Authors: Rosa Prince
Standing Down (21 page)
Nick Raynsford,
seventy, was Labour MP for Fulham (1986–87), Greenwich (1992–97) and Greenwich & Woolwich (1997–2015).
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I got selected as a candidate and then settled in for a two-year slog before the general election, and within a month the Tory MP for the area died unexpectedly. I was suddenly thrown into a very high profile by-election.
I was lucky enough to do well, caught the mood at the time quite successfully I think and secured a 3,500 majority. A year later I lost by the same margin in the general election.
The tradition in those days was you took your seat on the Tuesday after the by-election. I took mine on the Monday, and the reason was there was a vote on to legitimise Sunday trading, which was highly divisive, and actually the government was defeated.
So it was said to me, not only did you win a by-election, but you’ve come here and a government with over 100, which the Thatcher government had, was defeated on your first day.
Seeing the Olympics in Greenwich – not just in Greenwich Park but Woolwich, hugely important for the regeneration of Woolwich for it to be a big part, and of course the O2 [Millennium Dome].
It was a bit of a body blow [losing his seat in 1987]. It’s the only job in the world where you discover you’re redundant three hours after the last day of employment. Literally there is no notice. You’re out on your ear.
I’ve passed my seventieth birthday. I didn’t want to carry on with less vigour and energy than I think you need to do the job. I’m not convinced by those colleagues who carry on and want to die in harness. It’s a hard job, you have to have a lot of energy, a lot of commitment.
No, I won’t feel a terrible sense of loss. I absolutely feel now it was the right decision to take, to stand down.
I’ll carry on with various housing projects that I’m involved with and have a bit more time for myself and a bit more time for my wife, who is MP for Plymouth North. I’ll probably write something too.
This is an extraordinary privilege and a huge opportunity that you can use to very good effect. There are lots of things that can be achieved. The great secret is to identify, the old adage, the art of the possible.
The constituency is the bedrock. The great lesson is, it’s so varied and things change so unpredictably that you should never give up, never despair, because even when things look very glum and bleak, situations can change very, very rapidly. I think that’s an important lesson for life – never give up.
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the full story
Nick Raynsford had a tough start in life. His father was killed in the Second World War before he was born and his mother died in a car crash when he was eleven. Raised by grandparents who were Conservative in outlook, it was at university that he found himself drawn to the Labour Party.
He went on to run a housing charity and in the mid-1970s became involved in a campaign to introduce what would become the 1977 Homeless Person’s Act. The experience inspired him to consider a career in politics.
In 1986, a vacancy came up in Fulham, the London borough he was now living in, and he threw his hat into the ring. He had expected to have a couple of years to establish himself, but within weeks the sitting Conservative MP died suddenly. Mr Raynsford was elected in the ensuing by-election.
He says:
I certainly didn’t start my adult life thinking I was going to be an MP. It was much more a product of circumstances.
It was an extremely exciting three months, the first three months of 1986. I enjoyed it enormously, the excitement of the by-election but also the ability to articulate some of the deeply held beliefs I had about what was needed at a time when politics was much more divided than it is today.
As polling day approached, Mr Raynsford found himself subject to ‘huge attention’, and he became increasingly confident of victory:
I think we knew by the end of the campaign. The opinion polls were pretty consistent and we’d got a very strong lead. But nonetheless, I’d never done this before, so there was an element of nervousness about it. You are at times desperately nervous about not letting the side down and making a mistake.
Mr Raynsford didn’t let the side down, winning with a majority of more than 3,000. Despite his familiarity with Parliament from his campaigning days, he found his arrival at the Commons ‘quite a culture shock’, but ‘was very struck by how friendly people of all parties [were]’:
There were a few grumpy ones but the vast majority were very friendly, very helpful.
I remember taking a seat very early on for a debate and I asked whereabouts was it reasonable to sit and was told, ‘Sit where you like, there are no reserved seats.’
So I found somewhere three rows back in the middle, and felt that was suitably anonymous. I was listening to the debate and then Enoch Powell [the controversial anti-immigration MP] walked in.
He’d by that stage left the Conservatives and was with the Unionists, so he was sitting on the opposition side and he came up the gangway where I was, looked at me with this absolute look of disgust as if to say ‘what has the cat brought in?’ and then swept past me and went to sit down further along the bench.
At the next opportunity when we were both in the Lobby I went up to him and said: ‘Mr Powell, I’m very sorry if I offended you by taking your normal seat.’ He looked at me and he said: ‘Young man, there are no reserved seats in the House.’ Of course, constitutionally he was right, but I had been sitting in the place he normally would be sitting.
The famously ‘spartan’ working conditions in the Commons led to some embarrassing moments:
I had been working in the voluntary sector, which isn’t particularly flash, and had been used to working in pretty spartan conditions, but here it was ridiculous.
[It] took two weeks or so before I got the office, during which time there had been a very high-profile case involving a kidnapping [of journalist John McCarthy] in the Middle East.
His girlfriend, Jill Morel, she came and saw me as I was her MP. He’d just been kidnapped and it was a case of trying to contact the Foreign Office to get some help, and we were doing all this literally from seats in the corridors because I hadn’t got an office to work from. This just struck me as crazy.
Mr Raynsford ‘fell into a classic trap of the inexperienced’ by acting on advice to join the committee scrutinising the bill to introduce the Channel Tunnel.
While he found the project fascinating, ‘my life was completely taken over within a fortnight’ as the complexity of the bill tied him up in committee hearings for the rest of the parliament.
It was a ‘great learning curve’ and he learned some valuable lessons about how to deal with complicated legislation on major rail projects – which would prove helpful when, towards the end of his career, he battled to bring Crossrail to his Woolwich constituency.
As the general election grew nearer, Mr Raynsford admits he was ‘worried’ about the small size of his majority, but thought he was in with a shot at hanging on in Fulham. He says: ‘I hoped the momentum of a very high-profile by-election and what had seemed like a successful period of a year, during which I’d done an awful lot of casework … would tide me through. It didn’t.’
Mr Raynsford’s pain at losing his seat was shared with the nation thanks to a film crew that had selected him, as a high-profile figure from the by-election, to star in a fly-on-the-wall programme on election night. The cameras captured his family’s response to the bad news too.
He says:
My middle daughter came downstairs and she didn’t know the outcome, she’d gone to bed. Poor Laura came down and said: ‘Did you win, Daddy?’ And of course I had to say no.
The one conclusion I was able to draw from that was, I can’t have been so incompetent in the course of one year that I could actually turn a 3,500 majority into a 3,500 majority the other way.
So I recognised that there were wider forces at work. In the by-election people had been protesting.
Mr Raynsford’s year in Parliament had given him enough of a taste of the life of an MP for him to know he wanted to look around for another seat. With the support of his family, his quest took him south of the river to Greenwich, which Labour had lost to the SDP in a high-profile by-election to rival his own in 1986.
He says:
After losing in ’87 I reflected on it. I’d been here enough time to know that I really did want to do it. I was very lucky, I had connections in Greenwich, they were looking for a new Labour candidate and I seemed to fit the bill.
Mr Raynsford took the view, having become ‘very, very hard left’ in the 1980s, that Labour needed to reassure people, both in Greenwich and nationally, that it was safe to vote for the party again.
By 1992, Greenwich was a three-way marginal. On election night, Mr Raynsford was ‘a little bit apprehensive’ but was returned with a majority of 1,300.
Although victory was ‘very good news’, Labour had not done enough nationally to form a government.
When he got back to Parliament, he was struck by the ‘gloom’ among his colleagues:
The extraordinary thing when I arrived here in April 1992 [was] just how deeply depressed the Labour Party was. The stuffing was completely knocked out.
I remember a whole series of articles appearing in the press saying: ‘Is this the end, is this now a permanent Conservative regime?’ That was pretty depressing.
The malaise was halted with the election of John Smith as Labour leader, a man who shared Mr Raynsford’s vision about the need to modernise the party:
The selection of John Smith was so important. It was the same message I’d been trying to convey, both in Fulham when I’d been fighting that by-election and in Greenwich: that the Labour Party was essentially, fundamentally about social justice and the kind of values John Smith epitomised, probity and decency and fair play and looking after people who were disadvantaged. That had a real resonance.
Once he was elected I was pretty confident we were going to be on the way back, but Black Wednesday of course accelerated the process, and then his death further accelerated the process because it led to Tony Blair. I think we would have won anyway, myself.
As Labour began the process of making themselves electable, Mr Raynsford began to think about advancement:
I wasn’t desperate to get promotion but I was conscious I’d got something reasonable to offer. I had expertise in a particular area and got very much engaged in debates on housing, on regeneration, on relevant social policy issues and was clearly making an impact, so when I was asked a year later to become one of the front-bench team it wasn’t a surprise.
Mr Raynsford enjoyed being on the shadow front bench, relishing the prospect of shaping the debate in his field of construction. And when New Labour swept to power in the landslide of 1997, he was hopeful of being made a minister:
First was the extraordinary period of not knowing whether I was or not. I’d been doing the shadow housing and construction and London jobs and so assumed I’d be given the job. But when the department was being set up it was changed. John Prescott [then the Deputy Prime Minister] became the secretary of state, and transport became part of the department’s brief as well as all the things I’d been involved in.
There was suddenly a bit of a glut of other people going in and I got this awful sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that I wasn’t going to get a job.
It was only on day four, long time after the election, that I got a call saying, ‘Why aren’t you in the department?’
I said, ‘What department?’
And they said, ‘Well, Environment, Transport and the Regions.’
I said, ‘But I haven’t been appointed.’
‘Oh,’ they said, ‘well, we’ll just check that.’
Then I got this incredibly embarrassed phone call back from Prescott’s private secretary saying, ‘You should have had a call, would you mind ringing Downing Street?’
I said, ‘Do I have to ring them to ask the boss if he’s going to give me a job?’
‘No,’ they said, ‘it’s alright; we’ll get him to ring you.’
There had obviously been a bit of a mix-up. I was just really pleased I had got a job. Then when it was a question of sharing out particular responsibilities in the department, the ones I was given were natural for me, other than that I didn’t get housing, which was the thing I probably knew best of all.
I got construction and London and they were both big subjects, so I was a bit disappointed but I wasn’t unduly disappointed.
Mr Raynsford had worked hard in opposition to build bridges with the ‘antediluvian’ construction industry in order to tackle its ‘appalling’ safety records, which bore fruit when he made the transition into government.
He says:
Having been shadow minister for three years and then being minister for four years was a really important experience.
One of the conclusions I’ve drawn is [that] continuity is absolutely vital, and the present process whereby ministers come and go in very short order, often a year or two in the job, is absolutely disastrous, because it means that they simply don’t have the chance to become expert in the field. They are either dependent on their party’s existing position … or they become dependent on the civil servants.
I found that a very happy transition from opposition to government, and a very successful one I think.
The fatalities now are about less than 40 per cent of what they were in the late ’90s. The safety record has improved hugely, we now are reasonably confident we can do big projects. We didn’t used to be, the assumption was we would make a mess of them.