The Third Man: Life at the Heart of New Labour

I did have some allies. Before I’d been hired, Neil had installed Robin Cook, the young Scottish MP who had run his leadership campaign, in the new post of ‘Campaign Coordinator’, reporting to the shadow cabinet. Robin had set up something called the Breakfast Group, which brought together pro-Labour figures from the advertising and marketing world to advise on modernising our approach. I saw the party’s situation as even more dire than Robin did, and with Philip and the SCA, I wanted to go further and faster. That produced tension, at least on Robin’s side. I vividly recall an early weekend brainstorming session. Robin was there, countryside-dapper in a silk waistcoat, florid shirt and corduroy trousers. He was not hostile to what I was proposing, but there was an unmistakable frisson in his comments. A sense of ‘Who’s in charge here? I’m the elected politician. I’m the shadow cabinet’s Campaign Coordinator. I’m Neil’s mate. Here’s this ex-television kid, who has come in and started auditing, stock-taking, questioning things, challenging them.’ It was understandable. Robin had put the foundation stones in place. Now, I seemed to be taking over the construction.

There was tension of a different sort with the other key member of Neil’s team who was already involved in remaking Labour’s communications and image. Patricia Hewitt, who had narrowly failed to be elected as an MP, was Neil’s press secretary. She was only five years older than me, but she had been involved in campaign work since her early twenties, having begun as press officer for Age Concern before moving on to head the National Council for Civil Liberties. I was a bit in awe of her. She had had two years of battlefield experience in trying to get the media to take a kinder, or at least less unkind, view of Neil and of Labour, and had drawn up a range of campaigning plans, including a project to target key seats at the next election. If I wanted to go further and faster than Robin, Patricia seemed to want to go further and faster yet. With the best of intentions, she not only encouraged me but actively drove me on.

By early 1986 I was working flat out. There were two parts to my job, and two parts to my day. I would spend the mornings at Walworth Road, and was always at my precariously balanced desk by 7.30. There, my focus was campaigning, specifically a major social policy launch that had been agreed – but not planned out, designed or organised – before I arrived. Neil had set the tone. Rather than settle for the familiar NEC emphasis on ‘fairness’, he had insisted that it bring in the theme of ‘freedom’ as well. He recognised that Mrs Thatcher had succeeded in making freedom, a classic liberal value, an asset for the Conservatives. We had to start reclaiming it. But what policies would we actually be promoting? How would we present them? What would the posters and the pamphlets look like? How, and where, would we organise the launch event?

I had been at my job long enough to know what the NEC would expect. We would invite the media to one of our down-at-heel conference rooms in Walworth Road, hand out a dense tome on Labour’s policies, display the leaflets and stickers we were distributing to party cadres around the country – and assail the heartless Tories. The assumption, or the hope, would be that if only we could drive home the fact that we cared more than the Conservatives, the voters would care more about us.

I was absolutely determined that the campaign, the first test of the new approach and new structure I was trying to put in place, would be unrecognisably different. The problem was that I had done nothing remotely similar before. I did not fear that I’d end up with something worse than our normal fare. Leafing through sheafs of our recent policy material, with its tired and predictable slogans and uninspiring artwork, I did not believe that was possible. I did fear that whatever I attempted might be neutered by the NEC. Or that it might disappoint Neil, and even more so, Patricia. Working at an increasingly fevered pace with Philip, the SCA, the designers and printers, I sometimes felt overwhelmed by the need to get every one of hundreds of details right, and by anxiety over how much could go wrong.

The second part of my day was spent on the other side of the Thames. After a late, quick lunch, often at a very lively but now defunct pizzeria in the Elephant and Castle called the Castello, I would drive to the House of Commons and base myself in Neil’s office. My job there was to patrol the top-floor offices of the parliamentary press gallery. It seems amazing to me now, but along with Patricia I was wholly responsible for making Labour’s case to the media, and through them to the country. It was the start of my career as a spin doctor. Yet ‘spinning’ does not begin to capture the difficulty, bordering on impossibility, I found in securing anything more than the most occasional word of praise for Labour. Virtually all the newspapers looked upon 1980s Labour as hopelessly extreme in its policies, out of touch with the country, and hobbled by internal bickering. Since that was largely true, there were limits to what I could do to convince the reporters otherwise. I tried, but mostly my job was damage control. It was frustrating, and it was exhausting.

My refuge was the cottage in Foy on the River Wye in Herefordshire that I had bought while I was at LWT. Set in a lovely, secluded spot on a horseshoe-shaped bend in the river, it was what you might call ‘compact’. There was a small sitting room and an even smaller dining room on the ground floor, and three tiny bedrooms upstairs. A bathroom had been built off the back. It was also the most wonderful home I have ever owned. I bought a slightly battered, blue-velvet suite of furniture for downstairs, and within a couple of months I had the wall between the two downstairs rooms knocked through to make a living-and-dining area, and installed a big brick hearth. There was an antique-looking dial phone whose cord stretched just far enough for me to sit with it on the step outside the front door. I also acquired a – barely – portable phone, one of those contraptions with a huge battery pack you had to sling over your shoulder wherever you went.

I drove up to Foy every weekend, often with friends, sometimes alone. I would read, listen to music, watch TV, cut the grass, dig the garden, build bonfires. I would also work, often trying somehow to get a positive story about Labour, or much more frequently to soften a damaging one, in the all-important Sunday papers. Every Saturday I would wake up and steel myself for the task of spending half the morning phoning round all the Sunday papers’ political journalists. Then I would go into the nearby town of Ross, where I would do a supermarket shop before taking my regular seat at a wonderful Hungarian restaurant called Meaders, for my favourite dish of layered meat and cabbage. Back at the cottage, I would try to watch whatever classic movie the BBC had on in the afternoon, then fall into a deep sleep before working in the garden or going for a walk while I prepared myself mentally for the first editions of the Sunday papers.

Usually I knew what disturbing bit of Labour news was coming, because a reporter would have phoned for a comment earlier in the day. It was often an assault on Neil’s moves to expel Militant members from the party, or an alleged split on some policy or another. Occasionally I would be asked what the party thought about the latest far-left pronouncement by Ken Livingstone, or even Ted Knight. Every week, for hours on end, I had to hose down stories or stop the forest fires spreading to other papers or broadcasters. It was relentless, lonely and dispiriting work, and almost always involved arguing hard with whoever was on the line. I constantly had to make snap judgements, in an unremittingly hostile environment.

I was on the way back from Foy in a driving rainstorm one Sunday afternoon, six weeks before our ‘Freedom and Fairness’ launch, when all the pressures of the job – working out what to do, the antagonism of the press, the sheer scale of the task of somehow making Labour credible again, the expectations of Neil and Patricia, and myself – finally came to a head. As the rain beat against the windscreen, I was alarmed to feel tears starting to roll down my cheeks. For weeks, I had been finding it hard to sleep through the night. I would get off to sleep all right, but always awoke long before dawn, feeling very anxious. Unable to get back to sleep, I would arrive very early at the office. By nine o’clock I would feel completely worn out, and my head would be aching; I seemed to live on paracetamol. I would somehow force myself through the day, trying to focus on meetings, campaign planning, dealing with the press, just to get through to the evening. I would reach home late, and go to bed feeling simultaneously washed out and tightly wound up.

I believed passionately in what I was doing in my new job, but as the weeks passed, I just could not see how I would handle all the obstacles, anticipate everything that might go wrong. I could not see light at the end of the tunnel. As I drove towards London that Sunday afternoon through heavy traffic, anticipating another week of struggle and sleeplessness, I suddenly felt unable to cope. I was just not sure I could stay the course. I was due to attend a concert that evening at the Royal Festival Hall with an old London Labour friend, Illtyd Harrington, deputy head of the GLC before he and the rest of the sane tendency were pushed out by Ken Livingstone. When I arrived, visibly stressed and out of breath, on the terrace outside the Festival Hall, Illtyd took one look at me and said, ‘Peter, what’s wrong?’ All the pent-up worries came rushing out. Illtyd told me that if I wanted to see my efforts at Walworth Road succeed, the first thing I had to do was take care of myself. He made me promise to see his doctor, Denis Cowan, the following day.

Dr Cowan was reassuring. There was nothing seriously wrong with me, he said. It was just the inevitable result of steadily building pressure, the demands of the job and the demands I was putting on myself. He prescribed three weeks of self-discipline, and sleep. I must arrive at Walworth Road no earlier than 9.30 a.m., leave at 5 p.m. sharp, take no work home with me, and be in bed by ten. He also prescribed sleeping pills for several weeks. I was very reluctant to take them. When I was growing up, medicine was rather frowned upon at Bigwood Road: getting my mother to dispense as much as an aspirin took some persuasion. But I followed Dr Cowan’s advice to the letter. Within a few weeks I dispensed with the tablets, and the crisis passed.

My recovery, and Labour’s too, really began ten days before the grand policy launch, with a campaign of another sort. It was the first by-election on my watch, in Fulham, caused by the death of the sitting Conservative MP. At least in this battle I had some handson experience, from Brecon and Radnor. But I knew it would be the first test of the kind of modern campaigning machinery I had put in place with Philip and the SCA, and that sceptics and critics on the NEC would be keenly eyeing both the campaign and the result. There seemed to be little realistic prospect that we would win. Worse, with the Tory government growing increasingly unpopular, many pundits seemed to think the likeliest winner was the SDP, whose candidate was none other than my old south London friend Roger Liddle.

I think that only a few weeks earlier I could not have faced the challenge. But I knew we had to make every effort to at least make the election close. With Philip’s constant encouragement, we organised a campaign for our candidate, Nick Raynsford, that was eye-catching, simple and, it turned out, extraordinarily effective. Both the Conservative, Matthew Carrington, and Roger lived outside the constituency – to be fair, in Roger’s case this was only by a matter of a few miles – but all our campaign literature was dominated by an engaging photograph of our prospective MP framed by one, strikingly presented slogan: ‘Nick Raynsford Lives Here’. The fact that local Labour supporters throughout the constituency began taping the image to their front windows made the effect especially powerful and amusing.

On the night of the election, 10 April 1986, Labour took the seat from the Tories. Roger finished a fairly distant third. This personal embarrassment for me was made even more difficult by the fact that Roger’s wife, Caroline, was also a good friend from my days in youth politics. When she spotted me at the election count, she gave me what my mother would have called ‘an old-fashioned look’. I could hardly blame her. I was sad that Roger had lost, and resigned to the likelihood that it would be some time before my friendship with him and Caroline could be repaired. At the same time, I was elated that our revamped campaigning team had met its first obstacle, and convincingly and unexpectedly cleared it.

Then came the ‘Freedom and Fairness’ launch. We had been working for months to make it unmistakably new, and it was. The result was a campaign document that not only included the kind of policy pledges expected of Labour, like increased child benefit, educational subsidies for young people and new housing opportunities, but was also about making individuals freer in their day-to-day lives. We promised a greater say for patients in the NHS, and set out measures against vandalism and crime. The design, too, was sleeker, friendlier on the eye. The SCA had given the brief to Trevor Beattie, whose talent for finding eye-catching, if sometimes controversial, ways to grab the public’s attention would later produce Wonderbra’s ‘Hello Boys’ ads. Instead of our old-style Labour stickers, we minted metal badges in edgy black, grey and silver.

In what would become a pattern for many of the changes we went on to make, I had a brief moment of drama with Neil as the posters and media packs were going to the printers. Three days before the launch, he called me in and exclaimed, ‘Where does it say “Labour’s Freedom and Fairness Campaign”? What’s this “Putting People First”? Where’s the title?’ Feeling much better, more confident – and more rested – than I had for some time, I assured him that both freedom and fairness were still at the centre of the campaign. What we had done was to bring together real policy ideas to put those values into practice. Just like the imagery and artwork, the point was to move beyond talking in a political language that would pass most people by, and, yes, to say directly that we were ‘putting people first’. As delicately as I could, I reminded Neil that he had signed off on every creative stage of the campaign along the way. Besides, I said, not quite truthfully, it was almost surely too late to change. But Neil was adamant. In the end, literally almost as the presses were beginning to roll, I arranged for the printers to include the words ‘Labour’s Freedom and Fairness Campaign’, in small letters, along the side of each poster and pamphlet.

The most striking change was the site of the launch. It was not in a scruffy room at Walworth Road, but in the International Press Centre near Fleet Street. By the time we got there, Neil had been won over to the idea, and the design, of the campaign. He was typically fluent and forceful in tying together the policy prospectus with the themes of freedom and fairness. A small girl whose parents had agreed for her to be featured as the main image in our publicity material had come to the launch, and Neil – wonderfully, spontaneously – lifted her aloft. The photographers loved it.

Less enthusiastic was Eric Heffer, who had turned up unexpectedly and stood scowling at me from the back of the room. ‘It’s disgraceful,’ he muttered. When I failed to reply, he continued: ‘It’s more than disgraceful. It’s disgusting! The NEC never approved this. Where’s the Red Flag? What is “Putting People First”?’ Stalking out, he delivered a parting shot. This was not the Labour Party he had joined, he fumed. It was just one of a series of heartening reviews. From the other end of the political horizon Norman Tebbit, the Tory Chairman, issued a blistering condemnation of our ‘slickness’. The press, too, sat up and took notice. Not only were there warm responses from our own camp, the Guardian and Tribune; the Economist saw the choice of venue as a sign that Labour was determined ‘never again to look dowdy or old-fashioned’. Even the FT nodded approvingly.

Heffer was right about one thing: I had never sought detailed NEC approval for the new approach and the new look. I knew I would never have got it. At the very minimum, there would have been endless debate over every dot and comma. The most that would have come out of it was a hugely scaled-down version that would not have had anything like the same impact. I did, of course, have the NEC’s endorsement for the central themes of freedom and fairness. I reassured Larry Whitty, as I had told Neil, that our job had simply been to find a new and effective way to get people to listen to that message.

This would set the pattern for much of my future dealings with Larry and the NEC. I recognised that they were my bosses, and was careful to follow the letter of their directives. But I hoped, and became increasingly confident, that by pushing the limits of the spirit of their decisions we could make a major impact on how the party and its policies were seen. I discovered one important tactic early on. When I received an especially heavy-handed policy pronouncement – on the economy, on trade unions, on defence – for our latest party publicity, I would have the text squeezed onto the right-hand side of the page. I would then sit down with the increasingly enthusiastic and hard-working team around me at Walworth Road, people like Jim Parish, Anna Healy and Jackie Stacey, and go through every vote-losing word, picking out the most attractive-sounding phrases – about growth and prosperity rather than state control, or support for a strongly defended Britain rather than unilateral disarmament – and highlighting them in big, attractive type in the wide margin.

Over time, I would find myself applying similar methods to almost every aspect of our presentation and communications. I remember one major policy pronouncement, otherwise fairly forward-looking, in which the NEC instructed us to insert the text of our socialist credo, Clause IV. It did go in, but not in the document that I initially released to the media, only on the inside cover when it was printed. I could do little about the rousing rendition of ‘The Red Flag’ that closed the Labour conference, but I could try to ensure that it was not the lasting image voters kept in their minds. In this, I usually failed, but sometimes I would be able to choreograph the final speeches so that the concluding hymn would come after live TV coverage had ended. If we couldn’t change the policy, at least we could change the way we were seen.

The reporters I dealt with every day were less easily finessed. They knew it was policies that ultimately mattered, and that ours hadn’t changed. My daily, and often nightly, dealings with the press did become less wearing, however. Their copy was still almost unremittingly hostile, but personal relationships were being built up. I was their one-man, one-stop source for what Labour was doing, thinking and saying. In that sense, they needed me. It went without saying that I needed them if our public image was ever going to change. Some of the journalists were simply cynical hacks with a settled, utterly negative, view of Labour dictated by their news desks. It was a narrative they knew by heart, and could write up almost automatically before heading off for a drink at the Press Bar or in Strangers, the meeting place for MPs and others on the Thames side of the Houses of Parliament. The facts, and what I or anyone else at Labour said, didn’t really matter to them.

My reputation for toughness, or worse, with the press began with journalists like that in these early days. But many of the more serious, and more influential, writers and broadcasters were at least open-minded. I think they also had a bit of sympathy for my plight as I struggled to find ways to give Labour a new, more reasonable face. Most weeks I would have lunch with one or another of these reporters – sometimes, at their invitation and on their expenses, at one of the fancier restaurants around Westminster, but more often in the Commons press cafeteria. I kept telling myself that over time, if and when Labour had a better story to tell, they would help us tell it.

Even in this part of my job, I sometimes had to look over my shoulder. The first problem involved Rupert Murdoch’s stable of British newspapers – The Times and Sunday Times, the News of the World and the Sun. After prolonged and fruitless negotiation, Murdoch had forced through the introduction of new technology, over the protests of striking print union workers, and opened up a new plant in Wapping. His titles continued to publish, with most journalists crossing increasingly violent and heavily policed picket lines. The NEC voted in a ban on any contact with reporters from the Murdoch papers. It was the classic 1980s Labour response. Not only was it on the wrong side of where most voters thought we should be, but in theory it would keep me from talking to the very journalists I needed if I was to have any hope of improving the party’s image. At the news conference at which I announced the NEC boycott, I duly asked the Times and Sun reporters to leave the room. I felt ridiculous. I also realised that to do otherwise would have been the equivalent of handing in my notice.

However, I made it a point privately to continue briefing, and talking to, the Murdoch journalists. In the Fulham by-election, that was obviously not going to be sufficient. Once the campaign got under way, reporters would build their day around each of the three parties’ main news conferences. They were not going to have the time – or presumably the desire – to oblige me by sharing a private Castello pizza to receive my daily spin on the campaign. If we wanted our side of the story to appear in Murdoch’s papers, we would have to include their journalists in our news conferences. Making common cause with Patricia Hewitt, and with the support and understanding of Larry Whitty, I persuaded the NEC to suspend its boycott for the duration of the campaign. As I had hoped, it was then quietly forgotten.

The ‘Freedom and Fairness’ launch was never going to be enough fundamentally to change Labour’s look or its image. The next step was more audacious, and had a more far-reaching effect. In Philip’s stock-take, we had told the NEC that we planned to review ‘every aspect of Labour’s corporate appearance’. Though I imagine most members glossed over this bit of advertising-speak, there was never any doubt in my mind where the remake had to begin. The defining core of our image was our fluttering red flag. Eric Heffer, as an NEC member, had seen the report when it came up for approval, but neither he nor the other sceptics would have imagined that we would actually go ahead and fold up the red flag. Had he realised this at the ‘Freedom and Fairness’ launch, he might literally have combusted. For months, we worked at finding a new logo. It was Neil who first suggested borrowing a symbol from the Scandinavian social democrats: a red rose. We all liked the idea, and I consulted the design expert Michael Wolff, of Wolff-Olins fame, who recruited the artist Philip Sutton. The rose evoked England’s gardens. It suggested growth in fresh soil. Sunlight. Optimism. The challenge was to ensure that it would pass muster – with Neil, but above all with the NEC – in time for party conference at the end of September.

In July, Patricia, Philip, Michael Wolff and I went to see Philip Sutton in his studio in south London. Hanging up on clothes pegs on a washing line running along the studio walls were scores of images of different roses. Over a stretch of two hours, we went around the room, gradually narrowing down our search for the perfect rose and agreeing a shortlist of half a dozen prototypes. Three weeks later the artwork had been refined on each of them, and we had to decide from a final batch of three. I picked what I thought was the best, and it went to Neil for his approval. He loved it – or almost: he wanted the stem shortened.