A Journey (56 page)

In part, we were victims of our own mythology. Everyone assumed it was a masterstroke. Well, it must be, mustn’t it? After all, we were the sultans of spin, blah blah blah.

The interesting question, however, is why we thought it necessary to have a ‘new style’ launch at all. People assume that politicians are constantly looking for better ways to present because they condone the triumph of presentation over substance. Actually, the politicians are reacting to the situation, not creating it.

Your average politico is at their happiest talking policy, believe me. They love it. I do too. I could talk for hours about the ins and outs of education or health reform. I was genuinely intrigued by analysis of the criminal justice system and the debate and balance between civil liberties and effective law and order. It is one of the supreme myths about politicians that they are talk-show hosts who have to learn about policy; more often they are policy wonks who have to learn to be talk-show hosts.

As the media have become more geared to sensation, scandal and impact, so the politicians have had to look for more devices and strategies to generate interest. I came to the sad conclusion through the 2001 campaign that the best I could hope for was that underneath some whizz-bang piece of marketing creativity or twist to a story, we might squeeze some policy. But there was never any chance of having the policy out there centre stage.

When a government is in its first months and it is a novelty, and some of the policies mark a sharp break with the philosophy of the previous government, then policy can be out in front, able to speak and be heard. But as time goes on and the agenda becomes familiar – even if the actual policies are new – interest fades and very quickly a sense of ‘we’ve heard it all before’ takes over.

To be fair to the media, it was hard in circumstances where the Tories didn’t really engage, except on Europe. But even so, it was dispiriting and it meant that when we tried, as with the launch at the school and cocked up, it only allowed them to confirm for the public that we were indeed only interested in ‘spin’. But we knew for sure that if we did a conventional general election launch, it would go nowhere.

Throughout the campaign, with the polls showing us anywhere between ten and twenty points ahead and varying only slightly, we attempted to fire the whole thing up only to find that the squib exhibited perpetual signs of dampness. After a rally at Croydon, sitting in my hotel room, I took a call from Bill Clinton. It was eerie how he could read my mood from several thousand miles away.

‘Just phoned to see how you’re doing,’ he said.

‘Great,’ I replied.

‘No, I know what you’re feeling,’ he said. He then explained to me how in the 1996 campaign against Bob Dole, he had been a certain winner from the outset. All this did, he said, was make the media mad and the public think it was a shoo-in. He knew that at this moment I would be fretting and fearing that the public would react against it.

‘OK, you’re right,’ I said. ‘So what’s the answer?’

The answer, he went on, was to fight the campaign as if it were neck and neck, to show the people how much you want it, how much you are prepared to fight for it, and how grateful you are for every last vote you are going to get. ‘Show them you are desperate for their mandate, and the more you’re up in the polls, the more desperate you should become.’

It was good advice. I took it. From then on, I didn’t care how bad the Tories were, I just scrapped and fought and clawed my way through as if my life depended on every vote. It didn’t change the media mood, and heaven knows if it changed the outcome, but it gave me a sense of energy and the party a sense of urgency.

The Tory campaign was indeed abject. I had puzzled over William Hague. He was a truly outstanding debater, he had a good mind and a high-grade intellect. There was lots of real quality in him and about him. I thought he had definite leadership character. In different circumstances and at a different time, he could have been – and very possibly may still be – a great leader and even prime minister.

As I listened to him, however, I wondered if it is possible to love words too much. Such was his ability and use of words and humour, his capacity to weave clever conceits and amusing demonstrations of wit, that he expended too much of his mind on that and too little on the purpose for which the conceits and wit were devised. The result was that although he often humiliated an opponent, he less often beat them in argument.

While he was formidable and I could not underestimate him, he and the Tory high command inexplicably based their campaign on Europe. There were perfectly sound opinion poll and media reasons for such a strategy: polls showed Tory policy hugely preferred to ours; the Murdoch press, the
Mail
and the
Telegraph
were all very Eurosceptic and therefore strongly supportive of the Tory position. The problem was that very senior Tories like Ken Clarke were against such a strategy and the issue had the capacity to divide the party badly. What’s more, while Euroscepticism was just about tolerable, there were – as there always are with such issues – those who wanted to take a position that was already at the outer edge of respectability and push well beyond it. The leadership stance gave them permission to go even further and there’s where the public’s position on Europe couldn’t be entirely guessed by reference to the polls. True, if asked, they supported the Tories on it, but it was never going to determine the election. It wasn’t their priority, so the Tory focus on it gave the Tories a curious, lopsided look that swiftly turned into the thought among the public that, well, maybe they just weren’t ready to govern. Once such a thought takes hold, the election’s over.

Obviously, the single most important thing was for us to avoid a serious mistake. Of course, the media knew that too and tried to work out how to force us to make one. We had crafted our essential practical message: a lot done; a lot to do; a lot to lose. It was simple. No one could deny the economy was strong and the money was now beginning to flow into schools and hospitals (though the commitment to keep spending tight for the first two years had hampered things – the decision was right but it had constrained us). And it was a first term; surely we should be given the chance to complete what we had started. The memory of the Tories was still fresh enough for the ‘a lot to lose’ line to resonate.

Naturally, I wanted a more elevated campaign which moved the country beyond the choices of the past, beyond Thatcherism in a sense. In a note I did just as the election got under way, I spelt out what was wrong with Thatcherism, having spent much of the previous time reassuring people about what had to be kept.

Where Mrs Thatcher was absolutely on the side of history was in recognising that as people became more prosperous, they wanted the freedom to spend their money as they chose; and they didn’t want a big state getting in the way of that liberation by suffocating people in uniformity, in the drabness and dullness of the state monopoly. It was plain that competition drove up standards, and that high taxes were a disincentive. Anything else ignored human nature.

Where she was wrong and running against a tide of history, however, was in her attitude to Europe and her refusal to countenance the fact that the majority of people were always going to have to rely on public services and the power of government to get the opportunities they needed. The government should change; the public services should be reformed; but she just went too far in thinking everything could be reduced to individual choice. She was in that sense a very traditional Tory, but with the added impatience, like my dad, with anyone who hadn’t succeeded – she had, so why hadn’t they? In that way, though she ‘got’ one side of human nature, she appeared to ignore another.

The result was she had a view of Britain that was at one level correct and necessary – regaining our spirit of enterprise and ambition – but at another, completely failed to take account of the changing position of Britain in the world, however enterprising we were, by dint of population, size and geography; and allowed a desire for people to stand on their two feet to cross into a profound lack of compassion for those who were left behind. She was essentially uninterested in social capital.

I saw our role as taking Britain on a further stage of modernisation, creating public services and a welfare state that combined investment with reform to make them personal, responsive, entrepreneurial and, so far as the welfare side was concerned, based on responsibilities as well as rights and entitlements that were earned. There was no doubt in my mind that this was where the majority of the public stood, where the sensible, serious centre ground could congregate and where we could define an agenda that was essential third-way material: personal ambition combined with social compassion.

As for Britain’s place in the world, it seemed to me self-evident that we had to exercise power through alliances. We had the two best – Europe and America – so why not keep them strong and use them? This argument was less easy to make popular; but its strength was clear, and although its supporters might be fewer in number, they were high in quality. Business, in particular, understood the point thoroughly.

The trouble was, from the off, it proved wholly impossible to get coverage for any of this elevated stuff. I decided to use a series of speeches on Britain’s future as the washing line on which to hang the various parts of the agenda and so try to stimulate a vigorous policy debate. The speeches were thorough and, though I say it myself, well argued. I wrote most of them personally, along with help from chief strategy adviser Matthew Taylor, Andrew Adonis and David Miliband. But within days of the campaign starting, it was plain that whatever else it was going to be, an intimate account of the nation’s future policy choices it was not!

The day we launched the manifesto, 16 May 2001, was an almost comic illustration of the point. If elections were to be judged on the success of the election-day launch, the landslide would have been the other way. I doubt it is possible to have more mishaps, missteps and misadventures in a single day’s campaigning.

We chose to do a big serious manifesto press conference, with ministers wheeled out to describe the next Parliament’s programme. I decided to give the whole thing real edge by setting out clearly our design to bring the private sector into the running of public services. There was still an overwhelming tendency among senior politicians and advisers to see this as part of a plan – to their mind, unnecessary – to veer rightwards to appease the right-wing media. I kept trying to explain that I actually believed it – which I think may have made it worse. When you considered public service systems in other countries, it seemed to me axiomatic that certain core lessons stood out. Health care systems in which there was a mixed /files/04/57/76/f045776/public/private provision, or which at least demanded some individual commitment and gave some individual choice, did best. Monolithic systems either were in the process of being changed or were failing. It was true that the failing of the US system was the numbers of poor people left out, but – and this was an uncomfortable truth too many ignored – for those who were covered, the standard of care and its responsiveness (together with the second-order things like food, the environment, the ability to switch appointments and so on) were often much higher than in a purely state-run service. Surely it must be possible to combine equity and efficiency.

Also in the US, charter schools were just starting, and the results of the Swedish education reforms were starting to come through, so there was a wealth of empirical evidence from around the world as to what changes were being proposed, by whom, for what purpose and with what success.

All of this was anathema to the various interest groups that were determined to keep the status quo but just spend more money; yet I knew that any sensible, objective observer would want to know that we were open to new ideas, whatever the party traditions seemed to dictate.

So the 16 May launch was a much bigger moment than it appeared. There were all sorts of scratchy behind-the-scenes issues around who spoke when and on what, with people slightly resenting my insistence on dominating it, but I just wanted to be sure that the desire to secure a radical second-term mandate was plain and unvarnished. Some of the ministers, like David Blunkett and Patricia Hewitt, entered fully into the spirit, sensing, as I did, that a second term was pointless unless it broke new ground, and that this meant taking more profound risks.

But, as ever, in our wish to make it all properly organised and run smoothly, we were a bit of a parody of ourselves, with ministers given their two minutes – otherwise the whole thing would be too long – and then retreating into the shadows. Nonetheless, it passed relatively without incident; which is more than can be said for the rest of the day.

I was due to visit Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, where we were to open the new cardiac centre that was going to become (and indeed today is) one of the foremost and advanced in Europe. I met Gisela Stuart, the excellent local MP, at the entrance. Gisela was unusual in that she is German, speaks with a slight but noticeable German accent, and had won a seat in the Midlands – which only shows that people are not as prejudiced as you think. She was smart and very New Labour. As we entered the hospital a woman called Sharron Storer, who became rather famous as a result of the encounter, approached me and started to harangue me about the treatment her partner, a cancer patient, was receiving at the hospital. Of course, there turned out to be a multitude of disputes as to whether he had been badly treated or not, with the hospital staff protesting loudly, but their protests were drowned out by the fact of the prime minister getting an ear-bashing from someone ‘telling the truth’ about the NHS and how dire it was.