By this time, some at the top of the party had had enough of Labour’s drift into the vote-losing wilderness, and were especially alarmed at the growing prospect of the Bennites driving Labour ever further out of the mainstream. Six months after I started working for Albert, four leading Labour lights broke away to form the new Social Democratic Party. Former Foreign Secretary David Owen was one of the ‘Gang of Four’, as were Roy Jenkins, the former Home Secretary who had just completed his term as President of the European Commission, and Roger Liddle’s former boss, Bill Rodgers. The cabinet minister whom I had most admired, Shirley Williams, was the fourth.
Years later, when I was fighting my campaign for selection as a Labour parliamentary candidate, supporters of my main rival would spread the rumour that I too had come close to joining the SDP. That was not quite true, but I did share much of their vision of what a modern left-of-centre party should be, that it should fight for fairness and opportunity, appeal to the centre ground and stand up for national rather than sectional interests. These would become New Labour principles, too. I fully understood the reasons Roger joined Bill Rodgers in the SDP, not just because of their personal friendship, but because both were acting from the values that had brought them into a different Labour Party in the first place. But the ‘religion’ of Labour had come to me too early in life, and was too much a part of me, for me to go with him. The SDP breakaway did have a major impact on me. The decision I faced, however, was not whether to abandon Labour, but how best to continue fighting for a modern, moderate Labour Party against the challenge of the infantile but hard-nosed left.
In fact, there was one point at which I did feel very close to having to leave Labour. It came six months after the SDP had formed, when Tony Benn contested the deputy leadership against Denis Healey, the former Chancellor who was carrying the hopes of the moderates. I still remember arriving in Brighton for the party conference on a Sunday evening at the end of September, when the result would be announced. Many of my Labour friends, and many Labour MPs, were collectively holding their breath. I got the sense that they had not unpacked their bags, and that if Benn won they would simply leave for London, and very probably leave the party as well. I believe that a Benn victory would have led to a kind of tectonic political shift. The moderate, sensible centre of Labour, including many trade unionists, who like my grandfather saw us as a party of government, could very well have left en masse for the Social Democrats, and reformed the Labour Party in that shell. Frankly, I suspect that I would have joined them. A Benn victory would have sealed the ascendancy of the left, and set us on a path towards extremism, unelectability and irrelevance. Denis Healey won, but by less than 1 per cent of the vote. That meant the Labour Party I loved was not dead. But it was still on life support.
The immediate political decision I had to take was really no decision at all. An election for my Lambeth council seat was approaching, but I no longer had the stomach for my role as designated class enemy in Ted Knight’s political fiefdom. Both of my parents had taken pride in my first step on the political ladder, my father in particular, although he was maddeningly prone to telling me I was being too hard on ‘Red’ Ted when I brought back stories of the latest council excesses. They had also taken pride in my work with Albert Booth, but even my father recognised that Labour, in its current state, did not offer much cause for optimism. My mother, in her common-sensical way, pointed out that the party probably wouldn’t be able to offer her son a stable source of income in the foreseeable future. Perhaps, she suggested gently, it might be time for me to find a ‘real’ job.
I did. I finally left my job with Albert Booth in early 1982 – not for another party, but for what Charles Clarke described, rather disparagingly, as the ‘media route’. The most serious current affairs department in British commercial TV, at London Weekend Television, was advertising for additional staff. Trevor Phillips was already working there, and my other old BYC friend David Aaronovitch and I both applied. David got the plum job, at Brian Walden’s flagship Weekend World. One need only look at David’s later career as a political writer on national newspapers to see that it was the right call. I was hired too, beginning as a researcher on The London Programme, but following David some months later into Weekend World.
In between, I was assigned to the team covering the London battlegrounds in the 1983 general election. Much as I wanted to see Labour back in Downing Street, it was obvious that we were going to lose. The country was finally coming out of a brutal recession, and Mrs Thatcher was riding on the crest of victory in the Falklands War. Our manifesto was essentially an expanded version of Tony Benn’s battle cry to the 1980 party conference, with the additional promise of sky-high taxes for good measure. ‘The longest suicide note in history,’ it was called by Gerald Kaufman, the witty, waspish and wise Manchester MP who would become an ally in efforts to move Labour back towards the mainstream. In fact, the manifesto wasn’t all that long. But it was suicidal. We were not merely defeated, we were routed. In Labour’s worst result since the First World War, we haemorrhaged three million votes, and gifted the Tories a Commons majority of 144 seats.
Working for television turned out to be a – arguably the – major turning point in my political career. The knowledge I picked up of politics from the other side of the camera demystified the whole process for me. In covering the election, I got a close-up look at the Labour campaign machine, if you could call it that. It was fascinating, if hugely disheartening, and would soon prove indispensable in framing my own efforts to head off a similar débâcle for Labour next time round. I also made good and lasting friends, including John Birt, then LWT’s Director of Programmes, and Robin Paxton, a senior Weekend World editor who would play a critical role when I went to work for Labour again.
Two of the final programmes I produced drew me steadily in that direction. The first came in the wake of the 1983 election collapse. It was about Neil Kinnock, the Welsh MP I had got to know when I was working for Albert, and Neil was Shadow Education Secretary. After the election he had replaced Michael Foot as Labour leader, and he had begun the work of trying to rescue and rebuild the defeated and dejected party. The second was more broadly about the changing political landscape, exploring signs of disillusionment with Mrs Thatcher, the emergence of the SDP, and the prospects for a Labour revival. Watching tapes of these programmes now, I am struck by my underlying optimism. Naïvety, perhaps, would be a better word. I truly believed that Neil’s leadership could mark at least the start of Labour’s comeback. I felt a growing desire to come back myself as well.
My return began in a restaurant in Pimlico, shortly after Weekend World went off the air for its summer break. During my three years at LWT, I had remained in touch with Charles Clarke, and every six months or so we had lunch together. He was still with Neil. When we met in the summer of 1985, I told him how much I missed fulltime politics. He suggested I help out in a forthcoming parliamentary by-election in the Welsh constituency of Brecon and Radnor. ‘It’s in the neighbourhood,’ he added, referring to a little two-up, two-down cottage I had purchased the year before near the Welsh border. If nothing else, television paid better than politics. My salary had risen to the princely sum of £31,000, and a return to Labour, no matter what role I played, would pay nothing like that amount. That I never gave this much thought was a measure of the eagerness I felt to be part of the party’s recovery and reconstruction.
I had already planned to be at the cottage for the summer, and I leapt at the opportunity to help out in the campaign. When I arrived, however, it was not really a campaign. There were lots of people at the local HQ, but no single person in charge, no strategy, no plan of action. I was deputised to accompany our candidate, Richard Willey. A writer and educationist, he was the son of the long-serving Sunderland MP and future Labour chairman Fred Willey – also a distinguished resident of Hampstead