The Third Man: Life at the Heart of New Labour

With the election over, I took comfort from knowing how much ground we had reclaimed since the chaos and crisis of the spring. The campaign had been a watershed for Labour. It had shown to the party, and the numerous sceptics in the media, that we could compete with the Tories in using the tools of modern political communications to get our voice through to voters. We were at least back in the game. It had been transformational for me as well. As the central figure in the Walworth Road operation, I was always going to receive more media attention than before. If it had all gone haywire, I would have got the blame.

In the final days, the young political editor of the Observer wrote the first major profile of me to appear in the national press. I knew Robert Harris only professionally then, though he would later become one of my closest friends. His piece highlighted the differences in Labour’s campaigning and communications since 1983. In explaining the role I had played, the obstacles I had had to overcome and the artifice I had occasionally had to use to get our changes through, he also unwittingly coined a label – sometimes useful politically, often uncomfortable personally – that would stick with me for the rest of my public life: the ‘Machiavelli’ of Walworth Road. Coming from him, this was not meant as an insult, and the rest of the profile was very generous, both about the campaign and my part in it.

After election day, there was far more praise than criticism, some of it from unexpected quarters. Tony Benn said we had run Labour’s best campaign since 1959, the one in which he had pioneered groundbreaking TV messages of his own. The review that most touched me, however, was a note Larry Whitty left on my desk the morning after the election. ‘Just in case it may on occasion have seemed I felt differently,’ he said, ‘can I record that I believe your efforts, political judgement and imagination have made this the most effective campaign the party has ever waged. Well done – and thanks.’

Still, in the end, as Private Eye put it, we had achieved a ‘brilliantly successful election defeat’. The feeling that weighed most heavily on me was that when the votes were counted, we had lost. Again. The sense of frustration and failure gnawed at me in the days, weeks and months that followed as I contemplated what Labour’s third straight defeat meant for the party’s, and my, future. The reasons we had lost were clear. I singled out ‘the three Ds: Deirdre, defence and disarray’. However alluringly alliterative, that told only part of the story. To have any hope of getting back into government, we would have to completely revisit the range of policies where we were simply, fatally, out of touch with the electorate: unemployment and health, education, crime, and of course economics, finance and taxation.

The election result also taught me something else. It was about people’s feelings and beliefs, and how they projected these onto those who stood for the highest office. The electorate intensely disliked many aspects of the Labour Party. As for Neil Kinnock, while people felt that he was right to stand up to the hard left, to reform Labour and make its policies more centrist, they also had a feeling that he was not very prime ministerial, that he was uncertain what he believed in, and that his wordiness masked a lack of knowledge. While many voters had a visceral dislike of Mrs Thatcher, and believed that her policies were divisive, were destroying industry, generating unacceptable social costs and harming public services, they nevertheless felt that she was strong, was probably what the country needed, that they should continue taking the medicine, and anyway, that there was no real alternative. For voters, feelings prevail over beliefs. People may be torn between their head and their heart, but ultimately it is their gut feeling that is decisive: they vote for the candidate who elicits the right feelings, not necessarily the one who presents the right arguments. Ideally, of course, that should be the same person. This lesson would shape what I thought and did over the next two decades, because it ingrained in me just how subtle political communications are – and how complicated elections are to run.

In the eighteen months or so after the election, I gradually lost heart that this would happen with the necessary urgency. Intellectually, Neil understood the need for change. The trouble was that his heart, and more so his soul, weren’t in the scale of change needed. Labour had to find ways of appealing to voters far beyond our old, loyalist core. We had to have something to say not only to the have-nots in society, but to the haves – a group of which Thatcherite Britain’s ‘new working class’ either already had, or aspired to, membership. At times, Neil talked the talk. ‘But,’ I reflected in a diary note after the election, ‘he is too much of a socialist, and he hates the idea of being seen by the party as anything different. That is where he gets the power and the passion of his performance.’ I knew Neil could inspire. The question, especially on the tough policy decisions we had to confront, was whether he could lead the profound change that was clearly needed.

Hoping to prod him and others into action, I commissioned Philip and the SCA to begin a thorough examination of the state of mind of Britain’s voters: what they valued in their lives and in their government; why they supported Labour or the Tories or the Alliance; what had convinced them, or might convince them, to switch sides. We had never done anything on this scale before. Nor had any other British political party. Patricia, as usual, jumped into the driving seat of a process that would end up taking four months to complete, drawing not only on polling and focus groups, but the work of experts in charting political, economic and social trends. That was step one. Step two would be to apply the lessons to policy. We needed an issue-by-issue policy review. This would not have happened without Tom Sawyer, the deputy leader of the public service union NUPE, whose position on the NEC had earlier contributed to the two-vote majority that got me my job. He went to Neil with the idea of a policy review immediately after the election, and convinced him to support it. What shape it would take, how far it would go, remained to be seen. But at least a mechanism would be in place.

The landmark public attitudes report was called ‘Labour and Britain in the 1990s’, and when I got the draft after the party conference in the autumn, it was even more sobering than I had expected. Its findings were presented to a joint session of the NEC and the shadow cabinet in November. Over two decades, our share of the vote had fallen by nearly 20 per cent, while Tory support had remained steady. Even more disturbing were the findings about why people voted as they did. In the case of the Conservatives, it was their tougher, more aspirational appeal. But more than a quarter of Labour’s shrinking base said they remained with us only out of residual loyalty. Among those who had abandoned us, there was a remarkable consistency in the reasons they said had driven them away. ‘Extremism’ came top, followed by the dominance of the trade unions, our defence policy, and finally ‘weak leadership’. It was not just the well-off who didn’t like us, but in an increasingly mobile economy, the role of manual work was decreasing. Share ownership and home ownership were rising, and more voters had the kind of aspirations which they said made them reluctant to elect a Labour government. We were becoming less and less popular, less and less relevant. In its X-ray of the British electorate, the SCA report had now told us why. Our image unsettled and alienated voters, our organisation and leadership dented their trust. Our policies clashed with their hopes not only for the country, but for themselves.

I still have my notes of the presentation meeting. Tony Benn called the report ‘useful’, but said the voters had simply been duped by rightwing ‘media propaganda’, and that Labour’s job now was ‘to change their attitudes through our campaigning’. In other words, ‘don’t compromise with the electorate’. Ken Livingstone said we had been too busy ‘reassuring international bankers so they’ll now vote for us’ to develop and present a strong, socialist alternative to Mrs Thatcher’s running of the economy. He also said we had shamelessly gone along with media attacks on the hard left, instead of defending them. Still, by far most of those in the room clearly understood the seriousness of the message in the research report, and the need for us to reconnect as a party with what voters actually wanted in their lives and from their government. What mattered was what they would do about it.

The short answer turned out to be not much. The policy review, which would not finally be published until two years after the election, had all the trappings of a serious exercise. I certainly spun it in the press gallery as the start of a real change, saying that nothing would be off limits. Seven committees, each chaired by the relevant shadow minister and an NEC member, were tasked to look at every major policy area. But while Neil set out a general vision of change, he made surprisingly little personal input to the process. He didn’t meet the chairs or want to float ideas. Neither arguing for nor rejecting anything, he seemed to be leaving the outcome up to the individual groups and shadow ministers. With no pressure to be radical, almost all of the review groups played it safe. There was one significant exception: Gerald Kaufman, who was now Shadow Foreign Secretary. He knew what he wanted, knew what Labour needed, and showed every sign of being determined to get it: a jettisoning of unilateral nuclear disarmament. As for the rest, they largely tinkered: except for Shadow Chancellor John Smith’s group, which committed Labour to higher taxes, by including a whole raft of new benefits pledges.

My confidence that we would rise to the challenge had been eroding for many months. In the aftershock of the election, there was a lot of talk about ‘change’. But not only was there a lack of real action, Neil’s position with senior shadow cabinet colleagues appeared to have weakened. I had a startling insight into the depth of the discontent in an uncomfortable midnight encounter with Neil’s two most influential colleagues. I was in Edinburgh for the international television festival two months after the election, and John Smith and his wife Elizabeth had very kindly invited me to stay with them. When I arrived after dinner on the first night, Elizabeth had gone to bed. I was greeted not only by John, but by the party’s deputy leader, Roy Hattersley, and their shadow cabinet colleague, the Glasgow MP Donald Dewar. With the three of them seated in a kind of horseshoe formation around me, it felt like a courtroom drama.

John and Roy did most of the talking. They were scathing about Neil, blaming my ‘image-making’ for propping up a leader who they were convinced was not up to the job. John conceded that Neil had proven a formidable party manager, and ‘infighter’, in dismembering Militant. But that was pretty much it. He was aloof, abstract, and a nightmare to deal with on any issue of substance. John’s view was that Neil didn’t have an ‘intellectual interest’ in policy. No matter how glowing the reviews he’d received during the campaign, he was ‘all froth’. Roy piled in, saying that Neil suffered from ‘a lack of assurance, a feeling of being beleaguered and being out of his depth’. That, Roy believed, was because he was.

It was deeply unpleasant, and I did not know how to respond. Neil was party leader. I felt admiration for him because of what he had been put through, and loyalty to him as someone who had at least begun to revive the party. I thought John, Roy and Donald were being harsh and unfair, and I told them so. I also pointed out that while Neil’s speeches may have been ‘froth’, without that froth we would not only have lost the election, we would have been left for dead.

The main senior figure advocating real, if undefined, change was Bryan Gould. At my urging, he had publicly said that Labour had to develop ‘policies for the 1990s’. But he was paying a price, in the shape of a whispering campaign against him. He was naïve, it was said. An upstart. The more he pressed for greater influence, the more difficult his position became. It culminated in his proposal to challenge Roy for the deputy leadership at the beginning of 1988. I knew how much Bryan wanted the job, but I could not support him. Neil was dead against the distraction of a contest, and I shared that view. The party was divided enough without another full-scale power struggle, in which it was certain that Eric Heffer would also join the fray. Besides, I was a Labour Party official. Both the leader, and of course the current deputy, wanted Bryan to reconsider. I did the only thing I reasonably could: I talked him out of standing, averting political bloodshed but introducing a lasting strain in our relationship.

I began to wonder whether I should shift my focus outside the party. At one point, I even applied for a job as Director of Communications at the BBC. But I wasn’t offered it, and I very much doubt that I would have accepted it if I had been. Having returned to Labour at a time that the party had begun to change, I could not see myself baling out before the process was over, one way or the other. Still, I found myself trying to work around Neil to present a public image of a party ready for fundamental change. I retained a real respect for him, and a warmth that had nothing to do with politics. Neil could be awkward in his relationships, but he had an enormous capacity for kindness, and one instance in particular touched me in a way I have never forgotten.

It was in the spring of 1988, nearly a year after the election. I was called out of an NEC meeting to take an urgent call from my brother in my office. My father had been under the weather for a couple of weeks with a chest infection. Neither of us had been unduly worried, but I spoke daily either to my mother or Miles about how he was getting on. When it became apparent that he was not improving, our family GP had referred him to the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead. My father and I had found a new closeness over the past year or so. The grating of our unacknowledged similarities had receded, and I was much more able to recognise and appreciate the flair, the assurance, the sense of caring about politics and people which I had got from him, while he was able to show the pride he felt in what I had accomplished, and the work I was doing. The previous summer, he had come down to spend a day in Foy. He arrived with a lovely blue ceramic ashtray, decorated with a red rose, which I still have. I cooked him trout and salad and new boiled potatoes. We walked and talked, and then he slept before I drove him back to the station. I had every expectation that we would have further time to look back, and forward, together.

But now, Miles was phoning with bad news. The ‘chest infection’ was being treated, but the hospital had done tests. My father had cancer, and the prognosis was not good. I could not help the tears coming as I sat, holding the phone, before I replaced the receiver. Whether it was by means of telepathy I don’t know, but Neil appeared at my side, put his arm round my shoulder and cradled my head in his arms. It would be difficult, he said, but love for a father is a source of strength. ‘You’ll get through. We’ll make sure you get through.’ My father died without warning two weeks later, from a heart attack. It was months before I was over the first, terrible sense of loss – thinking of the things my father had said, the clothes he wore, the jokes we had shared, his pipe, the conversations we had or that I wished we had had. The deeper, duller throb went on for much longer.

At work, I looked for whatever examples and agents of real change I could find. I still dutifully briefed the media about Neil’s speeches and over-egged the odd policy document, but I was spending much more of my time trying to boost the image of the few Labour MPs who seemed to understand that we had to reform radically or face terminal decline. In my search for articulate, forward-looking Labour spokesmen to deliver a message that would at least sound new on radio and television, I was increasingly drawn to two bright young MPs who had been elected in 1983, and had been inseparable allies ever since. They shared a remote rabbit-warren of a parliamentary office. Both were forceful, effective communicators, and both believed that Labour had to do more – much more – if it was ever again going to get a chance to govern. The senior member of the partnership, a couple of years older and with the longer political CV, was a thirty-six-year-old Scottish MP named Gordon Brown. His ally and protégé was an Oxford-educated barrister, representing Sedgefield in northern England, called Tony Blair.

I had first got to know them before the election. We were all in our thirties, and were excited to be part of the post-1983 rebuilding project. We were young enough to hope still to be in command of our senses by the time Labour finally got back into government. The initial attraction for me was that here were two MPs who possessed a quality all too rare on the Labour benches: they had an understanding of, and a facility for, modern communications. It was natural that I should want to use their talents to help get Labour’s message across, and that they should see a re-energised Walworth Road as an asset.

After the election defeat, this coincidence of interests gradually became something much more than that: a partnership, a trio, a team. In contrast to the detachment and drift of Neil’s office, Gordon and Tony conveyed focus, and exuded energy. Constantly batting ideas off each other, positioning and planning, they were like a pair of very close, if unidentical, twins. Tony had the sunnier disposition. He had an easiness about him, a facility for engaging in serious politics without appearing to take the stakes, or himself, too seriously. He had a gift for putting others at their ease, even other politicians. People liked him, and wanted to be liked by him. In a different way, Gordon had that quality too. For me, he certainly did. We had much in common. Like me, he had resolved at a young age to entwine his life with Labour. Like me, he was the political equivalent of a football anorak. An intricate map of Prime Ministers and pretenders past, of alliances and feuds, triumphs and failures, speeches and manifestos, was implanted in both of us like a memory chip.

Although all three of us sensed by early in 1988 that Labour was not going to win the next election without something dramatic happening, I think that the realisation affected Gordon and me a bit differently than it did Tony. While he was frustrated, and sometimes angry, about the party’s failure to put itself back in the running for government, for us, there was a deeper, more personal, almost existential, feeling of despair.

There was another bond with Gordon as well. I was spending almost all my waking hours trying to find ways of getting Labour’s message into the newspapers or onto the radio or television, and through them to voters. That was not just my job, it was a fixation. For Gordon, it was nearer an obsession. It needed not be about some grand policy announcement – it rarely was. It was not done in any expectation of our winning the major arguments, much less an election, against Mrs Thatcher. But Gordon plotted a ceaseless campaign of guerrilla strikes against the Tories. He was constantly reading ministerial statements, dissecting policy proposals, culling potentially damaging leaks of internal documents. Then, sometimes acting by himself, sometimes through Tony, and increasingly often in league with me, he would zero in on just the right newspaper or broadcaster, just the right news cycle, to strike the blow. For Gordon, this was deadly serious. He viewed the Tories not only as political opponents, but as a battlefield enemy. We might not be able to kill them, but he hoped, wound by wound, to bring them to their knees. His eye for tactical opportunities was extraordinary, and he showed a master craftsman’s delight and eagerness in trying to initiate Tony and me into the secrets of the trade.

For the first time I heard him expound on his core principle of political battle, and it would resurface many times, in many contexts, later on. Essentially, his argument was that our own policies weren’t necessarily key to scoring a communications or campaigning success – which was fortunate, because our own policies were hardly putting us in a strong position. The key, Gordon said, was to identify, magnify and exploit ‘dividing lines’ with the Tories. I became an eager co-conspirator. Given the challenge of finding a way to market the pabulum of the policy review, I began to see Gordon’s endless schemes to annoy the Tories as invaluable in my efforts to keep Labour in the public eye. His relentless urge to attack also gave me a sense that Labour had not given up the fight.

I saw Tony, too, as a huge asset, especially in conveying a sense of newness in Labour on television. Even before I arrived at Walworth Road, I remember having been bowled over by an appearance he made on the BBC’s Question Time. He was accusing the Conservatives of undermining civil liberties, but it wasn’t the substance of his message that most struck me, timely and apt though it was. I was impressed by his freshness, his fluency, his ability to talk politics in words that connected in a way so many of our frontbenchers seemed to find it difficult to do. I was keen to find ways of turning this to Labour’s wider benefit, by steering high-profile TV invitations his way.

My increasing promotion of Tony’s and Gordon’s media profiles did not escape the notice of some of their more senior colleagues. The first time I put Tony on breakfast TV, to rebut Tory economic policy before the 1987 election, I felt almost as if I’d taken my life in my hands. He was at that time a junior spokesman in Roy’s Shadow Treasury team. That afternoon, a redoubtable and undeniably more senior member, the Thurrock MP Oonagh McDonald, pinned me up against a wall behind the Speaker’s chair in the Commons. When Roy wasn’t available for an interview, she thundered, she was next in line. Did I understand? What on earth had I been playing at by putting Tony up instead? I assured her that there would be plenty of future opportunities for everyone, but I couldn’t help adding, ‘Tony was very good, wasn’t he?’ It was not what Oonagh wanted to hear.

Gordon’s first real chance to shine came a year and a half after the 1987 defeat, and it happened by accident. Both he and Tony had risen up the ranks since the election. Still too junior to be perceived as a threat to those at the top, and too bright and effective to be ignored, they were voted into the shadow cabinet. Tony was Shadow Energy Secretary, while Gordon was Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, under John Smith. By the time we arrived in Brighton for the party conference at the end of September 1988, I was not alone in having marked them out as faces for the future. For Gordon, the time frame was about to shorten dramatically. Two days after conference, John suffered a serious heart attack which meant that he would need several months’ rest before returning to work. On paper, Bryan Gould should have been in line to fill in for him. With his responsibility for Trade and Industry, he held the second-top economic brief in the shadow cabinet. But Gordon made it instantly clear that he was able, and ready, to fill the breech. Since no one with influence went to bat for Bryan, the arrangement was nodded through. I am sure that they, like me, felt that while Gordon lacked John’s political weight and dispatch-box experience, he had the intellect and policy grasp to be capable of holding the fort. Within weeks, however, he faced a first major test: replying for Labour to the government’s autumn financial statement.

It had all the marks of a distinctly unequal fight. In the Conservative corner, Nigel Lawson had been Chancellor since 1983. He was two decades older than Gordon, and had been in the Commons a decade longer. He had steadily lowered income tax, and since 1986 had built an economic recovery into an income and consumer boom. There were signs of trouble, however. Inflation was rising, and interest rates, which stood at 14 per cent, even more worryingly. Though this was Gordon’s first big set-piece parliamentary encounter, he at least had a strong argument to make, ‘dividing lines’ to exploit, a target to attack. That he would make his points effectively was something I never doubted: he, and Tony and I, had worked on rehearsing and refining them.