by Blair, Tony
Anyway, Shadow Home Secretary was not a job with many applicants. I had, however, come to the view that: a) Labour people, certainly our voters, were really anxious about law and order issues and were far more likely to be tough than soft; and b) intellectually, the polarisation of left/right views was simply and clearly wrong. The left blamed social conditions, the right blamed the individual; any halfway normal person could see – or so I thought – it was a combination of the two.
I felt personally very strongly about crime. For years I had thought it was a disgrace which people shouldn’t have to put up with and I hated the liberal middle-class attitudes towards it. Usually they weren’t the victims, but the poorer people – the very ones we said we represented – were. The hard-pressed public were similarly outraged by crime, and not just the high-end serious offences, murder and robbery and so on, but also low-level antisocial disorder and vandalism. They couldn’t be expected to put up with it while waiting for the good society to be created, to endure it patiently until someone decided to remove the hell from their street. Of course, it also stood to reason that the better educated young people were, especially young men in the inner city, the greater their chance of a job and the increased likelihood that they were going to turn out well behaved.
So: fighting crime was a personal cause, it completely fitted a new politics beyond old right and left, and since no Labour person had ever made anything of it (though there had been great reforming liberal Labour Home Secretaries like Chuter Ede and Roy Jenkins), the field was mine to play on. For once I was very confident of what I could do. And I was correct. It solidified my position in the party and the country. It achieved enormous traction. It showed leadership. I took a traditional Labour position, modernised it, made it popular and upended the Tories with it.
Ironically, in the light of what was to happen, Gordon also played an interesting role in helping me formulate what became my catchphrase.
We used to travel to the US from time to time, essentially just to get away and think. For some bizarre reason or other we would stay at the Carlyle Hotel in New York. The Carlyle is as far removed from New Labour as binge drinking is from Methodism. It is an exclusive hotel that had been used by the likes of Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart. Eartha Kitt would sing in the cafe and Woody Allen would turn up with his clarinet. At that time, people dressed for dinner, the mood was formal, the decor elegant, the ambience a little austere. Not me at all, but funnily enough I grew to like it. The management were discreet, staff were friendly and behind all the upper-class facade, it was well run.
On one occasion in late 1992 we sat there and talked. Though still ruminating on a missed chance after our election defeat, I had begun to concentrate thoroughly on the task in hand and I explained my essential approach: we should of course stress social conditions and be radical in dealing with them, but we also had to be tough on crime itself. We should make this into a Labour issue by combining a traditional and a modern stance.
This is where Gordon, certainly in those days, would show a streak of genius. ‘You mean “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said, stunned by the brilliance of it, ‘that’s exactly what I mean.’
And so it became my slogan, but unusually for a slogan, actually encapsulated a philosophical insight. Shortly after returning, I used it in a speech and really never looked back.
Pretty soon, I had the Tories reeling under the onslaught, surprised and somewhat disbelieving that a Labour person could steal ‘their’ issue, but rather admiring of the way it was done. At that time Ken Clarke was Home Secretary. It was not his scene at all. He was liberal and utterly disdainful of his party conference. After enduring months of Ken being well and truly mugged on the issue, John Major sensibly decided to move him to the Treasury, where he was in his element, and Michael Howard into the Home Secretary position, for which he was temperamentally absolutely suited. Thereafter on the issue it got harder, since Michael decisively shifted Tory tone and policy to the right and in turn posed some hard tactical choices for me. He was so hard line that there was a risk that if I followed him I would alienate the party, and if I didn’t I would alienate the voter. But by then, my reputation was secure.
I had also articulated very clearly the social context for the policy in a way no Tory could easily match after fourteen years of government and with the memories of Thatcherism still fresh. In February 1993, there had been a horrific murder of a two-year-old boy, James Bulger, by two ten-year-olds up in Merseyside. The tragedy became representative of social breakdown. The ten-year-olds were, needless to say, from broken families. The reporting of the murder was laced with descriptions of the life, times and mores of certain groups of young people whose families seemed separated from the mainstream. Very effectively I made it into a symbol of a Tory Britain in which, for all the efficiency that Thatcherism had achieved, the bonds of social and community well-being had been loosed, dangerously so.
I did it sincerely. In a widely publicised speech – really very widely publicised, unusually so for an Opposition politician who was not a party leader – I set out what I thought was wrong.
The news bulletins of the last week have been like hammer blows struck against the sleeping conscience of the country, urging us to wake up and look unflinchingly at what we see. We hear of crimes so horrific they provoke anger and disbelief in equal proportions. The headlines shock, but what shocks us more is our knowledge that in almost any city, town or village more minor versions of the same events are becoming an almost everyday part of our lives. These are the ugly manifestations of a society that is becoming unworthy of that name . . .
The historic problem of old socialism was the tendency to subsume the individual, rights, duties and all, within ideas of the ‘public good’, that at its worst came simply to mean the state. The failure of the present right is to believe that the absence of community means the presence of freedom. The task is to retrieve the notion of community from a narrow view of the state and put it to work again for the benefit of us all. A new community with a modern concept of citizenship is well overdue.
Now, I look back and think that though the problem was real, the analysis was faulty and this came to have policy consequences I describe later. However, at the time, politically, there was a big impact on my standing, which rose still further.
I was also pushing the boundaries in another direction. While in my view John Smith was not a true radical, he was intelligent enough and brave enough to realise that the party had to modernise. One part of that process was in the relationship with the unions, which then revolved around the issue of One Member One Vote (OMOV), whereby instead of union national executive committees voting on the candidate for a selection, the members should all have one vote; and there should be a more balanced vote for leader, with MPs having a say.
Today it seems completely unacceptable, ridiculous even, that the unions played such a decisive role in the selection of candidates and leader, but the Labour Party had been born out of the Labour Representation Committee, a late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century body whose aim was precisely to get ‘working men’ into Parliament. It was formed, funded and run by the unions, so the roots were inseparably intertwined, with, I’m afraid, very mixed long-term consequences.
John decided to advocate OMOV, and I put myself full square behind the campaign. The unions already had bitter memories of my decision when Shadow Employment Secretary in 1989 to end Labour’s support for the ‘closed shop’, so my espousal of this issue alienated me still further from them, but it was putting me way in front as having a clear, unequivocal position on how the party could win. After years in which Labour people were scoffed at and scorned, in which all those feelings of inferiority were resting only a little below the surface, here was someone who seemed confident, able to take it to the Tories, and in tone and style chime with the very voters we knew we needed but who had always proved elusive.
As the mont
hs rolled on, my position as an out-and-out moderniser, stepping out and leading, became ever sharper. I felt a growing inner sense of belief, almost of destiny. I felt compelled, clear, certain and above all confident of my arguments, confident that they were right and confident that they could win the country over.
My relationship with Gordon was still very close, but towards the end of 1992 I took another small yet significant pace apart. There had been the usual merry-go-round on distributing rooms for MPs, and for these purposes all MPs were the same, except government ministers who had rooms set aside for them. A set of rooms in Millbank came up. At that time Gordon and I were both in 1 Parliament Street, just opposite Westminster by the bridge. Gordon decided to move to Millbank and asked me to join him. Cherie emphatically told me I shouldn’t. Rather to my surprise, Anji said the same. I didn’t go. It was no big deal; but it was another indicator.
Gordon was doing well as Shadow Chancellor, hammering the Tories in a responsible and measured way, although he was cautious, as was his wont; and he was a little discredited, though only a very little, by having supported the ERM, and therefore when that policy fell apart, he was marginally tarnished by it. Later, he came to see this and his strictures on too much public spending as the reason why I was preferred to him, but it wasn’t so. The truth is I was out in front taking risks, and this was a time for risk-takers. I spotted that; he didn’t.
As 1993 wore on, something changed that was imperceptible to most people. I say imperceptible, but maybe he and I were both wrong on that count. The Sunday Times, for example, had had me on their magazine front cover in May 1992 with the line ‘The Leader Labour Missed’. Normally such a thing would have caused jealousy, but partly because no one took it very seriously, it didn’t.
Peter Mandelson, by then a close friend and confidant of us both, noticed the difference in me. ‘You’re getting quite the little leader,’ he teased me one day as we stood at the railings outside my front door in Richmond Crescent. We had just had a meeting and plainly my assertiveness had made its impression.
‘By which you mean . . . ?’ I enquired.
‘Don’t get above yourself,’ he replied. ‘Gordon is still the one supposed to be the next leader, you know.’
‘Hmm,’ I said.
‘Hmm.’ He looked back at me and smiled in that Peterish way. ‘I’ll have to reflect on this conversation.’
‘I wouldn’t worry,’ I laughed, concerned that, even with him, I had given too much away.
‘Oh, but I do,’ he said, giving me an affectionate pat on the shoulder and getting into his car.
In truth, I didn’t know what I thought. I wasn’t really analysing, I was just letting my instinct roam. In fact, I feared to stop and think, because I felt with increasing clarity where my instinct was roaming. It was like I was waking each day feeling stronger, more certain. Each encounter with my own party, the other party, the media, the public, would be like another layer of steel bolted on to an already well-fortified casing. I could see the opportunity to take hold of the Labour Party, rework it into an electoral machine capable of winning over the people. I could see it like I suppose someone in business spots the next great opportunity, or an artist suddenly appreciates his own creative genius, or a coach or player knows that their moment for glory is about to come.
It is an extraordinary feeling, in the sense that you feel you can achieve something beyond the ordinary. And you know it. Maybe you won’t do it, but you know at that time, in those circumstances, with those conditions, it can be done. Yes, it can be done. I can see it and I can do it.
I was fighting my feelings towards Gordon, which were still of great affection and loyalty, but I also felt the tectonic plates shifting. For ten years, my judgement had been that he should do it and I should be second in command. I liked the notion of counselling, advising, urging, directing behind the scenes, seeing my work flourish. So at that point, no, there was no overbearing desire to move centre stage, although I sensed the change within me and could almost watch my own metamorphosis. I felt on fire, with a passion and a sense of mission. I was straining at the leash, and for the first time in our discussions, I noticed things about him I hadn’t fully noticed before, an intellectual caution that was cleverly coated but didn’t seem to me to match the strategic necessity of breaking emphatically with our past.
In our first years in Parliament, 1983–5, I had intermittently kept a diary. Rereading the entries now, it is so plain that from the outset Gordon had a tendency to look for a way of reframing the question rather than acknowledging the need for the hard answer. He was brilliant, had far more knowledge of the party than me, with an acute and, even then, well-honed tactical brain; but it operated essentially within familiar and conventional parameters. Within the box he was tremendous, but he didn’t venture outside it.
By 1994, I was straying well outside the box in policy and party reform, and I began to realise, with dismay but then soberly, that something was missing. Something he lacked. Something I started to know inside I had.
Of course I had no knowledge that John would die prematurely. Except that, in a strange way, I began to think he might. I don’t mean I had a premonition or anything odd like that, but if you had asked me, in some private contest with Providence, to stake my life on whether he would or not, I would have hesitated. I kept dismissing the thought. It kept intruding.
In April 1994, Cherie and I visited Paris. I was giving a speech to INSEAD, the business school at Fontainebleau. It was to be our last weekend of normal life. We left the kids at home. Derry recommended a little hotel near Montmartre. The rooms were tiny but pretty, and the hotel was central. I remember waking up the first morning and then waking Cherie. I said to her: ‘If John dies, I will be leader, not Gordon. And somehow, I think this will happen. I just think it will.’ Is that a premonition? Not in a strict sense; but it was strange all the same.
On Saturday afternoon we went to see Schindler’s List, the Steven Spielberg movie about the man who rescued Jews from the Nazi concentration camps, saving thousands of lives.
In later life, when I had got to know Spielberg, I told him how the movie had affected me more than any I had ever seen. Steven, being actually a rather modest person, probably thought I was exaggerating in that way theatrical people do, but I wasn’t. I was spellbound throughout the whole three and a quarter hours. We sat through it, missed our dinner and talked about it long into the night.
There was a scene in it I kept coming back to. The commandant, played by Ralph Fiennes, is in his bedroom arguing with his girlfriend. He gets up to urinate, they’re still arguing and she is mocking him, just like any girlfriend might do. While in the bathroom, he spies an inmate of the camp. He takes up his rifle and shoots him. They carry on their argument. It’s her I think of. She didn’t shoot anyone; she was a bystander.
Except she wasn’t. There were no bystanders in that situation. You participate, like it or not. You take sides by inaction as much as by action. Why were the Nazis able to do these things? Because of people like him? No, because of people like her.
She was in the next room. She was proximate. The responsibility seems therefore more proximate too. But what of the situations we know about, but we are not proximate to? What of the murder distant from us, the injustice we cannot see, the pain we cannot witness but which we nonetheless know is out there? We know what is happening, proximate or not. In that case, we are not bystanders either. If we know and we fail to act, we are responsible.
A few months later, Rwanda erupted in genocide. We knew. We failed to act. We were responsible.
Not very practical, is it, as a reaction? The trouble is it’s how I feel. Whether such reactions are wise in someone charged with leading a country is another matter. But more of that later.
I returned from Paris exhilarated, and again, with this curious sensation of power, of anticipation, of prescience.
Then John did die. As I began the first of my conversations with Gordon, I was
mentally prepared. I felt I had been disingenuous with him, which in the light of later events was a mistake. Occasionally between April 1992 and May 1994, he would seek reassurance and I would give it. Why not? I knew enough of him to know that had I withdrawn that assurance, we would have been doing battle. And what the hell. Probably it was just a dumb presentiment. Probably it would never happen. Probably John would go on and be prime minister and then who knows what the future would bring.
‘We have to talk,’ I said on that May morning in Aberdeen sitting in the party office, watching people walk by on the street outside, knowing their lives would go on as before and mine was about to change forever.
I had steeled myself. I knew he would press; probably bully; maybe even threaten. But I had crossed over.
‘OK, let’s talk when you’re back down,’ he said, a slight shift in the timbre of his voice already clear.
I did a brief visit in Aberdeen as planned, to some science and technology company I seem to remember. I gave a short statement to the press outside on John’s death, expressing our sense of shock and grief. I caught the plane back down to London as soon as I decently could. I may even have spoken to Gordon again. I can’t recall. As I stepped out on to the passenger tunnel at Heathrow, a cameraman was waiting to photograph me. It gave me a jolt. So this is what it’s like, I thought.
I went into Parliament. Everyone was in a state of turmoil, genuinely shocked, genuinely sad, but of course the political wheels were turning. I bumped into Mo Mowlam who, as unsentimental as ever (or appearing to be), came straight out with it: ‘It’s got to be you. Do not on any account succumb.’ Cherie, who had driven me into London from Heathrow, had given me the same message, in even stronger terms. They hadn’t needed to tell me. My mind was made up.