Speaking for Myself (19 page)
Through my work in employment law, I had come to the notice of Michael Beloff, a brilliant man with impossible handwriting — even worse than mine. When I joined 5 Essex Court back in 1977, I thought I was there for life. Then, during the eighties and certainly by the end of the decade, there was a movement for change at the Bar. It was no longer unheard-of for people to move chambers. Specialization became the hot topic, and life in general common-law sets became more precarious. And not only did commercial members of chambers earn much more money than criminal barristers, but to add insult to injury, they would complain that their well-to-do clients had to sit in the waiting room with people who were quite likely to take their wallets.
Employment law was still a fairly unusual specialty. Like any other area of expertise, the more cases you do, the more people are likely to come to you. If you can’t do a case yourself, you want to be able to pass it on — to “return” it — to someone else in chambers, and so it was becoming increasingly difficult to be a lone specialist in chambers.
In addition to employment law, I had also done a bit of public law, which was Michael Beloff’s field, and this, too, was starting to build up as an independent specialty. Public law is about challenging government decisions, and education was one of the areas in which I had become involved early on. Foremost among the cases I had worked on were those challenging school closures or the provisions that local authorities made for children with special education needs.
The planning barristers who largely made up Michael Beloff’s chambers were great advocates who could cross-examine witnesses till they were screaming for mercy, but their interests did not lie in analyzing and debating the exact meaning of a word in a piece of government legislation. Although I believe I am a good trial lawyer, I enjoyed this type of intellectual argument more. Moving to Michael Beloff’s chambers would mean moving into that more stimulating arena, where cases I was involved in would set precedents.
Tony has always been totally supportive of my having a career — he is not one of those men who are threatened by successful women — and by “supportive” I mean real, practical support. Without his help with child care, both on weekends and on holiday, I would have found it much more difficult to cope. As he had a parking space at the House of Commons, we would usually travel to work together, and when he dropped me off that morning for my interview, he said I had to go for it.
“You would be completely and utterly mad to turn down Michael Beloff just because you feel loyal to Freddie and the others,” he said.
As it turned out, I didn’t turn them down because I wasn’t offered the tenancy. Michael rang me later to say the chambers had been very divided, but in the end they had decided against taking me on. He added, however, that he thought this would not be a long-term decision, and he would get back to me. Sure enough, in the following year he did, and I was offered and accepted the place at Gray’s Inn Square.
Although my husband was not a senior MP, he was definitely starting to appear on the radar. In 1988 he got into the Shadow Cabinet in charge of energy, and after impressing with that, he was given the employment portfolio. This was a significant appointment. At the time I was first approached by Michael Beloff, the big issue was how we would deal with Thatcherite workplace reforms, in particular those dealing with the closed-shop rules requiring workers to belong to the relevant union. These rules’ original purpose had been to protect union members from being discriminated against by employers bringing in cheap nonunion labor. But the Thatcher government was eager to dismantle this tradition. In 1989 Tony committed the Labour Party to accepting the reforms, and the following year closed shops were outlawed by the 1990 Employment Act. He might have outraged the left wing of the party, but he made it far harder for the Tories to attack. These, of course, were all issues that I was familiar with because it was my field of law, and though there were some areas of policy that we disagreed on, this wasn’t one of them.
Although being in the Shadow Cabinet did not increase Tony’s salary, it did give him access to what is called Short money, named in honor of Edward Short, the Speaker of the House. Short money is allocated on the basis of how many seats the opposition has, so in 1987, when we didn’t have that many MPs, we had to get money from other sources, mainly the trade unions. The idea was for Tony and Gordon to pool whatever extra money they raised, but somehow Gordon always seemed to have more staff than Tony. We weren’t the only ones who noticed that Gordon put himself first. Mo Mowlam, another northeast MP, was strongly of the opinion that Tony was being taken for a ride by Gordon and should assert himself.
When I was at the LSE, I had a twenty-one-inch waist and was so skinny you could see my ribs. With each pregnancy, I put on twenty pounds, then managed to lose two-thirds of it. So by the autumn of 1989, with Kathryn getting on for eighteen months old, I was about twenty-one pounds overweight and a size 10 instead of a size 6. Intermittently I’d go on a diet, but basically I was stuck. One day I came across a handout in one of those free magazines that come through the door. It was directed at busy working women and/or young mothers who were feeling daunted by not being able to get back into shape. I qualified on both counts. It was a completely different approach to losing weight, “freeing the body and feeding the mind.” I knew that I wasn’t eating properly. When you have young children, you tend to finish off what they’re eating and then sit down for another meal with your husband. But with a full-time job and the constant feeling of guilt that I ought to be at home, I was not thinking about eating sensibly.
The course was called Holistix, and it was run by a mother and daughter, Sylvia and Carole Caplin. Carole was a professional dancer, incredibly fit and with more energy than anyone I had ever met, and she made everything seem both easy and possible. I immediately signed up. The course basically involved exercise classes combined with workshops on healthy eating — a regime that was about as far away from my normal daily routine as could be imagined. “Pamper yourself” was one of Carole’s favorite phrases, and she introduced me to Bharti Vyas, who ran a beauty clinic in Chiltern Street. That was the first time I’d ever had a facial. I also had my first massage and signed up for a course to learn how to do it myself, which I thought would be useful. In fact, over the next few years I was able to put my new skill into practice on Tony. I didn’t take all of Carole’s advice, but I did begin to lose weight. At the end of 1991, Carole moved to New York, and once she was no longer around, I found I didn’t keep up with the classes as much as I should have.
Around the same time, Peter Mandelson came into our lives. Although he had been appointed the Labour Party’s first director of communications in 1985, I didn’t really get to know him until after the 1987 election. Peter was a politician to the ends of his fingernails. His grandfather was Herbert Morrison, who had been Home Secretary in Clement Attlee’s government after World War II and who, so it was said, believed that he should have been Prime Minister instead of Attlee. Peter was charming, sympathetic, cultured, funny, and clever, and I got on well with him from the start. Not being an MP, he necessarily worked in the shadow of elected politicians, namely — following the 1987 election defeat — Tony and Gordon. He was closer to Gordon, but he wasn’t partial and would make use of whoever was around at the time. As Gordon’s base was in Scotland — he was then dating a Scottish advocate — he was often not around when needed, so inevitably Tony did more interviews. Wherever we’ve lived, we’ve had an open-door policy, and with Peter regularly dropping in, he gradually became introduced to our social circle.
After Tony had failed to get elected to the Shadow Cabinet in 1987, an unreconstructed veteran Labour MP told him that his mistake had been not being seen around enough in the bars at the House. Unless Tony stopped going home between seven and ten in the evening, the times when votes were taken in the House, he would never get anywhere in politics. Fortunately Tony took no notice. Our children were far too important to him, and indeed, this so-called advice proved utterly wrongheaded. One of the things the public liked about Tony was the fact that he was a family man. The House of Commons’ timetable was not designed for fathers who wanted to spend a modicum of time at home with their wives and kids. By now, however, we had developed a routine. We continued our habit of driving in together, with Tony dropping me off at chambers, and this gave us time to talk. Evenings were more complicated and revolved around the time of the vote in the House. If there was an early vote, Tony would come straight home afterwards, by which time I would have returned under my own steam, put the kids to bed, and started dinner. If the vote wasn’t till later, he might pick me up at chambers around six o’clock and then put the kids to bed while I cooked dinner. Then we would spend some time together before he had to go back to Westminster to vote at ten o’clock.
Our time with the kids was obviously limited during the week, but we would always take over on the weekend, which the nanny had off. Once Euan was in nursery school, we no longer traveled up to Sedgefield every weekend; we’d spend every other weekend at home in London. In our working lives we met barristers and politicians, and that was about it. But St. Joan of Arc had, as we’d hoped, given us a foot in the local community. Through the church we met all different types of people. I was able to get selected as a Labour Party governor of the school, and I was also a governor of Highbury Hill, the local girls’ comprehensive secondary school.
Around the time I moved to my new chambers, a new building became available for Shadow Cabinet offices. Gordon had assumed that he and Tony would go there together. Although they wouldn’t share rooms, they would have offices next to each other. But Anji Hunter, an old friend of Tony’s and a political studies graduate, who now ran his office, was of the view that Tony should not move, and Mo and I agreed. Peter didn’t express it quite as directly, because of his relationship with Gordon. So when Gordon decamped to the new offices, Tony stayed where he was, with Mo Mowlam and the others down the corridor. It added a physical distance between him and Gordon — there was no more just popping in and out — and it also sent a message that Tony was his own man. I don’t think Gordon was very happy, but he had no real alternative but to accept the situation. As far as their ability to work together was concerned, however, nothing really changed.
All Change
I
n the run-up to the 1992 election, the mood in the party was curiously subdued. Margaret Thatcher had resigned, and her successor, John Major, was generally seen as a damp squib. The Conservatives were in disarray. One of their biggest issues, a new poll tax, had alienated a huge proportion of the electorate. All in all, it should have been the perfect springboard for a Labour victory. It was not, and critics outside the party offered various reasons for Labour’s failure at the ballot box: Neil Kinnock was not seen as a credible Prime Minister, and a major campaign rally, nationally televised for all to see, came off as cocky and triumphalist. Within our group, however, nobody was surprised, and in spite of the traditional upbeat performance of politicians on the campaign trail, no one really believed we were preparing for government.
The press, meanwhile, had been hedging its bets and was on the lookout for Labour’s rising stars. The MP for Sedgefield was definitely on the list, and Barbara Amiel (later better known as Mrs. Conrad Black) came up to interview Tony for the
Sunday Times
. She had wanted to stay at Myrobella, but I put my foot down. Although I was happy to be known as Tony’s wife in the constituency, I didn’t see that I was relevant farther afield, perhaps sensing even then that I would somehow fall short.
I also hated the idea that I would be singled out and treated as some sort of celebrity. I wanted nothing to do with what I called showbiz life. I had always been suspicious of surface glamour, no doubt a view that I absorbed from my grandmother. It was exactly that life — a superficial world filled with frivolous people — that had led my father astray and turned him into a drinker and a womanizer. He had been completely seduced by it, with devastating consequences. It wasn’t that I didn’t relish the role of political wife. It was being treated as a celebrity that I objected to, as if politics were a strand of show business. It’s part of the reason that I tended to come out with “gaffes.” It didn’t happen when I was in my own world, in chambers or in court. But when I felt uncomfortable and on edge, I would end up talking too much as a result of nervousness, and that’s when I would say something untoward.
Barbara Amiel came up, and we took her out to dinner. I can’t say I enjoyed the evening. She was very flirtatious around all the men, especially Tony. A few days later she phoned, claiming that she needed more from me. Reluctantly I agreed to see her at chambers. I remember little of our conversation, beyond her saying that she envied me having a career and children, as she had not managed to do both. In the published profile, she wrote that I was prickly and recorded the fact that I hadn’t wanted to answer her questions. I hadn’t.
The 1992 election was the first time I saw how the kids might be affected by their father’s being a politician. There was a huge anti-Labour poster by the school, and I remember them getting very upset. (God knows it was mild compared with what was to come.) As for who should take over from Neil once he stepped down, John Smith, an old drinking buddy of Derry’s from Glasgow University and now Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, was seen as his inevitable successor: he had gravitas. Tony, however, wasn’t convinced that John would put through the necessary reforms. John’s line was “Steady as we go”; Labour was slowly crawling its way back, and eventually the electorate would see sense. Tony strongly disagreed. The electorate was not going to turn to Labour, he believed, until we had changed ourselves.