The Third Man: Life at the Heart of New Labour

That evening I wrote home: ‘The conditions are as gruesome as reported. Thousands of people living in unbearably cramped conditions … Of course, they will not leave the camps until they are given the opportunity to return to Palestine. It is the middle-aged and younger ones who seem most committed to return to Palestine. They are good-humoured, patient and with a will of steel. It is a desperate situation.’ I recognised that Israel’s situation was not easy either. I certainly did not take a ‘return to Palestine’ to mean the end of Israel, any more than my father did. But that the Palestinians had a national identity, and national cause, of their own seemed to me unarguable. When I returned to England I wrote an article for the Jewish Chronicle. Its message seems pretty unexceptional now, but it was less so then, especially for an Anglo-Jewish community audience. It was that until there were two states, one Israeli and the other Palestinian, there would never be peace for either people.

Back at Oxford, I again found myself practising politics as much as studying it. Labour had returned to power, as a minority government, the previous year, and although I was not yet sure exactly what I would do after university, I knew I wanted a future that involved working with Labour – or ideally in Labour – and shaping its policy. Having become more deeply involved in the British Youth Council, I became its vice-chairman in early 1976, and national chair two years later. Beyond the invigorating policy work we did, the BYC brought me into contact with a number of people who would influence me in one way or another throughout my political life. None was more dazzling to me at the time than Shirley Williams, Education Secretary in Jim Callaghan’s government, who had been a political protégée of my grandfather and who I first met at a conference on ‘young people in post-industrial society’ at Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire. Shirley was bright, attractive, and had the extraordinary talent of both talking and listening to young would-be politicians as if they were the fully finished article. She was also a modern, outward-looking, pro-European Labour politician who knew where and how elections were won – by appealing to mainstream voters on the centre ground. When I had shied away from joining the Labour Club on arriving at Oxford, it was because of the sterile stand-off between careerists on the ‘right’ and ‘left’ of the party. Shirley was no conventional right-winger. She seemed to epitomise a liberal, thinking core in the party that recognised a need to combine our traditional values with policies that were relevant to a changing world.

As BYC head, I also met and worked with leaders of the National Union of Students. The NUS chair when I first got involved was a burly lad who had grown up down the road from me in Hampstead Garden Suburb. I had known Charles Clarke and his brothers, but not to speak to: they were Highgate School boys. The more I worked with Charles in my BYC role, the more I liked him. I worked even more closely with one of his NUS colleagues, the then-Communist and future journalist David Aaronovitch. He was engaging, funny, and obviously clever enough to accomplish anything he set his mind to. But it was Charles with whom I would interact most often and most closely in later years: first, by Neil Kinnock’s side in the 1980s, and then in government, in New Labour.

My first job after university was in a distinctly Old Labour environment. I knew that if I wanted a future in the Labour Party, the most realistic route was through the trade union movement. Without the help of Alan Bullock, I would not have got the post I did six months after leaving Oxford. At the time, he was chairing a government inquiry on industrial democracy. It is hard to say whether it was behind or ahead of its time. One of the less fruitful concessions made to the trade unions, it proposed installing union representatives on the boards of British companies. The idea never caught on. But one of the inquiry panel’s members was the head of the TUC’s economic department, David Lea, and Alan successfully put in a word for me.

Congress House in Great Russell Street was more than just a union headquarters, and the economic department was more than a policy talking-shop. Listening as my new department bosses peremptorily demanded to talk with this Labour Cabinet minister or that, or acting as designated note-taker in an endless series of bargaining meetings between trade union general secretaries and senior ministers, I had a crash course in how power was then wielded inside Labour. It left an indelible impression on me, and a lesson in how not to run the country. The process was a product of a ‘corporatist’ approach in which government, business and trade unions carved up the decision-making and attempted to run the economy – investment, prices and incomes – among themselves. It was an idea whose time had gone, if it ever arrived.

The government was struggling, not least with controlling wages and inflation. It was a battle that had already seen Denis Healey forced to go to the IMF for a bailout, and that would end two years later in the Winter of Discontent and the arrival in Downing Street of Mrs Thatcher. Congress House routinely demanded policy tradeoffs for any government move to put the economy in order. Almost invariably, it got them. The TUC–Labour Liaison Committee was effectively the executive committee of government. Great Russell Street virtually shared sovereignty with Downing Street. More often, it seemed to be calling the shots.

This might have been heady stuff had I seen my future as a trade union power-broker. But the claustrophobic life of the TUC was not for me. Although I worked hard, my heart was in my role with the BYC. I had researched and written a BYC policy report called ‘Youth Unemployment: Causes and Cures’, and was a founding member of a pressure group we helped set up called Youthaid, which was intent on getting the government to do more to help the young unemployed. We called for more intervention to ensure that school-leavers had relevant training and skills, and that the national economy prioritised securing them jobs.

The beginning of the end of my glittering career in the trade union movement came when I and two colleagues were asked by the Prime Minister’s political adviser, Tom McNally, now a Liberal Democrat peer and government member, to come to Number 10 to discuss the BYC report with Jim Callaghan. This was my first visit to the Cabinet Room since I had strayed into it during my youthful excursion to view Trooping the Colour, and the Prime Minister and the other ministers with him were polite and receptive to our proposals. It was also my first encounter with Albert Booth, then the Employment Secretary, who would later employ me as his research assistant. My invitation to Number 10 put the TUC headquarters into a major tailspin. If anyone went to talk policy in Downing Street, they made it clear, it should be the top union brass, certainly not some young scribe from the economic department. Responsibility for youth unemployment policy belonged to the TUC’s Organisation Department. Before long, it was clear that I would have to choose between my union job and youth politics.

With the approach of the World Youth and Student Festival in Cuba in the summer of 1978, I handed in my notice. The idea of lending the presence of the flower of British youth to a transparent Soviet-bloc propaganda exercise was always going to be controversial, and we debated for months whether or not to attend. In the end we decided that our independent, Western, non-Communist voice should receive a hearing, although the Conservatives on the BYC voted against. There was considerable media criticism of our plans to participate, but the Foreign Secretary, David Owen, gave us a nod of approval, and Charles Clarke, freshly graduated from the NUS, took up residence in Havana as a member of the preparatory committee. I headed the national delegation with an NUS leader who soon became a friend, Trevor Phillips.

We went. We saw. We did not exactly conquer. Yet Trevor and I did manage to cajole, convince, outmanoeuvre or outvote a sizeable pro-Soviet – in some cases, pro-Stalinist – core in the British delegation, whose fervour was being whipped up by a slightly older ‘visitor’ to the festival, the Yorkshire miners’ union leader Arthur Scargill. Cuba was also my first experience of dealing with the press. The term ‘spin doctor’ did not exist then, and even if it had, I could hardly have imagined that one day I would come to embody it. Yet each day I would go to the Havana Libre hotel to brief British journalists on our pro-freedom, pro-human-rights agenda. It was there that I learned three basic rules of spin-doctoring that remained with me. Don’t overclaim. Be factual. And never arrive at a briefing without a story.

Most of the critics back home ended up being supportive, and not a little surprised by how well the British delegation had acquitted itself. The Foreign Office, too. Our trip had begun with a huge opening ceremony at Havana’s main stadium. As we entered I was asked to hold our large Union Jack banner while its bearer blew his nose. At that very moment an official appeared and led me away to a designated area where I was obliged to hold it aloft for an agonising three and a half hours while Fidel Castro delivered one of his shorter addresses. The visit ended with a reception at the British Embassy in Havana.

When I got back home, I was jobless. But not idle. Not only was I still national chair of the BYC, but once again Alan Bullock came to my rescue, fixing me up with a research project at the Aspen Institute in Berlin, on youth unemployment across Europe. I also moved house, swapping the lodger’s room I had taken in Hackney after university for a tiny flat in Kennington, in south London, from where I watched the unhappy unravelling of the Callaghan government as the May 1979 general election approached.

I loved my little studio apartment. It also turned out to be life-changing politically. Occupying a much larger flat in the same block was Roger Liddle, whom I met through the local Labour Party branch. We not only struck up an instant rapport – his knowledge of, and commitment to, Labour equalled my own – but began a lifelong collaboration in politics. Roger held out the added fascination of being a political adviser to a real-life cabinet member, the Transport Secretary William Rodgers. As the election drew nearer, the question was how long Roger, or his boss, or any Labour minister, would still have a job. The omens were dire. The IMF bailout, and then the union chaos that I had watched at first-hand in the run-up to the crippling strikes of the Winter of Discontent, had left Labour stumbling towards the finishing line.

I was at the Aspen Institute in the week of the election, and arrived back at Heathrow on the morning after. Labour’s defeat, however unsurprising, was depressing enough for me on its own. But on the tube from the airport I saw a story in the Stop Press of the late edition of the Evening Standard that hit me even harder. Shirley Williams, a kind of political pin-up in my eyes since I had first met her, had lost her seat. For me, Shirley represented everything in the Labour Party that I admired, and wanted to follow. I was so shocked by her defeat that I dropped my duty-free bag, and the bottle of wine inside it shattered on the carriage floor.

After the defeat, Roger and I commiserated with each other about the advent of a right-wing Tory government under Margaret Thatcher. We also talked, often long into the night, about the prospect of Labour finding a way back to national power. In Lambeth, where we lived, Labour appeared headed in the opposite direction. ‘Red’ Ted Knight had become council leader the year before. He was very much part of the hard-left vanguard about which Hans Janitschek had warned, and Harold Wilson had dithered, in the early 1970s. Ted favoured ever-higher council rates for an ever-growing series of spending commitments, as the Tory government steadily drained resources from local services.

The council ward where Roger and I lived, Princes, was dominated by Trotskyites. If Lambeth was to become a model for the future of the Labour Party, we would surely be settling in for a long, perhaps permanent, spell out of power. I remember being warned by a local Labour activist as we canvassed in a local estate one Sunday morning that the party must at all costs avoid ‘compromising with the electorate’. My local comrades had absolutely clear views. Criminals were victims of the capitalist system. The police were agents of repression. Riots were popular uprisings against capitalist injustice.

Often Roger and I would go out to the local pub with members of the beleaguered Labour mainstream to lick our political wounds. When a council seat suddenly became vacant at the end of 1979 in Stockwell, one of the few wards where moderates still had a wafer-thin majority, I was narrowly selected to stand for Labour. For the next two and a half years, along with my fellow Stockwell moderate Paul Ormerod, I was part of Ted Knight’s increasingly Soviet-style Labour group on the council. I suppose on some level I saw this as a first, small step towards a more grown-up role in Labour. My grandfather had been born in Lambeth, and began his political life as a councillor. There was still a Herbert Morrison primary school in Stockwell, and the rather down-at-heel Lord Morrison of Lambeth pub. However complex my views about my grandfather as a person, given the effects of his political life on my mother, I had grown up aware of his opinions and achievements, and admiring them. The defining battle in the Labour Party during the late 1920s and 1930s had pitted him against Ernest Bevin. While Bevin was a down-the-middle trade union man, my grandfather argued robustly – too robustly for Bevin – that to become a party of government, Labour had to represent more than just the unions, more indeed than just the working class. It had to be national, not sectional, and appeal to the growing middle class.

That fight was clearly still not won, certainly not in Lambeth. Mostly, my time as a councillor was an education. I was not a terribly effective brake on the Labour group’s march to the drumbeat of revolution, although I did rise briefly to the dizzying office of chairman of the Town Planning Applications Subcommittee. That was only for a year, and only because one of Ted’s lieutenants was in the lavatory as the Labour group was balloting on that minor post.

I rarely broke ranks on council votes, if only because I recognised that our divisions would be the Tories’ gain. In our internal caucuses, however, I was much more forthright. I argued that our far-left rhetorical indulgence would do little to improve the lot of the residents who had voted for us, but would slowly, surely convince most of them that we didn’t care about, or understand, their lives. Ted would almost invariably open the next meeting by glaring in turn at me and the other recalcitrants, and saying: ‘Certain comrades are misperceiving the situation …’ The atmosphere was very intimidating. The hard left was not only hard in its politics, it was even harder on those who didn’t toe the line.

After the 1981 Brixton riots, I could hold my tongue no longer. Ted called for the police to withdraw from the streets, accusing them of ‘concentration camp’ tactics of surveillance. Asked for a comment by a local reporter, I replied: ‘Given the choice between having the Labour Party and Ted Knight in the borough, or the police, 99 per cent of the population would vote for the police.’ I joined my two fellow Stockwell Labour councillors in a broader attack a few months later. ‘The Labour group has conspicuously failed to convince its electorate that maintaining its high level of expenditure is desirable or practical,’ we said. ‘The publicity-seeking statements of the council’s leader have come to symbolise the waywardness and irrelevance of the Labour Party for working-class people.’

Part of the reason for my more open frustration over the excesses of the far left was that, for the first time, I had become involved in national Labour politics. In the autumn of 1980 I was hired as a researcher by the Shadow Transport Secretary Albert Booth. I was followed into the opposition offices only weeks later by Charles Clarke, who went to work for Neil Kinnock, then Shadow Education Secretary. The idea of working at this level of Labour politics, even as a lowly researcher, was exciting in itself. But before I took up my role, a generous gift from Roger elevated it to an entirely different level. When the Tories won the election, he had taken with him several boxloads of the policy papers he had accumulated at the Department of Transport. This wasn’t strictly legal, and I only hope the statute of limitations on whatever crime he committed has long since lapsed. The effect on me, as I read folder after folder, was electrifying. I still remember the thrill I felt at being able to see how policy was made, the way in which different options were evaluated, advanced or abandoned. It was the first time I had seen the raw material of government. It not only fascinated me, it made me want to be a part of it, and all the more upset at those in the party who were making the likelihood of a future Labour administration ever more remote.

I enjoyed my eighteen months in the shadow cabinet corridor at the Commons. Albert Booth was an engineering draughtsman who had entered Labour politics as a Tynemouth councillor, and had become MP for Barrow-in-Furness in north-west England. He was also a favoured protégé of Michael Foot, who succeeded Jim Callaghan as Labour leader a few weeks after I started in my job. On the day of Michael’s victory, I remember Frank Dobson, later Tony Blair’s Health Secretary, standing in the doorway of the modest office Albert and I shared and punching the air with excitement. ‘Michael’s done it!’ he shouted with joy. ‘We’re on our way!’ Where to, exactly, remained to be seen.

I worked hard in my role, both for Albert and with his slightly rambunctious number two on the front bench, the Hull MP John Prescott. Albert and John, like Michael Foot, were on the moderate, Tribunite left of Labour. They were also disinclined, and by this time probably unable, to take on the rising influence of Tony Benn and the more assertive far left. At party conference just days before I began my job, Benn had brought delegates surging to their feet with his vision of what a Labour government would do, within days, once it got rid of Thatcher and the Tories: nationalise industries, pull out of Europe, abandon the nuclear deterrent and shut down the House of Lords. I wanted to get Thatcher and the Tories out no less than Tony Benn did, but I couldn’t imagine that was the way to do it.

I gravitated towards a much more experienced researcher down the hallway from our office named David Hill, and his boss, the Shadow Environment Secretary Roy Hattersley, as well as to Shadow Foreign Secretary Peter Shore and his researcher David Cowling. Together, we helped to organise the Labour Solidarity Campaign, run by the indefatigable Mary Goudie, which was intended as a counterweight to the Bennites, to give heart to the moderates and keep them in the party. With David Cowling and an intelligent, iconoclastic and occasionally irritatingly self-possessed Labour MP named Frank Field, I also joined efforts to press for a change in the Labour rulebook. Well before it became a cause célèbre for New Labour modernisers, we pressed for the introduction of one-member-one-vote democracy in the party.

There was also a familiar re-education in the power of the unions. Albert’s portfolio meant dealing with endless disputes involving the railway workers, and I vividly recall a slightly surreal morning when Albert and I were called in to see Michael Foot. He suggested we all go off to Rail House in Euston and try to get the chairman of British Rail, Peter Parker, to compromise with the rail drivers’ union in their dispute over ‘flexible rostering’, a fancy term for more time off for the same pay. The three of us piled into a taxi at the Commons with Michael’s dog, for some reason, yapping at his ankles. We drew up at Rail House to the surprise and bemusement of all, went in to see Peter Parker, and spectacularly failed to get him to agree to the train drivers’ demands.

By this time, some at the top of the party had had enough of Labour’s drift into the vote-losing wilderness, and were especially alarmed at the growing prospect of the Bennites driving Labour ever further out of the mainstream. Six months after I started working for Albert, four leading Labour lights broke away to form the new Social Democratic Party. Former Foreign Secretary David Owen was one of the ‘Gang of Four’, as were Roy Jenkins, the former Home Secretary who had just completed his term as President of the European Commission, and Roger Liddle’s former boss, Bill Rodgers. The cabinet minister whom I had most admired, Shirley Williams, was the fourth.

Years later, when I was fighting my campaign for selection as a Labour parliamentary candidate, supporters of my main rival would spread the rumour that I too had come close to joining the SDP. That was not quite true, but I did share much of their vision of what a modern left-of-centre party should be, that it should fight for fairness and opportunity, appeal to the centre ground and stand up for national rather than sectional interests. These would become New Labour principles, too. I fully understood the reasons Roger joined Bill Rodgers in the SDP, not just because of their personal friendship, but because both were acting from the values that had brought them into a different Labour Party in the first place. But the ‘religion’ of Labour had come to me too early in life, and was too much a part of me, for me to go with him. The SDP breakaway did have a major impact on me. The decision I faced, however, was not whether to abandon Labour, but how best to continue fighting for a modern, moderate Labour Party against the challenge of the infantile but hard-nosed left.

In fact, there was one point at which I did feel very close to having to leave Labour. It came six months after the SDP had formed, when Tony Benn contested the deputy leadership against Denis Healey, the former Chancellor who was carrying the hopes of the moderates. I still remember arriving in Brighton for the party conference on a Sunday evening at the end of September, when the result would be announced. Many of my Labour friends, and many Labour MPs, were collectively holding their breath. I got the sense that they had not unpacked their bags, and that if Benn won they would simply leave for London, and very probably leave the party as well. I believe that a Benn victory would have led to a kind of tectonic political shift. The moderate, sensible centre of Labour, including many trade unionists, who like my grandfather saw us as a party of government, could very well have left en masse for the Social Democrats, and reformed the Labour Party in that shell. Frankly, I suspect that I would have joined them. A Benn victory would have sealed the ascendancy of the left, and set us on a path towards extremism, unelectability and irrelevance. Denis Healey won, but by less than 1 per cent of the vote. That meant the Labour Party I loved was not dead. But it was still on life support.

The immediate political decision I had to take was really no decision at all. An election for my Lambeth council seat was approaching, but I no longer had the stomach for my role as designated class enemy in Ted Knight’s political fiefdom. Both of my parents had taken pride in my first step on the political ladder, my father in particular, although he was maddeningly prone to telling me I was being too hard on ‘Red’ Ted when I brought back stories of the latest council excesses. They had also taken pride in my work with Albert Booth, but even my father recognised that Labour, in its current state, did not offer much cause for optimism. My mother, in her common-sensical way, pointed out that the party probably wouldn’t be able to offer her son a stable source of income in the foreseeable future. Perhaps, she suggested gently, it might be time for me to find a ‘real’ job.

I did. I finally left my job with Albert Booth in early 1982 – not for another party, but for what Charles Clarke described, rather disparagingly, as the ‘media route’. The most serious current affairs department in British commercial TV, at London Weekend Television, was advertising for additional staff. Trevor Phillips was already working there, and my other old BYC friend David Aaronovitch and I both applied. David got the plum job, at Brian Walden’s flagship Weekend World. One need only look at David’s later career as a political writer on national newspapers to see that it was the right call. I was hired too, beginning as a researcher on The London Programme, but following David some months later into Weekend World.