A Journey (11 page)

The election in 1992 was John’s. We might have won had he been leader, rather than the Shadow Chancellor. But when I hinted to him in 1991 that he should go to Neil and ask him to step aside and said that myself, Gordon and others would back him up, John dismissed the idea. ‘I will be leader afterwards,’ he said. And that was that. The trouble was, partly I fear because John knew that afterwards he might be contesting the leadership, his proposed tax rises for those earning £30,000 and above were great for the party faithful but plainly problematic for the public. John was popular and respected, but this tax hike was, as the Tories cleverly exposed, a real ticking bomb underneath Labour’s campaign. Once we were beaten, somehow I felt that the next election would not be John’s.

In the run-up to the 1992 election I began a conversation with Gordon that was to have far-reaching consequences. I believed we had held back too much after the 1987 defeat, being too timid. It was true that we were now the undisputed leaders of the new generation. When Gordon had been John’s substitute, he had shone in taking on Nigel Lawson. We were getting a medium level of media interest, which was rising in regularity and usually pretty positive; we had definitely logged on with the elite class interested in politics. But it wasn’t yet our generation in charge. We were still on our way up; we weren’t in a position to dictate terms. In the core economic team for the 1992 election – John as Shadow Chancellor, Margaret as Shadow Industry Secretary, Gordon as Shadow Chief Secretary and me in Employment – we were the junior partners and I was the junior of the two of us. So though frustrated and anxious, I again held back.

Besides, I was still learning, thinking, trying to position myself on issues, beating out the basic elements of future political definition. Gordon and I would spend endless hours, days even, in political debate and discussion, iterating and reiterating, defining and refining, until eventually some sort of clarity appeared. The focus was not so much on the nitty-gritty of policy – or at least not always – but on setting the compass, getting the bearings and marshalling the arguments for the direction the party would or should take. We spent months trying to construct a framework for party reform. He had the idea of achieving mass membership by converting trade union levy-payers into full party members. I concentrated more on what would be the right way to broaden the party base, take power out of the hands of unrepresentative activists, and put the union influence within tight constraints.

I had also broached with Gordon the notion that should the defeat be as I thought, he would run for leader and if necessary challenge John. I liked John a great deal but I felt instinctively and very deeply that another defeat, especially one that indicated we never really came close, meant we had to go for radical change. John was a great politician, a thoroughly good man, but he wasn’t a radical reformer, neither in style nor in substance.

By 1992 I was almost forty. I had been in Opposition for a decade. The thought of another five years of merely incremental steps towards change in the party that was so obviously needed, filled me with dismay. If the steps were too incremental, we might fail again and I would be fifty before even getting sight of government; and what was the point of politics if not to win power, govern and put into practice the policies you believe in? There was, in addition, a strand of opinion crossing left and right which saw the party becoming increasingly fatalistic about our chances, fearing that the only answer was to change the voting system or, even worse, accept our fate as the perpetual Opposition.

I was convinced that the assumption that John would become leader following a defeat could and should be challenged. Gordon, to be fair, was non-committal. It would be a big ask, and John would feel it a betrayal. Plus Gordon was unmarried, and I told him, frankly, that I thought that was a problem. But I also thought the party would be ready to be excited and uplifted and that an injection of youth and energy would itself reap huge dividends. I saw myself as Shadow Chancellor in such a scenario. John would have been a perfect Foreign Secretary. And he was a big enough man to take it.

I thought it not wrong or disloyal to be prepared to do this. Others may disagree. I felt that the position of leader had to be taken with some elan, not necessarily at the ‘due’ moment, but seized almost, if you will. Buggins’ turn was an awful system of choosing the leader and actually at odds with every concept of what leadership should be about. Had John moved to replace Neil, it would have been bloody, but in my view he would have succeeded and history would have been very different. That he wouldn’t contemplate it told me what his leadership would be like: steady, serious and predictable. It wasn’t what the dire nature of our predicament demanded. Anyway, that’s how I felt, right or wrong.

When the results were coming through on the night of 9 April 1992, it looked as if a quirk of the constituency system might yield a hung Parliament, and for a brief while I thought my predictions of defeat were wrong; but as the night wore on, it became all too clear. I spoke to Gordon and Peter, just becoming the new MP for Hartlepool. I said, we have to go for it. Unsurprisingly, Peter was a trifle distracted. Gordon was again non-committal.

As the morning of another defeat dawned, the party was in despair. I wasn’t. I felt energised. What can we say? party HQ wailed. Plenty, I thought. The next morning there were bids from all the media outlets for interviews, and when no one wanted them, I took virtually the lot. I explained with the clarity of a man released from political and intellectual prison that the party had lost because we had failed to modernise sufficiently and we now had to do so, not by shades but by bursts of vivid colour. This time it had to be fundamental, clear and unmistakably geared to reuniting us with the people we sought to serve. I dodged the leadership issue easily enough – Neil hadn’t yet declared he was standing down – and planted my banner firmly on the terrain of radical change in the party’s organisation, programme and policies. Though I didn’t know it and it was not why I did it, the thought of me as leader stemmed from that morning. Years afterwards, party members recalled that it was the time they thought: Hmm, maybe he’s what we’re looking for.

I returned from the studios. I had told Gordon to come to Sedgefield with Nick Brown, who was an MP in nearby Newcastle. He had always been our campaign manager for the Shadow Cabinet elections, and was a kind of informal chief whip to me and Gordon (and indeed later took the role formally in government in 1997).

First, naturally, I pressed on Gordon the idea of him standing for leader. I rehearsed the arguments. He remained non-committal, however. Meanwhile, John had been phoning round just making sure of support. He phoned my home, Myrobella, in Trimdon Colliery in the heart of the constituency. I had offered to speak to John and explain why it should not be John who was leader, but I was nervous. It was a dilemma. If I indicated lack of support for John and Gordon didn’t stand, it would destroy my relationship with John as leader. On the other hand, as I picked up the phone in my office at Myrobella to take his call, I still thought I had a chance to persuade Gordon.

At first I hedged. John, who was nothing if not canny, picked up the hesitation. ‘I should speak to Gordon,’ I said.

‘I’ve spoken to him,’ John said. ‘He’s fully on board.’

At that point I dared hesitate no further but came on board too. Some months later John told me, innocently, that he and Gordon had come to an agreement well in advance of the election: John would be leader, with Gordon as Shadow Chancellor. Gordon would not stand. I knew in my bones it was a mistake.

There was still the matter of the deputy leader to be decided. This was an elected position but one usually held by a senior Shadow Cabinet member. Roy Hattersley, the then deputy (and Shadow Chancellor up to 1987), had been with Neil throughout the nine years of Neil’s leadership. They weren’t exactly bosom buddies, but it worked after a fashion. However, in the aftermath of defeat, he would plainly stand down too. In the course of the call with John, he asked me about the deputy leader role. It makes sense with me as leader, he said, to have one of the younger ones as deputy, either you or Gordon. Decide between you, he said. Clearly, he went on, the problem with Gordon would be two Scots. The alternative was Margaret Beckett, a highly capable woman and, all in all, a sound enough choice, despite being of the same generation as John.

After the call I went back into the sitting room to see Gordon and Nick. ‘John says you’re backing him,’ I said to Gordon.

‘It’s difficult to say otherwise,’ he said, reasonably enough, but I felt a little let down.

‘He wants to know if either of us should be deputy,’ I said. I then explained that though Gordon was senior to me, two Scots would be a problem, especially as it was precisely in the south of England that our support was thinnest. Nick said that there was a strong case for either of us, but that the crucial thing was to see who had most support in the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP). He agreed to take soundings.

Discussion took place over the next day or so. We met again. Nick said, ‘The pretty strong consensus in the PLP is that of the two of you, it should be Gordon.’

I knew this was not true. It couldn’t be. Not even the PLP at its daftest was that daft. The media was full of how Labour was blocked in its traditional heartlands of the North, Wales and Scotland, of how it was doomed if it couldn’t break out and win the middle class and the South. In those circumstances, to have a Scot as leader was a risk, although if there were an English deputy, it was a risk that could be taken; but to then add another Scot as deputy? An all-Scottish ticket? With our devolution commitment? It just wouldn’t wash. It was nuts.

So, in those two or three days, I learned two things: one was that Gordon had not seized the moment; the second was that he and Nick were working together and their first loyalty was to each other. From that moment, I think I detached a little bit from Gordon; just a fraction, imperceptible to the eye of the observer, unaccompanied by any expressions of distance, or even by any diminishing of affection. It was a detachment small in space, but definitive in consequence. The seed was sown of my future insistence that I should be leader, not him.

John duly became leader. Gordon took the Shadow Chancellor position. John asked me what I wanted. He was surprised at my choice, but I had thought about it long and hard: I chose to be Shadow Home Secretary. It was usually considered a graveyard position for Tory and Labour politicians alike. Tories could never be hard line enough. Sincere, decent (privately liberal) types would go to Tory Party Conference, try to ham it up, curdle the blood, etc., but they always got found out. The Labour problem was the opposite. Their audience expected something more liberal and yet the Labour Home Secretary or Shadow Home Secretary knew the watching public disliked all the liberal stuff. There’s one thing I learned in politics: those of extreme views, right or left, can always spot whether someone is a fellow true believer or not. Occasionally, when forced to pander – throw a bit of left-wing meat out (not on anything too important!) – I would give it my best; but you know something? They always spotted that my heart wasn’t in it. It’s something in the tone, the body language, which the true enthusiast has and the actor lacks.

Anyway, Shadow Home Secretary was not a job with many applicants. I had, however, come to the view that: a) Labour people, certainly our voters, were really anxious about law and order issues and were far more likely to be tough than soft; and b) intellectually, the polarisation of left/right views was simply and clearly wrong. The left blamed social conditions, the right blamed the individual; any halfway normal person could see – or so I thought – it was a combination of the two.

I felt personally very strongly about crime. For years I had thought it was a disgrace which people shouldn’t have to put up with and I hated the liberal middle-class attitudes towards it. Usually they weren’t the victims, but the poorer people – the very ones we said we represented – were. The hard-pressed public were similarly outraged by crime, and not just the high-end serious offences, murder and robbery and so on, but also low-level antisocial disorder and vandalism. They couldn’t be expected to put up with it while waiting for the good society to be created, to endure it patiently until someone decided to remove the hell from their street. Of course, it also stood to reason that the better educated young people were, especially young men in the inner city, the greater their chance of a job and the increased likelihood that they were going to turn out well behaved.

So: fighting crime was a personal cause, it completely fitted a new politics beyond old right and left, and since no Labour person had ever made anything of it (though there had been great reforming liberal Labour Home Secretaries like Chuter Ede and Roy Jenkins), the field was mine to play on. For once I was very confident of what I could do. And I was correct. It solidified my position in the party and the country. It achieved enormous traction. It showed leadership. I took a traditional Labour position, modernised it, made it popular and upended the Tories with it.

Ironically, in the light of what was to happen, Gordon also played an interesting role in helping me formulate what became my catchphrase.

We used to travel to the US from time to time, essentially just to get away and think. For some bizarre reason or other we would stay at the Carlyle Hotel in New York. The Carlyle is as far removed from New Labour as binge drinking is from Methodism. It is an exclusive hotel that had been used by the likes of Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart. Eartha Kitt would sing in the cafe and Woody Allen would turn up with his clarinet. At that time, people dressed for dinner, the mood was formal, the decor elegant, the ambience a little austere. Not me at all, but funnily enough I grew to like it. The management were discreet, staff were friendly and behind all the upper-class facade, it was well run.