A Journey (9 page)

Of course, after the heart attack he had to cut back, and did so – he lost weight, and ‘bagged’ over a hundred Munros (Scottish mountains over 3,000 feet high) – but as the stresses of taking the leadership told on him, and as time progressed into 1993 and 1994, I noticed he was again starting to drink more than was wise. He felt like the old John, so he thought he could act like the old John. I should emphasise again that his drinking never interfered with his performance; it was an end-of-the-day thing, a holiday thing, an evening-with-close-friends thing, but his health was more fragile than he knew (or perhaps more accurately wanted to admit) and despite the constant admonitions of Elizabeth, his wife and his love, he found it hard to do without the relaxation and fellowship with which it was associated.

On the evening of 11 May 1994, there was a fund-raiser for the upcoming European elections. All the Shadow Cabinet were assembled at a reasonably smart London hotel, nothing too fancy but more upmarket than Labour was used to, as we looked to consolidate what was back then fairly limited business support.

I was only a spectator, not a speaker, hosting a table and schmoozing as one of the few members of the Shadow Cabinet who could be safely left alone with the business types. I remember John’s arrival as he came in with Elizabeth and greeted people. I remember looking into his eyes as we talked and thinking he looked very tired. I remember his speech, which was fine, though without energy. It had a good ending: ‘The opportunity to serve our country. That is all we ask.’

For myself, I longed to get away. I had an early start the next morning, flying to Aberdeen for a campaign stop for the election. My daughter Kathryn was only six and would often wake up in the night, and even Nicky and Euan, though older, couldn’t be relied on to sleep right through or not to wake early, especially as the days got lighter. One way or another, my sleep was usually interrupted, therefore the sooner I got home to bed, the better. As soon as I decently could, I stole away and got back to Richmond Crescent.

The next morning I landed at around nine at Aberdeen airport and was picked up to be driven to party HQ for a brief on the day’s campaign. On the way in the car, someone from party HQ in London phoned to tell me John had suffered a serious heart attack; no one could be sure if he would live or not.

Moments later, Gordon called, as shocked as I was. We agreed to speak when I got to HQ. Another call came through just after I’d arrived. John was dead. I tried to compose myself. He had been a big part of my life, and I liked him very much. We had spent many times together, working and socialising. I knew what was coming now he was gone: even as people tried to assimilate the news, even as they mourned, even as they reflected about John Smith as a man, as a political leader, as a friend, attention would shift and they would ask the question that is asked every time a leader falls, and immediately a leader falls: who will be the successor?

It was a moment for which, at points consciously but more often unconsciously, I had been preparing. For years – at least up to 1992 – I had always assumed Gordon would be leader. I was not only happy with that, I actually rejoiced in it. I didn’t want the job. I was high enough to be able to espy its responsibility and its pain. No, if someone else could do it, I would be the supportive and loyal lieutenant. Fine by me. Good by me, in fact.

But by 1992, we had lost four times in a row. What’s more, our vote was stuck around 32 per cent. After thirteen years of Tory government and in the middle of a recession which you could say they had in part ‘caused’, still we hit a 32 per cent ceiling. Why? For some, electoral reform seemed appealing. No matter how well we did in between times, come the election day, the country reverted. That was the tenor of Labour thinking and of much of the commentary.

To me, such defeatism was not so much wrong as absurd. Why on earth should it be so? From early on, even before my election to Parliament in 1983, I had realised the Labour problem was self-made and self-induced. We were not in touch with the modern world. We could basically attract two sorts of people: those who by tradition were Labour, and those who came to a position of support for socialism or social democracy through an intellectual process. Many trade union activists were in the first category; I was a member of the second. Neither group were what I would call ‘mainstream’, and together they did not remotely add up to a constituency large enough to be in a position to win and to govern.

Furthermore, the first category was becoming smaller. The days of the old trade unionists were passing, along with many of the industries that they dominated – coal, steel, shipbuilding, textiles. The new industries – in particular those driven by emerging technologies, and modern service industries – were not attracted by the trade union mixture of industrial agitation and politics. More importantly, neither were those who worked in them. There was something irretrievably old-fashioned about the meetings, the rules, the culture. Some trade unionists realised this and tried to effect change, but the comfort zone was too big, too enticing, too enveloping for the leadership ever to feel the necessity to change. They could see it was important and occasionally they made steps towards it, as in the development of new union services, but it was not existential. They didn’t feel: change or die. There was no general election that pronounced an unalterable and unavoidable verdict; just the steady draining away of members, support and relevance. Unfortunately, they were still powerful and sufficiently relevant within the Labour Party, where the fact that they were courted and feted only added to their comfort.

Also, the nature of the union leaders themselves was changing. The leaders of the early and mid-twentieth century like Ernie Bevin, or Jack Jones later, were titans: working-class men who, through union meetings, colleges and conferences, achieved the education society had denied them, and who were shining examples of self-improvement. In those days, meetings were well attended – hundreds at a branch meeting was not exceptional. They were arenas of debate, often fiercely conducted, of discussion, of decision. They called for qualities of true leadership, of strategy and tactics combined to advance a cause that at the time was both reasonable and essential.

Old miners who had spent a life in the coalfields of the North-East used to tell me of the solemn ritual of such meetings, their significance in the community, their grandeur even, in terms of what they represented to local people. To be the branch official was a major role. To get to be an official was to have your feet on the rungs of achievement. To lead the Durham coalfield, for example, as Sam Watson, the famous leader of the 1950s, did, was to occupy a position of genuine authority. When Attlee was Labour leader and a dubious proposition was put forward, he would say: ‘Can’t be done. Sam Watson wouldn’t have it.’

But all progressive movements have to beware their own success. The progress they make reinvents the society they work in, and they must in turn reinvent themselves to keep up, otherwise they become hollow echoes from a once loud, strong voice, reverberating still, but to little effect. As their consequence diminishes, so their dwindling adherents become ever more shrill and strident, more solicitous of protecting their own shrinking space rather than understanding that the voice of the times has moved on and they must listen before speaking. It happens in all organisations. It is fatal to those who are never confronted by a reckoning that forces them to face up and get wise. The new leaders of the unions tended to ape the old, but in a context so changed that it became increasingly pointless except in maintaining the morale of those who just wanted to carry on as they were.

When she took on the trade unions, Margaret Thatcher didn’t come out of a sealed chamber with a new idea. It already existed: Harold Wilson and Barbara Castle had it with
In Place of Strife
; Edward Heath had it in the Industrial Relations Act of 1971. Both were attempts to bring union power within the purview of normal law. The difference was that by the time she took over, it was clear that an evolutionary attack on trade union privileges had failed and only a revolutionary one would succeed. And she had the character, leadership and intelligence to make it happen.

She was also greatly helped by her opponents. When Arthur Scargill became leader of the miners and the strike of 1984–5 began, it was plain that the choice was between on the one hand a very right-wing prime minister who was nonetheless democratically elected as leader of the nation and also correct about the excesses of union power; and on the other a leftist union leadership that was obviously undemocratic and completely out of touch with the modern world.

As I surveyed the wreckage of the Labour Party in the aftermath of the 1983 election, I knew change had to come about. The trade union base simply could not support a modern political party if it was to be a governing party.

In time I came to another conclusion, concerning the second category of people attracted to the party. The intellectual Fabian way of the Labour Party had deep roots and a venerable history. Its leading lights, often born relatively wealthy but who were indignant about inequality, were remarkable people. Like George Orwell, Hugh Dalton, Stafford Cripps and the members of the New Left Book Club and the Haldane Society, they tended to be erudite, committed, passionate and intensely intellectual in approach. Tony Benn was an example. Tony Crosland was another (indeed he had taught Benn at Oxford). As was the case with me, they had their first taste of left politics through university life. In that rather artificial environment, there had been an insight gained into the iniquity of the system; a conversion arising from a realisation that social conditions did indeed beget opportunity or the lack of it; an encounter of ideas that altered their life view. Once so altered, they became staunch advocates of social action and of the party of the trade unions and the working class whose lives had to be liberated from the conditions of poor housing, poor education and poor health care.

It took me a long time to work out what the problem with this second group was: although they cared for people, they didn’t ‘feel’ like them. They were like the Georges Duhamel character who says, ‘I love humanity, it’s just human beings I can’t stand.’ I don’t mean, incidentally, that they were aloof or unpleasant – they were often charming and fun – but they didn’t ‘get’ aspiration. They were almost too altruistic for their own political good. When injustice and inequality were reduced – in part through their efforts – they failed to see what would happen. A person who is poor first needs someone to care about it, and then to act; but when no longer poor, their objective may then become to be well off. In other words, for such a person it is about aspiration, ambition, getting on and going up, making some money, keeping their family in good style, having their children do better than them. My dad’s greatest wish was that I be educated privately, and not just at any old private school; he chose Fettes because he thought and had been told it was the best in Scotland.

The problem with the intellectual types was that they didn’t quite understand this process; or if they did, rather resented it. In a sense they wanted to celebrate the working class, not make them middle class – but middle class was precisely what your average worker wanted himself or his kids to be. The intellectuals’ belief in equality strayed dangerously into the realm of equality of income, not equality of opportunity. The latter was a liberator; the former would quickly become and be seen as a constraint. The impulse of many of those helped by well-meaning intellectuals was essentially meritocratic, not egalitarian – they wanted to be helped on to the ladder, but once on it, they thought ascending it was up to them.

As the 1980s gave way to the 1990s and the defeats kept coming, I became ever more convinced that there were crucial bits of a governing coalition missing for Labour. Where was our business support? Where were our links into the self-employed? Above all, where were the aspirant people, the ones doing well but who wanted to do better; the ones at the bottom who had dreams of the top? The intellectuals were right in saying social conditions determined success in life – but only in part. So did hard work, character, determination, grit, get-up-and-go. Where were those people in our ranks? Nowhere, I concluded.

Even back in 1983, when I still had ideas on nationalisation and defence that would have astounded and drawn derision from the Tony Blair of 1994, I knew we were a party out of its time. But I had to exercise care. I very nearly failed to become a candidate at all in 1983 because my views on modernising the party were so heretical.

However, I couldn’t stop the mask slipping from time to time. Straight after the 1983 election, as a new MP, I attended the post-election rally in Spennymoor Town Hall. We had lost by a landslide, worse than in 1979, since when there had been a deep recession. The Labour Party had been monumentally rejected.

The rally was entitled ‘Lessons from Defeat’. The blurb on the leaflet advertising it called for the most frank debate. I had been a barrister for near enough eight years and I was used to taking facts, dissecting them, analysing them, reassembling them and drawing conclusions. I was trained to be very rational in my thought processes. So: we had had a thumping great annihilation. Worst ever defeat. What’s more, as I knew from personal canvassing, even those who voted for us told me frequently that they had done so
despite
our policies and leadership, not because of them.

From 1979 to 1983, Tony Benn performed the political equivalent of a conjuring trick. He convinced the Labour Party that the real reason we had lost in 1979 to Margaret Thatcher was because Jim Callaghan, the Labour prime minister, had been too right wing. Weird, I know, but true. Thus convinced, Labour moved sharply left and advocated unilateral nuclear disarmament, pulling out of Europe and wholesale nationalisation. It was remarkable, and a huge tribute to his charisma and persuasive power. For a moment, it looked like he might even win the election for deputy leader and thus become the dominant force in the party. His opponent was Denis Healey, the former Labour Chancellor who had had to take the tough measures to sort out the economy after Britain went to the International Monetary Fund for help in 1976. Had Benn won, it would have been a defeat for the whole leadership, and most likely Michael Foot would have been toppled by him shortly afterwards. This was narrowly averted; but in the leftward march, the Labour Party split. A new party was formed in the centre, the Social Democratic Party, which immediately drew large-scale support from moderate Labour voters.