By the time I started at Walworth Road, Labour had ceded this kind of political marketing to the Tories. Larry’s predecessor as General Secretary, Jim Mortimer, had been scathing about the Conservatives’ 1983 campaign, vowing that we would never prostitute ourselves to the idea of presenting politicians and policies ‘as if they were breakfast food or baked beans’. It was a view that resonated with most of the party when I arrived. Not only was it naïve about modern politics, it was wrong about what motivated me. I did believe that there were parallels between political parties and the business and consumer world. Both had ‘products’: in our case, they were called policies, rooted in values. Both competed in the marketplace: in our case, the ultimate test of consumer judgement was a general election. For political parties as much as businesses, if you forgot your customers, if you were unaware of how they were changing and failed to communicate with them properly, they would soon forget you.
Still, our ‘product’ was different, and the difference mattered. I was driven by the conviction that a more modern, in-touch Labour Party would not just be more likely to win an election, but would lead to a fairer, more broadly based, more socially engaged and economically successful government than the Tories. It would be better for Britain. I have no doubt that I would have been good at marketing breakfast food or baked beans – or even the Tories – but I could never have contemplated doing so. The tools of communication might be the same; the aim, the ‘product’, and the driving political purpose were wholly different.
Making a start on getting Labour’s message heard, and making it worth hearing, was exhilarating. But the early months were sometimes brutally difficult. Politically, my position was delicate, to say the least. Neil and Roy had backed me for the job of Director of Campaigns and Communications, but I had been parachuted in, at what must have seemed an obscenely young age, to head one of the three key departments, and I felt that the veteran party operators heading the other two – Geoff Bish for policy, and Joyce Gould for organisation – although outwardly welcoming, viewed me with a mixture of suspicion and envy.
I did have some allies. Before I’d been hired, Neil had installed Robin Cook, the young Scottish MP who had run his leadership campaign, in the new post of ‘Campaign Coordinator’, reporting to the shadow cabinet. Robin had set up something called the Breakfast Group, which brought together pro-Labour figures from the advertising and marketing world to advise on modernising our approach. I saw the party’s situation as even more dire than Robin did, and with Philip and the SCA, I wanted to go further and faster. That produced tension, at least on Robin’s side. I vividly recall an early weekend brainstorming session. Robin was there, countryside-dapper in a silk waistcoat, florid shirt and corduroy trousers. He was not hostile to what I was proposing, but there was an unmistakable frisson in his comments. A sense of ‘Who’s in charge here? I’m the elected politician. I’m the shadow cabinet’s Campaign Coordinator. I’m Neil’s mate. Here’s this ex-television kid, who has come in and started auditing, stock-taking, questioning things, challenging them.’ It was understandable. Robin had put the foundation stones in place. Now, I seemed to be taking over the construction.
There was tension of a different sort with the other key member of Neil’s team who was already involved in remaking Labour’s communications and image. Patricia Hewitt, who had narrowly failed to be elected as an MP, was Neil’s press secretary. She was only five years older than me, but she had been involved in campaign work since her early twenties, having begun as press officer for Age Concern before moving on to head the National Council for Civil Liberties. I was a bit in awe of her. She had had two years of battlefield experience in trying to get the media to take a kinder, or at least less unkind, view of Neil and of Labour, and had drawn up a range of campaigning plans, including a project to target key seats at the next election. If I wanted to go further and faster than Robin, Patricia seemed to want to go further and faster yet. With the best of intentions, she not only encouraged me but actively drove me on.
By early 1986 I was working flat out. There were two parts to my job, and two parts to my day. I would spend the mornings at Walworth Road, and was always at my precariously balanced desk by 7.30. There, my focus was campaigning, specifically a major social policy launch that had been agreed – but not planned out, designed or organised – before I arrived. Neil had set the tone. Rather than settle for the familiar NEC emphasis on ‘fairness’, he had insisted that it bring in the theme of ‘freedom’ as well. He recognised that Mrs Thatcher had succeeded in making freedom, a classic liberal value, an asset for the Conservatives. We had to start reclaiming it. But what policies would we actually be promoting? How would we present them? What would the posters and the pamphlets look like? How, and where, would we organise the launch event?
I had been at my job long enough to know what the NEC would expect. We would invite the media to one of our down-at-heel conference rooms in Walworth Road, hand out a dense tome on Labour’s policies, display the leaflets and stickers we were distributing to party cadres around the country – and assail the heartless Tories. The assumption, or the hope, would be that if only we could drive home the fact that we cared more than the Conservatives, the voters would care more about us.
I was absolutely determined that the campaign, the first test of the new approach and new structure I was trying to put in place, would be unrecognisably different. The problem was that I had done nothing remotely similar before. I did not fear that I’d end up with something worse than our normal fare. Leafing through sheafs of our recent policy material, with its tired and predictable slogans and uninspiring artwork, I did not believe that was possible. I did fear that whatever I attempted might be neutered by the NEC. Or that it might disappoint Neil, and even more so, Patricia. Working at an increasingly fevered pace with Philip, the SCA, the designers and printers, I sometimes felt overwhelmed by the need to get every one of hundreds of details right, and by anxiety over how much could go wrong.
The second part of my day was spent on the other side of the Thames. After a late, quick lunch, often at a very lively but now defunct pizzeria in the Elephant and Castle called the Castello, I would drive to the House of Commons and base myself in Neil’s office. My job there was to patrol the top-floor offices of the parliamentary press gallery. It seems amazing to me now, but along with Patricia I was wholly responsible for making Labour’s case to the media, and through them to the country. It was the start of my career as a spin doctor. Yet ‘spinning’ does not begin to capture the difficulty, bordering on impossibility, I found in securing anything more than the most occasional word of praise for Labour. Virtually all the newspapers looked upon 1980s Labour as hopelessly extreme in its policies, out of touch with the country, and hobbled by internal bickering. Since that was largely true, there were limits to what I could do to convince the reporters otherwise. I tried, but mostly my job was damage control. It was frustrating, and it was exhausting.
My refuge was the cottage in Foy on the River Wye in Herefordshire that I had bought while I was at LWT. Set in a lovely, secluded spot on a horseshoe-shaped bend in the river, it was what you might call ‘compact’. There was a small sitting room and an even smaller dining room on the ground floor, and three tiny bedrooms upstairs. A bathroom had been built off the back. It was also the most wonderful home I have ever owned. I bought a slightly battered, blue-velvet suite of furniture for downstairs, and within a couple of months I had the wall between the two downstairs rooms knocked through to make a living-and-dining area, and installed a big brick hearth. There was an antique-looking dial phone whose cord stretched just far enough for me to sit with it on the step outside the front door. I also acquired a – barely – portable phone, one of those contraptions with a huge battery pack you had to sling over your shoulder wherever you went.
I drove up to Foy every weekend, often with friends, sometimes alone. I would read, listen to music, watch TV, cut the grass, dig the garden, build bonfires. I would also work, often trying somehow to get a positive story about Labour, or much more frequently to soften a damaging one, in the all-important Sunday papers. Every Saturday I would wake up and steel myself for the task of spending half the morning phoning round all the Sunday papers’ political journalists. Then I would go into the nearby town of