A Journey (49 page)

And all this takes place against a background where crime is so much more prevalent than in the mid-twentieth century. People can go over the reasons for this endlessly, but it amounts to this: the system doesn’t fit the reality of modern living. It’s a horse in the age of the motor car. It’s a wonderful thing but it doesn’t take you far enough, fast enough.

I was preoccupied with antisocial behaviour, and was personally completely intolerant of it. I remember when our home was in Stavordale Road, near the Arsenal Tube station in Islington, and I had to go out to dinner. I walked down to the station. As I passed the end of our street, a bloke was urinating against a wall. I stopped. ‘What are you looking at?’ he said. I said, ‘You, you shouldn’t be doing it.’ He took out a large knife from his coat. I walked on.

I hated it. I hated the fact that he did it. I hated even more the fact that I didn’t stop him. I hated the choice I was made to make: stop him and risk ending your life because someone urinated in the street – hardly the stuff of martyrdom – or walk on.

Day in, day out, across our cities, towns, suburbs, villages and hamlets, such vignettes are played out. It’s the same in most European cities and in the US it can be worse. Absolutely rightly, people resent it powerfully. It offends their most cherished sensibilities. Out and about around the country, that was what people talked about; and I listened with a genuine desire to act.

I felt we had gone really badly wrong as a society and had to correct it. I didn’t feel it as some fragment of nostalgia; I felt it was a classic challenge of the modern world and our system had to be modernised to meet it. I wrote several personal, private notes about reform in the criminal justice system. Jack Straw got it. I’m afraid Derry didn’t. He half pretended he did to humour me, but he took the
de
haut en bas
view that it was all populist gimmickry, as did most lawyers, judges and assorted bigwigs.

We had an additional problem, too, arising out of the fact of being a Labour government. The
Mail
had turned pretty poisonous. Worst of all, for those people like its editor Paul Dacre who are essentially tribal Tories, the gravitational pull of opposition meant that even if they agreed with what was being said, they disagreed with it because of who was saying it.

A whole section of the right went into a completely nonsensical civil liberties mode, at the same time as complaining of how we had to be tougher on crime. I don’t mean the whole civil liberties critique was nonsense – I didn’t concur with it, but I respected it – I mean right-wing law and order types who suddenly discovered that preserving the liberty of suspects was what they had really been about all along.

It was the beginning of the unholy coalition that after Iraq proved such a force, a sort of
Daily Mail
/
Guardian
alliance, whose only real point of unity was dislike of me, but who found in the reforms plenty to dislike if they were minded to; and they were. So, over time, the coalition of support New Labour had built got weakened by a coalition of opposition that on the one side was born of conviction and on the other of expedience. But its existence meant getting heard was a challenge.

As I set about making my case for reform of criminal justice, I did so with what can only be described as mixed success.

First, I decided to make the philosophical case about the nature of our society, how it had changed, how we could retrieve the sense of values lost if we were prepared to think afresh. Unfortunately, I decided to visit this sociological essay upon the good matrons of the Women’s Institute Triennial Gathering at Wembley.

Quite what I was thinking of when I embarked on such a rash and ill-starred venture, I don’t know. I can only think the birth of Leo might have had something to do with it.

One reason why I had been a tad distracted at the time of the ‘forces of conservatism’ speech, and didn’t calibrate and recalibrate it in my normal fashion, was because Cherie had just shocked me profoundly by telling me she was pregnant.

The announcement some weeks later had been greeted with the usual run of a) astonishment – ‘You mean the prime minister has sex? And with his wife?’; b) cynicism – ‘Alastair Campbell commanded it as part of a diversionary tactic’; and from our children, c) mild disgust.

The birth itself was bizarre. There I was in a corridor with my detectives, listening and waiting as Cherie did a bit of preliminary shrieking and groaning, then going in and staying with her as he was born. The midwives were wonderful – just really sensible, down-to-earth, no-nonsense people. Cherie was unbelievable. There are times with that woman when I am in awe. She kept working until the last minute. Gave birth on time and to order. Got out that night. And she was forty-five. It was pretty impressive.

It was a kind of global event. The next day I wandered out of Downing Street to say a few words as a proud dad, etc. I made the mistake of holding a mug of tea which had a picture of the other three kids on it, which was considered very cheesy, and I suppose it was. But for once I really did feel proud.

I then went back in for the official photo of Leo, having decided we would ask one photographer to do it and sell the pictures, giving the proceeds to charity. We asked Paul McCartney’s daughter, Mary, to do it. She was great, and the photos were superb. This was a minor miracle since the other kids – teenagers by then – behaved sensationally badly throughout the shoot and I could tell Mary thought they should have been given ASBOs.

I then had to do the proper modern dad thing and take paternity leave. It was bliss. Not because I adored looking after Leo (I’m afraid looking after babies at the eating, sleeping and other thing stage has never been my idea of fun, though I always did it). But I had two weeks to relax, miss PMQs and think about my speech to the Women’s Institute, whom I had been told were a generally delightful and well-disposed group of people and before whom I had decided to drop my pearls of wisdom.

So on the morning of 7 June, just before PMQs (what was I thinking of?), I beetled along to Wembley. I remember reading the speech through in a little anteroom and having a vague premonition that maybe it might have been a little more appropriate as a lecture to a bunch of professors. Afterwards, and though I say it myself, the thing that was most annoying was it was actually a good speech – thoughtful, well argued, and even if neither of those things, worthy of comment or critique.

I set out my reason why the absence of good manners among so many people was not a trivial thing but something that masked a decline in proper conduct that then expressed itself in far more serious ways. I talked about parents who sided with their children rather than the teacher who disciplined them; about how the essential courtesies are so often disregarded, and the culture to which this gives rise. I explained how we had to try to reverse this, not by pretending the clock could be switched back, but by recognising the world had changed and required a different system for enforcing good conduct in the absence of the pressure of tradition and family.

I thought the Women’s Institute might see the sense of all that, and strangely, had there been fewer of them and had they been prepared to listen, they probably would have.

Instead, as I proceeded on to the platform and looked out at 10,000 of them and started my speech, I had an uncomfortable feeling. I am acutely audience-sensitive – you have got to be in my profession – and somehow I knew this wasn’t quite ringing the bell.

About ten minutes in, when I was starting to plough on and getting more and more uneasy, a whole lot of shouting and slow handclapping suddenly started up. The audience were revolting. To be frank, there’s not a lot you can do in a situation like that. You more or less freeze.

I looked across at the Women’s Institute leadership on the platform. They were not encouraging. Eventually they intervened in a slightly ‘We’re sorry you’re having to listen to this but can you please – and sorry to be a nuisance about this – let him drone on a little longer’ sort of a way.

That quietened the masses somewhat, but only after a bit of grumbling and barking, and it was fairly clear I was on sufferance that might at any moment be revoked. The fact that the platform was showing the sort of leadership of your average French Revolutionary Committee in the presence of Madame Defarge didn’t help. I resolved to cut my losses, make some trivial extempore remarks and get the hell out of there. Which I duly did. To be fair, the leadership recovered a little to thank me for my presence and generally did a bit of pro forma buttering up. I smiled wanly and appeared to take it all in good humour, despite my largely unkind thoughts towards them all.

As I got into the back of the car to take me to Parliament and PMQs (and what a mirthless laugh the prospect of facing William Hague after that experience gave rise to), I shook my head. ‘What a disaster,’ I said to Anji.

The great thing about Anji was her indestructible and occasionally incredible optimism. She perked up when others perked down. She saw the silver lining long before the cloud. She was a positive life force, bashing down whole fields of negativity, basking the environs around her with beams of light, joy and hope amid the darkness.

She did not fail on this occasion. ‘Apart from the interruption I thought it went rather well,’ she said.

‘Keep it plausible, darling,’ I replied.

Later that evening, over a drink, after a day of bulletins of humiliation and exuberant delight among my foes, and under Cherie’s influence, I got the giggles about the whole thing. After all, as she said, it had been a speech about the decline of good manners.

The second happening around the decision to make the case for reform of criminal justice didn’t fare much better, though its consequences were more far-reaching and ultimately satisfactory.

As part of the discussions with senior police officials about crime and disorder, I had been debating with them how to short-cut the normal and lengthy processes for establishing guilt in respect of more minor criminal offences.

Here was the problem. When I sat down with police who worked the beat, as I did fairly regularly, one thing recurred time and again. I used to ask: When someone is found drunk and disorderly, say, or creates a disturbance or assaults another but the assault is not severe enough to result in any very serious sentence, what do you do? And more often than not, the reply came back: Nothing. It’s not worth it.

‘Let me tell you what happens in the real world,’ I remember one policeman in Kent telling me, and he recounted how, for even a minor charge, there were reams of paperwork, a barrage of hearings and meetings and consultations with prosecutors and witnesses and how, most galling of all, the offenders who were habitual and knew the system, knew that it could be gamed. So they acted more or less with impunity.

That, along with other similar conversations, convinced me that, whatever the theory, obliging a full court process for minor offences meant in practice they didn’t get prosecuted. I had become a complete adherent of the zero-tolerance analysis – if you let people get away with the small offences, the big ones follow. You create a culture of ‘anything goes’, of disrespect; of tolerating the intolerable. And though all these offences could be called minor, the adjective was relative. I never even tussled with the bloke urinating in my street, but I never forgot the incident.

So if the reality, whatever the textbook says, is that the minor offences go unpunished, the whole system is in disrepute. It was an argument I was to have many times over the years. I didn’t win it, certainly not in the way the argument was won about choice in health, or academies in schooling, or tuition fees for universities. But sometime or other, a government will have to relearn the lesson. Banging on about law and order while accepting the ‘givens’ of the existing legal system is like riding on Dr Dolittle’s pushmi-pullyu and wondering why you’re not getting anywhere.

After some debate, we alighted on the idea of giving the police the power to administer on-the-spot fines, ‘fixed penalty notices’ as they came to be known. We had a fierce battle over it in the relevant Cabinet Committee. Even the Home Office wanted to scale back. The police were up for it and I was convinced it would give them an additional instrument of law enforcement. Today, hundreds of thousands of them are given and they are accepted as part of the system, though in my view they could still be used more broadly, and the amount of the fine should be increased radically. But they are there, to be built on.

I decided to announce this at a venue even more weird and inappropriate for the subject matter than the WI.

My Oxford friend Pete Thomson had always sung the praises, rightly, of the inestimable Hans Küng, a Catholic priest turned professor at the University of Tübingen in Germany. Hans was a distinguished scholar and author who had fallen out with the Vatican over his views on papal infallibility, and was considered a radical. He had also written books such as
On Being a Christian
which were great works, reaching out to non-Catholics. He was years ahead of his time in the interfaith field, too. I fell out with him over Iraq, as I did with many people, but he was always courteous and generous.

At Pete’s prompting, Hans invited me to give a lecture at Tübingen. It is a beautiful ancient city, one of the few that escaped Allied bombardment. John Burton had once played there with his folk group. There is no plaque, though I should imagine there were a few records broken in the local taverns.