A Journey (21 page)

Let us deal with some of the myths. When I describe the experience to Americans, who, along with the Japanese, seem to like watching it for some bizarre reason, they will sometimes say: ‘Oh, but you always seemed to enjoy it so much.’ If I did seem to be enjoying it, then it was a supreme instance of acting. I hated it. Others would say at the time: ‘You looked very relaxed at PMQs today.’ I never relaxed for a moment, and never had anything less than a full adrenalin surge.

I’m afraid it’s also rather a myth that it’s a great way of holding the prime minister to account. This thesis assumes that those asking the questions are interested to know the answers. In truth, the whole thing is a giant joust, a sort of modern, non-physical duel. The weapons are words, but my God they can hurt, and to devastating effect. For those thirty minutes, the prime minister is essentially on the ‘at risk’ register. It is the unpredictability that is so frightening. Sure, your own back benches, if they are loyal, let you know the question, but to everyone else it’s a blood sport and the prime minister is the quarry. If it goes well, you feel buoyed; if it goes badly, you feel not simply wretched but humiliated. There’s no place like a full House of Commons for making someone seem a complete dolt.

And you can never tell. At times I would go in thinking: It’s obvious what the subject of the day is, I have the answers at my fingertips, it should be a reasonable afternoon. Minutes later I would be tottering, having made some verbal faux pas or tactical blunder that had the place screaming in anger or, worse, derision. At moments like these, in a hole, there is an almost irresistible desire to keep digging. Your answers get longer and more convoluted; your tone becomes more shrill; your face gets redder as the paucity of your argument becomes plainer. You glance sideways, imploring your own benches to give some sign of support, and see the look of embarrassment on their faces. As you sit down, a few diehard loyalists give cheers which dissolve away in an apologetic murmur. Across the aisle, two sword-lengths away – from the days when Members carried swords – the gloating Opposition faces are contorted with glee and gratitude.

Over time I got better at it, and by the end was more often OK than rubbish, but the fear never abated for an instant. Even today, wherever I am in the world, I feel a cold chill at 11.57 a.m. on Wednesdays, a sort of prickle on the back of my neck, the thump of the heart. That was the moment I used to be taken from the prime minister’s room in the House of Commons through to the Chamber itself. I used to call it the walk from the cell to the place of execution.

I would have got to the House of Commons around 11.30 a.m., having spent all morning in my office in Downing Street going through the papers, deciding tactics and strategy. In that last half-hour final decisions would be made, answers slipped through the door, hurried last-minute consultations held about some unfolding event. The worst thing was stories breaking at 10 or even 11 a.m., usually around bad statistics of one sort or another, or something idiotic a member of the government had said. A line would have to be taken, facts would have to be given, though the full facts might not be known. A mistake by the prime minister in that bear pit is not a mistake: it is a deliberate deception, and all hell breaks loose around it.

By the end, I had much better karma in doing it. I got braver. I realised that in the end I had to confront the demons. It was no use praying more the night before, wearing the right shoes (I wore the same pair of Church’s brogues every PMQs for ten years) or just hoping I would get by. I decided to analyse it, and try to work out how to do it to the best of my ability.

I remember as a schoolboy doing boxing, which was compulsory. I loathed it; I could never see the point of it nor understand its appeal. In the first fights, I was scared. I didn’t want to hit my opponent. I didn’t want him to hit me. I just wanted the thing over with. After a time, though, I chose to box properly, to stand my ground and fight. I did it with fear, but also with determination. Either do it properly or refuse to do it at all – that’s also fine – but don’t do it like a wuss. I didn’t like boxing any better, but I respected myself more.

Gradually, I evolved a pattern of working for PMQs. It all started with a determination to be braver, to stand my ground and fight, consciously. Fear as a stimulus, in proper proportion, can keep you on your toes. Fear that tumbles into panic is all bad. In the early days, I wouldn’t sleep well the night before or eat at all in the morning. The first thing I realised was the importance of being in the right physical as well as mental condition, so I changed my routine. I took a melatonin pill the night before so I got at least six hours’ sleep. I made sure I had a proper breakfast, and just before the ordeal began, I would eat a banana to give myself energy. It seems daft, but I was finding that my energy levels, and thus my mental agility, were dropping after ten minutes. It really made a difference. At 12.28 I was still alive to the risks and up to repelling the assault.

Secondly, I faced up to what the fear was. The fear was being made to look a fool, or simply being outwitted. The way to prevent it was not so much mastering the facts, but mastering the strategy of debate. The right facts, properly researched, are utterly essential, of course. By the time I was into my stride I had a team of great talent, headed at first by the ultra-efficient Clare Sumner, then by Kate Gross, superb organiser and mistress of ceremonies. The key special adviser was Catherine Rimmer, brilliant head of research and with an extraordinary ability to master detail (also invaluable during the Hutton Inquiry). The team was topped off by Nicholas Howard, the wonderful master of the PMQs folder. Together, they gave me confidence that the factual basis of the answer was correct. However, the final component in winning was not the facts themselves but how they were deployed. The facts were the horse, the armour and the lance; the skill was in using them to best effect, which meant guessing the line of attack, working out how to parry and then laying out the counter-attack.

On a bad day with a no-win subject – and there were quite a few of those – the best that could be done was to fight it to a draw, but on a good or average day you had to go for a win. Winning gives your side confidence, it lifts them, it makes them think of the future as bright. Your own standing is enhanced. Losing is not only undignified, it hurts morale. A run of really bad PMQs can put the leader in jeopardy.

The night before I would go through the folder which held all the potential answers to all the potential questions, and the really complex factual areas were studied without the frantic pressure of Wednesday morning upon us. By 8 a.m. I would have whittled down the most likely areas of interrogation and then I would sit with a pad and work out the debating lines. Sometimes the best phrases came during PMQs, but this was rare in my experience. No one speaks quite so eloquently as they do when their eloquence has been honed, toned, constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed in the privacy of the antechamber.

By this method, I learned over time how to break out of defence and go on the offensive. It would also allow me to analyse the argument I was making with the facts – was it sustainable and persuasive, how would it play with their backbenchers as well as mine?

I discovered the force of humour, of light and shade. John Smith had been the first person I saw use humour to brilliant effect in the House, as in his demolition of John Major over the ERM debacle. Gordon, too, in his early days had been exceptional in using wit to demolish the Tory economic front bench when he had stood in for John in the late 1980s. Some of the lines he used against Nigel Lawson and the Tory Treasury team would have our side roaring their approval. We might be, usually were, weak on the argument; but it’s amazing how much the weakness can be concealed by well-timed ridicule and well-judged wit. I tended to be more earnest, more like a lawyer with a case, but I have a sense of humour and I just needed the confidence to use it.

I learned how to disarm an opponent as well as blast them. They get angry; you get mild. They go over the top; you become a soothing voice of reason. They insult you; you look at them not with resentment, but with pity. Under attack, you have to look directly at them, study their faces, your eyes fixed on theirs rather than rolling with anxiety.

Finally I realised that if you foul up, you move on. Easy to say; hard to do. When I had had a bad PMQs, the walk back to the room from the Chamber was almost as bad as the walk to it. We would always have a few minutes afterwards to deal with any consequential issues. For the poor old team, it was always tough when I messed up. The disappointment would be written large on their faces, even as they struggled to contain it. Jonathan Powell was usually the only one to voice the truth. ‘Thank God there’s no more of that for a week,’ he’d say cheerfully as others would mutter about it being ‘a score draw, really’, or some such bull****.

Anyway, in those early days of May 1997, the twice-weekly PMQs was transformed into one. I never regretted that decision and subsequent prime ministers will thank me for it!

The next decision was of an altogether different and more fundamental nature. Some months before the election, Gordon and I formed the desire to give monetary policy – i.e. setting of interest rates – over to the Bank of England. The so-called ‘independence’ of the Bank had been a keen academic, economic and political debate going back decades.

I had no doubt it was right. I had been convinced long ago that for politicians to set interest rates was to confuse economics and politics, the long term with the short term, the expedient with the sensible. I had watched the game played out as governments carefully calibrated the interest rate movements with the electoral cycle. Everyone knew it was happening and why. The result was the country effectively paid a political premium on the interest rate. The contrast with the independent central banks of Europe, especially that of Germany, and with the US Federal Reserve, was instructive and telling.

The issue, as I liked to say to doubting backbenchers and the serious experts who opposed the move, was not whether the Governor of the Bank was a more intelligent person than the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He might or might not be of superior intellect. But the decision-making process at the Bank was definitely of superior objectivity. I had talked about it often with Roy Jenkins. Gavyn Davies – at that time with Goldman Sachs, and someone I often turned to for economic advice – had been immensely persuasive on the merits. I knew Nigel Lawson – a Chancellor I really admired – had wanted to do it. It was also the perfect riposte to those worried about the economic credentials of an incoming Labour government, so although the rationale was ultimately to put long-term economics above short-term politics, there were very good political reasons for doing so.

Gordon had come to the same conclusion, and so when I suggested it, he readily agreed. There was some debate about when it should be announced. I favoured doing it before the election to solidify our business credibility; he felt that it was sufficiently important to the way the markets would move that we should do it straight after the election, a proposition to which I eventually consented.

Gordon announced it on 6 May. It went well. Business and the markets liked it. The Tories opposed it but weren’t really in the mood to create a major storm, and were unable to do so even if they had wanted to. For me, it was a very important moment. It defined not simply our approach to economic policy, but an approach to governing: it was not born from traditional left/right ideology; it drew people to the intelligent, radical centre ground; it spoke of our determination from the outset to protect and enhance our economic opportunity as a nation.

I allowed Gordon to make the statement and indeed gave him every paean of praise and status in becoming the major economic figure of the government. I did so firstly because I thought he deserved it, secondly because it was good for the whole thing not to look like a one-man show, and thirdly not doing so would have created considerable tension.

But it had an unfortunate and long-lasting consequence. I have many faults, but one virtue I have is that I don’t mind big people around me. In my own office, I liked Alastair, Jonathan, Anji, Sally, Peter, David Miliband and others precisely because I knew they would tell me what they thought. That is not to say they were disrespectful (though the familiarity bred in Opposition wasn’t always appropriate transferred into the more formal settings of government), but they spoke their mind. I welcomed it, and drew valuable advice and even confidence from it.

So when I consciously and deliberately allowed Gordon to be out there as a big beast, as the acknowledged second most powerful figure in the government, I did so without any fear of being eclipsed or outmanoeuvred. Indeed, the concept of manoeuvring seemed irrelevant. The office were less sanguine. Alastair in particular worried that a picture was being drawn that I was ‘the chairman’ or ‘president’, and Gordon was ‘the chief executive’ or ‘prime minister’, which, as he pointed out with vigour, easily translated into the person who simply does the glad-handing, and the hard-working serious guy who runs the country. So relaxed was I in my own sense of who I was and what I was doing that it didn’t trouble me and I shrugged the warnings off.

In truth, too, as with the Bank of England independence, the broad framework on the economy, never mind anything else, was set by me. My notes to the office during those initial months were peppered with references to economic policy: getting the Comprehensive Spending Review aligned with the government’s priorities, explaining what we wanted to do to create a more competitive economy, and jerking back hard on the rein if I thought there was a deviation from the essential pro-business, pro-aspiration line (stamping on the idea of taxing professionals more, or on taxing second homes, for example). Frequently, and at quite a micro level, a salvo would be fired off to keep the Treasury in check. Nevertheless, the perception – which later became damaging and undermining – was that I kept out of the economic policy space. The reality was that the train, the tracks and the destination were constructed in close interaction with Gordon, and on lines I shaped or was comfortable with. The driver was then given considerable freedom to manage the service. Not until very late on did I ever really yield control of economic policy.