It was. The entire backcloth of the conference platform in Blackpool was adorned with the new logo in all its glory. The red rose was printed on everything capable of taking its imprint. For Labour to pack away the red flag, as the fury of Eric Heffer and others soon made clear, was like Nike dumping its swish, or McDonald’s chopping down the golden arches. The red flag symbolised everything Labour represented in the public mind: socialism, nationalisation, state control. Everything, that is, that voters now liked least and mistrusted most about us. The red rose wasn’t just a design change: it represented a transformation in how the party would present itself. It had real impact, reinforced by our now ubiquitous new strapline, recognising the need to put people, not the party, first.
The change did generate comment and controversy in our ranks, though not in anything like the way Neil and Glenys had feared. Delegates eagerly collected their conference folders, taking two or three at a time, briefly raising the spectre that we might run out. If they were left on seats, they were stolen. In some cases, money changed hands amongst ardent collectors. That the media were excited – and through them the country – was not only important in itself, it had an immediate effect on the morale of party members. Here was Labour doing something well and eye-catching, beating the Tories at their own game.
On the final day of conference I brought a huge box of fresh red roses, minus their thorns, onto the stage for Neil and Glenys to throw to the delegates. There was a roar of delight. Catching sight of my broadcasting officer Tony Beeton, who would tragically die in the Paddington rail disaster in October 1999, I suggested that he and his tiny son Piers join Neil on the platform. Spotting the young child, Neil’s instinctive response was as it had been at the ‘Freedom and Fairness’ launch: he clutched Piers in one arm and held up one of the – long-stemmed – roses in the other, to shouts and cheers from the hall. It was an extraordinarily uplifting moment. At least briefly, I even allowed myself to indulge in the fantasy that it might provide a springboard for the general election, due in eighteen months but likely to come earlier.
We had had a good year. With Philip’s research suggesting that many voters saw Mrs Thatcher as polarising and divisive, we had actually arrived at conference with a small lead in the opinion polls. I knew Labour’s problems went much deeper, however. Branding, image, marketing, could do only so much. It was the product that ultimately mattered – especially if the product was a set of policies on which voters would decide what kind of future they wanted, and what kind of government they trusted to deliver it. The main reason we had lost in 1983 wasn’t that our campaign was amateurish and outdated – that had merely helped turn a defeat into a drubbing. It was our policies. We were in favour of nationalised industries, strike-prone trade unions and unilateral disarmament. We were against the free market, privatisation and widened share ownership, and even allowing council tenants to buy their properties. When it came time to choose, millions fewer opted for us than for the Tories, and we had only just edged out the SDP.
Our image and packaging were finally changing. Our product – as resolution after resolution at the party conference made clear – was not. Nor, much beyond Neil and his shadow cabinet allies, did there seem to be a huge appetite for change. Modernising Labour’s appearance and image was difficult enough. Getting any fundamental policy change through the morass of ideological bickering in the NEC, not to mention the trade unions or leftist local parties, was not just a matter of changing Labour’s landscape. It was more like draining a swamp.
After our conference our polling numbers lifted, but they fell off as attention turned to the Tories, who were busy getting into their pre-election stride with an array of new policies entitled ‘The Next Steps Forward’. Still, I entered 1987 feeling relatively upbeat. It was far too late for us to perform major surgery on our policies, but I was confident that we now had assets which could at least make this battle different from 1983. With our new communications operation, my hope was to emphasise what had changed in Labour. I hoped to build on our new image by promoting Neil as a different kind of Labour leader.
I had no doubt about the strengths of the people working most closely around him – Patricia Hewitt, and his chief of staff Charles Clarke, who I had known well since our days in student politics in the 1970s. As we geared up for election year, there was a real sense of shared purpose: to build a professional campaign around Neil as a leader who was showing vision and courage in modernising Labour, and could bring similar qualities to Downing Street. I believed this to be true. Although I had never managed anything remotely on this scale, I felt a new level of confidence about my grasp of modern campaigning methods, and in the team we had in the SCA and at Walworth Road. Within days of returning from our ‘red rose’ conference, we began planning for the general election campaign. Ultimately, dozens of people would be involved. Some of them – Charles, Patricia, David Hill, Chris Powell at BMP and of course Philip Gould – would go on to play important roles with New Labour a decade later. But the main connecting line was in the mechanics of the campaign we devised.
When we began mapping things out in the autumn of 1986, Patricia was not officially at work: she had just had her first child and was on maternity leave. Philip and I would gather around her kitchen table, with Patricia holding her baby daughter in her arms. Some of the features of the 1987 campaign looked new only in the hidebound context of the Labour Party. They were basic, common-sense changes in image, advertising and presentation. That alone would make a difference, but what was really new was the degree of detail, coordination and control we wired in from the start. We began with our ‘warbook’, although we didn’t give it that name until the process became political orthodoxy in the 1990s: an outline of our own and other parties’ strengths and weaknesses, and a point-by-point plan of how to make the most of each of them. Then came what was probably the most lastingly important innovation. We began setting out a ‘grid’ – a day-by-day map of the entire campaign, with a single policy issue and related narrative as well as a pre-planned visual context, to provide a compelling image for TV news and the following day’s papers. It was all bound together by Philip’s input – the most sustained, detailed and nuanced research and analysis the Labour Party had ever seen.
In February, however, things began to go wrong. On the surface, all was still to play for. Though we no longer led in the polls, we were trailing the Tories by only a point or two, and were comfortably clear of the SDP in third place. With the economy recovering, however, a Tory policy prospectus promising growth, reduced taxes and low inflation would be a tough case to answer. While Neil’s identity as a new kind of leader was gaining traction, so were escalating Tory assaults on Labour’s ‘loony left’. Worse, voters were about to be reminded of it all over again. The occasion was a by-election in Greenwich, prompted by the death of the veteran Labour MP Guy Barnett. Labour had held the seat for four decades – even, with a reduced majority, in 1983. If we had tapped into Philip’s bank of research in picking Guy Barnett’s prospective successor, we surely would have won. But under NEC selection rules, with a strong boost from her National Union of Public Employees sponsors, the nod went to Deirdre Wood, Greenwich’s representative on the London Education Authority.
Deirdre had history in Ken Livingstone’s GLC. She was realistic enough to recognise the difficulties her candidacy presented us with in the run-up to a general election. When she met Neil after she’d been selected, she told him, ‘Don’t worry, I won’t drop you in it.’ She didn’t. She didn’t propose nationalising Greenwich, or declaring London a nuclear-free zone. But with the Daily Mail taking the lead, there was an orgy of ‘exposés’, with spurious allegations about her private life and even mockery of her looks. It was a sustained assault which on more than one occasion reduced Deirdre to tears.
In 1983, Guy Barnett had a 1,200-vote edge over the Conservatives, with the SDP in third place. This time, the Tories concluded early on that they were unlikely to win. The SDP ran the candidate they had recently picked for the general election: an attractive, softly-spoken market researcher named Rosie Barnes, whose husband was a local councillor who organised her campaign. The SDP’s Liberal allies sensed that Deirdre’s selection made us vulnerable, and flooded the constituency with canvassers. As the campaign neared its end, our polling suggested that the Tories were encouraging tactical voting as well. Days before the vote on 26 February, we still held a lead. But it was tiny. The night before the election, journalists