‘I bet this is as good as it gets’
A media-friendly, highly electable platoon of smiling, capitalist thugs.
Peter Baynham (1997)
The Blair government is mostly government by bilateral meeting.
Donald Dewar (1998)
I think the [Conservative] Party will slowly destroy itself.
Alan Clark (1997)
Like so many of the country’s dealings with the Continent, Britain’s involvement in the Eurovision Song Contest has been a patchy, semidetached affair. The event was created by the European Broadcasting Union and first staged in 1956, but the UK was not represented that year. It had meant to participate, but failed to get its timings right; the contest was held in May, while the Festival of British Popular Song, which was intended to choose the British entry, didn’t happen until October. The UK entered in 1957, but then was absent again; only from 1959 did the country become fully committed to the event, televising it every year and sending in songs which might not have been at the cutting edge of pop music, but were at least competent. And for some while, Britain was a major Eurovision power, averaging a third-place finish and winning the competition four times in fifteen years from 1967.
That run ended with the success of Bucks Fizz’s ‘Making Your Mind Up’ in 1981, a year when Margaret Thatcher was busily handbagging the European Community, securing a rebate on British contributions to the EC and showing no sign of wishing to be seen as a good European. Offence was taken, the Eurovision gods were displeased, and over the subsequent fifteen-year period the UK slid to an average sixth place, with no winners at all. Even when established chart acts like Michael Ball or Sonia were entered, they failed to carry off the prize.
The contest had never been very highly regarded; as far back as 1960 Maurice Richardson, the Observer’s television critic, had described the broadcast as ‘torture’, and later in the decade Michael Billington was to wonder in The Times whether, given the homogenised Europop sound of the entries, he was ‘listening to twenty-two singers with one song or twenty-two songs rendered by one singer’. Now, however, the public perception of the contest fell into disrepute, reduced in Britain to the level of a laughing-stock. During those fifteen lean years the highlight for many viewers became the commentary of Terry Wogan, relentlessly mocking the songs, the clothes, the voting and the event itself.
By 1997, then, there was little expectation of entertainment, let alone victory. ‘Each year you say this is dreadful, but there is always next year,’ remarked Wogan in the build-up. ‘Well, now it is next year and it is worse.’ Britain’s entry was the bookies’ third favourite, ‘Love Shine a Light’ by Katrina and the Waves, a group whose sole top twenty hit (‘Walking on Sunshine’) had been in 1985, and whose continued existence came as something of a surprise even to those who thought they knew about pop music. It was an unusually strong song, written by the band’s guitarist, Kimberley Rew, formerly of cult favourites the Soft Boys, but that meant little in this context.
Much more important was the fact that the contest was staged on 3 May, the day after it became clear that the Conservative government had fallen; its replacement, Tony Blair’s Labour Party, were widely believed to be bent on reversing the country’s Eurosceptic history. Clearly things had changed, and that night in Dublin the goodwill towards Britain was unstoppable. Katrina and the Waves scored a record number of maximum points, a record points tally and a record margin of victory.
The result was accepted in the manner it had been delivered: as an endorsement of the new government. ‘Britain proudly took centre stage in Europe last night,’ opened the Daily Mirror’s report, while Michael Leggo, the head of BBC entertainment, who was now to be responsible for hosting the next event, seemed to be confused about which competition he was staging: ‘We are delighted to be bringing the contest back after an absence of eighteen years,’ he declared, evidently forgetting that it had only been sixteen years, and that his eighteen took us back instead to the last Labour government. And in a manner that was to become all too familiar, Tony Blair was amongst the first to leap in with his congratulations. ‘It’s been a long time since Britain was walking on sunshine,’ he enthused. ‘Britain is now well and truly back in the spotlight.’
The Eurovision triumph was no isolated incident. On the day before polling, the French daily paper Libération had dedicated thirty-four of its forty pages to an account of Britain, including fashion, the arts and sport, but focusing on the election. ‘If Blair succeeds in power,’ commented the editor, ‘we will have hope.’ Helmut Kohl talked of his impression that ‘the Labour Party is the one that is more Euro-friendly’, and Jacques Santer, president of the European Commission, urged greater involvement: ‘Never more than now has the EU needed strong British commitment, with its unique combination of pragmatism and efficiency.’ In a speech in 1995 Blair had made his intentions clear – ‘I have no doubt at all that the future of my country lies in being at the heart of Europe’ – and although John Major had used exactly the same phrase at the start of his premiership, Britain’s European partners believed that this time it was sincere.
The Foreign Office, embarrassed for many years by the Conservatives’ detached attitude to Europe, was said to be ecstatic at the election result, with one diplomat quoted as saying of the new foreign secretary: ‘If Robin Cook went into negotiations in Brussels dressed as a clown, refusing to speak any language other than Swahili and ended the day by urinating in the German chancellor’s coffee, his negotiating stance would still be seen as an improvement over his predecessors.’ Some of this enthusiasm survived the early days, so that when a poll was conducted in France in March 1998, shortly after Blair had addressed the National Assembly (speaking much better French than any of his predecessors since Anthony Eden), it found that he would win a majority in that country as well.
Acclaim abroad was more than matched by a sense of euphoria at home. ‘This was our Velvet Revolution, and yesterday the population went wild,’ reported Matthew Engel in the Guardian, seeking to draw comparisons with the overthrow of communism in Czechoslovakia. ‘There was an almost tangible sense of enjoyment,’ wrote David Blunkett in his diary, ‘the sheer exhilaration of people revelling in the feeling that the Tories had disappeared – as if the whole nation was letting out a huge sigh of relief.’ As Peter Hain summed it up: ‘It was a joy to be Labour that spring.’ Even the opposition observed the same phenomenon. ‘A great sigh of relief seems to have gone up across Britain at the removal of the Tories,’ noted Paddy Ashdown. ‘Tony starts his prime ministership with a tidal wave of hope and goodwill behind him.’
Seldom in modern times had a new government been elected with such optimism and enthusiasm; one had to go back – the inevitable comparison – to the days of Harold Wilson in 1964. It was all too much for some, almost unbelievable. ‘I am sure we will all wake up in the morning and find that the Tories have won again,’ said David Miliband, at the victory celebration.
The media too were well satisfied. Like their readers, viewers and listeners, they were bored with stories about the travails of the Major government. At the very least, they were happy to find a new narrative, and in more liberal quarters, the joy was unconfined. Jane Garvey, then a presenter on BBC Radio 5 Live, recalled arriving for work on the morning after the election and encountering the detritus of what had clearly been some serious celebrations: ‘The corridors of Broadcasting House were strewn with empty champagne bottles.’
There was undoubtedly an abundance of positive energy, but given Blair’s stated objective – ‘the journey’s end had always been changing the country’ – the real question was the one posed by Giles Radice: ‘What will Tony’s success consist of: election victories or something more permanent? The jury is out.’
‘When Tony Blair came to power,’ reflected the writing team on the Channel 4 programme Rory Bremner, Who Else?, ‘we thought, “That’s it. What on earth are we going to do now?”’ They weren’t alone. John Major’s government had, after a hesitant start, proved such a rich source of material for comedians and satirists that there was some confusion about where to go from here. Drop the Dead Donkey disappeared entirely in the election year of 1997, and although it returned for a final short series of six episodes the following year, this was only a brief revival in which it concentrated most of its fire on the media, with a story arc concerning the imminent closure of Globelink News. Similarly Armando Iannucci’s Armistice series was absent in 1997, save for its election night special.
Private Eye was to come up with the ‘St Albion Parish News’, mocking Blair as a trendy vicar – a figure which proved durable enough to survive into his more self-righteous incarnation – but initially it too struggled to find an appropriate tone. An early attempt showed the new prime minister posing with an electric guitar as the lead singer of a pop band called Blairzone: ‘Hey listen – me and the band are going to put together a totally new sound,’ he enthused. ‘Not so new that you don’t like it but more a sort of classical progressive rock fusion sound – like Barclay James Harvest’s “Galadriel” – remember that?’ New Labour might be laughably light on policy, might have sold its heritage in pursuit of power, might be, in the words of Iannucci, ‘the party of the left that bashed the unions, was tough on spending, is in the pockets of media barons and is run by flash southern bastards who’ll privatise anything that moves’, but even so it was seen to represent a break from the morality-free zone of Conservative sleaze. And, despite the repeated playing down of expectations, there remained the belief that the party represented a fundamental change after eighteen years of Tory government.
The man in whom so many hopes were now vested seemed a very different proposition from his predecessor as prime minister. Tony Blair’s privileged background, complete with private education and Oxford degree, was a long way removed from John Major’s childhood in South London, but there were points of connection, in particular their family history in entertainment. Blair’s paternal grandparents had, like Major’s father, been stalwarts of the music halls: Celia Ridgway as a dancer and Charles Parsons, her third husband (though they were unmarried at the time of the birth of Blair’s father), as a comedian who called himself Jimmy Lynton. It was in his grandfather’s honour that Blair was gifted his middle names, Charles Lynton. Major was similarly bequeathed a stage name; his father’s real name was Tom Ball, only adding the Major when he formed a double-act called Drum and Major. The music hall roots were even of similar vintage, Jimmy Lynton being born just eight years after Tom Major-Ball.
Those roots expressed themselves in both men, but while it took the 1992 election to get Major onto his soapbox playing to the crowd, Blair followed the more conventional, self-indulgent path of a middle-class man of his generation. ‘I have always been crazy about rock music,’ he later commented, and while at Oxford in the early 1970s he sang with a student group, named Ugly Rumours, also featuring the future music journalist Mark Ellen on bass. ‘We were rather tragic, and had precisely zero presence on stage,’ remembered Ellen. ‘We were yards of unconditioned hair in cowboy boots.’ Blair sported a cut-off T-shirt to reveal his midriff as he posed like Mick Jagger, though the setlist was dominated by covers of West Coast American bands like the Eagles and the Doobie Brothers, and his voice was described by his future wife (one of the few people to have a tape of the band) as ‘reedy’. There appears to have been little serious intent in the venture, nor in Blair’s vague attempts to promote rock gigs in London, but he showed more commitment to the project than he ever did to student politics.
There was a show-business element too in his marriage in 1980 to Cherie, daughter of Tony Booth, the actor who appeared in the Confessions movies and whose best-known role was as Mike, the socialist son-in-law of working-class Tory Alf Garnett in the sitcom Till Death Us Do Part. By this stage, the long hair and the bared midriff had been consigned to history; Blair was an active member of the Labour Party, was working as a lawyer, having reverted to more immediate family precedent – his father had practised and lectured in law – and was beginning to think about Parliament.
His first opportunity came at the 1982 Beaconsfield by-election, held during the course of the Falklands War. Largely as a result of that conflict, it turned out to be the only by-election in the eighteen years of Conservative rule that saw a swing to the government, but perhaps more significant was the homogenisation of the main candidates. All three main parties were represented by men with ‘a civilised, middle class pedigree’, reported the Guardian. ‘Three Oxford-educated chaps, considerately dressed and properly spoken, all from decent public schools.’ Anthony Blair, as he was then known, didn’t exactly stand out from the crowd, and he lost his deposit.
The following year he was parachuted into a safe seat in Sedgefield, County Durham for the 1983 general election and was ready to start working his way to the top. He shared an office at Westminster with another newly elected MP, Gordon Brown, and the pair were identified early on as future stars of the parliamentary party, not least by Peter Mandelson, who took every opportunity to place them on view in the media. Both men voted for the fashionable candidate, Neil Kinnock, in the leadership election held shortly after their arrival in the Commons, and both threw themselves into the campaign to ditch the left-wing image that Labour had acquired during the ascendancy of Tony Benn. Often seen in these years as being almost joined at the hip, there were key differences; unlike Brown, Blair had not been born into the movement – his father, once a communist, had long since been a staunch Conservative – and his background was of a kind to cause suspicion in a party that still genuflected to proletarian purism. He had to work harder than his friend and colleague to shed some of his past; it was noticeable, for example, that he was no longer Anthony, just plain Tony.
Of the two, Brown was acknowledged by everyone – including Blair himself – as the senior; a potential leader who was capable of ferocious performances in the Commons, he had age, experience and expectation on his side, and was elected to the shadow cabinet by his fellow MPs a year earlier than was Blair. He was also regarded as the intellectual heavyweight, although much was to be made in later years by Blair’s supporters of their man’s unflinching re-examination of where the party should stand. ‘I developed a theory about the basis of socialism being about “community”,’ Blair explained in his memoirs; ‘i.e. people owed obligations to each other and were social beings, not only individuals out for themselves.’ The word ‘theory’ seemed a little grandiose.
As the defeats for the party continued to mount up, however, it was Blair’s distance from a traditional Labour image that increasingly attracted the approval of colleagues and opponents alike. ‘He could be one of us,’ wrote Gyles Brandreth in his diary in May 1993: ‘public school, Oxford, decent, amiable, well groomed, no known convictions.’ That use of Margaret Thatcher’s favourite phrase of approval – ‘one of us’ – was carefully judged. Labour in the 1980s, for all its left-wing image in the media, had seldom looked like a genuinely radical party; rather it spent most of its time desperately defending the status quo against the assaults of the Conservative government. Blair, however, leant towards the Thatcherite model of activity at all times, perpetually looking for roots that might be torn up, even if he had little insight into what might be put in their place.
The showbiz element had never quite left him, but as leader it was channelled into his major speeches to the annual conference and elsewhere, occasions that appeared to be treated with a degree of serious preparation not always in evidence when it came to detailed policy-making. He no longer looked like a rock star manqué, though he was clearly conscious that, by the standards of politics, he was a good-looking man. ‘Tony Blair is the first prime minister I can completely imagine having voluntary sex with,’ drooled Bridget Jones, and she wasn’t the only one. A poll in Forum found that Blair was the sexiest man in British politics (not a particularly competitive field) and when, in the summer of 1997, the women’s pages of the Sun ran their annual poll for the ‘top 100 hunks’, he came in as a new entry at number sixty-five, one place ahead of Brett Anderson of Suede, though he was a couple of places behind David Essex and a long way off the pace set by David Beckham, who had supplanted George Clooney in the top spot.
Beyond Blair himself, the new Parliamentary Labour Party looked very different from any that had gone before and, at first sight, much more like the country it represented. The impact of all-women shortlists, about which Blair had been sceptical at best, had paid dividends: the number of women in the Commons more than doubled, from 57 to 120, the overwhelming majority of them on the government benches (the Conservatives had fewer women MPs than in 1992). Amongst the beneficiaries of the shortlist policy were Maria Eagle, whose twin sister Angela was already an MP; Anne Begg, a 32-year-old teacher who suffered from Gaucher disease, a degenerative cell disorder, and who became the first wheelchair user elected to Parliament; and Gisela Stuart, a 41-year-old lecturer of Czech-German parentage who was born in Bavaria and had come to Britain at the age of seventeen.
Stuart’s cosmopolitan background was matched by that of Rudi Vis, a 46-year-old Dutch-born lecturer who took Finchley and Golders Green, incorporating Margaret Thatcher’s old seat of Finchley. Pleasure was found too in the election in Exeter of Ben Bradshaw, a gay 36-year-old BBC reporter, who recorded the biggest swing in the South-West. This was at the expense of Dr Adrian Rogers, the director of the Conservative Family Institute, who had used the campaign to denounce homosexuality as a ‘sterile, disease-ridden, God-forsaken occupation’ and had referred to his rival as ‘Bent Ben’; one Conservative election leaflet had warned that if Bradshaw won ‘schoolchildren would be in danger’. And if his sexuality weren’t bad enough, Bradshaw unashamedly outed himself as ‘a European who can speak German and Italian’.
Labour in 1997 looked and sounded like a different party from any that had previously governed in Britain. It was more diverse in terms of ethnicity, gender and declared sexuality, and – under the youngest prime minister since Lord Salisbury in 1812 – it was more youthful too. Indeed the average age of MPs after the election was just forty-seven. (The Tories meanwhile could also claim to have changed; for the first time in three hundred years, there was no Old Harrovian MP to be seen.)
Whatever encouragement might have been taken from these outward signs of diversity, however, was not to last. Despite the increased number of women elected, they still amounted to fewer than one in five of MPs and, particularly on the Labour side, there was a media tendency to see them as a single amorphous block, collectively nicknamed by the press ‘Blair’s babes’, a term that started out patronising and swiftly became derogatory. Within a few months, the Labour MP Brian Sedgemore was dismissing them as ‘the Stepford Wives, those female New Labour MPs who’ve had the chip inserted into their brain to keep them on-message’. In the same speech, Sedgemore made similarly dismissive comments about ‘all New Labour MPs’, and though those remarks were less well reported, he had a point, for it rapidly became clear that it didn’t really matter much what the parliamentary party looked like, let alone thought.
A very different approach to government was soon in evidence, one in which – given the massive size of the majority – MPs barely counted as lobby-fodder, and even the cabinet itself was of little significance. All the crucial decisions were instead to be taken by the intimate groups that surrounded Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, very few members of which had any claim to electoral legitimacy. Blair’s confidants included his childhood friend and diary secretary Anji Hunter, his former flatmate Charlie Falconer and his political secretary Sally Morgan. There was also, as chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, a former diplomat (and brother of Margaret Thatcher’s foreign policy adviser, Charles) who Blair had met during that 1993 trip to Washington. ‘Tony was wise enough to take advice from lots of different people,’ remarked Powell, with no apparent trace of irony: ‘from Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson, but also from John Burton, his constituency agent, Gail, his mother-in-law, and Jackie, his children’s nanny.’
The future had been spelt out in Blair’s first public remarks as prime minister elect outside the Royal Festival Hall victory party in the early morning of 2 May 1997. ‘A new dawn has broken, has it not?’ he began, in a phrase that he later claimed to regret, not because it was so terribly trite, but because it might have raised unrealistic expectations of what he was capable of delivering. The crucial proclamation came a few moments later: ‘We have been elected as New Labour and we will govern as New Labour.’ An inadvertent echo of Neil Kinnock at the Sheffield rally in 1992 (‘We will govern as we have campaigned’), as a statement of intent this related to style more than it did to substance, promising a continuation of the centralised control structure that had brought the party to power.
In pursuit of the New Labour project, the key relationships were between the inner circles and the media. The shadow cabinet, on the other hand, was effectively sidelined. Neither Blair nor Brown had shown much enthusiasm for the body even as shadow ministers under Kinnock (‘They didn’t always turn up,’ a colleague remembered), just as Blair had been reprimanded for his non-attendance at meetings of the parliamentary party.
During his own leadership, the shadow cabinet had met, but Blair had been continually irritated by the way that its proceedings found their way into the press, presumably as a result of unauthorised briefings. ‘I’ll have to tell them that if they cannot be trusted to have serious discussions in the shadow cabinet, we won’t have them,’ Blair huffed in 1995. Given how much damage Labour was doing to the Major government by the judicious use of leaks from within Conservative ranks, such caution was perhaps understandable, if undesirable. Less tolerated should have been the continuation of the practice into government, when cabinet meetings were downgraded still further. ‘They’re a farce,’ remarked Ivor Richard, leader of the House of Lords, in 1998; ‘nobody says anything.’ Lance Price, one of Blair’s spin doctors, attended a meeting of the cabinet in 1999 and concluded that all he had learnt from the experience was ‘how little real influence it has as an institution’. When someone tentatively suggested that a decision might be made, Blair replied: ‘Oh, I don’t think we should go that far.’
The inherent problem with a cabinet, of course, whether shadow or real, was that it shared power between its members, leaving its leader with the basic principle that his position was that of ‘first among equals’. Since Blair didn’t wish this to be true in his own case, it was self-evidently a system desperately in need of reform. Peter Mandelson addressed the issue in his 1996 book The Blair Revolution (co-written with Roger Liddle), arguing that ‘The cabinet is a rather inflexible body’, and that decisions should rather be taken in ‘bilateral and ad-hoc meetings’. As Will Hutton pointed out in a review of the book: ‘No prizes for guessing who plans to attend as many ad hoc meetings as possible.’
Mandelson, officially at that stage no more than a backbench opposition MP, was indeed at the heart of New Labour policy- and decision-making and, initially at least, was the figure who attracted the greatest public and press attention. He had been instrumental in the creation of New Labour, assisting Neil Kinnock’s repositioning of the party as well as playing a central role in Blair’s election as leader. Never entirely satisfied with a position of power backstage, however, Mandelson craved the spotlight and in 1990 had resigned as the party’s director of communications to seek a parliamentary seat of his own.
To tide him over and to help fund that ambition, he got a part-time job on the People newspaper writing a column under the heading ‘People in Power’. It was not a notable success and few went to it in search of political wisdom. Just three days before Black Wednesday in 1992, Mandelson was to be found staunchly defending John Smith’s muddle-headed opposition to the possibility of devaluing sterling, though he also made room to comment on a reported romance between singer Barbra Streisand and tennis player Andre Agassi: ‘If he’s game, and she’s set, it should make quite a match.’ Some years later, Alastair Campbell was to confess that not only had he helped Mandelson get the job, he had also churned out some of this guff himself. ‘Writing was never his strong point,’ nudged Campbell; ‘he had to look to his friends to help him out. Know what I mean?’
After the election victory of 1997, many continued to see Mandelson as the power behind the throne, though in reality his great days were already past, the kingmaker now become merely another courtier, vying for his master’s ear alongside new favourites. Nonetheless, his public image as the pantomime baddie was important in those early days, helping to deflect criticism from Blair himself. In 1995 the ever-outspoken Brian Sedgemore claimed that Mandelson was disliked right across the parliamentary party: ‘The level of hatred is consistent throughout every geographical area and cuts across gender, class, social background and occupation.’ As Mandelson himself put it: ‘They dare not attack Tony Blair directly, so they go for the next best thing, which they think is me.’
While not disagreeing with that perception, the journalist Frank Johnson believed that it stemmed ultimately from a sense of self-disgust amongst Labour MPs. Mandelson was the man identified with the changes Labour had made in order to become electable, but ‘they do not like to be reminded of that. Mr Mandelson’s presence reminds them of it all the time.’ Rather more direct was the attitude of Harry Enfield, as relayed on Have I Got News For You. ‘You’re ghastly,’ Enfield was reported to have drunkenly said to Mandelson at a Downing Street party in 1997. ‘No one likes you. You should go. You’re horrible.’ As Max Clifford, who knew a thing or two about being disliked, observed of Mandelson: ‘The public views him as slimy and he only has himself to blame.’
Fast eclipsing Mandelson as Blair’s right-hand man was Campbell himself, whose job title of press secretary merely hinted at his position. ‘He was indispensable, irreplaceable, almost an alter ego,’ gushed Blair in his memoirs, valuing the instinctive tabloid touch of a man who had graduated from writing for Forum magazine to being a political journalist on the Daily Mirror and Today. There were others, even in opposition, however, who felt that the relationship between the two men was not entirely healthy. Joy Johnson, formerly the political news editor of the BBC, spent just under a year as Labour’s director of communications, and compared Campbell’s role unfavourably with that of Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary in the 1980s. ‘When you heard Bernard Ingham speaking, you heard Margaret Thatcher,’ she noted, ‘and when you heard Margaret Thatcher speaking you heard Margaret Thatcher. When you heard Tony Blair, very often you heard Alastair Campbell.’
Ingham himself regarded Campbell and his henchmen as a new development in British politics. ‘They’re bullies,’ he cried. ‘They break every rule. I’d have been thrown out on my ear in a minute if I’d tried any of it. They’re an appalling bunch.’ Max Clifford wasn’t much impressed either: ‘It seems that either his position went to his head, or he didn’t understand the fundamentals of PR, because instead he upset a lot of people and only fed stories to his friends, which anyone can do and requires absolutely no skill.’ Nor were they alone in voicing early doubts. In 1996 the notoriously litigious Conservative MP Rupert Allason brought a libel case against Campbell and the Daily Mirror. The case was lost, but not before the judge had expressed serious reservations about Campbell’s conduct, saying he was ‘less than completely open and frank’, and adding: ‘He did not impress me as a witness in whom I could feel one hundred per cent confidence.’
Those opinions did nothing to impede Campbell’s rise to eminence within Blair’s camp at the expense of Mandelson, a fact that Mandelson clearly resented. In his diaries, Campbell recorded an inconsequential argument between the two of them about what their leader should wear for a photo-opportunity, a dispute that rapidly developed into a row and coming to blows before Blair was obliged to step in to separate them. ‘He went off,’ reported Campbell, ‘still shouting at me from the corridor, saying I was undermining him and Tony.’
Both men were effectively competing for the same post, that of chief spin doctor to the prime minister. And since spin was at the heart of New Labour, the job was of some significance. ‘If “spin” means presenting your policies and your programme as coherently as possible when others have every intention of distorting it, then I’m all for it,’ remarked David Blunkett, but of course that wasn’t what it meant. It also involved manipulation, dissembling and obfuscation. As Mandelson once explained, the objective of the spin doctor was ‘to create the truth’.
Rivalries like that between Campbell and Mandelson were far from uncommon in the higher echelons of the Labour government. Campbell had problems with Clare Short (‘he couldn’t stand her,’ observed Blair); John Prescott hated Harriet Harman and fell out with David Blunkett (‘a rift gradually opened between us,’ noted the latter); and neither Prescott, Blunkett nor Jack Straw got on with Gordon Brown (‘they don’t trust him,’ according to Campbell). Meanwhile the enmity between Brown and Robin Cook, dating back to their days as the bright young things of the Scottish Labour Party in the 1970s, was described by the Guardian as ‘one of the most bitter feuds in British politics’.
And Brown, of course, hardly spoke to Mandelson, who he believed had stabbed him in the back in the 1994 leadership election; like their 1960s namesakes Peter and Gordon, they lived in a world without love. The grudge was perpetuated by Brown’s own spin doctor, Charlie Whelan who, like Mandelson, had in his early years been involved in the Communist Party, where factionalism and splits were de rigueur. Meanwhile Cherie Blair hated Brown and all his circle. None of it was exactly comradely, as Clare Short pointed out. ‘We can’t go on carving each other up,’ she lamented in 1996. ‘You have to behave in a way that you preach.’ Her words were wasted. As one civil servant drily remarked of the new government: ‘We found that some of them really weren’t very nice to each other at all.’
Above everything else there was the split between Blair and Brown, the two men who had once been so close that they were nicknamed ‘Pushmi-pullyu’ by other MPs, in reference to the two-headed llama in the 1967 film Doctor Dolittle. Millions of words were to be written analysing their fractious relationship, though at heart the issue was very simple, as Blair recognised: ‘The truth is I got the leadership and he wanted it.’ Other issues crept into the dispute, from the personal (Blair’s choice of Jack Straw to manage his leadership campaign) to the political (Blair overruling Brown’s wish to introduce a top rate of income tax at 50 per cent) to the downright trivial (a dispute over who was going to use the soundbite ‘Labour’s coming home’), but the essence remained the same. Brown resented the fact that he had been overtaken by his younger colleague.
And so, for more than a decade after that leadership contest, Brown staged a slow-motion mutiny against the elected leader of his party, while Blair appeared to do nothing to resolve the issue. On the one side, there was bitterness and hostility, on the other, fear and indecision. The result was an uneasy, unsatisfactory compromise, by which Brown was installed as chancellor of the exchequer and was to remain there for the duration of Blair’s premiership.
Little of the dispute was rooted in policy or philosophy. ‘There is but a cigarette paper between the politics of Brown and Blair,’ wrote Polly Toynbee in 1996, but ultimately that didn’t matter, for ‘most of politics is far more about personal rivalry, jealousy and suspicion than usually gets reported’. If there was a difference between the two men, it was temperamental, not political, and lay more in their attitude towards the past than the future. Brown saw himself as part of the continuing romance of the Labour movement – a character in a new chapter perhaps, but not the author of a new volume – while Blair was eager to make a complete break. That was sufficient for many in the party, who saw in Brown a hope for the left, once Blair had worked his electoral magic; concrete evidence of difference was hard to find, but there was a tribal loyalty to be discerned in Brown’s speeches. In 1995 the comedian Caroline Aherne, in her character as chat show host Mrs Merton, asked Ken Livingstone a beautifully barbed question: ‘Which would you prefer to be – leader of the Labour Party or prime minister?’ Brown, one assumed, would have chosen the former, Blair the latter.
Consequently the language they used, the names cited as inspirations, the poses that were struck – these things sometimes varied, even if they led to no real divergence on what should be done now. Brown specialised in broad policy, Blair in warm generalities, but neither was at home with detail. Blair liked to talk about the radical centre, Brown of being a progressive, but both refrained from referring to socialism; similarly both avoided mention of the working class, favouring the much woollier ‘hardworking families’, a phrase imported from America. For a decade they had made for a complementary team; now, once victory was assured, that was being thrown away, and it was hard not to lay most of the blame at Brown’s door. ‘You can’t go on just sulking,’ Blair told him in mid-1995, but it appeared that he could and would.
Like Blair, Brown surrounded himself with courtiers who lacked any power base of their own and were dependent solely on their master’s patronage. Similar circles accompanied key figures elsewhere in New Labour, with diminishing returns as they got further away from Blair himself. ‘John is hopelessly insecure, ever afraid of being shown up by one of his underlings,’ Chris Mullin was warned when he became a minister in John Prescott’s vast empire at the newly created Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions. Once in office, he discovered the reality of departmental meetings helmed by Prescott: ‘Our main role is to laugh sycophantically at his jokes. This is how it must be at the court of Boris Yeltsin.’
The turf war at the heart of New Labour firmly entered the public domain in January 1998 when Paul Routledge published a biography of Brown, with the cooperation of its subject and his intimate circle. For the first time, the extent of the feud between Blair and Brown became known not merely to the public, but also to many within the party, who hadn’t realised how bad things had become. ‘I certainly think it was unwise of Gordon to talk to Routledge,’ wrote Giles Radice in his diary. ‘It suggests that he is still nursing a grudge.’
Indeed he was, and the book spelt out the chancellor’s account of the pair’s shared history, hinging on that dinner in Granita. Blair had always promised Brown a clear run in any leadership election; Brown only yielded on the point in order to preserve party unity; and the price for his non-candidature was that ‘He would have full charge of economic policy and a powerful influence across the range of social policy.’ All three points were fiercely disputed by Blair’s followers: there was no such agreement, Brown didn’t stand because he knew he would lose, and no deal was made. The book, said one Blair supporter, was ‘deliberately reopening old wounds to refight a battle that was never actually fought, because Gordon never stood’.
Those anonymous briefings against Brown began appearing even before the book was published. On the day the first extracts were serialised in The Times, Brown himself was to be found in Eastbourne, attending the wedding of the next generation’s most powerful Labour couple, Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper, an event covered by Routledge in his day job as political correspondent of the Independent on Sunday (he noted that the bride and groom wore Vivienne Westwood and Hugo Boss respectively). But back in London, members of the Blair camp, when not ‘screaming abuse’ at their counterparts in the Brown team, were working overtime behind the scenes to seize back the initiative. Their efforts paid off the following weekend, when Andrew Rawnsley in the Observer quoted ‘someone who has an extremely good claim to know the mind of the prime minister’ as saying that Brown had ‘psychological flaws’.
That comment was immediately attributed to Alastair Campbell, though he denied authorship, and the phrase was considered sufficiently apposite that it remained attached to Brown for the rest of his political career. Cherie Blair was later quoted as saying of the remark: ‘That was an understatement.’ Her preferred formulation was that Brown was ‘fucked up’. Meanwhile Donald Dewar, the secretary of state for Scotland, was privately voicing his opinion that although Brown had ‘the finest mind in British politics’, he was an ‘incomplete character’. A decade later Robert Harris, the novelist and former friend of Blair, suggested a more specific diagnosis, writing that Brown ‘suffers from a kind of political Asperger’s syndrome. Intellectually brilliant, he sometimes seems socially barely functional: a little bit odd.’ Even if all this were true, however, Charlie Whelan had a point when he complained that Blair’s camp were not exactly helping government stability: ‘We can’t have someone in Number Ten briefing that the chancellor is bonkers. It’s fucking madness.’
The perception that there was something slightly strange about Brown had been around for some time, though a lot of the speculation had previously been fixated on his bachelor status, with several in Westminster asserting ‘as a fact’ that he was gay. In 1996, while still shadow chancellor, Brown had appeared on the Radio 4 programme Desert Island Discs, where he was questioned by presenter Sue Lawley about his private life and why he was neither married nor known to have a steady partner: ‘People want to know whether you’re gay or whether there’s some flaw in your personality.’ Brown was understandably tetchy in his reply: ‘Look, I don’t have to answer these questions.’ But he did go on to say: ‘I’m not married. It just hasn’t happened. I hope it does. It may yet. It probably will do.’
The incident caused a minor controversy. Diana Wong, whose late husband Roy Plomley had created Desert Island Discs, and who owned the rights to the show’s format, expressed her displeasure at the intrusive line of questioning, while the actor Michael Cashman, a gay rights activist and future Labour MEP, also objected, on the grounds that there was no issue of ‘hypocrisy’ here: ‘If Gordon Brown had sought to discriminate against homosexuals in his economic policies, then issues pertaining to his sexuality would be pertinent.’
The interview cast an interesting sidelight on life in modern Britain, where an apparent lack of interest in sex had become suspect, and where it was now permissible to demand details of someone’s sexual proclivities. It also fuelled stories that Blair’s camp was responsible for spreading the rumours about Brown’s supposed homosexuality. (‘I told Gordon ages ago,’ Blair was reported to have said at the time of the leadership election in 1994, ‘that he could not be leader of the party without a wife and kids.’) The truth, that Brown was an intensely shy and private person who had no wish to expose himself to media scrutiny, didn’t seem an immediately obvious option. Yet in an era when most politicians leapt at the opportunity to flaunt their families at photo-opportunities, his insistence on maintaining a strict division between his personal and public lives was amongst his most endearing attributes.
‘I don’t try to be secretive,’ Brown insisted, but it was hard to avoid the impression that he did. When the Express on Sunday reported in January 1997 that he had become engaged to his girlfriend, Sarah Macaulay, he was quick to produce a flat denial: ‘It’s nonsense,’ he said, and the story disappeared for a little. When the couple did marry, in August 2000, it was in a private ceremony held in his own front room in Scotland. Tony Blair was not present, having been informed only the day before of the imminent wedding, and nor were any other stars of the political firmament. Nonetheless, the relationship did link Brown to the left-leaning elite of North London: Macaulay had been a pupil at Camden School for Girls, whose other alumni included Fiona Miller, now married to Alastair Campbell, and Nina Temple, the last general secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain. More recently, she had, after the collapse of one public relations firm, founded another in partnership with the daughter of the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm.
By contrast with Brown’s lack of disclosure, Blair was ostentatiously a family man. Cherie was the most visible prime ministerial spouse there had been; the closest that Britain had ever come to having a First Lady on the American model, she existed in a different world from that inhabited by Norma Major, who had shunned the spotlight whenever possible. The Blairs were the first couple to bring up children in Downing Street, and in 2000 added to their number a fourth child, Leo, conceived – as Cherie explained in her autobiography – at Balmoral, on a trip for which she ‘had not packed my contraceptive equipment, out of sheer embarrassment’. That self-proclaimed modesty was not apparent in her book, nor in her husband’s memoirs, which contained an account of their sex on the night after John Smith’s death. ‘I needed that love Cherie gave me,’ he remembered. ‘I was an animal following my instinct.’
The public flaunting of Blair’s personal life was not entirely to Brown’s taste. ‘The whole issue of my being a family man is very sensitive to him,’ Blair admitted to his wife, and it became yet another source of tension. The attempt to keep the split between the two men from public view was unsuccessful. Repeated denials of any division – claims that it was the ‘froth of politics’, whipped up by the media – were met with frank disbelief, and as leading figures in the New Labour world began publishing their memoirs and diaries some years later, the full horror, the sullen insolence with which Brown treated the man he referred to in person simply as ‘Blair’, was gradually revealed. ‘In retrospect, we probably should have made it public,’ wrote Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, in 2010, ‘but the moment never seemed quite right. We were fighting a form of asymmetric warfare. Gordon seemed to be prepared, if necessary, to burn down the citadel in order to capture it.’
The continual denials that any problem existed did nothing to resolve the issue, and Blair’s approach in private was equally irresolute, as Powell acknowledged: ‘His way of managing Gordon was to string him along indefinitely without ever addressing frontally the difficult issue of who was in charge.’ Blair prided himself on being a strong leader, willing to make tough choices; his failure to deal with Brown’s insubordination was an early indication of a weakness that was to mar his premiership.
In the immediate aftermath of the election victory, however, such questions seemed insignificant. And initially it was Brown who had the biggest announcement to make, even if it hadn’t been solely his idea.
The concept that the Bank of England should determine the level of interest rates, free from the dictates of the chancellor of the exchequer, had been around for some time. Tony Blair said that he had first been persuaded of the case in the mid-1980s, listening to Roy Jenkins arguing for it in the House of Commons, and within a few months of becoming Labour leader had resolved that it was the way forward. Gordon Brown had also been talking about the idea for a couple of years in private, encouraged by meetings with Alan Greenspan, the long-serving chairman of the US Federal Reserve.
It had, in fact, already been proposed by Norman Lamont, but rejected by John Major for what seemed like impeccable reasons: ‘I disliked this proposal on democratic grounds, believing that the person responsible for monetary policy should be answerable for it in the House of Commons.’ Even before that, John Smith had come to much the same conclusion, when he was shadow chancellor: ‘Don’t think that having been elected to Parliament and given responsibility for running the economy by the prime minister, I would hand over a large chunk of my responsibilities to the Bank of England.’ New Labour had no such reservations. Four days after the election, the government announced that it was giving the Bank control of base rates.
The principal argument for such a change was that the chancellor would always be tempted by short-term political considerations to act in ways that might be against the longer-term economic interests of the country. Some, such as the campaigner for constitutional reform Anthony Barnett, saw it as a positive step, suggesting that the Bank would become ‘more accountable as sovereignty over a crucial area of decision-making, the base rate, is openly shared’. But in addition to such high-minded wishes, Blair admitted, there were also ‘very good political reasons’, since the move would be ‘the perfect riposte to those worried about the economic credentials of an incoming Labour government’. For those with longer memories, there was the added element of one more deliberate rejection of Labour’s history. Back in 1946, one of the first acts of Clement Attlee’s chancellor, Hugh Dalton, had been to nationalise the Bank of England; now that was effectively to be reversed.
Even accepting the case for handing over monetary policy to the Bank, there were a number of details to be considered. First, the question of disclosure. If one of the key economic levers was to be taken out of the democratic arena, it seemed reasonable to consult the electorate, particularly since the move had clearly been planned before the election. Blair, it was said, wished to make the proposal public as part of the campaign, but was talked out of it by Brown. Instead knowledge of the move was kept within a tight group at the top of New Labour, though Brown did phone previous chancellors after the election to inform them of what he was going to do. ‘You’ll be pleased to hear that I’m introducing your policy,’ he told Norman Lamont, thus ensuring that a former Conservative politician, who had failed to be re-elected to the Commons, heard the news before the Labour Party or the electorate. When Labour MPs were told, some voiced their disapproval. ‘Who elected Eddie George?’ asked Dennis Skinner and Ken Livingstone, in reference to the Bank’s governor.
Second was the matter of who at the Bank of England should actually make the monthly decision on interest rates. John Patten, one of those who argued for the Bank’s independence, had suggested that to retain some form of democratic accountability, the governor and deputy governors should, when appointed, be subject to confirmation hearings in front of a Commons committee. That proposal resurfaced after Brown’s announcement, but was spurned. Instead, Brown established a monetary policy committee, comprising nine members, four of whom – all economists – were to be appointed by him, the other five coming from the Bank itself. He rejected the idea of confirmation hearings.
And third was the question of what the new committee’s frame of reference should be, the factors that they should bear in mind when setting interest rates. It was not, as it turned out, a particularly wide remit. Brown set the Bank the sole task of achieving an inflation rate of 2.5 per cent; no other considerations – unemployment, for example, or economic growth – were to be taken into account. Again, there was little new here. In the wake of Black Wednesday, Lamont had set an inflation target of between 1 and 4 per cent, to be reduced to 2.5 per cent by the end of the parliamentary term, an ambition that had very nearly been met; inflation was running at 2.6 per cent when the Tories left office. Brown was merely continuing the established Conservative policy; New Labour had bought into monetarist doctrine and inflation took precedence over all other aspects of the economy.
But if the chancellor believed his primary responsibility to be the control of inflation, and yet had handed over that duty to an unelected body, then what, one was entitled to ask, was the point of the chancellor? Or, more pertinently still, asked Bryan Gould: ‘what is the point of democracy?’ Gould, one of the few serious commentators not to celebrate the development, argued that ‘politicians should be made to bear responsibility for the performance of the economy – something they are constantly trying to escape’.
Others were occasionally to be heard expressing their doubts in private. David Blunkett confided to his diary in September 1997, as interest rates were put up, his uncertainty that ‘the decision to give interest rates to the Bank of England and to fail to take into account the manufacturing base of the country in the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England has been the right one’. The Liberal Democrats backed the move, but writing in 2009, their economic spokesperson, Vince Cable, described the Bank’s independence as ‘a policy that, until the recent economic crisis, was the most successful and enduring of New Labour’s years in office’. It was a hint that perhaps in retrospect the idea hadn’t been quite such a long-term triumph as envisaged.
By then, too, as the country plunged into a bank-driven recession, there were those querying Brown’s decision later in 1997 to put the supervision of British banking in the hands of the Securities and Investment Board. The previous system, with the Bank of England as the regulatory body, had failed to prevent the collapse of the banks Johnson Matthey, BCCI and Barings, and its credibility had been damaged thereby. The new arrangement, however, went on to fail in a similar manner, suggesting that the problem was not structural but political, a capitulation in the face of big money.
The intention of the Bank moves was, as both Blair and Brown never tired of pointing out, to bring an end to the economic policies that had given the country decades of ‘Tory boom and bust’. As so often with New Labour, the slogan had been purloined, this time from the last Conservative chancellor, Kenneth Clarke. ‘This chancellor does not want a boom because boom gets followed by bust,’ Clarke had said in 1994, making the point yet clearer in his budget speech the following year: ‘no return to boom and bust.’ There was a strong streak of continuity from the one incumbent at the Treasury to the next. Brown himself was later to admit that his Bank of England policy was largely to do with symbolism, not ideology or even practicality, and that it stemmed from fear, rather than courage: ‘We gave the Bank powers in order to be trusted and not for any fundamental economic reasons.’
Whatever reservations some might have expressed about handing over control of interest rates to the Bank of England, it was on the surface a bold move. And that was something of a surprise. Labour had come to office in a state of extreme nervousness, less about the current election, which was as good as in the bag, than about the next; in order to spike the Tory guns next time round, there was a determination not to promise anything that couldn’t be delivered. Before the election a pledge card was printed and distributed to every household. It bore five key undertakings: to cut class sizes in years 1 to 3 to a maximum of thirty, to fast-track the punishment of persistent young offenders, to cut NHS waiting lists by 100,000, to get a quarter of a million young people off benefit and into work, and to set rules for government borrowing with the aim of ensuring low inflation and strengthening the economy.
This was such a modest programme that it ran the risk of making Labour look like a government that would have much to be modest about. When asked in opposition whether his policy was the provision of universal nursery education, Blair had hedged his bets in a formulation of which Harold Wilson, at his most shifty, would have been proud: ‘We will make it a priority to make such a commitment.’ In that context, the Bank decision came as something of a shock. Perhaps, after all, it would be a reforming administration, just as Blair had promised in the last days of the election campaign. ‘I’m going to be a lot more radical in government than many people think,’ he’d claimed.
Other early decisions, however, suggested that this would not be the case. There were a series of announcements that sounded good and caught the eye of headline writers, but which amounted to little more than gestures – the grabbing of ‘low-hanging policy fruit’, in the words of Peter Mandelson. The rate of VAT on domestic fuel was cut from 8 to 5 per cent; the previous government’s ban on union membership at GCHQ in Cheltenham was reversed; entrance charges to public museums and galleries were abolished (a recognition, perhaps, of a less elitist cultural mood); a Food Standards Agency was set up; and – as a way of increasing spending without raising taxes – the rules of the National Lottery were changed to allow a billion pounds over the next four years to go to health and education, as promised by Blair in an election soundbite: ‘the people’s lottery, the people’s priorities’. (Inevitably the phrase ‘the people’s lottery’ came from John Major in the first place.)
More substantially, a promised windfall tax on the privatised utilities was introduced and the money directed towards the so-called New Deal, providing training schemes for the young unemployed. The country also finally signed up to the social provisions rejected by John Major during the Maastricht negotiations, though this was not much trumpeted for fear that Labour would be portrayed as left-wing extremists.
And there was the minimum wage, one of the few trade union demands that had survived the party’s transition into New Labour. During the 1992 election campaign, when Tony Blair had been the employment spokesperson and had made a ‘passionate defence of the minimum wage’, the proposal had been that it should be set at £3.40. In 1997 there was no such pledge, nor was the proposed level revealed during the passage of the legislation through Parliament. When it did emerge, in time for its implementation in April 1999, it turned out to be set at £3.60 an hour, with a lower rate of £3 an hour for those aged between eighteen and twenty-one (for anyone under eighteen, it didn’t apply at all). Had the 1992 figure been maintained, it would, allowing for inflation, have been £4.06. On this measure, therefore, there had been a 12 per cent devaluation in Labour aspirations since the days of Neil Kinnock.
The Low Pay Commission suggested that the figure should be set at £3.75, a proposal that, according to Alastair Campbell, infuriated Blair: ‘He was off on one, ranting that they were all going native and not understanding the big picture and have they thought of the effect on business?’ For even at the less than onerous level that was introduced, many major companies were affected by the legislation and were obliged to raise their levels of pay. Employees of McDonald’s and Burger King were amongst those to gain, as were many agricultural workers, and, as the conscience of the cabinet, Clare Short, pointed out, ‘the major beneficiaries would be low-paid women’.
It was clear, however, that the minimum wage would not do much to solve the issue of poverty, which was one of Gordon Brown’s stated objectives, as he promised to reform the welfare state as radically as had the governments of 1906 and 1945. In pursuit of this goal, he introduced the child tax credit and the working family tax credit, direct payments made by the state to the lowest-paid workers. The bill for this came in at £5 billion, which was raised by hitting pension funds through the abolition of advance corporation tax, penalising savers in order to redistribute wealth. ‘This is the tax bombshell which was waiting to be exposed during the election campaign,’ wrote Alex Brummer in the Guardian, adding that ‘it will affect almost everyone in Britain in an occupational pension scheme’. The policy, in the words of Charlie Whelan, was ‘to milk the middle class’, though again this was not proclaimed in public.
The new system was an extension of the family credit that already existed, but hugely expanded and based on lessons learned by Brown’s economic adviser Ed Balls while studying at Harvard. It had, some felt, a structural flaw. ‘In the longer term, there is a worry that the state is subsidising low-paid employment,’ reflected Short, though she concluded that it ‘created a new sense of hope in constituencies like mine’.
And, arguably, that feeling of optimism was New Labour’s major economic achievement in its early days. Objectively, nothing much changed. The economy had been growing for almost five years by the time the party came to power, the unemployment rate had been falling since its peak of nearly 11 per cent in early 1993, and Brown did little to change course. But the election added the feelgood factor that had proved so elusive for John Major’s government.
Most of the changes introduced by Labour were opposed by the Conservatives, though the size of the government majority made such opposition fairly academic. And anyway, neither the media nor the public was much interested in what the party did or said, and each found its lack of concern reinforced by the other. Gillian Shephard recalled an occasion when one of the frontbench Tory spokespeople was invited to do a television interview, addressing precisely that point of why the party was failing to make itself heard: ‘When he arrived, he was told the interview had been cancelled.’ In December 1997 a meeting of the 1922 Committee was held to discuss significant and far-reaching reforms to the party structure, but, wrote Alan Clark, ‘when we came out into the corridor there was not a single journalist waiting’. His conclusion was sad but accurate: ‘We have become irrelevant.’
Those proposed party reforms were the responsibility of the new leader, and for a couple of weeks at least, the contest to see who would succeed John Major did manage to generate a little press interest. The assumption had long been that it would be a fight to the finish between the two Michaels – Portillo and Heseltine – but neither actually made it to the starting line. Portillo was disqualified by reason of losing his seat and Heseltine missed out when he was rushed into hospital a couple of days after the election with a recurrence of his heart problem; with the example of John Smith going before him as a warning, he stood no chance. There were other big names around, however, and Michael Howard emerged as many people’s favourite before his progress encountered an unexpected setback.
The issue was somewhat obscure and dated back several years. When Howard became home secretary in 1993, he had inherited a director general of prisons named Derek Lewis, with whom he had a strained relationship from the outset. Early on there was a series of bad news stories about jails, most notably the escape of six convicted IRA terrorists from Whitemoor Prison in September 1994. Lewis could point to the fact that jail escapes had fallen substantially on his watch, but the mutual distrust between him and his political master worsened. The dispute came to a head when the report was published of an inquiry into another breakout, this one from Parkhurst Prison in January 1995, in response to which Howard decided to suspend the governor of Parkhurst, John Marriott. When Lewis rejected that decision, Howard took legal advice and found that he had no authority to overrule Lewis. He did, however, have the power to dismiss Lewis, and promptly did so.
In a subsequent Commons debate, Howard defended his actions vigorously and emerged triumphant, having emphasised that he couldn’t be held accountable for everything that went wrong in the prison service. He drew a distinction between those things for which he was responsible (which he defined as policy matters) and those for which he was not (operational matters), a separation that was not only established practice but also fairly obvious. So low had the Tories fallen in public opinion, however, that outside the House the argument seemed to many to be pettifogging legalese, designed simply to distance Howard from his officials and to save his skin. It lent itself to satire, exemplified by Armando Iannucci’s mock news item on The Friday Night Armistice: ‘On Friday a high court ruling declared that all of Britain’s remaining convicted armed robbers were to be released on the grounds that using guns to thieve was an operational matter rather than a policy decision, and therefore one for which they shouldn’t ultimately be responsible.’
What went unnoticed at the time was that Ann Widdecombe, as the prisons minister serving under Howard at the Home Office, sided entirely with Lewis and bitterly resented his treatment at the hands of her boss. She kept her resentment private until Howard emerged as the front runner for the Conservative leadership, at which point she broke cover, giving interviews in which she suggested that there was ‘something of the night’ about the man.
A killer phrase, echoing Clare Short’s description of Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell as ‘people who live in the dark’, it nailed Howard’s image perfectly. The BBC’s political correspondent Nicholas Jones had earlier referred to Howard’s ‘Machiavellian talent for media management’, arguing that he was the Tory ‘answer to Peter Mandelson’, and pointing out that he was known to some journalists as ‘the cabinet’s Geoffrey Boycott’ for his ability to stonewall endlessly. That talent was now to be put to the ultimate test, as he was invited onto the BBC’s Newsnight for an interview with Jeremy Paxman. Howard was asked whether he had threatened to overrule Lewis over the future of John Marriott, and gave an evasive answer, so Paxman asked the same question again. And again, and then again. Fourteen times in a row, he put the question to Howard without getting a straight answer. It was not Howard’s finest moment, and the interview became a cult classic, encapsulating for many what was seen as the shiftiness of modern politicians.
Howard’s hopes of becoming Conservative leader were probably ended with that performance, but to be on the safe side, Widdecombe followed it up with a speech in the House of Commons that comprehensively destroyed his reputation. She began by focusing on Howard’s treatment of Lewis, insisting that ‘We demean our high office if we mistreat our public servants’, before broadening this out into a more general analysis of the state of modern politics: ‘Many of our great institutions are falling into disrepute. I was wretchedly unaware of how many people to whom I talked during the election uttered the sentiment that politicians of all parties are sleazy and corrupt and principally concerned with their own interest and survival.’ It was time, she declared, for Parliament to clean up its act and discard its soiled image.
If this was bad news for Howard, it was the making of Widdecombe. She had on her wall a framed poster of the cartoon cat Garfield, with the caption ‘If you want to look thinner, hang around with people who are fatter than you’, and she seemed now to be applying this to her own political career. Long denounced as the epitome of the heartless right-winger, she had attacked a senior right-wing colleague with such ferocity that it changed her image almost entirely. No longer Doris Karloff, the shackler of pregnant prisoners, she was now the fearless assassin of Michael Howard, and henceforth, it seemed, she would always be associated with coining that soundbite: ‘something of the night’.
In the first round of voting for the Tory leadership, largely as a result of Widdecombe’s intervention, Howard finished last in a field of five, beaten by two other candidates from the right, Peter Lilley and John Redwood. Some distance ahead, however, came the two who were clearly going to fight it out for the top spot. Slightly in the lead was Kenneth Clarke, though his vote was less strong than anticipated, with the former Welsh secretary, William Hague, in second place.
Every poll – of the public, of party members, of peers and of MEPs – was quite clear: Clarke was the preferred candidate of everyone who was not entitled to vote. Those who did have a vote, however, the remains of the parliamentary party, were less convinced. Clarke was regarded as being deeply suspect on the issue of Europe, and he struggled to convince the relevant electorate to look at the larger picture. ‘The British people did not vote for Blair because they thought the Conservatives were insufficiently right-wing or Eurosceptic,’ he pointed out in a letter to MPs, but already the tide was turning. Both Howard and Lilley dropped out of the contest, pledging their support to Hague, and it became clear that he was now likely to win.
It was an unexpected development for the public, but not necessarily for bookmakers. Hague had been joint favourite at William Hill even during the general election campaign and, in the absence of Portillo, had been pushed up as odds-on favourite before the leadership voting began. John Major’s own private comment on hearing that Portillo had lost his seat was said to have been: ‘I suppose it will be William.’
Hague still trailed Clarke in the second ballot, which saw Redwood knocked out of the race, but then faced a development that genuinely took the political world by surprise. Redwood struck a deal with Clarke, pledging his support in return for being effectively his running mate. It was a deeply improbable alliance, bringing together two men who represented entirely opposing positions on what was supposed to be the single most important issue – Europe – but it did unite a pair of big players with weight and experience to recommend them, suggesting a degree of political maturity.
The move came with the backing of Michael Heseltine: ‘This is, I think, a historic moment in the history of the Conservative Party,’ he was reported to have said. ‘It is the end of years of conflict.’ Others shared his belief that the implausible coalition might signal a move away from the ideological infighting that had shaped the party for the last few years, a return to the Tory tradition of power at any price. It was, wrote Hugo Young in the Guardian, ‘the Conservative Party we used to know and fear. Ideas, it turns out, matter less than hatred, calculation and power.’ The now retired veteran Julian Critchley was less convinced: ‘Is this another Hitler-Stalin pact? Is the move too clever by half? Will it swing opinion Hague’s way by its very outrageousness?’
Critchley’s doubts were well founded. The deal was seen as naked opportunism at a time when intellectual purity was sought, and in the third and final ballot Clarke found he had gained only six votes out of the thirty-eight who had supported Redwood. Hague – who was now being backed from outside Parliament by Margaret Thatcher and Michael Portillo – won with a comfortable, if not huge, majority. Clarke announced that he would return to the back benches, and it was widely assumed that his career as a front-rank politician was over.
There was much in this election that echoed the condition of the Labour Party in the 1980s. In electing Hague, where Labour in 1981 had opted for Michael Foot, the Tories had chosen youth rather than age, but the underlying intention – of pleasing the party rather than the public – was strikingly similar. Just as Labour had then rejected the obvious option, Denis Healey, because it feared he was out of step with the membership, so too did the Tories reject Kenneth Clarke, and in both instances the failed candidate was attacked for being pro-Europe. Most of what Clarke had done as chancellor had the support of the party’s right wing, but he was seen as wrong on the EU, so ‘he was doomed to fall at what they believed to be the only fence on the course’, as Heseltine put it.
There was too, as with Labour in the 1980s, a desire to appease the fringes, in this instance the UK Independence Party and the Referendum Party. Back in the 1960s, Harold Wilson had famously said: ‘You don’t need to worry about the outside left. They’ve got nowhere else to go.’ In the 1990s, the Conservatives did have to worry; there was in UKIP an alternative, a potential home for disaffected purists. And, just as in 1981, the real hero of the radicals was absent. Then, Tony Benn had refused to stand, believing that the election lacked legitimacy, while now Portillo was out of Parliament (as Benn had been when Labour chose its next leader in 1983). The great achievement of the left in the previous decade had been to entrench Thatcher as prime minister by provoking a split in the Labour Party; the Eurosceptics didn’t quite manage to split the Tories, but they did succeed in keeping out Kenneth Clarke, thereby ensuring that New Labour had a pretty free run.
Hague’s victory was built on two key factors. First, he was seen as a moderate Eurosceptic, sufficiently opposed to the EU to attract right-wing support, but not so opposed that he would panic Europhiles into leaving the party. In fact he had, on this and on other issues, kept his head down during his eight years in Parliament, remaining sturdily loyal to the leadership. ‘It’s not the job of a junior minister to go rampaging round taking up positions on the wings of the party,’ he explained in 1994. And second, he was considered by some to be the Tory answer to Tony Blair. A 36-year-old, state-educated Yorkshireman, with a voice somewhere between those of Harold Wilson and of Peter Sallis in the Wallace and Gromit films, he was seen as the young, classless embodiment of the Conservative Party’s future. Rather neatly, he promised a ‘fresh start’, borrowing the slogan of the Maastricht rebels while hinting at a Blairite clean slate.
Hague’s age was, initially, one of the few things that attracted attention. The youngest leader of the Tories since William Pitt the Younger, more than two centuries earlier, he seemed to the public even more youthful than that, for his image was still dominated by his appearance as a sixteen-year-old at the 1977 Conservative conference. Then, as a pudgy-faced schoolboy, his hair (long by Tory standards) clashing somewhat with his tweed jacket and sensible tie, he had caused a sensation, urging a future Thatcher government to ‘roll back the frontiers of the state’ and to ‘create a capital-owning, home-owning democracy for the young people’.
Twenty years on, he still stood for the same principles, but the memory of that speech now merged all too easily with the character of Tory Boy, the smug, intolerant adolescent, created and played by Harry Enfield, who sneered his contempt for the unemployed and those on benefits. (Tory Boy’s rebirth in Enfield’s 1997 Christmas special as Tony Boy, an equally smug, intolerant adolescent, this time in New Labour colours, made less impact.) Julian Critchley referred to Hague as ‘a juvenile lead’, while Labour’s Tony Banks joked that the Conservatives had ‘elected a foetus as party leader’, adding maliciously: ‘I bet there’s a lot of Tory MPs that wish they hadn’t voted against abortion now.’
Hague also faced some criticism from the Daily Telegraph for saying that he wasn’t opposed to the idea of gay marriages, and during the leadership election rumours circulated about his sexuality. His team was full of ‘bachelor boys’, ran a jibe said to have originated with Iain Duncan Smith, who was running John Redwood’s campaign, though Hague was by now engaged to Ffion Jenkins, a civil servant he had worked with in the Welsh Office. ‘I like women so much I have even decided to marry one,’ he joked.
Despite some impressive performances at prime minister’s questions in the Commons – for he was a witty, quick-thinking debater and won the Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year award in 1998 – Hague’s cause wasn’t helped by some early misjudged attempts at photo-opportunities. Most notoriously these included a ride on a water-chute at Flambards theme park in Cornwall, for which he sported a personalised baseball cap, and an appearance at the Notting Hill Carnival, posing with Ffion, as they sucked through straws at a rum punch served in coconut shells. He looked game but awkward and no one believed he would be doing such things had cameras not been present.
The ridicule he faced for these ventures was matched only by the media’s studied refusal to recognise him at other times. He was ‘the only person to have one of those “Where are they now?” features written about him whilst leader of the Conservative Party’, mocked Peter Baynham on The Friday Night Armistice, and the right was no more convinced. ‘The Tories are a waste of space,’ wrote Richard Littlejohn in the Sun, ‘and by choosing William Hague have replaced Captain Mainwaring with Private Pike. Stupid boy.’ As often, Frank Johnson had the best line, comparing Hague to an asylum seeker: ‘a man with a well-founded fear of persecution in his own country’. Of all the many negative comments, however, perhaps the most perceptive was that of Alan Clark, who described Hague as a ‘shifty little bureaucrat’. For, in keeping with his role model, Tony Blair, the new leader saw his primary objective to be not policy development but structural reform of his party.
Hague faced an appallingly steep uphill climb as leader of the opposition. Not only were the ranks of Conservative MPs severely depleted, but the possibility existed that an end to the slaughter might not have been reached. Dozens of once-safe Tory seats were now held by such slim majorities that they had to be considered marginal, and could fall next time around. In two of the first three by-elections fought under Hague – at Winchester and at Beckenham, six months after the general election – the Tory share of the vote fell still further.
Outside Parliament, an even more sorry story was to be found. The average age of members was sixty-four (twenty years older than the Labour average) and estimates suggested that membership numbers had fallen by as much as two-thirds since 1992. ‘It’s getting older, weaker and smaller,’ Edwina Currie had noted of the party, while it was still in government, bemoaning the absence of young people: ‘without them we have no future – only nostalgia and unpopularity.’ A couple of years earlier a vice-chairman of the party had admitted privately that the grassroots were withering to the extent that ‘We couldn’t get candidates for the local elections.’ And when Michael Spicer tried to form a new local branch in his constituency in 1994, the meeting attracted just five people, three of them – including a woman celebrating her ninety-second birthday – having turned up by mistake. An eighty-year-old wondered why she was being thanked and had to be told that she’d just been appointed to sit on the branch committee. ‘Thus was the new branch formed,’ wrote Spicer in his diary, with bleak humour, ‘vigorously to bang the drums for the Conservative message and to take it into the future.’
Nationally the party was overdrawn by £3.5 million, having spent more than twice as much when losing the election as it had when winning in 1983, even if inflation was taken into account. And there were far fewer major donors around to make up the shortfall, now that, as the BBC’s political editor Robin Oakley pointed out on election night, ‘it looks as though Labour will be there for a couple of terms’. The only real big spender left in the Tory camp was the businessman Michael Ashcroft, appointed by Hague as the party treasurer despite concerns about his tax arrangements and overseas business interests. Meanwhile, many of those groups who had once been considered soul-mates of the Conservatives – the churches, the universities, the professions – had been driven away during the Thatcher revolution, when big business was courted at the expense of the traditional establishment.
Just to rub it in, for those who hoped the election of Hague might truly mean a fresh start for the Conservatives, the old image of sleaze made an unwelcome reappearance. The day after the leadership question was settled, Jonathan Aitken withdrew his libel action against the Guardian, when evidence emerged to prove that he’d lied in court; it was now inevitable that he would himself be prosecuted, and in due course he received a seven-month sentence after being found guilty of perjury. A fortnight later, a parliamentary investigation concluded that Neil Hamilton had indeed taken money and freebies from Mohammed Al-Fayed. Though that report was only partially endorsed on appeal, the Sun had already covered its publication under the uncompromising headline LYING SLEAZEBAG.
‘Our current organisation is not up to the job,’ admitted Hague, as he gazed around at the ruins of what had, until very recently, been the most successful party machine in the history of modern democracy. ‘No change is not an option. We need to renew our organisation, rebuild our membership and rejuvenate our party.’
He was right. Unlike the Labour Party, for whom the rewriting of Clause IV had been a largely cosmetic exercise in what was widely called ‘sending out signals’, the Conservative Party really was in desperate need of reform. Even its name was slightly misleading, for there was no such legally constituted entity as a Conservative Party. Rather there were three separate bodies: the parliamentary party, together with peers and MEPs; the full-time staff at Central Office, reporting to the leader of the parliamentary party; and the National Union, which brought together the voluntary organisations and constituency associations. Formally and technically these three groups had no influence over each other.
This had once been seen as a virtue (before the election, Labour’s general secretary, Tom Sawyer, had expressed his admiration of the ease with which a Tory leader could manoeuvre since ‘internal democracy is virtually nonexistent’), but it had also caused enormous strain in recent years. However much, for example, John Major might have wished that Neil Hamilton had not been a candidate in the general election, ensuring that sleaze remained in the headlines, there was nothing he could do about it. ‘The selection of a candidate is the responsibility of the association,’ he pointed out, with a barely concealed note of frustration. At Hague’s instigation, a single structure was now to be created, with representation from all sections of the party on a ruling board, akin to Labour’s national executive committee. Inevitably the net effect was to concentrate more power in the centre.
And there was to be a change to the MPs-only voting system that had given the Tories a succession of leaders, from Edward Heath to Hague himself. After some arguments between those who wished the MPs to retain the lion’s share of the votes when choosing their leader, and those prepared to hand over power to party members, a compromise was found whereby the MPs would vote on candidates until there were just two remaining; these would then go to a ballot of the whole membership (which meant that for the first time a national list of members had to be created). A further change made it much more difficult to challenge an incumbent leader, in the way that had led to Margaret Thatcher’s removal; previously a candidate needed just a proposer and seconder, now 15 per cent of MPs were required to agree before a contest could be called.
There was something quite impressive about the way Hague pushed the reforms through, for he was hardly in the most secure position as leader. He had secured only a quarter of MPs’ first-preference votes when elected, and the last-minute support of Michael Portillo – while undeniably welcome – had been something of a barbed compliment; the suspicion was that Portillo was plotting a return to the Commons, and didn’t want to find anyone as substantial as Kenneth Clarke in situ when the next leadership contest came along. That certainly seemed to be the perception of Thatcher, who was reported to be momentarily nonplussed when asked about the new leader: ‘William? Oh, William. He’ll only be around for eighteen months. Until we get Michael back.’
However significant the changes, the public was understandably less than fascinated by the preoccupation with procedure, and by the summer of 1998, things were looking even worse for the Tories than they had in the latter days of John Major. Opinion polls were showing Labour support at over 50 per cent, with the Conservatives scraping along at under 25 per cent. Rumours were circulating that Hague might not complete a whole term as leader, and Blair was expressing his concern that Clarke might be called upon to take over, ‘something he really fears’.
Part of the Conservatives’ problem was that they were still seen as ‘the nasty party’, unforgiven by the electorate. During the leadership contest, Hague had seemed to recognise that this had to change: ‘The free and prosperous society that we had championed became tainted with the image of sleaze, greed, self-indulgence and division.’ But he seemed unsure how to combat it, and anyway there were still many in his own ranks who had yet to be convinced. An initiative was launched under the banner of ‘Listening to Britain’, in which the shadow cabinet and other MPs would hold public meetings to see where they had been going wrong. Widely dismissed as a gimmick, the kind of project that politicians always pursue when lost for a sense of direction, it was in this instance a real educational exercise for some of its participants. ‘I truly believed that I was not out of touch with people’s preoccupations and concerns,’ wrote Gillian Shephard, ‘but experience of the meetings proved me wrong.’
There was still room in the parliamentary party, however, for the likes of Eric Forth, a communist in his Glasgow youth, who now espoused a hard right-wing position with diminishing returns. ‘There are millions of people in this country who are white, Anglo-Saxon and bigoted,’ he argued, ‘and they need to be represented.’ He’d backed Hague for the leadership, possibly in sympathy with Hague’s earlier support for the reintroduction of hanging, birching and the stocks, but that was the kind of thing from which the new leader was seeking to distance himself; figures like Forth made it all the more difficult. Nor did the appointment as party chairman of Cecil Parkinson, a figure identified entirely with the 1980s, play particularly well except amongst the ageing faithful.
Beyond the public perceptions, though, was perhaps a deeper problem still. One of Tony Blair’s key insights into the fortunes of the Labour Party was that it had been too successful for its own good, that by fighting to improve the lot of the working class, it had enabled many to escape their backgrounds. At that point the conventional wisdom, embodied in his own father, kicked in: ‘You made it; you were a Tory: two sides of the same coin.’ As Blair saw it, there was an attitude on the intellectual left that failed to connect with people’s aspirations: ‘In a sense they wanted to celebrate the working class, not make them middle class – but middle class was precisely what your average worker wanted himself or his kids to be.’ In an increasingly middle-class country – largely thanks, claimed Blair, to Labour’s achievements in the past – the only way forward for the party was to embrace and reflect those aspirations, to appeal beyond its natural constituency.
From the perspective of the Conservative Party, there was a very real danger that it was suffering a parallel process of having made itself surplus to requirements, that it too might be the victim of its own success. It had been elected in 1979 at a time when the trade unions were believed by many to be too powerful, when inflation was rampant and the economy in decline. After eighteen years of often very hard times indeed, including two huge recessions, it had broken the unions and delivered low inflation and steady growth. It had done the difficult things that it was meant to have done, and had convinced the other parties that this was the only sound approach to handling the economy. At which point, it could reasonably be asked what its continuing function was. The electorate had no obligation to feel gratefully loyal, and every right to decide that the time for unpleasant medicine had passed.
Over the course of the twentieth century, the Conservative Party had spent more years in power in Britain than had the communists in Russia. But that was history, and Blair was urging the country to ‘Forget the past’. In 1993 Margaret Thatcher had speculated that perhaps James Callaghan had led the last-ever Labour government. Five years later, Hywel Williams was one of the first prepared to ask in public the reciprocal question: ‘Was John Major the Conservative Party’s last prime minister?’