A Journey (22 page)

We had had enough run-ins during the three years when I was leader for me to understand that there was a significant difference in our approaches. Only in the latter years did that difference start to become not just marked but fundamental. I was in no doubt that we came at politics from essentially divergent positions which of course converged, but did so as much for reasons of politics as for reasons of conviction. In the end, we were two very different people in terms of economic attitudes, with two very different backgrounds. Perhaps a better way of putting it is that we had different economic, financial and business instincts.

Basically, I understood aspiration. I like people who want to succeed, and admire people who do. When I was at the Bar – and the seven years I spent as a full-time barrister were immensely formative for me in many ways – I did a lot of commercial and industrial work and got on well with the risk-takers, those who didn’t mope around, who had ‘get-up-and-go’. I hate class; but I love aspiration. It’s why I like America. I adore that notion of coming from nothing and making something of yourself.

This attitude had its downside. While the stories of my being dazzled by the wealthy are always ludicrously exaggerated (most of my close friends are not at all of that ilk), nonetheless I sometimes underestimated the ruthlessness and amorality that can go with moneymaking. Don’t misunderstand me: many business people can be creative people for whom money is the consequence of their success, rather than the motivation. But others don’t give a damn. And I tended on occasions not to comprehend fully the difference.

However, I didn’t resent success, and on the whole that was a good thing for a progressive politician. I identified with it personally too. Did I want a nice home? Yes. Did I prefer a five-star hotel to a two-star? Yes. Did I appreciate that there was more to life than this? Yes. I never thought that enjoying life’s good things led to indifference to the plight of those who couldn’t. For me the opposite was true: what I wanted for myself, I also wanted for others. But I didn’t feel it wrong to want it nonetheless.

When I was with a group of entrepreneurs, I felt at home. Gordon was completely different. He could analyse what a good business was and discuss the intricacies of this policy over that in order to promote it; but he never
felt
it. I was a public service guy who, if I had chosen a different path, would have liked running a business and making money. A bit of me thought: Wouldn’t that be great? Now if I had really wanted that, I would have done it. I am, all said and done, a public service guy at heart. Gordon was a public service guy who, if he had chosen a different path, would have been a bigger public service guy. That’s not to say he couldn’t have made it in business – with his brain and determination he could have made it doing anything – but it would never have motivated him or possibly even interested him.

So, for me, top-rate tax was not about top-rate tax. Of course you can make a perfectly good case for wealthy people paying more, and around the edges – National Insurance and so on – I was content that they did, but I wanted to preserve, in terms of competitive tax rates, the essential Thatcher/Howe/Lawson legacy. I wanted wealthy people to feel at home and welcomed in the UK so that they could bring more business, create jobs and spread some of that wealth about. They weren’t my priority; by which I mean that it wasn’t a priority to run
after
them, and nor was it a priority to run
at
them. I was happy to leave well alone.

I knew if we put up the top rate of tax it would be seen as a signal, a declaration of instinct, an indicator whose impact would far outweigh its intrinsic weight. When Gordon suggested it prior to the election and I was given the usual opinion-poll guff showing 70–80 per cent in favour of it, I put in a complete
nolle prosequi
. For me, it was a total red line. After time, Gordon backed off.

To be fair, he took a more radical view on capital gains tax, which in turn helped the private equity industry enormously. He cut the rate down to as little as 15 per cent for those who held shares for a fixed minimum period, so those investing in companies, sorting them out and then selling them on, were paying far less than the income tax rate. Nevertheless, I felt it was done more as a political sign to those he thought were designating him anti-business, and a product of those who were advising him, rather than an act born of great conviction.

No matter; in that first statement on the Bank of England and his first Budget, he was pretty clearly New Labour. However, his seeming endorsement of the notion that I had vacated the economic sphere sowed seeds of distortion whose harvest was damaging. Of course, it is in the nature of politics that all the elements that ultimately bring about the downfall are there from the outset, albeit in mild form. Time merely enlarges and strengthens them. Even in those early days of power, indeed even from the moment of the phone call after John’s death when I didn’t immediately accede, there was a battle unresolved. Whether it was ever resolvable is another question.

Despite all this, the presence of such a big figure, the mere appearance on the landscape of someone who plainly was up to it as well as up for it, whose energy, intellect and political weight were undeniable, was a massive plus for the government. If there was a clash, it was at least a clash of the titans. If there were tensions, they could also have their creative side. In my Cavalier embrace of the middle class and his Roundhead identification with Labour tradition, there was surely a coalition of sorts that could be built and could function. So it seemed in those months following 1 May 1997, and so it was.

I have a somewhat weirdly optimistic view of the power of reason, of the ability to persuade if an argument is persuasive. It sometimes led me to believe that if a political goal is right, then it could therefore be attained. Evidently, politics does not work like that: there are goals that are absolutely desirable and entirely worthy, but utterly beyond reach.

My experience with the Liberal Democrats in those initial days of power was a case in point. From the off, I wanted to have them in the big tent. I regarded Roy Jenkins as a mentor. I grew to love him, actually, and thought him a decent, courageous and vastly rational and intelligent man. I also liked and respected Paddy Ashdown, and thought they had younger folk who were basically New Labour. I understood why the SDP was formed, why it failed, and why its failure was not one of ideas but of organisation and politics.

The Liberals were regarded as a motley crew of the vaguely serious, the not so serious and completely unserious. I had all the usual prejudices about blokes with beards in sandals and hideously coloured shirts whose greatest ambition was to be a really good campaigning local councillor, and women in baggy dresses who looked odd and talked about the importance of sex education.

After the amalgamation of the Liberal Party with the SDP, the new Liberal Democrats did rather resemble in their political contours the shape of two objects jammed together on the basis that they fitted when actually they didn’t. They were a bit like the right and left wings of most parties, only more so, to paraphrase what Rick said of Louis in
Casablanca.

It meant their activists tended to oddness. Now, I am an activist myself, and certainly in younger days a very active activist – so I should be careful here. But political activism always has that tinge of the oddball in it. I know that’s a shocking admission of bigotry and preconception, but anyone who has ever swum in the waters of a political party and its membership knows what a peculiar habitat it is.

The Lib Dems could also be prone to gross opportunism. Now all politicians have to be opportunistic from time to time – seizing the opportunity is often what it’s about – but in some of their local campaigns the Lib Dems had perfected this and taken it to the level of a science or art form. In particular, despite their official (and for the most part genuine) protestations of belief in racial and sexual equality, they were well up to fighting pretty dirty campaigns targeting the personal characteristics of their opponents.

Although they were a jumble, their leadership was sound, there were some outstanding people in their ranks and they were more or less aligned with New Labour politically. We had taken the Labour Party to the point which recognised that much of what the old SDP had been saying was correct; some of their prominent members had defected and joined or rejoined Labour; and truthfully, I was closer in political outlook to some of them than to parts of the old left of my own party. It made sense to try to draw them in. Could we go a step further and bring them into government? The traditional part of the Labour Party – and John Prescott especially – would go nuts at the thought; but this was a moment in time and it might never come again. I was certainly willing to give it a try. Paddy, his wife Jane, Cherie and I dined together regularly before the election. We liked each other and trusted each other. Paddy had real leadership quality and, like me, was unafraid of taking on his party.

In my party conference speech later that year, and greatly to Alastair’s and Bruce’s alarm, I specifically went out of my way to pay tribute in my own political heritage to Lloyd George, Keynes and Beveridge as well as Attlee, Bevin and Keir Hardie. I had a belief – in part intuitive, in part reinforced by Roy Jenkins – that the twentieth century had been a Tory century precisely because good and talented people who should have been together were instead in separate parties fighting each other.

Reuniting these two wings of progressive social democracy appealed to my sense of history. It also derived from my general approach to politics. I had long before come to the conclusion that the party system, though necessary, was at one level irrational and counterproductive. It meant differences had to be either exaggerated or invented; it stopped sensible people cooperating to achieve sensible ends; complex problems that required thoughtful solutions were reduced to battles about slogans.

Hearing some of the Tory speakers during debates in the House of Commons in the 1980s, I concluded that were I an objective observer, what they were saying would have made a lot of sense. From a long time back, I would sit, converse and exchange views with Tories. None of this made me a Tory or diminished my commitment to my own political tribe, but it did illustrate the foolishness and even the futility of opposing for opposition’s sake.

Above all, I realised that the battle for political supremacy between government and business, the state and the market, was essentially a twentieth-century hangover. A proper functioning state was obviously necessary to do what only government could do, as was a thriving and competitive private sector to generate the nation’s wealth. Together, each in their proper sphere, they determined prosperity. I therefore concluded that while values and ends might differ and diverge – and in that lay real politics and ideology – the question of what means should be used to achieve those ends was plainly a practical one: what counts is what works. In terms of values and ends, it was hard, certainly so far as the Lib Dems were concerned at that time, to see where the great point of fundamental difference lay. Hence the decision to try to co-opt them.

In the frantic hours following the election, I spoke to Paddy. We agreed it would be premature to put them in the Cabinet (despite our cavalier attitude to our parties, we were both nervous about their respective reactions so soon after election), and unlike in 2010 I had won a huge majority. But we agreed we would begin a process of cooperation with an official committee that would try to draw up an agreed programme of constitutional reform.

Paddy was reluctant to do this, at least until after the constitutional committee had deliberated. I feared this would mean it wouldn’t happen.

My fear, amply borne out by events when the Lib Dems ended up opposing our public service reforms on what were basically Old Labour grounds – however they tried to dress it up – was that while we could agree on the easy stuff – or, if not easy, the stuff that didn’t touch voters’ immediate lives – they would shy away from the painful but thoroughly necessary changes in schools, hospitals, pensions and welfare, which most directly touched voters’ lives. In other words, for me the question was: is this cooperation for real? In the end, I’m afraid, it wasn’t, not through a lack of good intentions or good faith on Paddy’s part – he was totally straight about it throughout – but because of what I thought was their lack of the necessary fibre to govern. In the ultimate analysis, the Lib Dems seemed to be happier as the ‘honest’ critics, prodding and probing and pushing, but unwilling to take on the mantle of responsibility for the hard choices and endure the rough passages. It will be fascinating to see whether the coalition conceived after the 2010 election holds. It may, since the Lib Dem desire for electoral reform is so intrinsic to them. But if that doesn’t come about, I doubt the coalition will last long. However, I may be wrong . . .

Back in 1997, when a coalition would have been an entirely voluntary act between consenting parties, I thought that the opportunity for them to criticise, and thus take the easy way out, was just too tempting. The trouble is they get used to sitting on panels or TV shows and people nodding along with them because they are saying what people want to hear – which never really changes anything, I fear, and can lead them to opportunism that can be breathtaking.

I recall vividly when I was Shadow Home Secretary in 1993. Ken Clarke was Home Secretary. I like Ken, he’s a proper stand-up politician. The Tories were foolish never to make him leader, though I was very grateful for that. He had proposed a set of wide-ranging reforms to the police. Some were smart (like changing pension requirements), others not so smart (as with their disciplinary code). Most were justifiable, but my God did the police hate them. The Police Federation – by far the most well-drilled union I ever came across – held a rally against the reforms at Wembley Arena, which was remarkable for two things. The first was the collective discipline of the coppers. The Fed’s committee sat on the stage, with the audience in front of them. There must have been 10,000 police there, which was and is a really scary prospect. The massed ranks took their cue completely from the committee. When the committee applauded, so did the masses; when they sat on their hands, not a single person clapped. It was awesome.