I would not say no outright, I told him finally. I had to think it through. I also needed counsel from someone who knew both me and Gordon well, and whose instincts I had learned to trust. I said I wanted to discuss it with Tony. Gordon said that was fine, and we agreed that I would return by the end of the afternoon.
As soon as I left, I phoned Reinaldo. His reaction was not just surprise, but more nearly disbelief. Who could blame him? Yet as we talked through the obvious pitfalls, he came to the view that what mattered was whether the contribution I could make by returning to cabinet outweighed them. If I felt it did, I should do it. ‘But you’re right,’ he said, ‘to talk to Tony.’
When I arrived at Tony’s office in Grosvenor Square, he was in a meeting. As he ushered me in a few minutes later, it was apparent that Gordon had phoned ahead. Tony grasped my hand and laughed out loud. ‘You could not make it up!’ he said. But he added: ‘On the other hand, it has a certain logic. It’s a no-brainer. You belong in the government. The economic crisis is real. If the Prime Minister asks you to serve your country, you have to. It certainly wouldn’t look good if people got to know that you’d turned him down.’
‘He’s a nightmare to work with. It might be awful,’ I said.
‘It might be,’ Tony replied, ‘or it might not be. You don’t know. In the end, people will just say that you did your best.’
When I returned to Number 10, Gordon was waiting. ‘OK,’ I told him. ‘I’ll do it. I’m still not sure it’s the right thing for me to do. But I’ll do my best.’
‘It is the right thing,’ Gordon said. ‘I’m sure. You’ll see.’
As I left, I was in a daze. I did feel a sense of excitement, the surge of adrenalin I had almost forgotten in the gentler political climate of Brussels. The role Gordon had mapped out for me might turn out to be the most important and fulfilling of my political life. My new cabinet job would take me back to the now-renamed Department of Trade and Industry. It was the place where I’d cut my departmental teeth, where with a team of impressive civil servants I had done well, only to leave long before I had expected or hoped to. It meant that along with whatever ‘strategic’ role Gordon clearly wanted me to play, I would be at the heart of framing the government agenda where it mattered most: the economy.
I couldn’t help but smile at imagining what the media would make of my return. Outrageous? Astonishing? It was certainly both of those. But also risky? Ill-advised? Insane? I could only hope not. There was just one thing of which I was sure as I returned to my home off Regent’s Park, beyond the gaze or interest of reporters, at least until the news of the reshuffle became public. As so often when conflicting issues had to be weighed and a difficult decision made, Tony had been right. If the Prime Minister asks you to serve your country, you have to.
But I also knew that the reasons I had decided to come back, the reasons that in some ways I wanted to come back, were more complex than that. They had less to do with Gordon, or Tony, than with me. It is true that everything I had become as a politician had been marked by my relationship with New Labour’s two, very different, Prime Ministers. But the roots went back much further: to my time with Neil Kinnock, and with London Weekend Television’s Weekend World programme in the 1980s; to my experience in local government, the trade unions and youth politics in the Old Labour heyday of the 1970s; to my time at university. And to a bright white family home ten miles up the Northern Line from the Houses of Parliament, on a suburban street called Bigwood Road.
Born into Labour
Big Wood seemed much bigger to me as a child than it does now. It began at the top of our road, three minutes’ walk from our door. At the other end was an even larger expanse of green, the extension to Hampstead Heath, which bordered the neighbourhood where I spent the first two decades of my life. Hampstead Garden Suburb was the creation of Dame Henrietta Barnett, a Christian social reformer who believed that mixed communities with the feel of a country village would soften and ultimately heal the hostility of urban life. At the turn of the last century, after many years of charity work in the East End of London, she enlisted the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens and the utopian town planner Raymond Unwin to make her vision a reality.
The Suburb was less posh and intellectually self-important than Hampstead proper, which lay just over a steep incline and a mile or two nearer the centre of London. Under the Suburb’s original planning rules, there were no fences or walls between properties, only hedgerows. No shops were permitted within its boundaries. And no pubs. While the social activist in Dame Henrietta must have understood the attraction of a comradely pint at the end of a working day, the Christian in her could not abide the idea. The roads were wide, and trees were everywhere, bursting with white and pink and purple in springtime. It was a place designed for walking, and letting one’s eyes tilt skywards. The Suburb was centred on a lovely church square – St Jude’s C of E on one side, the Methodists opposite – and the adjacent girls’ school Dame Henrietta created, and which bears her name. For families, the Suburb was ideal. As a child, I loved it – an ardour that briefly dimmed when, as a teenager, I found it a bit too quiet and confining, but which I have since rediscovered. It was in London, yet not quite of it.
It was, however, very much a part of Labour London. Hampstead was home to Hugh Gaitskell and Michael Foot, but we had our share of luminaries too, notably Harold and Mary Wilson. They were near neighbours, just around the corner, and good friends. Their boys, Robin and Giles, were a little older than me and my elder brother Miles – Mary very kindly passed Giles’s rather scratchy Cub Scout jersey on to me when it was time for me to join the local pack attached to the Methodist church. My most vivid early political memory is from a few days before my eleventh birthday, when I watched the Wilsons negotiate a gaggle of camera crews and reporters, including the famous American broadcaster Walter Cronkite, as they left for Downing Street after the 1964 election.
A year later, the Wilsons invited us to Number 10 to watch Trooping the Colour. It would be ridiculous to suggest that as I walked wide-eyed through the famous black door I imagined I would return forty-five years later to watch the same ceremony as a senior minister, alongside another Labour Prime Minister. But I can’t deny that I was dazzled. Marcia Williams, Harold’s trusted political secretary, fed me large quantities of triangular smoked-salmon sandwiches and asparagus rolls. She even took my hand and led me into the Cabinet Room, and briefly planted me in the Prime Minister’s chair. I was conscious of feeling somehow special. Conscious, too, that part of that feeling had to do with the fact that my bond with Labour really began with my family. My mother was the only child of Herbert Morrison, the founding General Secretary of the Labour Party in London, a minister in Ramsay MacDonald’s 1929 government, and the first Labour leader of the London County Council in the 1930s. He served as Home Secretary in Churchill’s wartime cabinet, and was the organising force behind the manifesto and the election campaign that delivered Labour’s startling 1945 landslide, becoming Deputy Prime Minister and later Foreign Secretary in the Attlee government. As we left the Cabinet Room, Marcia introduced me to another guest sitting in the hallway, Clement Attlee himself. ‘This is Herbert’s grandson, Clem,’ she said. The former Prime Minister, either through advanced age or because he and my grandfather had not exactly been bosom buddies, looked at me briefly before grunting something inaudible.
My mother cared passionately about the issues that drove politics: I remember joining her on a march against Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech when I was fourteen. But her experience of the way politics