by Blair, Tony
Derry taught me how to think. In intellectual terms, I had only ‘passed exams’ before meeting Derry, and I hadn’t a clue how to think. I mean really think – analyse, dissect a problem from first principles, and having deconstructed it, construct a solution.
As my pupil master, he was tyrannical but a genius. I used to help write his opinions and do the pleadings. I remember the first time I wrote an opinion, I gave it to him expecting him to read it, make a comment or two and then bin it, because naturally I thought he would write it himself. He glanced at it, signed it and to my horror told me to tell the clerk to put it out. ‘Is that wise?’ I said, absolutely aghast. I mean – I was only a pupil!
‘Well,’ he said, looking up from his desk, ‘it’s your best work, isn’t it?’ He was growling and I was terrified. I stammered something about ‘Well, it was quite difficult and I hope it’s OK, but it’s my first . . .’ etc. He picked it up and literally threw it at me. ‘I don’t want your ramblings, I don’t want your half-thoughts. I want your best work, work that you personally will be responsible for. Understand?’
‘Yes,’ I said humbly.
‘Then come back to me when you’ve done it.’ And he looked back down at his desk. ‘Go on, bugger off,’ he said, without even glancing at me.
I returned with a different and better draft. This time, he told me to sit down and went through it, explaining the faults, questioning the arguments, above all drilling down to the answer. This drilling down is a process that fascinated me then, and fascinates me still.
Most people with a tricky problem grasp that it is difficult, and they think about it. Maybe they read up on it, learn what others have said. They think about which of those solutions they find best. They choose one, or they sort of ‘um and ah’ about it and decide it’s really all too difficult.
Faced with a legal problem, Derry was like the proverbial dog with a bone. He would gnaw at it, examine it, turn it over, bury it, dig it up, step back and stare at it. But he wouldn’t stop or reflect until he had got every bit of meat there was off it, had extracted its essence and mastered it. Above all, he never accepted the conventional analysis just because it was conventional. He went back to first principles, went behind and beneath the conventional, and occasionally – which was his genius – came back with analysis that looked at the problem in an entirely different way. Time and again, I recall a case that looked hopeless when seen conventionally, but was suddenly given hope by being analysed and looked at differently.
He was completely uncompromising when it came to matters of the mind. Woe betide you if you turned up half prepared, casually interested, semi-engaged. If your grammar or spelling was wrong, you missed a typo, you wrote a sentence that was sloppy, there would be an eruption – and Derry in full flow had an armoury of verbal battery that was truly impressive. I was scared of him, admired him and adored him; but most of all, I was grateful to him.
Derry was moderate Labour. He had never trifled with ultra-leftism, despised the false intellectual basis of it and regarded its adherents as dabblers. In this he was like Cherie. She too had been a major influence, not because she was my girlfriend and then wife, or even because we spent a long time discussing politics – we didn’t – but because her support for Labour was natural, sensible and born of real-life experience. She too had never had the slightest interest in intellectual or political posturing. Indeed, practically above all of my contemporaries, she stayed in the same spot politically from beginning to end. She watched as those to the left of her moved to the right of her; but, for herself, she remained in the same place. In that sense, she was like my constituency agent John Burton. Over time, I came to see practical, common-sense progressive politics as indispensable to effecting political change, as opposed to talking about it.
For my first four or five years at the Bar, I was devoted to the law. The work was so time-consuming – I worked at least twelve hours a day – that I had little time for political activism, but I was in my local party, first in Earls Court, then Marylebone, then Hackney; I wrote occasional articles for the New Statesman, at that time a serious weekly magazine; and through Derry I met John Smith and other Labour figures.
I can’t recall the date I first went to Parliament, but I recall the event and its impact on me vividly. Cherie’s dad, Tony Booth, was a long-time Labour supporter and, as a soap star and celebrity, knew a lot of Labour MPs. One was Tom Pendry. Tom was a very shrewd, capable guy, committed of course, but he had seen enough to make himself pretty worldly-wise. Labour Party politics following the defeat of 1979 was a bit like revolutionary France at the time of the Thermidorian Reaction, full of infighting, intrigue and bitter recrimination. The MPs were regarded by a large section of the party as sell-out merchants who had ‘betrayed socialism’. They responded as MPs do, with a mixture of courageous defiance, abject capitulation to the mob, and agonised dithering as they worked out which way the tumbril was heading.
Through Tony, Cherie fixed me up to see Tom. I had been toying with the idea of standing for Parliament, but I was unsure. Tom invited us to have a late-night drink in the Commons Bar, since he had to stay in the House to vote. I went in the door at the gate where they queue for PMQs. Security was looser in those days. I went up the steps, and on my left passed Westminster Hall, where Charles I had been tried, where kings, queens and the occasional statesman lay in state, and where the damaged but still recognisable statues of knights from ages past were set high up in alcoves along with the banners of ancient battles.
I walked into the cavernous Central Lobby where the public wait to meet their MPs, and I stopped. I was thunderstruck. It just hit me. This was where I wanted to be. It was very odd. Odd because so unlike me, and odd because in later times I was never known as a ‘House of Commons man’. But there and then, I had a complete presentiment: here I was going to be. This was my destiny. This was my political home. I was going to do whatever it took to enter it.
Cherie was rather startled by the effect on me. I was literally pacing up and down the place, drinking in its atmosphere, studying its architecture as if by looking at the building I would discover the secret of how to get there not by invitation, but by right. As I write this now, suddenly I retrieve the feeling from the shelf of old sentiment where it has lain so long, and I miss Parliament. By the time I finished in June 2007, almost thirty years later, I had had enough, I wanted out and away. But now, as I examine my emotions then, I get some of that passion back. The Bar had its attractions – and it was certainly a wealthier place – but to be a Member of Parliament, to be one of the legislators of the land, to walk unhindered through those hallowed corridors and chambers; what excitement, what an adventure, what a sense of arrival at a new and higher level of existence.
Tom thought me a pretty strange bird that evening. We had barely been introduced when I started plying him with questions. How do you get here? What can you do for me? Who do I see? What do I do? How shall I do it? ‘I didn’t realise you were in such a hurry,’ he said, amused at my behaving like some hyperactive child.
Tom gave me my first union introductions and invaluable advice about the low ground of Labour politics. From then on, until the Beaconsfield by-election in 1982, I pursued my goal without relenting. And then after that by-election, I redoubled in my determination until Sedgefield came to me at the very tail end of the 1979–83 Parliament. When it looked as if all was lost and I had resigned myself to sitting out the 1983 election, I had even decided to abandon the London Bar, move to Newcastle and take Nick Brown’s council seat, Nick having been chosen to fight the safe constituency of Newcastle East. The plan was then to take the neighbouring constituency of Wallsend, later to be Steve Byers’ seat. In my desperation, I had contacted Dad’s old chambers and made enquiries. In the end I never had to do it; but the fact that I would have done it is a measure of my desire.
As for my views on the Labour Party, these were evolving almost as fast as my ambition. I took care not to depart too far from
the party mainstream opinion at that time, much to the left of where it had been; but I was nevertheless aware from the beginning that we were in the wrong place. I admired Michael Foot but he was a quixotic choice over Denis Healey.
Cherie had been chosen for the Thanet North constituency, comprising Herne Bay and Margate, a Tory seat she couldn’t win. She had been asked to apply and agreed, but she was never really set on being an MP. And as I got more passionate, she saw herself more as a barrister. With her qualifications – top first in her degree, top of her year in the Bar exams – she was going to do better than me.
Her adoption as a candidate allowed me another experience that made its impact. Her dad knew Tony Benn well and asked him to speak to her party in Margate. I was deputed to pick him up at his home in Holland Park and drive him down there. By the way, Tony now is something of a national treasure. Back then, for a large part of Tory and middle-ground opinion, he was the devil. I don’t mean he was simply disagreed with; he would make people literally choke with rage. He was the bête noire above all bêtes noires for most parts of the media – which of course gave him hero status for a large part of the left.
I had never heard him speak before that night. I sat enraptured, absolutely captivated and inspired. I thought: If only I could speak like that. What impressed me was not so much the content – actually I didn’t agree with a lot of it – but the power of it, the ability to use words to move people, not simply to persuade but to propel. For days, weeks afterwards, I sat going over it in my mind. Probably to him it was one of half a dozen he did that week and was nothing special, but for me it was a revelation.
First, there was his utter confidence. From the outset, the audience were relaxed and able to listen, because they knew the speaker was in control. When he began and he looked around at them, there was no squeakiness, no uncertainty, no negative energy. It wasn’t the absence of nerves. It was the presence of self-belief. He held them, easily and naturally.
Second, he used humour. If someone can make you laugh, you are already in their power. The tension between speaker and audience, there until they get the measure of each other, evaporates.
Third, there was a thread that ran throughout the speech. There was an argument. Sometimes there was digression and the thread was momentarily obscured, but always he returned and the thread was visible once more.
Fourth, the argument was built, not plonked down. Although introduced broadly at the beginning, it was not glimpsed fully until layer upon layer of supporting words built up to it and finally the argument was brought forth. Suddenly all the words were connected, the purpose was made plain and the argument was out there, and you thought only the wilfully obdurate could not see its force and agree with it.
On the way back, we talked about Militant. I wanted to know what he thought about this Trotskyist sect that had infiltrated Labour. I was representing the party in the legal case against them and, having studied them and their methods, I knew there was no dealing with them, other than by expelling them. He didn’t agree, and I spotted the fundamental weakness in his position: he was in love with his role as idealist, as standard-bearer, as the man of principle against the unprincipled careerist MPs. He wouldn’t confront those who were actually preventing the idealism from ever being put into effect. He was the preacher, not the general. And battles aren’t won by preachers.
Eleven years later, I was leader of the Labour Party, just turned forty-one. John Smith, my predecessor, died on 12 May 1994. He had been leader for just two years. He was an outstanding figure: a minister in the last Labour government, a successful QC, a brilliant House of Commons debater, close friend of Derry and of Donald Dewar, and one of the sanest, smartest and surest people you could ever meet. In a strange way, he had been instrumental in getting me into Parliament in 1983 and therefore becoming leader of the party. When the Beaconsfield by-election came up in May 1982 and I thought about going for it, most people advised me against it since it was a no-hoper for Labour. On the contrary, John said, that was the very reason for doing it. No one could blame me, I would get national attention and be in a better position to have a crack at a good seat in the next election. He was right.
After the 1992 defeat, when Neil Kinnock lost for the second time, John was the obvious choice for leader. He did superbly in the aftermath of the Exchange Rate Mechanism debacle, when Britain was dumped unceremoniously out of the precursor to monetary union, and by May 1994 had established a solid, though not spectacular, poll lead.
But John had a health problem. In 1988, he had suffered a serious heart attack. He was at that time Shadow Chancellor. Gordon stood in for him and did magnificently, thus sealing his reputation as the coming man. After several months off, John came back, resumed his place and seemed to have recovered. However, he had, in part, suffered the attack because of his lifestyle. John was quite tubby, and though he was a great hiker, he was also a stupendous toper. He could drink in a way I have never seen before or since. I don’t mean he would ever be in drink when he needed to be sober – he was the complete professional – but if there was an Olympic medal for drinking, John would have contended with such superiority that after a few rounds the rest of the field would have simply shaken their heads and banished themselves from the track.
When he led a delegation to China in the 1980s, of which I was a member, we ended up with some local Chinese bigwigs in Shanghai. It was a jolly evening and a fair amount of whisky, mao-tai and beer was drunk. As the night progressed – punctuated by frequent toasts – things got a little more competitive, and essentially the chief bigwig and John got into a drinking bout. The Chinese guy was holding his drink in great style and it was the closest I ever saw to John being outclassed, but I gave it to John on points in the end (I had switched to green tea several hours before), after he got the entire committee up on their feet to link arms and repeatedly sing a rousing if somewhat unintelligible chorus of ‘Auld Lang Syne’.
John delighted in company. He loved going to the smoking room in the House of Commons after the vote, where in those days Tories and Labour would mix quite merrily, and where politics was taken that bit less seriously for a while. It was where F. E. Smith and Churchill would sit and talk like the two close friends they were, whatever hard words had been exchanged across the floor of the House (and some were very hard indeed). It’s a shame that such friendship is rare today, very rare. John would love to talk, reminisce, relax and wind down. Drink was a relaxant. In this regard, he was like Derry. They would never do it before a big occasion, but the two of them together betokened a monumental session that, if the time was free, could start at lunch and go on well into the night.
Unfortunately, John could take a lot of it. I say unfortunately because it meant there was no cut-off, no circuit breaker, no warning sign and insufficient punishment the day after. For me, past a very limited point I would be ill, fall asleep and for sure be punished severely the next day; but both Derry and John could get up in the morning and joke about feeling under the weather, but actually be perfectly capable of meeting a reasonably challenging day.
Of course, after the heart attack he had to cut back, and did so – he lost weight, and ‘bagged’ over a hundred Munros (Scottish mountains over 3,000 feet high) – but as the stresses of taking the leadership told on him, and as time progressed into 1993 and 1994, I noticed he was again starting to drink more than was wise. He felt like the old John, so he thought he could act like the old John. I should emphasise again that his drinking never interfered with his performance; it was an end-of-the-day thing, a holiday thing, an evening-with-close-friends thing, but his health was more fragile than he knew (or perhaps more accurately wanted to admit) and despite the constant admonitions of Elizabeth, his wife and his love, he found it hard to do without the relaxation and fellowship with which it was associated.
On the evening of 11 May 1994, there was a fund-raiser for the upcoming European elections. All the Shadow Cabinet were assembled at a reasonably smart Lon
don hotel, nothing too fancy but more upmarket than Labour was used to, as we looked to consolidate what was back then fairly limited business support.
I was only a spectator, not a speaker, hosting a table and schmoozing as one of the few members of the Shadow Cabinet who could be safely left alone with the business types. I remember John’s arrival as he came in with Elizabeth and greeted people. I remember looking into his eyes as we talked and thinking he looked very tired. I remember his speech, which was fine, though without energy. It had a good ending: ‘The opportunity to serve our country. That is all we ask.’
For myself, I longed to get away. I had an early start the next morning, flying to Aberdeen for a campaign stop for the election. My daughter Kathryn was only six and would often wake up in the night, and even Nicky and Euan, though older, couldn’t be relied on to sleep right through or not to wake early, especially as the days got lighter. One way or another, my sleep was usually interrupted, therefore the sooner I got home to bed, the better. As soon as I decently could, I stole away and got back to Richmond Crescent.
The next morning I landed at around nine at Aberdeen airport and was picked up to be driven to party HQ for a brief on the day’s campaign. On the way in the car, someone from party HQ in London phoned to tell me John had suffered a serious heart attack; no one could be sure if he would live or not.
Moments later, Gordon called, as shocked as I was. We agreed to speak when I got to HQ. Another call came through just after I’d arrived. John was dead. I tried to compose myself. He had been a big part of my life, and I liked him very much. We had spent many times together, working and socialising. I knew what was coming now he was gone: even as people tried to assimilate the news, even as they mourned, even as they reflected about John Smith as a man, as a political leader, as a friend, attention would shift and they would ask the question that is asked every time a leader falls, and immediately a leader falls: who will be the successor?