by Chris Mullin
I am under pressure to take a pager. Clare pressed me about it on my first day. If she mentions it again, I shall have to succumb. Mustn’t get off on the wrong foot.
At lunchtime I made a farewell visit to Eland House. Chris, Shayne, Dan and Kerry were already hard at work on behalf of their new master. They presented me with a little parting gift, a pair of binoculars (to replace those that were stolen two years ago). I thanked them, handed in my pass and departed. On the way out I noticed that my photograph has already been removed from the gallery of ministers in the entrance lobby. The waters have closed over me. I was never there.
Back at DFID I begin to realise what a formidable politician Clare is. Everybody speaks well of her. There is a real sense of loyalty. In three years she has transformed overseas development from a backwater, firmly in the grip of the Foreign Office, to an independent department, with its own (expanding) budget, pursuing its own agenda firmly focused on the poorest people in the poorest countries. No wonder she is not popular at the Foreign Office. According to Christine, Clare had to fight hard to wrest international development from the clutches of the FO, not to mention the Department of Trade and Industry with its insistence on linking aid to trade. The recent White Paper on globalisation is written with beautiful clarity. Quite unlike any other I have seen. That’s mainly down to Clare, too. Apparently the early drafts were risible.
Clare has one other strong card: she gets on well with Gordon. Only this afternoon she managed to wring £9 million out of the Treasury for the Indian earthquake.
Wednesday, 31 January
A succession of departmental directors have passed through my office in the last two days. This one in charge of Asia, this one Africa and so on. I find myself at ease with them. The world is now my oyster. We chat effortlessly about this country and that. Everyone seems happy. They are doing work in which they believe. Maybe I will like it here after all. The only fly in the ointment is Europe. About 30 per cent of our aid budget is dispensed via Brussels and, when it moves at all, goes mainly to middle-income countries around the Mediterranean, which we are not at all happy about.
Thursday, 1 February
The first public engagement of my new incarnation: a speech at the Royal Institute of Civil Engineers on the social and environmental consequences of dams. The first draft was undeliverable and I had to rewrite it from top to bottom (nothing has changed on that front). Before catching the train in the evening, I had to make a brief speech at the Royal Commonwealth Institute in Kensington. By and large my first week has passed smoothly. The workload is well down on my previous incarnation. It is ‘Minister, will you be taking a box tonight?’ rather than ‘How many?’ Clare seems to deal with almost all the paperwork. All I see is copies. I haven’t yet signed a single letter. At Environment I signed at least 50 a night.
Friday, 2 February
Sunderland
A visit to Havelock Primary School in the most desolate part of my constituency – 83 per cent of the children are on free meals and 50 per cent on some form of special measures. I thought it would be a depressing experience, but on the contrary, it was truly uplifting. Everything bright and cheerful, in stark contrast to the mean streets outside. Pot plants on the window ledges, every square inch of wall covered in artwork, an atmosphere redolent with love and encouragement. Everyone I met was cheerful. The head, Jane Caldwell, a formidable woman, has been there nearly 30 years. She had organised breakfast clubs, evening clubs, Saturday morning clubs. There were computer classes for parents. And yet there was sadness, too. Looking closely at the children, you could see that many of them are destined to be claimed by the virulent yob culture which laps at the very gates of the school. Some arrive barely able to speak. Many of the little faces are blank and pasty. Mrs Caldwell says that, with a handful of exceptions, most parents are difficult to motivate and uninterested in the school or the progress of their children. To my surprise she said she had voted Tory most of her life (coming from a family of Unionists in Portadown). She added, however, that the Tories were now unelectable, which was encouraging.
I spent much of the day trying to persuade Keith Vaz to overrule the entry clearance officer in St Petersburg and grant a student visa to the Sri Lankan nephew of two local doctors. The matter was urgent since the boy’s Russian visa expires next week The problem is this is the second time I have asked Keith to overrule this particular entry clearance officer and he is understandably cautious, given the pasting he is getting in the press (today’s Mail has another three pages). He is also as slippery as an eel. No sooner had I caught up with him than he rang off, promising to ring back ‘within two minutes’. Then I had to begin all over again. When I eventually cornered Keith he decided to refer the matter to John Battle for a second opinion and so I had to track down John and ensure that the papers were transferred to him.
Then the officials attempted to throw a spanner in the works, by dragging in lawyers. John, who is very straight, was fuming. He says the Foreign Office is not like other departments. The officials regard ministers as a temporary inconvenience and barely conceal their contempt. Especially, they don’t like ministers who overrule them. I must have made more than 20 calls in all, but at the last moment John came up trumps. I immediately tapped out a letter bearing the good news and the boy’s uncle came round right away to collect it. ‘I knew common sense and justice would win in the end,’ he said. I forbore to tell him that common sense had nothing to do with it.
Later, Councillors Dave Allen and Brian Dodds came round with two local policemen. They brought with them case studies of criminal youths against whom, despite all Jack’s efforts, the law is completely ineffective. Time after time they are bailed when they should have been remanded in custody. They are literally walking out of the court and picking up where they left off. They had been arrested 70, 80 times and were causing mayhem. The police are tearing their hair out.
Monday, 5 February
Rain and sleet all weekend. The rivers are overflowing and south of Peterborough much of the landscape is under water.
Sat in on a meeting between Clare Short and the new head of UNESCO, a Japanese. Fascinating to watch Clare at work. She’s very direct, warm, intimate, expressive – waving her arms around like an Italian, occasionally touching her interlocutor on the forearms. She talks a lot, but knows her stuff. In years gone by, when I sat next to her on the backbenches, I used to think of her as too noisy and temperamental, but she’s also bright.
Dinner with Clive Soley in the Millbank Room. He’s worried that Gordon is plotting a takeover, gradually sliding his men and women into place. He reckons Tony Lloyd is an agent of Gordon’s and Clive wants to stop him succeeding as chairman of the parliamentary party after the election. Does any of this matter? I am sure that Gordon is plotting every hour of every day but there is not a lot we can do. In any case, it is difficult to shift a sitting prime minister who doesn’t want to be shifted. Only the Tories are that ruthless. Clive thinks that Gordon’s henchmen will start stirring as soon as the election is out of the way with a view to persuading Tony to stand down in mid-term.
It is not desirable for Gordon to succeed to the throne. He may be clever, and not a bad chancellor, but he’s also obsessive, doesn’t listen, lacks hinterland and is the architect of many of our worst mistakes – the 75 pence pension increase, the cut in single-parent benefit, to say nothing of the air traffic control and London Underground privatisations.
I cautioned Clive to say nothing to The Man about this. There is nothing he can do about Gordon and there’s no sense in making him paranoid. It is in everyone’s interests that he remains above the fray.
Tuesday, 6 February
Clare and I were jointly briefed for Questions tomorrow. Clare in action is a sight to behold. A stream of officials flow through her office to be alternatively harangued and cajoled, all with great good humour.
Every draft answer has to be rewritten. She doesn’t believe in short, factual replies. Each must
begin with a little homily, setting out the big picture. Myths must be punctured. We give out clear messages. She has some stunning statistics at her disposal. Watching her I feel so inadequate.
Later, a man from Afghanistan came to see me. He works for a Norwegian relief agency, one of the few Western agencies still functioning under the Taliban. He had a dark beard and was dressed immaculately in a tailored suit. Gentle, dignified, soft-spoken, his manner belied the brutal world in which he lives. Very quietly he spoke of catastrophe. Of half the country affected by drought; of 500 people in Herat recently dying of cold; of burying the entire family of his neighbour after their home had been hit by a shell; of being permanently at risk of being denounced as a spy. He spoke mainly in understatement – using words like ‘disappointment’ and ‘negative consequences’.
He described himself as an intellectual, adding, ‘There are not many intellectuals left in my country. You can only take so much.’ His main message was that the sanctions on which the Americans have insisted (and with which we have lamely gone along) are hurting only the poor and making it difficult for foreign aid agencies to function. ‘Sanctions are in no way linked to the human rights of the Afghans’ was how he put it. He said warlords responsible for the slaughter of thousands of his countrymen were travelling the world with impunity. He claimed that the Taliban are disintegrating. Their commanders no longer obey orders from the centre. Mainly they are engaged in plunder, feeding themselves. However, he drew no comfort from the impending collapse of the Taliban. It merely means the return of the warlords.
He stayed an hour. It was very moving. Here was a man who had emerged briefly from the darkness to which, in two or three days, he will be returning and I could offer him not one crumb of comfort.
Dinner with Clare in the Millbank Room. Our first chance to bond since my arrival. Never have I come across a politician so in love with her job. She believes – and she is right – that she has the best job in government. What’s more she has had it long enough to make her mark. Her enthusiasm is infectious. So much so that it is difficult to say no to her. She wants me to have a pager and (with a heavy heart) I found myself conceding. She says it may be necessary for me to attend some of the development bank meetings in foreign climes (the Permanent Secretary has already been complaining to her about my lack of enthusiasm for business travel) and I promised to look again at some of the propositions I have declined. As I suspected, I shan’t be asked to take many decisions. With engaging frankness she describes herself as ‘policy greedy’. I am welcome to be involved in whatever interests me, but decisions will always be hers.
Clare thinks that we will win the election by between 50 and 100 seats and that The Man will stand down halfway through the next Parliament having become the first Labour prime minister to have led us into two full Parliaments and having entrenched social democracy. Gordon, says Clare, will inevitably succeed. Blunkett, she says, has done us a lot of damage with his denigration of teachers and his endless initiatives. On Robin, with whom she has had a number of run-ins, Clare says that being Foreign Secretary has gone to his head. ‘He’s all puffed up.’ She added that the Foreign Office deeply resents the size of our budget.
Sir Frederick Lawton has died. As usual with judges, the obits are full of sycophancy. Geoffrey Lane is quoted as saying, ‘If Fred ever made a mistake, I have yet to discover what it is.’ Well, for a start, in the 1930s, he was the British Union of Fascists’ candidate for Hammersmith. Presumably even Lord Lane would agree that was a mistake? Oswald Mosley’s ’s selection under the heading ‘A fine, fighting fascist’, words I once plastered across the front of Tribune over a picture of the old rogue looking gross in his wig. This resulted in a hurt letter saying it was only a youthful indiscretion and he had joined the Conservative Party soon afterwards. More seriously, he was also party to the disgraceful appeal judgment in the Guildford Four case – a fact that none of the obituaries are unkind enough to mention.
Wednesday, 7 February
I had an exchange with a bus conductor in Brixton who was berating passengers who got off at traffic lights. ‘They’re a lot of sheep,’ he kept repeating, ‘animals have got more sense.’
‘You hate your passengers, don’t you’?
‘Yes,’ he replied cheerfully.
‘If you treated them with respect, they might treat you with more respect.’
But he would have none of it. ‘I prefer animals to humans …’ My fellow passengers just looked on expressionless. Maybe he was right.
My first Question Time. I prepared carefully, having been allocated questions on Brazil, the Balkans and St Helena, and it went off well enough. International Development questions are a good-natured affair. The Tories aren’t really interested and so no one’s trying to catch you out. Indeed most people aren’t listening. They’ve come in early to make sure they have a seat at Prime Minister’s Questions, which follow on immediately.
This evening, to the Travellers’ Club in Pall Mall for dinner with the EC development commissioner, Poul Nielsen. The EC’s aid programme is a disaster area. Most of it goes either to the undeserving or to the not very deserving and takes for ever to get there (average length of time between commitment and delivery, 3.7 years). Commissioner Neilsen, a decent but long-winded Dane, is doing his best to shake up the bureaucracy, but the struggle is an uphill one and victory by no means assured.
Friday, 9 February
Sunderland
The surgery this evening was a mix of immigration cases and neighbour disputes. One man had spent £40,000 on lawyers in a disagreement over a footpath and is now wanting to appeal. I did what I could to persuade him to cut his losses, but he is determined to go on. Eventually, the lawyers will take his house. The Sri Lankan student from St Petersburg – who I persuaded Keith Vaz to admit last week – came in with his aunt and uncle to say thank you and, despite my protestations, insisted on giving Graham, Pat and me each a box of inedible Russian chocolates. Some of my greatest triumphs are immigration cases. But I must keep absolutely quiet about them since the very mention of foreigners and immigration drives many of my constituents to apoplexy.
Monday, 12 February
No engagements, just piles of paper to leaf through, none of which require the slightest action on my part, reminiscent of my days as a copy-taster in the news room at Bush House. The truth is there is not a job for two ministers. Clare could easily manage without an undersecretary. For me the only issue is whether to own up and get out or lie back and pretend. I could while away the time travelling and inspecting. There is no shortage of tempting offers. Most colleagues envy my supposed good fortune. ‘Why are you still in the country?’ Gerald Kaufman inquired this afternoon. I shall soon have to decide whether or not I am a serious politician and, if so, pluck up the courage to return to the backbenches after the election. Ngoc says I should carry on and make the most of what I have. After all, not many people have a job they enjoy. The only issue is whether or not I am of any use. The irritating thing is that most people assume this is the ideal job for me. ‘You said this was what you wanted,’ Ann Taylor remarked the other day. Not quite, Ann. What I said was that, when the music stops, I would like to be the Secretary of State in this department, but that job is very definitely spoken for.
Thursday, 15 February
To a windowless room on the third floor of the Cabinet Office for a breakfast meeting about GM foods. I arrived early and it took 15 minutes to convince the man on the door that any such meeting was taking place. Mo Mowlam was in the chair. The basis for discussion was a paper from John Krebs, overlord of the Food Standards Agency.
It triggered a rather esoteric discussion during the course of which it became clear that just about everyone present except Michael Meacher (who told me he had been outvoted seven–one at the previous meeting) is signed up to the advantages of GM and that the main issue is how to take the public with us. Michael’s position is that the science is untested and we should await the outcome of t
he experiments. David Sainsbury said that millions of people in America and China had been eating GM foods for years without the slightest ill-effect. It reminded me of the enthusiasm for nuclear power in the early days. Let’s hope this one has a happier ending.
Friday, 16 February
I am in trouble over my refusal to attend the annual meetings of the development banks. Officials are recommending that I attend all four, plus a special meeting of the Caribbean Bank in early March. I have refused the Inter-American and Asian bank meetings (in Chile and Honolulu respectively) on the grounds that they are not a justified use of public money or ministerial time. According to Christine, they are to a large extent social events. Some delegates bring their wives, and packets of money (which British delegates are instructed to refuse) are handed out by way of ‘expenses’. I want as little as possible to do with all this. Why is it that the problems of the Third World have so often to be discussed in conditions of extreme luxury?
Sir John Vereker, our rather grand Permanent Secretary, has gone running to Clare to complain about what he regards as my failure to pull my weight and she has expressed her displeasure, so I am going to have to get organised if I am to outwit him. This evening I composed a memo to Clare putting my side of the story. I may also ring her at the weekend.
Saturday, 17 February
Sunderland
New Labour is hyperactive. Every day a new initiative. Sometimes two or three. One minute we are sorting out ‘bog standard comprehensives’. Next the papers are full of Jack Straw’s plans for courts to sit all night. He’s also talking about recruiting an elite corps of police officers who will start as inspectors, missing out such humdrum tasks as pounding the beat. How very New Labour. A fast track to the stratosphere. Only the best and the brightest need apply. Not for them the tedium of the backbenches or boring old apprenticeships. Those are for losers. Every day we upset another vested interest. Sooner or later they will all gang up on us, although it has to be said there is no sign of it so far. Inexplicably, the polls still place us miles ahead.