I was at the Aspen Institute in the week of the election, and arrived back at Heathrow on the morning after. Labour’s defeat, however unsurprising, was depressing enough for me on its own. But on the tube from the airport I saw a story in the Stop Press of the late edition of the Evening Standard that hit me even harder. Shirley Williams, a kind of political pin-up in my eyes since I had first met her, had lost her seat. For me, Shirley represented everything in the Labour Party that I admired, and wanted to follow. I was so shocked by her defeat that I dropped my duty-free bag, and the bottle of wine inside it shattered on the carriage floor.
After the defeat, Roger and I commiserated with each other about the advent of a right-wing Tory government under Margaret Thatcher. We also talked, often long into the night, about the prospect of Labour finding a way back to national power. In Lambeth, where we lived, Labour appeared headed in the opposite direction. ‘Red’ Ted Knight had become council leader the year before. He was very much part of the hard-left vanguard about which Hans Janitschek had warned, and Harold Wilson had dithered, in the early 1970s. Ted favoured ever-higher council rates for an ever-growing series of spending commitments, as the Tory government steadily drained resources from local services.
The council ward where Roger and I lived, Princes, was dominated by Trotskyites. If Lambeth was to become a model for the future of the Labour Party, we would surely be settling in for a long, perhaps permanent, spell out of power. I remember being warned by a local Labour activist as we canvassed in a local estate one Sunday morning that the party must at all costs avoid ‘compromising with the electorate’. My local comrades had absolutely clear views. Criminals were victims of the capitalist system. The police were agents of repression. Riots were popular uprisings against capitalist injustice.
Often Roger and I would go out to the local pub with members of the beleaguered Labour mainstream to lick our political wounds. When a council seat suddenly became vacant at the end of 1979 in Stockwell, one of the few wards where moderates still had a wafer-thin majority, I was narrowly selected to stand for Labour. For the next two and a half years, along with my fellow Stockwell moderate Paul Ormerod, I was part of Ted Knight’s increasingly Soviet-style Labour group on the council. I suppose on some level I saw this as a first, small step towards a more grown-up role in Labour. My grandfather had been born in Lambeth, and began his political life as a councillor. There was still a Herbert Morrison primary school in Stockwell, and the rather down-at-heel Lord Morrison of Lambeth pub. However complex my views about my grandfather as a person, given the effects of his political life on my mother, I had grown up aware of his opinions and achievements, and admiring them. The defining battle in the Labour Party during the late 1920s and 1930s had pitted him against Ernest Bevin. While Bevin was a down-the-middle trade union man, my grandfather argued robustly – too robustly for Bevin – that to become a party of government, Labour had to represent more than just the unions, more indeed than just the working class. It had to be national, not sectional, and appeal to the growing middle class.
That fight was clearly still not won, certainly not in Lambeth. Mostly, my time as a councillor was an education. I was not a terribly effective brake on the Labour group’s march to the drumbeat of revolution, although I did rise briefly to the dizzying office of chairman of the Town Planning Applications Subcommittee. That was only for a year, and only because one of Ted’s lieutenants was in the lavatory as the Labour group was balloting on that minor post.
I rarely broke ranks on council votes, if only because I recognised that our divisions would be the Tories’ gain. In our internal caucuses, however, I was much more forthright. I argued that our far-left rhetorical indulgence would do little to improve the lot of the residents who had voted for us, but would slowly, surely convince most of them that we didn’t care about, or understand, their lives. Ted would almost invariably open the next meeting by glaring in turn at me and the other recalcitrants, and saying: ‘Certain comrades are misperceiving the situation …’ The atmosphere was very intimidating. The hard left was not only hard in its politics, it was even harder on those who didn’t toe the line.
After the 1981 Brixton riots, I could hold my tongue no longer. Ted called for the police to withdraw from the streets, accusing them of ‘concentration camp’ tactics of surveillance. Asked for a comment by a local reporter, I replied: ‘Given the choice between having the Labour Party and Ted Knight in the borough, or the police, 99 per cent of the population would vote for the police.’ I joined my two fellow Stockwell Labour councillors in a broader attack a few months later. ‘The Labour group has conspicuously failed to convince its electorate that maintaining its high level of expenditure is desirable or practical,’ we said. ‘The publicity-seeking statements of the council’s leader have come to symbolise the waywardness and irrelevance of the Labour Party for working-class people.’
Part of the reason for my more open frustration over the excesses of the far left was that, for the first time, I had become involved in national Labour politics. In the autumn of 1980 I was hired as a researcher by the Shadow Transport Secretary Albert Booth. I was followed into the opposition offices only weeks later by Charles Clarke, who went to work for Neil Kinnock, then Shadow Education Secretary. The idea of working at this level of Labour politics, even as a lowly researcher, was exciting in itself. But before I took up my role, a generous gift from Roger elevated it to an entirely different level. When the Tories won the election, he had taken with him several boxloads of the policy papers he had accumulated at the Department of Transport. This wasn’t strictly legal, and I only hope the statute of limitations on whatever crime he committed has long since lapsed. The effect on me, as I read folder after folder, was electrifying. I still remember the thrill I felt at being able to see how policy was made, the way in which different options were evaluated, advanced or abandoned. It was the first time I had seen the raw material of government. It not only fascinated me, it made me want to be a part of it, and all the more upset at those in the party who were making the likelihood of a future Labour administration ever more remote.
I enjoyed my eighteen months in the shadow cabinet corridor at the Commons. Albert Booth was an engineering draughtsman who had entered Labour politics as a Tynemouth councillor, and had become MP for Barrow-in-Furness in north-west England. He was also a favoured protégé of Michael Foot, who succeeded Jim Callaghan as Labour leader a few weeks after I started in my job. On the day of Michael’s victory, I remember Frank Dobson, later Tony Blair’s Health Secretary, standing in the doorway of the modest office Albert and I shared and punching the air with excitement. ‘Michael’s done it!’ he shouted with joy. ‘We’re on our way!’ Where to, exactly, remained to be seen.
I worked hard in my role, both for Albert and with his slightly rambunctious number two on the front bench, the Hull MP John Prescott. Albert and John, like Michael Foot, were on the moderate, Tribunite left of Labour. They were also disinclined, and by this time probably unable, to take on the rising influence of Tony Benn and the more assertive far left. At party conference just days before I began my job, Benn had brought delegates surging to their feet with his vision of what a Labour government would do, within days, once it got rid of Thatcher and the Tories: nationalise industries, pull out of Europe, abandon the nuclear deterrent and shut down the House of Lords. I wanted to get Thatcher and the Tories out no less than Tony Benn did, but I couldn’t imagine that was the way to do it.
I gravitated towards a much more experienced researcher down the hallway from our office named David Hill, and his boss, the Shadow Environment Secretary Roy Hattersley, as well as to Shadow Foreign Secretary Peter Shore and his researcher David Cowling. Together, we helped to organise the Labour Solidarity Campaign, run by the indefatigable Mary Goudie, which was intended as a counterweight to the Bennites, to give heart to the moderates and keep them in the party. With David Cowling and an intelligent, iconoclastic and occasionally irritatingly self-possessed Labour MP named Frank Field, I also joined efforts to press for a change in the Labour rulebook. Well before it became a cause célèbre for New Labour modernisers, we pressed for the introduction of one-member-one-vote democracy in the party.
There