Standing Down

by Rosa Prince

  Why are you leaving?

  It’s a five-year parliament that made me decide. This election’s going to be in 2015, I’ll be touching sixty-nine, then I’ll be seventy-four by the following election. OK, there are plenty of other people who do stay on in their seventies, but I can do other things, including spend more time with my family.

  What are your thoughts for future MPs?

  My advice is enjoy it, it’s the best job in the world. It’s an astonishing privilege to be a Member of Parliament. Don’t keep looking over your shoulder. Get on with the job.

  ***

  Jack Straw: the full story

  With a mother and grandfather who were strongly involved in the Labour Party, politics was ‘infused’ through Jack Straw’s family.

  He first became active at the age of eight, taking numbers on polling day, and joined the party in 1960 having decided at the age of thirteen that he wanted to be an MP.

  He achieved his ambition in fewer than twenty years, first serving in a political apprenticeship as president of the National Union of Students:

  I worked for the NUS for three years altogether after I left university, which was a fantastic education.

  I hit it lucky because it was the late ’60s and the British establishment and older generation were in a high state of neurosis about what to do about the younger generation, which of course included people who liked the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, to some extent drugs, certainly sex, and then revolting students.

  I was very high profile. It’s extraordinary, sometimes I would be one of the main items on the Nine O’Clock News as it then was, [so] I’ve been well known since I’ve been a student.

  Mr Straw moved to London and studied for his Bar exams. In 1972, and still involved with the Labour Party, he became, in rapid succession, a councillor on Islington Council, where he served alongside an Alderman called Ted Castle (husband of the legendary Labour Cabinet minister Barbara Castle), and then deputy leader of the Inner London Education Authority.

  Two years later, he took the first step towards fulfilling his childhood ambition, putting his name forward for selection for the safe Conservative seat of Tonbridge & Malling. ‘I fancied a dry run,’ he says. ‘A Labour candidate was not going to win Tonbridge & Malling but I thought it would be interesting, basically, to find out if I wanted to be in politics.’

  Mr Straw came in a respectable third, eighteen votes behind the Liberal candidate, and two days later Alderman Castle asked him in for a chat. He ended up working for Mrs Castle for two years, in a post now known as a special adviser – or SPAD:

  I was flattered [but] I couldn’t make up my mind. It was a hung parliament, minority government. No one knew how long it was going to last, the country was in chaos.

  I thought it had taken a long time to get this far, with my career at the Bar, [and] the practice was doing OK.

  I finally went to see my head of chambers, a lovely old guy who was a Conservative MP. I put my dilemma to him and he said: ‘In twenty years’ time, if you had the choice, would you rather be on the High Court bench or in the British Cabinet?’

  And I heard myself say: ‘Well, in the British Cabinet.’

  It was great working for [Mrs Castle]. Like Margaret Thatcher, she could be very flirtatious [and] spent a lot of time on her appearance. She could turn on the charm with men. But underneath that was steel.

  After Mrs Castle’s departure from the Cabinet, Mr Straw went to work for Peter Shore, the Environment Secretary, while casting around for a seat of his own. When Mrs Castle decided to stand down, Mr Straw was the obvious choice to replace her in her citadel of Blackburn. After a ‘quiet election’, Mr Straw walked into Parliament as an MP for the first time at the age of thirty-two.

  With his SPAD background, Mr Straw found it easy to settle in, and was unbothered by the all-night sittings at a time where nearly half of debates ran past midnight. Divorced and newly remarried, but without children at that stage, the pace of Parliament suited him:

  I started to go up through the ranks pretty quickly. I’d done alright in the House … I’d made quite a good name for myself, so I was appointed to the junior front bench within eighteen months.

  One of the things that has enabled me to be successful as a minister was the fact that the fulfilment of my direct ambition was becoming a Member of Parliament. Some people will say: ‘That’s fine for Jack to say, he’s been on the front bench for thirty years.’ But I always saw this as my political home, so when I was a minister I was always here, even when I was Foreign Secretary.

  I like the place. I think that it’s of critical importance if you are a minister that you stay in touch with your colleagues and don’t get up yourself.

  After a happy first two years, things went suddenly and rapidly downhill when Mr Straw suffered a devastating blow to his physical and mental health during a particularly troubled time for the Labour Party. The SDP was threatening to take over as the mainstream left-of-centre force in British politics and although Mr Straw never wavered in his support for Labour, he found the defection of close friends difficult to stomach:

  ’81 was a kind of crisis period for me personally as well as for the party.

  With my background, I’d worked really, really hard to get here I’d had plenty of false starts in my life, including my first marriage, and I just thought: ‘Oh, God, so close and yet so far.’

  You used to see people in the tearoom on a Thursday night, say goodbye to them – ‘See you Monday’ – and on Monday morning you’d turn on the radio and they’d defected. They came within a whisker of forming the second-biggest party.

  Mr Straw defied the opinion polls to hold his seat in 1983 and returned to the long slog of opposition – a time he says was made bearable mainly because he began to get satisfaction both professionally and in his private life:

  I was lucky because I was advancing up the greasy pole – even though one felt the pole being pulled down into a swamp.

  Our children were young [and] at the time I was pretty thankful that although I was on the front bench, and from ’87 in the shadow Cabinet, the responsibilities were much less.

  The hours strangely … meant I could see the children in the morning, and quite often go home and then come back in the evening. So I used to take them to school, I did the doctors, the school assemblies.

  The dissatisfaction returned however in 1992, after yet another election loss. Mr Straw came close to standing down, but was talked around by an old school friend who pointed out that he never knew what might be around the corner. What turned out to be around Mr Straw’s corner following the sudden and shockingly unexpected death of John Smith, the party’s new leader, was promotion to the role of shadow Home Secretary. By then, two men who had come in at the election after him, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, were making waves in the party. But Mr Straw insists he was not envious that it was they who were considered the obvious choice for the top two jobs:

  After the ’92 election really I thought I was going to chuck it in. By that stage I was forty-five. I just thought, ‘Cripes, I’ve given up the best years of my life to the party. Maybe it’s time to go back to the Bar or go do something else. Maybe this simply ain’t going to work for me.’

  John Smith dying was extraordinary. The night before we’d been at this fundraiser for this party where John Smith had said all he wanted was the chance to serve. I think he, as he did many nights, overindulged. And died. He was only fifty-six – no age at all.

  Having then this pure chance of a change in leadership and Tony Blair becoming leader completely changed my prospects.

  What I felt about Tony and Gordon was obviously that they were extremely talented. But also that, it was more obvious with Gordon, both of them were hungry for the job, and you have to be really hungry to get the job. And for a variety of reasons I wasn’t that hungry.

  I didn’t really harbour that much of an ambition. I harboured an ambition to be in the Cabinet obviously, but not to
be leader. I don’t think I felt a sense of envy of them [Blair and Brown] because at that stage I wasn’t certain I could have done the job of Leader of the Opposition.

  I always had this inner idea that if someone came along to me and said, ‘You can be Prime Minister, Mr Straw, all you have to do is sign this form’, that I could have done the job OK. I wasn’t certain I would be able to do in real life what you need to do to get there, which is to be Leader of the Opposition, which is far and away the worst job in British politics.

  I was never particularly close to Gordon. I had much greater fellow-feeling with Tony.

  Tony asked me to be his campaign manager, partly because I’d not been particularly identified with him until then. I kept out of camps. I was Labour rather than being this camp or that camp. I was never directly associated as a Blairite or a Brownite, although I was closer to Tony; I tried to be my own man.

  The following seven years were Mr Straw’s most rewarding time in politics, as, continuing Blair’s mantra of ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’, he saw off what he describes as the ‘pseudo-left’ view of law and order policies.

  With a good three years to figure out what he wanted to do, when he got into government in 1997 he had the satisfaction of implementing his entire agenda before he was promoted to the Foreign Office in 2001:

  That period was I think intellectually the most stimulating period I’ve ever spent in politics. For me it was intellectual liberation, we were able to talk about things that we hadn’t been able to talk about for years.

  The Labour Party had been hobbled by this pseudo-left stuff about ‘you have to be nice to offenders’. [But] it does affect poor people, it affected us in our block, so push off.

  Although he had expected to be made Home Secretary, he and his family were given a rude awakening to the full repercussions of what that meant on election night 1997 when ‘suddenly there were armed police in the garden’.

  Those guards would remain with the family for the next thirteen years – a period that would involve highs and lows for his wife Alice and their two children, William and Charlotte.

  One of the highs for the children was being taken along by their father when he was formally appointed to the post:

  I went in the front door – you’re kept hanging around in the lobbies of Downing Street, pushed in little rooms as other people were dealt with. Then when [I saw] Tony, he said, ‘I’m going to make you Home Secretary.’ I said, ‘Thank you very much.’

  He came out into that lobby and there were William and Charlotte and he said: ‘I’ve made your dad Home Secretary.’

  [Charlotte] was fourteen, poor kid. It was a lot to cope with. [She] was at an inner London comprehensive school … and, just like that, Dad’s in an armoured vehicle with two large detectives and there are two big policemen with guns outside our house.

  As Home Secretary, Mr Straw introduced ‘shed-loads of legislation on the ying and the yang side’, by which he means those laws welcome to the pseudo-left, such as the Human Rights Act and Freedom of Information Act, and those that were suitably ‘tough on crime’, including tackling anti-social behaviour and youth justice reform.

  He is proud of getting the Terrorism Act onto the statute books before 9/11, of the RIPA law (the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act) and the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry.

  By 2001, after Labour’s second election victory, he was looking forward to pastures new. And was again completely shocked by what proved to be around the next corner:

  I was ready to go. It was a fantastic job, being in the Home Office, but it was a very big job. I thought that I was going to take [John] Prescott’s job, to do planning, local government, transport and so on. And then when I got in to see Tony finally on election day in 2001 he said … ‘I’m making you Foreign Secretary.’ I said: ‘Oh f***.’

  Ironically, given what was to come on 11 September, Mr Straw found his first few months in office ‘terribly quiet’. When 9/11 happened he was in his office chatting to Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, about a deployment of troops to Macedonia. Within two years he had approved the despatch of troops to Afghanistan and, in a controversy that continues to this day, Iraq:

  By that stage I’d been in the shadow Cabinet for ten years, I’d been in Cabinet for over four. You’d been tested. Not obviously on the same scale, but in the Home Office there had been crises, there had always been crises, and so you get on with it.

  The troop deployment to Afghanistan at that stage was a limited one. Strangely the environment appeared fairly benign, initially.

  The major deployment, where we suffered really serious loss of life, came in ’05, ’06, in the south in Helmand, but at that stage it was limited. And it was a pretty straightforward decision to make to send the troops into Afghanistan.

  There was no issue of legality. It was a war of necessity. Iraq was infinitely more difficult because it was a war of choice.

  As Foreign Secretary, it was Mr Straw’s role to present legislation approving the decision to go to war to a reluctant House of Commons. He fought hard to get United Nations approval, and even in early 2003 hoped that war could be avoided. When the time came to decide whether Britain should join America in a unilateral invasion, he was fully aware of the weight of the responsibility that rested on his shoulders. ‘It was by far and away the most important decision I have ever taken,’ he says, made even more agonising by the fact that his wife and children opposed the war.

  Although he failed to win over much of the country, he was at the time genuinely convinced that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, a belief he now concedes was incorrect.

  As he awaits the verdict of the Chilcot Inquiry into his role in the drama that was the decision to go to war in Iraq, he is philosophical about the likelihood that he will be blamed, and knows he is still a hate figure to some:

  I made the decision I made, which was to support the war, and I have to take the responsibilities that flow from that. I think it’s pathetic to see people wringing their hands and pretending they weren’t there. Either you’re there or you’re not. If you make a decision of that magnitude and the consequences were as adverse as they have been, you have to accept your responsibility; nothing else to do.

  The question I sometimes face is: If you knew then what you know now, would you have made the same decision? Well, no, of course I wouldn’t, but that’s true of a myriad of decisions. You don’t have that luxury when you’re a decision-maker. You make decisions looking forward not back.

  What I sought to do in my evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry was to try to explain why I came to the decisions I came to in what were circumstances of very great uncertainty about the future.

  The deceiver was Saddam Hussein. Obviously the whole prism through which Iraq is seen would have been completely different had a great onslaught of WMD been found, but, anyway, it wasn’t to be.

  I knew that, had I taken a contrary view, I could have stopped the UK’s involvement. There’s no doubt about it. I [could have] said in early March to Tony: ‘Look here, Tony, I’m not going to support this’ – and, after all, I’d seen everything – ‘I’m not going to support this, you’ve got to decide; if you go ahead with this I’ll resign.’

  If I’d resigned, the government wouldn’t have got a majority and it may have brought the government down. I’m not being precious about that, it’s just a reality. So I was aware of that responsibility.

  With the benefit of hindsight I wish we had known what we subsequently discovered, but that’s hypothetical. I knew what I was doing. I made a decision, I’m accountable for it.

  People will shout at me on the Tube sometimes, with less frequency these days, and say I’m a war criminal. It’s much less pleasant for my family, particularly given the fact that my wife and both children opposed the war.

  They were amazingly loyal actually. But it was a very difficult period.

  It has been five years since Mr Straw gave evidence to Chilcot,
and, like everyone else, he is baffled by the delay. ‘It’s just very unfortunate it’s been going on as long as it has been. It’s not fair on the bereaved relatives of people who were killed there for it to have dragged on this long.’

  In 2006, Mr Straw was taken out of the Foreign Office and despatched to be Leader of the House. He was not unhappy with the move, but was annoyed at the circumstances: Mr Blair had promised he would give him notice if he planned to move him, but failed to live up to the pledge.

  At the time there were rumours that he was shifted at the behest of US President George Bush. He thinks it was more likely an off-the-record briefing he gave to a newspaper suggesting it was time to negotiate with Hamas, which appeared ‘with his fingerprints on it’, that had irritated Downing Street:

  Tony, in fairness to him … said to me two weeks afterwards he had made a mistake.

  We had got across each other in 2006, actually not over Iraq, interestingly, but over Middle East politics, over Iran and Israel and Palestine.

  I’ve no evidence whatsoever it was to do with George Bush. Tony and I were simply ending up at a different place. At the time maybe each of us could have avoided that. I didn’t like being forced out in those circumstances, and I was doing the job fine.

  If I had stayed on I think that I could have stayed him going right out on a limb over the war in south Lebanon, which is the reason the party said: ‘It’s time for you to go.’

  [But] I enjoyed being Leader of the House, it’s a very different job. If you like this place it’s a good job.

  In a symbolic move, having done the same job for Blair, Mr Straw ran Gordon Brown’s campaign for leadership in 2007 and served as his Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor.

  The Brown Cabinet was ‘different’, he says. ‘It was OK, but Gordon’s problem was a lack of grip of decision-making.’