As BYC head, I also met and worked with leaders of the National Union of Students. The NUS chair when I first got involved was a burly lad who had grown up down the road from me in Hampstead Garden Suburb. I had known Charles Clarke and his brothers, but not to speak to: they were Highgate School boys. The more I worked with Charles in my BYC role, the more I liked him. I worked even more closely with one of his NUS colleagues, the then-Communist and future journalist David Aaronovitch. He was engaging, funny, and obviously clever enough to accomplish anything he set his mind to. But it was Charles with whom I would interact most often and most closely in later years: first, by Neil Kinnock’s side in the 1980s, and then in government, in New Labour.
My first job after university was in a distinctly Old Labour environment. I knew that if I wanted a future in the Labour Party, the most realistic route was through the trade union movement. Without the help of Alan Bullock, I would not have got the post I did six months after leaving Oxford. At the time, he was chairing a government inquiry on industrial democracy. It is hard to say whether it was behind or ahead of its time. One of the less fruitful concessions made to the trade unions, it proposed installing union representatives on the boards of British companies. The idea never caught on. But one of the inquiry panel’s members was the head of the TUC’s economic department, David Lea, and Alan successfully put in a word for me.
Congress House in Great Russell Street was more than just a union headquarters, and the economic department was more than a policy talking-shop. Listening as my new department bosses peremptorily demanded to talk with this Labour Cabinet minister or that, or acting as designated note-taker in an endless series of bargaining meetings between trade union general secretaries and senior ministers, I had a crash course in how power was then wielded inside Labour. It left an indelible impression on me, and a lesson in how not to run the country. The process was a product of a ‘corporatist’ approach in which government, business and trade unions carved up the decision-making and attempted to run the economy – investment, prices and incomes – among themselves. It was an idea whose time had gone, if it ever arrived.
The government was struggling, not least with controlling wages and inflation. It was a battle that had already seen Denis Healey forced to go to the IMF for a bailout, and that would end two years later in the Winter of Discontent and the arrival in Downing Street of Mrs Thatcher. Congress House routinely demanded policy tradeoffs for any government move to put the economy in order. Almost invariably, it got them. The TUC–Labour Liaison Committee was effectively the executive committee of government. Great Russell Street virtually shared sovereignty with Downing Street. More often, it seemed to be calling the shots.
This might have been heady stuff had I seen my future as a trade union power-broker. But the claustrophobic life of the TUC was not for me. Although I worked hard, my heart was in my role with the BYC. I had researched and written a BYC policy report called ‘Youth Unemployment: Causes and Cures’, and was a founding member of a pressure group we helped set up called Youthaid, which was intent on getting the government to do more to help the young unemployed. We called for more intervention to ensure that school-leavers had relevant training and skills, and that the national economy prioritised securing them jobs.
The beginning of the end of my glittering career in the trade union movement came when I and two colleagues were asked by the Prime Minister’s political adviser, Tom McNally, now a Liberal Democrat peer and government member, to come to Number 10 to discuss the BYC report with Jim Callaghan. This was my first visit to the Cabinet Room since I had strayed into it during my youthful excursion to view Trooping the Colour, and the Prime Minister and the other ministers with him were polite and receptive to our proposals. It was also my first encounter with Albert Booth, then the Employment Secretary, who would later employ me as his research assistant. My invitation to Number 10 put the TUC headquarters into a major tailspin. If anyone went to talk policy in Downing Street, they made it clear, it should be the top union brass, certainly not some young scribe from the economic department. Responsibility for youth unemployment policy belonged to the TUC’s Organisation Department. Before long, it was clear that I would have to choose between my union job and youth politics.
With the approach of the World Youth and Student Festival in Cuba in the summer of 1978, I handed in my notice. The idea of lending the presence of the flower of British youth to a transparent Soviet-bloc propaganda exercise was always going to be controversial, and we debated for months whether or not to attend. In the end we decided that our independent, Western, non-Communist voice should receive a hearing, although the Conservatives on the BYC voted against. There was considerable media criticism of our plans to participate, but the Foreign Secretary, David Owen, gave us a nod of approval, and Charles Clarke, freshly graduated from the NUS, took up residence in Havana as a member of the preparatory committee. I headed the national delegation with an NUS leader who soon became a friend, Trevor Phillips.
We went. We saw. We did not exactly conquer. Yet Trevor and I did manage to cajole, convince, outmanoeuvre or outvote a sizeable pro-Soviet – in some cases, pro-Stalinist – core in the British delegation, whose fervour was being whipped up by a slightly older ‘visitor’ to the festival, the Yorkshire miners’ union leader Arthur Scargill. Cuba was also my first experience of dealing with the press. The term ‘spin doctor’ did not exist then, and even if it had, I could hardly have imagined that one day I would come to embody it. Yet each day I would go to the Havana Libre hotel to brief British journalists on our pro-freedom, pro-human-rights agenda. It was there that I learned three basic rules of spin-doctoring that remained with me. Don’t overclaim. Be factual. And never arrive at a briefing without a story.
Most of the critics back home ended up being supportive, and not a little surprised by how well the British delegation had acquitted itself. The Foreign Office, too. Our trip had begun with a huge opening ceremony at Havana’s main stadium. As we entered I was asked to hold our large Union Jack banner while its bearer blew his nose. At that very moment an official appeared and led me away to a designated area where I was obliged to hold it aloft for an agonising three and a half hours while Fidel Castro delivered one of his shorter addresses. The visit ended with a reception at the British Embassy in Havana.
When I got back home, I was jobless. But not idle. Not only was I still national chair of the BYC, but once again Alan Bullock came to my rescue, fixing me up with a research project at the Aspen Institute in Berlin, on youth unemployment across Europe. I also moved house, swapping the lodger’s room I had taken in Hackney after university for a tiny flat in Kennington, in south London, from where I watched the unhappy unravelling of the Callaghan government as the May 1979 general election approached.
I loved my little studio apartment. It also turned out to be life-changing politically. Occupying a much larger flat in the same block was Roger Liddle, whom I met through the local Labour Party branch. We not only struck up an instant rapport – his knowledge of, and commitment to, Labour equalled my own – but began a lifelong collaboration in politics. Roger held out the added fascination of being a political adviser to a real-life cabinet