The Third Man: Life at the Heart of New Labour

When I was ten, we settled into a pattern of going to Spain’s Costa Brava every summer. It was nowhere near as built-up then as it is now. We stayed a few miles down the coast from Rosas, at a place called Almadraba which consisted of a few dozen very basic chalets tucked away from the beach. Over dinner, my mother and father would give Miles and me a half-glass of wine, and very occasionally a tiny portion of Cointreau with ice as a nightcap. If I remember rightly, I drank more than Miles. Perhaps in part because of this distinctly Continental introduction to alcohol, I now drink only in moderation: wine and whisky.

Another effect of our Spanish summers proved slightly more painful. With light-coloured skin like my mother, and the more cavalier attitude towards such things that I got from my father, I would invariably neglect the sun lotion and quickly burn to a bright red. I still do when I’m not careful. Nor was my immersion in the sporting life of the Costa Brava especially successful. For two years running I tried – and failed – to learn how to water-ski, as everyone on the beach watched my repeated humiliation. I finally abandoned my efforts.

While the summers on the Costa Brava were idyllic for me as a child, politically, of course, Spain was no idyll. Franco was in power, and I am not sure how my parents reconciled our holidays there with their solid Labour sympathy for the republican side in the civil war. I do remember that we mollified my grandfather by bringing him a box of his favourite cigars after each holiday. He would drive over for Saturday lunch to collect them on our return.

The Suburb may have been created as a socially mixed urban utopia, but by the time I was born half a century later, it was decidedly middle-class. The more thrusting families aspired to send their children to the nearby four-hundred-year-old Highgate School, or to University College School in Hampstead. Although my parents might have been able to afford the fees, it would not have occurred to them to enrol us anywhere but at a state school. Anyway, they preferred to spend their money on our budget summer holidays in Europe. After Miles and I left Garden Suburb Primary, a short walk away on the other side of Big Wood, we moved on to Hendon County Grammar School. Under its dauntingly traditionalist head teacher, E.W. Maynard Potts, it was intellectually rigorous, and very strict. I did well academically. I enjoyed learning from, and on occasion jousting with, most of my teachers, especially about politics. I remember bringing a geography lesson to a standstill as our teacher, Mr Chapman, and I argued about the implications of the collapse of Barbara Castle’s trade-union reform White Paper, In Place of Strife. He said the retreat was a political disaster. I knew he was right, of course, but loyally defended the government’s corner.

I made some extraordinarily close friendships at school, above all with Keren Abse and a Hendon boy named Stephen Howell, who shared my teenage enthusiasm for all things political, and who remains close to me today. The two of them used to kid me about being something of a Labour anorak. Not only was I by now thoroughly conversant with the policy debates in the party, but particularly on long car journeys, I played what we called the ‘constituency game’. Boringly, and at length, I would try to name the sitting Labour MP for every constituency they could think of. Nevertheless, we became an inseparable trio. When we were sixteen, Steve’s grandmother and aunt, both Hendon Labour activists, suggested that we rekindle the dormant local branch of the Young Socialists. I became chairman, Steve the secretary, and Keren the slightly less politically obsessive glue that held our founding cell together. By the time of our inaugural meeting in March 1970, we had cajoled two dozen others to enlist in the cause. My mother no doubt shuddered at the thought that I might end up joining the breed she so disliked, and become a politician. If so, she didn’t show it. She provided a warm welcome to my comrades in arms, complete with egg-and-tomato sandwiches and hot chocolate, for our after-school meetings. She typed out our slightly overblown screeds for the monthly YS newsletter, and remained unruffled when the three of us were summarily thrown out of Hendon Town Hall during the 1970 election campaign for heckling the Conservative candidate. After the election, which ended in a Tory victory and brought Edward Heath into Downing Street, she even joined us on a demonstration against the new government’s Industrial Relations Bill. Mr Potts was less sanguine, threatening to expel me for my unruly activism. He was deterred only by the intervention of a strong-willed, and thoroughly Labour, school governor.

My politics began spilling into my school life, to Mr Potts’s alarm. In common with other grammars, Hendon County had found itself caught up in the Labour government’s campaign to end the 11-Plus examination and move to comprehensive secondary schooling. Mr Potts was dead against this, and was horrified when Steve, Keren and I joined with our YS comrades in campaigning for an end to selection and a merger with a nearby secondary modern. He denounced us to a school assembly as ‘industrial militants trying to tear apart the fabric of our school community’ – before taking early retirement, possibly to escape the spectre of the advancing Communist hordes.

When Steve and I became prefects in the lower sixth, we found ourselves at odds with the new head teacher. This time it was over our support for a move to open up the prefects’ room to all sixth-formers, liberalise the school-uniform rules and abolish the prefects system in favour of an elected school council. For me, like my parents, the joy of politics has always been in battles of principle. In this case, it meant the dilemma of abandoning the prospect of my becoming Head Boy, with all its attendant privileges. I did end up as the first head of an elected school council instead. I confess that this brought out a less attractive aspect of my future political personality, a quality Tony Blair would call my ‘imperiousness’. I was quite the disciplinarian, sometimes unbearably bossy towards pupils in the lower forms. Still, my wider political focus remained on the world of Labour politics. In one of my more portentous YS editorials, I even sounded a clarion defence of Clause IV – the socialist economic creed that I would back Tony in ditching a quarter of a century later. I did say, however, that such high-sounding words were pointless unless our brave band of student socialists was organising and acting in the real world. We all actively supported the campaign against apartheid and subscribed to Amnesty International, and in two summer holidays I volunteered in the offices of the National Council for Civil Liberties, the forerunner of Liberty, dealing with cases usually arising from allegations of rough justice at the hands of the police.

Midway through the sixth form, Keren, Steve and I opted for a distinctly unreal world: the Young Communist League. Keren went first. The Young Communists appealed to her rebelliousness, with the added attraction, she said, that the boys were cuter. Steve and I agreed to join her at what turned out to be their annual meeting, in a rambling house in West Hampstead. As we started going to occasional branch meetings, we wound down our YS branch early in 1971. Our main formal YCL activity was to try, with indifferent success, to flog the Morning Star on Friday evenings outside Kilburn tube station. Steve and I did become stewards at the YCL national congress, at which Keren was a delegate, and was denounced as a bourgeois turncoat for speaking out against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

The biggest impact the YCL made on my life was when news got round that a local youth club was losing its premises in a church, and was eyeing a disused four-storey Victorian pub, the Winchester Arms in Swiss Cottage, as a replacement. The pub had been purchased by Camden Council years before, and left empty. I volunteered to join the members of the youth club in occupying this wonderful building and setting to work on converting it, while I negotiated with the council for a short-term lease. The project consumed the attention of my whole family. The youth leader, Graham Good, and his partner Brenda, took up residence in my parents’ home, and my father became the project’s legal trustee. The refitted building survives as a popular youth club, under voluntary rather than Communist management, to this day.

As A-levels approached, I turned my mind to life after Hendon County. With Mr Potts barely acquiescent, I had been encouraged by my economics master, Mr Brown, to apply for a place to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. Much to my surprise, I succeeded. But the closer the prospect of starting there became, the more nervous I was. There was little university, much less Oxbridge, background in my family – although Miles had broken the mould by excelling at Nottingham, and going on to Liverpool. I felt too young, too Hampstead Garden Suburban, to go up to Oxford straight away, and persuaded the college to allow me to delay a year, convincing them that I would benefit from living and working in Tanzania, where Julius Nyerere was championing a distinctly African system of village-based socialism which he called Ujamaa.

Finding a placement was not easy. Over a period of many months, I wrote dozens of letters to the government, charities, churches and voluntary organisations, all to no avail. Eventually, luck struck. One evening I heard a radio interview with the Bishop of Stepney, Trevor Huddleston, previously a bishop in southern Tanzania, and a Nyerere enthusiast who as a young pastor had been booted out of South Africa for his stand against apartheid. I wrote to him, and he invited me to see him at his home in Commercial Road. We talked for nearly an hour, during which I imagine I impressed him more by my enthusiasm than by any special knowledge or qualifications I might bring to rural Tanzania. But he generously arranged for me to work with Anglican missions in the north of the country – and even more generously, I would later discover, to pay for my room and board.

In September 1972 I boarded a flight to Nairobi, from where I would make the short turbo-prop hop to Musoma in north-western Tanzania, with a feeling of adventure and excitement. When I arrived at the Buhemba rural aid station, amid rolling hills and sweeping valleys hundreds of miles from Tanzania’s coastal capital of Dar es Salaam, I was struck by the simple beauty of my new, very un-Suburb, breeze-block home. I shared it with a VSO and a Canadian volunteer. It was lit by kerosene lamps, and we had a small gas cooker and an outdoor latrine.

Soon, however, a sense of loneliness and isolation set in. I wondered how on earth I was going to survive a year of this. Even if I were one of life’s great natural linguists, which I am not, mastery of Swahili would have been a stretch. Over time, I did acquire a rudimentary competence, but thankfully most of the Tanzanians in the mission spoke English. They helped me, and teased me, over my initial difficulties. I had no obvious common ground with the assortment of New Zealand missionaries who ran the station, kind as they were. Nothing in my upbringing had prepared me to embrace the bedrock of religious belief and purpose that defined their lives. With each passing week, however, I began to feel more a part of things. When I was not working, I wrote scores of letters home to Bigwood Road, to Steve and Keren and other friends, and of course to Bishop Huddleston. They replied with letters of their own and an endless supply of books.

We started work early each morning, and finished in midafternoon, amid the heat of the approaching southern hemisphere summer. I planted endless gum trees, determined to stay one step ahead of the rabbits as they devoured the saplings. I built chicken coops. I painted houses. I helped in the mission office, sorting the huge pile of unfiled invoices. I also spent hours talking, and listening, to the Tanzanians with whom I was working. I travelled to Nairobi to buy agricultural spare parts and, nearer home, to Musoma to stay with a charming if slightly eccentric missionary couple, the aptly named Merry and Beatrice Hart.

After four months, I left to work at the missionary-run Murgwanza Hospital in Ngara, on the far side of Lake Victoria near the border with Rwanda and Burundi. A typical day would begin at the concrete slab that served as an operating table for the ebullient English missionary doctor, Arthur Adeney. I would pump anaesthetic ether from a cylinder into a patient with a torn limb, a broken bone, or a burst appendix. If things got complicated, Arthur would have me read him the relevant passages from his university anatomy textbook while I tried to maintain my attention on the pump. The rest of my day was devoted to the dozens of young children in the hospital’s orphanage. I can still almost feel the two young sisters who waited for my arrival every afternoon clinging to me, and vividly remember their wailing when it was time for me to leave.

I thought, read and wrote a great deal during my time in Tanzania. Much of what preoccupied me was politics. This was long before the era of the internet or the mobile phone. What news we got came from the BBC World Service, the beginning of my love affair with the BBC. I read books and pamphlets by Nyerere and his TANU party thinkers, as well as other African authors. I read political novels, like Emile Zola’s Germinal and William Morris’s utopian socialist fantasy News from Nowhere. I read about Christianity, and remember being especially moved by the theologian Michael Green’s passionate statement of belief in Christ’s resurrection, Man Alive. It helped me to understand, and even at times to feel a part of, the fervency, commitment and simple goodness of the missionaries whom I was working and living with, and coming to admire. In my letters home, I tried to come to terms with what this new wash of knowledge and experience meant about the easier life I had lived, and the easier choices I had made, before living in Africa. There were times when I felt caught up in the promise of Nyerere’s Tanzanian socialism. At others, I felt swept away by the shared purpose of the missionaries – almost, but never quite, fetching up in the arms of the organised Church.

My final work in Tanzania was at the Isamilo primary school in Mwanza. It was the hardest and most demanding of all. I taught every subject to a class of forty youngsters. Teaching had seemed so easy when I was on the receiving end, but now, no matter how hard I tried, I felt there was always a child I could not reach, or a bit of knowledge I could not convey. It left me with an undying admiration for those who have a natural talent for teaching.

In the end, I also learned something else about myself. Africa would for ever be a part of my life, including but beyond the campaigning against apartheid that involved my whole family. But I knew my real home was in Britain – the country, the culture, the politics in which I had grown up. I ended my eleven months away more rounded, wiser, more grown-up – and with far more questions than answers. One of my many long letters to Steve, written shortly before my return, probably captured this best: ‘Sometimes, I reason that Tanzanian socialism is tremendous, and the only hope for development, but that socialism in England would be wholly impractical. And that we are living in an ideological cloud-cuckoo land in which England no more has a socialist future than it will fly in the air … And then I think there is a lot wrong; much injustice and unnecessary poverty and human suffering, and that something must be done about it. But how? Through the Labour Party in Parliament … or yet more words and demonstrations?’ All I knew for sure was that, anxious though I was to get home, I would feel very different when I got there from when I had left.

I was certainly no less confused when I arrived at St Catherine’s in the autumn. But the tug of politics was stronger than ever, now with a pulsating African and international dimension. Whatever I had seen and written home about to Steve and the others, it never seriously occurred to me that my political home could be anywhere other than the Labour Party. This was reinforced by the influence of a small group of second-year PPE friends with whom I soon became close. Like them, I was uneasy about taking the predictable path for a would-be Labour politician at Oxford: the Union, or the Labour Club. The first of these I neither joined nor attended. It seemed full of self-serving careerists and preening would-be Cabinet ministers – although none of them, in fact, would end up fulfilling their ambitions. The Labour Club was going through one of its periodic periods of tension between right and left, social democrats and traditionalists. This time, the right was winning. Strange as it may seem in the light of the battles I would later fight, my heart was with the traditionalists. Rather than join, I helped set up an alternative Oxford Labour Students Association. Yet although I was a member of the executive, I spent fairly little time there. With my PPE friends – Michael Attwell, who went on to a career in television; Dick Newby, who would leave Labour to join the SDP and become a Liberal Democrat peer; and the future international trade unionist David Cockroft – I became much more involved in matters overseas. I joined the United Nations Youth and Students Association, as well as a group called Young European Left. In my first year I was especially active in the political causes of southern Africa. Every week, without fail, I would travel to London, helping to organise campaigns in support of the SWAPO insurgents in Namibia, even raising £12,000 to buy a Land Rover for them.

Academically, I rather lost my footing. I suppose I assumed I would always be able to muddle through. But at the end of year one I actually failed my preliminary exam in politics, to the amazement of my tutor, Wilfrid Knapp. To this day, I am not quite sure how I managed to pass philosophy and economics; certainly my tutors, John Simopoulos and Nicholas Stern, later of climate-change fame, were not confident that I had applied myself sufficiently to their subjects. I was suddenly faced with the prospect of not only failing to excel at Oxford, but failing to clear the first hurdle. I returned early in the autumn to retake the politics exam, and for all of September I had the best time of my life at Oxford, thoroughly immersed in all the books I was supposed to have read the previous year. I was especially engrossed by analytical tomes and biographies from post-war French politics.

I passed my prelim, but while the chastening fear of being tossed out of Oxford made me conscious of needing to rein in my political activities, I never really learned that lesson completely. In my second year I became president of the Junior Common Room, which took up considerable time, though it also marked the beginning of an enduring friendship with the college’s Master, the historian Alan Bullock. Through the Young Fabians I became involved in the British Youth Council, an umbrella organisation of voluntary youth and student organisations. Each of these experiences played a role in how I did politics, and what I did in politics, after Oxford. But if I had it to do over again, there is no doubt that I would concentrate on academic matters. Every time I speak to someone who is about to go up to Oxford, or any other university, I try to pass on that lesson. Forget the politics, I tell them. And the socialising. Forget stuff like the JCR. Forget student activism. The academic opportunity – the chance to read and write, think and learn – in this artificial laboratory of the mind is the one thing that will not come your way again.

I did socialise, but not in the conventional Oxford way – the fancy-dress dinners and large college balls. I would sometimes go out with one or all of my trio of PPE friends to eat and to talk. I also became close to a lovely, warm and, to me, exotic girl named Venetia Porter, one of the first intake of young women at St Catherine’s. Venetia was studying Arabic. She had grown up in Beirut, and then moved to London, where she had gone to the French Lycée. Her parents, whom I would sometimes visit with her, were separated, and also fascinatingly different. Her father, Robert Porter, was chief economist at the Ministry of Overseas Development, and was not only good company but an occasional source of rescue and support during my economics revision. Her mother was the famous, and delightfully unconventional, dress designer Thea Porter. It was she who gave me my first taste of London Bohemian life, at the Colony Room Club in Soho, where she was a member. Venetia and I were more curious observers than participants, but the Colony included an extraordinary cast of characters, and was a world away from Junior Common Room.

For a year I shared a house with Venetia and an Arabic Studies friend. It had that special, run-down quality of Oxford student lets, but it was cosy in its own way, and Venetia’s company always brightened things up. During study breaks for her, or political breaks for me, we would cook dinner, eat out or go to parties, where we danced and danced. We even enrolled in a rock ‘n’ roll class at a dancing studio across from Balliol, on Broad Street. In my final period in government thirty years later, I would cause considerable media mirth by suggesting myself as a candidate for Strictly Come Dancing. Had the producers taken me up on the idea, I suppose I would have had to come clean about my formal training.

At the end of year two, an opportunity arose to visit Venetia’s childhood city, and the wider Middle East. In my study of economics and politics, I was spending a lot of time focusing on the region. Through my UN Association work I met Lord Caradon, Britain’s UN Ambassador in the 1960s, and he organised a sponsored fact-finding trip through the Middle East during the summer. I almost didn’t make it. As term was ending, I suddenly fell ill with a form of sleeping sickness. As far as the doctors could surmise, I had probably picked it up in Africa, perhaps while rashly swimming in Lake Victoria, a notorious incubator for bilharzia, or when, in Ngara, I had waded through a swamp, swatting off tsetse flies, into Rwanda. Whatever the cause, I found myself in bed in Bigwood Road, unable to get up for nearly a month. At the suggestion of Venetia’s mother, my father took me to see a homeopath in Welbeck Street. It seemed to help, a bit. But it was mainly my determination not to miss the Middle East trip that gave me the energy to make my way to Heathrow.

As I set off, I carried with me the echoes of my father’s emotional ties with Israel. Even the most unobservant or deracinated British Jew felt a bond with the Jewish state. Especially having lived through the period of the Holocaust and Israel’s post-war creation, my father was no exception. The only time during my childhood when I can recall him being explicitly, overtly Jewish was when I was thirteen – during the pre-emptive Six-Day War that Israel launched against Egypt, Jordan and Syria after Nasser’s forces had begun massing on the Sinai border. In October 1973, just as I was starting at Oxford, Syria and Egypt joined in a surprise attack on Israel timed to coincide with the Jewish festival of Yom Kippur. Israel prevailed again, but this time it was a much more costly and close-run battle. My own views were broadly pro-Israel, but my St Catherine’s PPE friends had exposed me to the Arab side of the argument, and especially to the Palestinian cause.

My first stop was Egypt, followed by Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and finally Israel. Since the Arab League had helped set up the tour, I managed to see a range of government officials, and King Hussein of Jordan’s brother, the then Crown Prince Hassan. But the most memorable part of the trip was in Beirut, shortly before the civil war broke out between right-wing Christian militias and the pro-Palestinian Muslim left. Since their expulsion from Jordan after the 1970 civil war there, the political seat of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah and the other Palestinian military groups had been in Lebanon. I had a fascinating lunch with the Guardian’s Beirut correspondent, the quietly spoken yet passionately pro-Palestinian David Hirst. I also visited one of the Palestinian refugee camps along the road to Beirut airport, just inland from the Mediterranean.