Team Tony
The 1997 general election demonstrated just what a stunningly effective election-winning machine Tony Blair now led. New Labour won 419 seats, the largest number ever for the party and comparable only with the number of seats for the 1935 National government. Its majority in the Commons was also a modern record, 179 seats, and thirty-three more than Attlee’s landslide majority of 1945. The swing of 10 per cent from the Conservatives was yet another post-war record, roughly double that which the Thatcher victory of 1979 had produced in the other direction. A record number of women were elected to Parliament, 119 of them, of whom 101 were Labour, ‘Blair’s babes’. The party also won heavily across the south and in London, in parts of Britain from which it had recently been hardly represented. Yet among this slew of heart-stopping statistics, which had Blair shaking his head with disbelief and exclaiming ‘it can’t be real’, there were some small warning signs. The turnout was very low, at 71 per cent the lowest since 1935. Labour had won a famous victory but nothing like as many actual votes as the reviled John Major had won five years before. Still, as the sun came up on a jubilant, celebrating party there was much wet-eyed rhapsodizing about a new dawn for Britain. Alastair Campbell had assembled crowds of party workers and supporters to stand along Downing Street waving Union Jacks as the Blairs strode up to claim their inheritance. Briefly, it looked as if the country itself had turned out to cheer.
The victory was due to a small group of self-styled modernizers who seized the Labour Party, and then took it far further to the right than anyone expected. The language used tells its own story. New Labour was to be a party of the ‘left and centre left’, then one of the ‘centre left’, then the ‘centre and centre left’ and in Blair’s later years simply of ‘the centre’. Blair was the leading man in this drama but he was not the only player. He needed the support and encouragement of admirers and friends who would coax and goad him, rebuke him and encourage him, and do his will, whether he knew what they were up to or not. Who were they? There was Mandelson, the brilliant but temperamental former media boss, by now an MP. Once fixated by Gordon Brown, he was adored by Blair and returned the sentiment. Yet he was so mistrusted by other members of the team that his central role in Blair’s leadership election was disguised from them under the name ‘Bobby’ (for Bobby Kennedy, working to Blair’s JFK: modesty was never a hallmark of the inner circle).
There was Alastair Campbell, Blair’s press officer and attack-dog. A former journalist, natural propagandist, ex-alcoholic and all-round alpha male, Campbell would chew the ears of everyone who criticized Blair and helped devise the campaign of mockery against Major. He behaved in private towards the Labour leader (and on one occasion was filmed doing so) with the cheery aggression of a personal trainer working over a nervous young housewife. There was Philip Gould, a working-class boy whose admiration for US political techniques knew no bounds; he would bring his focus group expertise, his polling and ruthless analysis to the party. There was Derry Irvine, the rotund, intimidating, brilliant and surprisingly sensitive Highlands lawyer who had first found a place in his chambers for Blair and Cherie Booth. He advised on constitutional change and would become Lord Chancellor. And there was Anji Hunter, the contralto charmer who had known Blair as a youth and who remained his best hotline to Daily Mail-reading middle England.
These people, with Brown and his team working (almost) alongside them, formed the inner core. The young David Miliband, whose father was a famous Marxist political philosopher, provided research help. They would be joined by Jonathan Powell, a diplomat who had been observing the Clintons in the United States, and whose older brother Charles had been one of Thatcher’s most important aides. By the end of the Blair years, with so many others fallen by the wayside, he was undoubtedly the second most important man in Downing Street. Among the MPs who were initially close were Marjorie (better known as Mo) Mowlam and Jack Straw. The money for Blair’s leadership campaign was raised from a clutch of mainly media millionaires, including Greg Dyke, later Director General of the BBC, and Michael Levy, a record promoter who would later be ennobled and later still face a police investigation and arrest on conspiracy charges. The first striking thing about Team Blair is how few elected Labour politicians it included. The second is how many of its original members would later fall out with him. He had a capacity to charm and pull in people whom he needed, and then to drop them briskly once they were surplus or embarrassing.
Blair had won 57 per cent of the vote in the leadership election, easily beating two more left-wing candidates, one of whom, John Prescott, was elected as his deputy. In his campaign Blair had stuck mostly to generalities about modernization and the instincts of the British people, but had sounded approving of the regime of centralized testing and quangos the Conservatives had pursued in public services. To that extent people had due warning. By the time the party congregated again for its annual conference, the Labour Party had become ‘New Labour’. In his first conference speech Blair made a veiled reference to the need for an up-to-date statement of Labour values. What he actually meant was that he planned to scrap clause four of its constitution, which declared that public ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange was necessary to ‘secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruit of their industry’. Clause four, part four, was a household god for Labour, its 1918 commitment to destroy capitalism, which sat in a corner covered in cobwebs. Hugh Gaitskell had wanted to abolish it, but had drawn back and the ambition had slumbered for decades. Blair killed it. His new statement of aims began with the assertion that ‘the Labour Party is a democratic socialist party’ which, by then, was going it a bit. In his next conference speech Blair used the word ‘new’ fifty-nine times, referred to socialism just once and omitted to mention the working class at all.
Though politics is a serious business, there is an undeniably comic side to the Blair coup. With his impish grin he suddenly behaved as if everything was possible, and no political allegiance was impossible to shift. He became the playful magician of political life. He took to warmly praising Margaret Thatcher. He opened private talks with the Liberal Democrats about some grand new alliance of the centre. In Fleet Street he took to charming every rheumy proprietorial troll and crusty prophet of the right he could lay his smile on. Later he would continue the practice in government, appointing Tory statesmen to big jobs, gleefully ushering in defectors and keeping close for a while to the Lib-Dem leader Paddy Ashdown, and its elder statesman Roy Jenkins (though he would later disappoint both by his conservatism). He went to visit Rupert Murdoch’s News International team in Australia and impressed them too. What manner of man was this Tony Blair? Where did he stand? Where were his limits? There were not many. In the election campaign the pro-European Blair cheerfully put his name to an article in Murdoch’s Sun, ghost-written by Campbell, promising ‘to slay the dragon’ of federalism. Later relations would be so close that Murdoch would complain of the amount of time he wasted in London drinking tea with Blair and coffee with Brown. He searched out Lord Rothermere, proprietor of the Daily Mail, traditionally Labour’s bitterest critic in the British press, and dined him privately, promising him that he abhorred high taxes, uppity unions and sleaze. It was as if, freed by winning the leadership, Blair was rattling the handle of every door in town to see if it opened. As he was on a roll and Labour was desperate to win at all costs, the traditionalists looked on in silent, helpless disbelief. Was nothing sacred? Apparently not.
Yet when it came to serious policy formation, the story was less amusing. Blair talked of his priority being ‘education, education, education’, of his ambition to make Britain a ‘young country’ and of his own belief in ‘power for a purpose’. He identified the broad areas he wanted to concentrate on, but when it came to clearer proposals said little. Blair has been mocked so richly since for the airy blandness of his promises that it is worth recalling an example of the ‘optimism-lite’ rhetoric which was taken at least half-seriously in 1997. A few early sentences from Labour’s manifesto give a flavour of this:
I believe in Britain. It is a great country with a great history. The British people are a great people. But I believe Britain can and must be better: better schools, better hospitals, better ways of tackling crime, of building a modern welfare state, of equipping ourselves for a new world economy. I want a Britain that is one nation, with shared values and purpose, where merit comes before privilege, run for the many not the few, strong and sure of itself at home and abroad. I want a Britain that does not shuffle into the new millennium afraid of the future, but strides into it with confidence.
Britons would stride with a purpose, and in their hands they would hold New Labour’s first pledge card, a credit-card-sized rectangle of coloured cardboard. Produced in time for the election, its five pledges were rather clearer than the early rhetoric. In government Labour would cut class sizes to thirty or below for five- to seven-year-olds, by scrapping the assisted places scheme that helped people from poor families go to private schools. It would speed up punishment for persistent young offenders, halving the time from arrest to sentencing. It would cut health service waiting times ‘by treating an extra 100,000 patients as a first step’ paid for by cutting red tape (the last resort of political accountancy). A quarter of a million young people would be put to work through a windfall tax on the privatized utility companies. There would be no rise in income tax rates and inflation and interest rates would be kept ‘as low as possible’. The last seemed entirely meaningless since no government has tried to raise inflation, but now seems like a coded reference to Gordon Brown’s decision to hand control over interest rates to a committee of the Bank of England. Looking back, the pledge card revealed a lot about the strengths and weaknesses of New Labour. It was modest in promise, and costed. Its promises, however, were so simple they often turned out to be damaging in practice; the waiting times pledge was one example. And there was a yearning for numerical simplicity – all those suspiciously round numbers – which suggested the purpose of the pledges was propagandistic, not governmental, easy ideas to spoon into voters who could not be bothered to concentrate.
Most damaging of all for a campaign which so relentlessly accused the Conservatives of deceit and destroying people’s trust in politics, Labour made promises which it would promptly break when it won power. It promised not to privatize the air traffic control system, but did so. It promised not to levy tuition fees for students and a year later did exactly that – and would repeat the trick with student top-up fees during the 2001 election. It promised an end to sleaze and to deception. It implied that the overall tax burden would not increase, yet it would. The most important pledges were the negative ones, coming from Brown and his Treasury team; that there would be no increase in rates of income tax, while for two years a New Labour government would stick to the Conservatives’ spending totals. Those promises were stuck to, though there were big and unmentioned stings to come.
But why were so many other pledges broken? Team Tony, the group who put together the New Labour ‘project’, were intelligent people who wanted to find a way of ruling which helped the worse off, particularly by giving them better chances in education and to find jobs, while not alienating the mass of middle-class voters. They exuded a strange, unstable mix of anxiety and arrogance. They were extraordinarily worried by newspapers. They were bruised by what had happened to Kinnock, whom they had all worked with, and ruthlessly focused on winning over anyone who could be won. Yet there was arrogance too. They were utterly ignorant of what governing would be like. The early success of Blair’s leadership victory and his short time as Opposition leader produced a sense that everything was possible for people of determination. If they promised something, no doubt it would happen. It they said something, of course it was true. They weren’t Tories, after all. The pity of all this was that they were about to take power at a golden moment when it would have been possible to fulfil the pledges they had made and when it was not necessary to give different messages to different people in order to win power. Blair had the wind at his back. The Conservatives would pose no serious threat to him for many years to come. Far from inheriting a weak or crisis-ridden economy, he was actually taking over at the best possible time when the country was recovering strongly, but had not yet quite noticed. Blair won by being focused and ruthless, and never forgot it. But he also had incredible, historic luck, and never seemed to realize quite what an opportunity it gave him.