It was a solid, professional campaign, eventually. It also ended in defeat. The Tories lost the seat, but by a narrow margin we were outpolled by the Liberal candidate. The turning point came a few days before the election, and probably should have served as a warning as I embarked on my return to active Labour politics. With the miners’ strike only recently over, Arthur Scargill publicly demanded that a future Labour government release all those who had been detained during the strike, and reimburse the union for all the money it had cost.
I was not to be deterred, however. Charles told me during a campaign visit that the Publicity Director at national party headquarters had left, and was to be replaced by an overall Director of Campaigns and Communications. It seemed like the perfect job for me. When I told him I wanted to go for it, Charles said that by all means I should do so. He added, however, that there would be other strong candidates. I later discovered that despite this note of caution, Charles argued my case strongly with Neil. The evening before the selection meeting in front of Labour’s full thirty-member National Executive Committee, Neil made it clear to colleagues that I was his preferred choice.
Roy Hattersley, now his deputy and Shadow Chancellor, also backed me to the hilt. I had remained in touch with Roy during my time at LWT. After the 1983 election I had spent most of my free hours helping David Hill organise and support Roy’s campaign for the leadership. I saw him as a more experienced and more rounded figure than Neil, and a better bulwark against the Bennites. I had a further referee in John Prescott, who provided a supportive reference, although with a cryptic handwritten postscript: ‘Peter will do the job fine, as long as he keeps his nose out of the politics.’
I got the job, but only just. A mere handful of votes decided it. Two NEC members in particular would go on to help not just me but the broader push for change in Labour: the Crewe MP Gwyneth Dunwoody, who was in charge of the publicity subcommittee, and a forward-looking trade union leader named Tom Sawyer, General Secretary of Labour by the time of the 1997 election.
In my presentation to the NEC, I had echoed the optimism I felt in my final months at LWT. I argued that in the two years since our general election drubbing, the popular mood had begun to change. There was a new scepticism about the Tory government. If Labour could project a more popular, relevant, united message – and modernise its communications ideas and strategies – we would have an opportunity to recover momentum, and power. I genuinely believed this. Yet nothing in my apprenticeship since leaving Oxford – my experience of the TUC, ‘Red’ Ted and Lambeth, my work with Albert Booth or Weekend World – had prepared me for how difficult it would prove, or how long it would take.
A Brilliant Defeat
From the outside, 150 Walworth Road, near the Elephant and Castle in south London, was a handsome, red-brick battleship of a building. On the inside, it perfectly mirrored the party for which it was the national headquarters. The cramped offices, smoky hallways and paper-strewn conference rooms were disjointed and dishevelled. So was the machinery through which Labour made and presented what passed for policy. My cubbyhole consisted of a wobbly chair, a dodgy-looking three-legged table wedged up against the filing cabinet to balance it, a World War II-vintage intercom, and a dying spider plant on the windowsill behind me.
Barely two years had passed since our collapse at the polls. Michael Foot had retreated to the backbenches. He took the blame for the rout, but it more properly belonged to the party’s real masters: the Trotskyite entryists organised in Militant, and the ‘softer’, or at least subtler, leftists whom Tony Benn had been rallying ever since we lost power in 1979 – in fact, ever since we had lost power under Harold Wilson in 1970. The idea of Labour as a party of government, with any regard for what voters might actually feel, had been abandoned. Neil Kinnock, however, was now leader, and it was clear he saw the need for change.
A few days before I started work in October 1985, Neil had shown the flair, and the guts, that this was surely going to require. At the party conference in Bournemouth he had thundered against the hard-left Labour council in Liverpool, the epitome of how out of touch we had become. As I heard him speak, I couldn’t help but think back to Ted Knight and the Socialist Republic of Lambeth. ‘I’ll tell you what happens with impossible promises,’ Neil had said. ‘You start with farfetched resolutions. They are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and you go through the years sticking to that – outdated, misplaced, irrelevant to real needs. You end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council – a Labour council – hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers. I’m telling you – and you’ll listen – you can’t play politics with people’s jobs, and with people’s services!’ How long had I waited for a Labour leader to say that? The fight was on for a Labour Party that again served, and connected with, the interests of the people of Britain. A few weeks short of my thirty-second birthday, I was excited to become a part of it.
I arrived at Walworth Road with two all-consuming aims. The first was to do well at my new job. Despite my brave, and evidently successful, effort to sound supremely self-confident before the interview panel, I feared that I was supremely unqualified. Three years’ experience producing cerebral political television would not necessarily equip me to manage all of Labour’s day-to-day communications with an almost universally hostile press. It certainly hadn’t given me the skills or the experience to handle the other half of my brief: every aspect of the party’s campaigning, from pamphlets, posters and policy launches to preparations for a general election that was probably less than two years away. My other goal was to play my part in ensuring that Neil Kinnock’s vision of Labour, not Tony Benn’s or Ted Knight’s, won out. That would turn out to be harder still.
Tony Benn’s Bristol South-East constituency had been abolished by boundary changes before the 1983 election, and he had failed to be selected for the replacement seat, so it had been left to Party Chairman Eric Heffer to carry the Bennite banner in the contest for leader. With Labour still in collective shock from the scale of our defeat, Neil trounced Heffer. His only serious challenger, Roy Hattersley, was from the right of the party. But Benn was back now, having been returned to the Commons in a by-election at Chesterfield in March 1984, and was de facto leader of a vocal leftist core on the NEC. The traumatic year-long miners’ strike had also hurt Labour, and Neil. The party was again associated in the public mind with the vote-killers of 1983: ideological infighting, rhetorical excesses and trade union militancy. Neil would later say he wished he had got on top of the issue at the start, by denouncing the NUM for having failed to hold a proper national ballot. Instead, he was left twisting in the wind, feeling he couldn’t support the strike, and couldn’t disavow it either. The only benefit from his months of agony was that he and those around him had used the period to plan for a fightback against the far left, and a determined effort to reposition the party. Neil’s assault on Militant at the party conference had been the first step.
It is difficult to convey, twenty-five years on, how enormous the obstacles were. The Bennites and their fellow travellers were not the only barrier to the huge repair job we faced. Their Old Socialist certitudes had a resonance that went beyond their core supporters. Even many who understood that a state-run economy, unquestioned support for the unions or unilateral nuclear disarmament were impractical in late-twentieth-century Britain – and that they were certainly a guarantee that we would not get back into government – felt them to be somehow authentically Labour. With the radical conservatism of Mrs Thatcher taking hold in Downing Street, and Ronald Reagan’s in the White House, they felt almost automatically that we should be on the other side of the argument.
And it was an argument. Since September 1981 a group of passionately anti-nuclear women had planted themselves in a ‘peace camp’ at the RAF base at Greenham Common in Berkshire, in protest against the US Cruise missiles that were stationed there. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was enjoying a new lease of life. Mrs