Standing Down (25 page)
Authors: Rosa Prince
Despite his decision not to seek high ministerial office, Mr Doran was invited to become PPS to Ian McCartney, the then Employment Minister, a task he enjoyed greatly.
He says:
We spent the next two years, which is one of the genuine highlights of my life, making sure that we could bring in the minimum wage the way we wanted to.
The minimum wage was fascinating. We discovered that not all of our colleagues were 100 per cent in favour of it and we had a lot of struggle. Everything that we thought was important, we got through.
I stayed with Ian until he went into the Cabinet Office [in 1999]. I knew I wasn’t going to go into government and I wasn’t going to go grovelling to Tony to ask. There were far too many people coming in who had a prior claim. So I decided I wanted to move into something else. So I became chair of the Administration Committee.
Before Mr Doran took up the chairmanship of the Commons Administration Committee in 2005, however, he was forced to wrestle with two difficult moments.
Like many of his colleagues, Mr Doran was presented with a tough dilemma over the Labour government’s decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003. He voted against his Prime Minister:
It was painful. I’ve been very loyal to my government and I still think it was one of the biggest mistakes we made. The Middle East would have been a very different place if it hadn’t been for Iraq.
At the end of the day it was something I had to do. I wanted to make sure that my constituency understood. There were public meetings and all the rest of it. When it came to it I wanted to make sure that if I was going to vote against a Labour government, that my constituency was going to support me, and they did. I stuck by my principles.
Another low was the jump he was forced to make in 2005 to another seat, when yet more boundary changes meant his own was abolished.
The move means he has now represented Aberdeen North, Central and South; but at the time he was more focused on the difficult situation he was placed in, as he fought a colleague for the seat:
Again we fought pretty cleanly. We’re still good friends. It is a ruthless business. It’s the system.
Both of these experiences were extremely unpleasant. Neither of us on each occasion wanted to be there.
At the end of the day I won and I wasn’t particularly proud of it because on each occasion I’d fought against friends.
As chairman of the Administration Committee, Mr Doran has overseen a number of changes to the fabric of Parliament:
A lot of the things I did there I’m very proud of. One of the things I focused on was the small number of children who came here.
At the moment we’re building an education centre. This will be a dedicated special facility for children. When that’s opened we’ll be able to take over 100,000 kids a year.
The number of kids has rocketed since we introduced the subsidy [which allows children from far-flung places financial help to travel to visit Parliament]. That’s something I take a lot of pride in.
In 2010, Mr Doran was invited to chair the Speaker’s Advisory Committee on Art. As a former member of the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee he has long taken an interest in the Arts and earlier this year was awarded the Jane Attenborough Dance UK Industry Award at the Critics’ Circle National Dance Awards.
Although he was still enjoying life as an MP, by 2013 he and his wife decided it was time to move on:
Joan and I, we both discussed this at length. I think we both want to, while we’re able to, just live a little.
I had this fantasy when I was first elected: God, the theatres, the galleries, everything, it’s going to be wonderful. [But] I have less exposure to these sorts of things than I have at any other period of my life.
I don’t believe in retirement and neither will she, we’ll be doing other things. Not earning money, helping charities, that sort of thing.
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CV
Born and raised in Leith; attended University of Dundee; became a lawyer, working for trade unions and the Labour Party.
1984: Unsuccessfully fought European election seat of Scotland North East
1987: Elected MP for Aberdeen South
1988: Begins campaigning on behalf of victims of Piper Alpha disaster; becomes shadow Energy Minister for oil and gas
1992: Loses seat at general election
1997: Elected MP for Aberdeen Central; appointed PPS to Ian McCartney, Trade Minister
1999: Returns to back benches
2003: Rebels over Iraq War
2005: Elected MP for Aberdeen North; becomes chairman of Commons Administration Committee
2010: Becomes chairman of the Commons Advisory Committee on Works of Art
2013: Announces he will stand down at 2015 general election
Frank Doran is divorced and remarried Dame Joan Ruddock, former MP for Lewisham Deptford.
Joan Walley,
sixty-six, was Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent (1987–2015).
‘I don’t think the House of Commons is a friendly place; it’s a very alien place.’
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For me it’s always been: ‘How do you get things done?’ And you get things done by being part of a party that shares your values.
You want to be in a position where you help develop those policies and help put them into practice.
I ended up being selected [to become a Labour candidate] because I was a councillor in Lambeth at the time, and basically was removed from office for standing up for local services.
It was the height of the Thatcher government, and I was invited to stand in my home area of Stoke-on-Trent.
There was no induction, there was nothing to orientate you. You were just told to get a taxi and report at the members’ entrance. And when you got here you didn’t know quite what to do and where to go next.
The whole ethos of the place was public school and almost impenetrable. I don’t think it’s a friendly place, it’s a very alien place, I would say.
Having been chair of the Environmental Audit Committee these past five years has been very interesting, at a time of great need for everybody to get out of their silos.
It’s been a really hard-working committee. The work we’ve done has been important in charting where the gaps are and where the work has to be done. That for me has been the most rewarding thing.
That was the biggest disappointment of all, that we didn’t make it over the finishing line [at the 1992 general election].
There were a lot of very able people who were shadow ministers at the time who should have been in government, who were at the height of their career, and the election didn’t facilitate that.
Looking back on it, I think Neil Kinnock would have been absolutely superb [as Prime Minister].
There was an expectation that we could just about do it, and the fact that we didn’t, that was a bitter pill to swallow. You couldn’t really see the light at the end of the tunnel.
I’m standing down because I just feel that with five-year parliaments, nothing goes on forever.
I will be seventy-one at the next general election. Given that, now is the time for me to hang up my boots so that I’ve got some time to concentrate on things without being in two places at one and the same time.
I don’t know. I can’t see myself doing nothing. I think I’m going to have time for home, really.
I shall be rooting for the candidate who’s been selected, Ruth [Smeeth], and just really hoping that there will be a Labour government alongside her election to start to put right some of the huge inequalities that are now building up in the country.
To always put the constituency first. Because they’re the people you’re there to represent, they’re the people that matter most.
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the full story
Joan Walley never made a positive step towards becoming an MP, it was a ‘natural progression’, stemming from a desire, innate since childhood, to get things done.
Attending university during the ‘formative time’ of the late 1960s, she developed a growing interest in politics while studying social history and ‘the history of the working classes’.
After graduation she took up community and council work in south Wales, and it was here that she became a Labour Party member. ‘There wasn’t really any other party to join, in my eyes anyway,’ she says. ‘It was very much an extension of the beliefs I had. The Labour Party was the only party in town.’
In the late 1970s, Mrs Walley moved to London and was elected to serve on Lambeth Council, then one of the most left-wing in the country.
In 1985, the council was in the vanguard of a protest against the Thatcher government’s policy of capping local rates, and refused to set a budget for the following year. Things turned ugly when some councils, including Lambeth, racked up hundreds of thousands in interest payments, leading the government to make individual councillors liable for the shortfall.
This policy of ‘surcharging’ councillors meant Mrs Walley was personally sent a bill for thousands of pounds.
The money was ultimately paid from a fighting fund, and the national attention resulted in an offer from her local Labour Party back in Stoke-on-Trent.
Mrs Walley claims she was not particularly ambitious for the job, ‘it was just something that I wanted to do, really’, but was motivated by the desire to be in a position to help people.
Election night 1987 was exciting, although tempered by the failure of Labour to get into power:
That was quite a wonderful sense of achievement, working with everybody else to secure it, but then quickly balanced by the fact that we were an opposition party.
Winning in Stoke but actually not winning the Labour government, the prospect of all those years, although we didn’t know it at the time, of being in opposition.
Those years in opposition, they were long years. We weren’t in the era of five-year parliaments then. We didn’t know how long it was going to be, and you just saw the dismantling of so much [without] knowing how soon we could change things.
Although she knew quite a few people from Labour circles, Mrs Walley did not find settling into life in the Commons straightforward, not least because of the long working days and half a life spent away from her husband and two children:
It was a case of feeling your way in this place, which [had] much more of a public school aura than it does today. It’s a lot easier for women now.
It’s not easy having a life down here and a life [in the constituency], two places of work. You just work it out as you go along.
It’s a question of trying to understand how this place works but more importantly trying to relate what you do here to what you do for the area back home.
Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister [and] the whole environment was anti-areas that I came from, communities that I came from [and the] real people back in Stoke-on-Trent.
For Mrs Walley, the priority during the Thatcher years was to do her best to get into a position to influence decision-making, particularly how it related to her constituents.
Having initially struggled to fit in, she began to rather relish the late-night sittings and sense of closeness they fostered between colleagues.
Although she wasn’t a frequenter of the Commons bar scene – ‘I don’t think I particularly participated in that’ – she enjoyed the opportunity to chat to fellow MPs in the tearooms, as they debated the best way to get Labour into power.
Close to Neil Kinnock, the then leader, within a few years she was promoted to the front bench, as transport spokesman:
There was much more of a camaraderie, certainly among Labour MPs, because [of] the late-night sittings.
Everybody was based in small offices and you would spend more of your time over in the Commons or the tearoom and there was much more [of a] sense of people being together.
Because the House sat of an evening there would be many more meetings and functions that you would go to because you were here anyway, whereas of course that doesn’t take place now.
In those days we had late-night sittings virtually each and every night and we also had Friday sittings.
There were times when I’d be the only person on our side covering the front bench on environment or transport issues. So they were long, long weeks.
You get to know the ins and outs of the place, how it works, and really understand what the needs of the people you represent are.
You were looking ahead to the objective, which was to get a Labour government and get the policies that were needed.
Mrs Walley spent some of her happiest years in Parliament on the front bench, relishing the opportunity to be ‘constantly learning and to be constantly in a position of understanding what the issues are, what the changes are that are needed, to actually understand all of that’.
However, being a member of the front bench meant it was all the harder to bear when Labour was ultimately rejected by voters at the 1992 general election.
Along the way she lost what was probably her best chance of becoming a minister. By the time the next election came around, Mrs Walley was out of favour, and although she shared the joy of her colleagues at Tony Blair’s election, she knew she would not be serving in his government.
Mrs Walley is sad about the failure of both Mr Kinnock and his successor, John Smith, to become Prime Minister, saying both ‘cared’ and would have been a success at the job.
Recalling Mr Smith’s ‘shockingly’ sudden death in 1994, which she learned of on her way to a trade union conference, she says:
I got on the train and word came through that he’d sadly died.
Looking back, it’s difficult to think that he was so young. It was just so dreadful.
I [did the job of spokesman on the] environment for a tiny bit under Tony Blair, then he had the first reshuffle and I was moved.
I suppose at that stage, yes [I] could have been [a minister], but then by ’97 things had changed quite a bit. [It was] a new era in terms of the Labour Party. I think it was just really about trying to balance the need to win.
There was a new, not just leader, a new leadership team that was clearly delivering a great deal. That’s the nature of the game, the nature of how it is. You’re there just for a limited amount of time. I would have loved to have been [a minister] but I was never a Blair babe, put it that way. I think in retrospect it was something that probably wouldn’t have worked out any way.
Election night was a high point. ‘Oh, it was wonderful,’ she says. ‘There was a lovely big sunset, looking out over a part of my constituency called Golden Hill, a wonderful red sunset and a sense that all was now possible.’
Once the government was formed, the presence of John Prescott, whom she had supported for the leadership three years earlier, as Deputy Prime Minister, was a constant reassurance that, in her eyes, New Labour had not lost touch altogether with the party’s working-class roots:
I’m real Labour. I wouldn’t say old; real Labour. I was proud to support John Prescott. John Prescott represented a working-class area that was so familiar to me. John’s views very much chimed with my own.
I wouldn’t say [I was] disconnected, because John Prescott was Deputy Prime Minister and we had a Labour government. We had gone through the whole democratic process in terms of electing our leader, so you support that in every way possible. So that was what I did, bar a few votes that I just couldn’t go along with, notably on Iraq, and some of the privatisations.
The Labour government did so much that was exactly what was needed; could have done a lot more, but you can always do a lot more, and we had an awful lot to [do, following] the dereliction in terms of the policies over the Thatcher years and the problems they had created.
I think that basically whatever it was going to take to stay on board, I really wanted to do it.
Having an overall Labour government was more important than anything else, and you’ve got to have discipline, and you’ve got to be there in a position to do what you can to influence from the inside.
One of those moments when Mrs Walley could not go along with Tony Blair came in 2003, with the decision to go to war in Iraq. Despite intense pressure from the whips, she voted against the invasion:
I desperately didn’t want to be voting against the Labour government but there was no way I could bring myself to vote for it. Whatever the cost of that, it was just something that I couldn’t do.
It was clear cut that I had to vote against, but it was very difficult to actually vote against a Labour government I was part of.
Does she feel vindicated by ensuing events?
Yes, but it doesn’t help. I’m sure equally that Tony Blair thought it was the right thing to do. I just thought that he was wrong.
I think that it was a defining moment. And certainly there were a lot of people in the party [who] felt … it was a parting of the ways, and that [left] us very much depleted. We lost some very valuable party members who couldn’t go along with it and had to make their point.
In 2010, Mrs Walley was elected chairman of the Environmental Audit Select Committee, heralding an era that would prove to be her happiest in Parliament.
She says she was always concerned about green issues, and was pleased at the opportunity the committee provided her to scrutinise all aspects of government policy to ensure due regard to the environment:
You have got to get out of the silo mentality. Inside government, there isn’t, even now, the ability to look at policy from every different angle, from every different perspective, and to count the long-term cost of things.
We’re at a danger now that the whole mantra is ‘economy is all, is everything’ but it can’t be if you totally ignore the environmental impact of what’s going on.
You have to find a way of embedding that in policy decisions at very early stages. Failure to do that might be OK in the short term but in the long term it’s storing up problems.
For much of her time in Parliament, Mrs Walley has concentrated on helping her constituents. She says:
Doing the job that I love doing and being in a position to help the people in Stoke-on-Trent, in a way that I could, that was always the main thing and always has been.
[I feel] very privileged to be doing something that I really, really, really wanted to be doing and believed in.
There’s a difference between standing up in the chamber for things that you want to make happen and standing up in the chamber and just making a political point, and I think the former is what matters to me
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