A Journey (18 page)

So, in a sense, for me, politics started with that very ground-level human reconnection of party and people. In late 1996, Alastair, who got all this completely, persuaded me to appear on the
Des O’Connor
Show
. At that time, it was a very unusual thing for a politician to do. I was incredibly nervous. I had to prepare certain anecdotes, and get myself in a totally different frame of mind. It would be utterly unlike PMQs or a party conference speech. I didn’t have to prove ‘fitness to govern’ in terms of economic or social or foreign policy; I had to prove I was normal and could talk normally about the things people like to chat about. It was a risk, and I fear I made Alastair’s life hell in the lead-up to it, but it worked. What astonished me, however, was that from then on, people sublimely uninterested in politics would feel I was accessible to them.

It meant we were back in touch, that this rather frightening cultural disjunction of the 1970s and 80s had been realigned. People were focused and prepared to listen. However – and this is also crucial – such a reconnection was only a beginning. Sometimes, political leaders make the mistake of thinking: That’s enough, I’ve done it, they like me. That is gravely to underestimate people. That is actually just first base, no more than that.

Then they want answers. If you are in Opposition, people don’t expect you to know it all. They’re not asking for reams of detail, they just want to know where you stand – on spending and tax; on law and order; on defence; on Europe; on public services. Here two things are vital for an Opposition: keep it simple; and keep it coherent. By keeping it simple, I mean not surface only. I mean: clear.

For example, are you in favour of a tough approach on law and order or not? Do you support the war in Afghanistan fully or not? Are you for reform or status quo in public services? Do we need less, more or the same amount of public spending? Are you in favour of tax cuts, and if so, for whom? Big state, smaller state, different state?

Politicians, in one way rightly mistrusting the crudity of such simple positioning, don’t like this, because once defined you are limited, and their instinct is to keep all options open. The holy grail is to have everyone onside; and I’m not saying I didn’t pursue it fairly vigorously and, at points, more successfully than most.

However, you have to be able to answer those questions plainly and clearly. There can be qualifications and ‘get-outs’, but the answers must remain comprehensible, because they define you. They add up to a political, not merely personal, character. This requires thought, detailed analysis and intellectual rigour. Politics is a far more intellectual business than is often realised. You may think: Well, if it’s simplicity that’s required, you don’t need a whole lot of detail. Wrong. The simplicity is not born of superficial analysis. It is simple precisely because it is the product of being worked through.

It was here in the long period of Opposition, when every day, week and month had to be filled with something new or diverting, that the work I had done with Gordon and a range of other policy thinkers paid off. We had burrowed down; we had devilled; we had iterated and reiterated in order to get to grips with the governing principles in each area. So we needed more investment in public services. Fine. But how to pay for it? Growth? Tax rises? Are we against tax cuts or in favour of some? And how does that impact on spending? Is it investment first, then tax cuts? Or can you do both, maybe redistributing? If redistribution, of what sort? On the higher rate, or in other more covert ways?

I can’t tell you how many times we went back and forth on these issues, so that by 1994, when we became more busy and the relationship more tense, we were already orientated. The pathfinder was already switched on: growth was key; investment not tax cuts; redistribute, but carefully and not touching income tax; keep the middle class onside, but where growth and some redistribution allowed, focus on the poorest; then, in time, you could balance tax cuts and spending.

Likewise on welfare. Throughout 1995 and 1996, we toyed with a jobs programme. In the end, we came up with the ‘New Deal’ for the unemployed. The phrase was Gordon’s, borrowed from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s economic programmes in the 1930s. He always liked that sort of thing. We chose a windfall tax on the privatised utilities as the means of paying for it (being often in a monopoly position, the utilities had ended up with bumper profits). Gordon pushed for the tax, but I was a little reluctant, fearful of alienating business opinion. In early January 1997, I had a set-to with him about it, mainly because his adviser Ed Balls had gone over the top in briefing it. In the end, we settled on a compromise which was less than he wanted, but still a hefty sum.

However, the real crunch came in the programme itself, where Gordon and I were on the same page precisely: along with the job opportunities for the unemployed, we insisted on a responsibility on the part of the unemployed person to take them – i.e. modern, not old-fashioned welfare. This was very controversial ground with a lot of the party. There was a huge outcry from union leaders and others (including Robin Cook) accusing us of introducing a type of workfare, though Robin’s comments were in Shadow Cabinet and aimed at Gordon (with whom he had a long-standing feud that had begun deep in the history of 1970s Scottish politics). We stuck to our guns and saw the rebellion off.

But here’s the point: each decision – to have a tax, to put it on the utilities, to use it for a new type of jobs programme – was born of a set of thoroughly worked-out positions on tax, on business, on welfare. Our thinking had been painstakingly orientated so that when we came to the policy, it was not only clear but also coherent. The position on welfare didn’t contradict the business position. It could have done – we might have raised general corporation tax and funded a new type of jobs programme, but that would have been anti-business. We might have had a windfall tax on utilities and had an old-fashioned, traditional jobs programme, but that would have contradicted our message on welfare, namely that it was about a partnership between state and individual, not a handout. Instead, we chose carefully so that the policy was in balance and consistent with the overall New Labour position and message. In this way, it had broad appeal. Competitive business resented the utility windfall profits from privatisation, while people wanted action on unemployment but thought unemployed people also had a duty to help themselves.

I was obsessed by the thought that this Labour government had to be different; had to be able to govern for a lengthy term, as Tory governments seemed habitually capable of doing. In order to achieve this, there was no room for compromise on essentials. That is emphatically not to say we didn’t compromise. We did. In 1995, I came out for a publicly owned railway system. I never had much faith in this particular privatisation of the Tories and felt it would lead to a hugely complex and possibly uncompetitive system; but on the other hand, I wasn’t going to waste money renationalising it. On the NHS and schools we also compromised, sometimes more than I liked. However, when it came to those issues fundamental to New Labour – to its rationale, its heart, its political soul, if you will – there was no compromise at all. Often this was posed less in terms of what we would do than in what we wouldn’t. But that was natural for Opposition; and in any event, it created the right political space for those things I was determined to move forward on, if and when prime minister.

So: no return to the old union laws; no renationalisation of the privatised utilities; no raising of the top rate of tax; no unilateralism; no abolition of grammar schools. And there were certain clear pointers to future policy: a tough line on antisocial behaviour; investment and reform in public services; pro-Europe and pro-US; opportunity and responsibility together in welfare; encouragement for small- and medium-sized enterprises and even-handedness between business and labour (employees might have additional individual rights, but not collective ones).

At every stage of this (and the decisions came pretty fast and furious), I was reconciled to fighting, and to leaving if I lost. The party had to know I was not bluffing. If they didn’t want New Labour, they could get someone else. The country had to know that if I was going to be their prime minister, I would be ‘of the party’ but also removed from it.

At times – and this was a muted criticism from GB also – it seemed as if I was deliberately provoking the party. Genuinely I wasn’t; but I was not going to defer. I was going to speak the same language to party and country. In so doing, I was going to encourage the sensible and modernising people in the party to step up and step out. Party leaders have a symbiotic impact on their activists. There is a subtle cloning process that goes on which, in turn, gives more strength to the leader.

Speeches I gave back then were different in content to the speeches in the early part of the twenty-first century, to be sure, but in tone they remained the same. Our understanding of what it meant to modernise changed with the experience of governing, but the will and determination to modernise never wavered. Of course, the other point to underline is that this will was born of belief. My settled conviction was that twentieth-century politics was coming to an end not only in time but also in substance. The old left/right distinctions remained, but needed amendment, confinement and definition.

So there it was: a basic belief – recovering Labour values from outdated tradition and dogma and reconnecting the party to the modern world; a set of intellectual policy orientations coming from those values reapplied in the light of modernity; and finally a set of policy positions or decisions that reflected those earlier orientations and that basic belief. The commitment remained. The means of implementing it radically altered. The state and social action were a means of advancing the individual, not subsuming them. The objective was for the individual to fulfil their potential and ambition; our role was as the enabler of this, not the controller of it, aiming not to limit that ambition or those goals but to open up their possibility to all. ‘For the many not the few’, as the new Clause IV put it.

Every step, every declaration, every interview was dedicated to that coherent framework. The coherence itself is an essential component. Take the Tory Party of today. They wanted a modernising message. To an extent, they followed the New Labour handbook. They changed their position on gays, on investment in public services, on the importance of society. They put away some of the old Thatcherite rhetoric, but the seed didn’t take root. So when they thought it was in the bag, they relaxed. Suddenly the Eurosceptics were let out of the cage and indulged, and the Tories did less well in the 2010 election than expected. Now, of course, as a result of the coalition the Eurosceptics are conveniently, for the Tory leadership, back behind bars. Why is Euroscepticism a mistake for a Tory Party trying to modernise? At first blush you may think: No, that’s fine – after all, the polls show that’s where the British people are. But it is a mistake because it immediately breaks the coherence of the modernising message. To a 25–45-year-old audience, Europe is a fact. Live with it. (Whether you like it or not is another matter.) Let slightly wild-eyed anti-Europeans start talking about it with a passion that people instinctively distrust, and in a flash, the question mark over the party and its leader returns in bold print. Add into that any wavering on the economy, and the incoherence starts to worry the very voters you need to reassure. So, in a sense the final move towards modernisation was less a decision that could have ended with a conclusive election victory, and more the product of an election whose result was inconclusive. Having said that, they now have the chance to make it work, and to do in government what they did not do fully in Opposition.

Between 1995 and 1997, even after Clause IV, I was in a perpetual motion of reassurance. The more the poll lead went up, the more I did it. Members of the Shadow Cabinet would frequently say: Come on, enough, we are miles ahead. Each time they said it, I would get hyper-anxious, determined not for a single instant to stop the modernising drive. If I seemed obsessive, it was because I was. Reconnection was great and policy change was essential, but above all, people needed to know that when I was tested, I would stay true to that modernising appeal. Our opponents would say: it’s all clever spin and PR. Day in and day out, with the party’s reactionary elements as my foil, I would prove them wrong with a raft of modernising moves.

In June 1995 we had further outraged sensibilities by accepting an invitation, conveyed through the then editor of
The Times
, Peter Stothard, to address Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation conference on Hayman Island in Australia the next month. Again, now, it seems obvious: the country’s most powerful newspaper proprietor, whose publications have hitherto been rancorous in their opposition to the Labour Party, invites us into the lion’s den. You go, don’t you?

We kept the invitation and my desire to go very quiet indeed. Poor Bruce Grocott was aghast. He was and is a wonderful guy – really sincere, decent and absolutely Labour to the innermost part of his being. In fact, the best of traditional Labour. He had been Mo Mowlam’s inspired suggestion for my PPS. It was a great choice. (Bruce was succeeded by two equally great choices, David Hanson and Keith Hill. David was a great networker, respected even by those who disagreed passionately with me; and also a very tuned-in politician in his own right. Keith was a witty, lovable and really tough operator who hid his toughness beneath the wit; but the toughness was there when you needed it. Keith’s great joke, which I found more amusing after I had left office, was to come and get me for PMQs at 11.57 precisely, throwing the door open and saying like a town crier: ‘Prime Minister, a grateful nation now awaits.’) One enormous benefit was that I always knew what the party was thinking by reference to what Bruce thought. All the numerous volte-faces were pretty shocking to his system. He used to sit there as I explained my latest change to the party’s theology and ritual, and his eyes would wander and he would shake his head or occasionally laugh and say: No, come on, this time you really are joking.