Hoping to prod him and others into action, I commissioned Philip and the SCA to begin a thorough examination of the state of mind of Britain’s voters: what they valued in their lives and in their government; why they supported Labour or the Tories or the Alliance; what had convinced them, or might convince them, to switch sides. We had never done anything on this scale before. Nor had any other British political party. Patricia, as usual, jumped into the driving seat of a process that would end up taking four months to complete, drawing not only on polling and focus groups, but the work of experts in charting political, economic and social trends. That was step one. Step two would be to apply the lessons to policy. We needed an issue-by-issue policy review. This would not have happened without Tom Sawyer, the deputy leader of the public service union NUPE, whose position on the NEC had earlier contributed to the two-vote majority that got me my job. He went to Neil with the idea of a policy review immediately after the election, and convinced him to support it. What shape it would take, how far it would go, remained to be seen. But at least a mechanism would be in place.
The landmark public attitudes report was called ‘Labour and Britain in the 1990s’, and when I got the draft after the party conference in the autumn, it was even more sobering than I had expected. Its findings were presented to a joint session of the NEC and the shadow cabinet in November. Over two decades, our share of the vote had fallen by nearly 20 per cent, while Tory support had remained steady. Even more disturbing were the findings about why people voted as they did. In the case of the Conservatives, it was their tougher, more aspirational appeal. But more than a quarter of Labour’s shrinking base said they remained with us only out of residual loyalty. Among those who had abandoned us, there was a remarkable consistency in the reasons they said had driven them away. ‘Extremism’ came top, followed by the dominance of the trade unions, our defence policy, and finally ‘weak leadership’. It was not just the well-off who didn’t like us, but in an increasingly mobile economy, the role of manual work was decreasing. Share ownership and home ownership were rising, and more voters had the kind of aspirations which they said made them reluctant to elect a Labour government. We were becoming less and less popular, less and less relevant. In its X-ray of the British electorate, the SCA report had now told us why. Our image unsettled and alienated voters, our organisation and leadership dented their trust. Our policies clashed with their hopes not only for the country, but for themselves.
I still have my notes of the presentation meeting. Tony Benn called the report ‘useful’, but said the voters had simply been duped by rightwing ‘media propaganda’, and that Labour’s job now was ‘to change their attitudes through our campaigning’. In other words, ‘don’t compromise with the electorate’. Ken Livingstone said we had been too busy ‘reassuring international bankers so they’ll now vote for us’ to develop and present a strong, socialist alternative to Mrs Thatcher’s running of the economy. He also said we had shamelessly gone along with media attacks on the hard left, instead of defending them. Still, by far most of those in the room clearly understood the seriousness of the message in the research report, and the need for us to reconnect as a party with what voters actually wanted in their lives and from their government. What mattered was what they would do about it.
The short answer turned out to be not much. The policy review, which would not finally be published until two years after the election, had all the trappings of a serious exercise. I certainly spun it in the press gallery as the start of a real change, saying that nothing would be off limits. Seven committees, each chaired by the relevant shadow minister and an NEC member, were tasked to look at every major policy area. But while Neil set out a general vision of change, he made surprisingly little personal input to the process. He didn’t meet the chairs or want to float ideas. Neither arguing for nor rejecting anything, he seemed to be leaving the outcome up to the individual groups and shadow ministers. With no pressure to be radical, almost all of the review groups played it safe. There was one significant exception: Gerald Kaufman, who was now Shadow Foreign Secretary. He knew what he wanted, knew what Labour needed, and showed every sign of being determined to get it: a jettisoning of unilateral nuclear disarmament. As for the rest, they largely tinkered: except for Shadow Chancellor John Smith’s group, which committed Labour to higher taxes, by including a whole raft of new benefits pledges.
My confidence that we would rise to the challenge had been eroding for many months. In the aftershock of the election, there was a lot of talk about ‘change’. But not only was there a lack of real action, Neil’s position with senior shadow cabinet colleagues appeared to have weakened. I had a startling insight into the depth of the discontent in an uncomfortable midnight encounter with Neil’s two most influential colleagues. I was in Edinburgh for the international television festival two months after the election, and John Smith and his wife Elizabeth had very kindly invited me to stay with them. When I arrived after dinner on the first night, Elizabeth had gone to bed. I was greeted not only by John, but by the party’s deputy leader, Roy Hattersley, and their shadow cabinet colleague, the Glasgow MP Donald Dewar. With the three of them seated in a kind of horseshoe formation around me, it felt like a courtroom drama.
John and Roy did most of the talking. They were scathing about Neil, blaming my ‘image-making’ for propping up a leader who they were convinced was not up to the job. John conceded that Neil had proven a formidable party manager, and ‘infighter’, in dismembering Militant. But that was pretty much it. He was aloof, abstract, and a nightmare to deal with on any issue of substance. John’s view was that Neil didn’t have an ‘intellectual interest’ in policy. No matter how glowing the reviews he’d received during the campaign, he was ‘all froth’. Roy piled in, saying that Neil suffered from ‘a lack of assurance, a feeling of being beleaguered and being out of his depth’. That, Roy believed, was because he was.
It was deeply unpleasant, and I did not know how to respond. Neil was party leader. I felt admiration for him because of what he had been put through, and loyalty to him as someone who had at least begun to revive the party. I thought John, Roy and Donald were being harsh and unfair, and I told them so. I also pointed out that while Neil’s speeches may have been ‘froth’, without that froth we would not only have lost the election, we would have been left for dead.
The main senior figure advocating real, if undefined, change was Bryan Gould. At my urging, he had publicly said that Labour had to develop ‘policies for the 1990s’. But he was paying a price, in the shape of a whispering campaign against him. He was naïve, it was said. An upstart. The more he pressed for greater influence, the more difficult his position became. It culminated in his proposal to challenge Roy for the deputy leadership at the beginning of 1988. I knew how much Bryan wanted the job, but I could not support him. Neil was dead against the distraction of a contest, and I shared that view. The party was divided enough without another full-scale power struggle, in which it was certain that Eric Heffer would also join the fray. Besides, I was a Labour Party official. Both the leader, and of course the current deputy, wanted Bryan to reconsider. I did the only thing I reasonably could: I talked him out of standing, averting political bloodshed but introducing a lasting strain in our relationship.
I began to wonder whether I should shift my focus outside the party. At one point, I even applied for a job as Director of Communications at the BBC. But I wasn’t offered it, and I very much doubt that I would have accepted it if I had been. Having returned to Labour at a time that the party had begun to change, I could not see myself baling out before the process was over, one way or the other. Still, I found myself trying to work around Neil to present a public image of a party ready for fundamental change.