A Journey (15 page)

After the nomination as leader, with John as deputy, I began to put the team in place. Peter was now fully on board, but his being so estranged him completely from Gordon, who had come to believe – and such thoughts were never alien to his thinking – that Peter had plotted my ascension all the way along. It was untrue, at least to my knowledge – though the thing with Peter is that maybe it was true but he concealed it brilliantly from me! Actually, I am sure it wasn’t. Peter always liked to play the Machiavelli figure, but in my experience he is one of the most transparent and open people I know.

In September 1994 we had had an away day at the Chewton Glen Hotel in the New Forest, then later in 1995 we held a second meeting – just the inner circle of me, Peter, Gordon, Alastair, Philip, Anji, Jonathan, Sue – at Fritham Lodge, also in the New Forest, and the home of Jonathan’s brother. News of the second meeting caused no end of problems with John Prescott, who was not there. During the course of the day, Gordon privately took Peter aside and asked him to work under his design and tutelage. Peter pointedly said that he worked for the leader. From that moment there was an enmity between them, and neither was a good enemy to have.

I was supremely fixed on getting the right person to do the media. Peter and I considered the candidates – Andy Grice of the
Independent
, Peter McMahon of the
Scotsman
, Patrick Wintour of the
Guardian
– but though all were good, really good, I wanted a tabloid person, and thought Alastair Campbell would be best. I’m not sure if it was great for him, but it was certainly great for me. I wanted a hard nut and had thought he was good; what I got was a genius. It was a very lucky strike.

Once we decided on Alastair I decided to pursue him immediately with fervour. I can be like that, when determined on an objective. I resolved not to take no for an answer. It was tricky at first. He had sorted his life out since his nervous breakdown and had given up the booze. His partner, Fiona Millar, was dubious about him taking the job, thinking correctly that it would change their lives. He was destined to go far in the media – even then he had star quality – so he would be giving up a lot. He admired and liked Peter, but also feared ending up in competition with him. For all those reasons, he was hard to persuade.

Eventually in mid-August 1994 I just pitched up at his holiday house in the part of France where he went every summer. For reasons completely beyond me, he would stay near to where Neil and Glenys Kinnock and Philip Gould and his wife Gail were also vacationing. Personally, the thought of going on holiday with people active in politics appalled me. You would never get away from it. But he liked it and they all chatted and plotted away happily.

The house was in Flassan in Provence, a
département
studded with those near-perfect little French villages in beautiful countryside. The attempt by the British to reconquer France by peaceful acquisition isn’t daft.

I arrived, stayed to dinner, got Neil on board, talked half the night alone with Alastair and did the deal. I gave what assurances I could on Peter. He was already anxious about Gordon’s people, but most of all, he wanted to know that I would back him to do what was necessary.

While there, I broached the subject of Clause IV, the core statement of the Labour Party credo in our constitution. After the 1992 defeat, and without discussing it with anyone, not even Gordon, I had formed a clear view that if ever I was leader, the constitution should be rewritten and the old commitments to nationalisation and state control would be dumped.

Clause IV was hallowed text repeated on every occasion by those on the left who wanted no truck with compromise or the fact that modern thinking had left its words intellectually redundant and politically calamitous. Among other things, it called for ‘the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange’. When drafted in 1917 by Sidney Webb, a great Fabian of the party’s intellectual wing, the words had actually been an attempt to avoid more Bolshevik language from the further left. Most of all, of course, it reflected prevailing international progressive thought that saw the abolition of private capital as something devoutly to be desired.

What was mainstream leftist thinking in the early twentieth century had become hopelessly unreal, even surreal, in the late-twentieth-century world in which, since 1989, even Russia had embraced the market. But could it be changed? Fortuitously, I had never been pressed on this during the leadership contest. The issue had been raised, but was never pushed to the point where I lost ‘wiggle room’. I had closed it down without closing it off.

Of course, as opponents of the change immediately pointed out once it was announced, it was largely symbolic. No one except the far left ever really believed in Clause IV as it was written. In a sense, that was my point: no one believed in it, yet no one dared remove it. What this symbolised, therefore, was not just something redundant in our constitution, but a refusal to confront reality, to change profoundly, to embrace the modern world wholeheartedly. In other words, this symbol mattered. It was a graven image, an idol. Breaking it would also change the psychology in the party that was damaging and reactionary and which was precisely what had kept us in Opposition for long periods. It had meant that although we were able erratically to do well against the Tories in response to their unpopularity, we could not govern consistently on our own merits. For me, therefore, removing Clause IV was not a gimmick or piece of good PR or a question of drafting; it was vital if Labour was to transform itself.

Progressive parties are always in love with their own emotional impulses. They have a feeling, however, that the electorate may not be of the same mind, so they are prepared to loosen them. Deep down, they wish it weren’t so, and hope against hope that maybe one day, in one possibly unique circumstance, the public will share them. It’s a delusion. They won’t. But, though progressives know that, the longing is acute and the temptation to rebind themselves to such impulses strong. The most basic impulse is to believe that if power is delivered into their hands, they will use it for the benefit of the people; and the more power, the more benefit. Hence the affinity with the state and public sector.

It’s not malignly motivated – on the contrary, the impulse is grounded in real and genuine feelings of solidarity – but history should have taught us to mitigate it in two crucial ways. First, the state and public sector can become great big vested interests that can be clumsy with, or even contradict, the public interest. Second, as people become better educated and more prosperous, they don’t necessarily want someone else, anyone else, making their choices for them. If this impulse is kept in check – i.e. active but constrained – progressive government can be a fine and liberating alternative to conservative government; but if not, not, as it were.

By advocating public ownership of the entire means of production, distribution and exchange, Clause IV didn’t represent a constraint but an invitation to unfettered indulgence. It was not healthy, wise or, unfortunately, meaningless. At a certain level, it meant a lot and the meaning was bad. Changing it was not a superficial thing; it implied a significant, deep and lasting change to the way the party thought, worked and would govern.

Part of the reason that I took so easily – many thought far too easily – to dismantling some of the sacred myths of the Labour ideology, was because of how I came to politics. As a student I had nothing to do with the Oxford Union, wasn’t a member of the Labour Club, and took virtually no part – or certainly no very focused part – in student politics. My main political influences at university were two Australians, an Indian and a Ugandan. Each of these four people gave me an insight which stayed with me and shaped my approach to politics. All were of course on the left, but were very different people with very different experiences.

My fellow student Geoff Gallop was the most active politically, and indeed in later life became premier of Western Australia. He was brilliant, with an extraordinary intellect. He taught me all the right terms and phrases of leftist politics at the time, and was a member of the International Marxist Group, one of the numerous sects – this one Trotskyist – that abounded in the 1970s. Needless to say, anyone in the Labour Party was a sell-out. They were also bitter rivals with the Communist Party people, who tended to be far better organisers, with links to trade unions and the occasional normal person. Although Geoff adhered to the framework of the Marxist dialectic, his own spirit and intellectual curiosity refused to let him be imprisoned by it. He was constantly analysing and reanalysing, breaking out with new thinking and fresh insights. He taught me how social conditions formed character; but he also taught me not to be an unthinking disciple of the left.

Peter Thomson reinforced this. He was an Australian Anglican priest, probably the most influential person in my life. He was a mature student in his mid-thirties when we were at Oxford. When he died in January 2010, I wrote this for his funeral:

There are very few people of whom you can say: he changed my life. Peter changed mine. From the first moment I met him – I was having a party in my room in St John’s and had stepped out on to the battlements, swaying a little, and looking down saw Pete looking up: ‘I’d be careful if I was you, mate’ – from that first moment, he shaped my life, gave it meaning and purpose; and set its course.

He was my friend, teacher, mentor and guide. Any good that I have done, he inspired it. Whatever my manifold faults, he made me a better person for knowing him: better, stronger, more loyal, less frail, more thankful for what I have, more hopeful about life’s possibilities, more joyful in fulfilling them, more courageous in accepting their limitations.

We often say, of someone’s passing, that they will leave a void in my life. Peter’s passing leaves no void. His presence fills it still. He was there when I needed him most. He will be there for me always. The light that shone in Peter is too powerful to be diminished by death.

That is how God worked through Peter. He was, after all, the most un-vicar-like of vicars. He and the adorable Helen kept open house for us all, but though much tea was drunk, along with many other things, a vicarage tea party it wasn’t. Never have dog collar and manner of speaking been in such blissful disharmony.

But that defined Peter: a curious mixture of the traditionalist and the iconoclast. His Christianity was muscular not limp. He was a doer not a spectator; and a thinker not just a preacher. Those thoughts were bold, groundbreaking and, for our twenty-first-century world, visionary.

I have met many people, famous and successful people, whom the world would call great. I never met a greater man than Peter. I feel him with me now as I write. I will feel him beside me always. I know, even as I mourn his death, that the greatest achievement I could wish for is that at the hour of my death, he would think proudly of me.

All these years later, his influence remains like an insistent reminder that life has to be lived for a purpose. Politically, Pete was on the left, but religion came first. Therefore, so, in a sense, it did for me. Not that the two were separated by him, or me, but the frame within which you see the world is different if religion comes first. Religion starts with values that are born of a view of humankind. Politics starts with an examination of society and the means of changing it. Of course politics is about values; and religion is often about changing society. But you start from a different place.

This is vital in understanding my politics. I begin with an analysis of human beings as my compass; the politics is secondary. Later, when I became sure that the ‘progressive problem’ was an insufficiently clear separation between ends and means, this approach – very much instilled by Peter – was what allowed me to come to that conclusion freely.

Geoff would give me books on politics to read. Peter would give me the philosopher John Macmurray’s works, such as
Reason and Emotion
and
Conditions of Freedom
. I developed a theory about the basis of socialism being about ‘community’ – i.e. people owed obligations to each other and were social beings, not only individuals out for themselves – which pushed me down the path of trying to retrieve Labour’s true values from the jumble of ideological baggage that was piled on top of them, obscuring their meaning. For me, it was socialism, and wasn’t about a particular type of economic organisation, anchored to a particular point in history.

The Indian was a postgraduate student called Anmol Vellani. One day, sitting in his room on the ground floor of the quadrangle at St John’s College, he gave me an insight that stayed with me and had a curious but profound effect on the public sector reform programme of later years. I can still picture the moment.

Anmol, perhaps because of the experience of India, but also because he had more political maturity, was debating with me the new ideas I had received from Geoff. I was trying them out on him, prodding and pushing, hoping to get a better understanding of the new language I was learning to speak. We were talking about capitalism and the state. I was repeating the view that the state had to take over from the interests of capitalism, which only cared about profit – the usual Marxist line!

Anmol shook his head. ‘It is not as simple as that,’ he said. ‘The state, too, can be a vested interest. It’s not the same as the public interest, you know, not in practice at least.’