A Journey_ My Political Life Part 13

'Yes, Charlie,' I thundered, 'with the boy or girl of their choice and as much champagne as they can drink; or at least have got them riding in the Tube with us.'

I am ashamed to say I then shouted and bawled at him for a bit longer, while the more sensible of our party tried to find out what to do. Eventually we heard they were on their way, though possibly not in time for midnight. 'Please don't tell me it doesn't matter if they're not here for midnight, Charlie, or I will club you to death on the spot,' I recall saying. In the end some got there, some didn't; and anyway, the media coverage was more or less set in stone from that moment.

Meanwhile, a fresh knot of anxiety had gripped me. We had persuaded the Queen and Prince Philip to come down to the Dome to join in the fun. I don't know precisely what Prince Philip thought of it all, but I shouldn't imagine it's printable. I suspect Her Majesty would have used different language but with the same sentiment. However, we all had to go through it with a cheery face and she put on her best. We sat down together. We looked at the programme.

There was an acrobatic show prior to midnight. Now this was spectacular. They were way up in the Dome performing extraordinary feats, flying through the air. They were dressed in a riot of colour and really did look and act most impressively.

Then an appalling thought struck me, and chilled me to the innards. They were doing their wild thing right above where the Queen was sitting. 'Well, that is remarkable,' Prince Philip said, brightening a trifle. 'You know they're doing that without safety harnesses?' I swear I knew what was going to happen. I felt like someone in one of those sixth-sense movies who can see the future: from sixty feet up, one of the performers was going to fall in the middle of a somersault, hurtle down and flatten the Queen. I could see it all. 'QUEEN KILLED BY TRAPEZE ARTIST AT DOME ARTIST AT DOME'. 'BRITAIN'S MILLENNIUM CELEBRATIONS MARRED'. 'BLAIR ADMITS NOT ALL HAS GONE TO PLAN'. Britain's millennium would indeed be famous; I would go down in history forever.

I kid you not, I joke about it now but at 11.30 p.m. on New Year's Eve 1999, I was absolutely convinced. I have never been more relieved than when it all stopped.

Then came the ghastly singing of 'Auld Lang Syne'. Another decision; to link arms with the Queen or not. We looked at each other. I realised helplessly that to do it was ridiculous, but not to do it was stand-offish. I made my choice, stretching out my arms. She kept her options open, holding out one arm. But what the h.e.l.l, she was alive, and that was the main thing.

The rest of the evening pa.s.sed in a blur. We finally got home around 2 a.m. 'I thought the evening was rather fun,' Cherie said as we clambered into bed.

'Darling,' I replied, 'there is only one thing I am going to thank G.o.d for tonight, and that is they only come round every thousand years.'

The next morning I was back to the reality of the day job. We were now two and a half years into office. For the way governments work, it is a blink of an eye. For the way the public think, it is an eternity. The 'forces of conservatism' speech was the product, in a sense, of my frustration at being unable to align the two time zones. Some of the criticism from commentators and the public was undoubtedly unfair, but some indeed the core of it, namely that change was too slow and insufficiently radical I believed myself. Hence the speech.

I was learning how complex the inst.i.tutions of public service were, how multiple their pressures, how vast their demands and how great the expectations were of what could be done and in what period of time. The millennium may have been an exceptional moment in the calendar, but the 1999/2000 NHS 'winter crisis' came with the monotonous predictability of death and taxes. And two and a half years in, people expected better.

It is hard now to look back and realise just how inevitable such crises appeared. This time it was a flu bug. It produced the sad cases of individual misfortune. It centred around a lady called Mavis Skeaton, who was not given proper treatment and died. Her family naturally were outraged. The intensive care units of the hospitals were finding it hard to cope. There were stories of people being turned away; people treated on trolleys; people waiting hours in A & E.

Quite apart from routine cases and the flu epidemic, there were patients waiting so long for operations for heart disease that they would die while waiting. I received a letter from a woman whose husband, I think, had been a Northern Echo Northern Echo photographer whom I had worked with, who had died in such circ.u.mstances. I felt it horribly, felt the responsibility and felt, perhaps worst of all, the gnawing doubt as to whether it was just time we needed or something more profound in terms of the way the service was run. If it was the latter, we weren't scaled up to do it. And to be very frank, I wasn't entirely sure what the answer was. That's what I mean by learning. photographer whom I had worked with, who had died in such circ.u.mstances. I felt it horribly, felt the responsibility and felt, perhaps worst of all, the gnawing doubt as to whether it was just time we needed or something more profound in terms of the way the service was run. If it was the latter, we weren't scaled up to do it. And to be very frank, I wasn't entirely sure what the answer was. That's what I mean by learning.

I had an increasing worry on health and education, which was that while the Tory reforms may have been badly implemented and badly explained, their essential direction was one that was in fact nothing to do with being 'Tory', but to do with the modern world. These reforms were all about trying to introduce systems where the money spent was linked to performance and where the service user was in the driving seat. They were often divisive and even misguided in policy detail, but the overall approach was born of the same social and economic trends that had given rise to support for privatisation and tax cuts.

I could see a trend that was about breaking down centralised and monolithic structures, about focusing on the developing tastes of consumers, about ending old demarcations in professions; and this trend seemed to me to be related to how people behaved, not how government behaved. The precise shift in the way the private sector was organised and managed seemed, and not unnaturally, to have its echo in the challenges facing the public sector.

In crime and in welfare policy, I figured the Tories had not really thought it through and had only really begun to think radically at the end of their time. But in the NHS and schools it was different there were elements of the changes they had made that we needed to examine and learn from, not dismiss.

The trouble was, at the time there was not a great appet.i.te in the Labour Party for such thinking. Indeed, it was heretical. In particular, at the helm of the NHS, I had put Frank Dobson. This, in itself, indicated how little I understood when first in office. The truth is Frank was genuinely and, to be fair, avowedly Old Labour. He was one of the many who considered New Labour a clever wheeze to win. He didn't understand it much, and to the extent that he did, he disagreed with it.

The hierarchy in the department and in the NHS, though truly dedicated and fine public servants, believed sincerely that there was an incompatibility between private sector concepts like choice, and the basic equity of the NHS as an inst.i.tution. It was the age-old problem of the policy becoming the principle, so the policy of the NHS for 1948 perfectly appropriate for its time became the hallowed principle for all time.

So I was turning all this over in my mind during 1999 and beginning a conversation with my nearest and dearest political a.s.sociates. But I had two problems: the first was Frank Dobson, the second was money. I knew that the underinvestment in the NHS was clear and the Tories had not understood it, or maybe hadn't wanted to. When we compared our spending with that of any similar country, the disparity was plain. Money was not sufficient. But it was necessary.

The winter crisis was the immediate manifestation of the problem. But that was all it was. The true problem lay deep within the service: the funding and how it was run.

I had had a series of seminars with health professionals that the excellent Robert Hill (my adviser on health and author of NHS Direct) had put together for me. It was fascinating. From within the NHS, there were people who fully endorsed the NHS principles of equity, but were chafing at the bit about how the service was managed; how outdated its practices were; how there was an incompetence in some of its systems that led to consequences that were truly inequitable.

I had also had a conversation or several with Gordon about NHS funding; but as I antic.i.p.ated, he was fairly adamant against doing anything big on it. Incidentally, I make no criticism of that. It was his job as Chancellor to run a tight ship in respect of the finances and repel boarders, as it were.

So I had to get the money, in order to get the reform; and in order to get the reform, I had to get a top team who believed in it.

I did the first in a somewhat unconventional way. I was due to do my annual new year Frost Frost programme interview. programme interview.

David Frost was still far and away the best interviewer around on TV, far better than those who sneered at him for not being sneering enough. He wasn't rude or hectoring, but had an extraordinary talent for beguiling the interviewee, leading them on, charming them into indiscretion, tripping them, almost conversationally, into the headlines. I lost count of the number of times Alastair would say to me, 'What the h.e.l.l did you say that for?' after a Frost encounter. I would say, 'What?' and he would explain and I would go: 'Oh.'

Also, David had the revolutionary notion in his head that the audience wanted to hear what the person answering the questions had to say, rather than the person asking them. By this device, he got people to say much more than they intended and on a much broader range of topics. You would always end up with four or five news stories out of the interview. And of course by being insistent but not aggressive, he made it far harder, psychologically, for the interviewee not to answer directly.

Anyway, in this instance there was no need to worry about what I might say inadvertently. I had decided to say it advertently. I decided to commit us to raising NHS spending to roughly the EU average. Naturally, there were a plethora of methods for calculating what that was. There were armies of statisticians and accountants who worked it out and came to different conclusions from each other, but the basic point was fairly clear and the signal such a commitment sent would have its own determinative impact.

On Sat.u.r.day, Robert Hill and I worked through the possible permutations. I talked again to Gordon, who became more adamant. But I was convinced, as a matter of profound political strategy, that this decision had to be taken and now.

I also knew by then that we had a chance of getting the reform. In late 1999, Alan Milburn had replaced Frank in the department. Alan had been Minister of State and really shone there and was fully simpatico with the direction of change. Frank had resigned in order to concentrate on the mayoral contest for London.

I admit, at this point, that I had not discouraged Frank from resigning, partly because I thought it would free up the Department of Health. It did, however, leave us with a big problem for the mayoral race. The truth is that Frank had about as much chance of beating Ken Livingstone in a contest to be London mayor as Steptoe and Son's horse had of winning the Grand National. At a later point of this saga, when in the course of the election I was trying to lift my team's spirits, I said gamely that I thought Frank would just win it. To which Anji said: 'If you think Frank Dobson can beat Ken Livingstone in London, I'm calling a doctor.'

So there was a big mess looming in London; but by the time I did Frost Frost, I knew what I wanted and I had who I wanted at the helm.

I did the interview and, to David's pleasure, I didn't need my confession to be extricated, but averred it fully, openly and right speedily, as it were. It was one of the few examples I can remember of going on a programme with a story in mind and emerging from it with the same story on record.

There were a few days of tin-helmet time with Gordon, but he could see the inevitability of it and anyhow the politics made it impossible to oppose. It was a straightforward pre-emption. But it was a pre-emption that was both necessary and justifiable. It then allowed me to get on with the other part of the plan: to work with Alan on a serious proposal of reform.

We talked about it and agreed that we would work over the coming months to produce a proper, fully-fledged plan of transformation for the NHS. After some toing and froing we agreed it should be a ten-year plan. The aim should be to change fundamentally the way the NHS was run: to break up the monolith; to introduce a new relationship with the private sector; to import concepts of choice and compet.i.tion; and to renegotiate the basic contracts of the professionals from nurses to doctors to managers.

The most important element was that it implied a resolution of what had been revolving in my mind for some time. We had come to power in 1997 saying it was 'standards not structures' that mattered. We said this in respect of education, but it applied equally to health and other parts of the system of public services.

In other words, we were saying: forget about complex, inst.i.tutional structural reforms; what counts is what works, and by that we meant outputs. This was fine as a piece of rhetoric; and positively beneficial as a piece of politics. Unfortunately, as I began to realise when experience started to shape our thinking, it was bunk.u.m as a piece of policy. The whole point is that structures beget standards. How a service is configured affects outcomes.

That is, unless you believe that centrally managed change works best. This is where the change in thinking had deep political as well as service implications. Part of the whole thought process that had gone into creating New Labour was to redefine the nature of the state.

Except on law and order, I am by instinct a liberal. That is one reason why I used to go out of my way to praise Lloyd George, Keynes and Beveridge; and why I always had respect as well as affection for the mind of Roy Jenkins.

In a world in which the individual sought far greater control and power over their own lives, it seemed inconceivable to me that any modern idea of the state could be other than as an enabler, a source of empowerment, rather than paternalistic, handing out, controlling in the interests of the citizens who were supposedly incapable of taking their own decisions. That intuition, that gut feeling then obviously had to be translated into the praxis of state inst.i.tutions. Really it was as simple as that; a symmetry between the policy and the philosophy.

From early 2000 onwards, with the funding issue resolved, at least in general terms, Alan and I and a close team of advisers started to work out what would become the ten-year NHS Plan.

Meanwhile, we were working in other policy areas to similar purport. Andrew Adonis had taken over as my education adviser. I can't remember exactly how he came to us. He had been an academic at Oxford and member of the SDP. He had been committed to writing a biography of Roy Jenkins (which the pressure of work prevented him from completing) and had been a journalist for the Financial Times Financial Times and the and the Observer Observer. His arrival was fortuitous and gloriously productive. He was totally decent, had a first-cla.s.s intellect, and was not afraid to think without ideological constraint. He completely 'got' New Labour.

Of course, there was resentment of him because of the SDP past. By the way, it was similar with Derek Scott, who advised me on pensions and macroeconomic policy. Derek was really tough-minded and acerbic, and added a new dimension to the team. He had, however, the diplomatic skills of Dirty Harry. Meetings with the Treasury would turn into war zones and he could go off faster than the average firecracker. But, funnily enough, I liked having him around.

Andrew, by contrast, was such a thoroughly nice guy that even diehard SDP-haters found it difficult to dislike him. Not that a few of them didn't try really hard, mind you.

David Blunkett, like me, was undergoing the same reconsideration around standards and structures, and of course Andrew greatly urged in this direction. David had pulled around him a strong team as well, with people like Michael Barber and the permanent secretary of the department Michael Bichard, who was one of the best. So we also began rethinking our way through school and university reform, with the same principles as in health.

Criminal justice was altogether a different bag of nails. There the problem was and is profound. Over time, it led me to a complete reappraisal of the nature, purpose, structure, culture, mores, practice, ethos you name it of the whole system. It was and is essentially dysfunctional. But more of that another time.

Suffice to say, as one of my longer year 2000 notes put it, we needed to become more searching, more radical, more groundbreaking in our approach to the whole post-war settlement around public services and the welfare state, right across the board.

Throughout the first half of the year, we beavered away, especially on the NHS. In March, I made a statement to the House on NHS modernisation, which paved the way for the later July plan.

At the same time, the mayoral race trundled on with entirely predictable outcomes. There were two stages: first, the race for the Labour nomination; second, the race for the office itself.

As to the first, we put our all into securing Frank Dobson the nomination. We had a formidable machine in those days and it did its job formidably. The feeling about Ken among the top bra.s.s was unbelievably strong. And, of course, stupid. I don't exempt myself. I didn't feel visceral about it, as John and Gordon did. I rather admired Ken's style, his quirkiness, which made him stand out as different, and his ability to communicate. I also exaggerated the dangers of his policy positions, not wilfully, but just out of force of habit when describing an opponent's politics. It shouldn't be like that; there is always a risk in politics that when you disagree with someone, you magnify the disagreement. Two shades of grey become black and white. A mistaken policy becomes a disastrous one.

Ken as a Labour candidate was going to be a problem for a very simple reason: he disagreed totally with the public/private partnership John Prescott and Gordon had designed for the Tube. Since London transport in many ways defined the job, it was going to be difficult to have a Labour candidate dedicated to stopping the Labour transport policy.

I supported the policy, but felt strangely less sure about its modernising nature. I also thought Bob Kiley, who Ken wanted to bring in to run the Tube after a successful spell as chief of transport in New York, had something to commend him.

But John had the contempt of Northern Labour for London Labour, and didn't trust Ken or some arriviste New Yorker. And Gordon just detested him. Also Neil Kinnock expressed himself very strongly as only Neil could. And in any event, I had, as I say, not discouraged Frank from resigning to stand, so Ken was therefore obviously not the leadership candidate.

In time, I learned to let go and realised the stupidity, indeed the futility, of imposing the leadership line in situations where the whole point was to devolve power. It was, in fact, a hangover from the days of Labour Party indiscipline. There was such a fear of departing from the line that a sense of perspective easily got lost. So, in the end, I decided that, all in all, an independent Ken victory may be the least worst option, given Frank as mayor was undoable.

But we still had the party election to go through. Frank won, but due to union votes. Not a great New Labour outcome. I saw Ken at Chequers just before the result and asked for a pledge of loyalty if Frank won. He gave it, but without enthusiasm, and I was not really surprised when after the result he announced he would stand as an independent. I didn't really blame him. Interestingly, some of the London Party people who were supportive of me, but a little leftish, told me they were going to vote for Ken come what may; and that I had just been daft in opposing him, because, as they said, if Ken doesn't stand, don't think Frank will be mayor. He won't. They were probably right.

At the last moment, just before the primary got under way within the Labour Party, I made a last-ditch attempt to switch horses.

There had been some whispers that Mo Mowlam might consider entering the list. Now this was a wholly different order of proposition. Mo would give Ken a real run for his money. I asked her if she was serious. She said she was. I latched on to the idea. I invited Frank and his wife Janet round to Downing Street and had a drink with them in the flat. Alastair was there, and Cherie popped in. I explained I thought it would be difficult for Frank to win and explored whether he might contemplate standing down. The answer was firm; he wouldn't. I can't say I was surprised, and he probably, and with some justification, felt let down by me even broaching the subject.

In the end, Mo was not really prepared to press it either. My relationship with her also was not quite what it had been.

One of the problems in politics is that when you are leader and it is, I guess, the same in any organisation you have to take personnel decisions that can be highly fraught. There are only a certain number of top jobs and there are many more applicants or supplicants than appointees.

Reshuffles are hard enough. Sacking people is always a ghastly business, but so is failure to promote in accordance with the person's estimation of themselves. There is often a yawning gap between their judgement about their capacity and yours.

Mo had been fabulous in Northern Ireland just what the situation needed but when I came in late 1999 to consider a change there (as usual it was unhelpfully mooted in the press, and as usual even more unhelpfully ascribed as part of a Downing Street operation, which was completely untrue I would never have done that to Mo), I had a one-to-one discussion with her out on the terrace of Number 10.

She was not averse to moving, though she was annoyed at the stuff in the media, which was understandable. But she then startled me by saying (and she was nothing if not blunt): I am the most popular person in the government; Robin Cook is unpopular and tarnished; you should make me Foreign Secretary. It was a bid I was completely unprepared for, and I'm afraid I showed immediately that I thought it was unthinkable.

And there is the problem. The moment the chasm opens up between their revealed sense of their capability and your revealed sense of their capability, the relationship never recovers.

Mo had been an early supporter of mine. She had real political sense. She was immense fun to be around. She handled her illness with beautiful dignity. She was was the most popular member of the government. the most popular member of the government.

Her unique brand of what I can only call 'Mo-ness' was a healthy culture shock in Northern Ireland. I shall never forget the moment in the peace negotiations when in front of some fairly orthodox Irishmen, she came into my room, took off her wig, slapped it on the table, put her feet on the desk, belched loudly and opined, 'Well, this isn't a barrel of laughs, is it?' and proceeded to tell them how many other things she would prefer to be doing right then, starting with vigorous s.e.xual intercourse. In a matter of seconds she altered all hitherto fixed canons of behaviour recognisable in previous British Secretaries of State. But I quailed to think of what this att.i.tude would do when thrust upon the slender sensibilities of foreign ministers and tricky international summitry. I wasn't sure the Foreign Office the grand building imbued with the spirit of Palmerston and Grey and Halifax and even Peter Carrington was quite ready for 'Mo-ness'. So it wasn't to be.

Incidentally, it is an amazing thing about the Foreign Secretary job everyone wants it. It is not simply that the Foreign Secretary is one of the 'great offices of state', but also because you basically spend your time with people who are polite to you, on the global issues of the day, and travel the world generally dispensing goodwill and opinions to those who seem relatively keen to receive them. Not for you the h.o.r.n.y-handed sons of toil badgering you over fuel prices, or complaining about the government's clearly ill-motivated refusal to spend money on this service or that, or the minutiae of road schemes. You are too lofty to be troubled by such ephemera. Your stage is the world; your discourse is of strategic interests too rarefied and majestic for ordinary souls; your att.i.tudes can be balanced and measured in a way wholly inconsistent with the rough and tumble of the domestic scene. Even in the House of Commons the nearest you ever come to the brute side of life you can still talk of things and places and p.r.o.nounce names that have the average Member of Parliament nodding along in gratified incomprehension.

So people want it. One of the reasons why I had such huge regard for Jack Cunningham, a great example of a serious grown-up in the Labour politics of the 1980s and 90s, was that he had been John Smith's choice as Shadow Foreign Secretary. I moved him to make way for Robin Cook, who was not Jack's favourite person. He took the decision if he resented it he never showed it and got on with things. Such people are rare.

All this, however, is to digress. The mayoral election was doomed to be messy; and so it proved. Ken duly stood as an independent, trounced Frank and became mayor. I was careful, though, not to go OTT in attacking Ken during the campaign and kept lines of communication open. After the race, we settled down to a proper relationship with remarkable ease, something he deserved real credit for.

Throughout these months, despite the politics of London, fresh tremors in Northern Ireland, the hijacking of a plane at Stansted by (ironically in the light of future events) Afghans escaping the Taliban, May Day riots by anarchists who defaced the Cenotaph and all the normal flotsam and jetsam, I was still burrowing into the geothermals of public service reform.

The intricacy of the issues involved was really hard to unravel and reconstruct. At this stage, I was still feeling my way, holding endless meetings with advisers, experts and those within the services. I was trying to get a sense of how change might be fashioned, formulated and most important put in place on the ground, in real situations with real people.

I found it all intensely frustrating. At points, I wanted to give up everything else and just spend days on the front line, learning what it was like to manage a service, what its real pressures were, what could be done within the conventional parameters and how the parameters might be changed.

Also here I b.u.mped up against the single most difficult thing about making change in any organisation. It's what I call 'taking away the givens'. By this I mean as follows. Usually, you operate in any organisation within boundaries of thought and of practice. These become 'givens'. So in the NHS, it is a given that the surgeon performs operations, and the GP is a general pract.i.tioner who doesn't touch the surgeon's knife. The nurse doesn't (or didn't then) do complicated prescriptions. The more hospital beds, the better the service. In the private sector you pay; in the public sector you don't.

Or in a school, you have a standard national curriculum. Or in the Civil Service, you have a set career path. Or in the courts, there is a trial process that is hallowed.

Challenging these 'givens' within which the system operates can be hard. They are always there for a reason and, historically at least, often a good reason. Changing them can be even harder. A whole web of custom, practice and interest has been created around them; yet for the organisation to make progress, they must be changed.

So we began a reconsideration of the basic principles on which these services were run, trying to measure them not against the 'givens' but against the contemporary reality, the potential and possibility opened up by change, the parameters we would want if we were relieved of all political constraint and just exercised freethinking.

I used to call the experts in and say, if you had a completely free hand and you could do what you want, how you want, what would you do? The picture I started to build up conformed to my own instinct, but it was clear the services would require radical change.

Thus the ten-year NHS Plan. I didn't think I would last ten years and neither did Alan, but we were conscious of the need to set a framework to construct a platform that would place the NHS on a different trajectory. The pace might be quicker or slower, but the direction would be irreversible, at least if we were allowed the chance to show what reform could do.

But we had to proceed with the utmost care. There was party opposition John Prescott was often hostile; the Treasury sceptical though at that point merely mildly obstructive; the unions wary and (rightly) suspicious; and the professions within the services basically dominated by the traditionalists.

There was another challenge. People could accept there were areas of clear and obvious failure in the public services. It wasn't, to be fair, hard to persuade people we needed to change the way we dealt with the NHS winter pressures. It wasn't hard to persuade people to do something with failing schools, by which I mean schools that were to all intents and purposes basket cases 10 per cent, 15 per cent, 20 per cent of pupils getting five good GCSEs but that was nowhere near the ambition I wanted.

I take an essentially middle-cla.s.s view of public services, and you can't understand anything I tried to do to reform them without understanding that. I sent my own children to state schools; they were good state schools but I wanted them to be even better. And they were, at least then, reasonably rare. It wasn't simply the schools getting 10 per cent, 15 per cent or 20 per cent of their kids to the right level that concerned me, but the schools getting only 50 or 60 per cent.

It wasn't reducing waiting times for inpatients from eighteen months to six months that was the final goal; I thought six months totally unacceptable. I knew I wouldn't stand for my own loved ones waiting that long. Why should anyone else? And why should it be an impossible dream to alter the system so that the best happened?

So we had a much greater ambition for change. The trouble was for many people, including, ironically, the public we were wanting to serve, a coasting or average service seemed fair enough.

In any event, though there were people prepared to settle for less than they deserved, there was a large swathe of New Labour support that voted for us precisely because they shared that middle-cla.s.s mentality. By the way, none of that means 'working-cla.s.s' people want less; but the very fact that I feel that the phrase now goes in inverted commas shows something (and not just about me!). The aspirant working cla.s.s aspire to be middle cla.s.s.

It all comes back to the same thing. Most people are ambitious for themselves and their family and don't feel guilty about it. Neither should they. It's just they should not begrudge such ambition or achievement for others and should feel a sense of obligation to help bring it about for those less fortunate or successful.

The problem, however, was that though much of the party could accept radical reform in the event of chronic failure, most would not accept that radicalism in the case of pa.s.sive mediocrity. So we had a battle to change structure, to alter the 'givens'; we also had a battle to change att.i.tudes, to promote excellence not at the expense of equity but as a legitimate goal in its own right.

Probably, too, we were still in the process of education through empirical experiment. The NHS Plan, as it was written, still bore marks of political and intellectual immaturity. But it was a radical departure from where we had been.

Before that, I had a law and order agenda to address. We had begun the first antisocial behaviour legislation a couple of years before. Increasingly, for me, this fitted within a whole agenda around the antiquated and failing criminal justice system. The objective was to start treating criminal justice like a public service. I know that sounds odd, but here was the issue: because it concerns profound and rightly revered questions of human liberty, the focus in the criminal justice system was and still is on the interplay between prosecution and defence. In the adversarial inquisition that follows, the system is governed by the priority of doing justice to the process of finding someone guilty or innocent.

Of course, that is and always should be central, but in focusing so rigidly on this aspect, in the real world, whole legitimate areas of public and individual concern become marginal. How the system functions as a service is one. The witnesses, the victims, everyone basically other than the court itself, have to fit around the interplay between prosecution and defence. Cases are cancelled. Defendants don't turn up. Warrants don't get executed. The police don't have time to deal with minor offences. Behind each one of these things is a person, a victim who goes unnoticed until they turn up in court, that is, when often they go through a traumatic and prolonged process that adds insult to their already grievous injury.

And all this takes place against a background where crime is so much more prevalent than in the mid-twentieth century. People can go over the reasons for this endlessly, but it amounts to this: the system doesn't fit the reality of modern living. It's a horse in the age of the motor car. It's a wonderful thing but it doesn't take you far enough, fast enough.

I was preoccupied with antisocial behaviour, and was personally completely intolerant of it. I remember when our home was in Stavordale Road, near the a.r.s.enal Tube station in Islington, and I had to go out to dinner. I walked down to the station. As I pa.s.sed the end of our street, a bloke was urinating against a wall. I stopped. 'What are you looking at?' he said. I said, 'You, you shouldn't be doing it.' He took out a large knife from his coat. I walked on.

I hated it. I hated the fact that he did it. I hated even more the fact that I didn't stop him. I hated the choice I was made to make: stop him and risk ending your life because someone urinated in the street hardly the stuff of martyrdom or walk on.

Day in, day out, across our cities, towns, suburbs, villages and hamlets, such vignettes are played out. It's the same in most European cities and in the US it can be worse. Absolutely rightly, people resent it powerfully. It offends their most cherished sensibilities. Out and about around the country, that was what people talked about; and I listened with a genuine desire to act.

I felt we had gone really badly wrong as a society and had to correct it. I didn't feel it as some fragment of nostalgia; I felt it was a cla.s.sic challenge of the modern world and our system had to be modernised to meet it. I wrote several personal, private notes about reform in the criminal justice system. Jack Straw got it. I'm afraid Derry didn't. He half pretended he did to humour me, but he took the de de haut en bas haut en bas view that it was all populist gimmickry, as did most lawyers, judges and a.s.sorted bigwigs. view that it was all populist gimmickry, as did most lawyers, judges and a.s.sorted bigwigs.

We had an additional problem, too, arising out of the fact of being a Labour government. The Mail Mail had turned pretty poisonous. Worst of all, for those people like its editor Paul Dacre who are essentially tribal Tories, the gravitational pull of opposition meant that even if they agreed with what was being said, they disagreed with it because of who was saying it. had turned pretty poisonous. Worst of all, for those people like its editor Paul Dacre who are essentially tribal Tories, the gravitational pull of opposition meant that even if they agreed with what was being said, they disagreed with it because of who was saying it.

A whole section of the right went into a completely nonsensical civil liberties mode, at the same time as complaining of how we had to be tougher on crime. I don't mean the whole civil liberties critique was nonsense I didn't concur with it, but I respected it I mean right-wing law and order types who suddenly discovered that preserving the liberty of suspects was what they had really been about all along.

It was the beginning of the unholy coalition that after Iraq proved such a force, a sort of Daily Mail Daily Mail/Guardian alliance, whose only real point of unity was dislike of me, but who found in the reforms plenty to dislike if they were minded to; and they were. So, over time, the coalition of support New Labour had built got weakened by a coalition of opposition that on the one side was born of conviction and on the other of expedience. But its existence meant getting heard was a challenge. alliance, whose only real point of unity was dislike of me, but who found in the reforms plenty to dislike if they were minded to; and they were. So, over time, the coalition of support New Labour had built got weakened by a coalition of opposition that on the one side was born of conviction and on the other of expedience. But its existence meant getting heard was a challenge.

As I set about making my case for reform of criminal justice, I did so with what can only be described as mixed success.

First, I decided to make the philosophical case about the nature of our society, how it had changed, how we could retrieve the sense of values lost if we were prepared to think afresh. Unfortunately, I decided to visit this sociological essay upon the good matrons of the Women's Inst.i.tute Triennial Gathering at Wembley.

Quite what I was thinking of when I embarked on such a rash and ill-starred venture, I don't know. I can only think the birth of Leo might have had something to do with it.

One reason why I had been a tad distracted at the time of the 'forces of conservatism' speech, and didn't calibrate and recalibrate it in my normal fashion, was because Cherie had just shocked me profoundly by telling me she was pregnant.