The Third Man: Life at the Heart of New Labour

On the eve of conference, however, came a familiar last-minute hesitation. I had already got the design through the NEC publicity subcommittee. It was chaired by my early Walworth Road ally Gwyneth Dunwoody, who deftly and deliberately underplayed the significance of the party’s new symbol. It was just a ‘campaign logo’, she said. We had also designed a conference wallet to contain every delegate’s papers. It was salmon pink, emblazoned with the red rose and the word ‘Labour’ in big, bold letters. Now I was summoned to see Neil in his Commons office. His wife Glenys was there too, looking upset and worried. Neil was holding up one of our salmon-pink wallets. ‘Do you really think the mineworkers’ delegation are going to prance around conference holding this? They’re not going to be caught dead with these things,’ he said. ‘You can’t do it. There’ll be a riot.’ This time, it really was too late to change. I persuaded him it would be all right on the night.

It was. The entire backcloth of the conference platform in Blackpool was adorned with the new logo in all its glory. The red rose was printed on everything capable of taking its imprint. For Labour to pack away the red flag, as the fury of Eric Heffer and others soon made clear, was like Nike dumping its swish, or McDonald’s chopping down the golden arches. The red flag symbolised everything Labour represented in the public mind: socialism, nationalisation, state control. Everything, that is, that voters now liked least and mistrusted most about us. The red rose wasn’t just a design change: it represented a transformation in how the party would present itself. It had real impact, reinforced by our now ubiquitous new strapline, recognising the need to put people, not the party, first.

The change did generate comment and controversy in our ranks, though not in anything like the way Neil and Glenys had feared. Delegates eagerly collected their conference folders, taking two or three at a time, briefly raising the spectre that we might run out. If they were left on seats, they were stolen. In some cases, money changed hands amongst ardent collectors. That the media were excited – and through them the country – was not only important in itself, it had an immediate effect on the morale of party members. Here was Labour doing something well and eye-catching, beating the Tories at their own game.

On the final day of conference I brought a huge box of fresh red roses, minus their thorns, onto the stage for Neil and Glenys to throw to the delegates. There was a roar of delight. Catching sight of my broadcasting officer Tony Beeton, who would tragically die in the Paddington rail disaster in October 1999, I suggested that he and his tiny son Piers join Neil on the platform. Spotting the young child, Neil’s instinctive response was as it had been at the ‘Freedom and Fairness’ launch: he clutched Piers in one arm and held up one of the – long-stemmed – roses in the other, to shouts and cheers from the hall. It was an extraordinarily uplifting moment. At least briefly, I even allowed myself to indulge in the fantasy that it might provide a springboard for the general election, due in eighteen months but likely to come earlier.

We had had a good year. With Philip’s research suggesting that many voters saw Mrs Thatcher as polarising and divisive, we had actually arrived at conference with a small lead in the opinion polls. I knew Labour’s problems went much deeper, however. Branding, image, marketing, could do only so much. It was the product that ultimately mattered – especially if the product was a set of policies on which voters would decide what kind of future they wanted, and what kind of government they trusted to deliver it. The main reason we had lost in 1983 wasn’t that our campaign was amateurish and outdated – that had merely helped turn a defeat into a drubbing. It was our policies. We were in favour of nationalised industries, strike-prone trade unions and unilateral disarmament. We were against the free market, privatisation and widened share ownership, and even allowing council tenants to buy their properties. When it came time to choose, millions fewer opted for us than for the Tories, and we had only just edged out the SDP.

Our image and packaging were finally changing. Our product – as resolution after resolution at the party conference made clear – was not. Nor, much beyond Neil and his shadow cabinet allies, did there seem to be a huge appetite for change. Modernising Labour’s appearance and image was difficult enough. Getting any fundamental policy change through the morass of ideological bickering in the NEC, not to mention the trade unions or leftist local parties, was not just a matter of changing Labour’s landscape. It was more like draining a swamp.

After our conference our polling numbers lifted, but they fell off as attention turned to the Tories, who were busy getting into their pre-election stride with an array of new policies entitled ‘The Next Steps Forward’. Still, I entered 1987 feeling relatively upbeat. It was far too late for us to perform major surgery on our policies, but I was confident that we now had assets which could at least make this battle different from 1983. With our new communications operation, my hope was to emphasise what had changed in Labour. I hoped to build on our new image by promoting Neil as a different kind of Labour leader.

I had no doubt about the strengths of the people working most closely around him – Patricia Hewitt, and his chief of staff Charles Clarke, who I had known well since our days in student politics in the 1970s. As we geared up for election year, there was a real sense of shared purpose: to build a professional campaign around Neil as a leader who was showing vision and courage in modernising Labour, and could bring similar qualities to Downing Street. I believed this to be true. Although I had never managed anything remotely on this scale, I felt a new level of confidence about my grasp of modern campaigning methods, and in the team we had in the SCA and at Walworth Road. Within days of returning from our ‘red rose’ conference, we began planning for the general election campaign. Ultimately, dozens of people would be involved. Some of them – Charles, Patricia, David Hill, Chris Powell at BMP and of course Philip Gould – would go on to play important roles with New Labour a decade later. But the main connecting line was in the mechanics of the campaign we devised.

When we began mapping things out in the autumn of 1986, Patricia was not officially at work: she had just had her first child and was on maternity leave. Philip and I would gather around her kitchen table, with Patricia holding her baby daughter in her arms. Some of the features of the 1987 campaign looked new only in the hidebound context of the Labour Party. They were basic, common-sense changes in image, advertising and presentation. That alone would make a difference, but what was really new was the degree of detail, coordination and control we wired in from the start. We began with our ‘warbook’, although we didn’t give it that name until the process became political orthodoxy in the 1990s: an outline of our own and other parties’ strengths and weaknesses, and a point-by-point plan of how to make the most of each of them. Then came what was probably the most lastingly important innovation. We began setting out a ‘grid’ – a day-by-day map of the entire campaign, with a single policy issue and related narrative as well as a pre-planned visual context, to provide a compelling image for TV news and the following day’s papers. It was all bound together by Philip’s input – the most sustained, detailed and nuanced research and analysis the Labour Party had ever seen.

In February, however, things began to go wrong. On the surface, all was still to play for. Though we no longer led in the polls, we were trailing the Tories by only a point or two, and were comfortably clear of the SDP in third place. With the economy recovering, however, a Tory policy prospectus promising growth, reduced taxes and low inflation would be a tough case to answer. While Neil’s identity as a new kind of leader was gaining traction, so were escalating Tory assaults on Labour’s ‘loony left’. Worse, voters were about to be reminded of it all over again. The occasion was a by-election in Greenwich, prompted by the death of the veteran Labour MP Guy Barnett. Labour had held the seat for four decades – even, with a reduced majority, in 1983. If we had tapped into Philip’s bank of research in picking Guy Barnett’s prospective successor, we surely would have won. But under NEC selection rules, with a strong boost from her National Union of Public Employees sponsors, the nod went to Deirdre Wood, Greenwich’s representative on the London Education Authority.

Deirdre had history in Ken Livingstone’s GLC. She was realistic enough to recognise the difficulties her candidacy presented us with in the run-up to a general election. When she met Neil after she’d been selected, she told him, ‘Don’t worry, I won’t drop you in it.’ She didn’t. She didn’t propose nationalising Greenwich, or declaring London a nuclear-free zone. But with the Daily Mail taking the lead, there was an orgy of ‘exposés’, with spurious allegations about her private life and even mockery of her looks. It was a sustained assault which on more than one occasion reduced Deirdre to tears.

In 1983, Guy Barnett had a 1,200-vote edge over the Conservatives, with the SDP in third place. This time, the Tories concluded early on that they were unlikely to win. The SDP ran the candidate they had recently picked for the general election: an attractive, softly-spoken market researcher named Rosie Barnes, whose husband was a local councillor who organised her campaign. The SDP’s Liberal allies sensed that Deirdre’s selection made us vulnerable, and flooded the constituency with canvassers. As the campaign neared its end, our polling suggested that the Tories were encouraging tactical voting as well. Days before the vote on 26 February, we still held a lead. But it was tiny. The night before the election, journalists phoned me with advance word on the next morning’s coverage. The Tories had essentially conceded defeat, and the SDP were making a late surge. As the polls opened, I phoned Charles. ‘We’re going to lose,’ I said. ‘Heavily.’ When we did, by almost 7,000 votes, it was as if everything we had so painstakingly built up had crumbled away on that by-election dawn.

Before long there was a string of further setbacks, unlucky events and own-goals. The most serious involved our most difficult policy problem: defence. In 1986, Neil had gone to Washington, where he managed to deflect the embarrassment of failing to meet President Reagan by saying he’d be back before the election. Since our disarmament policy would commit a Labour government to breaking ranks with America and NATO, the last thing we needed was a tête-à-tête at the White House. I and others, including Shadow Foreign Secretary Denis Healey, tried to talk Neil out of going. He was insistent. He had said he would visit before the election. Not to do so would look weak. I was left to record in my diary the vain hope that Reagan would either fall ill, or for some reason be unable to find time for a meeting before the trip took place. The President was in robust health. When Neil arrived in the Oval Office the meeting was bad enough, with a series of predictably chilly exchanges. Then Reagan’s spokesman emerged with a politically damning account for reporters. He said the President had not even needed the allotted half-hour to tell Britain’s Labour leader that his policies would undermine the Western alliance. Even a friendly feature by one of our few supporters in the travelling press, the Mirror’s Alastair Campbell, could not curb the damage. A Gallup poll at the end of the month had us not only trailing the Tories, by nearly ten percentage points, but in third place, behind the Liberal-SDP Alliance.

I did my best to put a positive spin on it. I phoned the Press Association’s man in the Commons, Chris Moncrieff, and portrayed Neil’s surprisingly resilient remarks after the White House snub as stage one in a carefully planned ‘April fightback’ ahead of the election campaign. There was no such plan, much less any sign of a fightback. But it was one of those phrases that somehow take on a life of their own. By mid-month, although the polls gave the Tories a widening lead, we were at least back in second place. I knew we could still fall back. Although I told reporters that the polls showed that we were ‘back on course, and contending for power’, I truly believed only the first of these claims. ‘What I really feel,’ I wrote in my diary one evening in April, ‘is that we are back on course to remain in existence.’

When the election was announced on the second Monday of May, with polling day set for 11 June 1987, I felt more confident than I had a few weeks earlier. From command central in Walworth Road, I found myself working eighteen-hour days to keep on top of every facet of the campaign: speeches and appearances by Neil and others; decisions on advertising, posters and party TV messages; how and what we were briefing to the media. Philip’s daily cull and analysis of the opinion data was indispensable. As the campaign hit the road, I was in constant contact by primitive mobile phone with Patricia and, at key moments, with Neil.

Our frontman at news conferences and briefings was Bryan Gould, who had succeeded Robin as the shadow cabinet’s campaign chief. Born in New Zealand, Bryan had studied at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, become a television presenter, and had gone into the Commons in 1974. We hit it off immediately. He was articulate, self-assured, quick-witted and very good company, and I soon became good friends with both him and his wife Gill. He was also a huge asset to the campaign. His encounters with the media were amazing to behold. Entering the room with a few hastily scribbled talking points, he seemed capable of answering even the least anticipated question with fluency and lucidity.

Our first few days were steady rather than spectacular. Though even that represented a huge advance over 1983, it did nothing to cushion the blow of the first opinion polls. In two of them, we were back in third place. But soon, our carefully primed campaign engine got up to speed. Neil did too. His breakthrough moment came at the Welsh Labour conference in Llandudno in mid-May. He had been up much of the night fine-tuning a speech on a theme he had often promoted: freedom and opportunity. The words were strong, the argument deftly made. But the speech did not really take flight until he launched into a passionate, personal broadside against unfairness in Britain. ‘Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university?’ he began. ‘Why is Glenys the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it because our predecessors were thick? Did they lack talent? Those people who could sing, and play, and recite and write poetry; those people who could make wonderful, beautiful things with their hands? Those people who could dream dreams, and see visions? Was it because they were weak – those people who could work eight hours underground, and then come up and play football? Does anybody really think that they didn’t get what we had because they didn’t have the talent, or the strength, or the endurance, or the commitment?’ Of course not, he said. ‘It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand!’ There were not the conditions that allowed people who were free under British law truly to live that freedom.

Even watching on the TV at Walworth Road, I felt the power of his words. I knew that Neil on this form – genuine, spine-tinglingly eloquent, and speaking on the kind of social issues where the Tories were most vulnerable – would be key to the campaign. The imperative was to improve his connection with voters. We had already decided that our first broadcast of the campaign would focus on him. We had put it in the hands of a remarkable film-maker, the Chariots of Fire director Hugh Hudson. I’d first met Hugh the previous summer. He was one of a number of talented figures who wanted to do what they could personally to help revive and modernise Labour. Through the first part of the 1980s, such approaches had been routinely rebuffed or ignored. Eager to get Hugh involved, I asked him to produce a video of the autumn party conference. It was powerful, subtle, engaging, and perfectly captured the new ‘red rose’ image we were trying to bring to the party.

Before the campaign started, Patricia and I asked him to turn his artistry to Neil, in a party political broadcast. The aim was to confront his media image as weak, woolly and indecisive, and to project his personal and political strengths. When I first saw what Hugh had come up with, at a late-evening screening two days before it aired, I knew it had done the job. The media dubbed it ‘Kinnock: the Movie’. It opened with a fighter jet morphing into a seagull above the bluffs of south Wales. Using footage from interviews we had Alastair Campbell do with Neil, his family and leading party figures, Hugh created a portrait of a leader whose bedrock beliefs drove him to help others, and who had the determination and strength to turn his beliefs into action. The film segued into his assault on Militant at the 1985 conference. The climax was built around the Llandudno speech. The final scene showed Neil and Glenys walking hand-in-hand along the seacoast. It was breathtaking. The only question was what words we would put up at the end. Usually, it would be the campaign slogan or the Labour logo. When the screening was over I turned to Betty Boothroyd, a sympathetic NEC member and future Speaker of the Commons, who had wandered in to watch. She said, gratifyingly, that she had loved it. ‘What about ending the film with something besides the word “Labour”?’ I asked her. ‘Would it work to just put “Kinnock”?’ She agreed. Later, I would be criticised by some of her NEC colleagues for ‘personalising’ the campaign. I was guilty as charged. Amid all our policy ‘negatives’, Neil was one of our few potential positives.

The aims of our campaign had been to build up his stock as a new kind of leader, and in effect to camouflage most of the policy prospectus on which we were asking voters to put him into Downing Street. To a remarkable degree, we succeeded. In vision and planning, management and mechanics, our campaign made the vaunted Tory machine look staid, slow, stodgy. The day before the election, the New York Times wrote of how dramatically things had changed. Struck by the contrast between the Thatcher rallies staged by the Tories’ presentation supremo, Harvey Thomas, and our Hugh Hudson broadcasts, it concluded: ‘In 1979 and 1983, Mr Thomas’s rallies were the splashiest events around, yielding strong television images that helped establish the Conservatives’ primacy as the party with the most polished communications operation. But this year, the slickness of Mr Hudson’s films demonstrated Labour’s ability to beat the Conservatives at their own game.’ The article quoted a top London advertising executive as saying that we had ‘rattled the Conservative campaign, forcing them to spend valuable time repudiating Labour claims instead of concentrating on Tory successes’. It also praised the way in which we had managed to use the rallies we staged for Neil to ‘divert attention from defence to issues like health care, pensions and education – on which Mrs Thatcher, despite her lead in the polls, has been on the defensive’.

Realistically, however, our main rival was not Mrs Thatcher or the Tories. We were battling for second place, against the Liberal-SDP Alliance. In 1983 we had beaten them by only two percentage points, and well under a million votes. Even after our ‘April fightback’, the polls had intermittently shown us as neck-and-neck with the Alliance, or at times behind them. We faced the real prospect of finishing in third place. By polling day, I knew we had at least faced down that threat. From early in the campaign, especially since the Kinnock movie, we had drawn ahead. As I sat in Walworth Road on election night, the only question in my mind was by how much. I was exhausted. In one sense, it was lucky we had never really had a chance of defeating the Conservatives. By the end of the campaign I was so spent, emotionally and physically, that I had literally nothing left for the final sprint.

Bizarrely, there was a brief moment on election day when there was a suggestion that we might even win. Vincent Hanna, the BBC political correspondent, phoned me early in the evening. In a conspiratorial whisper, he said: ‘Peter, it’s Vincent. I have some very interesting information seeping out about the exit polls. You might just be in for a pleasant surprise.’ Swearing me to secrecy, and saying he could not go into detail, he continued: ‘You may want to get your “plan B” ready.’ I was intrigued, or more nearly astonished. I thanked him, but said: ‘For God’s sake, don’t tell Neil. It’ll get him all wound up.’

As Vincent had hinted, the first Newsnight prediction was for a hung Parliament. I still frankly didn’t believe it – I remember turning to Philip and saying, ‘If only …’ The exit poll corrected itself, and the Conservatives won, as we’d both known they would. Mrs Thatcher got a Commons majority of 102. Still, that was down by forty-two seats on 1983. We had gained twenty seats, and cantered home well ahead of the SDP-Liberal Alliance, by eight percentage points and nearly three million votes. We had survived. We had won the battle of the opposition. If the Greenwich trend had continued, we might well not have done.

I retreated to Foy that weekend. I was a tangle of emotions. The campaign had been more wearing than anything I had ever done in my life. I had never directed anything like it before, and had no benchmark against which to judge what I was doing. Every day was virgin territory. If it had not been for the two Goulds, Bryan and Philip, I am sure I would not have been able to carry it off. Never did I have more reason to be grateful for their support than on the first Saturday of the campaign, when I was suddenly confronted with the personal cost of my more prominent political role. The News of the World, Britain’s highest-circulation Sunday paper, was planning to use its front page next day to tell the country about my private life. I had never cloaked this in secrecy: I simply regarded my life outside politics as having no relevance to my public role. It didn’t preoccupy me, and I did not see why it should concern anyone else. The News of the World chose not only to target me, but to make personal allegations about Roy Hattersley and the Liberal Party leader, David Steel, as well.

I had been with my partner at the time for nearly ten years. He had also briefly been involved with a woman friend, with whom he had fathered a wonderful son – to whom not only his mother, but the two of us were devoted. What angered me was that the newspaper had decided to publicise this as well: identities, details, photographs and all. On Alastair Campbell’s advice, I telephoned the editor, David Montgomery, and told him that if he really wanted to ‘reveal all’ about me, he could go ahead, but including the name of the three-year-old boy involved, or his mother, would be an utterly unjustified violation of their rights to privacy. Montgomery was cold, monosyllabic, and seemingly could not have cared less. He shrugged off my request, and went ahead. Alastair, who was by my side throughout, shared my disgust.

I was told later that the News of the World ‘bombshell’ had been discussed with the Conservative Party’s high command. The Tories apparently saw this as a legitimate way of taking me out of the campaign. If so, it failed. I was fortunate that the pace and demands of the election left me little time to brood on what had happened. The rest of the media, in any case, ignored the News of the World’s prurience. But it couldn’t help but affect the way I felt about and responded to other media intrusions into my private life. It made me more determined than ever not to make concessions to those who are interested in the irrelevances of the bedroom over the Cabinet Room. This was nearly twenty-five years ago. Thankfully, the world has moved on, and with it, journalistic standards.