by Blair, Tony
It was doubly difficult for him. He had an expectation which was now to be snuffed out, to be relit in time possibly, but when, how or in what circumstances, he couldn’t know or determine. For my part – and you can believe this or not, I really don’t mind – I had been a reluctant convert to leadership. I remember that weekend after John died and being told of the Sunday Times poll about to appear, waiting for it with a bit of me still thinking how much easier things would be if it showed Gordon leading, and I would have the excuse to say to friends and supporters, ‘Well, it’s not me after all.’ But it didn’t, and probably if it had, I was too far gone by then. The point is that in so far as it is ever possible to disentangle motives at such a juncture, I did genuinely believe it was best that I took up the leadership. We were, at that point, fifteen years in Opposition and effectively pinned back in our heartlands – the North, Scotland, Wales, the inner city. Though disillusioned with the Tories, Middle England was still anxious and distrustful of us. The situation was crying out for the party to take a revolutionary modernising leap, to break out of those heartlands, to show for the first time that it could win support anywhere, that it could cross the class and employment divides, that it could unite the nation. I was the moderniser, in personality, in language, in time, feel and temperament. Split it any way you like, the damn thing was obvious in the end.
After the conversation at Amanda’s parents’ home, where they had moved as the family grew up, we sat in the kitchen looking out over the gardens and scrubland in the small indentation under Dean Bridge, near to where years ago I had done a spell on a voluntary project for the down-and-out in lieu of school corps. We were then simply managing how he could withdraw gracefully.
Later, there was a moment at Nick Ryden’s which illustrated the tenor of it all. Nick had just moved into a big old house and was doing the place up. He kindly agreed to go out and leave us alone to talk. After an hour or so Gordon got up to go to the loo. I waited downstairs. Five minutes passed. Then ten. Then fifteen. I was getting a bit alarmed. Suddenly the phone went. As it wasn’t my house, I left it. The answerphone clicked in, and Nick’s voice asked the caller to leave a message. Suddenly, out of the machine boomed another voice: ‘Tony, it’s Gordon here.’ Wow, I was really freaked out. What the hell was going on? ‘I am upstairs in the toilet,’ he went on, ‘and I can’t get out.’
In the building works, the loo door had been replaced but had no handle on the inside yet. Gordon had spent a quarter of an hour on his mobile trying to track down Nick’s number. The soundproofing in the house meant that I never heard him. I went up to the loo. ‘Withdraw from the contest or I’m leaving you in there,’ I said.
Finally, with Peter’s guidance, we made the announcement that Gordon would support me, and did it walking rather self-consciously round Palace Garden underneath Big Ben. It worked well as a piece of media management. Very quickly, however, it worked less well as a relationship.
The root of the problem was that he thought I could be an empty vessel into which the liquid that was poured was manufactured and processed by him. I was never totally sure, and still am not, whether he really did buy the illusion that I was just a frontman, carefully tutored by Peter and then, in time, Alastair, but incapable on my own. It was of course nonsense; not because I am so good, but because it is utterly impossible for anyone in a position like that to be the product of someone else. It can’t happen. There are a thousand decisions, large and small, that only the leader can take. You can’t fake body language or manufacture it. No matter how good an actor you are, in the end it’s not an act.
It’s like when people say to me: ‘Oh, so-and-so, they don’t believe in anything, they’re just a good communicator.’ As a statement about politics, it’s close to being an oxymoron, certainly for the top person. At the top, the scrutiny is microscopic. It is soul-penetrating. People see you like they do a person they see every day at work. For a time, maybe, they can be fooled or blinded, but soon, very soon in fact, they form a real judgement. Regardless of whether they agree or disagree with what you are doing, they can tell whether or not you believe in it. If you don’t have core beliefs as a politician, real path-finding instincts groomed out of conviction, you will never be a good communicator because – and this may seem corny, but it’s true – the best communication comes from the heart. To me, Bill Clinton was a classic example of this. Regularly it would be written that although he was a wondrous communicator, he didn’t believe in anything much. It was complete nonsense. It was true he didn’t believe in being a traditional Democrat; but he didn’t articulate the policy of the traditional Democrat. He was a new Democrat and that’s how he spoke and sounded, because that is what he believed. That’s why he was so good at communicating it.
Maybe Gordon thought the glass could be filled as he wished, but it was never going to be that way, and inevitably the rancour started to appear. We fell out over whether John Prescott should be deputy or not. I could live with Margaret Beckett in the position but, on balance, thought John gave something to the ticket which she didn’t. We fell out over who should run my leadership campaign. I and my people (the distinction was already taking hold) thought it couldn’t be Gordon; it was all too incestuous. I had to prepare now for the time when, as leader, I couldn’t live in the sealed compartment. He could be the favoured, but not the only. On my side we thought Jack Straw a better fit since he was from neither camp and so broadened my appeal in the PLP, and I had to explain that to Gordon. He resented it deeply.
The leadership campaign itself passed off without incident. Very few union leaders supported me, but their members did, and we won a majority of party members and MPs. A preoccupation throughout was to minimise stray comments, hostages to fortune or concessions to the left. Slowly I got used to the feeling I was going to become leader.
The sun used to shine in those days. I remember campaigning around the country, the weather hot, occasionally oppressively so. The mood was buoyant. No great breakthroughs at that point, and no particular mishaps, but it was clear I was a very different type of Labour leader. That in itself was generating interest, excitement and support. The Tories were trying to pretend it was all a chimera but, underneath the bravado, they were really worried. They knew if I turned out to possess the genuine article, with the ability to wear it so that it fitted, they were sunk.
After the nomination as leader, with John as deputy, I began to put the team in place. Peter was now fully on board, but his being so estranged him completely from Gordon, who had come to believe – and such thoughts were never alien to his thinking – that Peter had plotted my ascension all the way along. It was untrue, at least to my knowledge – though the thing with Peter is that maybe it was true but he concealed it brilliantly from me! Actually, I am sure it wasn’t. Peter always liked to play the Machiavelli figure, but in my experience he is one of the most transparent and open people I know.
In September 1994 we had had an away day at the Chewton Glen Hotel in the New Forest, then later in 1995 we held a second meeting – just the inner circle of me, Peter, Gordon, Alastair, Philip, Anji, Jonathan, Sue – at Fritham Lodge, also in the New Forest, and the home of Jonathan’s brother. News of the second meeting caused no end of problems with John Prescott, who was not there. During the course of the day, Gordon privately took Peter aside and asked him to work under his design and tutelage. Peter pointedly said that he worked for the leader. From that moment there was an enmity between them, and neither was a good enemy to have.
I was supremely fixed on getting the right person to do the media. Peter and I considered the candidates – Andy Grice of the Independent, Peter McMahon of the Scotsman, Patrick Wintour of the Guardian – but though all were good, really good, I wanted a tabloid person, and thought Alastair Campbell would be best. I’m not sure if it was great for him, but it was certainly great for me. I wanted a hard nut and had thought he was good; what I got was a genius. It was a very lucky strike.
Once we decide
d on Alastair I decided to pursue him immediately with fervour. I can be like that, when determined on an objective. I resolved not to take no for an answer. It was tricky at first. He had sorted his life out since his nervous breakdown and had given up the booze. His partner, Fiona Millar, was dubious about him taking the job, thinking correctly that it would change their lives. He was destined to go far in the media – even then he had star quality – so he would be giving up a lot. He admired and liked Peter, but also feared ending up in competition with him. For all those reasons, he was hard to persuade.
Eventually in mid-August 1994 I just pitched up at his holiday house in the part of France where he went every summer. For reasons completely beyond me, he would stay near to where Neil and Glenys Kinnock and Philip Gould and his wife Gail were also vacationing. Personally, the thought of going on holiday with people active in politics appalled me. You would never get away from it. But he liked it and they all chatted and plotted away happily.
The house was in Flassan in Provence, a département studded with those near-perfect little French villages in beautiful countryside. The attempt by the British to reconquer France by peaceful acquisition isn’t daft.
I arrived, stayed to dinner, got Neil on board, talked half the night alone with Alastair and did the deal. I gave what assurances I could on Peter. He was already anxious about Gordon’s people, but most of all, he wanted to know that I would back him to do what was necessary.
While there, I broached the subject of Clause IV, the core statement of the Labour Party credo in our constitution. After the 1992 defeat, and without discussing it with anyone, not even Gordon, I had formed a clear view that if ever I was leader, the constitution should be rewritten and the old commitments to nationalisation and state control would be dumped.
Clause IV was hallowed text repeated on every occasion by those on the left who wanted no truck with compromise or the fact that modern thinking had left its words intellectually redundant and politically calamitous. Among other things, it called for ‘the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange’. When drafted in 1917 by Sidney Webb, a great Fabian of the party’s intellectual wing, the words had actually been an attempt to avoid more Bolshevik language from the further left. Most of all, of course, it reflected prevailing international progressive thought that saw the abolition of private capital as something devoutly to be desired.
What was mainstream leftist thinking in the early twentieth century had become hopelessly unreal, even surreal, in the late-twentieth-century world in which, since 1989, even Russia had embraced the market. But could it be changed? Fortuitously, I had never been pressed on this during the leadership contest. The issue had been raised, but was never pushed to the point where I lost ‘wiggle room’. I had closed it down without closing it off.
Of course, as opponents of the change immediately pointed out once it was announced, it was largely symbolic. No one except the far left ever really believed in Clause IV as it was written. In a sense, that was my point: no one believed in it, yet no one dared remove it. What this symbolised, therefore, was not just something redundant in our constitution, but a refusal to confront reality, to change profoundly, to embrace the modern world wholeheartedly. In other words, this symbol mattered. It was a graven image, an idol. Breaking it would also change the psychology in the party that was damaging and reactionary and which was precisely what had kept us in Opposition for long periods. It had meant that although we were able erratically to do well against the Tories in response to their unpopularity, we could not govern consistently on our own merits. For me, therefore, removing Clause IV was not a gimmick or piece of good PR or a question of drafting; it was vital if Labour was to transform itself.
Progressive parties are always in love with their own emotional impulses. They have a feeling, however, that the electorate may not be of the same mind, so they are prepared to loosen them. Deep down, they wish it weren’t so, and hope against hope that maybe one day, in one possibly unique circumstance, the public will share them. It’s a delusion. They won’t. But, though progressives know that, the longing is acute and the temptation to rebind themselves to such impulses strong. The most basic impulse is to believe that if power is delivered into their hands, they will use it for the benefit of the people; and the more power, the more benefit. Hence the affinity with the state and public sector.
It’s not malignly motivated – on the contrary, the impulse is grounded in real and genuine feelings of solidarity – but history should have taught us to mitigate it in two crucial ways. First, the state and public sector can become great big vested interests that can be clumsy with, or even contradict, the public interest. Second, as people become better educated and more prosperous, they don’t necessarily want someone else, anyone else, making their choices for them. If this impulse is kept in check – i.e. active but constrained – progressive government can be a fine and liberating alternative to conservative government; but if not, not, as it were.
By advocating public ownership of the entire means of production, distribution and exchange, Clause IV didn’t represent a constraint but an invitation to unfettered indulgence. It was not healthy, wise or, unfortunately, meaningless. At a certain level, it meant a lot and the meaning was bad. Changing it was not a superficial thing; it implied a significant, deep and lasting change to the way the party thought, worked and would govern.
Part of the reason that I took so easily – many thought far too easily – to dismantling some of the sacred myths of the Labour ideology, was because of how I came to politics. As a student I had nothing to do with the Oxford Union, wasn’t a member of the Labour Club, and took virtually no part – or certainly no very focused part – in student politics. My main political influences at university were two Australians, an Indian and a Ugandan. Each of these four people gave me an insight which stayed with me and shaped my approach to politics. All were of course on the left, but were very different people with very different experiences.
My fellow student Geoff Gallop was the most active politically, and indeed in later life became premier of Western Australia. He was brilliant, with an extraordinary intellect. He taught me all the right terms and phrases of leftist politics at the time, and was a member of the International Marxist Group, one of the numerous sects – this one Trotskyist – that abounded in the 1970s. Needless to say, anyone in the Labour Party was a sell-out. They were also bitter rivals with the Communist Party people, who tended to be far better organisers, with links to trade unions and the occasional normal person. Although Geoff adhered to the framework of the Marxist dialectic, his own spirit and intellectual curiosity refused to let him be imprisoned by it. He was constantly analysing and reanalysing, breaking out with new thinking and fresh insights. He taught me how social conditions formed character; but he also taught me not to be an unthinking disciple of the left.
Peter Thomson reinforced this. He was an Australian Anglican priest, probably the most influential person in my life. He was a mature student in his mid-thirties when we were at Oxford. When he died in January 2010, I wrote this for his funeral:
There are very few people of whom you can say: he changed my life. Peter changed mine. From the first moment I met him – I was having a party in my room in St John’s and had stepped out on to the battlements, swaying a little, and looking down saw Pete looking up: ‘I’d be careful if I was you, mate’ – from that first moment, he shaped my life, gave it meaning and purpose; and set its course.
He was my friend, teacher, mentor and guide. Any good that I have done, he inspired it. Whatever my manifold faults, he made me a better person for knowing him: better, stronger, more loyal, less frail, more thankful for what I have, more hopeful about life’s possibilities, more joyful in fulfilling them, more courageous in accepting their limitations.
We often say, of someone’s passing, that they will leave a void in my life. Peter’s passing leaves no void. His presence fills it still. He was there when I ne
eded him most. He will be there for me always. The light that shone in Peter is too powerful to be diminished by death.
That is how God worked through Peter. He was, after all, the most un-vicar-like of vicars. He and the adorable Helen kept open house for us all, but though much tea was drunk, along with many other things, a vicarage tea party it wasn’t. Never have dog collar and manner of speaking been in such blissful disharmony.
But that defined Peter: a curious mixture of the traditionalist and the iconoclast. His Christianity was muscular not limp. He was a doer not a spectator; and a thinker not just a preacher. Those thoughts were bold, groundbreaking and, for our twenty-first-century world, visionary.
I have met many people, famous and successful people, whom the world would call great. I never met a greater man than Peter. I feel him with me now as I write. I will feel him beside me always. I know, even as I mourn his death, that the greatest achievement I could wish for is that at the hour of my death, he would think proudly of me.
