A Journey (3 page)

So the election campaign was long, enervating – as they always are – full of phoney ups and downs, shock polls and startling happenings, but in the end the result was obvious. The scale of the victory, however, was not clear. I had an inkling. If I had had to bet on it, I would have bet big. On the night of 1 May it became clear just how big. And that was when the fear started to set in.

The actual day of the election had passed uneventfully, as they do. Campaigning stops. You go to vote. I walked out of our constituency home in Trimdon Colliery, an old mining village near Sedgefield in County Durham where I had been MP for fourteen years. The mine had been a casualty of the closure policy of the 1960s. I strode to the polling station with Cherie and the children, the ideal family picture, while a horde of snappers took our photograph. Smile, but not exuberantly. Talk, but not with too much animation. Look natural, as if you would naturally walk hand in hand with your wife, in suit trousers, shirt and tie, with your children in tow, to vote in a makeshift wooden polling booth and claim your place in history.

Then back home. I had waited on election day three times before – in 1983, 1987 and 1992 – for the defeat I thought would come. I had wondered what it would mean for me, how I would position myself for the next bout of Opposition, how and whether I would ever get the chance to help steer us from the path of defeat. This time, all eyes were focused on me as I travelled the last steps of the path to victory. Anxiety displaces all other emotions. You can’t settle. I tried to concentrate on choosing a Cabinet, and phoned Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson, who was in charge of strategy. John Prescott came up from Hull to talk through the Cabinet. I spoke incessantly to Philip Gould, our chief pollster, and party staff about the prospects of the majority, but all really to pass the time. Even then, the enormity of what was about to happen didn’t really sink in.

By the time we got to the count, however, held in the cavernous indoor sports centre at Newton Aycliffe, it did. The exit polls had shown big leads. They might be out a fraction, but there was no way they were going to be that wrong. We were going to win. I was going to be prime minister. During the course of the evening, my psyche shifted as the results came in. Of course the journey’s end had always been changing the country, but in the intense struggle to get to the point where that could be achieved, every waking moment had been bent to eliminating the challenges, making sure the vehicle was fit for the voyage, the engine sparking, the passengers either on board or shouting impatiently from behind us, not barring the way ahead. To be sure, we conducted genuine and in-depth discussions to map out how we would navigate the new terrain of government once past the post; but living in the moment, it was the business of Opposition – which we were adept at and had been practising these long years in the wilderness – that dominated our thinking. Our intellectual and rational attention was drawn to the processes of government as the day came nearer, but our emotional core was still directed at getting there.

It was the only business we knew. One or two of the older hands like Jack Cunningham and Margaret Beckett had been very junior ministers in the Callaghan government of 1976–9, but the rest of us were going to come to power as utter novices. Even those older hands knew only a Labour government in its death throes, and the time, temper and spirit of 1997 were as far removed from that of the 1970s as Mars from Earth.

On our side, we had the mood. We had the momentum to sustain it. We had the self-belief that the start of a new adventure often bestows on the ignorant. We had the confidence that in reaching this stage we had swept all before us, conquered with ease, strode out with abandon. Hadn’t we fought a great campaign? Hadn’t we impaled our enemies on our bayonet, like ripe fruit? Hadn’t our strategies, like something derived from destiny, scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts? Wasn’t government just another point on the same journey, a new point maybe, further in its distance, uncertain and unpredictable for us here and now; but could it really be that different? Surely by being bold and acting with confidence, by retaining the same spirit of possibility, the team that had done so brilliantly to get to that point wouldn’t forfeit those qualities in the march ahead?

I could see those around me thinking all this. At times I thought the same. On that night, as the probability of being prime minister turned to certainty, I was no longer seeing through the glass darkly, but face to face with the light. And I was scared.

I was afraid because I knew this was not just another stage on the same journey. Now we would enter a new and foreign land. I was afraid because I felt instinctively that its obstacles and challenges were of an altogether different order of complexity and difficulty. I was afraid because, intent as I was on destroying the government, I could see over time that, even when it was in the right, once public opinion had gone sour it didn’t seem to matter whether what it did was right or wrong; and that once the mood had turned from the government and embraced us, the mood was merciless in its pursuit, indifferent to anything other than satisfying itself. I was afraid because, at that instant, suddenly I thought of myself no longer as the up-and-coming, the challenger, the prophet, but as the owner of the responsibility, the person not explaining why things were wrong but taking the decisions to put them right. Deep down – but fighting its way to the surface – I realised I knew nothing about how tough it really was, nothing about how government really works, most of all nothing about how I personally would react when the mood turned against me, as I knew it would.

Down in London in the HQ at Millbank (the building from which Labour ran its campaign, and a byword for electoral ruthlessness) the partying had begun. In the hall in my County Durham constituency where the votes were being counted, the air was of almost manic excitement. The Labour people naturally were suffused with it, but even the Tories, Lib Dems and assorted others had a sense of history.

There is a strange consequence of the parliamentary system whereby the prime minister is an MP with a constituency in which they stand for election like any other candidate. It is at one level very humbling, for at that moment you are just the constituency candidate, you stand on a platform along with the other candidates as the returning officer reads out the result. Odd, but very democratic and rather good. But of course, since there is so much coverage given to high-profile battles, the constituencies of the prime minister and Leader of the Opposition do not have only the mainstream parties standing, but also countless other candidates seeking publicity for causes (or sometimes just seeking publicity). They had such weird and wonderful names, such as Screwy Driver (Rock ’n’ Roll Party), Boney Maronie Steniforth (Monster Raving Loony Party), Jonathan Cockburn (Blair Must Go Party) and Cherri Blairout-Gilham (the Pensioners’ Party)! Each party has the right to send some of its people to the count, and there in the hall they were all mingling as I watched the national race on TV upstairs.

Pretty soon, the scale of the victory became clear. This was not a win. It was a landslide. After about two hours, for a time I actually became worried. The moving line at the bottom of the TV screen was showing over a hundred Labour seats. The Tories had just six. I began to think I had done something unconstitutional. I had meant to defeat the Tories and do so handsomely; but what if we had wiped them out? Fortunately, a little later their tally began to mount, but the majority was clearly still going to be historic. People started to relax and have a drink. I remained completely sober. I had work to do. There would be speeches to make; messages to give; tones to get right; comportment to maintain that needed to be consistent with the magnitude of the win.

It was at this point that my emotions began to diverge from those of virtually everyone else around me. As they became more and more buoyed up with the vastness of the victory, I became more and more weighed down by the burden of responsibility that was about to fall on me. I know this sounds completely bizarre but I even became slightly irritated with it all. Couldn’t they see what a great big job it was? Did they really think a manifesto written essentially to capture a mood, and whose details were deliberately and necessarily limited, was going to be enough to govern a country?

Someone lurched up to me – the first of many that night – and said, ‘Isn’t it incredible? You are going to be a great prime minister, Tony, you really are,’ to which I’m afraid I said, ‘Oh, bugger off.’ How could he know? How could
I
know?

Around midnight we called David Hill, a very sane and solid individual who was the party press officer down at Millbank, and started to bark at him that the party staff were going over the top in their celebrations, that it looked complacent and they should all calm down. ‘We are about to win the biggest victory in our history and end eighteen consecutive years of Tory government,’ he said. ‘I think it’s going to be a little hard to tell them all to look sombre.’

I turned my attention to what I was going to say. There would be three speeches: at the count when confirmed as an MP; at the local party meeting in the Labour Club in Trimdon Village, just up the road from my constituency home; and at the Royal Festival Hall in London at around 5 or 6 a.m., where a big event had been planned for the party faithful and the media.

I discussed the content with Alastair Campbell, in charge of communications. He had been like a rock throughout the previous three years. In my experience there are two types of crazy people: those who are just crazy, and who are therefore dangerous; and those whose craziness lends them creativity, strength, ingenuity and verve. Alastair was of the latter sort. The problem with them is that they can be mercurial, difficult and on occasions erupt with damaging consequences. Above all, you must realise you can’t tame them; you can reason with them, but the thing that makes them different and brilliant is the same thing that means they don’t conform to normal, predictable modes of behaviour. And they are always on the edge. In the later stages, before he left at the end of 2003, Alastair had probably gone over the edge. Like all creative people, he can snap, but for most of the time – especially in those years of Opposition and the first part of government – he was indispensable, irreplaceable, almost an alter ego. Along with Gordon and Peter Mandelson, he carried out with near genius the political concepts of New Labour and was able to give them media expression in a media age. Funnily enough, on policy he was really much more Old Labour. In mood, that night, he reflected mine: he too felt flat, almost anticlimactic. We went over what I would say, and as I withdrew from the euphoria around me we focused on what each of the speeches needed to emphasise: first speech, family; second, party; third, country.

My only real emotion came when I spoke about my dad. As I gave my speech at the count, I saw him there with tears of pride in his eyes. I thought back on his life: a foster-child in Glasgow; his foster-father a rigger in Govan shipyard; his foster-mother a strange mixture of fanatical parent – she refused to give him back to his real mother – and militant socialist; in his youth, secretary of the Glasgow Young Communists; then to the war as a private, ending it as an acting major and Tory, when virtually everyone else made the opposite political journey.

He became an academic, a practising barrister and then an active Conservative. The one safe Tory seat in the north of England was Hexham and for the 1964 election he was a racing certainty to be the candidate. He even had his own slot on local TV. He was bright, charming and ambitious to an unnatural degree. He fitted the mould the Tories were looking for in a changing world: no one could argue class with him. He knew it, had lived it and had learned to escape it.

Then one night that year, after his usual round of meetings, social events and hard work, he suffered a serious stroke and was near to death. He survived, but for three painful years he had to learn to speak again. I remember how my mother helped him, day after day, word after word, agonising sentence after agonising sentence. I remember, too, how our income dropped overnight, some of his friends fell away, and the crushing recognition came that since his speech would never return to normal, his political career was over.

My dad had been formative in my politics. Not because he taught me a vast amount about politics in the sense of instruction in its business (and him being on the opposite side of the political fence to me had given rise to some fairly heated debate, though much less frequently than might have been the case), but as a child I used to listen to his discussions with friends and absorb some of the arguments, hear the passion in their voices, and I obtained a little understanding of politics’ intricacies.

I recall the very first time I met any politicians. Bizarrely, I think they were Michael Spicer, later a Tory MP, and even – but my memory may play me false – Patrick Jenkin, who went on to serve in Mrs Thatcher’s Cabinet. They came to dinner at our house in High Shincliffe in Durham, the reason, I dimly recall, because Michael – a young Tory prospect at the time – wanted to fight a hopeless seat to cut his teeth, and Dad had influence in the Durham seats.

But none of that defined the principal impact on my political development. What Dad taught me above all else, and did so utterly unconsciously, was why people like him became Tories. He had been poor. He was working class. He aspired to be middle class. He worked hard, made it on his merits, and wanted his children to do even better than him. He thought – as did many others of his generation – that the logical outcome of this striving, born of this attitude, was to be a Tory. Indeed, it was part of the package. You made it; you were a Tory: two sides of the same coin. It became my political ambition to break that connection, and replace it with a different currency. You are compassionate; you care about those less fortunate than yourself; you believe in society as well as the individual. You can be Labour. You can be successful and care; ambitious and compassionate; a meritocrat and a progressive. Moreover, these are not alien sentiments in uneasy coexistence. They are entirely compatible ways of making sure progress happens; and they answer the realistic, not utopian, claims of human nature.