A Journey (20 page)

In 1996, I said our three priorities for government would be ‘education, education, education’ (a line – the only one ever! – given to me by Jonathan). The purpose of focusing on education was for its own sake, obviously, but it also served to emphasise how we saw the role of the state: enabling the fulfilment of potential, not controlling lives or business. In the ‘New Labour, New Britain’ guide we produced in 1996, we set out a clear compass in each area of policy. We had symbolic or token policies to illustrate direction, but carefully avoided overpromising or too much detail.

In this regard, Gordon was an indispensable ally. His natural caution made him disapprove of any hostages to fortune. He had seen the appeal of New Labour. He was determined to be seen as economically prudent, pro-business and, while he was always off to the left of me, it was all within bounds. He gave our position on the economy credibility, and that in turn enormously enhanced the credibility of the party’s aspiration to power. In the 1995 Mais Lecture to the banking and finance community, I had set out our approach to the economy in close collaboration with him, emphasising our commitment to stability. In writing it, I got help from key City people who I knew would understand that the core purpose was to be the embodiment of sane, steady common sense. It worked, and reassured further.

Meanwhile, I was learning to cope with fame. Suddenly, I was one of the best-known faces in the land. There was huge interest also in New Labour from abroad. We were written about widely as the coming thing. We were the fashion.

However, at that point, there was still a link to reality in my daily life. I had no security, I drove the kids to school most mornings, I could go out to eat, see friends, be alone with the family. I was busy, to be sure, and the responsibility I was carrying was great, but it sat with relative ease on my shoulders. I looked incredibly young. People would stop me in the street and chat. Looking back, I see the days were blessed then. At the time, of course, it didn’t seem like that.

Cherie and the children coped magnificently, but it is easy to forget how much their lives had changed. The children were, of a sudden, looked on differently by their classmates. Fortunately, because they carried on going to the same school, and as a family we went to the same church – St Joan of Arc in Highbury, just up from the then Arsenal football ground – the faces were familiar, and though evidently we were regarded in a new light, the families we were close to remained close. They provided much normality. Our friends tended to be non-political and it made a comforting change from the pressure cooker.

Cherie decided to remake her image: get fit, look good, carry herself like the well-known figure she was becoming. In this, Carole Caplin was a great support, as she was to me when fitness became more of a preoccupation. She did a superb job for Cherie, made her look and feel good when Cherie was suddenly transported from one world (professional Bar) to another (tabloid press).

Carole was monstered by the media later when she had an affair with Peter Foster, a con man. Whole reams of newsprint were devoted to her, including stories that were completely made up and then became standard fare, like the fable about Cherie and Carole having showers together.

My close office were, it is fair to say, intrigued but generally dismayed by Carole. Alastair, in particular, couldn’t understand her role and strongly disapproved of it. He judged, in a sense rightly, that politics had no place for someone as exotic and apolitical as Carole. Personally, that’s why I found her so refreshing.

Alastair was convinced she would sell her story. She never did. Whatever indignity was visited on her, she remained dignified. Contrary to the image assiduously and malignly created for her, she was kind, decent, hard-working and, above all, brilliant at what she did. The relationship with Foster was a big mistake, but it wasn’t venal or badly motivated. It was rather the product of her almost obsessive refusal to compromise with people’s opinions of other people. In this case, they were right and she was wrong, but that refusal to follow the crowd was what also made her innovative and creative in her work, a good friend and a reliable confidante for Cherie.

In retrospect, when the
Sun
broke the story of Carole’s involvement with Cherie in 1994, it would have been better to have acknowledged her, been open and been supportive. Instead, entirely understandably given our nervousness about our position and how she was bound to provoke controversy, we hid her away in a safe house. But, of course, it only increased the fascination with her.

The problem, as I used to say to people who became close, is that knowing me is like catching a disease. My friends swiftly became targets. If a hostile part of the media couldn’t get me, they tended to try to pick off people close to me. The truth is there is no one you cannot make out to be in some way odd, or a figure of ridicule, if you pry and probe into their life with sufficient ruthlessness.

But much of that came later. In those years before the election victory, we were working hard, but with the wind at our back. Within the constraints and limitations of Opposition, we were as prepared as we could be. However, I have come to the firm conclusion that those constraints and limitations are a considerable disadvantage. You are woefully short on what is required to step into government and govern effectively, especially if you come into power after such a long period of Opposition. This is not about understanding the machinery of government; above all, it is about knowing the complexity of policymaking, financial management and prioritising. Knowing the committee structure and departmental highways and byways is no doubt important; but it is far more important to know how to focus on the essential details of preparation for implementing a policy which may seem easy enough stated in a manifesto but, when looked at in the hard light of day, can be horrendously difficult to do. And parties tend to be really under-informed about the nature of how different commitments interact with public finances.

So, in policy direction we were pretty firm and clear. In the details, we were lacking. Nonetheless, as an election-fighting machine, we were exceptional. This we knew how to do. When John Major called the election we were ready and waiting. We were ignorant of what lay ahead after we passed the winning post, but we had built up near-irreversible momentum towards it.

FOUR

HONEYMOON

T
he disadvantage of a new government is lack of experience in governing. It is also the advantage. Its very innocence, its immaturity, the absence of the cynicism that comes from perpetual immersion in government’s plague-infested waters, gives it an extraordinary sense of possibility. From start to finish I never lost my optimism, self-belief or objective belief in what could be done, but you can never quite recapture that amazing release of energy and boundless ‘derring-do’ that comes with the election of a fresh team – especially when it comes after eighteen years of one party’s rule.

When I think of what we did in those first halcyon days, it was indeed quite remarkable. It wasn’t born of arrogance; whatever people said, I never lost the impulse to guard against complacency, or the recognition that the ultimate boss was ‘the people’. It came out of an unrestrained and genuine wish to drive the nation forward. We thought the unthinkable; did the undoable; the conventional became a constraint to be unshackled; what was traditional became old-fashioned.

One very early decision concerned me quite a bit, but I thought, To hell with it, I’m going to do it. At that time PMQs was scheduled twice a week, at 3.15 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays for fifteen minutes. Even if another event was scheduled for earlier in the day, the morning would pass fitfully as my mind grappled with the manoeuvres, opportunities and bear traps of the forthcoming encounter. After it ended at 3.30 p.m. it reverberated in the mind: how it had gone, who had got the upper hand, what it had said about the mood of the backbenchers. My rational self told me it was all over and was usually forgotten within forty-eight hours; but there is no ‘rational’ in the whole PMQs business. It is the emotional, intellectual and political repository of all that is irrational. Even as the Opposition leader – when I only had to ask the damned questions – it dominated my thoughts; I could only imagine what it would be like as prime minister.

One thing was obvious, though it may seem mundane: one of the keys to doing the job of a prime minister or president is to manage your time. Its importance is cardinal. Show me an ineffective leader and I will show you a badly managed schedule. This has nothing to do with the number of hours worked – I came across leaders who worked the most ridiculous hours, eighteen hours a day for frequent stretches of time – but whether time is used properly.

The schedule has to be based around the decisions that define the government, for which time must be made. In so far as it is possible to do so, the necessary formal routines have to be limited only to those that are vital. One of the first things Anji did for me on arriving in Number 10 was to uproot official dinners. I probably did no more than thirty, including the compulsory state banquets, during my whole time in Downing Street. Official dinners are almost always unnecessary. The host regards them as a chore, and here’s the news: so do the guests. You eat late (the food is either rich or rubbish), and there is no greater political torture than the after-dinner speech. If it’s business you’re after, do it in a forty-five-minute meeting before dinner. Then you can go off with your family, and the guests can go off with their friends or close associates, let their hair down, and everyone is happy. Except protocol. And a happy protocol is almost invariably a sign of a badly run government.

Creating time for a leader is a near-sacred task. The person in charge of it is one of the most important in the team, and they have to be completely ruthless in saying no. The leader has always got to be the good guy. You bump into someone; they ask for a meeting; you agree, of course. What can you say? ‘You’re too tedious, too unimportant and have nothing of any interest to say’? Of course not. You have to say yes. It’s the job of the scheduler to say no. ‘But he agreed to see me.’ No. ‘But he said he wanted to see me.’ No. ‘But he said he had been meaning to call me himself to fix a meeting.’ No. ‘But . . .’ No.

We used to have a phrase in the office called, in mock severity, ‘SO’, which stood for ‘sackable offence’. It applied to scheduling a meeting with people who were never to cross the threshold. It applied even if I had agreed to the meeting. It applied – I am a little ashamed to say – even if I had expressed to the individual concerned my deep frustration with my own office for defying my wishes and not scheduling the meeting.

There was a particular old Labour grandee who used to nobble me in order to give me ‘sound advice’. He was a lovely man, but really. I naturally expressed my intense interest in seeing him. Kate, my PA, who was a hugely efficient naysayer, went AWOL for some reason or other. Someone else was temporarily manning the gate, and he got in to see me. After about thirty minutes of ‘sound advice’, I was just about boss-eyed with boredom when the temporary gatekeeper put her head round the door and said, ‘Time’s up.’

‘Oh, really,’ I said, ‘what a shame. I was really enjoying this.’

‘Well, in that case,’ she said, ‘I could leave you another half-hour because your diary has changed.’

Prime Minister’s Questions is of course of great gravity and import, but I could see from watching John Major that the physical and mental effort of each of the twice-weekly fifteen-minute slots absorbed the whole day: the morning and early afternoon were spent in preparation; meetings, if held at all, did not receive full concentration; the late afternoon and early evening were spent reflecting on what had happened. Two PMQs equalled two days. That’s a lot of time.

I had hatched a plot before the election – somewhat disingenuously describing it in the manifesto as ‘making PMQs more efficient’ – to change the two slots to a single one of thirty minutes. Not a big change, you may think; but I tell you, it was a revolution in saving time. Fortunately Paddy Ashdown, leader of the Liberal Democrats, had indicated that he was in favour of reform, so I just took a deep breath and announced it, and it went through very quickly. If there had been any debate, it would most likely never have happened, but I was lucky we were a new government and the Tories were still reeling.

Later, when Robin Cook was Leader of the Commons, the half-hour slot moved to noon on Wednesday. Preparation would take place the night before and Wednesday morning would be clear, so while there was a period of complete absorption, it was limited in duration. By 12.30 p.m. the nightmare was over. Unless it had gone in a ghastly way, by mid-afternoon the mind had been released, and Thursday was free from its anxieties. It may have seemed a small reform, but for the personal well-being of the prime minister, it was vital.

It had its drawbacks: fifteen minutes may seem a very short time, but it’s not when you’re standing facing the howling mob gathered opposite the dispatch box – believe me, time passes very slowly indeed – so half an hour could be an ordeal, especially if the wicket was sticky and there was an ‘issue of the day’ around which the questioning could coalesce.

PMQs was the most nerve-racking, discombobulating, nail-biting, bowel-moving, terror-inspiring, courage-draining experience in my prime ministerial life, without question. You know that scene in
Marathon Man
where the evil Nazi doctor played by Laurence Olivier drills through Dustin Hoffman’s teeth? At around 11.45 on Wednesday mornings, I would have swapped thirty minutes of PMQs for thirty minutes of that.