The Third Man: Life at the Heart of New Labour

‘It’s not that,’ he said. ‘We’ll talk again.’

The next call, on Wednesday, 1 October, was no more illuminating. This time it was from Gordon. ‘I’m going to do this reshuffle,’ he began. ‘I need to talk to you about it. I want to put an idea to you – something I hope you’ll go along with.’ He asked if I could come to see him in Downing Street the following morning. I said I would be in London anyway, for a briefing at the Treasury on the financial crisis, and I could see him after that. He seemed satisfied, but before hanging up he added very sternly: ‘Do not discuss this with anyone.’

‘Discuss what?’ I asked.

‘Nothing,’ he replied. ‘Just don’t discuss it.’ Since I had no idea what he was on about, that was easy enough to agree to.

Maybe my famed political antennae were not as good as they have been cracked up to be. Maybe Brussels had dimmed my Westminster instincts. Maybe, despite our recent rapprochement, I simply assumed that Gordon and I had fought so many battles that some sense of estrangement would always survive. In any case, when I discreetly entered Number 10 on the afternoon of Thursday, 2 October 2008 through the french windows at the back, near the Foreign Office, I was anticipating a conversation about the other potential jigsaw pieces in Gordon’s grand scheme. I took his and Jeremy’s hints at some role for me to mean, at most, another attempt to get me to play a part in forging the ‘strategy’ he desperately wanted. I had difficulty in seeing quite how that would work, but I was willing to listen, and to help if I could.

We met in the small wood-panelled dining room on the first floor. Gordon took a spoonful of yoghurt and unpeeled a banana. ‘I don’t like sandwiches,’ he said when I offered him the plate. Then he got down to business.

‘I need to do something big. I need you to join the government. I want you to help get us through the economic situation. You would do it at the Business Department, from the House of Lords.’

For a moment, I was stunned. I was also seized by panic at the prospect, even if Gordon genuinely felt he could make it work, of a return to the political jungle, and an end to a European sojourn that had turned out even better than I had expected. ‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘but I actually like my present job. I have things I want to finish. And I have my comfort zone.’ I had my work. My life. The protection I now felt I had from the frequent ghastliness of Westminster politics as I had come to know it. I had my travel, my friends. I was now on top of the Trade Commissioner’s job, and trying against all odds to play my part in rescuing hopes for a world trade deal, not to mention the intractable negotiations to update our trade relations in Africa, or the never-ending talks on Russia’s membership of the World Trade Organisation.

Gordon would not be dissuaded. He said the world trade deal was going nowhere fast – he had just been in Washington, and he was sure of that. I was pretty sure of it as well: its prospects were looking about as dire as Gordon’s before his conference speech.

‘Think of what you would be able to achieve back in the government,’ he persisted. ‘It’s a great opportunity.’ And he added: ‘We need you. We could work together.’

‘Well, it would certainly be a surprise for everyone,’ I laughed. Yet, except for the undeniable satisfaction I would take from an unlikely – more nearly, impossible – third return from the cabinet dead, I still found the idea unsettling. Gordon left me to ponder.

When he returned to the room, it was with Sue Nye in tow. He suggested that she and I speak. This was the start of a carousel of conversations, first with Sue, then with Jeremy Heywood, as Gordon departed and reappeared, joined the discussion and left the other two to urge me to see the logic of his proposal. It made sense from every angle, they insisted. It would be the right thing for Gordon, for the government, and for me. I was tempted. It was not merely the idea of returning to cabinet. At a time when Gordon and New Labour were in political crisis, and the country was facing an economic one, I did feel that I could play a part in making things better.

But for other reasons, I was still reluctant. Even in our resumed, long-distance relationship, I had been reminded that Gordon could be hair-raisingly difficult to work with. ‘It’s all too difficult,’ I told him. ‘I’ll have to talk to Reinaldo about it. He’ll hate the whole idea of becoming involved in British politics again – and the media. He’s suffered enough.’ Gordon replied that by all means I should call my partner, then hurriedly added: ‘If you want, I’ll talk to him.’ The moment passed. Gordon’s suggestion, like so much else when he was at his best, had been genuine, and generous. So too was his invitation to me to return to the top ranks of government.

I would not say no outright, I told him finally. I had to think it through. I also needed counsel from someone who knew both me and Gordon well, and whose instincts I had learned to trust. I said I wanted to discuss it with Tony. Gordon said that was fine, and we agreed that I would return by the end of the afternoon.

As soon as I left, I phoned Reinaldo. His reaction was not just surprise, but more nearly disbelief. Who could blame him? Yet as we talked through the obvious pitfalls, he came to the view that what mattered was whether the contribution I could make by returning to cabinet outweighed them. If I felt it did, I should do it. ‘But you’re right,’ he said, ‘to talk to Tony.’

When I arrived at Tony’s office in Grosvenor Square, he was in a meeting. As he ushered me in a few minutes later, it was apparent that Gordon had phoned ahead. Tony grasped my hand and laughed out loud. ‘You could not make it up!’ he said. But he added: ‘On the other hand, it has a certain logic. It’s a no-brainer. You belong in the government. The economic crisis is real. If the Prime Minister asks you to serve your country, you have to. It certainly wouldn’t look good if people got to know that you’d turned him down.’

‘He’s a nightmare to work with. It might be awful,’ I said.

‘It might be,’ Tony replied, ‘or it might not be. You don’t know. In the end, people will just say that you did your best.’

When I returned to Number 10, Gordon was waiting. ‘OK,’ I told him. ‘I’ll do it. I’m still not sure it’s the right thing for me to do. But I’ll do my best.’

‘It is the right thing,’ Gordon said. ‘I’m sure. You’ll see.’

As I left, I was in a daze. I did feel a sense of excitement, the surge of adrenalin I had almost forgotten in the gentler political climate of Brussels. The role Gordon had mapped out for me might turn out to be the most important and fulfilling of my political life. My new cabinet job would take me back to the now-renamed Department of Trade and Industry. It was the place where I’d cut my departmental teeth, where with a team of impressive civil servants I had done well, only to leave long before I had expected or hoped to. It meant that along with whatever ‘strategic’ role Gordon clearly wanted me to play, I would be at the heart of framing the government agenda where it mattered most: the economy.

I couldn’t help but smile at imagining what the media would make of my return. Outrageous? Astonishing? It was certainly both of those. But also risky? Ill-advised? Insane? I could only hope not. There was just one thing of which I was sure as I returned to my home off Regent’s Park, beyond the gaze or interest of reporters, at least until the news of the reshuffle became public. As so often when conflicting issues had to be weighed and a difficult decision made, Tony had been right. If the Prime Minister asks you to serve your country, you have to.

But I also knew that the reasons I had decided to come back, the reasons that in some ways I wanted to come back, were more complex than that. They had less to do with Gordon, or Tony, than with me. It is true that everything I had become as a politician had been marked by my relationship with New Labour’s two, very different, Prime Ministers. But the roots went back much further: to my time with Neil Kinnock, and with London Weekend Television’s Weekend World programme in the 1980s; to my experience in local government, the trade unions and youth politics in the Old Labour heyday of the 1970s; to my time at university. And to a bright white family home ten miles up the Northern Line from the Houses of Parliament, on a suburban street called Bigwood Road.

2

Born into Labour

Big Wood seemed much bigger to me as a child than it does now. It began at the top of our road, three minutes’ walk from our door. At the other end was an even larger expanse of green, the extension to Hampstead Heath, which bordered the neighbourhood where I spent the first two decades of my life. Hampstead Garden Suburb was the creation of Dame Henrietta Barnett, a Christian social reformer who believed that mixed communities with the feel of a country village would soften and ultimately heal the hostility of urban life. At the turn of the last century, after many years of charity work in the East End of London, she enlisted the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens and the utopian town planner Raymond Unwin to make her vision a reality.

The Suburb was less posh and intellectually self-important than Hampstead proper, which lay just over a steep incline and a mile or two nearer the centre of London. Under the Suburb’s original planning rules, there were no fences or walls between properties, only hedgerows. No shops were permitted within its boundaries. And no pubs. While the social activist in Dame Henrietta must have understood the attraction of a comradely pint at the end of a working day, the Christian in her could not abide the idea. The roads were wide, and trees were everywhere, bursting with white and pink and purple in springtime. It was a place designed for walking, and letting one’s eyes tilt skywards. The Suburb was centred on a lovely church square – St Jude’s C of E on one side, the Methodists opposite – and the adjacent girls’ school Dame Henrietta created, and which bears her name. For families, the Suburb was ideal. As a child, I loved it – an ardour that briefly dimmed when, as a teenager, I found it a bit too quiet and confining, but which I have since rediscovered. It was in London, yet not quite of it.

It was, however, very much a part of Labour London. Hampstead was home to Hugh Gaitskell and Michael Foot, but we had our share of luminaries too, notably Harold and Mary Wilson. They were near neighbours, just around the corner, and good friends. Their boys, Robin and Giles, were a little older than me and my elder brother Miles – Mary very kindly passed Giles’s rather scratchy Cub Scout jersey on to me when it was time for me to join the local pack attached to the Methodist church. My most vivid early political memory is from a few days before my eleventh birthday, when I watched the Wilsons negotiate a gaggle of camera crews and reporters, including the famous American broadcaster Walter Cronkite, as they left for Downing Street after the 1964 election.

A year later, the Wilsons invited us to Number 10 to watch Trooping the Colour. It would be ridiculous to suggest that as I walked wide-eyed through the famous black door I imagined I would return forty-five years later to watch the same ceremony as a senior minister, alongside another Labour Prime Minister. But I can’t deny that I was dazzled. Marcia Williams, Harold’s trusted political secretary, fed me large quantities of triangular smoked-salmon sandwiches and asparagus rolls. She even took my hand and led me into the Cabinet Room, and briefly planted me in the Prime Minister’s chair. I was conscious of feeling somehow special. Conscious, too, that part of that feeling had to do with the fact that my bond with Labour really began with my family. My mother was the only child of Herbert Morrison, the founding General Secretary of the Labour Party in London, a minister in Ramsay MacDonald’s 1929 government, and the first Labour leader of the London County Council in the 1930s. He served as Home Secretary in Churchill’s wartime cabinet, and was the organising force behind the manifesto and the election campaign that delivered Labour’s startling 1945 landslide, becoming Deputy Prime Minister and later Foreign Secretary in the Attlee government. As we left the Cabinet Room, Marcia introduced me to another guest sitting in the hallway, Clement Attlee himself. ‘This is Herbert’s grandson, Clem,’ she said. The former Prime Minister, either through advanced age or because he and my grandfather had not exactly been bosom buddies, looked at me briefly before grunting something inaudible.

My mother cared passionately about the issues that drove politics: I remember joining her on a march against Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech when I was fourteen. But her experience of the way politics had come to dominate her father’s life, often crowding out both her and her mother, left her with a lifelong dislike of the exposure that goes with public life. As a young girl, she told her father to keep her out of his ‘beastly politics’. My father’s connection with Labour was less genetic than my mother’s, but in many ways stronger. Unlike her, he was fascinated by politicians, and by the bustle of energy and argument that surrounded them. By the people who surrounded them, too. He was good friends with Marcia Williams, and became especially close to the quiet, stoical Mary Wilson, as she and I have always recalled whenever our paths have crossed since.

His own starting point was traditional, Old Labour politics. Maybe this was because his views were formed in the post-war years, when the division between Labour and the Tories was starker and simpler than it has since become. Maybe part of it came from his own DNA. He was born in Pinner, an outer London suburb not exactly famous for politics, or much of anything else. But his ancestral roots went back to the nineteenth-century Jewish community in Poland, then under Russian rule. His great-grandfather Nathan was said to have been involved in an anti-tsarist plot, and to have escaped retribution only by fleeing one step ahead of the secret police.

There is a temptation to suggest that my father inherited Nathan’s streak of rebelliousness and Jewish activism. Somehow, though, I suspect not. He never hid his Jewishness – indeed, he could hardly have done so. He spent nearly all of his working life as the legendarily smooth, gregarious and popular advertising manager of London’s Jewish Chronicle, the world’s oldest Jewish newspaper. Yet he remained a strident non-believer. I cannot recall his ever walking the short distance to Hampstead Garden Suburb synagogue, even on the Jewish New Year or at Yom Kippur; he certainly never took me there. Religion never figured in our lively dinner table discussions, although politics invariably did.

I suppose I was, however, dimly aware of my refracted Jewishness. Most Fridays I would have dinner with my friend Caroline Wetzler and her family, observing a form of Jewish family routine. Another of my closest childhood friends was Keren Abse, daughter of the poet and playwright Dannie Abse and niece of the outspoken Jewish Labour MP Leo Abse. I would occasionally go with my father to the offices of the Jewish Chronicle in Furnival Street, just off Holborn. His army of advertising salesmen and administrators were unfailingly deferential to him, and unfailingly kind to me. But my main Jewish Chronicle memory was when the man in charge of ad layout, Nat Goldstein, took Miles and me to the Hammersmith Odeon one evening shortly after my twelfth birthday, for a Beatles concert. I did not enter a synagogue until more than three decades later, for the wedding of my wonderfully loyal long-time executive assistant, Maree Glass. The ceremony was extraordinarily beautiful. I also found it oddly, and a bit regretfully, alien.

My mother and Miles, but especially my father and I, followed Labour’s internal debates and its battles with the Tories the way football fanatics would fixate on Cup runs or local derbies. Labour was not just our ‘team’, however. That does not capture the depth of the attachment: among our happy quartet of atheists at 12 Bigwood Road, Labour was more nearly a religion.

From childhood, it was certainly mine. Even before Harold Wilson left for Downing Street, I remember rushing home from school to listen to the results of the final ballot from which he emerged as Labour leader after Hugh Gaitskell’s death, then racing into the kitchen to tell my mother the good news. She never became carried away by such things. At election time, I would set out on canvassing missions around the Suburb – beginning, I am told, by tricycle at the tender age of six. Once, I even embarrassingly knocked on the door of Manny Shinwell, Defence Minister alongside my grandfather in the post-war government, to remind him to vote.

What I most absorbed from both of my parents was their love for each other, and for Miles and me. Both my mother and father had been married before. They met after the war at the London advertising agency Dorlands, where my mother, who had worked with the Quaker refugee service in the war years, had a job as a secretary, while my father was on one of the ad account teams. It appears to have been love at first sight, but it was complicated by the fact that my father was still married. My mother had divorced her first husband, the son of the Agriculture Minister alongside Herbert Morrison in the cabinet. My grandfather had been unhappy enough about that first marriage, feeling that my mother, then only nineteen, was far too young. She and my father kept their liaison pretty much secret until he was divorced from his first wife.

Even then, however, the idea of my mother having married as a teenager, divorced soon afterwards, and then married another divorcee did not exactly please her father, to put it mildly. I don’t know whether he had moral objections, but what is clear is that he did not relish the possibility of any gossip or criticism that might encroach on what mattered most to him: his political career. As a young boy, I would come to feel pride, respect and sometimes awe at my grandfather’s political status and accomplishments. Those feelings never entirely left me as I made my own way into national politics, but as I approached my teens, I also became aware of the effects of his all-consuming political ambition on those around him, above all on my mother. He visited us when he was able to drive himself across London from his home in Eltham, but his second wife did not make it easy, as she wanted to cut him off from his family and past friends. When he died in March 1965, a few months after I turned eleven, the first we knew of it was from a newsflash that interrupted the Saturday-evening film on ITV. My mother tried not to show her hurt, but I am sure she felt it as acutely as I did. She arranged for me to be excused from school to attend my grandfather’s funeral: my abiding memory of the occasion is of George Brown, then Labour’s voluble deputy leader, telling me off for my politically inappropriate dress sense – I was wearing a blue tie.

The authority in our family came from my mother. She was by far the quieter of my parents, but she was a source of unquestioned support for all of us. She had an elegance, almost a regality about her: my childhood friends and I called her ‘Duchess’. That is how I remember her to this day. But she had steel. Never raising her voice, she instilled in Miles and me a sense of good manners, of propriety, right and wrong. Her silent opprobrium when we strayed beyond the boundaries was far more effective than any scolding or punishment would have been.

My father was in many ways her opposite. Though his real name was George, he was universally known as Tony, ever since he had served as an officer in the Royal Dragoons during the war. He dressed impeccably, and had the bearing of a City gent rather than an advertising salesman. He had a wonderful, waspish sense of humour and fun, and revelled in being with people, until he shut the front door behind him each evening and propped himself up on his bed, smoking his pipe, surrounded by his books and newspapers. In his later years he became a Suburb personality as chairman of the residents’ association. He sallied forth almost daily, walking stick in hand, sometimes with his wartime binoculars around his neck, to ensure that Dame Henrietta’s sylvan planning restrictions were surviving the era of two-Volvo families and paved-over front gardens.

As a child, I remember feeling slightly embarrassed at times by the showman in my father. As an adult, however, I would come to recognise that much of my own political passion and public personality came from him. My brother Miles, who is four years older than me, and was always more tranquil and reflective, saw this earlier and more keenly than I did. Having gone on to qualify as a clinical psychologist, he contributed his insights into how each of our family jigsaw pieces fitted together for a biography the journalist Donald Macintyre wrote about me in the 1990s. They were striking and, I am sure, accurate. Miles was always much more like my mother, he observed, while I am more like my father. But growing up, the attachments we formed with our parents were a mirror image of this. I was much closer to my mother, rather doting on her, and Miles to my father.

Perhaps because my father and I were alike in so many ways, there was a certain friction between us. Especially where politics was concerned – and more than ever when my first-hand experience of Labour in the 1980s convinced me that the party had to take on the hard left if it was to survive. Even before then, it was clear that his view of Labour and mine were likely to diverge. I remember the two of us visiting a Suburb neighbour named Hans Janitschek on a bright Sunday morning in 1972. Janitschek was an Austrian writer who was then Secretary General of the Socialist International. A modern European Social Democrat, I remember him saying that he feared Labour was risking a ‘dangerous’ swerve to the left. Harold Wilson had lost the 1970 general election, and Tony Benn and his allies had led a successful campaign to get Labour’s National Executive Committee to adopt a leftist policy programme. Harold evidently concluded that since the party wasn’t going to re-enter government anytime soon, there was no particular urgency about taking them on. Janitschek was convinced – rightly, of course – that this inaction would come back to haunt Labour, and that sooner or later a battle over policy and ideology would have to be fought. I listened intently as my father not only defended Harold’s apparent insouciance, but said that he felt the socialist ideologues should be given latitude and tolerance. For him, that was part of what being Labour was all about.

I loved both of my parents dearly. Even now, two decades after my father’s death and four years after my mother’s, there is barely a day when I don’t think of them. My mother’s memory, especially, still lives with me. But my father’s too. Events in my life, in politics, the places I go, often rekindle recollections of them. In the waning days of Gordon Brown’s government, I was in Regent’s Park for an early-morning stroll when I saw a man with a cane trying to make his way up one of the paths. My mind instantly flashed back to the array of walking sticks my father kept in the front hall, and the old army greatcoat he used to throw over his shoulders as he ventured out in his role as one-man Suburb conservation force. I smiled at the image. He was so full of life and energy and élan, so passionate about what he believed in. He was such a presence. And, as Miles still reminds me, so much like the person and politician I became.

In many ways, we led a charmed childhood. My Euro-enthusiasm as a politician grew from roots planted then. From the time I was a small child, my parents took us on summer holidays in Europe. Every August we would go somewhere new: Ibiza, Brittany, Italy and Elba. We would stay either on campsites or in an inexpensive pension or hotel. I remember one year we camped in the grounds of a monastery in Tuscany. A group of monks stood watching the silhouette of my mother inside her tent as she combed her waist-length hair. For a few years we shared our holidays with an American family we had met, from San Francisco. They had three boys, and together the two families travelled round in a – very crowded – VW camper van.