A Journey_ My Political Life Part 2

John delighted in company. He loved going to the smoking room in the House of Commons after the vote, where in those days Tories and Labour would mix quite merrily, and where politics was taken that bit less seriously for a while. It was where F. E. Smith and Churchill would sit and talk like the two close friends they were, whatever hard words had been exchanged across the floor of the House (and some were very hard indeed). It's a shame that such friendship is rare today, very rare. John would love to talk, reminisce, relax and wind down. Drink was a relaxant. In this regard, he was like Derry. They would never do it before a big occasion, but the two of them together betokened a monumental session that, if the time was free, could start at lunch and go on well into the night.

Unfortunately, John could take a lot of it. I say unfortunately because it meant there was no cut-off, no circuit breaker, no warning sign and insufficient punishment the day after. For me, past a very limited point I would be ill, fall asleep and for sure be punished severely the next day; but both Derry and John could get up in the morning and joke about feeling under the weather, but actually be perfectly capable of meeting a reasonably challenging day.

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 a.s.sociated.

On the evening of 11 May 1994, there was a fund-raiser for the upcoming European elections. All the Shadow Cabinet were a.s.sembled 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 a.s.similate 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 a.s.sumed 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 const.i.tuency 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 pa.s.sing, 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 t.i.tans: working-cla.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce 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 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 19845 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, pa.s.sionate 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s, not make them middle cla.s.s but middle cla.s.s 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 ent.i.tled '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, a.n.a.lysing them, rea.s.sembling 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 canva.s.sing, even those who voted for us told me frequently that they had done so despite despite our policies and leadership, not because of them. 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.

So you might reasonably conclude that the period 1979 to 1983 had been an unmitigated disaster and that something had gone rather seriously wrong. Pretty obvious, I thought.

The meeting's t.i.tle appeared to indicate people wanted to learn lessons. The platform consisted of me as the local MP, Dennis Skinner as standard-bearer of the far left at the time, and various a.s.sorted union people. Only a complete ingenu or total clot i.e. me could have thought it was going to be a balanced, frank debate.

Now, I had won my selection as Labour's candidate for the seat over the far left's choice, a man called Les Huckfield. He was a genuinely interesting political phenomenon and only goes to show the odd effect politics can have on people. In the 1960s he had been Labour's youngest MP; a moderate; a minister; a rising star. However, for reasons everyone a.s.sumed were to do with ambition but may have been sincere conviction, he caught the Benn virus and became overnight a fully paid-up ultra-leftist. When his const.i.tuency disappeared in the national boundary reorganisation, which had incidentally brought the Sedgefield const.i.tuency into being, he then toured the country trying to upend sitting MPs in their reselection. By a mixture of means, the doors were always barred and he became a bit like something out of Transylvania wondering from village to village and having the garlic and crosses hung above the doors. But he d.a.m.n near succeeded in Sedgefield, and only the organising genius of John Burton, my prime const.i.tuency ally and later my agent, prevented it. Les Huckfield's defeat shocked and angered him and there were murmurings and rumours from his camp that they would aim to deselect me and get him in on the next reselection contest. So it was all very raw.

Anyway, I'm the local MP in Spennymoor, so I speak first. I get up. I give a logical, rational and, though I say it myself, entirely accurate a.n.a.lysis of why Labour lost and the lessons we should draw. I was as frank as the blurb could possibly have meant.

I really quite warmed to my theme. Labour had lost touch. It had failed to spot how society had changed. I had two lines I was rather proud of: one was about Labour's att.i.tudes being from the era of 'black-and-white TV' (most people by 1983 having colour TVs); the other was about the party 'simply repeating old adages learned on your grandparents' knees' or some such.

Even I could tell it wasn't exactly going down a storm; but in those days, I had everything written out and didn't have the facility of adjusting mid-speech. Those were my thoughts. I wrote them down. I read them out. I finished to a smattering of applause from the few supporters John had brought along. The rest sat and I think this is the only time I ever saw such a thing and folded their arms, in unison, their faces grimacing as if a thousand lemons had been forced down their throats.

Dennis got to his feet. Still in unison, their arms unfolded and their faces began to smirk in eager antic.i.p.ation. They knew what was coming. I didn't.

In later years, Dennis was one of my best (if somewhat closet) supporters. He didn't agree with any of my policies, but he liked someone who whacked the Tories. Though I'm not sure he would thank me for saying so, he mellowed and became a nicer person. In particular, he used to give me brilliant PMQs advice, pointing out with uncanny accuracy the weaknesses of my Tory opponents, feeding me one-liners and explaining what would rouse the troops behind me. But back then Dennis was your original firebrand. He was also a genius at a particular type of left-wing rally speech. He was in his element, and little new-boy muggins had given him an opening as large as your average open-cast mine (which he didn't much like either, since he had been a miner and to him proper mines were deep underground).

There's nothing quite like being utterly and publicly humiliated for teaching you a lesson. The meeting learned very few lessons (and those the wrong ones) from Labour's defeat. But I learned one big one from Dennis that day.

'So,' he began, 'your new MP, supposed to be a Labour MP [particular emphasis on word 'Labour'], whose experience in Labour politics [again much emphasis on 'Labour'] up to now includes [here reading from a piece of paper with extraordinary thespian timing and skill] Durham Choir School [private school much hated by the local proletariat]; Fettes College, Edinburgh the Eton of Scotland I'm told, [in an aside] not that I'd know [much laughter and applause]; St John's College, Oxford [said with an especial sneer]; and the Bar [here applause] and that's not the one you buy a pint in [uproarious outburst of laughter] but one full of lawyers [pantomime hisses]; your new Labour MP thinks our grandparents didn't know what they were talking about; that it's time we disowned them; that now's the moment when we tell them many of whom never owned so much as a wireless, never mind a black-and-white TV that they don't belong in Thatcher's Britain [looks of horror on faces of audience]. Well, let me tell you, Anthony Charles Lynton Blair [my full name, rather unfortunately printed several times in the course of the Beaconsfield by-election], my grandparents were poor, it's true; were humble folk, I admit it; were, I dare say, a little old-fashioned in their principles of loyalty and solidarity; but THEY WERE DECENT PEOPLE AND PROUD OF BEING WORKING CLa.s.s.' The last words rose to a crescendo accompanied by an eruption of applause, cheers and general favour to a degree that fairly lifted the roof off the place.

After that the speakers got up one by one, and you never heard so many heart-rending tales of the fort.i.tude, heroism and near-divine decency of grandparents. Several opined that they were only alive today through their nan's dedication; others spoke of how entire mining communities had been on the brink of destruction until rescued by some miraculous intervention of grandma or grandad. Without ever quite being explicit, there were dark insinuations that maybe my own grandparentage had been of the landed gentry, possibly even the mine-owning sort whose adages they could only imagine, but were no doubt along the lines of grinding the faces of the poor into the dust.

Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse, it did. The final speaker, after completing his own cover version of the grandparent riff, turned to me and concluded by saying: 'I am sorry you don't understand the history or traditions of the people up here; but, comrades and colleagues, here is someone who does ...' And, at the back of the hall, in walks Les Huckfield. Cue standing ovation.

As I staggered out, with people avoiding eye contact and scurrying past me like I was diseased, my then agent (and a lovely man) George Ferguson and his wife Hannah each put an arm round me. 'Don't worry,' George said, 'you were the only one in there talking any sense and I'm as working cla.s.s as any of them.'

'He's right,' said John, 'but in future, learn to say it better.' I did.

Hannah was a remarkable woman in many ways. As well as bringing up her own children she had foster-parented others, and was as Labour as Labour could be, but she represented a different facet of what was called, patronisingly, 'the working cla.s.s'.

Part of Labour's problem was that such a term was a generic description that obscured as much as it illuminated. I concluded that two different strains of thinking brushed up against each other in that phrase which said something important about contemporary Britain. Probably they were always present, but the very social progress Labour had helped bring about had thrust the tension to the surface.

The genus fitted as a description of income, of type of job, and often, though not always by any means, of voting behaviour; but it didn't fit as a description of att.i.tude. One strain dominated the activists of union and party. They held many of the same leftist views as the intellectual wing, but tended to be even more hard line on areas to do with economic policy.

The other strain was represented by people like George and Hannah, who were out and about far more in the non-political world of most ordinary people. They understood aspiration and applauded rather than resented it. They were tough, eye-wateringly so, on law and order. They believed social conditions had to be changed, but they never accepted them as an excuse for criminal behaviour.

Shortly after I became MP and still a little unused to Sedgefield's ways, I spoke at a branch meeting in a village called Tudhoe where Hannah was a branch member. The issue of the death penalty came up. Someone asked me if I supported it in the case of murder. Now, I was used to the politics of Islington, not County Durham. In Islington, such a question was simple. You gave the stock answer; heads nodded; the meeting moved on. Actually, it was one of the few questions to which I could give a generally left-wing answer and so I rather liked being asked it. And I had, so I thought, a rather neat way of putting the answer.

'No, I don't,' I responded confidently, 'and I will tell you why. If I am not prepared to hang that person myself, I should not ask the state to do it for me.' I sat down rather pleased with myself.

'Well, I'd hang them,' Hannah piped up.

'Aye, and I'd draw and quarter them too,' said another equally benign-looking elderly woman; and she drew much support.

Nowadays, that sentiment on this issue would be much more rare. But the point is: the 'working cla.s.s' were not as h.o.m.ogeneous a group as many politicians a.s.sumed, or based their reasoning upon. Labour was largely losing the strain that Hannah represented. So even back then in 1983, though often imperfectly formed, my drift, politically and intellectually, was clear: Labour had to be radically reformed, and not by an adjustment or a shift of a few degrees, but in a manner that changed profoundly its modus operandi, its thinking, its programme and above all its att.i.tudes. How to do it, how fast to do it, which issues to tackle first, which to leave until later that was all a matter of tactics, but it was obvious society was undergoing a paradigm shift and Labour was not merely failing to heed it, but hiding from it.

By the 1992 election, I had been in the vanguard of the party's steady but slow move to modernisation. I was often out in front as City spokesman, energy spokesman, in changing fundamental positions on the unions when holding the employment brief but never so far in front that I was out of sight. I was the most forward, but took some care to remain with the pack and not to become so isolated that I could be picked off. I learned Dennis's lesson well; there is no point in being right about an organisation's failings if you have lost the ability to persuade it of them. You have to speak the language in order to change the terms of the debate conducted in that language, otherwise you may be a fine example of a person who is right, but irrelevant.

I had come to the conclusion that there were two major problems with the change in the Labour Party: the direction was right but the pace was too slow; more seriously, however, and despite my admiration for him, I was uneasy at the way Neil Kinnock was justifying the change.

Although Neil was seminal in bringing Labour to power he gave strong leadership over eradicating Militant and taking on the Scargill wing of the union movement, and this leadership allowed John Smith, then me, to make the changes necessary to win the unspoken argument was this: look, guys, we've lost elections, the electorate won't wear our policies, so I'm sorry, but we're going to have to change them. The message obviously one more palatable to party members was: the party needs power, we're just going to have to compromise with the electorate. Now this was better than the famous dictum of the far left 'No compromise with the electorate' which was printed on their banners as we tried to reform. But it seemed the party and the voters were in two different places, and so the party had to shift against its will. My own feeling, however, was: the voters are right and we should change not because we have to, but because we want to. It may sound a subtle difference, but it is fundamental.

In my view, we needed a complete, top-to-bottom reorientation of our programme and policies. In particular, we needed to separate conceptually a commitment to our values (timeless) from their application (time-bound). So, of course, we should and always would fight for social justice; but in today's world that didn't mean more state control. And on issues like defence and law and order, being tough was not striking a pose but a sensible reaction to the threats of the modern world, whether globally or on our street corners.

I had also tried to raise with John Smith the issue of asking Neil to step aside. Neil had led the Labour Party with enormous courage, saved it from political extinction and created a foundation for government; but he had to fight the 1987 election on a manifesto that wasn't sellable, and for whatever reason, I was convinced the British people were never going to elect him prime minister. The late-twentieth-century political spirit was changing. Parties were still important, but as party loyalties declined in intensity, much more came to rest on the person of the leader. Political a.n.a.lysts and practising politicians love to speculate on this or that voting trend and very often there is much truth in it but there is always a tendency to underplay the importance of the leader. To an extent, this is understandable surely it's the policies that matter, the social movements that dictate outcomes, the events that shape destiny but past a certain point, people regard left/right distinctions as less emphatic today, they think policies are open to amendment and know that programmes and manifestos can't set out how someone will react to events. Unless policies are defined to a very clear degree and are way off-centre, the character, likeability and personality of the leader are of paramount importance. They can determine the election, and this is now always a major, if not the the major factor. Simple as that. So if the people didn't take to Neil, and they didn't, and had rejected him already in 1987, they weren't going to elect him in 1992, unless their view of him had changed significantly. It hadn't. major factor. Simple as that. So if the people didn't take to Neil, and they didn't, and had rejected him already in 1987, they weren't going to elect him in 1992, unless their view of him had changed significantly. It hadn't.

The election in 1992 was John's. We might have won had he been leader, rather than the Shadow Chancellor. But when I hinted to him in 1991 that he should go to Neil and ask him to step aside and said that myself, Gordon and others would back him up, John dismissed the idea. 'I will be leader afterwards,' he said. And that was that. The trouble was, partly I fear because John knew that afterwards he might be contesting the leadership, his proposed tax rises for those earning 30,000 and above were great for the party faithful but plainly problematic for the public. John was popular and respected, but this tax hike was, as the Tories cleverly exposed, a real ticking bomb underneath Labour's campaign. Once we were beaten, somehow I felt that the next election would not be John's.

In the run-up to the 1992 election I began a conversation with Gordon that was to have far-reaching consequences. I believed we had held back too much after the 1987 defeat, being too timid. It was true that we were now the undisputed leaders of the new generation. When Gordon had been John's subst.i.tute, he had shone in taking on Nigel Lawson. We were getting a medium level of media interest, which was rising in regularity and usually pretty positive; we had definitely logged on with the elite cla.s.s interested in politics. But it wasn't yet our generation in charge. We were still on our way up; we weren't in a position to dictate terms. In the core economic team for the 1992 election John as Shadow Chancellor, Margaret as Shadow Industry Secretary, Gordon as Shadow Chief Secretary and me in Employment we were the junior partners and I was the junior of the two of us. So though frustrated and anxious, I again held back.

Besides, I was still learning, thinking, trying to position myself on issues, beating out the basic elements of future political definition. Gordon and I would spend endless hours, days even, in political debate and discussion, iterating and reiterating, defining and refining, until eventually some sort of clarity appeared. The focus was not so much on the nitty-gritty of policy or at least not always but on setting the compa.s.s, getting the bearings and marshalling the arguments for the direction the party would or should take. We spent months trying to construct a framework for party reform. He had the idea of achieving ma.s.s membership by converting trade union levy-payers into full party members. I concentrated more on what would be the right way to broaden the party base, take power out of the hands of unrepresentative activists, and put the union influence within tight constraints.

I had also broached with Gordon the notion that should the defeat be as I thought, he would run for leader and if necessary challenge John. I liked John a great deal but I felt instinctively and very deeply that another defeat, especially one that indicated we never really came close, meant we had to go for radical change. John was a great politician, a thoroughly good man, but he wasn't a radical reformer, neither in style nor in substance.

By 1992 I was almost forty. I had been in Opposition for a decade. The thought of another five years of merely incremental steps towards change in the party that was so obviously needed, filled me with dismay. If the steps were too incremental, we might fail again and I would be fifty before even getting sight of government; and what was the point of politics if not to win power, govern and put into practice the policies you believe in? There was, in addition, a strand of opinion crossing left and right which saw the party becoming increasingly fatalistic about our chances, fearing that the only answer was to change the voting system or, even worse, accept our fate as the perpetual Opposition.

I was convinced that the a.s.sumption that John would become leader following a defeat could and should be challenged. Gordon, to be fair, was non-committal. It would be a big ask, and John would feel it a betrayal. Plus Gordon was unmarried, and I told him, frankly, that I thought that was a problem. But I also thought the party would be ready to be excited and uplifted and that an injection of youth and energy would itself reap huge dividends. I saw myself as Shadow Chancellor in such a scenario. John would have been a perfect Foreign Secretary. And he was a big enough man to take it.

I thought it not wrong or disloyal to be prepared to do this. Others may disagree. I felt that the position of leader had to be taken with some elan, not necessarily at the 'due' moment, but seized almost, if you will. Buggins' turn was an awful system of choosing the leader and actually at odds with every concept of what leadership should be about. Had John moved to replace Neil, it would have been b.l.o.o.d.y, but in my view he would have succeeded and history would have been very different. That he wouldn't contemplate it told me what his leadership would be like: steady, serious and predictable. It wasn't what the dire nature of our predicament demanded. Anyway, that's how I felt, right or wrong.

When the results were coming through on the night of 9 April 1992, it looked as if a quirk of the const.i.tuency system might yield a hung Parliament, and for a brief while I thought my predictions of defeat were wrong; but as the night wore on, it became all too clear. I spoke to Gordon and Peter, just becoming the new MP for Hartlepool. I said, we have to go for it. Unsurprisingly, Peter was a trifle distracted. Gordon was again non-committal.

As the morning of another defeat dawned, the party was in despair. I wasn't. I felt energised. What can we say? party HQ wailed. Plenty, I thought. The next morning there were bids from all the media outlets for interviews, and when no one wanted them, I took virtually the lot. I explained with the clarity of a man released from political and intellectual prison that the party had lost because we had failed to modernise sufficiently and we now had to do so, not by shades but by bursts of vivid colour. This time it had to be fundamental, clear and unmistakably geared to reuniting us with the people we sought to serve. I dodged the leadership issue easily enough Neil hadn't yet declared he was standing down and planted my banner firmly on the terrain of radical change in the party's organisation, programme and policies. Though I didn't know it and it was not why I did it, the thought of me as leader stemmed from that morning. Years afterwards, party members recalled that it was the time they thought: Hmm, maybe he's what we're looking for.

I returned from the studios. I had told Gordon to come to Sedgefield with Nick Brown, who was an MP in nearby Newcastle. He had always been our campaign manager for the Shadow Cabinet elections, and was a kind of informal chief whip to me and Gordon (and indeed later took the role formally in government in 1997).

First, naturally, I pressed on Gordon the idea of him standing for leader. I rehea.r.s.ed the arguments. He remained non-committal, however. Meanwhile, John had been phoning round just making sure of support. He phoned my home, Myrobella, in Trimdon Colliery in the heart of the const.i.tuency. I had offered to speak to John and explain why it should not be John who was leader, but I was nervous. It was a dilemma. If I indicated lack of support for John and Gordon didn't stand, it would destroy my relationship with John as leader. On the other hand, as I picked up the phone in my office at Myrobella to take his call, I still thought I had a chance to persuade Gordon.

At first I hedged. John, who was nothing if not canny, picked up the hesitation. 'I should speak to Gordon,' I said.

'I've spoken to him,' John said. 'He's fully on board.'

At that point I dared hesitate no further but came on board too. Some months later John told me, innocently, that he and Gordon had come to an agreement well in advance of the election: John would be leader, with Gordon as Shadow Chancellor. Gordon would not stand. I knew in my bones it was a mistake.

There was still the matter of the deputy leader to be decided. This was an elected position but one usually held by a senior Shadow Cabinet member. Roy Hattersley, the then deputy (and Shadow Chancellor up to 1987), had been with Neil throughout the nine years of Neil's leadership. They weren't exactly bosom buddies, but it worked after a fashion. However, in the aftermath of defeat, he would plainly stand down too. In the course of the call with John, he asked me about the deputy leader role. It makes sense with me as leader, he said, to have one of the younger ones as deputy, either you or Gordon. Decide between you, he said. Clearly, he went on, the problem with Gordon would be two Scots. The alternative was Margaret Beckett, a highly capable woman and, all in all, a sound enough choice, despite being of the same generation as John.

After the call I went back into the sitting room to see Gordon and Nick. 'John says you're backing him,' I said to Gordon.

'It's difficult to say otherwise,' he said, reasonably enough, but I felt a little let down.

'He wants to know if either of us should be deputy,' I said. I then explained that though Gordon was senior to me, two Scots would be a problem, especially as it was precisely in the south of England that our support was thinnest. Nick said that there was a strong case for either of us, but that the crucial thing was to see who had most support in the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP). He agreed to take soundings.

Discussion took place over the next day or so. We met again. Nick said, 'The pretty strong consensus in the PLP is that of the two of you, it should be Gordon.'

I knew this was not true. It couldn't be. Not even the PLP at its daftest was that daft. The media was full of how Labour was blocked in its traditional heartlands of the North, Wales and Scotland, of how it was doomed if it couldn't break out and win the middle cla.s.s and the South. In those circ.u.mstances, to have a Scot as leader was a risk, although if there were an English deputy, it was a risk that could be taken; but to then add another Scot as deputy? An all-Scottish ticket? With our devolution commitment? It just wouldn't wash. It was nuts.

So, in those two or three days, I learned two things: one was that Gordon had not seized the moment; the second was that he and Nick were working together and their first loyalty was to each other. From that moment, I think I detached a little bit from Gordon; just a fraction, imperceptible to the eye of the observer, unaccompanied by any expressions of distance, or even by any diminishing of affection. It was a detachment small in s.p.a.ce, but definitive in consequence. The seed was sown of my future insistence that I should be leader, not him.

John duly became leader. Gordon took the Shadow Chancellor position. John asked me what I wanted. He was surprised at my choice, but I had thought about it long and hard: I chose to be Shadow Home Secretary. It was usually considered a graveyard position for Tory and Labour politicians alike. Tories could never be hard line enough. Sincere, decent (privately liberal) types would go to Tory Party Conference, try to ham it up, curdle the blood, etc., but they always got found out. The Labour problem was the opposite. Their audience expected something more liberal and yet the Labour Home Secretary or Shadow Home Secretary knew the watching public disliked all the liberal stuff. There's one thing I learned in politics: those of extreme views, right or left, can always spot whether someone is a fellow true believer or not. Occasionally, when forced to pander throw a bit of left-wing meat out (not on anything too important!) I would give it my best; but you know something? They always spotted that my heart wasn't in it. It's something in the tone, the body language, which the true enthusiast has and the actor lacks.

Anyway, Shadow Home Secretary was not a job with many applicants. I had, however, come to the view that: a) Labour people, certainly our voters, were really anxious about law and order issues and were far more likely to be tough than soft; and b) intellectually, the polarisation of left/right views was simply and clearly wrong. The left blamed social conditions, the right blamed the individual; any halfway normal person could see or so I thought it was a combination of the two.

I felt personally very strongly about crime. For years I had thought it was a disgrace which people shouldn't have to put up with and I hated the liberal middle-cla.s.s att.i.tudes towards it. Usually they weren't the victims, but the poorer people the very ones we said we represented were. The hard-pressed public were similarly outraged by crime, and not just the high-end serious offences, murder and robbery and so on, but also low-level antisocial disorder and vandalism. They couldn't be expected to put up with it while waiting for the good society to be created, to endure it patiently until someone decided to remove the h.e.l.l from their street. Of course, it also stood to reason that the better educated young people were, especially young men in the inner city, the greater their chance of a job and the increased likelihood that they were going to turn out well behaved.

So: fighting crime was a personal cause, it completely fitted a new politics beyond old right and left, and since no Labour person had ever made anything of it (though there had been great reforming liberal Labour Home Secretaries like Chuter Ede and Roy Jenkins), the field was mine to play on. For once I was very confident of what I could do. And I was correct. It solidified my position in the party and the country. It achieved enormous traction. It showed leadership. I took a traditional Labour position, modernised it, made it popular and upended the Tories with it.

Ironically, in the light of what was to happen, Gordon also played an interesting role in helping me formulate what became my catchphrase.

We used to travel to the US from time to time, essentially just to get away and think. For some bizarre reason or other we would stay at the Carlyle Hotel in New York. The Carlyle is as far removed from New Labour as binge drinking is from Methodism. It is an exclusive hotel that had been used by the likes of Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart. Eartha Kitt would sing in the cafe and Woody Allen would turn up with his clarinet. At that time, people dressed for dinner, the mood was formal, the decor elegant, the ambience a little austere. Not me at all, but funnily enough I grew to like it. The management were discreet, staff were friendly and behind all the upper-cla.s.s facade, it was well run.

On one occasion in late 1992 we sat there and talked. Though still ruminating on a missed chance after our election defeat, I had begun to concentrate thoroughly on the task in hand and I explained my essential approach: we should of course stress social conditions and be radical in dealing with them, but we also had to be tough on crime itself. We should make this into a Labour issue by combining a traditional and a modern stance.

This is where Gordon, certainly in those days, would show a streak of genius. 'You mean "Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime",' he said.

'Yes,' I said, stunned by the brilliance of it, 'that's exactly what I mean.'

And so it became my slogan, but unusually for a slogan, actually encapsulated a philosophical insight. Shortly after returning, I used it in a speech and really never looked back.

Pretty soon, I had the Tories reeling under the onslaught, surprised and somewhat disbelieving that a Labour person could steal 'their' issue, but rather admiring of the way it was done. At that time Ken Clarke was Home Secretary. It was not his scene at all. He was liberal and utterly disdainful of his party conference. After enduring months of Ken being well and truly mugged on the issue, John Major sensibly decided to move him to the Treasury, where he was in his element, and Michael Howard into the Home Secretary position, for which he was temperamentally absolutely suited. Thereafter on the issue it got harder, since Michael decisively shifted Tory tone and policy to the right and in turn posed some hard tactical choices for me. He was so hard line that there was a risk that if I followed him I would alienate the party, and if I didn't I would alienate the voter. But by then, my reputation was secure.

I had also articulated very clearly the social context for the policy in a way no Tory could easily match after fourteen years of government and with the memories of Thatcherism still fresh. In February 1993, there had been a horrific murder of a two-year-old boy, James Bulger, by two ten-year-olds up in Merseyside. The tragedy became representative of social breakdown. The ten-year-olds were, needless to say, from broken families. The reporting of the murder was laced with descriptions of the life, times and mores of certain groups of young people whose families seemed separated from the mainstream. Very effectively I made it into a symbol of a Tory Britain in which, for all the efficiency that Thatcherism had achieved, the bonds of social and community well-being had been loosed, dangerously so.

I did it sincerely. In a widely publicised speech really very widely publicised, unusually so for an Opposition politician who was not a party leader I set out what I thought was wrong.

The news bulletins of the last week have been like hammer blows struck against the sleeping conscience of the country, urging us to wake up and look unflinchingly at what we see. We hear of crimes so horrific they provoke anger and disbelief in equal proportions. The headlines shock, but what shocks us more is our knowledge that in almost any city, town or village more minor versions of the same events are becoming an almost everyday part of our lives. These are the ugly manifestations of a society that is becoming unworthy of that name . . .The historic problem of old socialism was the tendency to subsume the individual, rights, duties and all, within ideas of the 'public good', that at its worst came simply to mean the state. The failure of the present right is to believe that the absence of community means the presence of freedom. The task is to retrieve the notion of community from a narrow view of the state and put it to work again for the benefit of us all. A new community with a modern concept of citizenship is well overdue.

Now, I look back and think that though the problem was real, the a.n.a.lysis was faulty and this came to have policy consequences I describe later. However, at the time, politically, there was a big impact on my standing, which rose still further.

I was also pushing the boundaries in another direction. While in my view John Smith was not a true radical, he was intelligent enough and brave enough to realise that the party had to modernise. One part of that process was in the relationship with the unions, which then revolved around the issue of One Member One Vote (OMOV), whereby instead of union national executive committees voting on the candidate for a selection, the members should all have one vote; and there should be a more balanced vote for leader, with MPs having a say.

Today it seems completely unacceptable, ridiculous even, that the unions played such a decisive role in the selection of candidates and leader, but the Labour Party had been born out of the Labour Representation Committee, a late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century body whose aim was precisely to get 'working men' into Parliament. It was formed, funded and run by the unions, so the roots were inseparably intertwined, with, I'm afraid, very mixed long-term consequences.

John decided to advocate OMOV, and I put myself full square behind the campaign. The unions already had bitter memories of my decision when Shadow Employment Secretary in 1989 to end Labour's support for the 'closed shop', so my espousal of this issue alienated me still further from them, but it was putting me way in front as having a clear, unequivocal position on how the party could win. After years in which Labour people were scoffed at and scorned, in which all those feelings of inferiority were resting only a little below the surface, here was someone who seemed confident, able to take it to the Tories, and in tone and style chime with the very voters we knew we needed but who had always proved elusive.

As the months rolled on, my position as an out-and-out moderniser, stepping out and leading, became ever sharper. I felt a growing inner sense of belief, almost of destiny. I felt compelled, clear, certain and above all confident of my arguments, confident that they were right and confident that they could win the country over.

My relationship with Gordon was still very close, but towards the end of 1992 I took another small yet significant pace apart. There had been the usual merry-go-round on distributing rooms for MPs, and for these purposes all MPs were the same, except government ministers who had rooms set aside for them. A set of rooms in Millbank came up. At that time Gordon and I were both in 1 Parliament Street, just opposite Westminster by the bridge. Gordon decided to move to Millbank and asked me to join him. Cherie emphatically told me I shouldn't. Rather to my surprise, Anji said the same. I didn't go. It was no big deal; but it was another indicator.

Gordon was doing well as Shadow Chancellor, hammering the Tories in a responsible and measured way, although he was cautious, as was his wont; and he was a little discredited, though only a very little, by having supported the ERM, and therefore when that policy fell apart, he was marginally tarnished by it. Later, he came to see this and his strictures on too much public spending as the reason why I was preferred to him, but it wasn't so. The truth is I was out in front taking risks, and this was a time for risk-takers. I spotted that; he didn't.

As 1993 wore on, something changed that was imperceptible to most people. I say imperceptible, but maybe he and I were both wrong on that count. The Sunday Times Sunday Times, for example, had had me on their magazine front cover in May 1992 with the line 'The Leader Labour Missed'. Normally such a thing would have caused jealousy, but partly because no one took it very seriously, it didn't.

Peter Mandelson, by then a close friend and confidant of us both, noticed the difference in me. 'You're getting quite the little leader,' he teased me one day as we stood at the railings outside my front door in Richmond Crescent. We had just had a meeting and plainly my a.s.sertiveness had made its impression.

'By which you mean ... ?' I enquired.

'Don't get above yourself,' he replied. 'Gordon is still the one supposed to be the next leader, you know.'