A Journey (10 page)

So you might reasonably conclude that the period 1979 to 1983 had been an unmitigated disaster and that something had gone rather seriously wrong. Pretty obvious, I thought.

The meeting’s title appeared to indicate people wanted to learn lessons. The platform consisted of me as the local MP, Dennis Skinner as standard-bearer of the far left at the time, and various assorted union people. Only a complete ingénu or total clot – i.e. me – could have thought it was going to be a balanced, frank debate.

Now, I had won my selection as Labour’s candidate for the seat over the far left’s choice, a man called Les Huckfield. He was a genuinely interesting political phenomenon – and only goes to show the odd effect politics can have on people. In the 1960s he had been Labour’s youngest MP; a moderate; a minister; a rising star. However, for reasons everyone assumed were to do with ambition but may have been sincere conviction, he caught the Benn virus and became overnight a fully paid-up ultra-leftist. When his constituency disappeared in the national boundary reorganisation, which had incidentally brought the Sedgefield constituency into being, he then toured the country trying to upend sitting MPs in their reselection. By a mixture of means, the doors were always barred and he became a bit like something out of Transylvania wondering from village to village and having the garlic and crosses hung above the doors. But he damn near succeeded in Sedgefield, and only the organising genius of John Burton, my prime constituency ally and later my agent, prevented it. Les Huckfield’s defeat shocked and angered him and there were murmurings and rumours from his camp that they would aim to deselect me and get him in on the next reselection contest. So it was all very raw.

Anyway, I’m the local MP in Spennymoor, so I speak first. I get up. I give a logical, rational and, though I say it myself, entirely accurate analysis of why Labour lost and the lessons we should draw. I was as frank as the blurb could possibly have meant.

I really quite warmed to my theme. Labour had lost touch. It had failed to spot how society had changed. I had two lines I was rather proud of: one was about Labour’s attitudes being from the era of ‘black-and-white TV’ (most people by 1983 having colour TVs); the other was about the party ‘simply repeating old adages learned on your grandparents’ knees’ or some such.

Even I could tell it wasn’t exactly going down a storm; but in those days, I had everything written out and didn’t have the facility of adjusting mid-speech. Those were my thoughts. I wrote them down. I read them out. I finished to a smattering of applause from the few supporters John had brought along. The rest sat – and I think this is the only time I ever saw such a thing – and folded their arms, in unison, their faces grimacing as if a thousand lemons had been forced down their throats.

Dennis got to his feet. Still in unison, their arms unfolded and their faces began to smirk in eager anticipation. They knew what was coming. I didn’t.

In later years, Dennis was one of my best (if somewhat closet) supporters. He didn’t agree with any of my policies, but he liked someone who whacked the Tories. Though I’m not sure he would thank me for saying so, he mellowed and became a nicer person. In particular, he used to give me brilliant PMQs advice, pointing out with uncanny accuracy the weaknesses of my Tory opponents, feeding me one-liners and explaining what would rouse the troops behind me. But back then Dennis was your original firebrand. He was also a genius at a particular type of left-wing rally speech. He was in his element, and little new-boy muggins had given him an opening as large as your average open-cast mine (which he didn’t much like either, since he had been a miner and to him proper mines were deep underground).

There’s nothing quite like being utterly and publicly humiliated for teaching you a lesson. The meeting learned very few lessons (and those the wrong ones) from Labour’s defeat. But I learned one big one from Dennis that day.

‘So,’ he began, ‘your new MP, supposed to be a Labour MP [particular emphasis on word ‘Labour’], whose experience in Labour politics [again much emphasis on ‘Labour’] up to now includes [here reading from a piece of paper with extraordinary thespian timing and skill] Durham Choir School [private school much hated by the local proletariat]; Fettes College, Edinburgh – the Eton of Scotland I’m told, [in an aside] not that I’d know [much laughter and applause]; St John’s College, Oxford [said with an especial sneer]; and the Bar [here applause] – and that’s not the one you buy a pint in [uproarious outburst of laughter] but one full of lawyers [pantomime hisses]; your new Labour MP thinks our grandparents didn’t know what they were talking about; that it’s time we disowned them; that now’s the moment when we tell them – many of whom never owned so much as a wireless, never mind a black-and-white TV – that they don’t belong in Thatcher’s Britain [looks of horror on faces of audience]. Well, let me tell you, Anthony Charles Lynton Blair [my full name, rather unfortunately printed several times in the course of the Beaconsfield by-election], my grandparents were poor, it’s true; were humble folk, I admit it; were, I dare say, a little old-fashioned in their principles of loyalty and solidarity; but THEY WERE DECENT PEOPLE AND PROUD OF BEING WORKING CLASS.’ The last words rose to a crescendo accompanied by an eruption of applause, cheers and general favour to a degree that fairly lifted the roof off the place.

After that the speakers got up one by one, and you never heard so many heart-rending tales of the fortitude, heroism and near-divine decency of grandparents. Several opined that they were only alive today through their nan’s dedication; others spoke of how entire mining communities had been on the brink of destruction until rescued by some miraculous intervention of grandma or grandad. Without ever quite being explicit, there were dark insinuations that maybe my own grandparentage had been of the landed gentry, possibly even the mine-owning sort whose adages they could only imagine, but were no doubt along the lines of grinding the faces of the poor into the dust.

Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, it did. The final speaker, after completing his own cover version of the grandparent riff, turned to me and concluded by saying: ‘I am sorry you don’t understand the history or traditions of the people up here; but, comrades and colleagues, here is someone who does . . .’ And, at the back of the hall, in walks Les Huckfield. Cue standing ovation.

As I staggered out, with people avoiding eye contact and scurrying past me like I was diseased, my then agent (and a lovely man) George Ferguson and his wife Hannah each put an arm round me. ‘Don’t worry,’ George said, ‘you were the only one in there talking any sense and I’m as working class as any of them.’

‘He’s right,’ said John, ‘but in future, learn to say it better.’ I did.

Hannah was a remarkable woman in many ways. As well as bringing up her own children she had foster-parented others, and was as Labour as Labour could be, but she represented a different facet of what was called, patronisingly, ‘the working class’.

Part of Labour’s problem was that such a term was a generic description that obscured as much as it illuminated. I concluded that two different strains of thinking brushed up against each other in that phrase which said something important about contemporary Britain. Probably they were always present, but the very social progress Labour had helped bring about had thrust the tension to the surface.

The genus fitted as a description of income, of type of job, and often, though not always by any means, of voting behaviour; but it didn’t fit as a description of attitude. One strain dominated the activists of union and party. They held many of the same leftist views as the intellectual wing, but tended to be even more hard line on areas to do with economic policy.

The other strain was represented by people like George and Hannah, who were out and about far more in the non-political world of most ordinary people. They understood aspiration and applauded rather than resented it. They were tough, eye-wateringly so, on law and order. They believed social conditions had to be changed, but they never accepted them as an excuse for criminal behaviour.

Shortly after I became MP and still a little unused to Sedgefield’s ways, I spoke at a branch meeting in a village called Tudhoe where Hannah was a branch member. The issue of the death penalty came up. Someone asked me if I supported it in the case of murder. Now, I was used to the politics of Islington, not County Durham. In Islington, such a question was simple. You gave the stock answer; heads nodded; the meeting moved on. Actually, it was one of the few questions to which I could give a generally left-wing answer and so I rather liked being asked it. And I had, so I thought, a rather neat way of putting the answer.

‘No, I don’t,’ I responded confidently, ‘and I will tell you why. If I am not prepared to hang that person myself, I should not ask the state to do it for me.’ I sat down rather pleased with myself.

‘Well, I’d hang them,’ Hannah piped up.

‘Aye, and I’d draw and quarter them too,’ said another equally benign-looking elderly woman; and she drew much support.

Nowadays, that sentiment on this issue would be much more rare. But the point is: the ‘working class’ were not as homogeneous a group as many politicians assumed, or based their reasoning upon. Labour was largely losing the strain that Hannah represented. So even back then in 1983, though often imperfectly formed, my drift, politically and intellectually, was clear: Labour had to be radically reformed, and not by an adjustment or a shift of a few degrees, but in a manner that changed profoundly its modus operandi, its thinking, its programme and above all its attitudes. How to do it, how fast to do it, which issues to tackle first, which to leave until later – that was all a matter of tactics, but it was obvious society was undergoing a paradigm shift and Labour was not merely failing to heed it, but hiding from it.

By the 1992 election, I had been in the vanguard of the party’s steady but slow move to modernisation. I was often out in front – as City spokesman, energy spokesman, in changing fundamental positions on the unions when holding the employment brief – but never so far in front that I was out of sight. I was the most forward, but took some care to remain with the pack and not to become so isolated that I could be picked off. I learned Dennis’s lesson well; there is no point in being right about an organisation’s failings if you have lost the ability to persuade it of them. You have to speak the language in order to change the terms of the debate conducted in that language, otherwise you may be a fine example of a person who is right, but irrelevant.

I had come to the conclusion that there were two major problems with the change in the Labour Party: the direction was right but the pace was too slow; more seriously, however, and despite my admiration for him, I was uneasy at the way Neil Kinnock was justifying the change.

Although Neil was seminal in bringing Labour to power – he gave strong leadership over eradicating Militant and taking on the Scargill wing of the union movement, and this leadership allowed John Smith, then me, to make the changes necessary to win – the unspoken argument was this: look, guys, we’ve lost elections, the electorate won’t wear our policies, so I’m sorry, but we’re going to have to change them. The message – obviously one more palatable to party members – was: the party needs power, we’re just going to have to compromise with the electorate. Now this was better than the famous dictum of the far left – ‘No compromise with the electorate’– which was printed on their banners as we tried to reform. But it seemed the party and the voters were in two different places, and so the party had to shift against its will. My own feeling, however, was: the voters are right and we should change not because we have to, but because we want to. It may sound a subtle difference, but it is fundamental.

In my view, we needed a complete, top-to-bottom reorientation of our programme and policies. In particular, we needed to separate conceptually a commitment to our values (timeless) from their application (time-bound). So, of course, we should and always would fight for social justice; but in today’s world that didn’t mean more state control. And on issues like defence and law and order, being tough was not striking a pose but a sensible reaction to the threats of the modern world, whether globally or on our street corners.

I had also tried to raise with John Smith the issue of asking Neil to step aside. Neil had led the Labour Party with enormous courage, saved it from political extinction and created a foundation for government; but he had to fight the 1987 election on a manifesto that wasn’t sellable, and for whatever reason, I was convinced the British people were never going to elect him prime minister. The late-twentieth-century political spirit was changing. Parties were still important, but as party loyalties declined in intensity, much more came to rest on the person of the leader. Political analysts and practising politicians love to speculate on this or that voting trend – and very often there is much truth in it – but there is always a tendency to underplay the importance of the leader. To an extent, this is understandable – surely it’s the policies that matter, the social movements that dictate outcomes, the events that shape destiny – but past a certain point, people regard left/right distinctions as less emphatic today, they think policies are open to amendment and know that programmes and manifestos can’t set out how someone will react to events. Unless policies are defined to a very clear degree and are way off-centre, the character, likeability and personality of the leader are of paramount importance. They can determine the election, and this is now always a major, if not
the
major factor. Simple as that. So if the people didn’t take to Neil, and they didn’t, and had rejected him already in 1987, they weren’t going to elect him in 1992, unless their view of him had changed significantly. It hadn’t.