The Third Man: Life at the Heart of New Labour

In between, I was assigned to the team covering the London battlegrounds in the 1983 general election. Much as I wanted to see Labour back in Downing Street, it was obvious that we were going to lose. The country was finally coming out of a brutal recession, and Mrs Thatcher was riding on the crest of victory in the Falklands War. Our manifesto was essentially an expanded version of Tony Benn’s battle cry to the 1980 party conference, with the additional promise of sky-high taxes for good measure. ‘The longest suicide note in history,’ it was called by Gerald Kaufman, the witty, waspish and wise Manchester MP who would become an ally in efforts to move Labour back towards the mainstream. In fact, the manifesto wasn’t all that long. But it was suicidal. We were not merely defeated, we were routed. In Labour’s worst result since the First World War, we haemorrhaged three million votes, and gifted the Tories a Commons majority of 144 seats.

Working for television turned out to be a – arguably the – major turning point in my political career. The knowledge I picked up of politics from the other side of the camera demystified the whole process for me. In covering the election, I got a close-up look at the Labour campaign machine, if you could call it that. It was fascinating, if hugely disheartening, and would soon prove indispensable in framing my own efforts to head off a similar débâcle for Labour next time round. I also made good and lasting friends, including John Birt, then LWT’s Director of Programmes, and Robin Paxton, a senior Weekend World editor who would play a critical role when I went to work for Labour again.

Two of the final programmes I produced drew me steadily in that direction. The first came in the wake of the 1983 election collapse. It was about Neil Kinnock, the Welsh MP I had got to know when I was working for Albert, and Neil was Shadow Education Secretary. After the election he had replaced Michael Foot as Labour leader, and he had begun the work of trying to rescue and rebuild the defeated and dejected party. The second was more broadly about the changing political landscape, exploring signs of disillusionment with Mrs Thatcher, the emergence of the SDP, and the prospects for a Labour revival. Watching tapes of these programmes now, I am struck by my underlying optimism. Naïvety, perhaps, would be a better word. I truly believed that Neil’s leadership could mark at least the start of Labour’s comeback. I felt a growing desire to come back myself as well.

My return began in a restaurant in Pimlico, shortly after Weekend World went off the air for its summer break. During my three years at LWT, I had remained in touch with Charles Clarke, and every six months or so we had lunch together. He was still with Neil. When we met in the summer of 1985, I told him how much I missed fulltime politics. He suggested I help out in a forthcoming parliamentary by-election in the Welsh constituency of Brecon and Radnor. ‘It’s in the neighbourhood,’ he added, referring to a little two-up, two-down cottage I had purchased the year before near the Welsh border. If nothing else, television paid better than politics. My salary had risen to the princely sum of £31,000, and a return to Labour, no matter what role I played, would pay nothing like that amount. That I never gave this much thought was a measure of the eagerness I felt to be part of the party’s recovery and reconstruction.

I had already planned to be at the cottage for the summer, and I leapt at the opportunity to help out in the campaign. When I arrived, however, it was not really a campaign. There were lots of people at the local HQ, but no single person in charge, no strategy, no plan of action. I was deputised to accompany our candidate, Richard Willey. A writer and educationist, he was the son of the long-serving Sunderland MP and future Labour chairman Fred Willey – also a distinguished resident of Hampstead Garden Suburb. Richard and I immediately took to each other. I helped plan his appearances and speeches, advised him on how to handle himself with the local press, and kept his spirits up as we travelled around the large constituency. All of this was good experience that would come in handy in my later political life.

It was a solid, professional campaign, eventually. It also ended in defeat. The Tories lost the seat, but by a narrow margin we were outpolled by the Liberal candidate. The turning point came a few days before the election, and probably should have served as a warning as I embarked on my return to active Labour politics. With the miners’ strike only recently over, Arthur Scargill publicly demanded that a future Labour government release all those who had been detained during the strike, and reimburse the union for all the money it had cost.

I was not to be deterred, however. Charles told me during a campaign visit that the Publicity Director at national party headquarters had left, and was to be replaced by an overall Director of Campaigns and Communications. It seemed like the perfect job for me. When I told him I wanted to go for it, Charles said that by all means I should do so. He added, however, that there would be other strong candidates. I later discovered that despite this note of caution, Charles argued my case strongly with Neil. The evening before the selection meeting in front of Labour’s full thirty-member National Executive Committee, Neil made it clear to colleagues that I was his preferred choice.

Roy Hattersley, now his deputy and Shadow Chancellor, also backed me to the hilt. I had remained in touch with Roy during my time at LWT. After the 1983 election I had spent most of my free hours helping David Hill organise and support Roy’s campaign for the leadership. I saw him as a more experienced and more rounded figure than Neil, and a better bulwark against the Bennites. I had a further referee in John Prescott, who provided a supportive reference, although with a cryptic handwritten postscript: ‘Peter will do the job fine, as long as he keeps his nose out of the politics.’

I got the job, but only just. A mere handful of votes decided it. Two NEC members in particular would go on to help not just me but the broader push for change in Labour: the Crewe MP Gwyneth Dunwoody, who was in charge of the publicity subcommittee, and a forward-looking trade union leader named Tom Sawyer, General Secretary of Labour by the time of the 1997 election.

In my presentation to the NEC, I had echoed the optimism I felt in my final months at LWT. I argued that in the two years since our general election drubbing, the popular mood had begun to change. There was a new scepticism about the Tory government. If Labour could project a more popular, relevant, united message – and modernise its communications ideas and strategies – we would have an opportunity to recover momentum, and power. I genuinely believed this. Yet nothing in my apprenticeship since leaving Oxford – my experience of the TUC, ‘Red’ Ted and Lambeth, my work with Albert Booth or Weekend World – had prepared me for how difficult it would prove, or how long it would take.

3

A Brilliant Defeat

From the outside, 150 Walworth Road, near the Elephant and Castle in south London, was a handsome, red-brick battleship of a building. On the inside, it perfectly mirrored the party for which it was the national headquarters. The cramped offices, smoky hallways and paper-strewn conference rooms were disjointed and dishevelled. So was the machinery through which Labour made and presented what passed for policy. My cubbyhole consisted of a wobbly chair, a dodgy-looking three-legged table wedged up against the filing cabinet to balance it, a World War II-vintage intercom, and a dying spider plant on the windowsill behind me.

Barely two years had passed since our collapse at the polls. Michael Foot had retreated to the backbenches. He took the blame for the rout, but it more properly belonged to the party’s real masters: the Trotskyite entryists organised in Militant, and the ‘softer’, or at least subtler, leftists whom Tony Benn had been rallying ever since we lost power in 1979 – in fact, ever since we had lost power under Harold Wilson in 1970. The idea of Labour as a party of government, with any regard for what voters might actually feel, had been abandoned. Neil Kinnock, however, was now leader, and it was clear he saw the need for change.

A few days before I started work in October 1985, Neil had shown the flair, and the guts, that this was surely going to require. At the party conference in Bournemouth he had thundered against the hard-left Labour council in Liverpool, the epitome of how out of touch we had become. As I heard him speak, I couldn’t help but think back to Ted Knight and the Socialist Republic of Lambeth. ‘I’ll tell you what happens with impossible promises,’ Neil had said. ‘You start with farfetched resolutions. They are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and you go through the years sticking to that – outdated, misplaced, irrelevant to real needs. You end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council – a Labour council – hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers. I’m telling you – and you’ll listen – you can’t play politics with people’s jobs, and with people’s services!’ How long had I waited for a Labour leader to say that? The fight was on for a Labour Party that again served, and connected with, the interests of the people of Britain. A few weeks short of my thirty-second birthday, I was excited to become a part of it.

I arrived at Walworth Road with two all-consuming aims. The first was to do well at my new job. Despite my brave, and evidently successful, effort to sound supremely self-confident before the interview panel, I feared that I was supremely unqualified. Three years’ experience producing cerebral political television would not necessarily equip me to manage all of Labour’s day-to-day communications with an almost universally hostile press. It certainly hadn’t given me the skills or the experience to handle the other half of my brief: every aspect of the party’s campaigning, from pamphlets, posters and policy launches to preparations for a general election that was probably less than two years away. My other goal was to play my part in ensuring that Neil Kinnock’s vision of Labour, not Tony Benn’s or Ted Knight’s, won out. That would turn out to be harder still.

Tony Benn’s Bristol South-East constituency had been abolished by boundary changes before the 1983 election, and he had failed to be selected for the replacement seat, so it had been left to Party Chairman Eric Heffer to carry the Bennite banner in the contest for leader. With Labour still in collective shock from the scale of our defeat, Neil trounced Heffer. His only serious challenger, Roy Hattersley, was from the right of the party. But Benn was back now, having been returned to the Commons in a by-election at Chesterfield in March 1984, and was de facto leader of a vocal leftist core on the NEC. The traumatic year-long miners’ strike had also hurt Labour, and Neil. The party was again associated in the public mind with the vote-killers of 1983: ideological infighting, rhetorical excesses and trade union militancy. Neil would later say he wished he had got on top of the issue at the start, by denouncing the NUM for having failed to hold a proper national ballot. Instead, he was left twisting in the wind, feeling he couldn’t support the strike, and couldn’t disavow it either. The only benefit from his months of agony was that he and those around him had used the period to plan for a fightback against the far left, and a determined effort to reposition the party. Neil’s assault on Militant at the party conference had been the first step.

It is difficult to convey, twenty-five years on, how enormous the obstacles were. The Bennites and their fellow travellers were not the only barrier to the huge repair job we faced. Their Old Socialist certitudes had a resonance that went beyond their core supporters. Even many who understood that a state-run economy, unquestioned support for the unions or unilateral nuclear disarmament were impractical in late-twentieth-century Britain – and that they were certainly a guarantee that we would not get back into government – felt them to be somehow authentically Labour. With the radical conservatism of Mrs Thatcher taking hold in Downing Street, and Ronald Reagan’s in the White House, they felt almost automatically that we should be on the other side of the argument.

And it was an argument. Since September 1981 a group of passionately anti-nuclear women had planted themselves in a ‘peace camp’ at the RAF base at Greenham Common in Berkshire, in protest against the US Cruise missiles that were stationed there. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was enjoying a new lease of life. Mrs Thatcher was not only standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Reagan in agreeing to base US nuclear missiles in Britain. As she embarked on large-scale privatisation of the core of the old state economy, and curbed trade union strike powers, the default position for many in Labour was that whatever the Tories were for, we must be against. I understood this impulse. From my own Labour background, I knew it was part of the glue that held the whole party together. I recalled my own childhood experience of the annual disarmament marches from the nuclear research base at Aldermaston to Trafalgar Square. My family never marched, but in our own Labour Suburb way, we would pack my father’s Sunbeam with a roast-chicken picnic, drive to the outer reaches of the capital and watch as the throng made its way towards its final rallying point.

The problem was that a modern, relevant Labour Party could not operate on atavistic instinct. We could not make policy on the simple basis that everything that the Tory government – a comfortably re-elected Tory government – did was wrong. That risked not just failing to take on board policies that might be right, but could leave us opposing policies of far greater benefit to our own voters than anything we were offering. That was clearly the case with Mrs Thatcher’s programme to allow millions of council tenants to buy their own homes.

The structure of the party, too, was unrecognisably different then. As leader, Neil was in charge. Up to a point. The National Executive Committee, and indeed party conference, nowadays hold only nominal sway over policy. The trade unions wield nothing like the block-vote power they did then. But when I moved into my tiny third-floor office at Labour HQ, their influence was very real. The NEC, in particular, was the final voice on everything from paperclips to policy on nuclear weapons.

My immediate boss was the party’s new General Secretary, Larry Whitty. Over time, Larry and I would develop a good working relationship, but at the beginning we were on different wavelengths. A lifelong trade union man, he had a sentimental attachment to many of the policies and practices of Labour as it then was, and felt a kind of deference towards Tony Benn. I had been, at best, his second choice for the job. He had hoped for Nita Clarke, Ken Livingstone’s press chief at the Greater London Council, and would almost surely also have preferred David Gow, the Scotsman’s labour correspondent. At least Larry did not share the hostility of many others in Labour to modern communications techniques, which were seen as somehow Tory, and unclean. But he did worry that the changes I might bring about in Labour’s policy presentation would impact on the policies themselves, and that I would tread on the toes of those formally in charge of making them in the NEC. He was nervous that, as John Prescott had warned, I would ‘put my nose in the politics’. In this, Larry got me absolutely right.

Despite my private doubts, from the moment I arrived at Walworth Road I projected a sense of confidence. Partly, this was bravado. Partly, it was because I knew that any chance of my succeeding depended on it. But in one crucial sense I was confident. I was absolutely secure in my conviction that as long as we were saddled with the policies, the mindset and the public image that had led to our débâcle in 1983, Labour would never again be a party of government. And I was absolutely determined to help pull us back from oblivion. I may have lacked experience, even skills, at the start. But I did know what was wrong. Most of Britain’s voters, and almost all of the media, disliked us. Worse, they had simply stopped listening to what we said, or at least taking it seriously. My work in television had given me insight into and experience of modern communications. My job, which I set out to accomplish with a drive that sometimes bordered on obsession, was to make everything about Labour look and sound modern too.

I began, as I did whenever I embarked on a new job throughout my political life, by learning what I didn’t know, focusing on the most pressing problems, and taking early steps to fix them. I was very fortunate to know – or at least to have met – someone who I hoped could help me with all of this. I was first brought together with Philip Gould by Robin Paxton when I was at Weekend World. Philip was ‘in advertising’, Robin told me. He was clever, and a passionate Labour supporter. We met briefly before I left LWT, at a dinner hosted by Philip’s then girlfriend, an up-and-coming publisher named Gail Rebuck. In the intervening year, life had changed for all of us. The small firm Gail had co-founded, Century Press, had done so well that it took over the larger, better-known Hutchinson. She and Philip had married. Philip had set up his own communications consultancy. And I was at Walworth Road. Now, we arranged to talk again, over dinner at Robin’s home in Islington.

With his mop of long hair and oversized glasses, Philip made an extraordinary impression. I don’t know whether it was shyness or single-mindedness, but he barely made eye contact as he expounded for well over an hour on what was wrong with Labour’s image, presentation and political strategy, and how to begin fixing them. I had no way of knowing at that point where Philip might fit into that process, but in advance of our meeting he had sent me an eleven-page letter about how he might help me overhaul Labour’s presentational machinery. We discussed it at Robin’s dinner, and in much greater detail in the days that followed. A few weeks later, I took my first big decision. With a cheque for £600, a sizeable chunk of my budget, I commissioned Philip to conduct a stock-take of Labour’s communications and campaigning. Larry, to my relief, signed off on the idea. It would prove to be the best investment I ever made.

The party already had a contract with a public opinion agency, MORI. Our pollster-in-chief was its American-born chairman, Bob Worcester. His role was essentially to poll, crunch the numbers, deliver and explain the results. Philip was different. He reached beyond traditional opinion polls, assembling ‘focus groups’ to explain why people felt as they did about a policy issue or a political party, how this fitted into what they valued or wanted in their lives, and what it might take to change their minds. He gave Labour, and British politics, its first taste of rigorous, American-style political consultancy. By the time he delivered his sixty-four-page report in December, I knew what its main thrust would be, as I had been among the three dozen people – including Larry and senior colleagues at Walworth Road, and other figures in politics, the media and marketing – to whom he spoke in preparing it. He and I were meeting regularly. The core challenge was obvious to both of us. Labour had to stop seeing communications as something we did with, or to, ourselves. We could no longer, as my canvassing colleague in that council estate in Lambeth had put it, ‘refuse to compromise with the electorate’.

Looking back on the notes of my early conversations with Philip, I am struck not only by my concern about the obvious policy vulnerabilities that had hurt us in 1983. I felt there was a deeper problem: our inability to meet people’s concerns on basic issues affecting their daily lives: health, social services, housing benefits, the economy – and crime, or as I put it to Philip, ‘making people secure in their homes and on the streets’. We could produce policy reports, or catchy ideological prescriptions, but even our traditional supporters were no longer listening. Significant numbers of the ‘working class’ had turned away from Labour and backed the SDP in 1983. Many more had supported Mrs Thatcher. Faced with a choice between a dogmatic, ideologically pure socialism or a Prime Minister, even a Tory Prime Minister, who had allowed them to buy their council houses, it was no choice at all. ‘It’s not just a question of having a neat little formulation extracted from some document placed before the Home Policy Committee of the NEC, or some neat way of saying “You’re number one with Labour”,’ I wrote to Philip. ‘We can’t just get an NHS ambulance with a sticker saying “I Love the Welfare State” and launch a charter. People are not idiots.’

The stock-take report was blunt in its diagnosis and unflinching in its prescription. Knowing I would have to get it through the NEC, I made the language a bit more diplomatic in parts. But I left the core message unaltered. We were so bad at communicating with voters, so seemingly uncaring about what they thought or wanted, that we had become unelectable. No longer could the NEC, the leader’s office and the shadow cabinet haphazardly combine to produce press releases and policy documents, schedule press conferences and public meetings, and await Bob Worcester’s monthly reports in the preposterous expectation that we were on our way back. My office would become the central focus for all party communications. I would be supported by a new organisation we called the Shadow Communications Agency. Run by Philip and me, it would draw on the expertise of outside advertising and marketing professionals who volunteered their services. Also involved would be Labour’s advertising partner, the BMP agency of Chris Powell, older brother of Tony Blair’s future chief of staff, Jonathan. The SCA’s first task would be another stock-take, this time examining ‘every aspect of Labour’s corporate appearance’. Instead of relying on grassroots leaflet and sticker campaigns to get our message across, everything we said from now on would be decided and measured against one, revolutionary, objective: to win votes.

By the time I started at Walworth Road, Labour had ceded this kind of political marketing to the Tories. Larry’s predecessor as General Secretary, Jim Mortimer, had been scathing about the Conservatives’ 1983 campaign, vowing that we would never prostitute ourselves to the idea of presenting politicians and policies ‘as if they were breakfast food or baked beans’. It was a view that resonated with most of the party when I arrived. Not only was it naïve about modern politics, it was wrong about what motivated me. I did believe that there were parallels between political parties and the business and consumer world. Both had ‘products’: in our case, they were called policies, rooted in values. Both competed in the marketplace: in our case, the ultimate test of consumer judgement was a general election. For political parties as much as businesses, if you forgot your customers, if you were unaware of how they were changing and failed to communicate with them properly, they would soon forget you.

Still, our ‘product’ was different, and the difference mattered. I was driven by the conviction that a more modern, in-touch Labour Party would not just be more likely to win an election, but would lead to a fairer, more broadly based, more socially engaged and economically successful government than the Tories. It would be better for Britain. I have no doubt that I would have been good at marketing breakfast food or baked beans – or even the Tories – but I could never have contemplated doing so. The tools of communication might be the same; the aim, the ‘product’, and the driving political purpose were wholly different.

Making a start on getting Labour’s message heard, and making it worth hearing, was exhilarating. But the early months were sometimes brutally difficult. Politically, my position was delicate, to say the least. Neil and Roy had backed me for the job of Director of Campaigns and Communications, but I had been parachuted in, at what must have seemed an obscenely young age, to head one of the three key departments, and I felt that the veteran party operators heading the other two – Geoff Bish for policy, and Joyce Gould for organisation – although outwardly welcoming, viewed me with a mixture of suspicion and envy.