Speaking for Myself (26 page)

I remember the one thing that came over strongly was how she felt about her boys and how close to them she was, how much a part of her life they were. She was concerned that William should be brought up in a more modern way than his father had been, and she wanted to see a modern monarchy. She was keen to stress that she, too, was a modern person. By this time she was involved in the land mine issue, and she put forward the idea that she could have a role in promoting Britain in the wider world as a sort of roving ambassador. Tony was certainly considering whether there was a way we could use her talents for the benefit of the country. Although she didn’t say she was actually a supporter of New Labour, she certainly implied that she was, though whether she really was, is another question.

A few weeks later I met Norma Major at the
Daily Star
Gold Awards. We were both presenting awards — it was the first time I had been asked to do something like that on my own account. I hadn’t met her before, but she came over and shook my hand (the press took a picture that appeared everywhere the next day), which I thought was incredibly gracious of her. She didn’t have to do it.

Over the eighteen months since Tony had become leader, his office had coalesced into a very strong team that became like an extended family. Anji Hunter — known, not entirely affectionately, as “the gatekeeper” — ran his office, with Kate Garvey under her as diary secretary. Liz Lloyd did research. Jonathan Powell had arrived a month or so after Alastair to serve as chief of staff. Tony wanted someone who knew about the Civil Service, and Jonathan had been a diplomat, working in our embassy in Washington, which was where Tony first met him. What always struck people as particularly amusing, however, was that his brother Charles had been Margaret Thatcher’s right-hand man.

It was clear that Anji and Alastair were resentful of Jonathan. They were incredibly dismissive, saying that because he’d been in the Foreign Office, he didn’t understand politics. But the point was that he knew how the Civil Service operated, and that was why Tony needed him. For a while there was a definite jockeying for position, a “We were here first” attitude and “Can you really be on our side because you’ve been working for the government all this time?” I was inclined to take Jonathan’s part, first because I’m a bit perverse, but also because I thought they were giving him far too much of a hard time. He’s a lovely person to have around, a Tigger-like character, and charming in the way that Alastair is charming — the difference being that Alastair is a charming thug, and Jonathan doesn’t have an ounce of thuggery in him. I also like him because he’s eccentric — tall, gangly, and always terribly untidy. Jonathan never cares what he wears, and once we were in Downing Street, Tony was always giving Jonathan his old shirts and ties.

Jonathan’s role was to prepare our people for government, which he did brilliantly. He is a public-school boy, clever and fantastic on policy. He was Tony’s right-hand man all the way through the Northern Ireland peace process.

After their initial shadowboxing Jonathan and Alastair got on very well, not least because their areas of expertise were entirely different. Jonathan was in charge of the policy people, and he handled the details of policy and the niceties of negotiating very well. Alastair hasn’t the slightest interest in policy; he either loves you or he hates you, and people either love or hate him.

With all this going on, it is not perhaps surprising that the office was intruding more into our family life than it had before. If there was work to be done, Tony had a choice: either he stayed in his office in Westminster, or he came home and the people he needed to see came with him. His visits to Trimdon became more infrequent, and John Burton was left to keep constituency matters ticking over. Everyone was so focused on winning the forthcoming general election that it became all-consuming. Almost the only person who didn’t assume that Tony was going to win was Tony. His mantras were “No complacency” and “Do not take anything for granted.” At some point before the election, a television reporter from ITV interviewed us in Richmond Crescent and asked me how I thought Downing Street would cope with having young children living there.

“Well,” I said, “Downing Street will just have to get used to the idea of having noise and piano practice and friends round for tea.”

Alastair got very upset. I shouldn’t have answered the question, he said, as it made the assumption that we were going to win. While we were doing the interview in the garden, Euan had been playing the piano inside, so Alastair negotiated that ITV could have a shot of Euan practicing in return for their not broadcasting my remark. I was not happy. I considered my comment perfectly harmless, and I would rather not have had Euan involved in any way. Alastair just kept repeating, “You can’t take the electorate for granted.”

Inevitably Alastair won these arguments. Nevertheless, I think he found me a bit of a dilemma. He once said that I had the brains of a man and the emotions of a woman, and he found that very difficult to deal with. The truth is, he never believed that women have equal capacity.

Chapter 19

Endgame

F
rom 1996 on, we were on an election footing, and when it wasn’t called that October, we knew it would be May or June of 1997. The only piece of information lacking was the exact date. Then on March 17, John Major went to Buckingham Palace, and Parliament was dissolved. He had hung on till the very last minute. Polling Day would be Thursday, May 1 — a six-week campaign, though campaigns can be as little as three weeks. The view among Tony’s staff was that the other side hoped we would run out of resources and steam. Not if Tony had anything to do with it.

Each morning, after an hour in his makeshift gym in Nick’s room, Tony would leave around eight o’clock for the daily press conference at Millbank Tower, the Labour Party campaign headquarters. Most mornings I would go straight to the Albany gym, a former chapel near Regent’s Park. I’d exercise for an hour, shower, dress, sort out my hair and makeup, and then go to meet Tony at Millbank.

In the months leading up to the election, the routine had been pretty much the same. Once the campaign proper began, after my workout I would leave the gym with one of the trainers who lived nearby and have a shower and change at her place, just to have a bit more privacy. Years later, when this woman needed the money, she sold a story to the Sunday tabloid the
News of the World
claiming that Carole and I had had showers together, which is a complete load of rubbish. (I knew the editor, Rebekah Wade, and the next time I saw her, I decided to have it out. “You don’t seriously think that I was taking showers with Carole Caplin, do you, Rebekah?” I asked. She shrugged, then laughed. “It’s only a story,” she said.)

That was much, much later, but even as early as 1994, negative stories had started to appear in the tabloid press, usually about my appearance. I didn’t save them — I’m not a masochist — but I did keep the letters that colleagues at the Bar sent me at the time, generally commiserating and expressing solidarity. One actually used the saying “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.” Little did I know that this grinding would be done on an industrial scale once we were inside Number 10 Downing Street.

The campaign “battle bus,” an old coach customized to the office’s specifications, was cramped and uncomfortable. There was a semicircle of seats all the way round at the back, where the windows were blacked out; this was where Tony and I sat. There was also a table with a fax machine and a television. At the front were tables and seats for the people who were with us and for members of the press, who would get on from time to time.

For security reasons, Terry always followed in the Rover behind us, and at the end of the day — if we could — Tony and I would get out of the bus and have Terry drive us back to London, while the other poor souls had to lurch on a bit longer. Tony tried to arrange the itinerary so that we could be home every night for the sake of the kids, but it didn’t always happen.

For six weeks we crisscrossed the country, seemingly nonstop. In the election campaigns that followed, I did much more on my own, but 1997 was the first, and Tony and I largely stayed together. Every evening Tony would give a set-piece speech to the party faithful which he and Alastair had worked on during the day. He always spoke so well, and so passionately, that each night there was this extraordinary feeling of moving forward, a momentum that was unstoppable.

Not all our campaigning was together. At one point I made a solo visit to Crosby. Crosby was not on our list of potentially winnable seats — all of which Tony visited — so I just went with my dad. We got a tremendous welcome. Claire Curtis-Thomas, the Labour parliamentary candidate, was her usual dynamic self. “Cherie,” she said, “we can win this seat! I know we can!” She was a good candidate, but how could we possibly win Crosby? It had been Tory since the beginning of time.

The last burst was a five-day campaign covering the last weekend of April. Alastair had one final idea, which he considered a brilliant coup because nobody ever did it. We would go and visit night workers, he said, starting with Smithfield meat market — a place my dad used to work when he was an out-of-work actor. This time I put my foot down.

“No, Alastair. Not unless you want to kill him. He needs to sleep.” No doubt it was a wonderful idea, but you cannot campaign all day and all night when you’re on the final leg of a six-week marathon and still be breathing at the end of it.

Those last five days the crowds grew bigger and bigger. Every place we visited, there seemed to be more people on the streets, and the pressure was building. The last day of campaigning found us in Scotland, a short hop from our roost in the northeast. In a town called Stockton-on-Tees a platform had been erected in the marketplace. We stood there, surrounded by a sea of faces, all shouting “Ton-ee, Ton-ee” and “We’re on our way.” The sheer emotion, the goodwill, and the intensity of it all were amazing. It was as if everyone’s hopes were pinned on Tony, as if he were a boxer or a long-distance runner, a feeling that everything depended on this one man. I must have realized this before, or sensed at least some of it, but standing in the marketplace in Stockton was when it really hit home. I, too, felt very emotional and so proud. But I was also worried about him, because it was such a powerful thing that was happening. How could he possibly fulfill these people’s dreams? It was a huge sense of responsibility, and I could sense Tony becoming more concentrated. He was pulling back into himself, becoming almost quiet, realizing that there was a real possibility that he was going to become leader of our country and that the people expected him to make a difference.

The previous Christmas we had taken a long-promised trip to Australia and visited our old friends Geoff and Bev Gallop and their kids. Tony had lived there for some years as a boy but had very little memory of it until he went back, and he loved it. He was struck by how young the country felt, and that’s how he wanted Britain to be. So many things back home were stuck in the past, and we weren’t moving forward. In fact, under the current administration we seemed to be moving backward. John Major’s most recent conference speech had conjured up a vision of ladies riding bicycles in English country lanes and cricket on the lawns, whereas Tony wanted Britain to embrace modern technology. Then there had been the Tories’ nastiness over immigration and gay rights, inherent in the Clause 28 question. The idea that we should still be uncomfortable about homosexuality had to go, he believed. There was an atmosphere of negativity in Britain that Tony was keen to change.

As MP for Sedgefield, he knew only too well the feeling in the north that the south didn’t really care what was going on in the rest of the country as long as it was doing okay. I knew firsthand of the disparity of opportunity. I had brought up my own children, had been a school governor, and knew that most schools literally had to make a choice between books and teachers, because there simply wasn’t enough money. Traveling round the country, being shown the state of school buildings, I saw how much of the infrastructure was close to collapse. And then there were the hospitals. In 1997 a number of health service authorities were in severe crisis with their funding. All round the nation, citizens were suffering. There were reports of elderly men and women unable to pay for heat and dying of hypothermia. We were told we couldn’t afford a minimum wage, so there were people working as night watchmen and caretakers, for example, and women working in shops, all for £1 or £2 an hour. Things had to change.

Tony was now being seen as the instrument for that change, and there was a huge expectation that with a change of government, we would have a change of culture, that the country would change practically overnight. It was completely unrealistic, and one person who wasn’t swept up in the fantasy was Tony.

Since he was first elected to Parliament in 1983, he had never had power, because the Labour Party had never been in power. Tony was still thinking that it could all go horribly wrong, as it had in 1992, when Neil Kinnock was convinced he was going to win. That last day of the campaign, Tony was the least buoyed up of any of us, I think.

After Stockton-on-Tees it was only a few miles back to Trimdon and Myrobella. The house was already full of Labour people when we arrived.

I could feel that Tony was still keeping himself back, but he knew plans had to be made, things had to be done — and quickly. The most immediate issue was making the Bank of England independent, which Tony emphatically believed was the vital emblem of Labour becoming economically respectable. He’d wanted it to be announced during the election campaign, but Gordon had thought it better to wait.

Around nine o’clock the kids arrived with Ros. They were amazed to see that Myrobella was now ringed by armed guards, sent by the Durham police. The mobile incident trailer that served as their headquarters was parked in the field next to the house, which in the summer was a mass of buttercups. We took the children over to see it, where we were shown an assortment of gas masks, bullet-proof vests, and night-vision rifles. The police let the kids look down the sights, but there was no great excitement. All three of them were rather subdued — as we all were, with reason. The whole experience freaked us out. Floodlights had been put up, and we could see shadowy figures here and there, and police dogs sniffing round. From time to time a siren would sound when a motion detector was inadvertently tripped. Myrobella had always been an open house, and suddenly it was being closed off.
We
weren’t closing it, but it was being closed around us.