‘I don’t want control of you’
Too much power is held at the centre.
John Smith (1993)
SIR MICHAEL JAFFA: Democracy is all very well in its place – ancient Greece, for example – but nowadays, oppositions are in favour of democracy until they get elected. Because once you’re in government, you realise how frightfully negative democracy can be.
Chris Langham, Look at the State We’re In! (1995)
Honk if you hate the English.
bumper sticker seen in Scotland (1994)
A year after Margaret Thatcher’s third successive election victory, Britain celebrated in 1988 the three hundredth anniversary of the Glorious Revolution, the moment when a constitutional monarchy had been established and the independence of Parliament asserted, as set out in the Bill of Rights. Three centuries on, there were those who felt that it was time for Britain’s piecemeal accumulation of constitutional documents – of which the Bill of Rights occupied pride of place, alongside Magna Carta and the Petition of Right – to be replaced by a written constitution in the way of all properly modern democracies. And so was born Charter 88, a campaigning group that launched itself via an advert in the Guardian, signed by 250 prominent figures, amongst them actors and academics, comedians, writers and lawyers, from Rik Mayall to Ralph Miliband.
‘Three hundred years of unwritten rule from above are enough,’ the Charter declared, as it set out its demands for proportional representation, a reformed House of Lords, freedom of information and a new Bill of Rights that would enshrine ‘the right to peaceful assembly, to freedom of association, to freedom from discrimination, to freedom from detention without trial, to trial by jury, to privacy and to freedom of expression’. In the wake of Thatcher’s re-election, these basic rights, it was felt, were in danger of being eroded, whether through neglect or deliberate action. ‘It is now the turn of the body politic to be brought up to date, by bringing the extraordinary powers of the British state under democratic regulation,’ wrote Anthony Barnett, the organisation’s first director.
Charter 88 lit a slow-burning fuse. Ignored by the government of the time, it nonetheless did much to set an agenda on the left, its warnings about slipping into an elected dictatorship only heightened by the talk of a one-party state that followed the 1992 election. Some in the upper echelons of New Labour regarded the organisation with a certain suspicion, seeing it as little more than a middle-class North London talking shop, but it had by then diffused its ideas widely enough that they would be hard to resist. And in any event the concept of constitutional reform chimed rather well with Tony Blair’s own approach to politics.
For the one organisation that Blair had ever run was the Labour Party; this was his sole qualification for being prime minister, and the experience he gained there was in structural change. The rewriting of Clause IV, the centralisation of policy-making, the neutering of the national executive committee, the conference and the shadow cabinet – all had been concerned with form rather than content. Now, embracing much of the thinking of Charter 88, that experience was to be applied to the political structure of the country as a whole, with somewhat mixed results.
Amongst the resulting changes was the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into British law. First ratified by the UK in 1951, the Convention had previously existed as a final recourse, available only to those who had exhausted the British courts and had won leave to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. As Labour leader, John Smith had committed the party to bringing the process into domestic law, so that British courts would also be able to interpret the provisions of the Convention and make judgements accordingly. Enacting this proposal was one of the Labour government’s early moves, and went a long way to addressing Charter 88’s call for a Bill of Rights.
It wasn’t entirely coincidental that the advent of the Human Rights Act should be accompanied by television drama series that depicted lawyers as campaigners for justice. There was a precursor to this trend with Kavanagh QC, in which the main character met his wife in the 1960s when he defended her after she was arrested on a pro-abortion demonstration, but it reached new heights with Judge John Deed (2001). Created by G.F. Newman, best known for his novels and dramas about corrupt police officers, the series starred Martin Shaw as the most liberal judge imaginable. ‘You still think like a defence barrister,’ he’s told, as he gives his full support to his daughter, arrested while destroying a field of genetically modified crops. ‘Sometimes direct action is the only way,’ he concludes. Similarly the legal drama North Square (2000) opened with a group of trendy young middle-class barristers singing along to the Clash’s song ‘Bankrobber’. Tastes would soon change, as right-wing newspapers began a sustained assault on human rights legislation, but for now it was possible to present fictional lawyers in a heroic light.
The other great constitutional change that came out of the Home Office was – for politicians at least – more controversial. ‘We are pledged to a Freedom of Information Act, leading to more open government,’ promised Labour’s 1997 manifesto, though as Jack Straw later admitted, ‘those few words were about all the serious intellectual consideration that the PLP or the shadow cabinet had given to this inherently complex issue’. Only when a white paper was published did the newly elected government recognise the dangerous waters into which they were drifting and begin to row back as fast as possible. The resulting Act was passed in 2000, its provisions becoming fully operative in 2005. Campaigners were furious at the watering down of the proposals – even the normally loyal John O’Farrell, now a Guardian columnist, complained that the measure had ‘suffered a death by a thousand caveats’ – but their disapproval was as nothing compared with that of the prime minister, when he realised that he had given away the privilege of privacy.
‘You idiot,’ Blair wrote in his memoirs, addressing his younger, less experienced self. ‘You naive, foolish, irresponsible nincompoop. There is really no description of stupidity, no matter how vivid, that is adequate.’ He didn’t dwell too long on his own culpability, however, swiftly moving on to criticise the civil servants who he felt should have stopped him from making good on his election pledge. The consequence was to reinforce Blair’s existing tendency for what became known as ‘sofa government’, the taking of decisions in informal, off-the-record meetings; if no minutes were kept, there could be no paper trail available to inquisitive journalists. A move intended to illuminate the corridors of power had, in the short term, the effect of making government less accountable.
The drive for constitutional change was most evident in the pursuit of devolution, the passing of powers from Westminster to some of the United Kingdom’s constituent nations. This hadn’t been one of the original demands of Charter 88 (though the preamble to the launch advert had recognised the issue, declaring ‘Scotland is governed like a province from Whitehall’), but for the government, it was painful, outstanding business left over from the last time Labour was in office.
Back in 1979 referendums had been held in both Scotland and Wales on whether to establish devolved assemblies, and had met with contrasting fates; the ‘yes’ campaign secured 52 per cent of the vote in Scotland, but just 20 per cent in Wales. Even with that Scottish majority, however, the proposal was defeated, since an amendment to the legislation governing the referendums had introduced an additional hurdle, which required that a change to the constitution must achieve the support of 40 per cent of the electorate; in the event, the turnout proved too low, under a third of registered voters approving the proposal. Believing that they had been cheated of victory, the Scottish National Party responded by withdrawing its support for what was then a minority government, and in a subsequent vote of no confidence, James Callaghan was defeated by a single vote, precipitating the general election that brought Margaret Thatcher to power and shut Labour out for eighteen years.
For more than a decade, the idea of devolution had been off the Westminster agenda, and it wasn’t until 1992, with the possibility of a Labour victory, that it returned as a live issue. During that campaign, John Major took up the cause of the Union with some enthusiasm, denouncing Labour’s plans for Scottish and Welsh assemblies as a threat to the wider nation. ‘The United Kingdom is in danger,’ he warned at an election rally. ‘Wake up, my fellow countrymen. Wake up now before it is too late.’ And his words may have had an impact, for the Conservatives bucked the national trend in Scotland, marginally increasing their vote, their share of the vote and their number of MPs.
It was, however, only a temporary setback, and in 1997 Labour went into the election with much the same proposals. Once more Major talked of how devolution would ‘undermine the unity of the United Kingdom’, but fewer seemed prepared to listen this time; the Tory vote fell by eight points in Scotland, relegating the party to third place behind the SNP. With the Nationalists calling for full independence, and Labour and the Liberal Democrats both supporting devolution, there was a clear majority for constitutional change (far surpassing that 40 per cent threshold), and a new Westminster government prepared to enact it.
The approach this time round differed from the 1970s. There were again to be referendums in Scotland and Wales, which in itself annoyed some ardent devolutionists – in 1992 the manifesto had promised the creation of assemblies without need for further consultation – but this time there would be no threshold; a simple majority of the votes cast would be sufficient to determine the outcome. More significantly, the referendums would be held before detailed proposals were laid before Parliament. In the 1979 votes, the question had been whether to ratify legislation that had already been passed in Westminster; now the order of events was reversed. ‘The tactic was obvious,’ said Blair: ‘get the people to say yes, then the Lords could not say no.’ Others saw it as yet another example of encroachment on parliamentary sovereignty, a break with constitutional tradition.
Blair’s commitment to the project was, in any event, lukewarm at best. ‘It’s Gordon’s passion,’ he shrugged. ‘So we’re doing it.’ And indeed the issue was largely driven by Gordon Brown, who had supported devolution in the 1970s, when the idea hadn’t been universally popular in the Labour Party – his great Scottish rival, Robin Cook, for example, had been opposed. It had too a personal resonance for Brown, as one of the few totems from his more left-wing youth to which he could still cling. So many compromises had been made that, in the words of the Welsh historian Martin Johnes: ‘Devolution seemed to be the only radical thing New Labour was offering.’
When first appointed shadow trade and industry spokesperson in 1989, Brown had made clear the strength of his national allegiance: ‘I am particularly pleased to be one of four Scots in the new shadow cabinet.’ Now he was part of a cabinet in which nearly a third were Scottish, and he wasn’t going to miss a chance to make good on the long-delayed promise of a fully fledged new Parliament (the proposal of an ‘assembly’ had by now been upgraded) in Edinburgh.
Brown was backed heavily by Donald Dewar, the party’s Scottish spokesperson through the 1980s and now secretary of state for Scotland. Like others in the Scottish Labour Party, Dewar was aware of the potential threat from the SNP if devolution wasn’t carried through. ‘People should not underestimate how fragile the Union now is in Scotland,’ he explained in 1996; the next election was secure, ‘but the 2001 election could be a different matter if Labour messes it up’. The ambition was, as the 1997 manifesto made clear, to see ‘the threat of separatism removed’. As even Blair recognised: ‘in Scotland disillusioned Labour voters have somewhere to go.’
The passage of the campaign was not entirely smooth. A key question was the power that would be exercised by a Scottish Parliament and, in particular, whether it would have the ability to set different tax rates from those laid down in Westminster. It had long been accepted that this would be within the authority of a devolved government, but it became an increasingly pressing concern as the election approached. In 1995 John Major appointed Michael Forsyth as secretary of state for Scotland, and Forsyth began a powerful rearguard action against devolution. Amongst his initiatives were the granting of new powers to the Scottish Grand Committee – a parliamentary body that included all those MPs who sat for Scottish seats – and the propaganda coup of returning the Stone of Scone from Westminster Abbey to Scotland in 1996, the 700th anniversary of its removal by Edward I.
These gestures hadn’t been entirely successful in changing attitudes. ‘It speaks volumes for the attitude of Westminster,’ fumed the Scotsman, ‘that they should expect Scotland to be grateful for being awarded this useless lump of sandstone in lieu of self-government.’ But Forsyth had more luck when he coined the phrase ‘the tartan tax’ to warn that devolution would hit voters in the pocket. Blair, desperate to shed Labour’s reputation as the high-tax party, was rattled and decided, to the fury of many, that the referendum should have two separate questions: first, whether there should be a parliament at all, and second, if such a parliament were established, whether it should have tax-raising powers.
Having thus raised the possibility that a toothless parliament would be created, Blair went on during the general election campaign to compound his perceived fault. Asked in an interview with the Scotsman about the tax issue, he answered: ‘Once the powers are given, it’s like any parish council, it’s got the right to exercise them.’ He was trying to explain that in the event of Labour forming a government in Scotland, it would not – if he had his way – exploit that right to raise taxes, but the ham-fisted use of the phrase ‘parish council’ provoked outrage, drowning out the launch that day of the Labour manifesto for Scotland.
The manifesto itself was ostentatiously adorned with the Blair tartan in a desperate attempt to flaunt the leader’s Scottish credentials. (It was perhaps the same desire that prompted him, when asked what he loved most about England, to reply: ‘Walking in the Scottish highlands.’) It didn’t work, and Blair faced a far greater degree of hostility in the Scottish media than he did in London. Alastair Campbell, who encountered the same antagonism, put it down to resentment that he and Blair were both perceived to have abandoned their roots: ‘they view us as ultra English,’ he complained, adding rather plaintively in his diary that ‘I play the bagpipes’ as proof of his true identity. In a reversal of roles, Blair was considerably blunter about Scottish journalists, dismissing them as ‘unreconstructed wankers’.
Despite his clumsiness, Blair led Labour to a handsome victory in Scotland in the general election and swiftly made good on the promised referendum. It was scheduled to be held on 11 September 1997, though there was some concern that it might be postponed following Princess Diana’s death. It is far from clear what impact such a postponement would have made, since Scotland’s response to the death was noticeably less dramatic than that of England; a World Cup qualifying match against Belarus, scheduled for the day of the funeral, was put back by a day, but only after a great deal of pressure had been exerted on the Scottish FA by Downing Street and, more importantly, after three senior players announced that they wouldn’t play on the original date. The saga of whether the match would be rescheduled ran through the week after Diana’s death and suggested a semi-detached attitude north of the border to the woman who was said to be uniting the nation in grief. The opening line of Elton John’s tribute song (‘Goodbye, England’s rose’) didn’t feel overly inclusive either.
In any event, the referendum went ahead as planned and produced a resounding double yes vote: 74 per cent supported the creation of a parliament, 63 per cent agreed that it should have ‘tax-varying powers’. Even under the terms of the 1979 referendum, devolution would have gone ahead. The following year saw the passing of the Scotland Act, and in 1999 the first elections were held for the new 129-seat Parliament. Donald Dewar became the first minister, heading a coalition government of Labour and Liberal Democrat MSPs, as the new members were known.
Amidst this progress towards devolution was a worrying sign of New Labour’s refusal to countenance dissent. An official list of approved candidates for the Scottish Parliament pointedly excluded several perceived trouble-makers, most notably Dennis Canavan, who had been the Falkirk West MP for a quarter of a century. Canavan was undoubtedly seen by the party leadership as difficult, a left-winger who objected to benefit cuts and tuition fees, but to judge that he was unsuitable for Edinburgh after his long service in Westminster seemed perverse. The selection procedure was a stitch-up, he complained with some justification, the work of a faction that was ‘similar to the Militant Tendency – there’s a party within a party’. He subsequently stood as an independent and was returned with a majority of over 12,000, the largest margin of victory recorded by any candidate in the election. Meanwhile Labour, while emerging as the largest party in the Parliament, saw its share of the vote reduced to 39 per cent, considerably down from the 46 per cent achieved in the general election.
Nonetheless, the rapidity with which devolution was delivered did at least address Dewar’s fears about a possible nationalist backlash, reducing the risk that an anti-English sentiment would become the defining characteristic of Scottish culture. That such a feeling existed was evident from the fact that by the end of the 1990s three-quarters of all cases reported in Scotland to the Commission for Racial Equality were from English people feeling discriminated against by Scots. It was also to be heard in the rhetoric of the SNP, which spoke of the country as a colony and pointed out, in its 1997 election manifesto, ‘Over fifty countries have become independent from Britain since 1945 and none of them have applied to become colonies or dependencies again.’
The same terminology had been employed, rather more forcefully, in the hugely successful Trainspotting. ‘It’s shite being Scottish,’ rants Renton (Ewan McGregor). ‘We’re the lowest of the low. The scum of the fucking Earth. The most wretched, servile, pathetic trash that was ever shat into civilisation. Some hate the English. I don’t. They’re just wankers. We, on the other hand, are colonised by wankers.’
There was also Braveheart (1995), the Oscar-winning tale of William Wallace’s fight for Scottish independence against the forces of the English king Edward I in the thirteenth century. It was a gloriously old-fashioned Hollywood yarn of heroism which, in the tradition of swashbuckling epics, quite properly played fast and loose with the minor details of historical fact, romanticising the past to the point of sentimentality. And, just like the classic works of Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn, it succeeded largely thanks to the presence of its star, in this instance Mel Gibson, who also directed the piece. Perhaps unsurprisingly for an American movie made by an Australian about Scottish history and filmed in Ireland, the English don’t come out too well. But although Wallace’s prime objective is to avenge ‘a hundred years of theft, rape and murder’, he also finds himself constantly at odds with the Scottish aristocracy, which is portrayed as a class of squabbling collaborators (‘a nest of scheming bastards who couldn’t agree on the colour of shite’) who will happily betray Scotland in pursuit of their own interests. Robert Bruce’s message to Wallace is not substantially different from that of Renton: ‘From top to bottom, this country has got no sense of itself.’ The film was, said comedian Billy Connolly, ‘pure Australian shite’, though Gordon Brown adjudged it ‘terrific’.
There was a new cultural mood in Scotland; the shortbread-and-tartan, heather-and-haggis image gently subverted by Hamish Macbeth was being cast off. The nomination of Glasgow to be the European City of Culture in 1990 was greeted with some incredulity at the time – previous recipients of the honour had been more conventional choices: Athens, Florence, Paris – but proved successful, while from the 1980s onwards, a succession of novelists had emerged, ranging from cult writers like Alasdair Gray and A.L. Kennedy through the controversial Booker Prize-winner James Kelman to best-sellers including Ian Rankin, Iain Banks and Irvine Welsh. Between them, they articulated a grittier, more contemporary vision of Scotland, a cause helped by Danny Boyle’s films Shallow Grave and Trainspotting and Gillies MacKinnon’s Small Faces.
The Glaswegian satirist Armando Iannucci was amongst those keen to ridicule received images of the country, particularly in a nightmare recounted in The Armando Iannucci Shows in 2001: ‘Scottish heaven consists of a bald man who tells me what a great country Scotland is because it invented golf, it discovered penicillin and it has the songs of Runrig,’ he fantasised. ‘And Scottish hell consists of a portrait of Ally McLeod, a frightening tartan drummer girl and a giant computer scoreboard flashing up what Scotland’s goal difference is and why it means we’ll go out after the first round.’
‘I don’t want Scotland to be presented as simply a nation living in the past,’ observed Gordon Brown on Desert Island Discs.‘We want to be a modern country with a vibrant, dynamic economy and culture.’ He went on to introduce Runrig’s version of ‘Loch Lomond’.
The demand for political separation was much less striking in Wales than in Scotland, as witnessed by the results of the 1979 referendum, though it was on occasion more aggressive. At the start of the 1990s, holiday homes owned by English people were still being firebombed, acts for which the nationalist group Meibion Glyndŵr claimed responsibility, though these began to tail off after the conviction in 1993 of Sion Aubrey Roberts. He was jailed for twelve years for sending letter-bombs to several targets, including Wyn Roberts, a minister at the Welsh Office, the first successful prosecution of a member of the group after more than a decade of action.
There was a certain amount of sympathy for the cause even outside Wales. In one of Rupert Allason’s novels, a member of Meibion Glyndŵr is given the chance to articulate his position: ‘We don’t kill people or maim them,’ he explains, ‘we destroy property. It’s Welsh property, but it’s owned by outsiders who exploit the region, push up property prices, and force our youngsters to move elsewhere.’ The result, as he sees it, is entirely positive: ‘It scares off the money from the Midlands. The weekenders aren’t prepared to take the risk. That reduces the pressure on the property market, and for the first time in years there are houses available that local people can afford.’
The group Cymdeithas Yr Iaith Gymraeg had also carried out a campaign of vandalising post boxes, telephone kiosks and similar targets that displayed signs written solely in English. Hundreds were prosecuted in the 1980s, but the actions did help provoke the passing of the Welsh Language Act in 1993, which – though criticised for enforcing bilingualism in the public sector alone – was a landmark in the history of the language. So too was the introduction of Welsh to the country’s national curriculum; by the 2001 census, over 40 per cent of children were reported to be Welsh speakers, compared to just 25 per cent a decade earlier.
There had been a marked shift in popular opinion since 1979. Even so, the devolution referendum – held a week after the Scottish vote in the hope of building momentum – produced a perilously close result; if just 3,361 people, out of an electorate numbering more than two million, had switched their votes, the result would have been overturned. The proposal was passed by a margin of less than a single percentage point, would have failed the 1979 criterion (just a quarter of the electorate came out in support), and achieved a majority in only half the local authority areas, but still it was won, and plans to introduce a sixty-seat Welsh Assembly duly went ahead.
Key to the success, it was widely felt, was the recent history of Conservative government and the appointment over the last decade of English MPs as the secretary of state for Wales; most notable was John Redwood, who had won few friends in Welsh politics during his term in office. His ideological objections to big government collided with the realities of a country where 35 per cent of jobs in the capital city were in the state sector, and when he announced that he’d found sufficient savings in his budget that he could return £112 million to the Treasury, there were many who felt that the money might have been usefully spent.
‘The people of Wales are sick of being treated like a colonial outpost,’ declared Alex Carlile, leader of the Welsh Liberal Democrats. ‘The new viceroy, Mr Redwood, is the last straw.’ Peter Hain wrote that Redwood ‘was almost single-handedly responsible for all Welsh Tory MPs losing their seats’, and he put the case for an Assembly in purely anti-Tory language. ‘This is a loyalty vote in your new Labour government,’ pleaded Hain. ‘Do not side with the Tories in undermining such a crucial part of our programme by voting No or by not bothering to vote at all.’ Others in Labour shared the feeling that this was indeed the critical factor: Rhodri Morgan, who went on to become first minister of Wales, argued that the drive for devolution was a desire to build ‘a bulwark against the return of a Margaret Thatcher, the return of a John Redwood’.
As in Scotland, there was a feeling that the country had been ignored and neglected by a Westminster government. ‘We voted Labour, we got Thatcher,’ read a graffito in Caerphilly shortly after the 1987 election. Sensibilities were further affronted by the reported remarks of Welsh Office minister Rod Richards in 1994, in which he described Labour councillors in Wales as ‘short, fat, slimy and fundamentally corrupt’, adding that the Welsh had ‘no sense of self-worth’ and that Labour-dominated education authorities had ‘created the inferiority complex that is part of us as a nation’.
The campaign to establish the Assembly was led initially by Ron Davies, the first secretary of state for Wales to represent a Welsh constituency since David Hunt in 1987. He had developed the policy in opposition and was expected to become the leader of the new Assembly, until in October 1998 he found himself at the centre of a curious incident that recalled some of the sex scandals from John Major’s days.
The details of the story never fully emerged, but it appeared that Davies had been mugged at knifepoint by a man whom he met on Clapham Common in South London. Given the Common’s reputation as a cruising area for male homosexuals, in conjunction with rumours that were already circulating in the party, it was assumed that Davies had simply picked up the wrong man, though when he reported the robbery to the police, they were sympathetic, wondering whether he was part of a local pattern of attacks on cabbies. ‘Are you a minicab driver?’ they asked, and he replied with as much dignity as he could muster: ‘No, I’m the secretary of state for Wales.’ Davies became the first cabinet minister to resign (or, rather, to be resigned, for it was against his wishes) from the Blair government. The resignation letter that was written for him included a phrase contributed by Blair himself, saying that he had suffered from ‘a moment of madness’.
His replacement as the party’s choice for the post of first secretary for Wales, by any normal criteria, would have been Rhodri Morgan (‘the talismanic Rhodri’, in Peter Hain’s words), who had only narrowly been defeated by Davies in a vote at a Welsh Labour conference to select a candidate. But Blair and his circle had taken against Morgan, seeing him as a maverick who didn’t really belong in New Labour. Morgan’s tough questioning of Alastair Campbell in front of the Public Accounts Committee probably didn’t help his case. Instead Alun Michael – who was briefly appointed to the cabinet as Welsh secretary – was told that he was being sent to Cardiff. It didn’t prove to be a happy experience.
Following Blair’s wishes, Michael did become the candidate for the post of first secretary, having been selected in an electoral college vote that revealed how unpopular a choice he was; he was backed by union leaders and MPs, but secured amongst party members barely half the number of votes that Morgan achieved. The feeling that he had been imposed by Westminster helped Plaid Cymru to their best-ever performance in the subsequent election, mostly at the expense of Labour, though Morgan (like Dennis Canavan) bucked the trend. As in Scotland, Labour was the largest party in the Assembly, but with an even steeper fall in vote share, down from 55 per cent in the general election to just 38 per cent, so that although Michael became first secretary, it was at the head of a minority government. ‘What sort of election is it,’ wondered a senior Labour figure, ‘where we lose the Rhondda?’ Blair was said to be furious, railing against the ‘Fucking Welsh’.
Worse was to come for the leadership. Within a year Michael was obliged to stand down, rather than face a vote of no confidence, and was replaced, at last, by Morgan, under whose stewardship, which spanned almost the whole first decade of the new century, the Assembly established a clearer identity and acquired greater legitimacy. Support for further devolution of powers was not marked, but a growing sense of national identity could be seen in the 2001 census, when ‘Welsh’ was not offered as an option for ethnicity; over 400,000 respondents added it in for themselves.
Perhaps more significant than politics in forging that new identity was a cultural renaissance, largely centred on music. The rock and pop heritage of the country was rich but disparate, ranging from mainstream acts like Shirley Bassey, Tom Jones and Bonnie Tyler to blues-rock bands Love Sculpture, Budgie and Man, as well as providing a home for the rock and roll revival movement with Shakin’ Stevens and the Sunsets and Crazy Cavan and the Rhythm Rockers. A tighter focus developed in the 1990s with the success of the Manic Street Preachers, who came from Blackwood in Neil Kinnock’s constituency. Their Welsh identity, proclaimed on stage with the display of the national flag, became more marked as their career progressed: their album This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours (1998) took its title from a speech by Aneurin Bevan, while the multi-tracked vocals on songs like ‘If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next’ suggested the tone of male voice choirs.
They also opened a path for a host of Welsh indie bands: Catatonia, Stereophonics, Feeder and, particularly, Super Furry Animals and Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci. The latter two groups sang in both Welsh and English and, if the Welsh releases sold less well, the fact that they existed at all, and got airplay elsewhere in Britain and abroad, did a great deal to promote international awareness of the language. So too did the inclusion of Welsh songs on twelve-year-old Charlotte Church’s million-selling album Voice of an Angel (1998).
There was talk by now of Cool Cymru, a local rival to Cool Britannia, and if that was a little overstated, there was certainly – as in Scotland – the sense of a new public perception of Wales. A succession of movies, starting with Hedd Wyn (1992), were nominated for best foreign language film in the Oscars, while the actor Rhys Ifans made his name in Twin Town (1997), a film set in Swansea and Port Talbot, before becoming an international star. Catherine Zeta-Jones had already made a successful transition from The Darling Buds of May to Hollywood, and when she married the actor Michael Douglas in 2000, the media happily reported that the catering included Welsh lamb, Caerphilly cheese and Brains beer.
The image of a modern nation was further projected in sport when the final of the 1999 Rugby World Cup was staged at the newly built Millennium Stadium in Cardiff (Wales were regrettably absent, having been knocked out in the quarter-finals by the eventual victors, Australia). The same year, linking the old and new strands of Welsh culture, the Stereophonics debuted their rugby song ‘As Long as We Beat the English (We Don’t Care)’.
At a concert held in May 1999 to inaugurate the Assembly, however, the newer acts were conspicuous by their absence. Bassey, Jones, Tyler and Stevens all performed, but the Manic Street Preachers and Catatonia declined an invitation to appear in front of the Queen, while the Stereophonics confined themselves to sending a recorded message. Nonetheless the evening ended with a rendition of Catatonia’s song ‘International Velvet’, with its rousing chorus: ‘Every day when I wake up, I thank the Lord I’m Welsh.’ (The Welsh language verses were slightly less celebratory. ‘Deffrwych Cymru cysglyd,’ it opened: ‘Wake up, sleepy Wales.’) Tony Blair attended the accompanying state banquet, though again his lack of personal commitment was apparent; he said it was ‘his greatest conflict of interest in two years’, since it meant he was going to miss the Champions League final between Manchester United and Bayern Munich. (Alex Ferguson’s team, 1–0 down at 90 minutes, still managed to triumph, with two goals scored during injury time, completing a unique treble-winning season for the club and securing a knighthood for Ferguson himself.)
For those with longer memories, stretching back beyond the first devolution referendum to the investiture of the Prince of Wales in 1969, the progress was impressive. ‘In the years since then the Welsh sense of national identity has marvellously revived,’ observed the historian and travel writer Jan Morris, three decades on. ‘Pride in Welshness is far stronger now, the Welsh language flourishes and is not often resented, the struggling political infant that was Plaid Cymru in 1969 has masterfully established itself as the Party of Wales. Anybody who has lived in this country since the devolution referendum two years ago must have observed the immense change in the national spirit.’
The leadership’s attempt to influence the Welsh Assembly by blocking the candidature of Rhodri Morgan was repeated in even more naked form in London. When Margaret Thatcher’s government had abolished the Greater London Council in the mid-1980s, it was widely seen as an attempt to silence a noisy, awkward, alternative voice, represented by the last leader of the authority, Ken Livingstone. The abolition had also left London, as Livingstone and others never tired of pointing out, as the only major capital city in the western world without a unified political administration. In response the Labour manifesto of 1992 had promised the creation of a Greater London Authority, effectively a new GLC, though one with reduced powers.
There was, however, an alternative proposal, put forward in a Bill in 1990 by Tony Banks, who had been chair of the GLC in Livingstone’s time. He suggested the creation of an elected mayor of London, backed up by a city-wide council, and let it be known that he fancied the job himself. He didn’t, of course, make any progress at the time, but the idea resurfaced after the election of Tony Blair as Labour leader. Always excited by the thought of making links outside politics, Blair saw the possibility of a non-party figure – he had in mind a businessman like Richard Branson – becoming London mayor in a way that replicated the American model, though with less political muscle. This would, he believed, be the key to reinvigorating local government in Britain.
Accordingly the 1997 manifesto promised ‘a new deal for London’, based – though few recognised the fact – on Banks’s model of a mayor and a Greater London Assembly (GLA), and a referendum was duly held in May 1998, asking the people of London whether they wanted such a system. It was hardly a resounding endorsement, for although 72 per cent agreed with the proposition, turnout was pitifully low at just 31 per cent, meaning that even fewer Londoners than Welsh people were in favour of this devolution of power. Nonetheless, the majority was sufficient for the plan to go ahead. It was at this stage that things became difficult for the government.
The problem was Livingstone. A deeply divisive figure in his GLC days, hated by the Labour leadership and not much liked in the country generally, he was nevertheless very popular in large parts of London. ‘Ken Livingstone is a folk hero,’ sang Dexys Midnight Runners in 1983, and many expected great things of him when he was first elected to Parliament in 1987. Sadly, nothing much had materialised. ‘I think Ken has squandered his talents, which is a great tragedy,’ reflected Banks in 1997. ‘His attention got diverted, he wasn’t willing to start from the bottom again and he never got the chance to build on what he had.’
Newly appointed as sports minister, Banks was now firmly inside the Blairite tent, but Livingstone was still struggling to find a place in Westminster. He had been ostracised by the party hierarchy as soon as he arrived in the Commons, finding that his undoubted gifts were unappreciated. For a year after his arrival he wasn’t given a room or a desk, the whips seemingly keen to cut him down to size, and on the rare occasions when he was invited to participate on the margins of the House’s activities, nothing went smoothly. ‘I was put up for the coypu control committee,’ he remembered. ‘Then they announced that the coypu was extinct, and the committee disbanded.’
Livingstone was a prophet without honour in his own land, for he looked in retrospect to have been the most influential and significant Labour figure of the 1980s, his contribution doing much to shape the subsequent decade. His espousal of identity politics had been wildly out of step with the times but was now accepted as the norm, whilst his method of campaigning against the abolition of the GLC – using advertising and the media to appeal direct to the public, building coalitions beyond the party, finding common purpose with popular culture – had set a template that Blair was happy to follow. Indeed the fact that the issue had become focused on abolition, rather than on his policies or his conduct in office, was an early triumph for spin, relocating the news story in a way that New Labour never quite matched. Although he was accused of costing the party dear at the ballot box, Labour in London had fared much better in the disaster of the 1983 election than in the country at large.
He was also, though, capable of infuriating those in authority to the extent that they were prepared to do anything to stop his activities. When the GLC took out paid adverts in the press, Thatcher’s government responded by passing the 1986 Local Government Act, which prohibited the use of public funds for political advertising. When Livingstone beat Peter Mandelson in the 1997 elections to the NEC, Blair retaliated by changing the rules so that MPs were henceforth not allowed to stand for election in the constituencies section. (Largely unnoticed by the public, this was a significant loss to party democracy, for the constituency representatives had long provided a counterbalance to the leadership, giving a platform to dissenting voices.) And Livingstone equally annoyed many of those with whom he worked and who should have been on his side. Banks wasn’t the only one irritated by his actions; the attempt to launch a leadership campaign after John Smith’s death ‘caused an awful lot of ill will’, according to Tony Benn.
Now that there was going to be a mayor, everyone knew that he would be in the running. ‘I’d love to be in government,’ he’d commented after the NEC election. ‘I love running things.’ Just one question, therefore, now obsessed the Labour leadership: how to stop the job falling into Livingstone’s hands. Blair, who had lived in London in the 1980s, was fearful of bad publicity arising from any association with Labour from that time (he’d already ensured Neil Kinnock’s absence from domestic politics by nominating him as a European commissioner), but he claimed that the main objections to the idea of Livingstone being selected as the party’s mayoral candidate were raised by Gordon Brown and John Prescott: ‘I didn’t feel visceral about it, as John and Gordon did.’
The dispute was partly to do with policy. The London Underground was in desperate need of investment, following years of neglect that, in Kenneth Clarke’s last budget, had culminated in the cutting of a further £700 million from the system. Livingstone disagreed with the party’s plans, devised by Brown and Prescott, to set up a public-private partnership to operate the London Underground; he argued instead that a bond issue could raise the necessary funds. ‘It was going to be difficult to have a Labour candidate dedicated to stopping the Labour transport policy,’ reflected Blair, though the mistake was perhaps to have devised the policy first without any democratic process, and then to expect the elected mayor to follow it through. In any event, the policy itself was flawed, based on the same model that was already unpopular on the railways: the separation of infrastructure maintenance from the running of the trains. Unsurprisingly, the scheme didn’t work out.
Behind this disagreement lay – as ever with New Labour – a personal insecurity that verged on paranoia. Ever since Granita, Brown had been less than supportive of anyone who might one day threaten his succession to the party leadership. His determination to avoid competition had been apparent even in opposition, with the departure of key figures from their roles as economic spokespeople; to give Brown a clear ride as the sole voice on the economy, Robin Cook had been moved from trade and industry, Prescott from employment, and both had been targeted in off-the-record briefings by Charlie Whelan. Now, according to Jonathan Powell, Brown ‘saw Ken Livingstone as a rival. In 1999, he told Tony that he knew he was positioning Livingstone as a counterweight to him in the Labour Party.’ It seemed unlikely that Livingstone would ever be able to mount a serious challenge to Brown, but he was far and away the best-known politician outside the cabinet and a proven vote-winner with the public; that in itself was enough of a threat.
Seeking to kill two birds with one stone, it was decided that the Labour candidate should instead be Frank Dobson, the bluff, jokey embodiment of non-ideological old Labour, who was currently health secretary but whose presence in the cabinet had never been much desired. ‘He was one of the many who considered New Labour a clever wheeze to win,’ sniffed Blair. ‘He didn’t understand it much, and to the extent that he did, he disagreed with it.’ If Dobson were chosen as the mayoral candidate, it would remove him from cabinet and dispose of Livingstone at the same time. The only problem was that Dobson lacked the appeal of Livingstone within the party, and stood no chance at all of winning the nomination under the system that had been spelt out as recently as May 1999 by Nick Raynsford, the minister for London: ‘the Labour Party will elect its candidate on the basis of one member, one vote.’
So the usual procedure for trying to contain Livingstone was followed: the rules were rewritten. An electoral college was dreamt up, with a third of the votes going to the membership, a third to trade unions and the final third to London MPs, MEPs and GLA candidates. This latter group were denied a secret ballot, while the union section still operated on the long since discredited block vote (just as they had when choosing Alun Michael over Rhodri Morgan).
The result was a humiliatingly narrow victory for Dobson, who beat Livingstone by just 3 per cent despite overwhelming defeats in two of the three sections. Livingstone got the support of 60 per cent of the party membership and 70 per cent of the unions, scoring particularly highly in those unions that actually balloted their members. Had individual votes been counted equally, as originally proposed, Livingstone would have won by a margin of nearly four to one. It was as naked a piece of gerrymandering as British politics had seen for a long time, and it did Dobson no favours at all. ‘We had really fucked this from start to finish,’ admitted Alastair Campbell, and Jonathan Powell had the same sensation of impending disaster: ‘We fucked it up. But we couldn’t allow a bozo like Livingstone to win.’
Some had been sceptical all along. ‘The trouble is that Ken is cleverer than the people ranged against him, and a much better strategic thinker,’ reflected Mo Mowlam; ‘he is better at spinning.’ Livingstone had learnt how to construct stories that would appeal to the media while Blair and Brown were still waiting to make their maiden speeches in Parliament, and only the arrogance of New Labour prevented the party from recognising that he could be an asset, not a liability. Campbell’s sad conclusion, as Livingstone continued to set the agenda – ‘He was running rings round us’ – inadvertently echoed a 1984 Daily Mail headline: THE MAN RUNNING RINGS ROUND MAGGIE.
When the leadership had attempted to stop Livingstone even being put forward to the electoral college, his response had been to start a grassroots campaign demanding his inclusion in the process. Now, cheated of his rightful place as Labour’s candidate, he announced that he would run as an independent, and used his body of support to construct an electoral machine. A large proportion of those working for his election were actually members of the Labour Party, working against their official candidate, while many others had already drifted from the party, coming out for one last campaign. Livingstone, it turned out, was still capable of inspiring activists at a time when New Labour didn’t seem much interested in their contributions.
He also retained some of that rebel allure that had inspired Dexys Midnight Runners. Blair might have invited Noel Gallagher to a Downing Street reception, but Blur had invited Livingstone to narrate ‘Ernold Same’ on their 1995 album The Great Escape. Now that he was setting himself up in opposition to Blair, he found the remnants of Cool Britannia flocking to his banner. Chris Evans made a big donation to the cause, the likes of Fatboy Slim, Damon Albarn and the Chemical Brothers expressed their support, and the YBAs staged a fund-raising auction. ‘I’ve been waiting all my life for a Labour government and now I’ve got one, it’s shit,’ explained Tracey Emin, as she gave her vote to Livingstone: ‘Ken’s interesting, sexy, dynamic.’
Livingstone was expelled from the party, of course, and a virulent coordinated assault on his integrity was launched, but to no one’s great surprise he won the mayoralty with ease, picking up 39 per cent of the first preference votes. Dobson, the fall guy who few blamed personally, narrowly scraped into third place, ahead of the Liberal Democrats. For those who had always resented New Labour’s insistence that compromise was the party’s only hope, the election provided a sign of hope. As Tony Benn pointed out, ‘following Blair is not the only way to win’. For Livingstone, it was a personal vindication; his victory speech started with the words: ‘As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted fourteen years ago . . .’ The line was one originally suggested by Tony Banks back in 1991, when nursing his own dream of becoming mayor.
Meanwhile, the contest had been hugely enlivened by the Conservative Party. Seeking a high-profile candidate who might give Livingstone a run for his money, the Tories decided that the novelist Jeffrey Archer was the man for the job. There were some doubts about Archer – he was ‘an accident waiting to happen’, in the eyes of William Whitelaw – and he hardly distinguished himself in the campaign for the candidacy. Claiming that he approved of modern, multicultural Britain where ‘there are the most staggeringly beautiful girls of every nationality’, he explained that this was a great improvement on thirty years ago, when ‘Your head did not turn if a black woman passed because they were badly dressed, probably overweight and probably had a lousy job.’
There was also a lingering concern about the unpleasantness more than a decade ago, when certain newspapers had alleged that he had paid money to a prostitute. He could, however, reasonably point to his successful claim against the Daily Star for libel, so that the story was now behind him.
Except that it wasn’t. Archer’s case in the libel trial had been grounded in an alibi provided by Ted Francis, a friend of his who had written a letter saying that on the night that Archer was alleged to have visited the prostitute, the two men were actually having dinner together. As far as Francis was concerned, this was just a friend providing cover for his wife: ‘It wasn’t until the trial started that I realised Jeffrey had manipulated me and intended to use my letter for his defence.’ Now, confronted with the possibility that Archer might become mayor of London, Francis admitted that he had lied.
When the story broke, Archer’s initial response was that this was just another of those little setbacks he had faced all through his life, another irritant to be overcome. ‘I’m pretty confident I can get through this,’ he told William Hague, but was soon put in his place: ‘Oh no, you can’t. You’re out, that’s final.’ Court proceedings were brought against both Archer and Francis and in July 2001, Archer was found guilty of perjury and sentenced to four years in jail, though Francis was acquitted on a charge of perverting the course of justice.
With Archer’s withdrawal, the wealthy entrepreneur Ivan Massow was thought briefly to be an alternative. It was just as well, however, that he wasn’t chosen, since he left the Tories the following year, denouncing the party under Hague as having become ‘less compassionate, more intolerant and frankly just plain nasty’. He would later claim that he had only joined in the first place because, as a gay teenager, he had a love of camp and ‘Margaret Thatcher was beyond camp’. Instead Steven Norris – the man whose multiple affairs had provided such entertainment a few years earlier – was selected, though he was profoundly unimpressed by it all. ‘People out there will look at the party and think it can’t run a fucking whelk stall on an Essex pier,’ he commented. Nonetheless, he made the most of a poor hand, and came second with 27 per cent of the first preference votes, a creditable performance in the circumstances.
The powers wielded by the new mayor were heavily circumscribed. He had no authority in such fields as health and education, but was charged with creating an integrated transport policy, which – as John Redwood pointed out – raised the intriguing constitutional issue of what would happen if the successful candidate was ideologically opposed to centralised transport planning. Even without that complication, the responsibility wasn’t entirely logical; local roads remained within the scope of local authorities, while the mayor took over the bits of trunk roads that lay in London, but not the equivalent sections of motorway. The start of the A1 was therefore within his remit, but not the start of the M1 (which, like the rest of the A1, remained under the purview of the Department of Transport). It was hard to escape the impression that policy was being made up on the hoof.
The same was true of all the piecemeal changes to the constitution introduced in Tony Blair’s first term. A bewildering array of voting arrangements were now in place. Elections to the House of Commons and local councils remained unchanged, operating under the first past the post system (the former in single-member constituencies, the latter in multi-member wards), but elsewhere various systems were in use: the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and the London Assembly employed one system, the mayor of London (and mayors of any other cities who might follow) another, and the European Parliament yet another.
There was little apparent logic in any of this jigsaw. In places it was progressive – the mix of first past the post and top-up lists in Scotland, Wales and London took a decisive step towards proportional representation – but elsewhere there were signs of Labour’s centralising tendency. The European Parliament was to be elected on a closed list system, entitling voters to choose only a party rather than an individual candidate, an arrangement that passed yet more power to the party leaderships. Looked at positively, it suggested that a range of options were being tried, in order to ascertain which might be most effective, but no one expected much further development to take place after the initial flurry of reforms.
In opposition, Blair had flirted with the idea of changing the system by which MPs were elected to the Commons, and the manifesto had promised a referendum on electoral reform. A committee was set up, under Roy Jenkins, to investigate the matter; its report, in late 1998, recommended a complex compromise known as the Alternative Vote Plus. ‘This is a day I have looked forward to for half a century,’ exulted Paddy Ashdown (which must have made him one of the more electorally sophisticated seven-year-olds in Clement Attlee’s Britain), but Blair, who had never been very enthusiastic, knew that on this issue at least he could count on only limited support from his MPs, many of whom would lose their seats. No referendum was staged, the proposal quietly died, and Jenkins’s system was implemented nowhere.
All the really difficult issues associated with devolution were similarly shelved. Tam Dalyell’s 1978 query – dubbed by Enoch Powell the West Lothian Question – still remained: Why should Scottish MPs sitting in Westminster be able to pass laws that affected people in England but not their own constituents? ‘It was a perfectly sensible question,’ concluded Blair, ‘and an interesting example of a problem in politics to which there is no logical answer.’
There was a logical answer, of course: an English parliament, or even a committee of the House of Commons, comprising all those elected as MPs for constituencies in England, which would be responsible for decisions related specifically and solely to English matters. This would have created two tiers of MP, with a steep reduction in influence for the lower tier; MPs for Scottish constituencies would have even less responsibility than they already did, since so much domestic policy was devolved to the Scottish Parliament. The official government response to the proposal was to reject it because ‘at a practical level, there is no room in the precincts large enough to accommodate all 582 members sitting for English seats’. Teresa Gorman voiced an alternative interpretation: ‘It doesn’t take a genius to work out why the English are denied a referendum and its own parliament; England is where most Conservative voters are to be found.’
Likewise there was no attempt to address the matter of the disproportionately high number of Scottish and Welsh MPs who sat in the House. Nor was there any amendment to the Barnett Formula, the stop-gap system introduced in the 1970s which provided Scotland and Wales with high levels of government spending, and which had remained untouched ever since. David Blunkett did argue for a change in early 2001, but Gordon Brown told him: ‘I can’t do anything about the Barnett Formula before the election.’ Blunkett’s response was at least honest: ‘No, I don’t expect you can. I want to win seats in Scotland and Wales as well.’
Further confusion ensued when changes were made to the House of Lords. The existence of an unelected second chamber with an inbuilt Conservative majority, thanks to the presence of hundreds of hereditary peers, had long been a cause of annoyance on the British left, even if it was difficult to persuade many of those peers to turn up and vote, save in extreme circumstances. Apart from the hereditaries, the House found room for the Archbishop of Canterbury and twenty-five other Anglican bishops, as well as Prince Charles and some of the other royals, but was mostly comprised of life peers, many of them retired or rejected members of the Commons.
When, for example, Lynda Chalker, formerly the minister for overseas development, lost her seat in the 1992 election, she was immediately given a peerage and reappointed to the same job. No one doubted her commitment to the issue of international development, but some were tempted to ask what was the point of elections, if not to remove people from office. Similarly, when Blair’s friend Charlie Falconer failed to find himself a safe Labour seat, he was given a peerage as a consolation prize, so that he could be part of the government. The low esteem in which the Lords was held could be seen in Michael Heseltine’s suggestion of creating ‘a new class of life peers appointed to sit for one parliament only, at the end of which they should have the opportunity to stand for the Commons again’. This off-the-cuff attempt at a constitutional innovation – it wasn’t enacted – was conceived solely to keep Chris Patten active in British politics after he lost his Commons seat in 1992.
In short, the Lords was an illogical mishmash of birth, position and patronage, widely perceived on the left to be a block on any radical reform. Its powers were limited to delaying the passage of a Bill, as opposed to stopping it outright, but it was seen to be inherently conservative.
The Labour manifesto’s response was to promise to end ‘the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords’. This would be the first phase of reform, to be followed at some unspecified date – possibly in the current parliament, possibly later – by a change to how the membership was chosen and what the chamber should be called. No one could agree on what should replace the Lords, and the suspicion was that the second stage of reform would be delayed indefinitely, with Labour spokespeople seemingly preparing the ground for indecision. ‘Better a quango of the living than the dead,’ said Jack Straw, before the election. ‘Better to have people appointed for their own merit rather than the alleged merit of their forebears.’
As it turned out, even the first phase was far from the clean break that had been promised. In a bid to secure a smooth passage for the reform Bill in 1999, the government put forward a compromise whereby ninety-two hereditary peers, chosen by their fellow hereditaries, would be allowed to remain in place, thus introducing an elected element to the House but one whose electorate was the smallest in the country. This bizarre proposal made even less sense than the system that preceded it, and the situation was scarcely improved by the retention of the Anglican bishops and the creation of new life peerages for ten of those who had previously sat by hereditary right, including Princess Margaret’s ex-husband, the Earl of Snowdon. Life peerages were also reported to have been offered to Prince Charles, Prince Andrew and Prince Philip, though they were turned down. (Philip was anyway a firm believer in the hereditary peers: ‘I’d rather they were chosen by God than by the prime minister.’)
Continuing on its illogical path, the Lords still had not one member elected from outside the House, and was now dominated by life peers, so that those who benefited personally from patronage outnumbered those whose ancestors had been so favoured. It wasn’t, however, noticeably more progressive than its earlier incarnation, and the government still had to overrule it when it blocked the passage of legislation to equalise the age of homosexual consent. Meanwhile Tony Blair was so busy promoting people to the Lords that he created more new peers than any other twentieth-century prime minister; by the time he resigned from his position in 2007, nearly half of those in the House would be his appointees. It was not a major democratic advance.
Nonetheless, the changes wrought on the constitution of the country during Blair’s first term were substantial. Not all of the demands made by Charter 88 and others had been met, and it was hard not to see the devolution enacted by the Blair government as having a strong vein of self-interest: in one way or another, Labour’s control of Scotland, Wales and London was entrenched for a political generation. Even so, there had been a transformation that could be cautiously greeted as allowing the emergence of greater democracy. And if the transition had been managed incompetently at times, perhaps that was inevitable; a party leadership that had no track record whatsoever in administration was attempting to reconstitute the Union on a scale unparalleled in modern British history.
Where New Labour suffered from its lack of experience in government, the Conservative Party had precisely the opposite problem. ‘The attractions of opposition are greatly exaggerated by those who have not experienced it,’ warned Margaret Thatcher in 1996, and that included virtually the whole of the shadow cabinet; the decreasing age of frontline politicians meant that few had been around in the pre-Thatcher years. It wasn’t, however, an entirely unpleasant sensation for some to find that the burden of office had been lifted. John Major made his first speech in the Commons from the opposition back benches in 1998 and was enthused by the freedom it gave him. ‘He now sees what a doddle opposition is,’ reported Hugo Young, after interviewing the former prime minister. ‘So easy to make a speech when you are able to say what you actually think.’
Meanwhile, the new opposition front bench was busily trying to copy New Labour’s behaviour and thereby running the risk of making exactly the same mistakes as its rivals. In 1999 the Tories hired Amanda Platell to be head of news and media, though in practice she was, like Alastair Campbell, primarily concerned with building up the leader – in her case William Hague – rather than the party as a whole.
An Australian journalist who had most recently worked for the Sunday Express, Platell was clearly intended as the Conservative equivalent of Campbell and, although she was hardly in the same league – just as Hague was no real match for Blair – she did start to get some better coverage than had hitherto been the case. She was also, however, capable of careless blunders, as when she persuaded Ffion Hague to wear a silver pendant in the shape of a pound sign, supposedly a gift from her husband that symbolised his determination to keep Britain out of the euro. The stratagem looked gimmicky and geeky, and backfired completely when the jeweller from whom the piece was bought, annoyed that he hadn’t been paid, revealed that it was Platell not Hague who had acquired it. She also set up a notorious interview in GQ magazine in 2000 in which Hague bragged of the time he spent, as a teenager, working for his father’s drinks company, when he used to consume up to fourteen pints of beer a day. While Hague seemed happy to go along with these silly stunts that were intended to humanise his image, he turned down her one genuine coup, when he refused to interrupt a holiday for a meeting with Rupert Murdoch.
The real problem, however, was the way in which the relationship between Hague and his shadow chancellor, Michael Portillo, appeared to replicate that between Blair and Brown, with all the same tensions, rivalry and bickering. Portillo, like Brown, seemed incapable of accepting that another man had the job he coveted, and he displayed no inclination to accept the authority of his party’s elected leader. Repeatedly threatening to resign if he didn’t get his way, he fought for every square inch of political turf. In his attempt to assert his power, he threw away the one eye-catching policy he had inherited from Francis Maude, his predecessor as shadow chancellor: a guarantee that, under a Tory government, tax would fall as a share of GDP. The party was already committed, largely through the advocacy of Ann Widdecombe, to matching Labour’s spending plans on health and education – emulating New Labour’s commitments when in opposition – but still the issue of regaining trust on taxes made political sense. It was Maude too who came up with the phrase ‘stealth taxes’, to describe Brown’s attempts to find other sources of revenue beyond income tax. That slogan was considerably more effective than anything Portillo devised.
Just as Blair and Brown would meet in private, with no advisers present and no minutes taken, so too did Hague and Portillo. The difference was that Portillo acted from a much stronger base than Hague had been capable of building, with a powerful circle of admirers and supporters, both in the party and in the press. The suspicion was that he exerted a greater influence over policy than did his Labour counterpart. And he too seemed determined to remove any potential rivals to the leadership. His arrival in the shadow cabinet, after his by-election victory, was accompanied by the departure of John Redwood, and there were many who saw the two events as being related, that Portillo had demanded the removal of the man who had stood against Major in 1995. That effectively left Widdecombe as the only serious threat when – as was almost certain – the Tories lost the next election and Hague stepped down. The time for dealing with her would surely come.
Again, though, there was little discernible sign of serious policy development. The twin poles of attraction within the shadow cabinet – Portillo on the left and Widdecombe on the right – had very different visions of the future of Conservatism, and Hague looked as though he were torn between them, fluctuating wildly between an inclusive liberalism and a neo-Thatcherism, without much conviction in either case. Little wonder that when private polling was leaked in 2000, it showed that the word used by the public to describe him was ‘weak’. And that seemed the worst option of all, to copy Blair’s non-ideological chase after public opinion, but to have no control over his own party. As Blair pointed out: ‘there’s only one thing the public dislike more than a leader in control of his party, and that is a leader not in control of his party.’
While the Tories were mimicking New Labour’s feud culture, the constitutional reforms to the country, the most radical and far-reaching changes of the Blair years, passed them by without any serious Conservative critique or contribution. Theirs was the party that had passed the 1867 Reform Act, given women the vote in 1918 (and extended the female franchise in 1928), invented life peerages, allowed hereditary peers to renounce their titles, created the parliamentary select committee system and been the first to publish the ministerial code. It could, in short, boast a more radical history when it came to reforming the constitution than could Labour, yet it now had nothing to say beyond defending the status quo.
When he was Welsh secretary, William Hague had argued that an Assembly would be ‘a waste of time, a waste of space and a waste of money’. In opposition, he continued to oppose devolution, but accepted that once it was a fait accompli, the Conservatives would be obliged to accept the changes. ‘We cannot unscramble the omelette,’ as he put it in 1998.