Speaking for Myself (15 page)

During Tony’s Beaconsfield campaign, I had got to know the regional secretary of the Labour Party quite well. He had seen for himself that I was at home canvassing and generally holding forth, and one day in the early spring of 1983 he suggested I drop in and see him. He had some news, he said, that I might be interested in.

“There may be a seat going,” he said when I arrived. “They’re looking for a woman candidate, so I was wondering if you’d be interested.” I never found out why they wanted a woman particularly. It was a safe Tory seat, so perhaps they thought they needed to do something different to generate publicity. “Thanet,” he continued, naming the district. It rang a vague bell. Thanet, I hazily recalled, was near Southend, and I knew from the courts that Southend wasn’t that far from Hackney.

“Well, why not?” I said. “After all, it’s only round the corner.” He gave me a slightly puzzled look.

The more the regional secretary told me, the more I liked the sound of it. The sitting MP was a chap called Billy Rees-Davies, QC, a notorious old criminal lawyer who’d got silk, it was thought, solely because he was an MP. He had only one arm and used to claim that he’d lost the other during enemy action, making himself out to be some sort of war hero, though some said that the circumstances were more dubious.

Rees-Davies was a well-known rogue, one of those barristers who are more famous for the anecdotes about them than anything else. He was a character with a capital
C,
so I thought,
Well, at least you can have a bit of fun with an opponent like that
.

As I got into my car to go home, I had a thought. “I suppose I had better go to some ward meetings and that kind of thing,” I said to the regional secretary.

“Oh, no,” he said. “Don’t bother with any of that. Just go for the final selection. We’ll get you a nomination, and you can take it from there.”

Great!

It was only the night before the selection meeting, when I looked up my route on the map, that it dawned on me what a terrible mistake I had made.

Thanet was nowhere near Southend, except possibly as the seagull flies. It was the other side of the Thames, at the far end of Kent — more than a hundred miles away. (This was before the M2 was opened.) During the long drive down, crawling through southeast London, I prayed that I wouldn’t be selected.

Fat chance. The constituency party consisted of about three men and a dog. I was the only woman, and the moment I went in, I could tell by their smiles that they really did want a woman candidate and they were going to select me. Sure enough, they did.

I drove back feeling very odd. Marc and Bina had just had their first baby, so I met Tony at the hospital.

“Guess what?” I said. “I’ve become a candidate.”

On one level it was quite a coup. Barristers were not flavor of the month in the Labour Party. At least I was a working-class barrister, which is slightly better than a public-school barrister, and for once being a woman had worked in my favor.

Tony smiled, a bit wanly I thought. He obviously had mixed feelings. Yes, I had a seat to fight — we’d had so many setbacks that we didn’t actually think it would happen — but it wasn’t that lucky because it was perfectly obvious that Billy Rees-Davies would get straight back in.

I’d rather been looking forward to sparring with him — it was the one bright spot on the horizon — but in the end even that was denied me. The former Thanet West and Thanet East constituencies were changed to north and south to reflect the current demographic. The Tories took full advantage of that to chuck out Billy Rees-Davies, who even they knew had been a hopeless incompetent. My new opponent was named Roger Gale. To take on someone of his background — a former pirate radio DJ and regional television presenter — could have been amusing, but it wasn’t.

Thanet’s local organization made Beaconsfield seem a powerhouse in comparison. It had no resources and very few members. As a constituency, it was a strange mixture. The main center of population was Margate, and a lot of it was seaside land, full of old people who’d retired there, most of whom were too proud to be Labour. It was a sign of respectability to put a blue Tory sticker in the window.

Even my agent and the councillors were in their sixties and seventies. The few young people around were basically Trots who’d done their usual infiltrating — not that Thanet was exactly a prime target for the radical left.

The local Labour Party was not without ambition, however, and when my dad said he could probably get Tony Benn, the standard bearer of the old left of the Labour Party and a former cabinet minister, to come up and speak, the members were delighted. Of course my dad came along, too. The result was a very strange meeting. I was definitely the most conservative of the three.

For my little speech of introduction, I raised a few smiles when I said how proud I was to be on the platform with these two Tonys, who had been such a great influence on me and the Labour Party. “I give you Tony Booth and Tony Benn!”

The third Tony — my Tony — was there as well, though very much behind the scenes. We had offered to drive Tony Benn down in our car, and on the way back he had really opened up. The three of us had talked nonstop, both politics and, more surprisingly, religion — about liberation theology and the influence of Christianity on socialism. We ended up at his house in Notting Hill still talking, where we met his wife, Caroline, a lovely woman. We all got on very well, and I had the feeling that Tony Benn thought my Tony was an okay guy, although politically, of course, they were on different sides of the debate.

The Thanet Labour Party was delighted with the meeting. It got more publicity than it had had in years, probably ever. Whether it won us any votes is less certain. There was a council election at the same time, however, so it was important.

My husband was supportive right from the beginning. On our way back from France the previous Easter, before the election had even been announced, we had stopped in Margate to have lunch with my agent to talk about the forthcoming campaign. My feelings were a mixture of excitement and dread. The Conservatives were on a high, while the Labour Party was tearing itself apart.

After lunch, it was time for business.

“Tony,” he said, “Cherie and I need to talk things over, so perhaps you wouldn’t mind helping my wife with the washing up?” Tony ambled off to the kitchen.

My agent’s wife was nice enough, but very much the supportive spouse. The conversation during lunch had drifted here and there — the pleasures of the seaside and her belief that seagulls are vermin. While they were washing up, Tony later reported, she said, “So tell me, Tony, are you interested in politics, or are you just doing this for Cherie’s sake?”

For him, this was the nadir.

Chapter 11

Sedgefield

T
ony’s thirtieth birthday was on May 6, 1983, a Friday, and I’d decided to organize a surprise party. Then Margaret Thatcher called the election, so I had to start campaigning more or less immediately. I wasn’t about to let her spoil the celebrations, however.

I arranged for Richard Field, our old friend from Crown Office Row, to keep the birthday boy busy until about eight o’clock. Maggie and I had spent the whole day cooking, and I’d asked everyone to come at seven-thirty.

Time passed. Eight o’clock came and went. Eight-thirty. Just before nine the pair of them staggered in, having passed a pleasant few hours at El Vino’s. I was furious. It wasn’t Tony’s fault, of course. The man I had relied on to bring him home had himself had one drink too many. When everyone had gone, I apologized to my husband for being less than gracious when they finally showed up.

He had stayed drinking, he said, because he was really depressed.

“The thing is,” he said, “I don’t really want to be a barrister anymore. I just want to be an MP. And look at me: a general election looming and no seat.”

“You’ve done everything you could —”

“It wasn’t enough. At least you’ve got Thanet.”

I laughed.

“There’s apparently one seat left in Durham,” he said. “I haven’t got a hope in hell, of course. But I’ve nothing to lose, so I may as well go up there anyway.”

So that’s what he did.

Tony drove up the next day and stayed with friends of his dad’s in Shincliffe. For some reason the constituency of Sedgefield had been abolished in 1974, and now they had decided to re-create it, hence the lack of candidates.

As a first step in the selection process, Tony needed a nomination from one of the local party wards. He telephoned John Burton, secretary of the Trimdon Village branch, a few miles to the north of Sedgefield itself, where they had yet to nominate a candidate.

“As it happens, we’re having a meeting of the local lads on Wednesday,” John told him. “We won all the seats on the council, and we’ll be having a bit of a drink to celebrate.”

Tony rang me every evening at my agent’s house in Margate to tell me how he was getting on. The semi-enthusiasm he had set off with, however, was dissipating rapidly. Although he liked the sound of John’s voice, he said, he wasn’t convinced it would get him anywhere. It meant hanging around for another two days, and he felt bad about not helping me campaign in Thanet East. He also confessed that he might even be missing me.

“You can’t give up now,” I told him. “What’s two days in the greater scheme of things? From the sound of it, it’s exactly the kind of seat you’re looking for. And if it’s right for you, there’s a good chance you’ll be right for them.”

When Tony arrived at John’s house, the lads were watching soccer. So the beers were handed round, and at the end of regulation it was still a draw. Then it went to extra time, then into penalties. Basically they were sitting round the television for two and a half hours without a word of politics being spoken.

When they finally got to talking about the election, Tony told them what a relief it was to find himself among normal people. In London, he said, Labour Party meetings were erupting in violence, plate-glass windows were being smashed, and people were being thrown off balconies. (That, at least, is John’s memory of the evening.)

“And now here I am sitting with you lot, watching football, which seems a great deal better than all that infighting.”

Indeed it was. Even though it was very late, Tony called me as soon as he got back to his dad’s friends’ house.

“I’ve got it!” he said. His voice sounded completely different. I could hardly keep my eyes open, but I listened to him talking about these “normal” people and what a lovely bunch they were. He had told them he thought Britain should remain part of the European Community, which flew in the face of Labour Party policy. He’d also made clear that he did not agree with the Labour Party’s campaign for unilateral disarmament. Even so, they had agreed to support him.

He spent the next few days meeting everyone who would have a vote at the selection meeting, from little old ladies to union people. It wasn’t enough. The left had organized against him, and he’d failed to make it onto the final list. He was devastated, and John was furious.

But John, it turned out, had one more card up his sleeve. The following night the local party’s General Management Committee met. As the selection list was about to be closed, he stood up. “I would like Tony Blair’s name added to the short list,” he said. “I’m not going to say anything about Tony Blair. I just want to tell you what the leader of our party thinks about Tony Blair,” and he read out the letter that Michael Foot had sent Tony after Beaconsfield.

A vote was taken, and Tony got through 42 to 41.

As time was so short, the selection meeting itself was the following night, and Tony won easily, by 73 votes to the runner-up’s 46.

The area was very run-down. Coal mining was in decline, and there were fewer and fewer pits. There were some small-scale factories, but the main employer was the local council. John Burton said that people knew something had to change.

When Tony called me that night, he was ecstatic but also rather terrified.

“Knowing my luck,” he said, “I’ll be the person to lose what is technically an unlosable seat.” (Tony has always had the tendency to be pessimistic, while I am incurably optimistic.)

Tony moved into John and Lily Burton’s house, sleeping in their daughter Caroline’s room. (She was away at college.) When I joined him on the weekends, we took the two single mattresses off the beds and pushed them together on the floor. Lily laughed. It did her heart good, she said, to see two people so in love.

With John’s stalwart help, Tony ran a brilliant campaign. The local organization was minimal, and once again the family came to the rescue. Tony’s brother, Bill, and his new wife, Katy, came over, as did Lyndsey and my auntie Audrey, all knocking on doors and doing the tedious but crucial stuff of grassroots canvassing and getting the vote out. And, of course, my father and Pat Phoenix were a main attraction.

Everything was brought into play, even my voice. John ran a folk group called Skerne, named after the local river. Because of my folksinging background, I knew all the words to their songs and, with the rest of the audience, would join in. Although John and those close to him knew that Tony wasn’t just a posh barrister drafted to run for the seat by the London party bigwigs, it was important to show the constituency as quickly as possible that this wasn’t the case.

The day before the election, I sent Tony a card: “From the candidate in Thanet to the candidate in Sedgefield, in the sure knowledge that one of us will be an MP tomorrow.”

June 9, 1983, was one of those perfect summer days that politicians pray for. Sunshine brings with it a general air of optimism and not having to pester or ferry people down to the polling booths in the cold or rain. Lyndsey was there to support me at the count, and Bill and Katy sent me a bunch of red roses for luck. At Sedgefield, Tony had his dad and stepmother. It will always be a lasting regret that I couldn’t be there with him, but Leo and Olwen could not have been prouder.

My results came in fairly early. I didn’t do bad. Basically, Labour was decimated in the southeast, but I got 12 percent of the votes, one of the few Labour candidates to do that well that year. Lyndsey and I drove back to London, listening to the other results on the car radio, trying to work out when Sedgefield would come in. When we arrived back home, I rang up Labour Party headquarters and asked them to call me when the Sedgefield results came in.