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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
During nearly two decades in the adrenaline-filled, egotistical and stressful world of Parliament, Mark Field had a remarkable capacity for getting into high-profile scrapes – most famously in his close friendship with future Prime Minister Liz Truss, his role in David Cameron's Piggate scandal and his skirmish with protesters at Mansion House. From his first foray into student politics at Oxford, where he got to know David Miliband, Jeremy Hunt, Michael Gove and Keir Starmer, to his years as a Foreign Office Minister alongside Boris Johnson and Rory Stewart, Mark casts an unsparing eye over forty years of British political life. Crammed with vivid pen portraits of some of the most influential political figures of our age, this wry and incisive memoir also reflects candidly on the changes that have taken place in the UK during Mark's lifetime. Recognising that his has been a golden generation that has benefited from a range of opportunities now denied to younger Britons, Mark emphasises how our unrealistic sense of exceptionalism risks holding us back from the urgent reform now needed in so many of our institutions. Above all, he argues that post-Brexit, it is the Conservative Party's failure to ensure we take responsibility for our own fate that has led to its rapid decline and fall.
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To Vicki, Frederick and Arabella
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Contents
Preface
In the immediate aftermath of leaving Parliament, my feelings were too raw to have contemplated writing this book. The sheer intensity of almost two decades at Westminster and the endless dramatic turbulence of my final years there made it impossibly difficult to place events into a proper perspective.
Five years have now passed since I left public life. My reflections on those times have been the cause of melancholy, unease and even a sense of guilt that it was somehow wrong to have walked away when I did, in the midst of a crisis of governance for the nation.
I was born a matter of weeks before the fabled baby boom came to an end. Ours was a golden generation that, especially in the eyes of those who have followed us, has apparently had it all. Peace in our time – not for us wartime military conscription or even being compelled to sacrifice our late teenage years to national service. Higher education almost entirely subsidised by the state, leading to plenty of graduate-level opportunities in stable, well-remunerated and fulfilling careers. Levels of economic prosperity and affluence almost unimaginable to our parents, enabling us to accumulate housing, wealth and personal capital from early adulthood onwards. Rapid xadvances in technology and progressive social changes – ensuring that we reached middle age in an era before the strains on welfare and pensions began to overwhelm the entire post-war settlement.
Yet the legacy my generation is about to pass on is lamentable. Renewed economic, political and military insecurity; living standards that are stagnating at best; the racking up of levels of collective debt that are unimaginable outside of wartime; and a sense that public utilities and services are in a state of deep crisis.
This has been an era characterised by instant gratification and short termism. Shamefully few of our political or commercial leaders make a virtue of patient accumulation, prudent investment or delayed consumption. But perhaps this lack of serious intent to address many of our nation’s structural problems is shared by all too many of us. As I witnessed first hand in the world of politics, shallowness and performative grandstanding counted for more than diligence and competent administration. Social media, and all too often its better-established cousin, the internet, encourages a constant sense of crisis, division and hysteria at a time when we need to work together.
My time in public service featured a moderate level of conventional attainment and prominence without my ever threatening to reach the upper rungs of the political ladder. Occasionally I am still stopped in the street by former constituents. Some thank me for specific assistance that I gave them (in truth this was invariably the work of my ever-attentive private office); others wish to acknowledge more generally my years of service to the local community. But without fail, each and every person I encounter observes with more than a hint of sympathy, ‘You must be glad to be out of it.’
• • •
xiI have read enough political memoirs over the years to take with a huge pinch of salt any author’s exaggerated claim this will be a ‘totally different sort of biography’.
So, in the hope that you may either be a little more trusting or credulous, let me explain at the outset how I have structured this book. Each of the eight chapters starts with a key event in my life that helped shape my future. In avoiding a slavish chronology, I have tried to scatter within this account some underlying themes that reflect the changes that have taken place in the UK over the last six decades, almost half of which I have spent in public office.
None of this story has needed embellishment, but I also hope to have interspersed some of the more serious messages with anecdotes which, sometimes at least, make clear the sheer absurdity that is part and parcel of political life.
I remain immensely proud to be English and British. In the lottery of life that is citizenship, I still regard myself as hugely fortunate to have been able to make my life here. Perhaps we should all reflect a little more on this in trying to understand the desperation of so many migrants who risk everything to reach and breach our borders.
But this is no longer the exceptional country that so often lies at the heart of our national narrative. The sooner our political and ruling class comes fully to terms with this fact, the better it will be for policy formulation at home and building relationships abroad.
I would go further still. The century since the end of the Second World War may still have two decades left to run, but when, in twenty years’ time, we reflect on Britain’s place in the world since 1945, I believe we shall look back on a period of almost consistent relative decline in our global standing. The only departure from this trend was the brief period between 1982 and 2003, bookended by xiitwo military skirmishes – the Falklands War and UK forces joining the US in combat in Iraq.
As it happens, this brief upward blip in the nation’s relative fortunes coincided precisely with the first two decades of my adult life. Only now do I realise it was a deviation from an otherwise consistent course. Looking back, I also acknowledge that even this uptick in our standing was by no means uniformly experienced in every corner of the UK.
Britain and its people are not owed a living. Our decision to leave the European Union might, or perhaps should, have been the moment when we took full responsibility for our fate. No more blaming Brussels bureaucrats for all of our problems and life’s inconveniences. Yet ever since the Covid pandemic, which helped accelerate the trend away from the previous three decades or so of relentless globalisation, the mentality of many of our fellow Britons has been to double down on that sense of entitlement. We seem to have forgotten the lessons of the past that only collective hard work, creative flair and passion for innovation will enable future generations to thrive in a highly competitive global economy.
Depressingly, in an extensive post-pandemic survey amongst developed nations, it is the British who are least likely to say work is important to them. Maybe we have also been conditioned over the years to think that whatever difficulties may arise, they will sort themselves out somehow. I worry that many of us here in the UK hold firm to a dangerously unwarranted belief that come what may, something will turn up. That it will always be ‘all right on the night’.
• • •
One of the many paradoxes of the Brexit referendum in 2016 is that xiiithe outcome, which confirmed the UK’s innate capacity to go it alone in the eyes of the narrow majority who supported it, has only exposed more starkly many of our national vulnerabilities. Indeed, I suspect that the most tangible of those elusive Brexit opportunities we have all been promised may turn out to be the overdue wake-up call to the realities of the nation’s diminished status. Farewell to all that talk of British exceptionalism.
This reflects another aspect of the generational divide that has grown ever wider in UK society: older people still regard this nation as special and exceptional in the community of nations whilst most Britons under the age of forty are entirely relaxed that their homeland is a mid-sized European nation with a proud, imperial history and an awesome international capital city attached. This younger generation find nothing wrong with the prospect of the UK enjoying the global influence that the Netherlands or Portugal have today. We no longer punch as much above our weight in international affairs as we think. Only the continued post-war diplomatic structures that have become set in stone (for now, at least) allow us to retain institutional clout beyond our true place in the world.
Our military is still widely respected, but with an army smaller than at any time since Waterloo and naval capacity a pale shadow of its Falklands-era strength only four decades ago, we have already voluntarily relinquished our first-tier military status. A succession of political and military leaders at the Ministry of Defence have overseen an utterly dismal record in defence procurement over recent years, which makes a mockery of the clamour that yet more public money should be spent here as a matter of urgency.
The self-regard of our civil service that it runs a ‘Rolls-Royce’ state is fast being exposed as an illusion through its institutional inertia to reform, poor management, inadequate focus on delivery xivand evidence of a culture of systematic covering up of incompetence in the public sector.
The overall size of our economy and its underlying anaemic rates of growth and productivity are no longer sufficient to cater for the public services that our political class continue to tell the population, especially the elderly, they are entitled to as their right. Too much of the activity in financial and professional services – such as the law, consulting and insurance, where we retain a global competitive advantage – is prone to cyclical trends. Our over-reliance on this is a perpetual economic risk. Our expertise in many industrial sectors where we have had traditional strength, such as infrastructure, transportation and construction, has in recent years been found wanting.
More generally, there is an abiding sense that nothing works anymore – an overwhelming malaise in many public services and the overriding feeling that many working in customer service have little pride in what they do.
The NHS is no longer the ‘envy of the world’. Perhaps it never was; after all, no other country of comparable size or wealth has ever sought to emulate the structure of universal healthcare that we put in place as long ago as 1948. Our universities still complacently tell themselves they are ‘world beating’, but before long, on current trends and with only a handful of exceptions, few will rank near the top of global league tables. The abject failure of officialdom and its immediate instinct to cover up incompetence and wrongdoing across much of the British state has become increasingly high profile, as we have seen over the contaminated blood, Post Office and Windrush scandals. They have also led to a serious undermining in trust, with countless vulnerable citizens being exposed to daily danger. This ‘make do and mend’ approach to life has resulted in xva nation increasingly beset by an inadequate public realm; this applies both physically and metaphorically.
The ties that have traditionally bound the constituent parts of the UK are frayed as never before. Much the same applies to any remaining sense that there is, or even should be, equity and fairness between generations of Britons. Even those research-heavy sectors where the UK remains a global leader, such as life sciences, specialist technology and pharmaceuticals, face threats to their export markets as nations seek to onshore on national security grounds. Meanwhile, in politics and public life, the UK’s reputation for coolness under pressure and institutional stability has taken a massive hit with the turbulence of recent years.
Needless to say, this questioning of British exceptionalism is an especially stark and unwelcome message for my own Conservative Party, whose core beliefs have been so inextricably tied up with respect for our nation’s history and traditions.
Furthermore, the most recent and noticeable weakening in the UK’s standing has come under coalition and Conservative governments, partly during my own time in ministerial office. So, I must take my share of collective responsibility for this decline. My party traditionally stood for sober and moderate governance, careful husbandry of the public finances and an aversion to passing on unsustainable levels of debt to future generations, and instinctive suspicion of either revolutionary upheaval or grand projects.
Arguably, conservatism’s electoral success over the past two centuries implies strongly that this passion for quiet, competent governance was not just the Conservative way but the British way. Our international standing and reputation has essentially been underpinned by our steady and reliable conduct of public affairs. As I look back on my time in Parliament and public life, it is difficult not to xviconclude that these values have been badly shaken, if not betrayed. Instead of standing up for consistency and steady administration, the Conservative Party has been associated more with chaos, disruption and instability over the past decade.
Unusually, I have known four of the six most recent Prime Ministers when they were in their twenties. This was well before any of them came to public prominence, when their political ambitions, let alone the prospect that they might one day walk through the door of 10 Downing Street, were still something of a distant dream. In comparing and contrasting their personalities and style, in an era where performative style all too often finds favour over industrious substance, it is impossible not to conclude that the UK has been badly served by the bombastic bluster of those leaders claiming that ‘our best days lie ahead’. Cheerful optimism is all well and good, but the hard daily grind of policymaking and delivery requires much more than broadbrush enthusiasm. Yet this has all too often been the blueprint of British political leadership in recent times.
• • •
The great Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope reputedly spent his first two waking hours before breakfast each and every morning writing 2,000 words of peerless prose. This inspiring level of literary output was consistently churned out at the same time as he held down a succession of demanding, serious and senior roles in the civil service. No working from home for him in those days either.
For my part, I had always rather vaguely planned to write a memoir of sorts after I had left public life for the sake of my children. Once I put my mind to the task, over a period of several months I began to haphazardly scribble down random thoughts and ideas in xviia magpie-like fashion. Matters accelerated and the fast-changing of personnel in Downing Street during summer and autumn 2022 also persuaded a number of old contacts in the media world that a personal memoir might be of wider interest. Eventually, after about a year of sketching out brief notes, I decided to take a more systematic approach. Suddenly, amidst all my other non-executive and advisory commitments, writing this book took on a life of its own. On some days I think the great man Trollope would have been impressed at my industry and output!
My initial thought had been to end this preface with a brief roadmap to life’s journey as I have experienced it. When all is said and done, however, all the nuggets of advice and wisdom come down to this: love is everything. Especially the feelings you have for family, for blood really is thicker than water. I only became a father in my forties, and the intense and unshakeable love that you have for your children is truly life’s most magnificent gift. So it is with much pride and joy that I dedicate this book to them and my wife Victoria.
The Rt Hon. Mark Field March 2025
xviii
Chapter 1
An Unwelcome Letter
10 JULY 1975
Time and its passing have always held a deep fascination for me. Since early childhood, I have had something of an obsessive memory for dates and the marking of anniversaries and events; not simply as they impact my daily life, but in long-lasting preoccupations, such as cricket, football and pop music, where a love or slavish pursuit of statistical records often prevails. Remind me of a past event and, in all likelihood, I will instantly calculate not only how long ago it took place but will also work out what was happening at the time when an equivalent period had previously elapsed.
But I cannot claim that even as keen a memory as mine is infallible. No one fully understands what triggers our earliest recollections, but in retelling many of the anecdotes set out in these pages, I have been struck by how intimately I have been able to remember the tiniest details of encounters that sometimes took place decades ago. Yet, perversely, even on these most momentous of days, there must have been endless waking hours for which I cannot even begin to account.
2The story of my political awakening starts with my eleventh birthday nearly upon me. It begins with an official-looking letter addressed to my parents arriving in the post at our then family home in Tring, the small market town lying at the far north-western tip of Hertfordshire.
Strictly speaking, my earliest political memories date back a little further still, for I was at junior school during the fabled three-day week of the winter of 1973–74. Truth be told, at the time I was far more concerned by the impact of the power cuts on school opening times, the scheduling of professional football and whether on Thursday nights we would get to watch Top of the Pops on TV and discover whether it would be Slade or Gary Glitter at number one (little did we know that Mr Glitter would be permanently cancelled from our screens half a century on, but that’s another story entirely). I am rather ashamed to admit that all of this meant far more to me than the plight of the Heath government as it fought its battles with the National Union of Mineworkers. I do vaguely remember both general elections of 1974, but again, largely in the context of having two unexpected bonus days off school, as our classrooms were used as a polling station.
I overheard the slightly tortured discussions taking place between my parents before the February contest about which way they were going to vote. The Field household bloc, for the first and only time, fell in behind that nice Mr Thorpe’s Liberal Party, as the local Conservative MP held on only by the skin of his teeth (187 votes to be precise). They switched back to their usual voting preference in the October election, but to no avail, as the seat was then lost to Labour.
Back to that letter. On 10 July 1975, I was just seven weeks away from starting secondary school education. Or that at least was the plan. My father had attended Reading School as a boarder during 3and after the Second World War. For him, his schooldays really were the happiest of his life. So it was quite easy to understand that he wanted me to follow in his footsteps. As a consequence of the Education Act of 1944, Reading School had evolved from a fee-paying establishment to a direct-grant grammar school. However, because of its history, around a fifth of its intake were still boarders. All was set. I had passed the entrance exam to take up a place in one of the boarding wings. My mother had already purchased industrial quantities of school kit and dutifully sewn my name tag into each and every item.
But we had reckoned without the telling intervention of the by now Labour-controlled Hertfordshire County Council. As the Field family were residents in one county and the state school I was set to attend was located in another, a netting-off process for me and the many other school pupils similarly affected was necessary between the two county councils. This was designed to take account of the modest marginal costs incurred by a local authority educating a non-resident child. The problem – and this was the bombshell set out in the momentous letter – was that the recently elected county council’s anti-selective education policy meant it was refusing point blank to pay for one of its resident children to attend a grammar school. The sum of £43 per term (around £400 in today’s money) lingers in the mind. To add insult to injury, those glorified pen pushers in their Hertford ivory tower would not even permit my parents to pay the disputed charge out of their own pocket.
That long summer evening turned into a fully-fledged household conference, mulling over all the options. The upshot was that, like countless other families before and since, my parents resolved to move house in order to further their children’s educational opportunities. By the autumn we had arrived in Reading and, decked out 4in an entirely different set of sporting colours, all lovingly tagged, I commenced grammar school as a day pupil.
Unsurprisingly, this little episode galvanised me into a political partisanship, which has never really waned. The politics of envy and the casual invoking of class-war rhetoric still raises my hackles like little else. Meanwhile, that first brush with patronising local government bureaucracy instilled in me a lifelong, instinctive wariness and distrust of officialdom.
Unequivocal support for the hardy few grammar schools that had survived the 1960s and 1970s cull, alongside unwavering sympathy for parental choice in selective education, was then a benchmark of Conservative Party belief. To many of my generation, it was the issue that politicised us. Perhaps younger generations of Conservatives, besides those educated at one of the 164 surviving grammar schools, feel less passionate about this matter.
More recently, the party has toyed with watering down this commitment. Shamefully, in the early years of modernisation under David Cameron the official line was that ‘grammar schools entrench social advantage’ – although in fairness, like so much else, this was never followed through when we made it into government. My old friend Graham Brady sacrificed his ministerial prospects to lead the charge that even a modern Conservative Party should support aspiration, opportunity and choice, because choice is the best way to raise outcomes for all. Like him, I have always believed in promoting excellence, rather than equality, because an obsession with ‘fairness’ will inevitably manifest itself in the levelling down of standards and opportunities.
It is all too easy to suggest that the debate about selective education is a throwback to the ideological battles of the past. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Like it or not, we 5now live in a highly competitive global economy. The emergence in my adulthood of China, India and many Asian tiger economies as the commercial superpowers of the future will profoundly affect the prospects and prosperity of future generations of Britons. The paradox I witnessed as a constituency MP is that virtually every immigrant community making their way in this country instinctively understands this. Whilst many arrive here resigned to taking up, and remaining in, unskilled and precarious employment, they avidly want and expect so much more for their children. First-rate education lies at the heart of these hopes. The abiding memory of my final election campaign was being ushered into the living room of a rather shabby social-housing flat in Pimlico by its middle-aged British-Bangladeshi tenant. He spoke very little English, but bursting with pride, he pointed to the wall on which was hung the framed degree certificates for each of his three daughters.
• • •
Many future parliamentarians are brought up in highly political families. In my case, neither of my parents could really be described as politically active – although Peter, my father, had been a member of the Young Conservatives in the early 1950s (more of a social than a political commitment in those days). Both were traditional Tory voters. My father had served for almost twenty years as an army officer and whilst posted overseas, he did not exercise his right to vote. Like some in the armed services he took the view that being prepared to fight for queen and country necessitated being above party-political considerations. Still, there was no doubting where his political allegiances lay.
Yet it was instructive for me to see how his attitudes changed 6following the Conservative victory in 1979. Politics and current affairs had always been discussed avidly at the Sunday lunch table; it was crystal clear that my father was typical of many who in the late 1970s despaired of the state of the country and relished the prospect of a radical Conservative alternative to tame the power of the trade unions. However, once Margaret Thatcher arrived and started to unashamedly implement free-market economics and shake up the cosy middle-class consensus, he found the harsh reality of this unfamiliar new world a rather alarming prospect. It was for me early evidence of how Middle England all too often wants to both have its cake and eat it.
It is the normal way of things for young people to doubt whether their parents had ever really been carefree or youthful themselves. Certainly, as my brother and I were growing up there was precious little in my father’s attitude, appearance or demeanour to suggest this to be so. From his late teens he had lived in a succession of drafty, spartan, unwelcoming military encampments – not even as a conscripted national serviceman but out of choice as a cadet at Sandhurst. That regimentation and his military discipline dominated our home life, so that even by the standards (a very important word in his lexicon) of the day, our upbringing was strict.
Pleasure in life or the right to freedom of thought or action had to be earned and even then, only after some combination of blood, sweat, toil and tears. By the time he resigned his commission, still only in his late thirties, the world he had known and understood was fast on its way to being transformed. He had entered Sandhurst seven years after the end of the Second World War, spending the rain-swept day of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation on guard outside Westminster Abbey. When Britain still had an empire, he had served in Aden, Hong Kong, Borneo and Singapore. By the time 7he left the army in 1971 – funnily enough, I only recently calculated that his overall duration in military service matched my duration in Parliament to the month – overseas postings essentially meant Germany and Northern Ireland.
The ill-discipline of life beyond the warm embrace of the army – outside in Civvy Street – is something he never really came to terms with. He railed against the lack of punctuality, slovenly dress, unpolished shoes and men having either beards or long hair… especially the long hair. There was a sole occasion when we were about eight or nine years old when he was entrusted to take my brother and me for a haircut. We returned from the barber having endured a severe shearing that would have seemed excessive even for new recruits.
My mother was horrified: ‘Peter, they look as though they have just come out of Belsen!’
At home we became accustomed to hearing my father refer to dark-skinned immigrants in terms that were not intrinsically unkind but would be regarded as totally unacceptable by all young and middle-aged Britons today. He had proudly served with Nepalese Gurkhas, Yemeni Arabs and Malays but had a patronising attitude towards other races and other nationalities that was commonplace for that era.
But aside from this all-pervading atmosphere of severity, my father loved his family deeply, if undemonstratively. Apart from a week’s solitary vacation every year fly fishing, his entire life was devoted to the duty of providing for us all, even though this meant holding down a series of mid-level management roles that, after the excitement of military life, he found neither fulfilling nor especially enjoyable. Yet in his own way he felt he was branching out from his own austere upbringing. My paternal grandfather had been a senior RAF officer who simply refused to speak with his eldest son 8for almost three years after he had the audacity to sign up for the army.
On the one hand, my father wanted his sons to have a very different life from the one he had been forced to lead. But then on the other, he felt let down somehow when we turned into different kinds of people. Not totally – my values are probably more similar to my father’s than I would care to admit. Nevertheless, my brother probably hit the nail on the head when the two of us met up in Westminster for lunch with our families on the day of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee and toasted his memory: ‘What would Daddy have made of his country seventy years on since lining the route for the coronation?’
Needless to say, like so many teenagers trying to work out their parents’ relationship, we wondered what on earth our mother saw in our father. My mother, Ulrike, had an altogether more exotic background. She was German, although having a German mother in those days was not unusual amongst families in the armed services. Indeed, intermarriage between the British and Germans was one of the lasting legacies of the huge post-war British military presence in West Germany. What was perhaps more unusual is the enormous pride I have always had in the country of my birth (I was born in October 1964 at the British Military Hospital, Hannover) and my half-German ancestry.
My mother had been a refugee twice by the age of fifteen. Born in November 1939, just outside Breslau in Silesia (now Wrocław in modern-day Poland), her family, along with much of the civilian ethnic German population, were displaced in the first few weeks of 1945, ending up with relatives near Leipzig. This part of Saxony had initially been liberated by the Americans but was eventually incorporated into Soviet-administered East Germany. Nine years later, 9my maternal grandfather, a doctor in general practice, was tipped off by a patient in the Stasi that he was about to be arrested. Travelling to Berlin – this was still seven years before the Berlin Wall was built – the family walked across from east to west and into a refugee camp. They went from there to Bielefeld, which lay in the heart of British Army territory in Rhine country. There, whilst working as a translator for NATO in the early months of 1961, my mother met a dashing young captain in the Royal Corps of Transport.
I suspect my mother was able to take advantage of the absence of clearly defined benchmarks that often arises when different cultures come into contact. A haziness, bordering on mystery, has always surrounded the precise background of her wider family in Silesia. My grandfather’s status as a Heidelberg-educated medical professional and Burschenschaft member was never in question. Like post-war West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, he bore the tell-tale facial scar of the student duelling ritual. But his precise movements during the Second World War were less clear.
My mother was bright, strikingly attractive as a young woman and in her late teens had more than a slightly wilful streak. Within four years of leaving the drab, grey conformism of East Germany and only months after her eighteenth birthday, she had arrived in north London – in Hodford Road, Golders Green, to be precise – to work as an au pair with a view to improving her English. She spent the next eighteen months there and so began her love affair with the country she would make her home for almost the entirety of her adult life.
After her death, I discovered amongst her papers, in pristine blue ink, a handwritten letter of recommendation from her employer. In due course, I was able to piece together a rather intriguing but touching story. It transpired that my mother had worked for a 10Jewish couple who had escaped Nazi Germany as children in 1938. Forever grateful to the UK for providing them with sanctuary, they also longed for the land of their birth. Above all, they wanted their children to learn the mother tongue of their own childhood and also to understand that not all Germans should be tainted by the calamity of the Hitler era. My mother was treated as family and would often observe the Friday evening Shabbat rituals. Whilst not unique, this was still rare in the late 1950s when the lived experience of the Holocaust was still so raw.
In later years, my mother would always have my undivided attention whenever she reminisced about her childhood and her tales of strife and fear as a refugee were brought to life. She spoke movingly of her flight at the age of five from Silesia, in a rickety family car packed with her mother, three siblings, nanny and whatever heirlooms and items of sentimental value could be squeezed in. On the way, they passed tens of thousands of fellow expellees (the term ethnic cleansing was not then in vogue) trudging westwards on the roadside.
But above all there would be endless stories about food – or more accurately, its scarcity – during wartime and especially the post-war period. Her first taste of chocolate, courtesy of the kind-hearted American GIs who had been billeted in her grandparents’ Leipzig home in the spring of 1945; the heartbreaking insistence every lunchtime from her painfully malnourished grandparents that the children should eat ‘as we have had such an enormous breakfast earlier’; and the constant, aching hunger of her childhood years.
As a mother, she would compensate for this privation by constantly baking. Friends would remark that there always seemed to be a cake or homemade biscuits on the go at our house. For my part, a lifelong sweet tooth was cultivated from an early age, but even 11the finest London patisseries fail to match up to my mother’s warm Streusselkuchen, Pflaumentorte and Kugelhopf.
On the matter of politics, she was always more circumspect. Her first vote, at the age of fourteen, had come at East German elections, in which her father taught her how to spoil her ballot paper. No matter; Walter Ulbricht was still safely re-elected. It amused her that once they were safely in the west, it still took many months for her parents to get used to the idea that politics need not be discussed in hushed tones when out in public.
But my mother instinctively knew of the disruption and sacrifice that politics had entailed for so many of her generation of Germans. I shall never forget her congratulating me at my 2001 count, at the very moment of my first election to Parliament. She hugged me close and whispered, ‘I am so thrilled, darling, as I know it is what you have always wanted.’ The sad, almost wistful expression in her eyes told a different story.
In his deeply moving memoir about his parents’ odyssey to north-west London, Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad, Daniel Finkelstein perfectly captures the innate insecurity all of us have begun to feel about political stability as children of refugees. It is something that in our hearts we have been able to spend most of our lives taking for granted. Yet watching the unpredictable global political tides of recent years, with some reaching even our shores, my generation has been forced to remember with a deepening sense of unease the lessons of family history that were passed down to us.
I had always felt confident that building up capital, owning a home and accumulating possessions here in the UK was providing me with the ultimate security against the grasp of arbitrary power. But that small voice of doubt has become just a little louder this past decade. I suspect that my grandfather must also have felt himself 12fortunate to have been only a student in 1923 when hyperinflation destroyed the savings of countless millions of his fellow countrymen in Germany. Yet in time, the impact of political upheaval and a desire to live in freedom twice wiped out everything he had worked for, in his mid-forties and again in his mid-fifties.
• • •
The main upheaval of my childhood existence was the almost constant moving around that is part and parcel of military life. By the time the family had finally settled in Reading, I had lived in eight homes and attended six different schools. All this by the ripe old age of eleven. One constant was my brother, Dominic, who had been born only twelve-and-a-half months after me. Our sister, Antonia, arrived a decade later. Now approaching her fiftieth birthday and even with her eldest child in her twenties, in the eyes of her two brothers she will always be the baby of the family.
Despite – or perhaps because of – our being so close in age, Dom and I were never especially friendly as we were growing up. Later on, we placed much of the blame for this on our mother. She had two older sisters, and the rivalry and sense of competition between the three daughters, often over trivial matters, was a running sore throughout their lives. This was then played out between her two sons, with a near constant pitting of one against the other as we were growing up. The simple truth was that we had very different boyhood characters. Perhaps it is inevitable that all of us parents who pride ourselves on treating each child equally are unable to understand why, when our input has been identical, the outcomes seem so very different.
Dom has always been far more intrepid than me. As my seventh 13decade approaches, I have never had any trouble declining what I regard as the dubious potential pleasures that come, for example, with abseiling, sky diving, mountaineering or potholing. Dom, by contrast, is much more of a thrill seeker. Of the two of us, he alone enjoys country sports – he is never happier than when he is out on the golf course, fishing for trout or on a shoot with his beloved black Labrador Retriever, Badger. My only contribution to the pursuit of field sports has been in the voting lobby. Whilst I have no desire to engage in such activities, nor have I ever wanted to ban others from doing so.
In middle age, we have grown much closer. Death and divorce have played their part. Our first marriages ended in our early forties and for both of us, unquestioning fraternal support was the best antidote to the attendant stress and misery. Around this time we also became orphans, so to speak. When the moment eventually arrives that you become part of your family’s oldest living generation, there is real comfort in strong sibling ties, if only to chat about early life as well as reminiscing about a uniquely shared past. All those childhood irritations and rivalries can now be laughed off; we frequently catch up by text, WhatsApp or phone and regularly enjoy long lunches together.
The gradual realisation that blood really is thicker than water has been one of the great joys of middle age. For me, it culminated a few years ago when Dom asked me to be best man at his second wedding, which is genuinely the greatest personal honour to have been bestowed on me. We have also become the ideal sounding board to each other in later life, not least when we can both indulge and find some crumbs of comfort in our mutual hypochondria.
Ours was a solid and unspectacular middle-class upbringing, albeit one with a traditionally English approach to openly 14intellectual pursuits. I cannot make the claim that there were no books in our house, but the sum total was many years’ worth of rather dog-eared copies of Reader’s Digest, a fairly pristine set of Encyclopaedia Britannica and a few dozen novels by Barbara Taylor Bradford or her German equivalents. In fairness, the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times were invariably present, albeit with especially well-thumbed back pages.
My father’s prowess and enthusiasm for team sports rubbed off on me – or at least the latter did. My only claim to sporting fame came as the opening batsman one summer for the Berkshire County under-12s. This owed more to my having a determined and effective defensive technique than any great flair; the shortcomings in my game were quickly exposed as I got older, not least as the cricket season clashed with school examinations term. But I still love watching the game, and as well as Test and county matches, I have finally been won round to the T20 format.
Football has always been an abiding passion of mine. My father supported Reading, the home town of his youth, and it was as a direct result of this – or rather, two results – that at the age of six my unlikely loyalty to Bury Football Club was sealed. I had absolutely no connection to that former mill town and have only ever visited it to watch football matches. However, during the 1970–71 season, when I was just getting interested in sport, Reading was thrashed by Bury both home and away by 5–1 in the space of a month. So, in a tribute of sorts to my father, I settled on this rather unfashionable team when sensible boys of my age were striking up allegiances for the Leeds Uniteds, Liverpools or Manchester Uniteds of this world.
It has been a labour of love, but once you are a genuine supporter, you follow your team through thick and thin – or, in Bury’s case, thin and thinner. Until they had the singular misfortune of going 15into liquidation and being expelled from the Football League in 2019, I would endeavour to watch them whenever they were playing in or around London. A low moment came when I witnessed the biggest ever league defeat in the club’s history (8–0 at Swindon Town in 1979). But I was also there in person eighteen years later when they were promoted for the first time in three decades to what is now the Championship by holding out for a nervy goalless draw at Watford. As it happened, this match took place on the Saturday before the general election that brought Tony Blair to office. I was a candidate in nearby Enfield and raced down the M25 after a morning’s campaigning activity, arriving outside Watford’s Vicarage Road moments before the afternoon kick-off. Leaving the car on a double yellow line, I rushed into the stadium and returned two hours later, exhilarated after a dismal spectacle of a match but a triumphant result. Expecting at least a parking ticket, if not a clamped front wheel or even abject evidence that my car had been towed away, I sprinted back to find my vehicle standing absolutely untouched. God bless Watford District Council parking enforcement!
Through most of my time supporting Bury, there was an uncanny inverse correlation between the club’s fortunes and that of the Conservative Party nationally. Bury were promoted in 1974, when the Tories crashed to defeat – twice. In 1979–80, the club were relegated but the Conservatives won the general election. In 1992, bad news and relegation once more for Bury was cancelled out by John Major’s victory and so on. This theory all went a bit haywire in the 2010s with promotions in 2015 and 2019, but by then the club’s finances had gone similarly awry. The bankruptcy of the club has been devastating for its loyal band of supporters and a sizeable blow for the town itself. In all honesty, it has also taken the edge off my once near-obsessional interest in the game. I suspect only fellow 16football fanatics will fully understand, but even as a grown man in my fifties, there was nowhere I would rather be on a Saturday afternoon than watching the football scores unfold. But with the demise of the club that has meant so much to me for so long, that lifelong intensity has been lost.
Nowadays, all politicians are expected to display an avid attachment to the national game, even if their professed favourite team may seem something of a public relations contrivance. This is only a fairly recent development. The notion that Anthony Eden or Harold Macmillan would have been expected to have the remotest interest in the game is frankly laughable. Even as recently as the summer of 1983, when filling in my university application form, one well-meaning piece of advice from my father was to remove any reference to football from my list of interests. The reputation of the game was then at an all-time low. Beset by hooliganism, racism, corruption and appalling facilities, few self-respecting university admissions officers would be much impressed by a potential undergraduate claiming any association with the sport. Or so we both thought. Some years later, I discovered that my tutor was in fact a passionate Stoke City fan; in the year below me was another law student who had apparently clinched his place at interview not by any evidence of great jurisprudential insight but by asking plaintively whether he really needed to hang around overnight waiting for further questioning because he had tickets the following afternoon for Tottenham Hotspur’s home match.
One affection that my father proved unable to pass on to me, however, was his love of classical music and opera. This would have been even more disconcerting had he known then that one day in the future, I would become the constituency representative for the Royal Albert Hall, the Royal Opera House and the English National 17Opera. I would always dutifully attend events when invited, and in all fairness, I came to enjoy the spectacle and sense of occasion of the proms and set-piece operatic performances. But nothing I saw or heard even in these wonderful settings has induced me to play classical music at home or on the car radio.
My musical tastes have always been unashamedly mainstream. Not for me the achingly trendy contrivance of an apparent passion for obscure indie music, reggae or the like. Through childhood and until well into my thirties, I would attentively follow the weekly pop music charts. After all, there is a good reason why bestselling pop and rock music is played relentlessly on commercial radio stations. It has widespread appeal. The classic American soft rock of the Eagles and Daryl Hall & John Oates will always be the sort of stuff I shall automatically turn to.
My teens began in 1977, the year when punk rock was all the rage. I guess by then I was already too conformist to be much interested in the rise of this cynical and derisive commercial movement that tapped into the bad-tempered mood of the time. Beyond the school gates, within which strict rules about permitted uniform were demanded and observed, I watched with a wry cynicism of my own as classmates desperately tried to reinvent themselves away from their middle-class roots. Some dressed like down-and-outs, others hung around with unsavoury local characters. Virtually all of them eventually knuckled down to their studies and made it to university. Looking and listening back on the entire punk rock farrago, it is remarkable how tame it all now seems.
The revelatory musical epiphany of 1977 for me was first listening to Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’. Legendary producer Giorgio Moroder introduced the world to the Moog synthesizer, and in the near half century since, it has been its derivatives, from disco to 18mainstream electronic dance music, that have been the soundtrack to my life.
• • •
It is so strange how snippets of memory linger in the mind for us all – relatively mundane encounters that seize your attention and stay with you for life. Around about the time that Donna Summer was topping the charts, I had a first major economic awakening in the unlikely surroundings of a Tesco supermarket. This all took place in the unlamented Butts Shopping Centre, a brutalist concrete monstrosity in central Reading mercifully long since demolished and rebranded. I must have been about thirteen years old, looking to invest my weekly pocket money on cut-price sweets and biscuits. There, in one of the aisles, stood a short, fairly well-dressed elderly man, desperately counting the coins in his outstretched hand, muttering away angrily at the rising cost of items on the shelves before him. And weeping. I don’t think I had ever seen a grown man crying before. It was a truly shocking experience. Presumably he, like many others, survived on a fixed income and inflation – then running at over 20 per cent a year – was fast eating away at his meagre savings.
This was the economic story for many as the 1970s played out: the Nixon administration had torn up the Bretton Woods settlement that had underpinned the economies of the free western world since 1944 by taking the US off the gold standard. This momentous decision, coupled with the oil shock of 1973–74, ushered in an era of inflation after decades of price stability. Control of inflation became the overriding economic and political imperative of the second half of the 1970s. As we have seen recently, the most debilitating impact 19of endemic inflation is psychological. If each and every time you go to the shops to buy staple foodstuffs you do so not knowing the price but assuming it will be higher than it was previously, trust in money, trust in the government and, before long, confidence in the entire economic system is badly shaken. Politicians of all parties have much to answer for in their mismanagement of the UK economy since the turn of the century, but once it was clear that inflation was returning with a vengeance, I believe it was absolutely right for the Sunak government to make taming it the number-one political priority.
I am about as young as it is possible to be to still remember using pre-decimalised currency. Schooling began for me in autumn 1969 and weekly dinner money then was the princely sum of seven shillings and sixpence. Reluctantly, even I have to confess that this represented pretty good value, even on the days when the much-hated cheese pie, liver or butter beans were on the menu. I am sure some of my generation blame the inherent confusion that arises from grappling with two parallel money systems for any arrested mathematical development they may have experienced. To be honest, I reckon having to deal with this from my earliest school days has been a lifelong boon to my powers of mental arithmetic, a skill all but unknown to my children. Needless to say, they are bewildered to hear that I grew up in an age before universal pocket calculators. They are horrified to learn that there were only three TV channels, none of which started broadcasting until midday and wound down programming well before midnight. And let’s not get started on the internet and digital era that they take for granted.
I remember that my mother’s calls to German relatives required the help of an operator until well into the 1970s. Mobile phones were unknown, and the red telephone boxes that proliferated contained 20dialling equipment rather than defibrillators. As a pedestrian in those days, you could walk in a straight line along any urban or suburban pavement for more than ten yards without the risk of bumping into someone gawping at some screen or other… or being obstructed by a backpack-wearing music lover whose state-of-the-art earphones have made them blissfully oblivious to the world beyond.
One of the pluses of the modern era is that the endless electronic and digital distraction has all but banished boredom. It is difficult to recall now just how stultifyingly dull Sundays were as I was growing up. Middle-class folk, even those who were non-church goers like my parents, respected the idea that Sunday was special, so my brother and I were expected to play together at home and were not permitted to see other friends or even play at the local recreation ground. No shops other than newsagents (which normally closed by noon) were open; there was no live sport to be shown on TV. It was almost always a joy to return to school the following day.
There were no health clubs, gyms or joggers; yet obesity was virtually unknown. We were all less sedentary and ate far, far less. Eating in the street was strictly frowned upon. There were no fast-food outlets with all their resultant packaging littering the pavements. Trainers were only worn on the sports field rather than as universal footwear. The consumer society had yet to take off, and every two or three days, come rain or shine, my mother, being a housewife, would shop at local stores, including specialist butchers and fishmongers that were on every high street. Only later in the 1970s did self-service supermarkets and the ubiquitous weekly shop come into vogue. Fruit and vegetables were only available ‘in season’. No one questioned this or assumed that every variety of 21food should be universally on sale throughout the year, even if that required transportation from the other side of the world.
Electronic surveillance was barely in its infancy and the mass security and civil liberties industry unknown. Even in large cities, white faces predominated and the monochrome nature of life extended to general, rather than celebrity, fashion. Dull colours, sober dress, shirt and tie, clean-shaven men and certainly none of today’s virtually universal designer stubble for anyone under the age of forty.
During my childhood, the only tattoos on show were on middle-aged men, invariably extending no further than their forearm and almost always borne by someone who had served in a non-commissioned role in the armed forces. Earrings, meanwhile, were almost always worn as a solitary pair. The modern fad for assorted face furniture, ranging from nose rings to studs and multiple clips, was unknown. A man sporting an earring was widely assumed to be making a statement about his sexual orientation.
My children are amazed by the tales of the universal pall of cigarette smoke that hung over every enclosed space. Smokers seemed to be everywhere, and their habit was tolerated on Tube trains, in shops, offices and, memorably, even on hospital wards. I voted the libertarian line when, early in my time as an MP, smoking was eventually outlawed in one of its last redoubts, the public house. Whilst I cannot claim to regret my decision to take that principled line, equally I recognise that there is, probably rightly, no going back.
The routine of an annual overseas holiday, let alone several per year, was still undeveloped other than for the wealthy, international jet setters. Of the four overseas vacations during my childhood, two were to Germany (the second of which even exotically extended to 22a few days in Switzerland and France) and the other two to Guernsey. All involved my family driving to the coast, taking a car ferry and, on arrival, staying with relatives. As a result, I did not step onto an aeroplane until a post-A levels trip with a group of friends to Rhodes at the age of nineteen. The sum total of my childhood hotel-staying experience was a five-day break at the Royal Beacon Hotel in Exmouth (where even at the age of nine I was able to detect the all-pervading sense of faded grandeur) visiting a relatively recently widowed great-aunt.
With a half century of hindsight this all sounds quaint, but it was by no means unusual. To my teenage children, this level of deprivation, as they see it, is a cause of hilarity and some sympathy, as if my childhood had been endured in almost neo-Dickensian genteel poverty. For them, holidays abroad have already included hotel stays in New York, on three Caribbean islands and two Gulf states, not to mention having a second home in Mallorca for over a decade. By contrast, my first venture beyond European shores did not happen until after my thirtieth birthday.
• • •
All of this lay well into the future as my secondary education commenced at Reading School. If I skate relatively briefly across my seven years there, it is not because I had painful memories of my schooldays that I now prefer to gloss over – rather the opposite as a matter of fact. It was – and has consistently been for many decades – one of the top-performing state schools in the country. I thrived academically and I owe the institution and several inspirational masters there more than I shall ever be able to repay. In my first year, I was subjected to one small episode of bullying; I fought back 23and received a bloodied nose but thereby won the respect of my tormentor, a notorious aggressor in the year above. The only contact I had with him during the rest of our time at the school came in occasional corridor encounters when he asked after me and offered to ‘sort out’ anyone causing me trouble. I never had any cause or inclination to take him up on his kind offer.
Although it was nominally a direct-grant grammar, Reading School was run more in the manner of a minor public school, albeit with considerably superior academic results. It was an all-boys institution with three boarding houses, Saturday morning school, pupils addressed by their surname and sporting fixtures against the top public schools in the locality, which included Eton, Harrow, Radley and Wellington. In short, the best education that no amount of money could buy.
I have never been one to suffer from imposter syndrome, save I think for that daunting first day at Reading School. I can remember as if it were yesterday the sense of awe and rising panic as I walked up the steps of its somewhat austere late-Victorian main building (still occasionally used in filming for period murder-mystery dramas). Long wooden honours boards listed in gilded lettering the names of past pupils who had served as school captain and had won scholarships to Oxford or Cambridge University. I gulped at the sense of expectation now on my shoulders – seven years on, as vice-captain and a mere Oxbridge commoner, I contrived on both counts narrowly to miss out on my little piece of immortality.
We then settled down in alphabetical order in class. Directly behind me sat the one fellow pupil who has since become a lifelong friend. How strange it is that so much hangs on such seemingly small coincidences. Or perhaps we are all so amazingly adaptable that countless other boys in class could easily have become my best 24buddy if only we had by chance been seated next to each other? Anyway, John Cullen and I still see each other regularly and are godparents to each other’s eldest child. Funnily enough, our friendship ebbed and flowed a little at school as we hung out in different groups, but the mutual admiration we had from each other’s mother meant we always stayed close. In fact, there were times as teenagers when we were convinced that domestic life would be a lot less tense for us both if we simply swapped homes.
When I reveal that John trained as an accountant with Price Waterhouse and has recently retired after almost thirty years working in financial roles with global insurance giant Aon, where he ended up as the chief financial officer of one of its main operating arms, it would be very easy to form a misleading impression of the man. He is the absolute antithesis of the staid, risk-averse bean counter that one might reasonably expect from that thumbnail CV. John is a charismatic, work-hard, play-hard force of nature, never happier than glamping at an outdoor rock festival or watching international rugby at Twickenham or his beloved Chelsea at Stamford Bridge. Several times in recent years he tried to wind down his career, but his employer invariably fought back, offering new responsibilities. Now finally in semi-retirement, he has served as deputy chair on the council of Imperial College London. Meanwhile, having generously used his share options to set up and fund a trust, he devotes much of his time and energy working alongside his wife, Cathy, on charitable endeavours for the homeless in Brighton. I reckon his career mirrors our friendship as a clear lesson in the virtues of consistency. He has always known where his talents lie, and it has been a pleasure to have shared his friendship over so many years.
At school, I studied consistently in the classroom and became something of an academic all-rounder. But it is not undue modesty 25
