‘I wish everyone, friend or foe, well, and that is that. The end.’ As last words go, they were perhaps not the most eloquent but they were enough to earn Tony Blair a standing ovation in the House of Commons; it was his final appearance at Prime Minister’s Questions and he was handing over the reins to Gordon Brown after ten years in power.
There was a collegiate air of bantering and goodwill and he read out the details of his newly arrived P45 to gales of laughter: ‘Details of employee leaving work. Surname: Blair; first name: T. It said actually: Mr, Mrs, Miss or other. This form is important to you, take good care of it, P45.’
Mr Blair, of course, would not have to worry too greatly about his future prospects. In fact, he would go on to earn many millions in his role as a consultant and speech maker over the coming year: £2.5m from JP Morgan Chase alone. And of course he could rely on the £84,000 of taxpayers’ money to run his private office plus his annual pension of £63,468.
The distance between the lives of those working in Westminster and the constituents they were elected to represent could sometimes appear as an un-bridgeable gulf. Take one of the houses Mr Blair bought as he planned for his retirement from politics: the house on Connaught Square in London, purchased for £3.65 million in 2004. This home contrasts sharply with the house he and his wife owned in his North East constituency of Sedgefield, an impressive four-bedroom detached house valued at £300,000. Yet as average house prices in the town stand at less than £95,000, even in Sedgefield the Blairs enjoyed a standard of living that was unattainable to most.
Of course, the counterpoint to that is to recognise that the Blairs achieved a great deal of their wealth through hard work and their careers in law, before Tony entered politics. Cherie has written about her ‘ordinary’ background growing up in Liverpool, yet in truth Mrs Blair was born in 1954, and hers was a generation that saw a great deal of upward mobility due to the opportunities that came to those who excelled at school and gained a place at a university in the 1970s.
Since then social mobility has ground to a halt. The hope that children from poorer backgrounds would grow to earn more than their parents has not materialised. In fact, in 2005, the Sutton Trust produced research that revealed a significant decline in upward mobility between those born in 1958 and those born in 1970. In essence, a child’s life chances mirror those of its parents. In fact, the UK, alongside the United States, came bottom of the league of 11 developed countries that determined a child’s chances of climbing the social or income ladder.
Two years later the Sutton Trust produced a follow-up report that showed that this lack of social mobility is now affecting generations not just born from the 1970s, but even those now born after the millennium. That covers both the generation that Moat was born to as well as that of his children.
Yet it was the Labour party under Blair’s leadership that vowed to bridge the social divide. In 1999 he told the Labour Conference: ‘If we are in politics for one thing, it is to make sure that all children are given the best chance in life.’ Social inequality had grown in the 1980s and, for New Labour, the hope was that if access to higher education was radically expanded, more children from poorer backgrounds would be able to improve their life chances.
However, despite the expansion, by the late 1990s there had only been a three per cent increase in poorer children graduating from university, whilst their wealthier contemporaries took up 26 per cent of the available places. Furthermore, when it comes to taking up positions in professions at the higher end of the social scale, it would take the Milburn Report to expose how entrenched the elite and the privileged still are in the UK today.
Forty-five per cent of top civil servants, 50 per cent of doctors, 32 per cent of members of parliament, 53 per cent of top journalists, 70 per cent of finance directors and 75 per cent of judges come from the seven per cent of the population who went to private schools.
When the laissez-faire approach to economics took hold 30 years ago – allowing industry to be free of state intervention – it seemed that it had a direct consequence on the life chances of those at the lower end of the social ladder and in regions that were formerly reliant on the industrial and manufacturing base, as the North East had been. Yet at the same time, the ability of the upper end of the social scale to thrive did not miss a beat.
Tackling social inequality is complex and disparities in wealth alone does not account for why some children are able to improve their life chances whilst others do not. For researchers, the worry is that even by the age of three, children from poorer backgrounds are already falling behind. Teachers are aware of a gap between poorer children and those from richer families from the day they arrive at school, in terms of vocabulary and cognitive skills.
One teacher with over 20 years’ experience working in primary schools said that during the first week at her Reception class, the new intake of four-year-olds are asked to draw a picture of themselves and write their names. She revealed that from that one picture, she can predict precisely what level a child will achieve at the age of 11.
She is aware that parents would be alarmed to think that any child could be pigeon-holed at such an early age, which is why she remains anonymous, but in her experience, how the child executes that one picture reveals a great deal. It demonstrates a child’s ability to hold a pencil, concentrate on the task, and to remember where the features of a face are placed. Those skills rely on attention, memory and symbolic thinking – a capacity that is nurtured by the stimulation a child receives in the early years. This educator, like many others, believes that a child’s life chances are fixed even before they take their first steps into the school playground. That is not to say that parents from poorer backgrounds cannot provide a stimulating and responsive environment in the early years. Equally, parents from well-off backgrounds do neglect their children. Interestingly, psychologist Oliver James has written a great deal about the need to provide young children with a stable and responsive environment.
Financially, Oliver James’s childhood was privileged but he believes that his mother’s mild depression meant that when it came to parenting, ‘her mood was one of resignation, with an undertow of anger.’ He considers that this led to what he characterises as his ‘electrochemical thermostat’ being set at ‘angry’, ‘risk-taking’ and ‘sad’ modes, and, as a boy, he admits that he was frequently aggressive. He broke another boy’s arm during one confrontation. But facing his late teens, he had the resources to break out of a destructive cycle and decided to study hard and he went on to gain a place at Cambridge.
Depression does affect the ability of a parent to provide a stable emotional environment and a number of studies throughout the UK have shown that rates of depression and anxiety are far higher in deprived areas than in those that are affluent. What triggers depression cannot be credited to a single factor. Likewise, what shapes each of us is an interplay of emotional, interpersonal and social factors both at an individual level but also at a family and social level.
These considerations may sound remote because in the mind of most parents is merely the desire to do all they can to ensure their child’s happiness. Providing what is needed and putting your own needs second to that of your child is the ideal attitude, but it is not one that it is possible to live up to at all times. It is a particularly difficult aspiration for those who did not receive good parenting themselves in early life – the blueprint then has to be made from scratch.
Moat’s upbringing had been far from ideal but now, as a father, would he repeat the mistakes of his past or would he be able to provide his daughters with better opportunities to thrive than he had received?
By the time that Raoul’s third daughter was born, he knew a great deal about how fragile a sense of family could be. He didn’t want that for Chanel. He wanted to make things right this time and ensure that his little princess would want for nothing.
He had secured a house in Fenham Hall Drive in Fenham, a three bedroom semi-detached that he was confident would be a suitable family home that he was going to need. His first two daughters from his relationship with Marissa were now living with him, and had been since October 2006. Relations were strained between him and his ex and she could see them on a limited basis only.
It was far from the end of the matter however, and Moat was feeling increasingly hemmed in because of his dealings with social services. As a department, their role is to place the safety and wellbeing of children first, but Moat felt increasingly frustrated and antagonised by their examination of his role as a father.
He was prone to outbursts of anger and staff documented his aggression. The mode of expression that served him well on the street was proving detrimental when it came to dealing with authority. And Moat’s response to his run-ins with the police and social services is revealing. He asked for help but he also tried to take control of the forces he believed were deliberately misrepresenting him.
He installed CCTV cameras and began recording his conversations with social and other council workers. He accused them of lying and suggested they were corrupt and seemed increasingly at the end of his tether when it came to accounting for his actions and the allegations made against him.
At one point he said: ‘I was up in court on two charges for allegations that social had made, that are proven to be false in court through CCTV, through all the recordings, and I’m still getting crucified for it now.’
The pressure of battling against allegations was building, but by installing CCTV he felt he had wrested back some measure of control, a way of hitting back at agencies that had the potential to break up the new family unit he’d formed. He placed the cameras not just in highly visible spots but under hedges too, as he was determined to monitor every moment that council staff or police entered his property.
Yet Moat also spoke of the need to address his temperament. He is heard saying during one of his meetings with social workers: ‘You know, it’s easy for me to say I don’t do anything wrong but I would like a professional, you know, not a DIY thing you know? A professional thing for someone to come along and say: “Look there’s area for improvement here, this is a problem”.’
Views as to why Moat reached out this way are divided. Some say that it was a clear cry for help, a recognition that his volatility was a problem that was affecting his ability to parent. Others are not convinced, since those with a Narcissistic Personality Disorder are perfectly capable of saying what needs to be heard if they know that it will further their ends.
There are mixed reports as to what happened after Moat spoke of his acceptance that he might need help. A spokesman for Newcastle City Council said that a psychiatric report had been carried out but that it was part of confidential family court proceedings. He added: ‘This report did not recommend any treatment, but examined Mr Moat’s aggressive behaviour on the safety and wellbeing of the children…It didn’t recommend any treatment because it wasn’t about Mr Moat, it was about the safety of the children.’
In the final analysis, custody had been awarded to Moat in 2006 and so there cannot have been sufficiently robust evidence to justify why the children should not be under his guardianship.
The house in Fenham Hall Drive had plenty of toys and the garden at the back would be somewhere where they could play but it was not what Moat wished for his children even if it was adequate for now. In one call to a social worker he says: ‘I’ll quite enjoy the peace to get away from the police.’ He went on: ‘This is the kinda place we were talking about. Me and Sam were talking about getting somewhere out in the sticks. I’m the farmer type.’ In another conversation he says: ‘We are hoping to get a bit of farmland. She wants horses, which will be ideal for the kids. I like the idea of animals, I cannot get used to the city, I cannot get used to it at all.’
It seems strange to think of Moat, a man who’d grown up in the city and made the areas he lived in his own in many respects, talk about it as a place he cannot get used to. Things were changing in his life, he was ageing and the physicality he had long relied on was no longer a point of certainty for him. During one of the taped conversation he says: ‘If you use your body like a machine it’s going to break – like a machine it’ll break down.
‘I did martial arts from being young, that was always my thing. When you do something and you excel at it, you want to do it more, but if you do it for too long your body starts to show the wear and tear.
‘I just go and lift a few weights now and enjoy it. It keeps us looking good and keeps us fit for the kids.’
His children were always his concern but his ability to provide a stable environment for them was repeatedly under question. There is a sense that Moat kept treading water, but in his fight with various authorities, he was no longer certain how long he could keep his head above water.
It was strange that Moat also taped some of his conversations with his daughters. Was this simply something to remember them by or another demonstration of a need to control his environment? Of course he could simply have forgotten to turn the recording equipment off, but in one exchange he talks to one of the girls about his grandmother, the woman who had been a constant in his early life. He is heard to say: ‘You know who you take after? You take after my granny because she was very little.
‘She’s very special to me. She brought me up. And you’ve got her tiny little hands and tiny little feet. And you have got what I had as a kid, you have got my little freckles.
‘When I was a kid I looked nothing like I do now. I had one of the smallest noses you would ever get on a kid, freckles and ginger hair.’
Indeed, there was very little of the younger Moat in the man who stared back at him when he looked in the mirror. He was now his mid-thirties. He’d lost touch with his brother, no longer wanted to know his mother, and his grandmother had been dead for some time. A lot of his past was little more than memories. He’d come a long way but rather than his achievements making him feel more secure about his surroundings, he felt less so.
Moat was not part of the traditional working class – that class, in that part of the world, had long gone. He was now part of an outsider class, men who did not have a traditional path to work and advancement, men who could not expect their children to go on to excel and achieve, characters who dipped in and out of a grey economy, making cash in hand here and there but who saw threats to their livelihoods from the overbearing role of the authorities on all sides. Their kids could be taken, their cars impounded, their occupations low skilled and low status, their lives existing on the fringes of a society that did not value them.
His voice on the phone is heard to say: ‘I’m living my life on the edge, just trying to get by till this next thing and then there’s another one and another one. None of this is right, it’s not.’
He was a man trying to create a future, one where he could take his children to the country and live in peace, but it was an impossible dream. In truth, he had no faith in the future anymore. He felt assailed on every side, and an idyllic life in Rothbury always seemed beyond his grasp.