Doing Politics E-Book

Tony Wright

• Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 455

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

A dose of sense from the voice of parliamentary reason.Throughout the expenses scandal and the lobbying scandal and all the other storms which have buffeted Parliament, Dr Tony Wright is the one MP who has consistently provided a measured, sane and sensible reaction to events. As Chair of the influential Public Administration Committee he has risen above party and partisan politics to offer a sometimes lone voice of reason. His new book considers the wider implications of the various political ructions and the public reaction to them, and argues that if we want to defend politics, then we also have to defend politicians: the class of people is intrinsic to the activity. Somebody has to do the messy business of accommodating conflicting demands and interests, choosing between competing options, negotiating unwelcome trade-offs, and taking responsibility for decisions that often represent the least worst course of action. That somebody is politicians. They give voice to our hopes, but they also, inevitably, feed our disappointments, even if their name is Obama. From one of our most erudite, intellectually rigorous yet sensible politicians, Doing Politics is just the book the nation needs.

Leseprobe

Tony Wright

‘… is one of the wisest heads in Westminster’

Polly Toynbee

‘… is always a voice of sanity’

Ann Treneman

‘… always put the interests of the House above tribal politics’

The Times

‘… is one of the most dedicated parliamentarians in Westminster: acidic, pithy, sharp, delighted to give the pip to the powerful, and utterly assured in his role’

Ben Macintyre

‘… carved out a distinctive niche in the Commons as an MP who looks at the broader political and constitutional picture’

Peter Riddell

‘… is a mensch, one of the few mensches in modern politics … impressive, strategic and free-thinking … Dr Wright has thought – and thought hard – about how modern politics should be organised, its ethics and the contract between the politician and the polity’

David Aaronovitch

‘… had been warning of the expenses apocalypse for seven years’

Martin Bell

Doing Politics

Tony Wright

In memory of Edmor Phillips (1923–2010)

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Preface

PART ONE DOING POLITICS: THEN AND NOW

PART TWO WRITING ABOUT DOING POLITICS

Doing Politics Differently

Bad Language

Controllers versus Visionaries

Am I a Blairite?

Liberal Socialism: Then and Now

Guild Socialism Revisited

Reinventing Democracy?

Reforming Parliament

Parliament and Executive: Shifting the Balance?

Palace of Low-grade Corruptions

Rebuilding the House

What are MPs for?

Inquiry and Iraq

Reforming the Lords (Again)

A Matter of Honour

Monarchy for Grown-ups

England, Whose England?

Inside the Whale: The Media from Parliament

Hypocrisy and Hunting

Notes after a Surgery

In Defence of Politicians

Copyright

Preface

‘Good morning, sir. How is East Devon today?’

This cheery greeting, delivered by one of the policemen watching over the entrance to the House of Commons on my last day in the place, after nearly twenty years, reminded me why I should never write any kind of memoir. He had got the wrong person. And the wrong constituency.

Apart from musing on how cushy it must be to represent somewhere like East Devon (and how unfair it was that Labour MPs got all the tough places), I felt a sense of profound political insignificance. I was the sort of person who had sat at the Cabinet table but not, alas, when the Cabinet was meeting. Consulting Alastair Campbell’s voluminous diary record of the New Labour years to see if I appeared on his radar, I found only this: ‘Got a message to Tony Wright to shut up.’

So when it was suggested to me by my old friend Sean Magee, now at Biteback Publishing, that I might write a book, I knew it could not be a memoir. He agreed that I might instead bring together some of the political writing I had done over the years, supplemented by a more personal opening chapter. This is what I have done.

In the opening section I have tried to give a sense of what life was like for someone born shortly after the end of the Second World War who became interested in politics from an early age and, in different ways over subsequent decades, took some small part in it. I hope it gives a flavour of the times, and what has changed. The rest of the book – a mixture of longer articles and shorter pieces – reflects some of the themes and issues I have been interested in over this long period, and which still seem to have some relevance today.

I am grateful to Sean for asking me to do this book and for making sure I did it, even when he would much rather have been at the races. It is dedicated to my father-in-law, Edmor Phillips, who died on general election day in 2010. He could rarely be prised away from his corner of west Wales, but was nevertheless a genuine citizen of the world. I hope he knew he was the audience for everything I said and wrote, and the person whose opinion and approval I most valued.

Tony Wright January 2012

PART ONE

DOING POLITICS: THEN AND NOW

It was different then. The first general election of my lifetime was in February 1950, when I was nearly two. The great reforming post-war Labour government, led by the unassuming Clement Attlee, scraped a win but without a working majority. Another election soon followed in 1951, narrowly won by the Conservatives with more seats but fewer votes than Labour. A commentator on the 1950 election, writing in the Political Quarterly (which I now edit) declared: ‘It is good to record a record poll, and a hard, clean fight … The record poll of 84 per cent is a reflection of the high level of political interest and concern throughout the country. Correspondents from other lands have applauded it as another tribute to the political maturity of the British electorate.’

It is not just the turnout that now seems remarkable. In 1950 no less than 90 per cent of the total vote went to the Labour and Conservative parties between them, and this rose to a staggering 97 per cent the following year. In 2010, by contrast, the figure was only 65 per cent. Behind the 1950/51 voting figures were party memberships that ran into the millions, although the exact numbers are uncertain. What is certain is that politics was rooted in rival political traditions, each embedded in its own political culture.

My family were Labour. That was our tribe. It was also the dominant political tribe in our little Northamptonshire town, where most men worked in the shoe factories (many had the top of a finger missing, caused by the ‘clicking’ machines), and in the strange-speaking place a few miles away called Corby (known as ‘little Scotland’) where my father worked as a clerk in the steelworks. The surrounding Northamptonshire countryside was inhabited, in our eyes, by a different tribe of squires and foxhunters, demanding deference from the villagers, blue to our red. In our town, as in similar working-class communities, being Labour really was part of a dense culture of chapel and Sunday school, Co-op shop and working men’s club. These were the institutions, along with the football club, which framed my early life. Even today I have our ‘divi’ number at the Co-op (4735) engraved in my memory.

So I was Labour by cultural immersion, not intellectual conversion (which only came later, reading R. H. Tawney’s The Acquisitive Society while working on a kibbutz in Israel in 1967, just after the war). There was Us and Them, and Labour was the party of Us just as the Tories were the party of Them. We lived in our own house, just across the road from the council estate, which made us ‘upper’ working class, but such distinctions – though important in other ways – did not detract from the general sense of political Us-ness. Evidence of the recent war was all around in the remains of old army huts, the concrete floors of which provided our football pitches. My father had emerged from the war as an officer in the RAF, meeting and marrying my mother when he was stationed at the local air base, and as a Conservative. In the early days my mother would put up a Labour election poster in the window when my father had gone to work and take it down before he came home. He too, though, soon succumbed to the Us-ness of the community he had joined, and to the political assaults of my mother, and before long he was secretary both of the local Labour Party and of his trade union branch.

There was one occasion, before his re-education was complete, when he made the mistake of referring to Churchill as ‘the greatest living Englishman’. This set my mother off – did he not know that Churchill had set the troops on the striking miners at Tonypandy? – and my father was banished to the shed until he recanted such political heresy. It is not surprising, then, that I grew up thinking that politics was something that mattered in a rather profound way – that it defined who we were, where we had come from and what future we might have. It was not expressed like this, of course, but this is what I took it to mean. My understanding was not very sophisticated at this stage, but it was fundamental.

It meant that politics was part of my life from a very early age, in a way that seems odd now but was entirely natural then. Politics (Labour) and football (Wolverhampton Wanderers) became my twin enthusiasms. (I had no idea where Wolverhampton was, just that they were the team of the moment.) On one side, my heroes were our Labour leaders Bevan and Gaitskell; on the other, Peter Broadbent, the dazzling inside left of that great Wolves side of the 1950s (whose skills I tried to emulate). I was decked out, interchangeably, in Labour red and the old gold and black of Wolves. As soon as I was old enough, I got a job delivering newspapers before school, which allowed me both to scrutinise the opinion polls to see how the political battle was going and to examine the football forecasts so that I could fill in my fixed-odds pools coupon. The result of both activities was that I regularly missed the school bus.

On election days in the 1950s my job was to run from the polling station at my primary school to the Co-op Hall at the top of the road with the lists of polling numbers, which were then marked off by the party workers on the electoral registers pinned to large trestle tables. This showed who had voted and who had not, so that the latter could be ‘knocked up’. Many Conservatives had cars, while most Labour voters didn’t, so a good ruse was to get our elderly supporters to ask for lifts to the polling station from the Conservatives. I remember my grandfather, retired from managing the Co-op grocery shop, winking at me on one occasion as he alighted from a large Conservative car to cast his Labour vote. What puzzled me at the time about these general elections was that our town voted solidly Labour but the Conservatives always won. This seemed very unfair.

At the 1959 general election, a headline in the local newspaper reported that an open-air election meeting in our town addressed by the Conservative candidate had been interrupted by an eleven-year-old boy who had asked questions about the H-bomb and old-age pensions. What it did not report was that I then arranged with my friends to drive this Conservative candidate out of town on our bikes, planting fireworks in the back of his Land Rover that exploded as he furiously drove away with us in hot pursuit. We had expelled the class enemy from our territory. At least that was how I saw it; I suspect my friends thought it was just a bit of fun.

In 1958, during the run-up to the general election of the following year, the local Labour Party hired a coach to take members to a big rally in the De Montfort Hall in Leicester, some twenty miles away, where both Hugh Gaitskell and Nye Bevan were to speak. This was the period when the Labour Party was divided into Bevanites and Gaitskel-lites – the fundamentalists and the revisionists – but I did not know this at the time. We were just Labour, loyal to our leaders, untroubled by faraway schisms and united in our opposition to the Conservative enemy; though for some reason my mother was particularly taken with the fact that Hugh Gaitskell was an accomplished dancer. What we did not know, of course, was that within the next few years both Bevan and Gaitskell would be dead, our leaders taken from us before their victories could be won. For years afterwards I kept the copy of the Daily Mirror that announced Gaitskell’s death in the cupboard beside my bed, along with my prized collection of football programmes (and, shamefully, birds’ eggs).

Allowed to go, I had a chance to see my political heroes in the flesh. Coaches disgorged party members from all over the East Midlands and the hall was packed. In my memory there were thousands there, and I had a perch high up on the front row of the balcony. Since I was only ten, much of it went over my head, except for the exciting atmosphere and one line from Bevan which stayed with me. ‘Those Tories,’ he said, in that captivating Welsh lilt, ‘they might be trusted to look after animals but they should not be trusted to look after the country.’ I thought this was very good. What was even better was that afterwards – because my father was a party secretary – we were allowed to go backstage to meet the great men. I wish I could record a memorable exchange, but I was probably too star-struck to do anything but look gormless.

The only politician I had encountered in person until then was our own MP, G. R. (Dick) Mitchison, who would sometimes come to social events or political meetings in the Co-op Hall. He was a kindly man with a disarming stutter, but also rather grand. Not only was he a QC but also the owner of a castle in Scotland, which I then assumed was entirely natural for a Member of Parliament, even a Labour one. Even more exotic, though, was his wife, Naomi, who combined being a famous writer with the honorary chieftainship of a tribe in Africa. To the ladies of the Co-operative Women’s Guild she must have seemed like a visitor from another planet, but valiant efforts at communication were made on both sides. The Mitchisons were liked and respected, and when my parents were invited to their daughter’s wedding in the crypt chapel at the House of Commons I was included too, my first step inside the place.

Our next MP, after Mitchison retired, was another grand figure, Sir Geoffrey de Freitas. A former Wing Commander, who had also been a High Commissioner, he sported a magnificent moustache and a dashing demeanour. By this time I was in the sixth form at grammar school and chairman of the Young Socialists in Kettering. In this capacity, one day in 1966 I received a letter from Sir Geoffrey at the House of Commons, enclosing a ticket for the forthcoming final of the World Cup. The letter invited me either to attend the final myself or to raffle the ticket for branch funds. A nanosecond of reflection persuaded me that the latter course of action would be far too complicated and divisive and that I had a clear duty to go myself. So, courtesy of our MP, I watched England win the World Cup from a seat not far from the Royal Box. Still a schoolboy, I sensed that the rest of life might be something of an anti-climax after this.

By now I really was a political obsessive. I filled the letters page of the Kettering Evening Telegraph with a running commentary on the political issues of the day, drawing responses from people who had no idea they were arguing with a mere schoolboy. My teachers at the grammar school, a mixture of the mad and the inspirational, must have found me very irritating. Certainly my English teacher did, who reported in my last term: ‘When he sets his mind to it, he can produce most competent work; when he allows his political prejudices to influence his literary criticism, his work is usually irrelevant and tedious.’ A great inspiration to me was our History teacher, Mr Cowell, known to us for some reason as Tarzan, who managed to weave irreverent references to contemporary politicians like Harold Macmillan and Selwyn Lloyd (whom he called ‘Selluloid’) into accounts of the Great Reform Act and changes to the Corn Laws. On my last day at school the deputy head, Mr Wood, who taught Latin and was normally a master to be feared, summoned me to his room. I expected the worst. He took down from his shelves the two volumes of The History of British Socialism by Max Beer and said that he would like me to have them. I cherish those books, along with the memory of the teacher who gave them to me.

The only other books in our house were on biblical prophecy. My father spent much of the Second World War in the Middle East and had immersed himself in the Bible and its prophecies. Even the Jehovah’s Witnesses learned to avoid our house, as my father was always ready to break off from his gardening to instruct them in their prophetic errors. So I had to find reading material elsewhere, which I did first in our little local library and then in the cornucopia of Kettering Public Library. This magnificent civic building, with an art gallery attached, became an integral part of my life. It was where I went every afternoon after school before I caught the bus home, and also where I found a Saturday job. My preference for the library over the school rugby team incurred (not for the first time) headmasterly wrath: I was stripped of the prefect’s stripes on the wrists of my blazer, leaving only the faded rings where they had been. But the library provided history, politics and literature in glorious abundance, whereas rugby only gave me cuts and bruises. Many years later when I wrote a book on R. H. Tawney, I dedicated it to Kettering Public Library. It would have seemed unthinkable to me then that libraries, a core part of the civic infrastructure, would one day be in peril.

Like all of my school friends, I was the first in my family to go to university. I wanted, inevitably, to study politics. The headmaster had decided that I should go to Oxford to study PPE (Politics, Philosophy and Economics). This I duly did, but I stayed only for one term, which caused distress for my proud parents and invoked yet more headmasterly wrath. I enjoyed the delights of Oxford (and went back later to do a doctorate), but at that time the first year of PPE had no politics in it and that was what I wanted to do. So I arranged a transfer to the London School of Economics for the following year, and spent the intervening months (after a winter as a daffodil inspector in Jersey, patrolling the fields and inspecting the hold of ships in search of the dreaded eelworm) wandering around Europe and North Africa with my thumb extended, as many of my generation did in the 1960s.

While living in a cave on the side of the rock of Gibraltar, I read in a newspaper that Spanish students were protesting against Franco’s Fascism under the slogan ‘Franco no, democracia si!’. I decided, as an act of solidarity, that I would attach a piece of cardboard with this slogan on it to my rucksack before travelling back up through Spain. When I presented myself at the Spanish border post, I soon realised that this had not been a good idea. I was taken by the guards into a side room, and they began to question me about where I had come from and what I was doing. Every time I said the word ‘Gibraltar’ they would spit on the floor in unison. When they asked where I was a student and I gave them the name of the LSE a book was consulted, producing much excitable chatter. I was then removed to a holding room in the town police station. After a while, realising that matters were now getting serious, I went up to the desk and demanded (just like in the films) that I should be allowed to see the British consul. In response a policeman hit me, sending me reeling back into my seat.

Eventually I was marched out to a bus, put on the front seat, with a row of policemen on the back row holding rifles, and driven to the Gibraltar border. There I was kicked off the bus and handed my passport, which had been stamped to say that I was henceforth prohibited from entering Spain. It was a forlorn ending to my anti-Fascist crusade. It also left me with the problem of how to get to France and home without going through Spain, which was only solved by signing up for the Swedish Merchant Navy. It was hardly Homage to Catalonia, but it was a sharp lesson for a youthful socialist that liberal democracy should not be taken for granted.

Arriving at the LSE in 1967 after a spell of portering at the old Middlesex Hospital, I soon found myself at the epicentre of the student revolution. The place was in constant turmoil. During one student occupation a porter died. Daily mass meetings brought student leaders from all over the world to the university in revolutionary solidarity. It was impossible not to feel in some way part of what was happening. I duly wrote a long (and now embarrassing) article for my local paper at home, explaining that it was all about participatory democracy and the breaking of oppressive bureaucratic structures. This was the spirit and meaning of 1968.

Yet in truth I had a far more ambivalent attitude to what I was witnessing, though this did not stop me getting involved in various kinds of mischief, helped by the convenient proximity of the LSE to inviting targets. I organised a group from our hall of residence to occupy Rhodesia House in the Strand every Thursday. We would walk in, sit down and wait for the police to carry us out into the street (where, on one occasion, I was interviewed by a young BBC television reporter called Martin Bell). There were endless demonstrations and at one of these, again in the Strand, I was arrested and carted off to the cells at Bow Street police station. I was charged with obstructing the police, which I knew I had not. Alarmed to discover that the charge (and sentence) was potentially very serious, I resolved to plead not guilty, and spent many hours in the Law Library at the LSE working on a defence. When the case was heard at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court, I was shocked – in my innocence – when a police inspector gave a version of events that was entirely fictitious. He knew it was – and knew that I knew it was, as I put to him in questioning – but he also knew that a court would accept his version rather than mine. In the event, the wily stipendiary magistrate said that he had no alternative but to find me guilty, but had decided to fine me the princely sum of ten shillings. He inquired – with a twinkle in his eye – if I would like time to pay. It felt like a magnificent vindication.

I had no qualms about this kind of activity – occupying Rhodesia House to support the fight against minority rule, opposing the Vietnam War in Grosvenor Square, invading the pitch at Twickenham to disrupt the Springbok tour in the name of anti-apartheid – but I did have a growing feeling of unease about student militancy itself. I wanted to be part of a university, not to destroy it. The idea that university authorities were agents of oppression seemed to me to be ludicrous and self-indulgent. Besides, I was Labour, by background and identity, and I had nothing in common with those self-styled revolutionaries of assorted sectarian affiliations who thought that social democracy was an enemy that had to be attacked. They thought that its defeat would open the door for the triumph of the revolutionary left, whereas it seemed obvious to me that it would instead clear the path for the advance of the political right (as it did).

If I was troubled by such political illiteracy (and by actual illiteracy – throughout the ‘troubles’ at LSE the wall of the Old Theatre had ‘Anarchism’ sprayed on it, but misspelt), I was even more disturbed by the sheer intolerance and illiberalism of some of the student Trots. Opposing views were shouted down and their proponents intimidated. This was not my idea of how a university, or politics, should function. One occasion in particular sticks in my mind. Michael Oakeshott, the distinguished conservative philosopher, was delivering a lecture on Roman political thought when a group of Trotskyite thugs burst into the room, roughed him up and poured a jug of water over his head. It was all over in seconds. The elderly philosopher simply shook himself down, said nothing about the incident (which doubtless just confirmed his general view of the world) and calmly continued his description of the Roman understanding of potestas and auctoritas as forms of rule.

I was learning that there were different kinds of socialism (and politics) and that some I wanted nothing to do with. At this time Marxism was the dominant discourse of the social sciences, stripping away the liberal veneer of bourgeois societies to reveal the class power beneath. Politics was a function of economics. It seemed to me that, despite the analytical value of this approach, it carried with it a devaluation and misunderstanding of politics that was wrong and even dangerous. I was being taught at this time by Ralph Miliband (father of David and Ed), who was the leading political theorist of British Marxism. Handing back an essay I had done on Lenin’s State and Revolution, he said: ‘The trouble with you, Wright, is that you are basically a liberal.’ I did not regard it as a ‘trouble’ to be associated with a kind of politics that wanted to combine liberty and equality, and refused to make politics only a derivative of something else. Nor did I regard it as accidental that Marxists managed to get so much analysis right, and so much politics wrong.

After the LSE I had a year in the United States, courtesy of a scholarship to Harvard. From the moment I arrived (on the new QE2, glimpsing the Manhattan skyline at dawn) it was exhilarating. All the academic giants were at Harvard – figures like Daniel Bell and John Rawls – and I was able to attend classes with all of them, while my personal tutor was Seymour Martin Lipset, the renowned political sociologist whose book, Political Man, was already a classic. In one lecture series, where there was always standing room only, the rival political theorists Robert Nozick (on the right) and Michael Walzer (on the left) conducted a running debate on the relationship between liberty and equality. This was heady stuff, and a kind of teaching I had never experienced before.

There was also the headiness of America itself. At Christmas some of us drove non-stop, three days and nights, from snowbound Boston to sun-drenched California. There were regular bus trips down to Washington for Vietnam demonstrations outside Congress. Greyhound buses provided a means of exploring every corner of this extraordinary country. Above all, there was the atmosphere of civic energy and democratic optimism of a kind that I had never encountered before and which I decided was a well from which I would periodically need to drink thereafter. Yet I came to feel something else too, a sense that here was a country that was simply too vast and various for the kind of political movement I was attracted to; and it was this that finally reconciled me to the prospect of returning to a Britain that might be less exciting, but was somehow more manageable.

At this stage I was not certain what I would do when I returned home. It would be something to do with politics, but whether this would be of an academic or more worldly kind I was not sure (a dilemma I never really resolved). I remember telling an American girlfriend, as we sat in a fish restaurant on Boston harbour, that I thought I would probably become a Labour MP, but this was a notion rather than a plan. I already had a place waiting for me at Oxford to do a doctorate; however, this was the default option rather than a settled intention. I tried to become a journalist, writing from America to the BBC, The Guardian and The Times, inviting them to take me on – an invitation which they lost no time in declining.

So it was Oxford, and the academy. More precisely, it was a thesis on the political thought of G. D. H. Cole, the scourge of Fabian centralism and an apostle of a creed of participatory democracy known as guild socialism. Happy days were spent poring over Cole’s papers in Nuffield College, or interviewing remaining members of the Cole Group, which had been a central fixture of left-wing life in Oxford in the 1930s. The redoubtable Margaret Cole, widow and ferocious guardian of her husband’s legacy, came to visit, gamely agreeing to be picked up from the station on the back of my motorbike. Even happier days were spent meeting, and marrying, Moira, my Welsh wife.

Yet I was still trying to break out of the academy. I applied to be one of the researchers for the Labour shadow Cabinet (posts which were funded by Rowntree and so known as ‘chocolate soldiers’) and was invited to interview at the House of Commons. Most of the shadow Cabinet appeared to be in the room, with Roy Jenkins presiding. The interview seemed to be going extremely well and my hopes were steadily rising. Then, Tony Crosland, whose 1956 book The Future of Socialism was the key text of post-war social democracy, slowly uncurled himself from his near-somnolent state on the chair next to mine and, through a fog of cheroot smoke, drawled out his single devastating question: ‘So, tell us Mr Wright, how would you solve the problems of the British economy?’ That was the moment I failed to get the job. A long and kindly letter from Douglas Houghton, the chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party, informed me that it had been very close and that I was the runner-up, but that the job had gone to someone called Matthew Oakeshott (now Lord Oakeshott, the Liberal Democrat peer). It seemed that I was destined to remain in scholarly life, despite my periodic attempts at escape.

There followed a first lecturing job at the University College of North Wales in Bangor, where I encountered the troubling politics of nationalism (and tried valiantly to learn just enough Welsh to impress my wife’s Welsh-speaking parents). On one occasion the college was closed by a student protest demanding that Hebrew should be taught through the medium of Welsh. This was a more complicated kind of politics than I had previously experienced, organised around different kinds of division. Then I spotted an opportunity to work in a more worldly version of a university and moved to the extramural department at the University of Birmingham, which was to become my academic home. I felt I was joining a great academic tradition that included the Workers’ Educational Association and the university extension movement, bringing learning to the masses and nourishing an active democracy. In fact, this tradition was already in decline (and in universities now has, disgracefully, almost entirely disappeared), but I believed in it and felt proud to be part of it.

It was also great fun. The department was full of wonderful characters (like my roommate Harry, the son of Marie Stopes, the patron saint of modern birth control) and housed in a magnificent Edwardian mansion on the edge of the leafy Edgbaston campus that had once been the family home of the screw-making Nettlefold family. Its majestic grounds were now the university’s botanical garden. From this base we sallied forth, armed with boxes of books, to run courses on every subject under the sun in towns and villages from Birmingham to the Welsh border, aided by organising tutors who were resident in the different parts of our great educational empire. Looking back, it feels like a lost golden age.

I settled into a pattern of life that, typically, involved writing during the day and teaching in the evening and, often, also on Saturdays. Much inventiveness was needed, especially for someone teaching politics, in devising titles for courses for which people might be persuaded to sign up. One particularly unfortunate title that I remember in the departmental brochure was ‘Child Abuse – A Practitioner’s Guide’. Many of mine were called ‘The Politics of …’, with the missing word carefully crafted to sound more interesting than politics. Classes attracted a wide variety of people, which made teaching interesting, and some of the very best students were those who had brought up children and missed out on university but now wanted to do something else with their life.

There were special courses for the Armed Forces, and also for the growing army of school governors. (At one of the latter, in deepest Worcestershire, I first encountered a bolshy German parent who is now the admirably feisty Gisela Stuart MP.) A class at a Birmingham mosque was regularly interrupted by the call to prayer; and one for miners was held in a Staffordshire town that I did not know would one day be part of my constituency. I also ran regular day conferences, particularly aimed at schools, on the political issues of the day, with both politicians and academics as speakers.

For one of these conferences, on the issues raised by the Brandt report on international development, I had secured the former Prime Minister Edward Heath as a speaker. Thinking I needed a suitably impressive vehicle to transport him from New Street station to the university, I asked Harry, who drove one of those vast elongated Citröens, if he would oblige. He readily agreed. The only problem was that he was a notoriously dangerous driver – colleagues would routinely inquire if Harry was on the road before setting out for a class in the same vicinity. My first meeting with him had been interrupted by a call from his solicitor, with Harry enquiring ‘how this relates to the last dangerous driving charge I had’. Perhaps it was his mother’s fault: she had prevented him riding a bike in case it damaged his reproductive organs.

A message came from the Vice-Chancellor that under no circumstances would Harry be allowed to transport a former Prime Minister to the university. I therefore turned to another colleague, who had recently inherited an ancient Rover with all the trimmings and was happy to help, although he warned me that the car sometimes had difficulty engaging first gear. On the appointed day, Heath emerged from the station accompanied by his security officer, and we set off for the university. All went well, until we had to stop at the traffic lights near Edgbaston cricket ground. The lights changed, and changed again, and again, but the car resolutely refused to find first gear. The security man started looking around anxiously. Heath remained impassive and uncommunicative. Finally, the car lurched forward – and the rest of the day, including Heath’s impressive speech (who by then had relaxed), went well.

I had not given up on practical politics, though. Soon after arriving in Birmingham I had been selected as the Labour candidate for Kidderminster. The constituency was based in the carpet-making town but also covered a large chunk of lovely Worcestershire countryside. When our first child was born the local paper announced it as a ‘Victory for Labour’; but it was to be the only one. There was no chance of winning – the seat was securely held for the Conservatives by the scion of the Bulmer cider family, and the 1978–9 ‘winter of discontent’ was the final nail in the Labour government’s coffin – but the whole campaign was thoroughly enjoyable. It was also my first experience of the Liberals, who ran the local council, and their particular style of campaigning, which seemed to involve making up fictitious ‘facts’ (including the fact that they were going to win) and shamelessly disseminating them. It was a style of campaigning – making promises in the sure knowledge that they would never have to be implemented – that eventually caught up with them when they formed part of a coalition government.

Among my party members were Edward (E. P.) and Dorothy Thompson, great historians and figures of the left, who lived in a manor house near Worcester. Edward’s The Making of the English Working Class had become a key Labour movement text, but when I made the mistake at one party meeting of referring to it, and saying how much we valued having them with us, they almost resigned on the spot. Campaigning around the villages in Edward’s Land Rover one day we were greeted by an old man who declared that it was the first time he had seen a Labour candidate since 1945. This immediately persuaded Edward, an inveterate romantic, that the historical tide was moving in our direction. What was actually happening was that the Labour Party was in the process of putting itself out of power for a generation.

These were dismal political years, at least for social democrats, as Labour turned itself into a basket case after 1979. I recalled a remark by my old LSE tutor, Bob McKenzie (of election television ‘swing-o-meter’ fame), that he could not understand why the Trots spent all their time attacking the Labour Party when they could easily take it over instead. This they now did, to the despair of traditional party supporters and to the benefit of the Thatcherised Conservative Party. In this bleak political environment, I concentrated on producing books and, with my wife’s help, babies.

I was now watching politics, and writing about it, much more than doing it. My civic energies went into school government and the local community health council rather than into the Labour Party. I did chair the Birmingham Fabian Society, though, where we regularly agonised over the state of the moderate left with visiting politicians. Our most memorable meeting was with Shirley Williams, her last as a member of the Labour Party, just as the Gang of Four was breaking away to set up the Social Democratic Party (SDP). I introduced her by quoting, mischievously, from a book by her father, George Catlin, on the importance of loyalty in politics. The room was packed, the atmosphere charged, and Shirley was magnificent. For many people present it was the evening when they decided whether to stay in or leave the Labour Party. I knew that I could never abandon the party that had always been part of my family’s life; but I was deeply unhappy that it had got itself into such a state that Shirley Williams felt she had to give up on it.

Then a far more profound misery descended, which had nothing to do with politics, and which changed everything. In 1985 our youngest son died, aged two years and eight months, after heart surgery that was supposed to put him right. Nothing can prepare a parent for this. Years later, I told a television interviewer how this experience created a particular bond between Gordon Brown and David Cameron, behind and beyond the antagonism. At the time I could not see how the rest of life would be possible. I even searched for solace, and solidarity, in churchyards among the graves of young children from a distant age when infant deaths were common. I tried to escape my grief by railing against the slum that was then Birmingham Children’s Hospital, where children had to be wheeled outside on their way to the operating theatre, and the lack of paediatric intensive care beds meant that several times our son was prepared for surgery that was then postponed. This was – almost literally – the roof that needed fixing by a future Labour government. I became a public service reformer because of my frustration at the impossibility of getting information about surgical success rates at different hospitals. The lack of bereavement support at the hospital drove me to compile a research report on the whole issue. Yet I was really only trying to find ways to cope with what had happened.

There was something else, though, which I like to think changed everything afterwards. Partly it was a feeling that nothing worse could ever happen, and that this provided a kind of protection in the rest of life. Partly a sharp sense of perspective about what mattered and what did not. I like to think, whether true or not, that this fostered a spirit of independence, a feeling of detachment, of not being beholden to anyone or anything, and an impatience with stuff that did not really matter. Perhaps all this was a construct I had created for myself, a way of keeping my son as an active presence in my life, but I wanted it to be true.

‡

Becoming a Member of Parliament in 1992 was the result of several happy accidents. I was not scouring the country for a seat, but when I was encouraged by some local party members in the Staffordshire constituency of Cannock & Burntwood, a Tory-held marginal just north of Birmingham, to put my name forward, I readily did so. I nearly missed the selection meeting as my ancient Volvo broke down on the M6 and I only arrived just in time, accompanied by an AA escort. I had no expectation of winning, assuming that some union stitch-up had probably fixed the outcome, and almost decided there was no point in turning up for the meeting the following morning when the result would be announced.

In the event, I did turn up, and was taken aback to hear that I had won. My good fortune was in having found a constituency in which there was not only a genuinely open contest, but which had already adopted a one-member-one-vote selection system long before the party as a whole. Many years later an elderly party member, recalling this selection meeting, told me, ‘Nobody had ever talked to us like you did.’ When I asked her what she meant, hoping to hear about my compelling oratory, she said I was ‘like a lecturer, walking about’.

Over the years the constituency changed its boundaries, and its name, but my happy relationship with it endured. When the local party disagreed with my stance on the hunting ban and I invited party members to instruct me how to vote, as they clearly had much stronger views on the issue than me, they adamantly refused to do so.

There was also the good fortune of a win in 1992, by a nail-biting 1,000 votes or so, one of only a couple of dozen Labour gains in that election. Despite its recovery from the nadir of the 1980s, it was still obvious on the ground that Labour had not yet done enough to win an election. The Tories had dumped Mrs Thatcher and installed John Major, and could still play the tax card against Labour with telling effect. Our own local contest had a sharp ideological edge to it (at least for our supporters) as the incumbent MP, Gerald Howarth, had been Mrs Thatcher’s PPS and was a prominent member of the right-wing ‘No Turning Back’ group. For us, he represented the handbag over the water. Evicting him was therefore a particular pleasure, although (as I later pointed out to him) it enabled him to find a much safer seat elsewhere. He was not grateful for this favour at the time.

Cannock & Burntwood was a traditional coal-mining constituency, straddling the Cannock Chase coalfield, but in 1992 there was only one pit left. Taken down it for the first time, I was in the cage at the surface, preparing to plunge into the depths, when one of the men slammed the cage door shut with the reassuring words, ‘We have the worst safety record of any pit in the country.’ It is impossible not to feel a particular privilege in representing coal miners, and we waged a passionate but futile campaign to save the pit from the mass closure programme that the Conservative government had embarked upon. The issue dominated my Parliamentary apprenticeship. On a cold December dawn in 1993 some of us waited at the pit head for the final shift to come up. Then, led by a lone piper, and with banners flying, there was a march that snaked its way from the pit and through the town. It was extraordinarily moving, as people clapped and cried and shouted support, knowing that this was the end not just of a pit but of a way of life that had sustained the community for a century. The future was going to be a different country.

Having won a fourth successive election, despite everything, the Conservatives began to think that they might be in office for ever. Many on the Labour side had come to the same gloomy conclusion. Commentators who should have known better started announcing the arrival of one-party rule. That was the background against which a small group, all of us newly elected MPs, formed a New Agenda Forum to ‘promote new thinking on key political issues to help the Labour Party regain the political initiative’. The Guardian promptly dubbed us the ‘Cerebral Tendency’. In a pamphlet we announced: ‘Our message is one of modernization and renewal’. We argued that it was time to ditch Clause IV as the statement of what the party stood for, and drafted our own replacement for it.

I was also part of a discussion group that had been convened at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), the Labour-leaning think tank, to talk through these same issues. At our first gathering someone pointed out that our meetings would clash with those of the party’s National Executive Committee. David Miliband (then at IPPR) promptly suggested that we call ourselves the Not the NEC Group, to merry agreement. That evening we were going through the division lobby in the Commons when John Smith, who had replaced Neil Kinnock as Labour leader, said he wanted to see me (‘laddie’) in his room. This sounded very promising for my future career. It turned out he had heard about our little group and was furious about its name. (‘If Peter Hain gets to hear about this he will make all kinds of trouble.’) I tried to explain that it was just a joke, but he found it anything but funny. It had to be stopped, now. This was my first brush with a more muscular kind of politics.

Under John Smith’s leadership, Labour strengthened its position; but there was underlying tension between those who believed in ‘one more heave’ and those who thought something more radical would be needed to restore Labour’s fortunes. I was emphatically, and vociferously, in the latter camp. So was Tony Blair, then shadow Home Secretary. Sharing a table with him in the Commons cafeteria one evening, I said I hoped he was ready for the red boxes and the black cars that were on their way. He simply did not believe this, still insisting that we had ‘not yet done enough’ to convince people that we were a genuinely changed party and that something more fundamental was required.

On the morning of John Smith’s sudden death I was sitting on a London bus behind two elderly women. Looking at the newspaper billboard announcing his death, one said, ‘He was a good man,’ and the other replied, ‘Yes, he was.’ That’s all, nothing more, but they had said it all. In the constituency we held our own memorial service and put a bench in the churchyard in his memory. This meant that Labour needed a new leader, and I had no doubt that it should be Tony Blair – I was the first Labour MP to say so publicly (which probably also secured my first entry in Gordon Brown’s little black book). From this moment the New Labour Project was to be constructed in earnest, with Blair and Brown as its joint architects.

For me, this was the renewal of social democracy, the necessity of which I had argued for in print and speech. It was not just an electoral tactic, but an essential revisionism. At this time my name regularly appeared in the ‘ones to watch’ newspaper features on the intellectual movers and shakers of New Labour. Yet this was misleading, as I was never an insider; in fact, Peter Mandelson once informed me that my role was that of a ‘useful outrider’. I am not sure that I was content with that role, or whether I actively chose it. It would at least have been nice to be invited inside the tent. The nearest I got was a note from Tony Blair in 1995, saying he did not want to put me on the front bench at the moment – ‘I think you are better (for me) doing what you are doing now. But you know I am a huge admirer of you and your time will come!’

From time to time I would be asked by Blair’s office to supply material for speeches, usually to buttress points he wanted to make with historical references or quotations. On one occasion, just as I was finishing a Friday evening constituency advice surgery, Blair himself rang with a query. He was doing a big speech the following day and wanted to ask me, ‘What is socialism, exactly?’, and could I supply a couple of good quotes? This was refreshing and alarming in equal measure; and not a request that could have been made by any previous Labour leader. It was a reminder that Blair really was in a class of his own.

A request of a different kind came from Gordon Brown. The decision had been taken to change Clause IV, and Gordon asked if I would rapidly put together a collection of writings with him (helped by a researcher he would give me) that would demonstrate the rich variety of socialist thought. As we talked he began tossing assorted volumes at me from around his book-filled room that he thought might be useful, most of which he had probably read. Here was a genuine intellectual, although his purpose was firmly practical. The book (a rather handsome anthology called Values, Visions and Voices) was duly produced and launched by Brown and Blair at the Labour conference. I had assumed (and hoped) that this collaboration would lead to a continued relationship with Gordon, but it did not. As his rivalry with Blair intensified, I suspect this complex, formidable, driven and unforgiving man thought I was in the wrong camp.

In fact, I was in a sort of no man’s land of my own. Much of my Parliamentary activity at this time was taken up with pressing for various political reforms, such as the protection of whistleblowers and the curbing of patronage, and I was given a Parliamentary award for my work by the Campaign for Freedom of Information. I was also very critical of Parliament itself, and of its expenses, which did not make me very clubbable. In one debate on MPs’ pay and expenses soon after I arrived in the place, I described the advice I had been given on my first day by a colleague on how I could maximise my travel expenses. (This involved buying a certain make of diesel car with a big engine so that you could claim the highest rate for engine size while also maximising miles to the gallon.) Leaving the chamber, having recounted the story, I was accosted by a senior colleague who warned me icily that I ‘would never be forgiven for what I had just said’. It was my first encounter with the Parliamentary omerta on the matter of expenses. This same colleague, Stuart Bell, went on to preside over the Parliamentary expenses system that, a decade and a half later, exploded over us all.

It was an early indication of just how toxic this issue was. I described in a New Statesman article in 1996 (under the heading ‘Palace of Low-grade Corruptions’, reprinted on pages 190–95) how I had endeavoured to pursue the issue, and the resistance I had met. ‘What really matters,’ I wrote, ‘is that when the rest of the world is having to learn to live with the requirements of audit and performance indicators, the Westminster club will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid scrutiny of its own inner workings. That makes it ripe for assorted low-grade corruptions.’ As it turned out, of course, also for some higher-grade ones. When I coupled this with an argument about the defects of Parliament, and Parliamentarians, as instruments of effective scrutiny, it is not surprising if I was viewed with suspicion and irritation by many of my Parliamentary colleagues.

By the time of the 1997 election, when Conservative disintegration combined with Blairite transformation had made the outcome certain, I was playing a leading role in the promotion of the New Labour cause. When Penguin wanted to produce a set of election specials, I was asked to do the Why Vote Labour? one (with David Willetts writing the Conservative equivalent). However, I had also written a widely-noticed Fabian pamphlet (with the title Who WinsDares) in the run-up to the election in which I argued that it was not enough to win the election if it did not also mean a new kind of politics: ‘There may be those who think that a governing project can be assembled and contained within the parameters of spin-doctoring, media-managing, polling and focus-grouping. It cannot. I am prepared to believe that these black arts are indispensable to the conduct of modern politics; but I am not prepared to accept that they provide a substitute for a governing vision.’

Worryingly, at least for my political career, words like ‘thoughtful’ and (worse) ‘independent-minded’ had started to become routinely attached to my name in the public prints. This made me doubt whether I would be given a job in the Blair government, despite my public profile and regular appearance on speculative lists of likely names. The journalist John Kampfner has recorded how, when he once mentioned my name to Peter Mandelson, ‘Mandelson bristled and replied: “The trouble with him is that he thinks too much.”’ This was not a good omen. My ideal job would have given me a role in implementing some of the political reforms for which I had been arguing, or advancing the cause of public service reform. In the event, I was summoned to attend upon the new Lord Chancellor, Tony Blair’s old pupil-master, Derry Irvine.

I had never met him before. He said he wanted me to be his Parliamentary Private Secretary, an elaborate name for the lowest form of sub-ministerial life. When I said that he did not know me, he replied, ‘Tony has told me all about you.’ I then pointed out that I was not a lawyer, to which he retorted that there were already too many of those. I had resolved that I would only take a proper job or nothing, but he went on to explain that I would not be a ‘normal PPS’ but ‘more of a special adviser’ and that he would arrange for me to have access to all the official papers. As Derry was also to preside over the Cabinet committee implementing the government’s big constitutional reform programme, this was an attractive proposal and I accepted. It was further agreed that I could continue to speak freely on all other issues except those relating to the work of the department.

The problem was that it did not work out like this. Within days, the official machine had clearly told Derry that there was no role of the kind he had offered me, and there was certainly going to be no routine access to departmental papers. He wrote to say that we should ‘abstain from any mutual discussion’ of constitutional matters, and that anything I said or wrote on such matters should make clear that it had no connection with my departmental role in relation to him (‘the message needs to be unambiguous’). It was already clear that Derry and I had entered into a relationship that was going to cause difficulties for both of us.

Matters rapidly became much worse, as comments by me on assorted issues were invariably (and inevitably) trailed in the press as coming from ‘Irvine aide’, despite my insistence that they had nothing to do with him. His proximity to Blair made him an especially inviting media target. When, in the course of one interview, I said that I could see no reason why Charles should not marry Camilla at some point if he wanted to (‘better a happy king than an unhappy one’), and that the Church would simply have to like it or lump it – all of which seemed to me to be pretty obvious – the balloon went up. Derry had to write me an official letter which began, ominously, ‘Alastair Campbell has contacted me about your recent interview on the Today