio. When we were sixteen, Steve’s grandmother and aunt, both Hendon Labour activists, suggested that we rekindle the dormant local branch of the Young Socialists. I became chairman, Steve the secretary, and Keren the slightly less politically obsessive glue that held our founding cell together. By the time of our inaugural meeting in March 1970, we had cajoled two dozen others to enlist in the cause. My mother no doubt shuddered at the thought that I might end up joining the breed she so disliked, and become a politician. If so, she didn’t show it. She provided a warm welcome to my comrades in arms, complete with egg-and-tomato sandwiches and hot chocolate, for our after-school meetings. She typed out our slightly overblown screeds for the monthly YS newsletter, and remained unruffled when the three of us were summarily thrown out of Hendon Town Hall during the 1970 election campaign for heckling the Conservative candidate. After the election, which ended in a Tory victory and brought Edward Heath into Downing Street, she even joined us on a demonstration against the new government’s Industrial Relations Bill. Mr Potts was less sanguine, threatening to expel me for my unruly activism. He was deterred only by the intervention of a strong-willed, and thoroughly Labour, school governor.
My politics began spilling into my school life, to Mr Potts’s alarm. In common with other grammars, Hendon County had found itself caught up in the Labour government’s campaign to end the 11-Plus examination and move to comprehensive secondary schooling. Mr Potts was dead against this, and was horrified when Steve, Keren and I joined with our YS comrades in campaigning for an end to selection and a merger with a nearby secondary modern. He denounced us to a school assembly as ‘industrial militants trying to tear apart the fabric of our school community’ – before taking early retirement, possibly to escape the spectre of the advancing Communist hordes.
When Steve and I became prefects in the lower sixth, we found ourselves at odds with the new head teacher. This time it was over our support for a move to open up the prefects’ room to all sixth-formers, liberalise the school-uniform rules and abolish the prefects system in favour of an elected school council. For me, like my parents, the joy of politics has always been in battles of principle. In this case, it meant the dilemma of abandoning the prospect of my becoming Head Boy, with all its attendant privileges. I did end up as the first head of an elected school council instead. I confess that this brought out a less attractive aspect of my future political personality, a quality Tony Blair would call my ‘imperiousness’. I was quite the disciplinarian, sometimes unbearably bossy towards pupils in the lower forms. Still, my wider political focus remained on the world of Labour politics. In one of my more portentous YS editorials, I even sounded a clarion defence of Clause IV – the socialist economic creed that I would back Tony in ditching a quarter of a century later. I did say, however, that such high-sounding words were pointless unless our brave band of student socialists was organising and acting in the real world. We all actively supported the campaign against apartheid and subscribed to Amnesty International, and in two summer holidays I volunteered in the offices of the National Council for Civil Liberties, the forerunner of Liberty, dealing with cases usually arising from allegations of rough justice at the hands of the police.
Midway through the sixth form, Keren, Steve and I opted for a distinctly unreal world: the Young Communist League. Keren went first. The Young Communists appealed to her rebelliousness, with the added attraction, she said, that the boys were cuter. Steve and I agreed to join her at what turned out to be their annual meeting, in a rambling house in West Hampstead. As we started going to occasional branch meetings, we wound down our YS branch early in 1971. Our main formal YCL activity was to try, with indifferent success, to flog the Morning Star on Friday evenings outside Kilburn tube station. Steve and I did become stewards at the YCL national congress, at which Keren was a delegate, and was denounced as a bourgeois turncoat for speaking out against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
The biggest impact the YCL made on my life was when news got round that a local youth club was losing its premises in a church, and was eyeing a disused four-storey Victorian pub, the Winchester Arms in Swiss Cottage, as a replacement. The pub had been purchased by Camden Council years before, and left empty. I volunteered to join the members of the youth club in occupying this wonderful building and setting to work on converting it, while I negotiated with the council for a short-term lease. The project consumed the attention of my whole family. The youth leader, Graham Good, and his partner Brenda, took up residence in my parents’ home, and my father became the project’s legal trustee. The refitted building survives as a popular youth club, under voluntary rather than Communist management, to this day.
As A-levels approached, I turned my mind to life after Hendon County. With Mr Potts barely acquiescent, I had been encouraged by my economics master, Mr Brown, to apply for a place to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. Much to my surprise, I succeeded. But the closer the prospect of starting there became, the more nervous I was. There was little university, much less Oxbridge, background in my family – although Miles had broken the mould by excelling at Nottingham, and going on to Liverpool. I felt too young, too Hampstead Garden Suburban, to go up to Oxford straight away, and persuaded the college to allow me to delay a year, convincing them that I would benefit from living and working in Tanzania, where Julius Nyerere was championing a distinctly African system of village-based socialism which he called Ujamaa.
Finding a placement was not easy. Over a period of many months, I wrote dozens of letters to the government, charities, churches and voluntary organisations, all to no avail. Eventually, luck struck. One evening I heard a radio interview with the Bishop of Stepney, Trevor Huddleston, previously a bishop in southern Tanzania, and a Nyerere enthusiast who as a young pastor had been booted out of South Africa for his stand against apartheid. I wrote to him, and he invited me to see him at his home in Commercial Road. We talked for nearly an hour, during which I imagine I impressed him more by my enthusiasm than by any special knowledge or qualifications I might bring to rural Tanzania. But he generously arranged for me to work with Anglican missions in the north of the country – and even more generously, I would later discover, to pay for my room and board.
In September 1972 I boarded a flight to Nairobi, from where I would make the short turbo-prop hop to Musoma in north-western Tanzania, with a feeling of adventure and excitement. When I arrived at the Buhemba rural aid station, amid rolling hills and sweeping valleys hundreds of miles from Tanzania’s coastal capital of Dar es Salaam, I was struck by the simple beauty of my new, very un-Suburb, breeze-block home. I shared it with a VSO and a Canadian volunteer. It was lit by kerosene lamps, and we had a small gas cooker and an outdoor latrine.
Soon, however, a sense of loneliness and isolation set in. I wondered how on earth I was going to survive a year of this. Even if I were one of life’s great natural linguists, which I am not, mastery of Swahili would have been a stretch. Over time, I did acquire a rudimentary competence, but thankfully most of the Tanzanians in the mission spoke English. They helped me, and teased me, over my initial difficulties. I had no obvious common ground with the assortment of New Zealand missionaries who ran the station, kind as they were. Nothing in my upbringing had prepared me to embrace the bedrock of religious belief and purpose that defined their lives. With each passing week, however, I began to feel more a part of things. When I was not working, I wrote scores of letters home to Bigwood Road, to Steve and Keren and other friends, and of course to Bishop Huddleston. They replied with letters of their own and an endless supply of books.
We started work early each morning, and finished in midafternoon, amid the heat of the approaching southern hemisphere summer. I planted endless gum trees, determined to stay one step ahead of the rabbits as they devoured the saplings. I built chicken coops. I painted houses. I helped in the mission office, sorting the huge pile of unfiled invoices. I also spent hours talking, and listening, to the Tanzanians with whom I was working. I travelled to Nairobi to buy agricultural spare parts and, nearer home, to Musoma to stay with a charming if slightly eccentric missionary couple, the aptly named Merry and Beatrice Hart.
After four months, I left to work at the missionary-run Murgwanza Hospital in Ngara, on the far side of Lake Victoria near the border with Rwanda and Burundi. A typical day would begin at the concrete slab that served as an operating table for the ebullient English missionary doctor, Arthur Adeney. I would pump anaesthetic ether from a cylinder into a patient with a torn limb, a broken bone, or a burst appendix. If things got complicated, Arthur would have me read him the relevant passages from his university anatomy textbook while I tried to maintain my attention on the pump. The rest of my day was devoted to the dozens of young children in the hospital’s orphanage. I can still almost feel the two young sisters who waited for my arrival every afternoon clinging to me, and vividly remember their wailing when it was time for me to leave.
I thought, read and wrote a great deal during my time in Tanzania. Much of what preoccupied me was politics. This was long before the era of the internet or the mobile phone. What news we got came from the BBC World Service, the beginning of my love affair with the BBC. I read books and pamphlets by Nyerere and his TANU party thinkers, as well as other African authors. I read political novels, like Emile Zola’s Germinal and William Morris’s utopian socialist fantasy News from Nowhere. I read about Christianity, and remember being especially moved by the theologian Michael Green’s passionate statement of belief in Christ’s resurrection, Man Alive. It helped me to understand, and even at times to feel a part of, the fervency, commitment and simple goodness of the missionaries whom I was working and living with, and coming to admire. In my letters home, I tried to come to terms with what this new wash of knowledge and experience meant about the easier life I had lived, and the easier choices I had made, before living in Africa. There were times when I felt caught up in the promise of Nyerere’s Tanzanian socialism. At others, I felt swept away by the shared purpose of the missionaries – almost, but never quite, fetching up in the arms of the organised Church.
My final work in Tanzania was at the Isamilo primary school in Mwanza. It was the hardest and most demanding of all. I taught every subject to a class of forty youngsters. Teaching had seemed so easy when I was on the receiving end, but now, no matter how hard I tried, I felt there was always a child I could not reach, or a bit of knowledge I could not convey. It left me with an undying admiration for those who have a natural talent for teaching.
In the end, I also learned something else about myself. Africa would for ever be a part of my life, including but beyond the campaigning against apartheid that involved my whole family. But I knew my real home was in Britain – the country, the culture, the politics in which I had grown up. I ended my eleven months away more rounded, wiser, more grown-up – and with far more questions than answers. One of my many long letters to Steve, written shortly before my return, probably captured this best: ‘Sometimes, I reason that Tanzanian socialism is tremendous, and the only hope for development, but that socialism in England would be wholly impractical. And that we are living in an ideological cloud-cuckoo land in which England no more has a socialist future than it will fly in the air … And then I think there is a lot wrong; much injustice and unnecessary poverty and human suffering, and that something must be done about it. But how? Through the Labour Party in Parliament … or yet more words and demonstrations?’ All I knew for sure was that, anxious though I was to get home, I would feel very different when I got there from when I had left.
I was certainly no less confused when I arrived at St Catherine’s in the autumn. But the tug of politics was stronger than ever, now with a pulsating African and international dimension. Whatever I had seen and written home about to Steve and the others, it never seriously occurred to me that my political home could be anywhere other than the Labour Party. This was reinforced by the influence of a small group of second-year PPE friends with whom I soon became close. Like them, I was uneasy about taking the predictable path for a would-be Labour politician at Oxford: the Union, or the Labour Club. The first of these I neither joined nor attended. It seemed full of self-serving careerists and preening would-be Cabinet ministers – although none of them, in fact, would end up fulfilling their ambitions. The Labour Club was going through one of its periodic periods of tension between right and left, social democrats and traditionalists. This time, the right was winning. Strange as it may seem in the light of the battles I would later fight, my heart was with the traditionalists. Rather than join, I helped set up an alternative Oxford Labour Students Association. Yet although I was a member of the executive, I spent fairly little time there. With my PPE friends – Michael Attwell, who went on to a career in television; Dick Newby, who would leave Labour to join the SDP and become a Liberal Democrat peer; and the future international trade unionist David Cockroft – I became much more involved in matters overseas. I joined the United Nations Youth and Students Association, as well as a group called Young European Left. In my first year I was especially active in the political causes of southern Africa. Every week, without fail, I would travel to London, helping to organise campaigns in support of the SWAPO insurgents in Namibia, even raising £12,000 to buy a Land Rover for them.
Academically, I rather lost my footing. I suppose I assumed I would always be able to muddle through. But at the end of year one I actually failed my preliminary exam in politics, to the amazement of my tutor, Wilfrid Knapp. To this day, I am not quite sure how I managed to pass philosophy and economics; certainly my tutors, John Simopoulos and Nicholas Stern, later of climate-change fame, were not confident that I had applied myself sufficiently to their subjects. I was suddenly faced with the prospect of not only failing to excel at Oxford, but failing to clear the first hurdle. I returned early in the autumn to retake the politics exam, and for all of September I had the best time of my life at Oxford, thoroughly immersed in all the books I was supposed to have read the previous year. I was especially engrossed by analytical tomes and biographies from post-war French politics.
I passed my prelim, but while the chastening fear of being tossed out of Oxford made me conscious of needing to rein in my political activities, I never really learned that lesson completely. In my second year I became president of the Junior Common Room, which took up considerable time, though it also marked the beginning of an enduring friendship with the college’s Master, the historian Alan Bullock. Through the Young Fabians I became involved in the British Youth Council, an umbrella organisation of voluntary youth and student organisations. Each of these experiences played a role in how I did politics, and what I did in politics, after Oxford. But if I had it to do over again, there is no doubt that I would concentrate on academic matters. Every time I speak to someone who is about to go up to Oxford, or any other university, I try to pass on that lesson. Forget the politics, I tell them. And the socialising. Forget stuff like the JCR. Forget student activism. The academic opportunity – the chance to read and write, think and learn – in this artificial laboratory of the mind is the one thing that will not come your way again.
I did socialise, but not in the conventional Oxford way – the fancy-dress dinners and large college balls. I would sometimes go out with one or all of my trio of PPE friends to eat and to talk. I also became close to a lovely, warm and, to me, exotic girl named Venetia Porter, one of the first intake of young women at St Catherine’s. Venetia was studying Arabic. She had grown up in Beirut, and then moved to London, where she had gone to the French Lycée. Her parents, whom I would sometimes visit with her, were separated, and also fascinatingly different. Her father, Robert Porter, was chief economist at the Ministry of Overseas Development, and was not only good company but an occasional source of rescue and support during my economics revision. Her mother was the famous, and delightfully unconventional, dress designer Thea Porter. It was she who gave me my first taste of London Bohemian life, at the Colony Room Club in Soho, where she was a member. Venetia and I were more curious observers than participants, but the Colony included an extraordinary cast of characters, and was a world away from Junior Common Room.
For a year I shared a house with Venetia and an Arabic Studies friend. It had that special, run-down quality of Oxford student lets, but it was cosy in its own way, and Venetia’s company always brightened things up. During study breaks for her, or political breaks for me, we would cook dinner, eat out or go to parties, where we danced and danced. We even enrolled in a rock ‘n’ roll class at a dancing studio across from Balliol, on Broad Street. In my final period in government thirty years later, I would cause considerable media mirth by suggesting myself as a candidate for Strictly Come Dancing. Had the producers taken me up on the idea, I suppose I would have had to come clean about my formal training.
At the end of year two, an opportunity arose to visit Venetia’s childhood city, and the wider Middle East. In my study of economics and politics, I was spending a lot of time focusing on the region. Through my UN Association work I met Lord Caradon, Britain’s UN Ambassador in the 1960s, and he organised a sponsored fact-finding trip through the Middle East during the summer. I almost didn’t make it. As term was ending, I suddenly fell ill with a form of sleeping sickness. As far as the doctors could surmise, I had probably picked it up in Africa, perhaps while rashly swimming in Lake Victoria, a notorious incubator for bilharzia, or when, in Ngara, I had waded through a swamp, swatting off tsetse flies, into Rwanda. Whatever the cause, I found myself in bed in Bigwood Road, unable to get up for nearly a month. At the suggestion of Venetia’s mother, my father took me to see a homeopath in Welbeck Street. It seemed to help, a bit. But it was mainly my determination not to miss the Middle East trip that gave me the energy to make my way to Heathrow.
As I set off, I carried with me the echoes of my father’s emotional ties with Israel. Even the most unobservant or deracinated British Jew felt a bond with the Jewish state. Especially having lived through the period of the Holocaust and Israel’s post-war creation, my father was no exception. The only time during my childhood when I can recall him being explicitly, overtly Jewish was when I was thirteen – during the pre-emptive Six-Day War that Israel launched against Egypt, Jordan and Syria after Nasser’s forces had begun massing on the Sinai border. In October 1973, just as I was starting at Oxford, Syria and Egypt joined in a surprise attack on Israel timed to coincide with the Jewish festival of Yom Kippur. Israel prevailed again, but this time it was a much more costly and close-run battle. My own views were broadly pro-Israel, but my St Catherine’s PPE friends had exposed me to the Arab side of the argument, and especially to the Palestinian cause.
My first stop was Egypt, followed by Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and finally Israel. Since the Arab League had helped set up the tour, I managed to see a range of government officials, and King Hussein of Jordan’s brother, the then Crown Prince Hassan. But the most memorable part of the trip was in Beirut, shortly before the civil war broke out between right-wing Christian militias and the pro-Palestinian Muslim left. Since their expulsion from Jordan after the 1970 civil war there, the political seat of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah and the other Palestinian military groups had been in Lebanon. I had a fascinating lunch with the Guardian’s Beirut correspondent, the quietly spoken yet passionately pro-Palestinian David Hirst. I also visited one of the Palestinian refugee camps along the road to Beirut airport, just inland from the Mediterranean.
That evening I wrote home: ‘The conditions are as gruesome as reported. Thousands of people living in unbearably cramped conditions … Of course, they will not leave the camps until they are given the opportunity to return to Palestine. It is the middle-aged and younger ones who seem most committed to return to Palestine. They are good-humoured, patient and with a will of steel. It is a desperate situation.’ I recognised that Israel’s situation was not easy either. I certainly did not take a ‘return to Palestine’ to mean the end of Israel, any more than my father did. But that the Palestinians had a national identity, and national cause, of their own seemed to me unarguable. When I returned to England I wrote an article for the Jewish Chronicle. Its message seems pretty unexceptional now, but it was less so then, especially for an Anglo-Jewish community audience. It was that until there were two states, one Israeli and the other Palestinian, there would never be peace for either people.
Back at Oxford, I again found myself practising politics as much as studying it. Labour had returned to power, as a minority government, the previous year, and although I was not yet sure exactly what I would do after university, I knew I wanted a future that involved working with Labour – or ideally in Labour – and shaping its policy. Having become more deeply involved in the British Youth Council, I became its vice-chairman in early 1976, and national chair two years later. Beyond the invigorating policy work we did, the BYC brought me into contact with a number of people who would influence me in one way or another throughout my political life. None was more dazzling to me at the time than Shirley Williams, Education Secretary in Jim Callaghan’s government, who had been a political protégée of my grandfather and who I first met at a conference on ‘young people in post-industrial society’ at Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire. Shirley was bright, attractive, and had the extraordinary talent of both talking and listening to young would-be politicians as if they were the fully finished article. She was also a modern, outward-looking, pro-European Labour politician who knew where and how elections were won – by appealing to mainstream voters on the centre ground. When I had shied away from joining the Labour Club on arriving at Oxford, it was because of the sterile stand-off between careerists on the ‘right’ and ‘left’ of the party. Shirley was no conventional right-winger. She seemed to epitomise a liberal, thinking core in the party that recognised a need to combine our traditional values with policies that were relevant to a changing world.
As BYC head, I also met and worked with leaders of the National Union of Students. The NUS chair when I first got involved was a burly lad who had grown up down the road from me in Hampstead Garden Suburb. I had known Charles Clarke and his brothers, but not to speak to: they were Highgate School boys. The more I worked with Charles in my BYC role, the more I liked him. I worked even more closely with one of his NUS colleagues, the then-Communist and future journalist David Aaronovitch. He was engaging, funny, and obviously clever enough to accomplish anything he set his mind to. But it was Charles with whom I would interact most often and most closely in later years: first, by Neil Kinnock’s side in the 1980s, and then in government, in New Labour.
My first job after university was in a distinctly Old Labour environment. I knew that if I wanted a future in the Labour Party, the most realistic route was through the trade union movement. Without the help of Alan Bullock, I would not have got the post I did six months after leaving Oxford. At the time, he was chairing a government inquiry on industrial democracy. It is hard to say whether it was behind or ahead of its time. One of the less fruitful concessions made to the trade unions, it proposed installing union representatives on the boards of British companies. The idea never caught on. But one of the inquiry panel’s members was the head of the TUC’s economic department, David Lea, and Alan successfully put in a word for me.
Congress House in Great Russell Street was more than just a union headquarters, and the economic department was more than a policy talking-shop. Listening as my new department bosses peremptorily demanded to talk with this Labour Cabinet minister or that, or acting as designated note-taker in an endless series of bargaining meetings between trade union general secretaries and senior ministers, I had a crash course in how power was then wielded inside Labour. It left an indelible impression on me, and a lesson in how not to run the country. The process was a product of a ‘corporatist’ approach in which government, business and trade unions carved up the decision-making and attempted to run the economy – investment, prices and incomes – among themselves. It was an idea whose time had gone, if it ever arrived.
The government was struggling, not least with controlling wages and inflation. It was a battle that had already seen Denis Healey forced to go to the IMF for a bailout, and that would end two years later in the Winter of Discontent and the arrival in Downing Street of Mrs Thatcher. Congress House routinely demanded policy tradeoffs for any government move to put the economy in order. Almost invariably, it got them. The TUC–Labour Liaison Committee was effectively the executive committee of government. Great Russell Street virtually shared sovereignty with Downing Street. More often, it seemed to be calling the shots.
This might have been heady stuff had I seen my future as a trade union power-broker. But the claustrophobic life of the TUC was not for me. Although I worked hard, my heart was in my role with the BYC. I had researched and written a BYC policy report called ‘Youth Unemployment: Causes and Cures’, and was a founding member of a pressure group we helped set up called Youthaid, which was intent on getting the government to do more to help the young unemployed. We called for more intervention to ensure that school-leavers had relevant training and skills, and that the national economy prioritised securing them jobs.
The beginning of the end of my glittering career in the trade union movement came when I and two colleagues were asked by the Prime Minister’s political adviser, Tom McNally, now a Liberal Democrat peer and government member, to come to Number 10 to discuss the BYC report with Jim Callaghan. This was my first visit to the Cabinet Room since I had strayed into it during my youthful excursion to view Trooping the Colour, and the Prime Minister and the other ministers with him were polite and receptive to our proposals. It was also my first encounter with Albert Booth, then the Employment Secretary, who would later employ me as his research assistant. My invitation to Number 10 put the TUC headquarters into a major tailspin. If anyone went to talk policy in Downing Street, they made it clear, it should be the top union brass, certainly not some young scribe from the economic department. Responsibility for youth unemployment policy belonged to the TUC’s Organisation Department. Before long, it was clear that I would have to choose between my union job and youth politics.
With the approach of the World Youth and Student Festival in Cuba in the summer of 1978, I handed in my notice. The idea of lending the presence of the flower of British youth to a transparent Soviet-bloc propaganda exercise was always going to be controversial, and we debated for months whether or not to attend. In the end we decided that our independent, Western, non-Communist voice should receive a hearing, although the Conservatives on the BYC voted against. There was considerable media criticism of our plans to participate, but the Foreign Secretary, David Owen, gave us a nod of approval, and Charles Clarke, freshly graduated from the NUS, took up residence in Havana as a member of the preparatory committee. I headed the national delegation with an NUS leader who soon became a friend, Trevor Phillips.
We went. We saw. We did not exactly conquer. Yet Trevor and I did manage to cajole, convince, outmanoeuvre or outvote a sizeable pro-Soviet – in some cases, pro-Stalinist – core in the British delegation, whose fervour was being whipped up by a slightly older ‘visitor’ to the festival, the Yorkshire miners’ union leader Arthur Scargill. Cuba was also my first experience of dealing with the press. The term ‘spin doctor’ did not exist then, and even if it had, I could hardly have imagined that one day I would come to embody it. Yet each day I would go to the Havana Libre hotel to brief British journalists on our pro-freedom, pro-human-rights agenda. It was there that I learned three basic rules of spin-doctoring that remained with me. Don’t overclaim. Be factual. And never arrive at a briefing without a story.
Most of the critics back home ended up being supportive, and not a little surprised by how well the British delegation had acquitted itself. The Foreign Office, too. Our trip had begun with a huge opening ceremony at Havana’s main stadium. As we entered I was asked to hold our large Union Jack banner while its bearer blew his nose. At that very moment an official appeared and led me away to a designated area where I was obliged to hold it aloft for an agonising three and a half hours while Fidel Castro delivered one of his shorter addresses. The visit ended with a reception at the British Embassy in Havana.
When I got back home, I was jobless. But not idle. Not only was I still national chair of the BYC, but once again Alan Bullock came to my rescue, fixing me up with a research project at the Aspen Institute in Berlin, on youth unemployment across Europe. I also moved house, swapping the lodger’s room I had taken in Hackney after university for a tiny flat in Kennington, in south London, from where I watched the unhappy unravelling of the Callaghan government as the May 1979 general election approached.
I loved my little studio apartment. It also turned out to be life-changing politically. Occupying a much larger flat in the same block was Roger Liddle, whom I met through the local Labour Party branch. We not only struck up an instant rapport – his knowledge of, and commitment to, Labour equalled my own – but began a lifelong collaboration in politics. Roger held out the added fascination of being a political adviser to a real-life cabinet member, the Transport Secretary William Rodgers. As the election drew nearer, the question was how long Roger, or his boss, or any Labour minister, would still have a job. The omens were dire. The IMF bailout, and then the union chaos that I had watched at first-hand in the run-up to the crippling strikes of the Winter of Discontent, had left Labour stumbling towards the finishing line.
I was at the Aspen Institute in the week of the election, and arrived back at Heathrow on the morning after. Labour’s defeat, however unsurprising, was depressing enough for me on its own. But on the tube from the airport I saw a story in the Stop Press of the late edition of the Evening Standard that hit me even harder. Shirley Williams, a kind of political pin-up in my eyes since I had first met her, had lost her seat. For me, Shirley represented everything in the Labour Party that I admired, and wanted to follow. I was so shocked by her defeat that I dropped my duty-free bag, and the bottle of wine inside it shattered on the carriage floor.
After the defeat, Roger and I commiserated with each other about the advent of a right-wing Tory government under Margaret Thatcher. We also talked, often long into the night, about the prospect of Labour finding a way back to national power. In Lambeth, where we lived, Labour appeared headed in the opposite direction. ‘Red’ Ted Knight had become council leader the year before. He was very much part of the hard-left vanguard about which Hans Janitschek had warned, and Harold Wilson had dithered, in the early 1970s. Ted favoured ever-higher council rates for an ever-growing series of spending commitments, as the Tory government steadily drained resources from local services.
The council ward where Roger and I lived, Princes, was dominated by Trotskyites. If Lambeth was to become a model for the future of the Labour Party, we would surely be settling in for a long, perhaps permanent, spell out of power. I remember being warned by a local Labour activist as we canvassed in a local estate one Sunday morning that the party must at all costs avoid ‘compromising with the electorate’. My local comrades had absolutely clear views. Criminals were victims of the capitalist system. The police were agents of repression. Riots were popular uprisings against capitalist injustice.
Often Roger and I would go out to the local pub with members of the beleaguered Labour mainstream to lick our political wounds. When a council seat suddenly became vacant at the end of 1979 in Stockwell, one of the few wards where moderates still had a wafer-thin majority, I was narrowly selected to stand for Labour. For the next two and a half years, along with my fellow Stockwell moderate Paul Ormerod, I was part of Ted Knight’s increasingly Soviet-style Labour group on the council. I suppose on some level I saw this as a first, small step towards a more grown-up role in Labour. My grandfather had been born in Lambeth, and began his political life as a councillor. There was still a Herbert Morrison primary school in Stockwell, and the rather down-at-heel Lord Morrison of Lambeth pub. However complex my views about my grandfather as a person, given the effects of his political life on my mother, I had grown up aware of his opinions and achievements, and admiring them. The defining battle in the Labour Party during the late 1920s and 1930s had pitted him against Ernest Bevin. While Bevin was a down-the-middle trade union man, my grandfather argued robustly – too robustly for Bevin – that to become a party of government, Labour had to represent more than just the unions, more indeed than just the working class. It had to be national, not sectional, and appeal to the growing middle class.
That fight was clearly still not won, certainly not in Lambeth. Mostly, my time as a councillor was an education. I was not a terribly effective brake on the Labour group’s march to the drumbeat of revolution, although I did rise briefly to the dizzying office of chairman of the Town Planning Applications Subcommittee. That was only for a year, and only because one of Ted’s lieutenants was in the lavatory as the Labour group was balloting on that minor post.
I rarely broke ranks on council votes, if only because I recognised that our divisions would be the Tories’ gain. In our internal caucuses, however, I was much more forthright. I argued that our far-left rhetorical indulgence would do little to improve the lot of the residents who had voted for us, but would slowly, surely convince most of them that we didn’t care about, or understand, their lives. Ted would almost invariably open the next meeting by glaring in turn at me and the other recalcitrants, and saying: ‘Certain comrades are misperceiving the situation …’ The atmosphere was very intimidating. The hard left was not only hard in its politics, it was even harder on those who didn’t toe the line.
After the 1981 Brixton riots, I could hold my tongue no longer. Ted called for the police to withdraw from the streets, accusing them of ‘concentration camp’ tactics of surveillance. Asked for a comment by a local reporter, I replied: ‘Given the choice between having the Labour Party and Ted Knight in the borough, or the police, 99 per cent of the population would vote for the police.’ I joined my two fellow Stockwell Labour councillors in a broader attack a few months later. ‘The Labour group has conspicuously failed to convince its electorate that maintaining its high level of expenditure is desirable or practical,’ we said. ‘The publicity-seeking statements of the council’s leader have come to symbolise the waywardness and irrelevance of the Labour Party for working-class people.’
Part of the reason for my more open frustration over the excesses of the far left was that, for the first time, I had become involved in national Labour politics. In the autumn of 1980 I was hired as a researcher by the Shadow Transport Secretary Albert Booth. I was followed into the opposition offices only weeks later by Charles Clarke, who went to work for Neil Kinnock, then Shadow Education Secretary. The idea of working at this level of Labour politics, even as a lowly researcher, was exciting in itself. But before I took up my role, a generous gift from Roger elevated it to an entirely different level. When the Tories won the election, he had taken with him several boxloads of the policy papers he had accumulated at the Department of Transport. This wasn’t strictly legal, and I only hope the statute of limitations on whatever crime he committed has long since lapsed. The effect on me, as I read folder after folder, was electrifying. I still remember the thrill I felt at being able to see how policy was made, the way in which different options were evaluated, advanced or abandoned. It was the first time I had seen the raw material of government. It not only fascinated me, it made me want to be a part of it, and all the more upset at those in the party who were making the likelihood of a future Labour administration ever more remote.
I enjoyed my eighteen months in the shadow cabinet corridor at the Commons. Albert Booth was an engineering draughtsman who had entered Labour politics as a Tynemouth councillor, and had become MP for Barrow-in-Furness in north-west England. He was also a favoured protégé of Michael Foot, who succeeded Jim Callaghan as Labour leader a few weeks after I started in my job. On the day of Michael’s victory, I remember Frank Dobson, later Tony Blair’s Health Secretary, standing in the doorway of the modest office Albert and I shared and punching the air with excitement. ‘Michael’s done it!’ he shouted with joy. ‘We’re on our way!’ Where to, exactly, remained to be seen.
I worked hard in my role, both for Albert and with his slightly rambunctious number two on the front bench, the Hull MP John Prescott. Albert and John, like Michael Foot, were on the moderate, Tribunite left of Labour. They were also disinclined, and by this time probably unable, to take on the rising influence of Tony Benn and the more assertive far left. At party conference just days before I began my job, Benn had brought delegates surging to their feet with his vision of what a Labour government would do, within days, once it got rid of Thatcher and the Tories: nationalise industries, pull out of Europe, abandon the nuclear deterrent and shut down the House of Lords. I wanted to get Thatcher and the Tories out no less than Tony Benn did, but I couldn’t imagine that was the way to do it.
I gravitated towards a much more experienced researcher down the hallway from our office named David Hill, and his boss, the Shadow Environment Secretary Roy Hattersley, as well as to Shadow Foreign Secretary Peter Shore and his researcher David Cowling. Together, we helped to organise the Labour Solidarity Campaign, run by the indefatigable Mary Goudie, which was intended as a counterweight to the Bennites, to give heart to the moderates and keep them in the party. With David Cowling and an intelligent, iconoclastic and occasionally irritatingly self-possessed Labour MP named Frank Field, I also joined efforts to press for a change in the Labour rulebook. Well before it became a cause célèbre for New Labour modernisers, we pressed for the introduction of one-member-one-vote democracy in the party.
There was also a familiar re-education in the power of the unions. Albert’s portfolio meant dealing with endless disputes involving the railway workers, and I vividly recall a slightly surreal morning when Albert and I were called in to see Michael Foot. He suggested we all go off to Rail House in Euston and try to get the chairman of British Rail, Peter Parker, to compromise with the rail drivers’ union in their dispute over ‘flexible rostering’, a fancy term for more time off for the same pay. The three of us piled into a taxi at the Commons with Michael’s dog, for some reason, yapping at his ankles. We drew up at Rail House to the surprise and bemusement of all, went in to see Peter Parker, and spectacularly failed to get him to agree to the train drivers’ demands.
By this time, some at the top of the party had had enough of Labour’s drift into the vote-losing wilderness, and were especially alarmed at the growing prospect of the Bennites driving Labour ever further out of the mainstream. Six months after I started working for Albert, four leading Labour lights broke away to form the new Social Democratic Party. Former Foreign Secretary David Owen was one of the ‘Gang of Four’, as were Roy Jenkins, the former Home Secretary who had just completed his term as President of the European Commission, and Roger Liddle’s former boss, Bill Rodgers. The cabinet minister whom I had most admired, Shirley Williams, was the fourth.
Years later, when I was fighting my campaign for selection as a Labour parliamentary candidate, supporters of my main rival would spread the rumour that I too had come close to joining the SDP. That was not quite true, but I did share much of their vision of what a modern left-of-centre party should be, that it should fight for fairness and opportunity, appeal to the centre ground and stand up for national rather than sectional interests. These would become New Labour principles, too. I fully understood the reasons Roger joined Bill Rodgers in the SDP, not just because of their personal friendship, but because both were acting from the values that had brought them into a different Labour Party in the first place. But the ‘religion’ of Labour had come to me too early in life, and was too much a part of me, for me to go with him. The SDP breakaway did have a major impact on me. The decision I faced, however, was not whether to abandon Labour, but how best to continue fighting for a modern, moderate Labour Party against the challenge of the infantile but hard-nosed left.
In fact, there was one point at which I did feel very close to having to leave Labour. It came six months after the SDP had formed, when Tony Benn contested the deputy leadership against Denis Healey, the former Chancellor who was carrying the hopes of the moderates. I still remember arriving in Brighton for the party conference on a Sunday evening at the end of September, when the result would be announced. Many of my Labour friends, and many Labour MPs, were collectively holding their breath. I got the sense that they had not unpacked their bags, and that if Benn won they would simply leave for London, and very probably leave the party as well. I believe that a Benn victory would have led to a kind of tectonic political shift. The moderate, sensible centre of Labour, including many trade unionists, who like my grandfather saw us as a party of government, could very well have left en masse for the Social Democrats, and reformed the Labour Party in that shell. Frankly, I suspect that I would have joined them. A Benn victory would have sealed the ascendancy of the left, and set us on a path towards extremism, unelectability and irrelevance. Denis Healey won, but by less than 1 per cent of the vote. That meant the Labour Party I loved was not dead. But it was still on life support.
The immediate political decision I had to take was really no decision at all. An election for my Lambeth council seat was approaching, but I no longer had the stomach for my role as designated class enemy in Ted Knight’s political fiefdom. Both of my parents had taken pride in my first step on the political ladder, my father in particular, although he was maddeningly prone to telling me I was being too hard on ‘Red’ Ted when I brought back stories of the latest council excesses. They had also taken pride in my work with Albert Booth, but even my father recognised that Labour, in its current state, did not offer much cause for optimism. My mother, in her common-sensical way, pointed out that the party probably wouldn’t be able to offer her son a stable source of income in the foreseeable future. Perhaps, she suggested gently, it might be time for me to find a ‘real’ job.
I did. I finally left my job with Albert Booth in early 1982 – not for another party, but for what Charles Clarke described, rather disparagingly, as the ‘media route’. The most serious current affairs department in British commercial TV, at London Weekend Television, was advertising for additional staff. Trevor Phillips was already working there, and my other old BYC friend David Aaronovitch and I both applied. David got the plum job, at Brian Walden’s flagship Weekend World. One need only look at David’s later career as a political writer on national newspapers to see that it was the right call. I was hired too, beginning as a researcher on The London Programme, but following David some months later into Weekend World.
In between, I was assigned to the team covering the London battlegrounds in the 1983 general election. Much as I wanted to see Labour back in Downing Street, it was obvious that we were going to lose. The country was finally coming out of a brutal recession, and Mrs Thatcher was riding on the crest of victory in the Falklands War. Our manifesto was essentially an expanded version of Tony Benn’s battle cry to the 1980 party conference, with the additional promise of sky-high taxes for good measure. ‘The longest suicide note in history,’ it was called by Gerald Kaufman, the witty, waspish and wise Manchester MP who would become an ally in efforts to move Labour back towards the mainstream. In fact, the manifesto wasn’t all that long. But it was suicidal. We were not merely defeated, we were routed. In Labour’s worst result since the First World War, we haemorrhaged three million votes, and gifted the Tories a Commons majority of 144 seats.
Working for television turned out to be a – arguably the – major turning point in my political career. The knowledge I picked up of politics from the other side of the camera demystified the whole process for me. In covering the election, I got a close-up look at the Labour campaign machine, if you could call it that. It was fascinating, if hugely disheartening, and would soon prove indispensable in framing my own efforts to head off a similar débâcle for Labour next time round. I also made good and lasting friends, including John Birt, then LWT’s Director of Programmes, and Robin Paxton, a senior Weekend World editor who would play a critical role when I went to work for Labour again.
Two of the final programmes I produced drew me steadily in that direction. The first came in the wake of the 1983 election collapse. It was about Neil Kinnock, the Welsh MP I had got to know when I was working for Albert, and Neil was Shadow Education Secretary. After the election he had replaced Michael Foot as Labour leader, and he had begun the work of trying to rescue and rebuild the defeated and dejected party. The second was more broadly about the changing political landscape, exploring signs of disillusionment with Mrs Thatcher, the emergence of the SDP, and the prospects for a Labour revival. Watching tapes of these programmes now, I am struck by my underlying optimism. Naïvety, perhaps, would be a better word. I truly believed that Neil’s leadership could mark at least the start of Labour’s comeback. I felt a growing desire to come back myself as well.
My return began in a restaurant in Pimlico, shortly after Weekend World went off the air for its summer break. During my three years at LWT, I had remained in touch with Charles Clarke, and every six months or so we had lunch together. He was still with Neil. When we met in the summer of 1985, I told him how much I missed fulltime politics. He suggested I help out in a forthcoming parliamentary by-election in the Welsh constituency of Brecon and Radnor. ‘It’s in the neighbourhood,’ he added, referring to a little two-up, two-down cottage I had purchased the year before near the Welsh border. If nothing else, television paid better than politics. My salary had risen to the princely sum of £31,000, and a return to Labour, no matter what role I played, would pay nothing like that amount. That I never gave this much thought was a measure of the eagerness I felt to be part of the party’s recovery and reconstruction.
I had already planned to be at the cottage for the summer, and I leapt at the opportunity to help out in the campaign. When I arrived, however, it was not really a campaign. There were lots of people at the local HQ, but no single person in charge, no strategy, no plan of action. I was deputised to accompany our candidate, Richard Willey. A writer and educationist, he was the son of the long-serving Sunderland MP and future Labour chairman Fred Willey – also a distinguished resident of Hampstead Garden Suburb. Richard and I immediately took to each other. I helped plan his appearances and speeches, advised him on how to handle himself with the local press, and kept his spirits up as we travelled around the large constituency. All of this was good experience that would come in handy in my later political life.
It was a solid, professional campaign, eventually. It also ended in defeat. The Tories lost the seat, but by a narrow margin we were outpolled by the Liberal candidate. The turning point came a few days before the election, and probably should have served as a warning as I embarked on my return to active Labour politics. With the miners’ strike only recently over, Arthur Scargill publicly demanded that a future Labour government release all those who had been detained during the strike, and reimburse the union for all the money it had cost.
I was not to be deterred, however. Charles told me during a campaign visit that the Publicity Director at national party headquarters had left, and was to be replaced by an overall Director of Campaigns and Communications. It seemed like the perfect job for me. When I told him I wanted to go for it, Charles said that by all means I should do so. He added, however, that there would be other strong candidates. I later discovered that despite this note of caution, Charles argued my case strongly with Neil. The evening before the selection meeting in front of Labour’s full thirty-member National Executive Committee, Neil made it clear to colleagues that I was his preferred choice.
Roy Hattersley, now his deputy and Shadow Chancellor, also backed me to the hilt. I had remained in touch with Roy during my time at LWT. After the 1983 election I had spent most of my free hours helping David Hill organise and support Roy’s campaign for the leadership. I saw him as a more experienced and more rounded figure than Neil, and a better bulwark against the Bennites. I had a further referee in John Prescott, who provided a supportive reference, although with a cryptic handwritten postscript: ‘Peter will do the job fine, as long as he keeps his nose out of the politics.’
I got the job, but only just. A mere handful of votes decided it. Two NEC members in particular would go on to help not just me but the broader push for change in Labour: the Crewe MP Gwyneth Dunwoody, who was in charge of the publicity subcommittee, and a forward-looking trade union leader named Tom Sawyer, General Secretary of Labour by the time of the 1997 election.
In my presentation to the NEC, I had echoed the optimism I felt in my final months at LWT. I argued that in the two years since our general election drubbing, the popular mood had begun to change. There was a new scepticism about the Tory government. If Labour could project a more popular, relevant, united message – and modernise its communications ideas and strategies – we would have an opportunity to recover momentum, and power. I genuinely believed this. Yet nothing in my apprenticeship since leaving Oxford – my experience of the TUC, ‘Red’ Ted and Lambeth, my work with Albert Booth or Weekend World – had prepared me for how difficult it would prove, or how long it would take.
3 (#ulink_901883b3-98a3-55ba-aa02-16bc34480b02)
A Brilliant Defeat
From the outside, 150 Walworth Road, near the Elephant and Castle in south London, was a handsome, red-brick battleship of a building. On the inside, it perfectly mirrored the party for which it was the national headquarters. The cramped offices, smoky hallways and paper-strewn conference rooms were disjointed and dishevelled. So was the machinery through which Labour made and presented what passed for policy. My cubbyhole consisted of a wobbly chair, a dodgy-looking three-legged table wedged up against the filing cabinet to balance it, a World War II-vintage intercom, and a dying spider plant on the windowsill behind me.
Barely two years had passed since our collapse at the polls. Michael Foot had retreated to the backbenches. He took the blame for the rout, but it more properly belonged to the party’s real masters: the Trotskyite entryists organised in Militant, and the ‘softer’, or at least subtler, leftists whom Tony Benn had been rallying ever since we lost power in 1979 – in fact, ever since we had lost power under Harold Wilson in 1970. The idea of Labour as a party of government, with any regard for what voters might actually feel, had been abandoned. Neil Kinnock, however, was now leader, and it was clear he saw the need for change.
A few days before I started work in October 1985, Neil had shown the flair, and the guts, that this was surely going to require. At the party conference in Bournemouth he had thundered against the hard-left Labour council in Liverpool, the epitome of how out of touch we had become. As I heard him speak, I couldn’t help but think back to Ted Knight and the Socialist Republic of Lambeth. ‘I’ll tell you what happens with impossible promises,’ Neil had said. ‘You start with farfetched resolutions. They are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and you go through the years sticking to that – outdated, misplaced, irrelevant to real needs. You end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council – a Labour council – hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers. I’m telling you – and you’ll listen – you can’t play politics with people’s jobs, and with people’s services!’ How long had I waited for a Labour leader to say that? The fight was on for a Labour Party that again served, and connected with, the interests of the people of Britain. A few weeks short of my thirty-second birthday, I was excited to become a part of it.
I arrived at Walworth Road with two all-consuming aims. The first was to do well at my new job. Despite my brave, and evidently successful, effort to sound supremely self-confident before the interview panel, I feared that I was supremely unqualified. Three years’ experience producing cerebral political television would not necessarily equip me to manage all of Labour’s day-to-day communications with an almost universally hostile press. It certainly hadn’t given me the skills or the experience to handle the other half of my brief: every aspect of the party’s campaigning, from pamphlets, posters and policy launches to preparations for a general election that was probably less than two years away. My other goal was to play my part in ensuring that Neil Kinnock’s vision of Labour, not Tony Benn’s or Ted Knight’s, won out. That would turn out to be harder still.
Tony Benn’s Bristol South-East constituency had been abolished by boundary changes before the 1983 election, and he had failed to be selected for the replacement seat, so it had been left to Party Chairman Eric Heffer to carry the Bennite banner in the contest for leader. With Labour still in collective shock from the scale of our defeat, Neil trounced Heffer. His only serious challenger, Roy Hattersley, was from the right of the party. But Benn was back now, having been returned to the Commons in a by-election at Chesterfield in March 1984, and was de facto leader of a vocal leftist core on the NEC. The traumatic year-long miners’ strike had also hurt Labour, and Neil. The party was again associated in the public mind with the vote-killers of 1983: ideological infighting, rhetorical excesses and trade union militancy. Neil would later say he wished he had got on top of the issue at the start, by denouncing the NUM for having failed to hold a proper national ballot. Instead, he was left twisting in the wind, feeling he couldn’t support the strike, and couldn’t disavow it either. The only benefit from his months of agony was that he and those around him had used the period to plan for a fightback against the far left, and a determined effort to reposition the party. Neil’s assault on Militant at the party conference had been the first step.
It is difficult to convey, twenty-five years on, how enormous the obstacles were. The Bennites and their fellow travellers were not the only barrier to the huge repair job we faced. Their Old Socialist certitudes had a resonance that went beyond their core supporters. Even many who understood that a state-run economy, unquestioned support for the unions or unilateral nuclear disarmament were impractical in late-twentieth-century Britain – and that they were certainly a guarantee that we would not get back into government – felt them to be somehow authentically Labour. With the radical conservatism of Mrs Thatcher taking hold in Downing Street, and Ronald Reagan’s in the White House, they felt almost automatically that we should be on the other side of the argument.
And it was an argument. Since September 1981 a group of passionately anti-nuclear women had planted themselves in a ‘peace camp’ at the RAF base at Greenham Common in Berkshire, in protest against the US Cruise missiles that were stationed there. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was enjoying a new lease of life. Mrs Thatcher was not only standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Reagan in agreeing to base US nuclear missiles in Britain. As she embarked on large-scale privatisation of the core of the old state economy, and curbed trade union strike powers, the default position for many in Labour was that whatever the Tories were for, we must be against. I understood this impulse. From my own Labour background, I knew it was part of the glue that held the whole party together. I recalled my own childhood experience of the annual disarmament marches from the nuclear research base at Aldermaston to Trafalgar Square. My family never marched, but in our own Labour Suburb way, we would pack my father’s Sunbeam with a roast-chicken picnic, drive to the outer reaches of the capital and watch as the throng made its way towards its final rallying point.
The problem was that a modern, relevant Labour Party could not operate on atavistic instinct. We could not make policy on the simple basis that everything that the Tory government – a comfortably re-elected Tory government – did was wrong. That risked not just failing to take on board policies that might be right, but could leave us opposing policies of far greater benefit to our own voters than anything we were offering. That was clearly the case with Mrs Thatcher’s programme to allow millions of council tenants to buy their own homes.
The structure of the party, too, was unrecognisably different then. As leader, Neil was in charge. Up to a point. The National Executive Committee, and indeed party conference, nowadays hold only nominal sway over policy. The trade unions wield nothing like the block-vote power they did then. But when I moved into my tiny third-floor office at Labour HQ, their influence was very real. The NEC, in particular, was the final voice on everything from paperclips to policy on nuclear weapons.
My immediate boss was the party’s new General Secretary, Larry Whitty. Over time, Larry and I would develop a good working relationship, but at the beginning we were on different wavelengths. A lifelong trade union man, he had a sentimental attachment to many of the policies and practices of Labour as it then was, and felt a kind of deference towards Tony Benn. I had been, at best, his second choice for the job. He had hoped for Nita Clarke, Ken Livingstone’s press chief at the Greater London Council, and would almost surely also have preferred David Gow, the Scotsman’s labour correspondent. At least Larry did not share the hostility of many others in Labour to modern communications techniques, which were seen as somehow Tory, and unclean. But he did worry that the changes I might bring about in Labour’s policy presentation would impact on the policies themselves, and that I would tread on the toes of those formally in charge of making them in the NEC. He was nervous that, as John Prescott had warned, I would ‘put my nose in the politics’. In this, Larry got me absolutely right.
Despite my private doubts, from the moment I arrived at Walworth Road I projected a sense of confidence. Partly, this was bravado. Partly, it was because I knew that any chance of my succeeding depended on it. But in one crucial sense I was confident. I was absolutely secure in my conviction that as long as we were saddled with the policies, the mindset and the public image that had led to our débâcle in 1983, Labour would never again be a party of government. And I was absolutely determined to help pull us back from oblivion. I may have lacked experience, even skills, at the start. But I did know what was wrong. Most of Britain’s voters, and almost all of the media, disliked us. Worse, they had simply stopped listening to what we said, or at least taking it seriously. My work in television had given me insight into and experience of modern communications. My job, which I set out to accomplish with a drive that sometimes bordered on obsession, was to make everything about Labour look and sound modern too.
I began, as I did whenever I embarked on a new job throughout my political life, by learning what I didn’t know, focusing on the most pressing problems, and taking early steps to fix them. I was very fortunate to know – or at least to have met – someone who I hoped could help me with all of this. I was first brought together with Philip Gould by Robin Paxton when I was at Weekend World. Philip was ‘in advertising’, Robin told me. He was clever, and a passionate Labour supporter. We met briefly before I left LWT, at a dinner hosted by Philip’s then girlfriend, an up-and-coming publisher named Gail Rebuck. In the intervening year, life had changed for all of us. The small firm Gail had co-founded, Century Press, had done so well that it took over the larger, better-known Hutchinson. She and Philip had married. Philip had set up his own communications consultancy. And I was at Walworth Road. Now, we arranged to talk again, over dinner at Robin’s home in Islington.
With his mop of long hair and oversized glasses, Philip made an extraordinary impression. I don’t know whether it was shyness or single-mindedness, but he barely made eye contact as he expounded for well over an hour on what was wrong with Labour’s image, presentation and political strategy, and how to begin fixing them. I had no way of knowing at that point where Philip might fit into that process, but in advance of our meeting he had sent me an eleven-page letter about how he might help me overhaul Labour’s presentational machinery. We discussed it at Robin’s dinner, and in much greater detail in the days that followed. A few weeks later, I took my first big decision. With a cheque for £600, a sizeable chunk of my budget, I commissioned Philip to conduct a stock-take of Labour’s communications and campaigning. Larry, to my relief, signed off on the idea. It would prove to be the best investment I ever made.
The party already had a contract with a public opinion agency, MORI. Our pollster-in-chief was its American-born chairman, Bob Worcester. His role was essentially to poll, crunch the numbers, deliver and explain the results. Philip was different. He reached beyond traditional opinion polls, assembling ‘focus groups’ to explain why people felt as they did about a policy issue or a political party, how this fitted into what they valued or wanted in their lives, and what it might take to change their minds. He gave Labour, and British politics, its first taste of rigorous, American-style political consultancy. By the time he delivered his sixty-four-page report in December, I knew what its main thrust would be, as I had been among the three dozen people – including Larry and senior colleagues at Walworth Road, and other figures in politics, the media and marketing – to whom he spoke in preparing it. He and I were meeting regularly. The core challenge was obvious to both of us. Labour had to stop seeing communications as something we did with, or to, ourselves. We could no longer, as my canvassing colleague in that council estate in Lambeth had put it, ‘refuse to compromise with the electorate’.
Looking back on the notes of my early conversations with Philip, I am struck not only by my concern about the obvious policy vulnerabilities that had hurt us in 1983. I felt there was a deeper problem: our inability to meet people’s concerns on basic issues affecting their daily lives: health, social services, housing benefits, the economy – and crime, or as I put it to Philip, ‘making people secure in their homes and on the streets’. We could produce policy reports, or catchy ideological prescriptions, but even our traditional supporters were no longer listening. Significant numbers of the ‘working class’ had turned away from Labour and backed the SDP in 1983. Many more had supported Mrs Thatcher. Faced with a choice between a dogmatic, ideologically pure socialism or a Prime Minister, even a Tory Prime Minister, who had allowed them to buy their council houses, it was no choice at all. ‘It’s not just a question of having a neat little formulation extracted from some document placed before the Home Policy Committee of the NEC, or some neat way of saying “You’re number one with Labour”,’ I wrote to Philip. ‘We can’t just get an NHS ambulance with a sticker saying “I Love the Welfare State” and launch a charter. People are not idiots.’
The stock-take report was blunt in its diagnosis and unflinching in its prescription. Knowing I would have to get it through the NEC, I made the language a bit more diplomatic in parts. But I left the core message unaltered. We were so bad at communicating with voters, so seemingly uncaring about what they thought or wanted, that we had become unelectable. No longer could the NEC, the leader’s office and the shadow cabinet haphazardly combine to produce press releases and policy documents, schedule press conferences and public meetings, and await Bob Worcester’s monthly reports in the preposterous expectation that we were on our way back. My office would become the central focus for all party communications. I would be supported by a new organisation we called the Shadow Communications Agency. Run by Philip and me, it would draw on the expertise of outside advertising and marketing professionals who volunteered their services. Also involved would be Labour’s advertising partner, the BMP agency of Chris Powell, older brother of Tony Blair’s future chief of staff, Jonathan. The SCA’s first task would be another stock-take, this time examining ‘every aspect of Labour’s corporate appearance’. Instead of relying on grassroots leaflet and sticker campaigns to get our message across, everything we said from now on would be decided and measured against one, revolutionary, objective: to win votes.
By the time I started at Walworth Road, Labour had ceded this kind of political marketing to the Tories. Larry’s predecessor as General Secretary, Jim Mortimer, had been scathing about the Conservatives’ 1983 campaign, vowing that we would never prostitute ourselves to the idea of presenting politicians and policies ‘as if they were breakfast food or baked beans’. It was a view that resonated with most of the party when I arrived. Not only was it naïve about modern politics, it was wrong about what motivated me. I did believe that there were parallels between political parties and the business and consumer world. Both had ‘products’: in our case, they were called policies, rooted in values. Both competed in the marketplace: in our case, the ultimate test of consumer judgement was a general election. For political parties as much as businesses, if you forgot your customers, if you were unaware of how they were changing and failed to communicate with them properly, they would soon forget you.
Still, our ‘product’ was different, and the difference mattered. I was driven by the conviction that a more modern, in-touch Labour Party would not just be more likely to win an election, but would lead to a fairer, more broadly based, more socially engaged and economically successful government than the Tories. It would be better for Britain. I have no doubt that I would have been good at marketing breakfast food or baked beans – or even the Tories – but I could never have contemplated doing so. The tools of communication might be the same; the aim, the ‘product’, and the driving political purpose were wholly different.
Making a start on getting Labour’s message heard, and making it worth hearing, was exhilarating. But the early months were sometimes brutally difficult. Politically, my position was delicate, to say the least. Neil and Roy had backed me for the job of Director of Campaigns and Communications, but I had been parachuted in, at what must have seemed an obscenely young age, to head one of the three key departments, and I felt that the veteran party operators heading the other two – Geoff Bish for policy, and Joyce Gould for organisation – although outwardly welcoming, viewed me with a mixture of suspicion and envy.
I did have some allies. Before I’d been hired, Neil had installed Robin Cook, the young Scottish MP who had run his leadership campaign, in the new post of ‘Campaign Coordinator’, reporting to the shadow cabinet. Robin had set up something called the Breakfast Group, which brought together pro-Labour figures from the advertising and marketing world to advise on modernising our approach. I saw the party’s situation as even more dire than Robin did, and with Philip and the SCA, I wanted to go further and faster. That produced tension, at least on Robin’s side. I vividly recall an early weekend brainstorming session. Robin was there, countryside-dapper in a silk waistcoat, florid shirt and corduroy trousers. He was not hostile to what I was proposing, but there was an unmistakable frisson in his comments. A sense of ‘Who’s in charge here? I’m the elected politician. I’m the shadow cabinet’s Campaign Coordinator. I’m Neil’s mate. Here’s this ex-television kid, who has come in and started auditing, stock-taking, questioning things, challenging them.’ It was understandable. Robin had put the foundation stones in place. Now, I seemed to be taking over the construction.
There was tension of a different sort with the other key member of Neil’s team who was already involved in remaking Labour’s communications and image. Patricia Hewitt, who had narrowly failed to be elected as an MP, was Neil’s press secretary. She was only five years older than me, but she had been involved in campaign work since her early twenties, having begun as press officer for Age Concern before moving on to head the National Council for Civil Liberties. I was a bit in awe of her. She had had two years of battlefield experience in trying to get the media to take a kinder, or at least less unkind, view of Neil and of Labour, and had drawn up a range of campaigning plans, including a project to target key seats at the next election. If I wanted to go further and faster than Robin, Patricia seemed to want to go further and faster yet. With the best of intentions, she not only encouraged me but actively drove me on.
By early 1986 I was working flat out. There were two parts to my job, and two parts to my day. I would spend the mornings at Walworth Road, and was always at my precariously balanced desk by 7.30. There, my focus was campaigning, specifically a major social policy launch that had been agreed – but not planned out, designed or organised – before I arrived. Neil had set the tone. Rather than settle for the familiar NEC emphasis on ‘fairness’, he had insisted that it bring in the theme of ‘freedom’ as well. He recognised that Mrs Thatcher had succeeded in making freedom, a classic liberal value, an asset for the Conservatives. We had to start reclaiming it. But what policies would we actually be promoting? How would we present them? What would the posters and the pamphlets look like? How, and where, would we organise the launch event?
I had been at my job long enough to know what the NEC would expect. We would invite the media to one of our down-at-heel conference rooms in Walworth Road, hand out a dense tome on Labour’s policies, display the leaflets and stickers we were distributing to party cadres around the country – and assail the heartless Tories. The assumption, or the hope, would be that if only we could drive home the fact that we cared more than the Conservatives, the voters would care more about us.
I was absolutely determined that the campaign, the first test of the new approach and new structure I was trying to put in place, would be unrecognisably different. The problem was that I had done nothing remotely similar before. I did not fear that I’d end up with something worse than our normal fare. Leafing through sheafs of our recent policy material, with its tired and predictable slogans and uninspiring artwork, I did not believe that was possible. I did fear that whatever I attempted might be neutered by the NEC. Or that it might disappoint Neil, and even more so, Patricia. Working at an increasingly fevered pace with Philip, the SCA, the designers and printers, I sometimes felt overwhelmed by the need to get every one of hundreds of details right, and by anxiety over how much could go wrong.
The second part of my day was spent on the other side of the Thames. After a late, quick lunch, often at a very lively but now defunct pizzeria in the Elephant and Castle called the Castello, I would drive to the House of Commons and base myself in Neil’s office. My job there was to patrol the top-floor offices of the parliamentary press gallery. It seems amazing to me now, but along with Patricia I was wholly responsible for making Labour’s case to the media, and through them to the country. It was the start of my career as a spin doctor. Yet ‘spinning’ does not begin to capture the difficulty, bordering on impossibility, I found in securing anything more than the most occasional word of praise for Labour. Virtually all the newspapers looked upon 1980s Labour as hopelessly extreme in its policies, out of touch with the country, and hobbled by internal bickering. Since that was largely true, there were limits to what I could do to convince the reporters otherwise. I tried, but mostly my job was damage control. It was frustrating, and it was exhausting.
My refuge was the cottage in Foy on the River Wye in Herefordshire that I had bought while I was at LWT. Set in a lovely, secluded spot on a horseshoe-shaped bend in the river, it was what you might call ‘compact’. There was a small sitting room and an even smaller dining room on the ground floor, and three tiny bedrooms upstairs. A bathroom had been built off the back. It was also the most wonderful home I have ever owned. I bought a slightly battered, blue-velvet suite of furniture for downstairs, and within a couple of months I had the wall between the two downstairs rooms knocked through to make a living-and-dining area, and installed a big brick hearth. There was an antique-looking dial phone whose cord stretched just far enough for me to sit with it on the step outside the front door. I also acquired a – barely – portable phone, one of those contraptions with a huge battery pack you had to sling over your shoulder wherever you went.
I drove up to Foy every weekend, often with friends, sometimes alone. I would read, listen to music, watch TV, cut the grass, dig the garden, build bonfires. I would also work, often trying somehow to get a positive story about Labour, or much more frequently to soften a damaging one, in the all-important Sunday papers. Every Saturday I would wake up and steel myself for the task of spending half the morning phoning round all the Sunday papers’ political journalists. Then I would go into the nearby town of Ross, where I would do a supermarket shop before taking my regular seat at a wonderful Hungarian restaurant called Meaders, for my favourite dish of layered meat and cabbage. Back at the cottage, I would try to watch whatever classic movie the BBC had on in the afternoon, then fall into a deep sleep before working in the garden or going for a walk while I prepared myself mentally for the first editions of the Sunday papers.
Usually I knew what disturbing bit of Labour news was coming, because a reporter would have phoned for a comment earlier in the day. It was often an assault on Neil’s moves to expel Militant members from the party, or an alleged split on some policy or another. Occasionally I would be asked what the party thought about the latest far-left pronouncement by Ken Livingstone, or even Ted Knight. Every week, for hours on end, I had to hose down stories or stop the forest fires spreading to other papers or broadcasters. It was relentless, lonely and dispiriting work, and almost always involved arguing hard with whoever was on the line. I constantly had to make snap judgements, in an unremittingly hostile environment.
I was on the way back from Foy in a driving rainstorm one Sunday afternoon, six weeks before our ‘Freedom and Fairness’ launch, when all the pressures of the job – working out what to do, the antagonism of the press, the sheer scale of the task of somehow making Labour credible again, the expectations of Neil and Patricia, and myself – finally came to a head. As the rain beat against the windscreen, I was alarmed to feel tears starting to roll down my cheeks. For weeks, I had been finding it hard to sleep through the night. I would get off to sleep all right, but always awoke long before dawn, feeling very anxious. Unable to get back to sleep, I would arrive very early at the office. By nine o’clock I would feel completely worn out, and my head would be aching; I seemed to live on paracetamol. I would somehow force myself through the day, trying to focus on meetings, campaign planning, dealing with the press, just to get through to the evening. I would reach home late, and go to bed feeling simultaneously washed out and tightly wound up.
I believed passionately in what I was doing in my new job, but as the weeks passed, I just could not see how I would handle all the obstacles, anticipate everything that might go wrong. I could not see light at the end of the tunnel. As I drove towards London that Sunday afternoon through heavy traffic, anticipating another week of struggle and sleeplessness, I suddenly felt unable to cope. I was just not sure I could stay the course. I was due to attend a concert that evening at the Royal Festival Hall with an old London Labour friend, Illtyd Harrington, deputy head of the GLC before he and the rest of the sane tendency were pushed out by Ken Livingstone. When I arrived, visibly stressed and out of breath, on the terrace outside the Festival Hall, Illtyd took one look at me and said, ‘Peter, what’s wrong?’ All the pent-up worries came rushing out. Illtyd told me that if I wanted to see my efforts at Walworth Road succeed, the first thing I had to do was take care of myself. He made me promise to see his doctor, Denis Cowan, the following day.
Dr Cowan was reassuring. There was nothing seriously wrong with me, he said. It was just the inevitable result of steadily building pressure, the demands of the job and the demands I was putting on myself. He prescribed three weeks of self-discipline, and sleep. I must arrive at Walworth Road no earlier than 9.30 a.m., leave at 5 p.m. sharp, take no work home with me, and be in bed by ten. He also prescribed sleeping pills for several weeks. I was very reluctant to take them. When I was growing up, medicine was rather frowned upon at Bigwood Road: getting my mother to dispense as much as an aspirin took some persuasion. But I followed Dr Cowan’s advice to the letter. Within a few weeks I dispensed with the tablets, and the crisis passed.
My recovery, and Labour’s too, really began ten days before the grand policy launch, with a campaign of another sort. It was the first by-election on my watch, in Fulham, caused by the death of the sitting Conservative MP. At least in this battle I had some handson experience, from Brecon and Radnor. But I knew it would be the first test of the kind of modern campaigning machinery I had put in place with Philip and the SCA, and that sceptics and critics on the NEC would be keenly eyeing both the campaign and the result. There seemed to be little realistic prospect that we would win. Worse, with the Tory government growing increasingly unpopular, many pundits seemed to think the likeliest winner was the SDP, whose candidate was none other than my old south London friend Roger Liddle.
I think that only a few weeks earlier I could not have faced the challenge. But I knew we had to make every effort to at least make the election close. With Philip’s constant encouragement, we organised a campaign for our candidate, Nick Raynsford, that was eye-catching, simple and, it turned out, extraordinarily effective. Both the Conservative, Matthew Carrington, and Roger lived outside the constituency – to be fair, in Roger’s case this was only by a matter of a few miles – but all our campaign literature was dominated by an engaging photograph of our prospective MP framed by one, strikingly presented slogan: ‘Nick Raynsford Lives Here’. The fact that local Labour supporters throughout the constituency began taping the image to their front windows made the effect especially powerful and amusing.
On the night of the election, 10 April 1986, Labour took the seat from the Tories. Roger finished a fairly distant third. This personal embarrassment for me was made even more difficult by the fact that Roger’s wife, Caroline, was also a good friend from my days in youth politics. When she spotted me at the election count, she gave me what my mother would have called ‘an old-fashioned look’. I could hardly blame her. I was sad that Roger had lost, and resigned to the likelihood that it would be some time before my friendship with him and Caroline could be repaired. At the same time, I was elated that our revamped campaigning team had met its first obstacle, and convincingly and unexpectedly cleared it.
Then came the ‘Freedom and Fairness’ launch. We had been working for months to make it unmistakably new, and it was. The result was a campaign document that not only included the kind of policy pledges expected of Labour, like increased child benefit, educational subsidies for young people and new housing opportunities, but was also about making individuals freer in their day-to-day lives. We promised a greater say for patients in the NHS, and set out measures against vandalism and crime. The design, too, was sleeker, friendlier on the eye. The SCA had given the brief to Trevor Beattie, whose talent for finding eye-catching, if sometimes controversial, ways to grab the public’s attention would later produce Wonderbra’s ‘Hello Boys’ ads. Instead of our old-style Labour stickers, we minted metal badges in edgy black, grey and silver.
In what would become a pattern for many of the changes we went on to make, I had a brief moment of drama with Neil as the posters and media packs were going to the printers. Three days before the launch, he called me in and exclaimed, ‘Where does it say “Labour’s Freedom and Fairness Campaign”? What’s this “Putting People First”? Where’s the title?’ Feeling much better, more confident – and more rested – than I had for some time, I assured him that both freedom and fairness were still at the centre of the campaign. What we had done was to bring together real policy ideas to put those values into practice. Just like the imagery and artwork, the point was to move beyond talking in a political language that would pass most people by, and, yes, to say directly that we were ‘putting people first’. As delicately as I could, I reminded Neil that he had signed off on every creative stage of the campaign along the way. Besides, I said, not quite truthfully, it was almost surely too late to change. But Neil was adamant. In the end, literally almost as the presses were beginning to roll, I arranged for the printers to include the words ‘Labour’s Freedom and Fairness Campaign’, in small letters, along the side of each poster and pamphlet.
The most striking change was the site of the launch. It was not in a scruffy room at Walworth Road, but in the International Press Centre near Fleet Street. By the time we got there, Neil had been won over to the idea, and the design, of the campaign. He was typically fluent and forceful in tying together the policy prospectus with the themes of freedom and fairness. A small girl whose parents had agreed for her to be featured as the main image in our publicity material had come to the launch, and Neil – wonderfully, spontaneously – lifted her aloft. The photographers loved it.
Less enthusiastic was Eric Heffer, who had turned up unexpectedly and stood scowling at me from the back of the room. ‘It’s disgraceful,’ he muttered. When I failed to reply, he continued: ‘It’s more than disgraceful. It’s disgusting! The NEC never approved this. Where’s the Red Flag? What is “Putting People First”?’ Stalking out, he delivered a parting shot. This was not the Labour Party he had joined, he fumed. It was just one of a series of heartening reviews. From the other end of the political horizon Norman Tebbit, the Tory Chairman, issued a blistering condemnation of our ‘slickness’. The press, too, sat up and took notice. Not only were there warm responses from our own camp, the Guardian and Tribune; the Economist saw the choice of venue as a sign that Labour was determined ‘never again to look dowdy or old-fashioned’. Even the FT nodded approvingly.
Heffer was right about one thing: I had never sought detailed NEC approval for the new approach and the new look. I knew I would never have got it. At the very minimum, there would have been endless debate over every dot and comma. The most that would have come out of it was a hugely scaled-down version that would not have had anything like the same impact. I did, of course, have the NEC’s endorsement for the central themes of freedom and fairness. I reassured Larry Whitty, as I had told Neil, that our job had simply been to find a new and effective way to get people to listen to that message.
This would set the pattern for much of my future dealings with Larry and the NEC. I recognised that they were my bosses, and was careful to follow the letter of their directives. But I hoped, and became increasingly confident, that by pushing the limits of the spirit of their decisions we could make a major impact on how the party and its policies were seen. I discovered one important tactic early on. When I received an especially heavy-handed policy pronouncement – on the economy, on trade unions, on defence – for our latest party publicity, I would have the text squeezed onto the right-hand side of the page. I would then sit down with the increasingly enthusiastic and hard-working team around me at Walworth Road, people like Jim Parish, Anna Healy and Jackie Stacey, and go through every vote-losing word, picking out the most attractive-sounding phrases – about growth and prosperity rather than state control, or support for a strongly defended Britain rather than unilateral disarmament – and highlighting them in big, attractive type in the wide margin.
Over time, I would find myself applying similar methods to almost every aspect of our presentation and communications. I remember one major policy pronouncement, otherwise fairly forward-looking, in which the NEC instructed us to insert the text of our socialist credo, Clause IV. It did go in, but not in the document that I initially released to the media, only on the inside cover when it was printed. I could do little about the rousing rendition of ‘The Red Flag’ that closed the Labour conference, but I could try to ensure that it was not the lasting image voters kept in their minds. In this, I usually failed, but sometimes I would be able to choreograph the final speeches so that the concluding hymn would come after live TV coverage had ended. If we couldn’t change the policy, at least we could change the way we were seen.
The reporters I dealt with every day were less easily finessed. They knew it was policies that ultimately mattered, and that ours hadn’t changed. My daily, and often nightly, dealings with the press did become less wearing, however. Their copy was still almost unremittingly hostile, but personal relationships were being built up. I was their one-man, one-stop source for what Labour was doing, thinking and saying. In that sense, they needed me. It went without saying that I needed them if our public image was ever going to change. Some of the journalists were simply cynical hacks with a settled, utterly negative, view of Labour dictated by their news desks. It was a narrative they knew by heart, and could write up almost automatically before heading off for a drink at the Press Bar or in Strangers, the meeting place for MPs and others on the Thames side of the Houses of Parliament. The facts, and what I or anyone else at Labour said, didn’t really matter to them.
My reputation for toughness, or worse, with the press began with journalists like that in these early days. But many of the more serious, and more influential, writers and broadcasters were at least open-minded. I think they also had a bit of sympathy for my plight as I struggled to find ways to give Labour a new, more reasonable face. Most weeks I would have lunch with one or another of these reporters – sometimes, at their invitation and on their expenses, at one of the fancier restaurants around Westminster, but more often in the Commons press cafeteria. I kept telling myself that over time, if and when Labour had a better story to tell, they would help us tell it.
Even in this part of my job, I sometimes had to look over my shoulder. The first problem involved Rupert Murdoch’s stable of British newspapers – The Times and Sunday Times, the News of the World and the Sun. After prolonged and fruitless negotiation, Murdoch had forced through the introduction of new technology, over the protests of striking print union workers, and opened up a new plant in Wapping. His titles continued to publish, with most journalists crossing increasingly violent and heavily policed picket lines. The NEC voted in a ban on any contact with reporters from the Murdoch papers. It was the classic 1980s Labour response. Not only was it on the wrong side of where most voters thought we should be, but in theory it would keep me from talking to the very journalists I needed if I was to have any hope of improving the party’s image. At the news conference at which I announced the NEC boycott, I duly asked the Times and Sun reporters to leave the room. I felt ridiculous. I also realised that to do otherwise would have been the equivalent of handing in my notice.
However, I made it a point privately to continue briefing, and talking to, the Murdoch journalists. In the Fulham by-election, that was obviously not going to be sufficient. Once the campaign got under way, reporters would build their day around each of the three parties’ main news conferences. They were not going to have the time – or presumably the desire – to oblige me by sharing a private Castello pizza to receive my daily spin on the campaign. If we wanted our side of the story to appear in Murdoch’s papers, we would have to include their journalists in our news conferences. Making common cause with Patricia Hewitt, and with the support and understanding of Larry Whitty, I persuaded the NEC to suspend its boycott for the duration of the campaign. As I had hoped, it was then quietly forgotten.
The ‘Freedom and Fairness’ launch was never going to be enough fundamentally to change Labour’s look or its image. The next step was more audacious, and had a more far-reaching effect. In Philip’s stock-take, we had told the NEC that we planned to review ‘every aspect of Labour’s corporate appearance’. Though I imagine most members glossed over this bit of advertising-speak, there was never any doubt in my mind where the remake had to begin. The defining core of our image was our fluttering red flag. Eric Heffer, as an NEC member, had seen the report when it came up for approval, but neither he nor the other sceptics would have imagined that we would actually go ahead and fold up the red flag. Had he realised this at the ‘Freedom and Fairness’ launch, he might literally have combusted. For months, we worked at finding a new logo. It was Neil who first suggested borrowing a symbol from the Scandinavian social democrats: a red rose. We all liked the idea, and I consulted the design expert Michael Wolff, of Wolff-Olins fame, who recruited the artist Philip Sutton. The rose evoked England’s gardens. It suggested growth in fresh soil. Sunlight. Optimism. The challenge was to ensure that it would pass muster – with Neil, but above all with the NEC – in time for party conference at the end of September.
In July, Patricia, Philip, Michael Wolff and I went to see Philip Sutton in his studio in south London. Hanging up on clothes pegs on a washing line running along the studio walls were scores of images of different roses. Over a stretch of two hours, we went around the room, gradually narrowing down our search for the perfect rose and agreeing a shortlist of half a dozen prototypes. Three weeks later the artwork had been refined on each of them, and we had to decide from a final batch of three. I picked what I thought was the best, and it went to Neil for his approval. He loved it – or almost: he wanted the stem shortened.
On the eve of conference, however, came a familiar last-minute hesitation. I had already got the design through the NEC publicity subcommittee. It was chaired by my early Walworth Road ally Gwyneth Dunwoody, who deftly and deliberately underplayed the significance of the party’s new symbol. It was just a ‘campaign logo’, she said. We had also designed a conference wallet to contain every delegate’s papers. It was salmon pink, emblazoned with the red rose and the word ‘Labour’ in big, bold letters. Now I was summoned to see Neil in his Commons office. His wife Glenys was there too, looking upset and worried. Neil was holding up one of our salmon-pink wallets. ‘Do you really think the mineworkers’ delegation are going to prance around conference holding this? They’re not going to be caught dead with these things,’ he said. ‘You can’t do it. There’ll be a riot.’ This time, it really was too late to change. I persuaded him it would be all right on the night.
It was. The entire backcloth of the conference platform in Blackpool was adorned with the new logo in all its glory. The red rose was printed on everything capable of taking its imprint. For Labour to pack away the red flag, as the fury of Eric Heffer and others soon made clear, was like Nike dumping its swish, or McDonald’s chopping down the golden arches. The red flag symbolised everything Labour represented in the public mind: socialism, nationalisation, state control. Everything, that is, that voters now liked least and mistrusted most about us. The red rose wasn’t just a design change: it represented a transformation in how the party would present itself. It had real impact, reinforced by our now ubiquitous new strapline, recognising the need to put people, not the party, first.
The change did generate comment and controversy in our ranks, though not in anything like the way Neil and Glenys had feared. Delegates eagerly collected their conference folders, taking two or three at a time, briefly raising the spectre that we might run out. If they were left on seats, they were stolen. In some cases, money changed hands amongst ardent collectors. That the media were excited – and through them the country – was not only important in itself, it had an immediate effect on the morale of party members. Here was Labour doing something well and eye-catching, beating the Tories at their own game.
On the final day of conference I brought a huge box of fresh red roses, minus their thorns, onto the stage for Neil and Glenys to throw to the delegates. There was a roar of delight. Catching sight of my broadcasting officer Tony Beeton, who would tragically die in the Paddington rail disaster in October 1999, I suggested that he and his tiny son Piers join Neil on the platform. Spotting the young child, Neil’s instinctive response was as it had been at the ‘Freedom and Fairness’ launch: he clutched Piers in one arm and held up one of the – long-stemmed – roses in the other, to shouts and cheers from the hall. It was an extraordinarily uplifting moment. At least briefly, I even allowed myself to indulge in the fantasy that it might provide a springboard for the general election, due in eighteen months but likely to come earlier.
We had had a good year. With Philip’s research suggesting that many voters saw Mrs Thatcher as polarising and divisive, we had actually arrived at conference with a small lead in the opinion polls. I knew Labour’s problems went much deeper, however. Branding, image, marketing, could do only so much. It was the product that ultimately mattered – especially if the product was a set of policies on which voters would decide what kind of future they wanted, and what kind of government they trusted to deliver it. The main reason we had lost in 1983 wasn’t that our campaign was amateurish and outdated – that had merely helped turn a defeat into a drubbing. It was our policies. We were in favour of nationalised industries, strike-prone trade unions and unilateral disarmament. We were against the free market, privatisation and widened share ownership, and even allowing council tenants to buy their properties. When it came time to choose, millions fewer opted for us than for the Tories, and we had only just edged out the SDP.
Our image and packaging were finally changing. Our product – as resolution after resolution at the party conference made clear – was not. Nor, much beyond Neil and his shadow cabinet allies, did there seem to be a huge appetite for change. Modernising Labour’s appearance and image was difficult enough. Getting any fundamental policy change through the morass of ideological bickering in the NEC, not to mention the trade unions or leftist local parties, was not just a matter of changing Labour’s landscape. It was more like draining a swamp.
After our conference our polling numbers lifted, but they fell off as attention turned to the Tories, who were busy getting into their pre-election stride with an array of new policies entitled ‘The Next Steps Forward’. Still, I entered 1987 feeling relatively upbeat. It was far too late for us to perform major surgery on our policies, but I was confident that we now had assets which could at least make this battle different from 1983. With our new communications operation, my hope was to emphasise what had changed in Labour. I hoped to build on our new image by promoting Neil as a different kind of Labour leader.
I had no doubt about the strengths of the people working most closely around him – Patricia Hewitt, and his chief of staff Charles Clarke, who I had known well since our days in student politics in the 1970s. As we geared up for election year, there was a real sense of shared purpose: to build a professional campaign around Neil as a leader who was showing vision and courage in modernising Labour, and could bring similar qualities to Downing Street. I believed this to be true. Although I had never managed anything remotely on this scale, I felt a new level of confidence about my grasp of modern campaigning methods, and in the team we had in the SCA and at Walworth Road. Within days of returning from our ‘red rose’ conference, we began planning for the general election campaign. Ultimately, dozens of people would be involved. Some of them – Charles, Patricia, David Hill, Chris Powell at BMP and of course Philip Gould – would go on to play important roles with New Labour a decade later. But the main connecting line was in the mechanics of the campaign we devised.
When we began mapping things out in the autumn of 1986, Patricia was not officially at work: she had just had her first child and was on maternity leave. Philip and I would gather around her kitchen table, with Patricia holding her baby daughter in her arms. Some of the features of the 1987 campaign looked new only in the hidebound context of the Labour Party. They were basic, common-sense changes in image, advertising and presentation. That alone would make a difference, but what was really new was the degree of detail, coordination and control we wired in from the start. We began with our ‘warbook’, although we didn’t give it that name until the process became political orthodoxy in the 1990s: an outline of our own and other parties’ strengths and weaknesses, and a point-by-point plan of how to make the most of each of them. Then came what was probably the most lastingly important innovation. We began setting out a ‘grid’ – a day-by-day map of the entire campaign, with a single policy issue and related narrative as well as a pre-planned visual context, to provide a compelling image for TV news and the following day’s papers. It was all bound together by Philip’s input – the most sustained, detailed and nuanced research and analysis the Labour Party had ever seen.
In February, however, things began to go wrong. On the surface, all was still to play for. Though we no longer led in the polls, we were trailing the Tories by only a point or two, and were comfortably clear of the SDP in third place. With the economy recovering, however, a Tory policy prospectus promising growth, reduced taxes and low inflation would be a tough case to answer. While Neil’s identity as a new kind of leader was gaining traction, so were escalating Tory assaults on Labour’s ‘loony left’. Worse, voters were about to be reminded of it all over again. The occasion was a by-election in Greenwich, prompted by the death of the veteran Labour MP Guy Barnett. Labour had held the seat for four decades – even, with a reduced majority, in 1983. If we had tapped into Philip’s bank of research in picking Guy Barnett’s prospective successor, we surely would have won. But under NEC selection rules, with a strong boost from her National Union of Public Employees sponsors, the nod went to Deirdre Wood, Greenwich’s representative on the London Education Authority.
Deirdre had history in Ken Livingstone’s GLC. She was realistic enough to recognise the difficulties her candidacy presented us with in the run-up to a general election. When she met Neil after she’d been selected, she told him, ‘Don’t worry, I won’t drop you in it.’ She didn’t. She didn’t propose nationalising Greenwich, or declaring London a nuclear-free zone. But with the Daily Mail taking the lead, there was an orgy of ‘exposés’, with spurious allegations about her private life and even mockery of her looks. It was a sustained assault which on more than one occasion reduced Deirdre to tears.
In 1983, Guy Barnett had a 1,200-vote edge over the Conservatives, with the SDP in third place. This time, the Tories concluded early on that they were unlikely to win. The SDP ran the candidate they had recently picked for the general election: an attractive, softly-spoken market researcher named Rosie Barnes, whose husband was a local councillor who organised her campaign. The SDP’s Liberal allies sensed that Deirdre’s selection made us vulnerable, and flooded the constituency with canvassers. As the campaign neared its end, our polling suggested that the Tories were encouraging tactical voting as well. Days before the vote on 26 February, we still held a lead. But it was tiny. The night before the election, journalists phoned me with advance word on the next morning’s coverage. The Tories had essentially conceded defeat, and the SDP were making a late surge. As the polls opened, I phoned Charles. ‘We’re going to lose,’ I said. ‘Heavily.’ When we did, by almost 7,000 votes, it was as if everything we had so painstakingly built up had crumbled away on that by-election dawn.
Before long there was a string of further setbacks, unlucky events and own-goals. The most serious involved our most difficult policy problem: defence. In 1986, Neil had gone to Washington, where he managed to deflect the embarrassment of failing to meet President Reagan by saying he’d be back before the election. Since our disarmament policy would commit a Labour government to breaking ranks with America and NATO, the last thing we needed was a tête-à-tête at the White House. I and others, including Shadow Foreign Secretary Denis Healey, tried to talk Neil out of going. He was insistent. He had said he would visit before the election. Not to do so would look weak. I was left to record in my diary the vain hope that Reagan would either fall ill, or for some reason be unable to find time for a meeting before the trip took place. The President was in robust health. When Neil arrived in the Oval Office the meeting was bad enough, with a series of predictably chilly exchanges. Then Reagan’s spokesman emerged with a politically damning account for reporters. He said the President had not even needed the allotted half-hour to tell Britain’s Labour leader that his policies would undermine the Western alliance. Even a friendly feature by one of our few supporters in the travelling press, the Mirror’s Alastair Campbell, could not curb the damage. A Gallup poll at the end of the month had us not only trailing the Tories, by nearly ten percentage points, but in third place, behind the Liberal-SDP Alliance.
I did my best to put a positive spin on it. I phoned the Press Association’s man in the Commons, Chris Moncrieff, and portrayed Neil’s surprisingly resilient remarks after the White House snub as stage one in a carefully planned ‘April fightback’ ahead of the election campaign. There was no such plan, much less any sign of a fightback. But it was one of those phrases that somehow take on a life of their own. By mid-month, although the polls gave the Tories a widening lead, we were at least back in second place. I knew we could still fall back. Although I told reporters that the polls showed that we were ‘back on course, and contending for power’, I truly believed only the first of these claims. ‘What I really feel,’ I wrote in my diary one evening in April, ‘is that we are back on course to remain in existence.’
When the election was announced on the second Monday of May, with polling day set for 11 June 1987, I felt more confident than I had a few weeks earlier. From command central in Walworth Road, I found myself working eighteen-hour days to keep on top of every facet of the campaign: speeches and appearances by Neil and others; decisions on advertising, posters and party TV messages; how and what we were briefing to the media. Philip’s daily cull and analysis of the opinion data was indispensable. As the campaign hit the road, I was in constant contact by primitive mobile phone with Patricia and, at key moments, with Neil.
Our frontman at news conferences and briefings was Bryan Gould, who had succeeded Robin as the shadow cabinet’s campaign chief. Born in New Zealand, Bryan had studied at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, become a television presenter, and had gone into the Commons in 1974. We hit it off immediately. He was articulate, self-assured, quick-witted and very good company, and I soon became good friends with both him and his wife Gill. He was also a huge asset to the campaign. His encounters with the media were amazing to behold. Entering the room with a few hastily scribbled talking points, he seemed capable of answering even the least anticipated question with fluency and lucidity.
Our first few days were steady rather than spectacular. Though even that represented a huge advance over 1983, it did nothing to cushion the blow of the first opinion polls. In two of them, we were back in third place. But soon, our carefully primed campaign engine got up to speed. Neil did too. His breakthrough moment came at the Welsh Labour conference in Llandudno in mid-May. He had been up much of the night fine-tuning a speech on a theme he had often promoted: freedom and opportunity. The words were strong, the argument deftly made. But the speech did not really take flight until he launched into a passionate, personal broadside against unfairness in Britain. ‘Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university?’ he began. ‘Why is Glenys the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it because our predecessors were thick? Did they lack talent? Those people who could sing, and play, and recite and write poetry; those people who could make wonderful, beautiful things with their hands? Those people who could dream dreams, and see visions? Was it because they were weak – those people who could work eight hours underground, and then come up and play football? Does anybody really think that they didn’t get what we had because they didn’t have the talent, or the strength, or the endurance, or the commitment?’ Of course not, he said. ‘It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand!’ There were not the conditions that allowed people who were free under British law truly to live that freedom.
Even watching on the TV at Walworth Road, I felt the power of his words. I knew that Neil on this form – genuine, spine-tinglingly eloquent, and speaking on the kind of social issues where the Tories were most vulnerable – would be key to the campaign. The imperative was to improve his connection with voters. We had already decided that our first broadcast of the campaign would focus on him. We had put it in the hands of a remarkable film-maker, the Chariots of Fire director Hugh Hudson. I’d first met Hugh the previous summer. He was one of a number of talented figures who wanted to do what they could personally to help revive and modernise Labour. Through the first part of the 1980s, such approaches had been routinely rebuffed or ignored. Eager to get Hugh involved, I asked him to produce a video of the autumn party conference. It was powerful, subtle, engaging, and perfectly captured the new ‘red rose’ image we were trying to bring to the party.
Before the campaign started, Patricia and I asked him to turn his artistry to Neil, in a party political broadcast. The aim was to confront his media image as weak, woolly and indecisive, and to project his personal and political strengths. When I first saw what Hugh had come up with, at a late-evening screening two days before it aired, I knew it had done the job. The media dubbed it ‘Kinnock: the Movie’. It opened with a fighter jet morphing into a seagull above the bluffs of south Wales. Using footage from interviews we had Alastair Campbell do with Neil, his family and leading party figures, Hugh created a portrait of a leader whose bedrock beliefs drove him to help others, and who had the determination and strength to turn his beliefs into action. The film segued into his assault on Militant at the 1985 conference. The climax was built around the Llandudno speech. The final scene showed Neil and Glenys walking hand-in-hand along the seacoast. It was breathtaking. The only question was what words we would put up at the end. Usually, it would be the campaign slogan or the Labour logo. When the screening was over I turned to Betty Boothroyd, a sympathetic NEC member and future Speaker of the Commons, who had wandered in to watch. She said, gratifyingly, that she had loved it. ‘What about ending the film with something besides the word “Labour”?’ I asked her. ‘Would it work to just put “Kinnock”?’ She agreed. Later, I would be criticised by some of her NEC colleagues for ‘personalising’ the campaign. I was guilty as charged. Amid all our policy ‘negatives’, Neil was one of our few potential positives.
The aims of our campaign had been to build up his stock as a new kind of leader, and in effect to camouflage most of the policy prospectus on which we were asking voters to put him into Downing Street. To a remarkable degree, we succeeded. In vision and planning, management and mechanics, our campaign made the vaunted Tory machine look staid, slow, stodgy. The day before the election, the New York Times wrote of how dramatically things had changed. Struck by the contrast between the Thatcher rallies staged by the Tories’ presentation supremo, Harvey Thomas, and our Hugh Hudson broadcasts, it concluded: ‘In 1979 and 1983, Mr Thomas’s rallies were the splashiest events around, yielding strong television images that helped establish the Conservatives’ primacy as the party with the most polished communications operation. But this year, the slickness of Mr Hudson’s films demonstrated Labour’s ability to beat the Conservatives at their own game.’ The article quoted a top London advertising executive as saying that we had ‘rattled the Conservative campaign, forcing them to spend valuable time repudiating Labour claims instead of concentrating on Tory successes’. It also praised the way in which we had managed to use the rallies we staged for Neil to ‘divert attention from defence to issues like health care, pensions and education – on which Mrs Thatcher, despite her lead in the polls, has been on the defensive’.
Realistically, however, our main rival was not Mrs Thatcher or the Tories. We were battling for second place, against the Liberal-SDP Alliance. In 1983 we had beaten them by only two percentage points, and well under a million votes. Even after our ‘April fightback’, the polls had intermittently shown us as neck-and-neck with the Alliance, or at times behind them. We faced the real prospect of finishing in third place. By polling day, I knew we had at least faced down that threat. From early in the campaign, especially since the Kinnock movie, we had drawn ahead. As I sat in Walworth Road on election night, the only question in my mind was by how much. I was exhausted. In one sense, it was lucky we had never really had a chance of defeating the Conservatives. By the end of the campaign I was so spent, emotionally and physically, that I had literally nothing left for the final sprint.
Bizarrely, there was a brief moment on election day when there was a suggestion that we might even win. Vincent Hanna, the BBC political correspondent, phoned me early in the evening. In a conspiratorial whisper, he said: ‘Peter, it’s Vincent. I have some very interesting information seeping out about the exit polls. You might just be in for a pleasant surprise.’ Swearing me to secrecy, and saying he could not go into detail, he continued: ‘You may want to get your “plan B” ready.’ I was intrigued, or more nearly astonished. I thanked him, but said: ‘For God’s sake, don’t tell Neil. It’ll get him all wound up.’
As Vincent had hinted, the first Newsnight prediction was for a hung Parliament. I still frankly didn’t believe it – I remember turning to Philip and saying, ‘If only …’ The exit poll corrected itself, and the Conservatives won, as we’d both known they would. Mrs Thatcher got a Commons majority of 102. Still, that was down by forty-two seats on 1983. We had gained twenty seats, and cantered home well ahead of the SDP-Liberal Alliance, by eight percentage points and nearly three million votes. We had survived. We had won the battle of the opposition. If the Greenwich trend had continued, we might well not have done.
I retreated to Foy that weekend. I was a tangle of emotions. The campaign had been more wearing than anything I had ever done in my life. I had never directed anything like it before, and had no benchmark against which to judge what I was doing. Every day was virgin territory. If it had not been for the two Goulds, Bryan and Philip, I am sure I would not have been able to carry it off. Never did I have more reason to be grateful for their support than on the first Saturday of the campaign, when I was suddenly confronted with the personal cost of my more prominent political role. The News of the World, Britain’s highest-circulation Sunday paper, was planning to use its front page next day to tell the country about my private life. I had never cloaked this in secrecy: I simply regarded my life outside politics as having no relevance to my public role. It didn’t preoccupy me, and I did not see why it should concern anyone else. The News of the World chose not only to target me, but to make personal allegations about Roy Hattersley and the Liberal Party leader, David Steel, as well.
I had been with my partner at the time for nearly ten years. He had also briefly been involved with a woman friend, with whom he had fathered a wonderful son – to whom not only his mother, but the two of us were devoted. What angered me was that the newspaper had decided to publicise this as well: identities, details, photographs and all. On Alastair Campbell’s advice, I telephoned the editor, David Montgomery, and told him that if he really wanted to ‘reveal all’ about me, he could go ahead, but including the name of the three-year-old boy involved, or his mother, would be an utterly unjustified violation of their rights to privacy. Montgomery was cold, monosyllabic, and seemingly could not have cared less. He shrugged off my request, and went ahead. Alastair, who was by my side throughout, shared my disgust.
I was told later that the News of the World ‘bombshell’ had been discussed with the Conservative Party’s high command. The Tories apparently saw this as a legitimate way of taking me out of the campaign. If so, it failed. I was fortunate that the pace and demands of the election left me little time to brood on what had happened. The rest of the media, in any case, ignored the News of the World’s prurience. But it couldn’t help but affect the way I felt about and responded to other media intrusions into my private life. It made me more determined than ever not to make concessions to those who are interested in the irrelevances of the bedroom over the Cabinet Room. This was nearly twenty-five years ago. Thankfully, the world has moved on, and with it, journalistic standards.
With the election over, I took comfort from knowing how much ground we had reclaimed since the chaos and crisis of the spring. The campaign had been a watershed for Labour. It had shown to the party, and the numerous sceptics in the media, that we could compete with the Tories in using the tools of modern political communications to get our voice through to voters. We were at least back in the game. It had been transformational for me as well. As the central figure in the Walworth Road operation, I was always going to receive more media attention than before. If it had all gone haywire, I would have got the blame.
In the final days, the young political editor of the Observer wrote the first major profile of me to appear in the national press. I knew Robert Harris only professionally then, though he would later become one of my closest friends. His piece highlighted the differences in Labour’s campaigning and communications since 1983. In explaining the role I had played, the obstacles I had had to overcome and the artifice I had occasionally had to use to get our changes through, he also unwittingly coined a label – sometimes useful politically, often uncomfortable personally – that would stick with me for the rest of my public life: the ‘Machiavelli’ of Walworth Road. Coming from him, this was not meant as an insult, and the rest of the profile was very generous, both about the campaign and my part in it.
After election day, there was far more praise than criticism, some of it from unexpected quarters. Tony Benn said we had run Labour’s best campaign since 1959, the one in which he had pioneered groundbreaking TV messages of his own. The review that most touched me, however, was a note Larry Whitty left on my desk the morning after the election. ‘Just in case it may on occasion have seemed I felt differently,’ he said, ‘can I record that I believe your efforts, political judgement and imagination have made this the most effective campaign the party has ever waged. Well done – and thanks.’
Still, in the end, as Private Eye put it, we had achieved a ‘brilliantly successful election defeat’. The feeling that weighed most heavily on me was that when the votes were counted, we had lost. Again. The sense of frustration and failure gnawed at me in the days, weeks and months that followed as I contemplated what Labour’s third straight defeat meant for the party’s, and my, future. The reasons we had lost were clear. I singled out ‘the three Ds: Deirdre, defence and disarray’. However alluringly alliterative, that told only part of the story. To have any hope of getting back into government, we would have to completely revisit the range of policies where we were simply, fatally, out of touch with the electorate: unemployment and health, education, crime, and of course economics, finance and taxation.
The election result also taught me something else. It was about people’s feelings and beliefs, and how they projected these onto those who stood for the highest office. The electorate intensely disliked many aspects of the Labour Party. As for Neil Kinnock, while people felt that he was right to stand up to the hard left, to reform Labour and make its policies more centrist, they also had a feeling that he was not very prime ministerial, that he was uncertain what he believed in, and that his wordiness masked a lack of knowledge. While many voters had a visceral dislike of Mrs Thatcher, and believed that her policies were divisive, were destroying industry, generating unacceptable social costs and harming public services, they nevertheless felt that she was strong, was probably what the country needed, that they should continue taking the medicine, and anyway, that there was no real alternative. For voters, feelings prevail over beliefs. People may be torn between their head and their heart, but ultimately it is their gut feeling that is decisive: they vote for the candidate who elicits the right feelings, not necessarily the one who presents the right arguments. Ideally, of course, that should be the same person. This lesson would shape what I thought and did over the next two decades, because it ingrained in me just how subtle political communications are – and how complicated elections are to run.
In the eighteen months or so after the election, I gradually lost heart that this would happen with the necessary urgency. Intellectually, Neil understood the need for change. The trouble was that his heart, and more so his soul, weren’t in the scale of change needed. Labour had to find ways of appealing to voters far beyond our old, loyalist core. We had to have something to say not only to the have-nots in society, but to the haves – a group of which Thatcherite Britain’s ‘new working class’ either already had, or aspired to, membership. At times, Neil talked the talk. ‘But,’ I reflected in a diary note after the election, ‘he is too much of a socialist, and he hates the idea of being seen by the party as anything different. That is where he gets the power and the passion of his performance.’ I knew Neil could inspire. The question, especially on the tough policy decisions we had to confront, was whether he could lead the profound change that was clearly needed.
Hoping to prod him and others into action, I commissioned Philip and the SCA to begin a thorough examination of the state of mind of Britain’s voters: what they valued in their lives and in their government; why they supported Labour or the Tories or the Alliance; what had convinced them, or might convince them, to switch sides. We had never done anything on this scale before. Nor had any other British political party. Patricia, as usual, jumped into the driving seat of a process that would end up taking four months to complete, drawing not only on polling and focus groups, but the work of experts in charting political, economic and social trends. That was step one. Step two would be to apply the lessons to policy. We needed an issue-by-issue policy review. This would not have happened without Tom Sawyer, the deputy leader of the public service union NUPE, whose position on the NEC had earlier contributed to the two-vote majority that got me my job. He went to Neil with the idea of a policy review immediately after the election, and convinced him to support it. What shape it would take, how far it would go, remained to be seen. But at least a mechanism would be in place.
The landmark public attitudes report was called ‘Labour and Britain in the 1990s’, and when I got the draft after the party conference in the autumn, it was even more sobering than I had expected. Its findings were presented to a joint session of the NEC and the shadow cabinet in November. Over two decades, our share of the vote had fallen by nearly 20 per cent, while Tory support had remained steady. Even more disturbing were the findings about why people voted as they did. In the case of the Conservatives, it was their tougher, more aspirational appeal. But more than a quarter of Labour’s shrinking base said they remained with us only out of residual loyalty. Among those who had abandoned us, there was a remarkable consistency in the reasons they said had driven them away. ‘Extremism’ came top, followed by the dominance of the trade unions, our defence policy, and finally ‘weak leadership’. It was not just the well-off who didn’t like us, but in an increasingly mobile economy, the role of manual work was decreasing. Share ownership and home ownership were rising, and more voters had the kind of aspirations which they said made them reluctant to elect a Labour government. We were becoming less and less popular, less and less relevant. In its X-ray of the British electorate, the SCA report had now told us why. Our image unsettled and alienated voters, our organisation and leadership dented their trust. Our policies clashed with their hopes not only for the country, but for themselves.
I still have my notes of the presentation meeting. Tony Benn called the report ‘useful’, but said the voters had simply been duped by rightwing ‘media propaganda’, and that Labour’s job now was ‘to change their attitudes through our campaigning’. In other words, ‘don’t compromise with the electorate’. Ken Livingstone said we had been too busy ‘reassuring international bankers so they’ll now vote for us’ to develop and present a strong, socialist alternative to Mrs Thatcher’s running of the economy. He also said we had shamelessly gone along with media attacks on the hard left, instead of defending them. Still, by far most of those in the room clearly understood the seriousness of the message in the research report, and the need for us to reconnect as a party with what voters actually wanted in their lives and from their government. What mattered was what they would do about it.
The short answer turned out to be not much. The policy review, which would not finally be published until two years after the election, had all the trappings of a serious exercise. I certainly spun it in the press gallery as the start of a real change, saying that nothing would be off limits. Seven committees, each chaired by the relevant shadow minister and an NEC member, were tasked to look at every major policy area. But while Neil set out a general vision of change, he made surprisingly little personal input to the process. He didn’t meet the chairs or want to float ideas. Neither arguing for nor rejecting anything, he seemed to be leaving the outcome up to the individual groups and shadow ministers. With no pressure to be radical, almost all of the review groups played it safe. There was one significant exception: Gerald Kaufman, who was now Shadow Foreign Secretary. He knew what he wanted, knew what Labour needed, and showed every sign of being determined to get it: a jettisoning of unilateral nuclear disarmament. As for the rest, they largely tinkered: except for Shadow Chancellor John Smith’s group, which committed Labour to higher taxes, by including a whole raft of new benefits pledges.
My confidence that we would rise to the challenge had been eroding for many months. In the aftershock of the election, there was a lot of talk about ‘change’. But not only was there a lack of real action, Neil’s position with senior shadow cabinet colleagues appeared to have weakened. I had a startling insight into the depth of the discontent in an uncomfortable midnight encounter with Neil’s two most influential colleagues. I was in Edinburgh for the international television festival two months after the election, and John Smith and his wife Elizabeth had very kindly invited me to stay with them. When I arrived after dinner on the first night, Elizabeth had gone to bed. I was greeted not only by John, but by the party’s deputy leader, Roy Hattersley, and their shadow cabinet colleague, the Glasgow MP Donald Dewar. With the three of them seated in a kind of horseshoe formation around me, it felt like a courtroom drama.
John and Roy did most of the talking. They were scathing about Neil, blaming my ‘image-making’ for propping up a leader who they were convinced was not up to the job. John conceded that Neil had proven a formidable party manager, and ‘infighter’, in dismembering Militant. But that was pretty much it. He was aloof, abstract, and a nightmare to deal with on any issue of substance. John’s view was that Neil didn’t have an ‘intellectual interest’ in policy. No matter how glowing the reviews he’d received during the campaign, he was ‘all froth’. Roy piled in, saying that Neil suffered from ‘a lack of assurance, a feeling of being beleaguered and being out of his depth’. That, Roy believed, was because he was.
It was deeply unpleasant, and I did not know how to respond. Neil was party leader. I felt admiration for him because of what he had been put through, and loyalty to him as someone who had at least begun to revive the party. I thought John, Roy and Donald were being harsh and unfair, and I told them so. I also pointed out that while Neil’s speeches may have been ‘froth’, without that froth we would not only have lost the election, we would have been left for dead.
The main senior figure advocating real, if undefined, change was Bryan Gould. At my urging, he had publicly said that Labour had to develop ‘policies for the 1990s’. But he was paying a price, in the shape of a whispering campaign against him. He was naïve, it was said. An upstart. The more he pressed for greater influence, the more difficult his position became. It culminated in his proposal to challenge Roy for the deputy leadership at the beginning of 1988. I knew how much Bryan wanted the job, but I could not support him. Neil was dead against the distraction of a contest, and I shared that view. The party was divided enough without another full-scale power struggle, in which it was certain that Eric Heffer would also join the fray. Besides, I was a Labour Party official. Both the leader, and of course the current deputy, wanted Bryan to reconsider. I did the only thing I reasonably could: I talked him out of standing, averting political bloodshed but introducing a lasting strain in our relationship.
I began to wonder whether I should shift my focus outside the party. At one point, I even applied for a job as Director of Communications at the BBC. But I wasn’t offered it, and I very much doubt that I would have accepted it if I had been. Having returned to Labour at a time that the party had begun to change, I could not see myself baling out before the process was over, one way or the other. Still, I found myself trying to work around Neil to present a public image of a party ready for fundamental change. I retained a real respect for him, and a warmth that had nothing to do with politics. Neil could be awkward in his relationships, but he had an enormous capacity for kindness, and one instance in particular touched me in a way I have never forgotten.
It was in the spring of 1988, nearly a year after the election. I was called out of an NEC meeting to take an urgent call from my brother in my office. My father had been under the weather for a couple of weeks with a chest infection. Neither of us had been unduly worried, but I spoke daily either to my mother or Miles about how he was getting on. When it became apparent that he was not improving, our family GP had referred him to the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead. My father and I had found a new closeness over the past year or so. The grating of our unacknowledged similarities had receded, and I was much more able to recognise and appreciate the flair, the assurance, the sense of caring about politics and people which I had got from him, while he was able to show the pride he felt in what I had accomplished, and the work I was doing. The previous summer, he had come down to spend a day in Foy. He arrived with a lovely blue ceramic ashtray, decorated with a red rose, which I still have. I cooked him trout and salad and new boiled potatoes. We walked and talked, and then he slept before I drove him back to the station. I had every expectation that we would have further time to look back, and forward, together.
But now, Miles was phoning with bad news. The ‘chest infection’ was being treated, but the hospital had done tests. My father had cancer, and the prognosis was not good. I could not help the tears coming as I sat, holding the phone, before I replaced the receiver. Whether it was by means of telepathy I don’t know, but Neil appeared at my side, put his arm round my shoulder and cradled my head in his arms. It would be difficult, he said, but love for a father is a source of strength. ‘You’ll get through. We’ll make sure you get through.’ My father died without warning two weeks later, from a heart attack. It was months before I was over the first, terrible sense of loss – thinking of the things my father had said, the clothes he wore, the jokes we had shared, his pipe, the conversations we had or that I wished we had had. The deeper, duller throb went on for much longer.
At work, I looked for whatever examples and agents of real change I could find. I still dutifully briefed the media about Neil’s speeches and over-egged the odd policy document, but I was spending much more of my time trying to boost the image of the few Labour MPs who seemed to understand that we had to reform radically or face terminal decline. In my search for articulate, forward-looking Labour spokesmen to deliver a message that would at least sound new on radio and television, I was increasingly drawn to two bright young MPs who had been elected in 1983, and had been inseparable allies ever since. They shared a remote rabbit-warren of a parliamentary office. Both were forceful, effective communicators, and both believed that Labour had to do more – much more – if it was ever again going to get a chance to govern. The senior member of the partnership, a couple of years older and with the longer political CV, was a thirty-six-year-old Scottish MP named Gordon Brown. His ally and protégé was an Oxford-educated barrister, representing Sedgefield in northern England, called Tony Blair.
I had first got to know them before the election. We were all in our thirties, and were excited to be part of the post-1983 rebuilding project. We were young enough to hope still to be in command of our senses by the time Labour finally got back into government. The initial attraction for me was that here were two MPs who possessed a quality all too rare on the Labour benches: they had an understanding of, and a facility for, modern communications. It was natural that I should want to use their talents to help get Labour’s message across, and that they should see a re-energised Walworth Road as an asset.
After the election defeat, this coincidence of interests gradually became something much more than that: a partnership, a trio, a team. In contrast to the detachment and drift of Neil’s office, Gordon and Tony conveyed focus, and exuded energy. Constantly batting ideas off each other, positioning and planning, they were like a pair of very close, if unidentical, twins. Tony had the sunnier disposition. He had an easiness about him, a facility for engaging in serious politics without appearing to take the stakes, or himself, too seriously. He had a gift for putting others at their ease, even other politicians. People liked him, and wanted to be liked by him. In a different way, Gordon had that quality too. For me, he certainly did. We had much in common. Like me, he had resolved at a young age to entwine his life with Labour. Like me, he was the political equivalent of a football anorak. An intricate map of Prime Ministers and pretenders past, of alliances and feuds, triumphs and failures, speeches and manifestos, was implanted in both of us like a memory chip.
Although all three of us sensed by early in 1988 that Labour was not going to win the next election without something dramatic happening, I think that the realisation affected Gordon and me a bit differently than it did Tony. While he was frustrated, and sometimes angry, about the party’s failure to put itself back in the running for government, for us, there was a deeper, more personal, almost existential, feeling of despair.
There was another bond with Gordon as well. I was spending almost all my waking hours trying to find ways of getting Labour’s message into the newspapers or onto the radio or television, and through them to voters. That was not just my job, it was a fixation. For Gordon, it was nearer an obsession. It needed not be about some grand policy announcement – it rarely was. It was not done in any expectation of our winning the major arguments, much less an election, against Mrs Thatcher. But Gordon plotted a ceaseless campaign of guerrilla strikes against the Tories. He was constantly reading ministerial statements, dissecting policy proposals, culling potentially damaging leaks of internal documents. Then, sometimes acting by himself, sometimes through Tony, and increasingly often in league with me, he would zero in on just the right newspaper or broadcaster, just the right news cycle, to strike the blow. For Gordon, this was deadly serious. He viewed the Tories not only as political opponents, but as a battlefield enemy. We might not be able to kill them, but he hoped, wound by wound, to bring them to their knees. His eye for tactical opportunities was extraordinary, and he showed a master craftsman’s delight and eagerness in trying to initiate Tony and me into the secrets of the trade.
For the first time I heard him expound on his core principle of political battle, and it would resurface many times, in many contexts, later on. Essentially, his argument was that our own policies weren’t necessarily key to scoring a communications or campaigning success – which was fortunate, because our own policies were hardly putting us in a strong position. The key, Gordon said, was to identify, magnify and exploit ‘dividing lines’ with the Tories. I became an eager co-conspirator. Given the challenge of finding a way to market the pabulum of the policy review, I began to see Gordon’s endless schemes to annoy the Tories as invaluable in my efforts to keep Labour in the public eye. His relentless urge to attack also gave me a sense that Labour had not given up the fight.
I saw Tony, too, as a huge asset, especially in conveying a sense of newness in Labour on television. Even before I arrived at Walworth Road, I remember having been bowled over by an appearance he made on the BBC’s Question Time. He was accusing the Conservatives of undermining civil liberties, but it wasn’t the substance of his message that most struck me, timely and apt though it was. I was impressed by his freshness, his fluency, his ability to talk politics in words that connected in a way so many of our frontbenchers seemed to find it difficult to do. I was keen to find ways of turning this to Labour’s wider benefit, by steering high-profile TV invitations his way.
My increasing promotion of Tony’s and Gordon’s media profiles did not escape the notice of some of their more senior colleagues. The first time I put Tony on breakfast TV, to rebut Tory economic policy before the 1987 election, I felt almost as if I’d taken my life in my hands. He was at that time a junior spokesman in Roy’s Shadow Treasury team. That afternoon, a redoubtable and undeniably more senior member, the Thurrock MP Oonagh McDonald, pinned me up against a wall behind the Speaker’s chair in the Commons. When Roy wasn’t available for an interview, she thundered, she was next in line. Did I understand? What on earth had I been playing at by putting Tony up instead? I assured her that there would be plenty of future opportunities for everyone, but I couldn’t help adding, ‘Tony was very good, wasn’t he?’ It was not what Oonagh wanted to hear.
Gordon’s first real chance to shine came a year and a half after the 1987 defeat, and it happened by accident. Both he and Tony had risen up the ranks since the election. Still too junior to be perceived as a threat to those at the top, and too bright and effective to be ignored, they were voted into the shadow cabinet. Tony was Shadow Energy Secretary, while Gordon was Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, under John Smith. By the time we arrived in Brighton for the party conference at the end of September 1988, I was not alone in having marked them out as faces for the future. For Gordon, the time frame was about to shorten dramatically. Two days after conference, John suffered a serious heart attack which meant that he would need several months’ rest before returning to work. On paper, Bryan Gould should have been in line to fill in for him. With his responsibility for Trade and Industry, he held the second-top economic brief in the shadow cabinet. But Gordon made it instantly clear that he was able, and ready, to fill the breech. Since no one with influence went to bat for Bryan, the arrangement was nodded through. I am sure that they, like me, felt that while Gordon lacked John’s political weight and dispatch-box experience, he had the intellect and policy grasp to be capable of holding the fort. Within weeks, however, he faced a first major test: replying for Labour to the government’s autumn financial statement.
It had all the marks of a distinctly unequal fight. In the Conservative corner, Nigel Lawson had been Chancellor since 1983. He was two decades older than Gordon, and had been in the Commons a decade longer. He had steadily lowered income tax, and since 1986 had built an economic recovery into an income and consumer boom. There were signs of trouble, however. Inflation was rising, and interest rates, which stood at 14 per cent, even more worryingly. Though this was Gordon’s first big set-piece parliamentary encounter, he at least had a strong argument to make, ‘dividing lines’ to exploit, a target to attack. That he would make his points effectively was something I never doubted: he, and Tony and I, had worked on rehearsing and refining them.
When he rose to face Lawson, he did much more than that. He spoke with confidence, vigour and verve. Lawson’s great economic expansion, he said, was mere sleight of hand, based on irresponsible levels of borrowing. ‘It is a boom based on credit,’ he said. Warning of trouble ahead, he ridiculed the Conservatives’ efforts to insist that all would be well despite their failure to live up even to their own economic forecasts. Then came the killer line, as Lawson sat grimacing, like an elephant improbably brought down by a mosquito: ‘The proper answer is to keep the forecasts and discard the Chancellor!’ When he had finished, to shouts of support from the Labour benches, I went up to the press gallery to gauge the reaction. I didn’t need to tell them Gordon had done well; they had seen it for themselves. But I felt we had witnessed something of real significance to Labour in this David and Goliath drama. ‘Today,’ I told them, ‘a star was born.’ The reason the Guardian’s Ian Aitken and others echoed the phrase the following morning was because all of us recognised that it rang true.
Part of what drew me to Gordon and Tony, and drew us together, was simply the way they did politics. So much of the Labour Party seemed weighted down by torpor and an acceptance of defeat. Morale reached a new low the week after Gordon’s Commons breakthrough, with a particularly painful by-election defeat in the ostensibly safe seat of Glasgow Govan. We lost it, with a swing of 33 per cent, to the Scottish Nationalists. Neil was feeling so despondent that for a brief period he even began speaking of stepping aside the following summer. I was feeling equally down. A fortnight later, I boarded a train north with Tony to join him at a meeting with his constituents. The contrast could hardly have been greater. Watching him use his mixture of intellect, humour and charm to communicate – with voters was like getting a blood transfusion.
The growing bond between Tony, Gordon and me was not only about politics. On policy, we also found much common ground. The specifics of the new Labour platform we envisaged would not take shape until much later. But we knew absolutely what had to go: the statist, unilateralist and class-defined prospectus that had lost us three straight elections and was surely going to lose us a fourth.
Two late-night entries in my diary, six months apart in 1988, chart the depth of my frustration and my growing certainty about what needed to be done. The first followed the NEC’s approval of the initial policy review reports. It reflected my relief at the vote, and my admiration for Neil’s role in arguing for and mobilising the support needed to secure it. But I worried about what hadn’t been accomplished, the risks we had failed to take, and where we might go from here. ‘The problem is that for all Neil’s courage and strength of leadership, he is let down by his lack of self-confidence and his seeming lack of interest in the detail of policy,’ I wrote. ‘It shows not so much in what he says and does, but in what he fails to articulate and to achieve.’ There was an ‘awful’ implication in this. I had begun to suspect that the country might never view Neil as prime ministerial material. He would end up being both ‘the hero and the fall-guy of history. The likelihood at the moment is that he will be the leader who restored and rebuilt the Labour Party but who could not clinch victory.’
The second snapshot is from a few days after my trip to Tony’s constituency in Sedgefield. ‘Increasingly,’ I wrote, ‘my role is revolving around the strong future leaders – Gordon Brown and Tony Blair – and the political nourishment and companionship I get from this group. They have such political gifts, and they know that on the present course we shall remain out of office for a generation. I have now become determined to be part of that successor generation. All my political ambition has returned with the challenge that they hold out.’
While I had not yet shared this with Neil, or even Charles Clarke, I knew something else as well. If I wanted to be part of creating a truly revived Labour Party, I could not do it from where I was – as a headquarters man, whatever the range of my influence. Like Gordon and Tony, I needed to be on the front line. I needed to resume a course I had abandoned, in disgust at the shambolic extremism of London Labour politics. I would seek election as a Labour Member of Parliament.
4 (#ulink_d00d0b36-fbb9-57b3-92e2-2d832d9e52f3)
The Three Musketeers
My search for a seat in the Commons need not have ended my role in organising Neil Kinnock’s last realistic chance to become Prime Minister. But it did. By the time of the next election, my relations with Neil would be much more distant, while with Charles Clarke they were badly strained. With Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, however, they were not only closer: the three of us had become a political partnership, convinced that the party had to transform itself if it was to have any hope of returning to government. We were also fairly sure that neither Neil nor his likely successor, John Smith, could deliver that change.
I first broached the subject of looking for a parliamentary seat with Patricia Hewitt at the start of 1989. She smiled, an increasingly rare occurrence. Far from trying to argue me into staying the course with Team Kinnock, she had given up trying to convince herself. Working in the leader’s office, she was even more frustrated than I was about the prospects for the policy changes needed for renewal. With criticism of his leadership rising, Neil was in brooding, bunker mode. A change had come over Charles as well. His ebullient, can-do confidence was less in evidence, as was the banter with which he had always entertained, and sustained, the Kinnock operation – ‘Why, it’s Jolly Pierre!’ he would invariably greet me in my first years at Walworth Road. While I had undoubtedly become a bit less jolly myself, Charles’s morale had clearly suffered from the strain of projecting and promoting, protecting and preserving, Neil’s leadership against critics within Labour, and the media without.
Neil mistrusted, feared, and often despised the press, and would be upset by every unfriendly headline. He was using Patricia less and less, but blamed her when things went wrong – with sometimes distressing results that Charles did little or nothing to alleviate. She had begun helping Clive Hollick, a business supporter of Labour who headed the Mills & Allen billboard giant, in his efforts to equip the party for government over the longer term. Mrs Thatcher had entered Downing Street in 1979 with the core of a programme and a political identity – built, with Keith Joseph, largely on the work of a US-style think tank called the Centre for Policy Studies. There was no left-of-centre equivalent. With Clive’s backing, that was remedied, with the establishment of the Institute for Public Policy Research. Shortly after we spoke, Patricia left to become Deputy Director of the IPPR.
I mentioned my plans to Charles a few days later. He asked me to take Patricia’s place as Neil’s press secretary, an offer he repeated several times in the weeks ahead. No doubt naïvely, I did believe I might succeed in using day-to-day contact with Neil to engage him more deeply in the plans we needed to put in place to win the next election. But I had a caveat. I told Charles that if I made the move, I would want to keep open the option of going for a seat in the Commons. He insisted that that wouldn’t work, and he was right. Patricia’s place eventually went to Julie Hall – a bright, charming ITN reporter who became a close friend, and later the wife, of my most gifted protégé at Walworth Road, Colin Byrne.
I turned my attention to securing real change through the policy review, which was due to be published in the spring. At the end of January, I accompanied Gerald Kaufman on a trip to Moscow for the overseas equivalent of the ‘Freedom and Fairness’ launch. It was an intricately choreographed event, designed to pave the way for us to abandon one of our most entrenched, and electorally perverse, policies: unilateral nuclear disarmament. Gerald and I took with us the trade union leader Ron Todd, a long-time supporter of unilateralism whose presence would be important in making the shift credible.
As we had anticipated, Gerald was told in his meetings with Soviet officials that even the Kremlin saw Labour’s unilateral disarmament policy as an unhelpful distraction. They were also dismissive of the idea of bilateral arms talks, the halfway house favoured by some on the left. The Soviets wanted Britain involved in a multilateral disarmament process, alongside their talks with the Americans, a position they helpfully made clear to the travelling British press. Gerald held a press briefing in front of Lenin’s tomb in Red Square at which he took the first step towards abandoning unilateralism, by steering the reporters away from expecting separate arms talks between Moscow and a future Labour government. Gerald then left, for personal rather than political reasons: one of his more endearing quirks as Shadow Foreign Secretary was his ambition to sample the finest local ice cream on all his travels. For reasons that were never entirely clear, he had decided that Moscow’s best was to be found in the GUM department store, across Red Square. I followed up his remarks with further, off-the-record briefing that delivered the message more directly. Unilateralism, I said, was dead. When we finally released the policy review in May, it was. Labour would remain committed to disarmament, but ‘in concert with action taken by the superpowers’.
The policy review was called ‘Meet the Challenge, Make the Change’. With the exception of Gerald’s bold move on defence, it might more accurately have been entitled ‘Skirt the Challenge, Hint at Change’. There were a few significant changes, notably a retreat from the Bennite dream of reversing all Mrs Thatcher’s privatisations. But on finance, John Smith’s domain, we did not manage to jettison our high-tax, high-spending reputation. The booklet was glossy enough, the presentation sufficiently polished, to make some impact: for the first time since the run-up to the 1987 election, one of our internal polls even showed us leading the Tories. It also provided a platform for organising our campaign for the June European elections.
In the wake of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in April 1986, environmental issues would play a major role, leading to predictions that the Green Party might have a singificant effect on the outcome. Many in Labour were arguing for us to adopt a raft of new environmental policies, looking to the possibility of a longer-term ‘red–green’ alliance against the Tories if the Greens’ impact continued to grow. Though I was open to this, I came to believe that it should not be at the expense of a realistic energy policy, including a commitment to nuclear power. I was especially influenced in this by Jack Cunningham, a shadow cabinet minister whose constituency included the nuclear plant at Sellafield. He quite rightly feared that if we came out against nuclear energy he would lose his seat. In the event, I used my campaign briefings to make it clear that we would not close Sellafield, and left others, especially Robin Cook, to court the green vote by implying that we might well do so. With Colin Byrne and Philip Gould helping me plot the overall strategy of the campaign, I also played the policy review for all it was worth, which is to say I trumpeted the changes on defence and nationalisation, and skirted over the rest. I worked as hard as I had since 1987, coordinating campaign events, orchestrating media appearances and briefings.
Against resistance from most of the shadow cabinet, Neil and I insisted on retaining Bryan Gould as the main face of the campaign. Not only was he a proven performer, he was broadly Eurosceptic, and thus perfectly placed to play on the Tories’ internal divisions over the EU. As Bryan’s partner in presentation I chose Mo Mowlam, a young MP from the 1987 intake, a Political Science PhD with a sharp sense of humour and an in-your-face frankness about her. Mo was excited at being given her chance to shine. Afterwards, quite unnecessarily, she even went out and bought me a gift, a combination radio and television that would have pride of place in my constituency home throughout my period as an MP. Mo and I became good friends, and she and Bryan formed an effective team. Surpassing all expectations, Labour picked up fourteen seats in the European elections, while the Tories lost fourteen. It was the first election of any kind since 1974 in which we had defeated them. The Greens took about 15 per cent of the vote, though the first-past-the-post system meant they got no seats.
Despite media talk of a Labour revival, however, I suspected it was a false dawn. Judging by Neil’s mood, and Charles’s, so did they. In many ways, however, I was now enjoying my work at Walworth Road. The early fears that I wouldn’t be up to it were gone. I had assembled a talented, and committed, team, and the changes we had made to Labour’s public face – how our literature and launches looked, how we organised election campaigns – were now embedded. Our party and its policies may not yet have been modern in any real sense, but our communications were. I was even enjoying my role as the spokesman – or more often the stage manager, interpreter and spinner – for Labour in the media. Not everybody in the media enjoyed me quite so much, but I did build working relationships, even very friendly relations, with many journalists.
Ultimately, however, I saw my role as using any tool at my disposal to ensure that Labour, and Neil, were presented in the best possible light. I paid special attention to television coverage, because of its importance and immediacy, and because my time at LWT had given me first-hand experience of the mechanics of the medium. If that sometimes meant cold-shouldering those who made Labour look bad, I saw that too as part of my job. This stored up bad blood that would do me damage in the future.
I did sometimes have to use more direct measures. Before finalising the policy review, we had launched a nationwide publicity tour called ‘Labour Listens’. The idea was for a rotating cast of shadow cabinet ministers to hold meetings in which the audience would tell us what they wanted to see reflected in a future Labour manifesto. My touchingly naïve hope was that thousands of voters would take the opportunity to do so, and that their common-sense messages would prod the party towards changes in policy. In fact, it was a disaster. It began in Brighton, with Roy Hattersley chairing the panel. A Steve Bell cartoon in the Guardian captured the atmosphere perfectly: politicians rabbiting on in front of an audience that was snoring, or in some cases dying of boredom.
The nadir came in Birmingham, where, in front of a grand total of twenty people and a local television crew, the shadow ministers made their opening pitch and then asked for questions. A few hands went up. One belonged to an odd-looking woman who was wearing a very tall hat made of newspapers. I sent a note up to Ann Taylor, the senior shadow cabinet member on the platform, saying under no circumstances should she be called on. But before long, our lady of the newspapers was the only one with her hand up. As she began her incomprehensible question, I deliberately tripped over the wire linked to the TV crew’s sound system, apologising profusely to the cameraman as I regained my balance. ‘Labour Listens’ was not seen or heard from again. Still, despite the occasional rows and setbacks, and my frustration that we did not have a more attractive message to convey, I liked what I was doing. I felt it was important, and that I was good at it.
I did not, however, think that over the longer term I could best help promote a changed Labour Party from Walworth Road. I did not intend to leave soon. And not completely, since I still held out some hope of applying the experiences and lessons of 1987 to organising a ‘brilliantly successful’, yet victorious, campaign next time round. But I believed victory would be a tall order. Though my role had given me an increasingly prominent public profile, my ability to influence the change that mattered most – in Labour’s policies – was limited. I was certain that I would feel more fulfilled personally in the Commons, and that I could make a more useful contribution to turning the party round from there. My aim was, alongside Gordon and Tony, to become part of a new generation of MPs who would complete the work Neil had begun and bring a genuinely modernised Labour Party back into government.
The three of us were already working together. I began turning increasingly to Gordon and Tony as front-rank Labour spokesmen. Oonagh McDonald was no longer around, having lost her seat in the 1987 election, but other senior, or rising, MPs and shadow cabinet colleagues resented the profile they were getting. The fact is that they were the most effective and convincing means of getting Labour’s message across. They helped me as well, encouraging me in my efforts to gain selection as a Labour parliamentary candidate. Gordon’s role was largely tactical. Having come from the tough school of Scottish Labour politics, he was an endless source of advice on navigating the eddies of local party, and trade union, influence. Tony provided the critical, on-the-ground, support. He was convinced I would make an ideal candidate for Hartlepool, a north-east seat adjacent to his own, and when he learned that the sitting MP, Ted Leadbitter, had decided to step down, he took me to meet him. Our talk was warm and engaging, but inconclusive. It turned out that a key group of local party leaders had decided to sound out another, undeniably high-profile, aspirant: Glenda Jackson. I spoke to Glenda. Though no one had yet contacted her about Hartlepool, she was aware of the interest, and I told her that if she wanted to go for the seat, I’d defer to her. I meant it. I also sensed she would be happier with a London seat, as soon turned out to be the case.
Once that became clear, I threw my energies into trying to win support, both in the constituency and with the critically important trade unions. Masterminding my campaign was an astute and talented local party member, Bernard Carr, whose political skills were exceeded only by his ability to conjour up delicious meals. It was not easy at first. Although the national exposure I had got at Walworth Road was in one sense a big advantage, it was not without its downsides. My rivals for the nomination were understandably keen to paint me as an outsider, out of touch both politically and socially with the largely working-class constituency I wanted to represent. They especially delighted in dragging up, and embellishing, a media myth about me from a by-election campaign a few years earlier. In its final form it had me strutting into a Hartlepool fish-and-chip shop and mistaking mushy peas for guacamole. For the record, I have never mixed up the two. And I quite like mushy peas. In fact it was an American intern working for Jack Straw who had made the error.
While the invented version of this story didn’t help, as I began spending more and more time in Hartlepool, I found it to be the exact opposite of its parochial media stereotype. The scores of people I met during my bid to become the prospective parliamentary candidate in 1989, and the many thousands more I would meet as their MP, were almost without exception outward-looking and open-minded. And much too canny to be taken in by the guacamole story. The choice of candidate was to be made in mid-December, and I still have the outline speech that Gordon hammered out for me on his office typewriter as the basis of my presentation to the selection meeting. The theme was hardly revolutionary, but it was modernising in the sense that it championed social justice without linking it to higher taxes, ‘matching unused resources with unmet needs’. I think that what most won the day was my genuine enthusiasm both for serving the future interests of Labour nationally, and Tony-style, for engaging with and listening to my constituents.
During the run-up to the vote I had said that the first thing I would do if I were selected was to buy a home in Hartlepool, and I soon found a comfortable four-bedroom house on Hutton Avenue, near the civic centre in the heart of the town. It cost a little under £90,000. My mother helped with the deposit, and I took out a mortgage for much of the balance. The only sadness was that, to make ends meet, I would have to sell my wonderful little cottage in Foy.
In London, my living arrangements were also in flux. I was lodging in the Islington home of one of my closest political friends and her family. Sue Nye had worked as a ‘garden girl’, one of the Downing Street secretaries, for Jim Callaghan, moving with him into opposition, and had gone on to play a steadily more senior role with Michael Foot and now Neil. Her husband, the Goldman Sachs chief economist Gavyn Davies, was high-powered and wealthy. He was also informed and astute about politics, warm and generous and utterly without pretension. They offered me a room in their home until I could find a more permanent base, which I did when I bought a small flat in neighbouring Wilmington Square the following year. But my focus had begun to shift away from the capital, towards Hartlepool and the north-east.
On the day of my selection, Tony was in Sedgefield giving a speech. It would mark the beginning of his emergence as a politician whose weight and prominence in the party were equal to, and eventually greater than, Gordon’s. None of us realised this at the time. Weeks earlier, Gordon had finished first in the elections for the shadow cabinet, and was rewarded with a departmental role of his own, as Trade and Industry spokesman. The increasingly settled view was that he was future leadership material. Tony’s shadow cabinet brief had changed as well: he was now Employment spokesman. He spotted early on that the party’s support for the European ‘social chapter’ meant that a Labour government would have to abandon its backing for arrangements under which employees could be required to be members of a designated trade union. He also had the modernising instinct to make a virtue out of necessity. As I was addressing the selection meeting, Tony was telling his constituency party that Labour would no longer back the so-called ‘closed shop’. He spoke, almost literally, to three people and a dog. But by pre-arrangement with Colin, I made sure the media were primed to give Labour’s most serious policy shift since Gerald’s move on defence the prominence it deserved. The TV bulletins and newspaper headlines unsettled the unions and the Labour left, but gave encouragement to the growing band of ‘modernisers’ in the party. They also raised Tony’s profile in much the same way Gordon’s showdown with Nigel Lawson had done for his a year earlier. Before long he too would find himself being talked about as a future leader.
I was hugely excited by my selection as a candidate, and even more so at the prospect, in a solid Labour seat, of becoming an MP. But while I knew I would now be spending at least a couple of days each week in Hartlepool, I assumed that I would continue my work at Walworth Road. Within days, however, I realised that Neil, and particularly Charles, wanted me out. Neil was relaxed when I told him I intended to apply for the seat, because he assumed I wouldn’t get it. ‘I should not be hopeful, kid,’ he told me. ‘I wish you well, because I want you to have what you’ve set your heart on. But Hartlepool won’t have you. I know what sort of party it is.’ At first, neither he nor Charles seemed bothered by my increasingly frequent trips to the north-east to drum up support for my candidacy. I was still in London for any major media or campaign event, and in touch with journalists by phone when I was away, and Colin was doing an excellent job anchoring the operation during my absences. But when I won the selection, Neil was shocked, and Charles’s attitude hardened. ‘Betrayal’ was the first word to cross Neil’s lips, I was later told. ‘I should have known Peter would have conducted this like a military operation, every door knocked on, no stone left unturned, the charm turned on,’ he apparently said when he had calmed down a bit. ‘He deserves it, but it’s left us in the shit.’ On the Monday after my selection, Charles called me into the Shadow Cabinet Room in the opposition leader’s suite in the Commons. ‘I have never known Neil so angry over anything,’ he said. ‘You cannot stay. You’ll have to leave, and we’ll find someone to replace you.’ He added that if it were up to him, I would be clearing out my desk that day.
For four years, I had worked side by side with Charles. We could not have been closer politically. I had always viewed the challenge of overhauling Labour’s image as inseparable from promoting Neil as leader, often at the cost of friction with the NEC. I recognised that in fighting for my own seat, I was going to be less directly involved in the next election campaign, but I knew I could still help, and had assumed that, in some capacity, I would do so. To be told to clear my desk, without a successor or any continuity in place, struck me as rash and irresponsible. When I told Julie about my talk with Charles, she was alarmed at the idea of my packing up and going. So were Sue and others in the office. Philip was even more upset.
When they made their views known to Neil, he decided I should stay on until party conference the following autumn. Charles acquiesced. He recognised the advantages of my staying put for now, but was resolutely opposed to my having any role in the general election. He vetoed fresh appeals from Philip as the campaign drew nearer. I am sure that he understood my desire to stand as an MP. It was a desire he shared, and would later fulfil, and I suspect this may explain why he reacted so strongly to my doing so now. He also saw my decision as an act of flight, undermining Neil’s last realistic shot at power.
For a while, it looked very realistic indeed. Mrs Thatcher was being battered by protests against her Community Charge, or ‘poll tax’. She was in lethal cabinet combat with her Chancellor Nigel Lawson over whether Britain should join the Exchange Rate Mechanism, a system whereby currencies’ exchange rates were fixed within a series of narrow bands, linked to the German mark, intended to stabilise currency swings in preparation for a single European currency. Lawson wanted Britain to join. Mrs Thatcher did not, and had put him in his place by bringing in his rival Alan Walters as her economic adviser, a move that eventually provoked his resignation. In March 1990 I helped mount a by-election campaign against the Tories in Mid-Staffordshire, which we won with a 21 per cent swing, essentially by making it a referendum on the poll tax. In May, we made further gains in the local elections. By the end of the party conference season in the autumn – and the end of my five years at Labour headquarters – two separate polls showed us with a double-digit lead over the Tories.
I left Walworth Road in October 1990. Neil had the good grace to join me at a farewell reception for journalists, and he and Julie Hall presented me with my farewell gift: a huge portion of fish and chips, and mushy peas, all wrapped in a copy of that morning’s Daily Mirror. A few days later, Philip and Julie drove down with me to Foy for one of my final weekends before the cottage was sold. As Charles must have suspected, I continued to speak with Philip, and received summaries of his polling and focus group data, his analysis and strategy memos.
I had hoped that my job at Walworth Road would go to David Hill, Roy’s chief lieutenant. I felt his experience, seriousness and good relations with the media would mesh with Colin’s youthful energy and flair. That idea foundered on Neil’s unwillingness to have a ‘Hattersley man’ running the show. When I then lobbied for Colin to be promoted, Neil was supportive, and voted for him on the NEC. But his own staff spread the word that Colin was too close to me, encouraging NEC members to go for John Underwood, a former TV reporter who they thought would be a safer, and more easily manageable, pair of hands. Underwood saw the job very much in traditional Labour terms. Instead of acting as a change-maker, or in fact personally promoting Neil, he worked in concert with other shadow cabinet and NEC members, whatever shade of opinion they held. He and I overlapped for my final months. He lasted in the job for about a year, and when he decided to leave, in mid-1991, David was finally brought in.
I had been gone only a few weeks when the entire political landscape suddenly changed. After another test of wills over European monetary union – this time with her Deputy Prime Minister, Geoffrey Howe – Mrs Thatcher was challenged for the leadership by Michael Heseltine. She won the first ballot, but not convincingly enough to ward off a second vote. Initially, she said she would contest it, and win. Yet when one minister after another told her the game was up, she accepted the inevitable. On 22 November she announced that she was resigning as Prime Minister. Heseltine, having wielded the knife but failed to finish the job, could not strike again, and by the end of the month John Major – with just three months as Foreign Secretary, and a year as Chancellor – became leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister.
Neil was ecstatic. ‘It’s fantastic, kid,’ he beamed when I saw him a few days later. He had always felt rather intimidated by Mrs Thatcher, and had feared that Heseltine – rather than the untested, unpolished and uncharismatic Major – would follow her. I believed that Heseltine would have suited us in the long run. I thought he was too mercurial, too impulsive, too flawed a politician to unite his party behind him. Whatever John Major’s weaknesses, I felt he was sure to benefit simply from not being Mrs Thatcher, a leader the country had always respected more than liked. I also thought that we had made Major’s job easier: by focusing so much of our political fire on Mrs Thatcher, we had made her the issue with voters, rather than developing the policies necessary to defeat the Tories. I did not, however anticipate how strong Major’s political position would become in his early months in office. Domestically, he was the un-Thatcher; abroad, like Mrs Thatcher in the Falklands, he had a good war: the joint US and British operation in January 1991 to force Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi troops out of Kuwait.
Far from being at the centre of Labour’s response, I was now out of a job. My time at Walworth Road had transformed my political life. When I arrived, I was a junior producer of high-brow political television. Though it had not always been easy, I had acquired the tools of modern political communications and campaigning, and applied them in a way that had transformed Labour’s approach and image. At first, leaving was a shock. It was as if I’d run a marathon, or stepped out of the ring after a fifteen-round fight, to find that once the adrenalin rush subsided I was left with the aches and pains, and no new challenge to work for.
But the period before the general election would broaden and invigorate me in other ways. My first bit of good fortune was to have Dennis Stevenson as a friend. Though he was nearly a decade older than me, I had got to know him when I was chairman of the British Youth Council and he was head of one of its member organisations, the National Association of Youth Clubs. He became something of a mentor, first in my youth activity and then on every step of my political and professional life. Bright, cultured, generous with his time, he gave unfailingly wise advice on how Labour might modernise its economic policy and detoxify its image with the business community. Now he offered me a four-day-a-week position at the business consultancy he had created, SRU. As in my early days at LWT, I probably learned more than I contributed. I did work hard on a number of projects that were certainly a change from Walworth Road. For one client, I travelled to Denmark and the Netherlands to explore the market for chilled desserts. I was determined to pull my weight, especially since Dennis had agreed to let me build my schedule around my commitments in Hartlepool. Dennis, his high-octane partners like the London style guru Peter York, and their clients opened up a window on the business world. I got additional work with the help of another friend, the founding Weekend World editor John Birt, who was now Deputy Director-General of the BBC. I took on a part-time consultancy advising the corporation on how the different parties’ policies might affect it after the election.
My most important new connection with an old friend was political. Roger Liddle and I had drifted apart since the mid-1980s, first because I had moved away from Kennington, and then because we found ourselves on different sides of the Labour–SDP schism. The Fulham by-election had been painful for both of us, and especially for his wife Caroline. While we had had almost no contact since then, it was typical of him that when I came under attack during my selection campaign in Hartlepool, he leapt to my defence. I was accused of having come close to abandoning Labour and joining the SDP at its birth in 1981, but Roger, who had been part of the many hours of late-night discussions I had had with close friends at the time, refuted the suggestion.
When I was selected he sent me a note of congratulations, and we began to see more of each other. He was still in the SDP, or more accurately in the now merged Liberal Democrats, but he was starting to drift back towards Labour, or at least to see the possibility of accomplishing within a new kind of Labour Party the social democratic project that had inspired his original breakaway. He had set up a consultancy firm called Prima Europe, specialising in advising businesses on the implications of British and European regulation, and he now offered me a small, part-time role which I gratefully accepted. Roger would become a constant presence in my political life. Over the two decades that followed, I can honestly say that between them, he and Philip Gould informed every political, strategic or policy judgement I made. Early on in politics I had developed an ability to make decisions and stick with them. I also knew the importance of getting the decisions right. I invariably relied on Philip and Roger to reach a settled point of view.
By late 1991, I was concentrating on winning my own seat in Hartlepool. My direct involvement in preparations for Labour’s general election campaign was limited to a detailed note, at David Hill’s request, on the lessons to be learned from 1987 – ranging from the need to keep a tight day-to-day hold on events, messages and media coverage, to the imperative of avoiding burn-out in the final stages by setting aside time simply to sleep, as well as having a final-week campaign plan. I continued to talk to Philip regularly, and, if much less often, to Neil. I desperately wanted him to be successful. He had worked and driven himself hard, and taken political risks, to make Labour electable. But at Walworth Road, the unsettled aftermath of the Underwood interregnum had left Colin both exhausted and sceptical about whether there was any real will to win. Before long, he resigned too.
In October, I went to see Neil and Glenys at their home in Ealing. I could see a new desperation in Neil. He was very nervous about the coming election, and said he felt an inability to ‘find words’ for his speeches – an especially painful anxiety for a leader who relied so much on his oratory. He felt he was losing the battle against his poor image, and was upset at the favourable press Major was getting. As we talked, Glenys suddenly interjected: ‘Why don’t you have Peter back to organise things and get a better press?’ If there was any doubt of how low Neil’s self-confidence had sunk, it was clear in his reply. He couldn’t bring me back, he said, ‘because of the Mandelson myth, and what everyone will say about him pulling the strings and controlling me’. I left disappointed not so much by my own inability to help Neil, as by the growing feeling that no one could do so. He seemed isolated, down. It was as if the fight had gone out of him.
For a while, there were murmurings among Labour MPs, shadow cabinet ministers and the unions about replacing Neil. Some union leaders began quietly to canvass the option of John Smith becoming leader before the election. Gordon and Tony even went to see John to gauge his intentions. He replied that he was not interested. He said he did not think we had any chance of winning with Neil, but that he was not going to take the risk of taking aim at him and missing. So Neil survived the talk of rebellion.
My view was that even under a new leader, we would have a hard time winning. With the exception of our abandonment of unilateralism and a partial retreat on nationalisation, our policies simply hadn’t changed enough since 1983. With John’s commitments to £3 billion in increased pension and child benefits in the policy review, we would also be going into the election on a platform of higher taxes. And since he had pledged to unveil a fully-fledged ‘shadow budget’ before voting day, tax was sure to become a major issue. As the campaign approached, John finalised a package that would increase National Insurance contributions for anyone earning more than £21,500 a year. It was a formula for alienating voters of almost every class and background.
Neil knew this was trouble. He tried, but failed, to get John to scale down his proposals, and at least to phase in the NI increase. I am sure even John recognised the danger, but he felt it was outweighed by the loss of trust he would risk by a last-minute change to his tax or spending plans. Gordon, Tony and I also felt the tax issue would greatly hurt our chances in the election. But although it didn’t really register with me at the time, there was a nuance of difference in the reasons each of them objected. Gordon favoured John’s plans for increases in state help for pensioners and struggling parents. His problem was practical and tactical: how to pay for them, and how and when to announce and implement them. While Tony saw welfare increases as a commendable long-term goal, he felt that Labour’s priority must be to demonstrate to middle-class voters, and to our traditional working-class supporters who aspired to be middle-class, that we would not raise their taxes. We had to show we were on their side. That outweighed all other considerations for him. To the extent that I thought about the discrepancy, I put it down to the fact that Gordon’s political position was more delicate than Tony’s. His roots, like John’s, lay in Scottish Labour. Now that he was Shadow Trade and Industry Secretary, he held the senior economic portfolio next to John, making any appearance of disagreement with him out of the question.
There were growing strains in his relationship with John. Gordon’s rise through the party’s ranks had caused suspicions in the Smith camp that he might become a rival for the succession if we lost the election. These were being fed by Gordon’s oldest and bitterest Scottish Labour rival, Robin Cook. John got the head of the GMB union, John Edmonds, to phone me in Hartlepool late one Friday night with the aim of putting Gordon in his place. ‘I gather the mice are playing,’ he began. When I replied that I had no idea what he was on about, he said: ‘I hear you and others are trying to push Gordon. This isn’t helpful.’ I wasn’t, and I told him so. In fact, Gordon, Tony and I were all sceptical about whether John could deliver the change Labour needed. We had been talking, if only in speculative terms, about the merits of a ‘modernisers’ challenge’, with Gordon going for the leadership and Tony as deputy. The Edmonds phone call was obviously intended to pre-empt any such move.
It was followed, days later, by a more explicit signal. On the shuttle flight down from Edinburgh to London, John turned to Gordon and asked point-blank whether he would try for the leadership. Feeling cornered, Gordon answered in the only way he felt he could: ‘No, absolutely not.’ ‘Good,’ said John, ‘because it would not help our friendship if you did.’ Gordon was so worried about the veiled threat that he asked me to ensure that his undertaking to John appeared in print. I obliged, and later in the week a columnist duly reported that should Labour lose the coming election, Gordon would not be a candidate for the leadership against John. Nobody assumed that Neil would stay.
This did not keep Gordon from making his misgivings about the shadow budget plans clear to John. Short of going public, though, he was never going to be able to force a change. The Tories had no need for such scruples. On 10 March, the day before Major called the election, the Tories’ final budget took aim at our obvious vulnerability on taxes. Lawson’s successor as Chancellor, Norman Lamont, announced a new 20p income tax band.
To many in Labour, and to at least some in the media, we still had every chance of winning the election. We had a small lead in the opinion polls, even after the budget. The Tories had been in power for thirteen years. The economy was in the deepest recession for decades. Our manifesto was more voter-friendly than in 1987. But not by much. When the NEC met to sign off on it, Neil mustered a majority against a series of motions from Tony Benn, Dennis Skinner and their allies: a call for an explicit reference to socialism, a vow not to impose pay restraint, and a demand to phase out private beds in NHS hospitals.
Our campaign strategy was to play things safe, not to screw up, and to cling on to our poll lead until the finish line. David Hill did a highly professional job at Walworth Road, while Philip was an even more important mainstay than in 1987. We had a few mishaps, but none of them fatal. After the campaign was over, the media and many inside Labour singled out Neil’s final, prematurely triumphal rally in Sheffield as crucial to the result. I never believed that. Nor did Philip’s later research bear it out. It was our tax and spending plans, made starkly clear in John’s shadow budget a few days before the election – and the way that message played into a wider image of Labour as too extreme, too much of a risk, to be trusted in Downing Street – that sealed our fate.
My own campaign involved making my case to the voters of Hartlepool. Just because I was standing in a safe Labour seat didn’t mean it was fail-safe. I highlighted local issues, above all the need for investment and economic growth in a town still feeling the effects of the post-war decline of its staple industries. I also raised what would soon become a distinctly New Labour priority: the need for even a left-of-centre party to get serious about crime, and tougher on criminals. The personal high point for me was when my mother, always reluctant to venture into the political limelight, joined me on the campaign. The political high point was my result. The Tories added 1,000 votes, or 1 per cent of the electorate, to their 1987 tally. Our vote rose by more than 3 per cent, to nearly 52 per cent.
Still, I had no doubt by election day that Britain as a whole was going to vote in a fourth-term Tory government, and the national results were indeed the worst of all worlds for us. We had lost. But we had picked up forty seats, bringing our total to 229. The Tories, on 376 seats, had lost forty-two. The Lib Dems, with twenty-two, were two seats down on 1987. Though John Major would still have a comfortable Commons majority, the election had been close enough for many in Labour to feel we were almost
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Peter Mandelson
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Биографии и мемуары
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 18.04.2024
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О книге: The number one bestselling memoir of one of New Labour’s three founding architects, now with a revealing new chapter updating this e-book edition.Peter Mandelson is one of the most influential politicians of modern times. ‘The Third Man’ is his story – of a life played out in the backroom and then on the frontline of the Labour Party during its unprecedented three terms in government.Much of the book is devoted to the defining political relationships of Peter Mandelson’s life – with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Charting what he terms the ‘soap-opera’ years of the Labour government, his book continues to ruffle feathers with an updated preface bringing the story up to the tempestuous present.