Standing Down

by Rosa Prince

  Why are you leaving?

  I’ve passed my seventieth birthday. I didn’t want to carry on with less vigour and energy than I think you need to do the job. I’m not convinced by those colleagues who carry on and want to die in harness. It’s a hard job, you have to have a lot of energy, a lot of commitment.

  Will you feel a pang on 7 May – and what are you going to do next?

  No, I won’t feel a terrible sense of loss. I absolutely feel now it was the right decision to take, to stand down.

  I’ll carry on with various housing projects that I’m involved with and have a bit more time for myself and a bit more time for my wife, who is MP for Plymouth North. I’ll probably write something too.

  What are your thoughts for future MPs?

  This is an extraordinary privilege and a huge opportunity that you can use to very good effect. There are lots of things that can be achieved. The great secret is to identify, the old adage, the art of the possible.

  The constituency is the bedrock. The great lesson is, it’s so varied and things change so unpredictably that you should never give up, never despair, because even when things look very glum and bleak, situations can change very, very rapidly. I think that’s an important lesson for life – never give up.

  ***

  Nick Raynsford: the full story

  Nick Raynsford had a tough start in life. His father was killed in the Second World War before he was born and his mother died in a car crash when he was eleven. Raised by grandparents who were Conservative in outlook, it was at university that he found himself drawn to the Labour Party.

  He went on to run a housing charity and in the mid-1970s became involved in a campaign to introduce what would become the 1977 Homeless Person’s Act. The experience inspired him to consider a career in politics.

  In 1986, a vacancy came up in Fulham, the London borough he was now living in, and he threw his hat into the ring. He had expected to have a couple of years to establish himself, but within weeks the sitting Conservative MP died suddenly. Mr Raynsford was elected in the ensuing by-election.

  He says:

  I certainly didn’t start my adult life thinking I was going to be an MP. It was much more a product of circumstances.

  It was an extremely exciting three months, the first three months of 1986. I enjoyed it enormously, the excitement of the by-election but also the ability to articulate some of the deeply held beliefs I had about what was needed at a time when politics was much more divided than it is today.

  As polling day approached, Mr Raynsford found himself subject to ‘huge attention’, and he became increasingly confident of victory:

  I think we knew by the end of the campaign. The opinion polls were pretty consistent and we’d got a very strong lead. But nonetheless, I’d never done this before, so there was an element of nervousness about it. You are at times desperately nervous about not letting the side down and making a mistake.

  Mr Raynsford didn’t let the side down, winning with a majority of more than 3,000. Despite his familiarity with Parliament from his campaigning days, he found his arrival at the Commons ‘quite a culture shock’, but ‘was very struck by how friendly people of all parties [were]’:

  There were a few grumpy ones but the vast majority were very friendly, very helpful.

  I remember taking a seat very early on for a debate and I asked whereabouts was it reasonable to sit and was told, ‘Sit where you like, there are no reserved seats.’

  So I found somewhere three rows back in the middle, and felt that was suitably anonymous. I was listening to the debate and then Enoch Powell [the controversial anti-immigration MP] walked in.

  He’d by that stage left the Conservatives and was with the Unionists, so he was sitting on the opposition side and he came up the gangway where I was, looked at me with this absolute look of disgust as if to say ‘what has the cat brought in?’ and then swept past me and went to sit down further along the bench.

  At the next opportunity when we were both in the Lobby I went up to him and said: ‘Mr Powell, I’m very sorry if I offended you by taking your normal seat.’ He looked at me and he said: ‘Young man, there are no reserved seats in the House.’ Of course, constitutionally he was right, but I had been sitting in the place he normally would be sitting.

  The famously ‘spartan’ working conditions in the Commons led to some embarrassing moments:

  I had been working in the voluntary sector, which isn’t particularly flash, and had been used to working in pretty spartan conditions, but here it was ridiculous.

  [It] took two weeks or so before I got the office, during which time there had been a very high-profile case involving a kidnapping [of journalist John McCarthy] in the Middle East.

  His girlfriend, Jill Morel, she came and saw me as I was her MP. He’d just been kidnapped and it was a case of trying to contact the Foreign Office to get some help, and we were doing all this literally from seats in the corridors because I hadn’t got an office to work from. This just struck me as crazy.

  Mr Raynsford ‘fell into a classic trap of the inexperienced’ by acting on advice to join the committee scrutinising the bill to introduce the Channel Tunnel.

  While he found the project fascinating, ‘my life was completely taken over within a fortnight’ as the complexity of the bill tied him up in committee hearings for the rest of the parliament.

  It was a ‘great learning curve’ and he learned some valuable lessons about how to deal with complicated legislation on major rail projects – which would prove helpful when, towards the end of his career, he battled to bring Crossrail to his Woolwich constituency.

  As the general election grew nearer, Mr Raynsford admits he was ‘worried’ about the small size of his majority, but thought he was in with a shot at hanging on in Fulham. He says: ‘I hoped the momentum of a very high-profile by-election and what had seemed like a successful period of a year, during which I’d done an awful lot of casework … would tide me through. It didn’t.’

  Mr Raynsford’s pain at losing his seat was shared with the nation thanks to a film crew that had selected him, as a high-profile figure from the by-election, to star in a fly-on-the-wall programme on election night. The cameras captured his family’s response to the bad news too.

  He says:

  My middle daughter came downstairs and she didn’t know the outcome, she’d gone to bed. Poor Laura came down and said: ‘Did you win, Daddy?’ And of course I had to say no.

  The one conclusion I was able to draw from that was, I can’t have been so incompetent in the course of one year that I could actually turn a 3,500 majority into a 3,500 majority the other way.

  So I recognised that there were wider forces at work. In the by-election people had been protesting.

  Mr Raynsford’s year in Parliament had given him enough of a taste of the life of an MP for him to know he wanted to look around for another seat. With the support of his family, his quest took him south of the river to Greenwich, which Labour had lost to the SDP in a high-profile by-election to rival his own in 1986.

  He says:

  After losing in ’87 I reflected on it. I’d been here enough time to know that I really did want to do it. I was very lucky, I had connections in Greenwich, they were looking for a new Labour candidate and I seemed to fit the bill.

  Mr Raynsford took the view, having become ‘very, very hard left’ in the 1980s, that Labour needed to reassure people, both in Greenwich and nationally, that it was safe to vote for the party again.

  By 1992, Greenwich was a three-way marginal. On election night, Mr Raynsford was ‘a little bit apprehensive’ but was returned with a majority of 1,300.

  Although victory was ‘very good news’, Labour had not done enough nationally to form a government.

  When he got back to Parliament, he was struck by the ‘gloom’ among his colleagues:

  The extraordinary thing when I arrived here in April 1992 [was] just how deeply depressed the Labour Party was. The stuf
fing was completely knocked out.

  I remember a whole series of articles appearing in the press saying: ‘Is this the end, is this now a permanent Conservative regime?’ That was pretty depressing.

  The malaise was halted with the election of John Smith as Labour leader, a man who shared Mr Raynsford’s vision about the need to modernise the party:

  The selection of John Smith was so important. It was the same message I’d been trying to convey, both in Fulham when I’d been fighting that by-election and in Greenwich: that the Labour Party was essentially, fundamentally about social justice and the kind of values John Smith epitomised, probity and decency and fair play and looking after people who were disadvantaged. That had a real resonance.

  Once he was elected I was pretty confident we were going to be on the way back, but Black Wednesday of course accelerated the process, and then his death further accelerated the process because it led to Tony Blair. I think we would have won anyway, myself.

  As Labour began the process of making themselves electable, Mr Raynsford began to think about advancement:

  I wasn’t desperate to get promotion but I was conscious I’d got something reasonable to offer. I had expertise in a particular area and got very much engaged in debates on housing, on regeneration, on relevant social policy issues and was clearly making an impact, so when I was asked a year later to become one of the front-bench team it wasn’t a surprise.

  Mr Raynsford enjoyed being on the shadow front bench, relishing the prospect of shaping the debate in his field of construction. And when New Labour swept to power in the landslide of 1997, he was hopeful of being made a minister:

  First was the extraordinary period of not knowing whether I was or not. I’d been doing the shadow housing and construction and London jobs and so assumed I’d be given the job. But when the department was being set up it was changed. John Prescott [then the Deputy Prime Minister] became the secretary of state, and transport became part of the department’s brief as well as all the things I’d been involved in.

  There was suddenly a bit of a glut of other people going in and I got this awful sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that I wasn’t going to get a job.

  It was only on day four, long time after the election, that I got a call saying, ‘Why aren’t you in the department?’

  I said, ‘What department?’

  And they said, ‘Well, Environment, Transport and the Regions.’

  I said, ‘But I haven’t been appointed.’

  ‘Oh,’ they said, ‘well, we’ll just check that.’

  Then I got this incredibly embarrassed phone call back from Prescott’s private secretary saying, ‘You should have had a call, would you mind ringing Downing Street?’

  I said, ‘Do I have to ring them to ask the boss if he’s going to give me a job?’

  ‘No,’ they said, ‘it’s alright; we’ll get him to ring you.’

  There had obviously been a bit of a mix-up. I was just really pleased I had got a job. Then when it was a question of sharing out particular responsibilities in the department, the ones I was given were natural for me, other than that I didn’t get housing, which was the thing I probably knew best of all.

  I got construction and London and they were both big subjects, so I was a bit disappointed but I wasn’t unduly disappointed.

  Mr Raynsford had worked hard in opposition to build bridges with the ‘antediluvian’ construction industry in order to tackle its ‘appalling’ safety records, which bore fruit when he made the transition into government.

  He says:

  Having been shadow minister for three years and then being minister for four years was a really important experience.

  One of the conclusions I’ve drawn is [that] continuity is absolutely vital, and the present process whereby ministers come and go in very short order, often a year or two in the job, is absolutely disastrous, because it means that they simply don’t have the chance to become expert in the field. They are either dependent on their party’s existing position … or they become dependent on the civil servants.

  I found that a very happy transition from opposition to government, and a very successful one I think.

  The fatalities now are about less than 40 per cent of what they were in the late ’90s. The safety record has improved hugely, we now are reasonably confident we can do big projects. We didn’t used to be, the assumption was we would make a mess of them.

  In his role as Minister for London, Mr Raynsford was responsible for overseeing the formation of the Greater London Authority.

  He says:

  The referendum on creating the Greater London Authority was a high point. We knew we were going to win but we won every single London borough and that was so decisive. It was so clear that there was a will on the part of London to have a new authority. It felt a very creative period with a lot happening.

  I then had two years as Housing and Planning Minister. We did some very good things. I look now at the Decent Homes Programme that has transformed the condition of a lot of the housing stock and some of the pioneering work.

  Mr Raynsford took his role as Housing Minister to heart, moving into one of the government’s model projects, at the Greenwich Millennium Village. ‘It’s a great place to live and it works,’ he says. ‘That’s a high, being associated with that.’

  In 2002, have been given responsibility for the fire service, he was faced with one of the most testing times of his career, as firefighters went on strike. During negotiations to resolve the dispute, the government agreed to work with the force to bring about a different approach to the job, focusing on fire prevention:

  I remember reading myself into the job when I was given the responsibility, this figure just came out at me that half of the people who die in domestic fires were dead before the alarm was raised. So however good the firefighters were, and they’re very good at getting out to a fire quickly, it’s never going to save half the people. And so prevention’s vital. Actually I feel quite proud of the way we turned what was a potential disaster of a large dispute into an opportunity.

  In the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks on New York, Mr Raynsford was put in charge of planning for a similar disaster in London:

  We ran an exercise testing how we would respond in a simulated attack on the Underground, Bank Underground Station, in 2003. And two years later it happened for real [the 7/7 terror attacks on public transport in London].

  Some of the lessons learnt in the test were put to good effect. So that was important.

  Like many of his peers, Mr Raynsford struggled with the 2003 decision to go to war in Iraq.

  He says:

  I was actually very cautious and not very convinced about the need for us to be involved but in the end I gave my support.

  The doubts were all about whether it was really possible in a very different culture to achieve regime change.

  I gave him [Tony Blair] my support and I now think it was a mistake but there you are. That’s history. You do reach some bad judgements.

  Mr Raynsford says there will inevitably be failures and frustrations during any ministerial career: ‘There have been lots of disappointments, there always are. There are lots of failures, there are lots of missed opportunities, there are things you would like to have done better.’

  One of his disappointments is the failure in 2005 of the government to repeat its magic in London and set up a regional assembly in the north east of England.

  He puts the blame down to the change in the atmosphere post-Iraq, the lack of drive from Downing Street for a project that was largely seen as Lord Prescott’s baby, and the failure to grant the proposed assembly any substantive powers:

  The north-east referendum wasn’t a crushing disappointment because it was very clear to me for some time that we were going to lose it. It came at the wrong time and the package hadn’t got enough power. That was pretty clear way before the actual vote itself in the referendum. So on a particularly cold night in Sun
derland I was disappointed but not surprised.

  With the 2005 general election approaching he ‘let it be known I’d done my time as a Minister of State’ and that the only job he would then accept was one in Cabinet. Instead, when the call came, it was to offer a move to the Treasury in another middle-ranking position. He turned it down and returned to the back benches:

  I’d done eight years, I’d gone I think as far as I thought I was likely to go as a Minister of State. Had I been offered a Cabinet job I think I’d have taken it. I said that to John Prescott in the run-up to the 2005 election.

  He thought I deserved promotion but I didn’t get it so I just thought, this is time for me to go. I had eight really good years in the government, I enjoyed it a lot, I think I achieved quite a lot and think I was quite effective, but if nothing else was going to be offered beyond what I’d done I think at that point of time that was a point to call it a day.

  The 2005 election brought joy as well as disappointment. His former secretary, Alison Seabeck, was elected MP for Plymouth North, and some time afterwards, the two fell in love. They went on to marry in 2012.

  He says:

  We’d both been previously married and one of the curious things that happened was not working together any more after 2005; in a way it reminded us just how strongly we felt about each other.

  She was down in Plymouth half the time and I was here, but it became clear that there was a very strong bond and I’m extremely happy with the outcome.

  Mr Raynsford had assumed the transition to the back benches would be a traumatic one, but almost immediately he got caught up in the campaign to fight the government’s decision not to build a station in Woolwich on the new Crossrail line.