A Journey (19 page)

On this one, if I had told him I had a friend called Faust and he had cut this really great deal with some bloke called Satan, it couldn’t have gone down worse. I also knew Neil Kinnock would hate it and feel, understandably, betrayed. The
Sun
had been vicious beyond vicious to him, and as a result really had achieved demon status for party activists. People would be horrified. On the other hand, as I said to Alastair, not to go was to say carry on and do your worst, and we knew their worst was very bad indeed. No, you sat down to sup; or not. So we did.

The long journey allowed me to craft the speech carefully. It had to be a speech that didn’t pander. It had its pro-European part and commitments on poverty and the environment, but was also a clear articulation of New Labour from the point of principle not simply electability. Paul Keating, then Australian prime minister, went with us and as ever he was great company and a huge source of sensible advice delivered in the inimitable Keating manner. (‘Don’t ever put up income tax, mate,’ he used to say to me. ‘Take it off them anyhow you please, but do that and they’ll rip your f***ing guts out.’) He thought Rupert a bastard, but one you could deal with.

I thought Rupert an enigma, and the more I got to know him, the more I thought so. In the end – and I am aware of the shrieks of disbelief as I write this – I came to have a grudging respect and even liking for him. He was hard, no doubt. He was right wing. I did not share or like his attitudes on Europe, social policy or on issues such as gay rights, but there were two points of connection: he was an outsider, and he had balls. The ‘outsider’ thing was crucial to understanding him. He remained both immensely powerful and, at certain quite elemental points, anti-Establishment. He would admire Mrs Thatcher, but not necessarily the Tory Party with all its baggage, airs and graces. That gave me something to work with.

We had flown to Sydney after PMQs on the Thursday, and stayed overnight at Kirribilli House, the prime minister’s place down by the harbour. We then flew up with Paul to Hayman Island on the Sunday, gave the speech the following day, and left an hour later to fly all the way back. We got to London in time to make a speech with Chris Smith, the Shadow Heritage Secretary, on the technology revolution on the Tuesday morning, and then did PMQs that afternoon.

The speech on Hayman Island went down well. I could see the executives were in awe (and a little fearful) of Rupert. Once he had introduced me in glowing terms (having given me credit, privately I think, for having the brass nerve to come), they all rallied and I could feel we were in with a chance of winning the
Sun
’s support.

The party were half appalled and half excited by the sheer vim of it all. Indeed, back then we were moving at such a pace that they hardly had the chance to recover from one shock to the system before another came in its wake. It took their breath away, and though some of the criticism was strong, the mainstream of the party loved the fact we were wrong-footing, disorientating and generally outfoxing the Tories. After years of feeling like a whipped underdog, they rather liked the idea of a bit of the swagger of a top dog.

At around that time in mid-1995, I set out a template for the Labour Party approach to policy in a series of articles. Looking back, what is interesting is that although the actual policies shifted significantly with the experience of government, the basic philosophical positions remained. In June, I wrote in an article in
The Times
that:

The truth is that the electorate now sees Labour as the sensible mainstream party. We have changed. We admit the changes. But far from simply ditching our past, we are proclaiming a positive message for the future. The new Clause IV is the most visible symbol of that change but it is not the only one. We have changed, too, the way we make policy. The education policy launched last week was not devised to please the National Union of Teachers. It was devised to meet the concerns of parents. The health policy we launched yesterday drew on the expertise of professional bodies and other experts in the NHS. But uppermost in our minds, all the time, was the patient.

We were constantly operating on two levels. One concerned the campaigning genius of Alastair, Peter and the political team. They were, of course, putting over the New Labour case, but they were also whacking the Tories very hard, exploiting their divisions, underscoring their weaknesses, using a devastating mixture of critique, ridicule and bombast. It was fun, effective and professionally delivered. It carried us through the by-elections which we were now regularly winning from the Tories, even in the most unlikely places. As a machine, it was close to unbeatable, like Manchester United at their best: exciting to watch, unnerving for opponents and pretty much unstoppable. This was complemented by the rigorous attention to the need for policy positions that were centrist, credible and coherent, so that differences with the Tories didn’t lead to vulnerability and so that the key message – Labour has genuinely changed, and not out of electoral calculation – would be reinforced.

Most of the articles about our position were written personally, crafted out of detailed policy discussion with David Miliband, Michael Barber, Jonathan and others. In what caused much jarring and tutting within the party, I even decided to own up to supporting changes Margaret Thatcher had made. I knew the credibility of the whole New Labour project rested on accepting that much of what she wanted to do in the 1980s was inevitable, a consequence not of ideology but of social and economic change. The way she did it was often very ideological, sometimes unnecessarily so, but that didn’t alter the basic fact: Britain needed the industrial and economic reforms of the Thatcher period. Saying this immediately opened the ears of many who had supported the Tories in that period – not because they were instinctively or emotionally Conservative, but because Labour had seemed so old-fashioned and out of touch with individual aspiration. Our economic policy had appeared hopelessly collectivist; our social policy born of political correctness.

In another article for
The Times
in July 1995, I explained why Labour should be the party of social order and security at home, and internationalism and free trade abroad:

The only way to rebuild social order and stability is through strong values, socially shared, inculcated through individuals and families. This is not some lurch into authoritarianism or an attempt to impose a regressive personal morality. It is, in fact, about justice and fairness. The strong and powerful can protect themselves. Those who lose most through the absence of rules are the weak and the vulnerable. The first casualties of social breakdown are often the poor and disadvantaged. That is why the left should treat it seriously . . .

The left of centre should be the meritocrats of the twenty-first century. The Conservatives are in danger of becoming narrowly and insularly nationalistic. There is no future for that in a world of change. I am not saying it does not have popular appeal. It does. But it is not serious politics . . .

The Labour government I hope to lead will be outward-looking, internationalist and committed to free and open trade, not an outdated and misguided narrow nationalism.

It is a rejuvenated and revitalised left of centre that is placed to respond to and shape this new world of change. If it can escape the constraints of its past, learning from history not living in it, it is best equipped intellectually and philosophically for the new century. It is precisely to do this that New Labour will continue to change.

My main worry was that the Tories would regain some political sense, change leader and rejuvenate. It wasn’t that John Major was bad. However, he was plainly trying to keep together a party viscerally divided over Europe, stretching the skin as tight as it would go to conceal the break, rather than conduct surgery and mend it. In a move that could have worked, in 1995 he suddenly decided to hold a leadership election and force his opponents out in the open. It was a rather brilliant tactic and had me worried. John Redwood stepped forward, with the support of the Eurosceptic Tory press. ‘Redwood vs Deadwood’, as the
Mail
put it.

But then, fortunately for me, Major made the same error as Labour had in the 1980s: he appealed for unity rather than a mandate. So the bold tactic was not accompanied by a bold strategy. Redwood was defeated; but not for a cause. Michael Heseltine, who could have led the Tories, remained marginalised.

It’s a strange thing, the power of the appeal to loyalty in respect of a leader. You have to be very wary of it. In particular, you have to define what it is and what it isn’t, or rather what it should be and what it shouldn’t. When prime minister, and in the darker days when I was under fairly much routine attack by Gordon’s people, my close supporters would sometimes complain that his supporters were disloyal. I would always respond that they were perfectly entitled to challenge me, to put forward an alternative, and to say I should go. What they shouldn’t do is undermine me. In other words – and obviously not trivially or serially – if you come to the conclusion the leader is not up to it or is taking the party fundamentally in the wrong direction, there is nothing disloyal in being open and mounting a challenge. If the criticism is right, the challenge comes out of loyalty to the bigger cause: the party itself and its purpose. That is why I never had a problem with Gordon’s people wanting me out, provided it was for a purpose other than simply that of Gordon doing the job rather than me. And for some of them, hostile to New Labour, it was. What is always unacceptable is to chip away, to refuse the open challenge, to corrode. That is disloyal because it weakens the party; it doesn’t change it or redirect it.

So I used to say: I don’t mind the so-called disloyalty, I mind the fact that they want Labour to go back to election-losing ways. Major could have used the contest to assert leadership. Instead, the fight was messy and served to underline the fact that the Tories were unresolved in their essential direction.

In January 1996, we published the ‘Party into Power’ document, a seemingly innocuous exercise in party management, but ultimately a very important change in the way the party developed policy. When I had read up on previous Labour governments, I had noticed that a destabilising factor was the relationship between party and government. When the party was called upon to exercise real power, there immediately came about a dangerous tension between activists and ministers in which the two always ended up divided from each other. The party wanted true ‘socialism’ beloved of the activists; the government was focused on the people. They moved with remarkable speed into inhabiting separate political cultures. The result was an increasing disillusionment with the government from the party, which quickly communicated itself to the public.

The worst aspect was that this disillusionment then found easy expression in the party structures, notably the NEC and the party conference. The NEC became the equivalent of the government’s moral inquisitor, trying to keep it to the straight and narrow; the party conference became the focal point for the dissension and a battleground for resolutions that usually asked the government to do something electorally suicidal. The ‘Party into Power’ document effectively altered the rules so as to ensure that the routine resolutions didn’t happen just by tabling a motion, but instead grew out of a managed process that required long debate and discussion in policy groups; and the NEC powers were sharply curtailed. We had to get the unions on board for the changes, and it was here that Tom Sawyer was invaluable, as a former trade unionist. With some reluctance and opposition, the party conceded the changes at the 1996 conference. They were vital when the going got rough in government.

None of this meant we were immune to the usual party backbiting and gossip. Several times in 1996, I was counselling the Shadow Cabinet to avoid damaging briefings and leaks and to stop fighting each other and fight the Tories. At the same time, I was trying to ward off attacks from the left that we had already diluted our principles in the quest for power. I decided, as I put it, to own up to the charges of betrayal and sell-out before we ever got there. I thought the bane of the left – the tendency to believe that the leadership is too right wing when usually the public worry is the opposite – was best brought out, acknowledged and confronted. In a message both to them and to the country, I said in effect: Don’t be under any misconception; we are New Labour, we are going to govern as New Labour; it is not a gimmick; it is real; it is born of belief. I knew it wouldn’t stop the charges of betrayal, but it would limit their salience and reach.

Roy Jenkins used to describe me as like someone carrying an immensely valuable vase across a wide room with a very slippery floor. Not for one moment could I let myself relax, my gaze be unfixed on the precious cargo, my mind diverted from the task in hand. Vast amounts of care and hard work went into the conferences. In 1994, I announced the change to Clause IV. In 1995, we announced a deal with BT to promote skills, a connection with a major privatised utility sending the clear message that we would be good with business. In that speech, I also tried to reflect my wish for the country to modernise and to look outward and forward, and coined the phrase ‘Britain as a Young Country’ – a phrase somewhat mocked, but illustrating my passion for Britain to capture some of the youthful optimism and energy of a country feeling confident of its future, not staring nostalgically into its past.