It was in the spring of 1988, nearly a year after the election. I was called out of an NEC meeting to take an urgent call from my brother in my office. My father had been under the weather for a couple of weeks with a chest infection. Neither of us had been unduly worried, but I spoke daily either to my mother or Miles about how he was getting on. When it became apparent that he was not improving, our family GP had referred him to the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead. My father and I had found a new closeness over the past year or so. The grating of our unacknowledged similarities had receded, and I was much more able to recognise and appreciate the flair, the assurance, the sense of caring about politics and people which I had got from him, while he was able to show the pride he felt in what I had accomplished, and the work I was doing. The previous summer, he had come down to spend a day in Foy. He arrived with a lovely blue ceramic ashtray, decorated with a red rose, which I still have. I cooked him trout and salad and new boiled potatoes. We walked and talked, and then he slept before I drove him back to the station. I had every expectation that we would have further time to look back, and forward, together.
But now, Miles was phoning with bad news. The ‘chest infection’ was being treated, but the hospital had done tests. My father had cancer, and the prognosis was not good. I could not help the tears coming as I sat, holding the phone, before I replaced the receiver. Whether it was by means of telepathy I don’t know, but Neil appeared at my side, put his arm round my shoulder and cradled my head in his arms. It would be difficult, he said, but love for a father is a source of strength. ‘You’ll get through. We’ll make sure you get through.’ My father died without warning two weeks later, from a heart attack. It was months before I was over the first, terrible sense of loss – thinking of the things my father had said, the clothes he wore, the jokes we had shared, his pipe, the conversations we had or that I wished we had had. The deeper, duller throb went on for much longer.
At work, I looked for whatever examples and agents of real change I could find. I still dutifully briefed the media about Neil’s speeches and over-egged the odd policy document, but I was spending much more of my time trying to boost the image of the few Labour MPs who seemed to understand that we had to reform radically or face terminal decline. In my search for articulate, forward-looking Labour spokesmen to deliver a message that would at least sound new on radio and television, I was increasingly drawn to two bright young MPs who had been elected in 1983, and had been inseparable allies ever since. They shared a remote rabbit-warren of a parliamentary office. Both were forceful, effective communicators, and both believed that Labour had to do more – much more – if it was ever again going to get a chance to govern. The senior member of the partnership, a couple of years older and with the longer political CV, was a thirty-six-year-old Scottish MP named Gordon Brown. His ally and protégé was an Oxford-educated barrister, representing Sedgefield in northern England, called Tony Blair.
I had first got to know them before the election. We were all in our thirties, and were excited to be part of the post-1983 rebuilding project. We were young enough to hope still to be in command of our senses by the time Labour finally got back into government. The initial attraction for me was that here were two MPs who possessed a quality all too rare on the Labour benches: they had an understanding of, and a facility for, modern communications. It was natural that I should want to use their talents to help get Labour’s message across, and that they should see a re-energised Walworth Road as an asset.
After the election defeat, this coincidence of interests gradually became something much more than that: a partnership, a trio, a team. In contrast to the detachment and drift of Neil’s office, Gordon and Tony conveyed focus, and exuded energy. Constantly batting ideas off each other, positioning and planning, they were like a pair of very close, if unidentical, twins. Tony had the sunnier disposition. He had an easiness about him, a facility for engaging in serious politics without appearing to take the stakes, or himself, too seriously. He had a gift for putting others at their ease, even other politicians. People liked him, and wanted to be liked by him. In a different way, Gordon had that quality too. For me, he certainly did. We had much in common. Like me, he had resolved at a young age to entwine his life with Labour. Like me, he was the political equivalent of a football anorak. An intricate map of Prime Ministers and pretenders past, of alliances and feuds, triumphs and failures, speeches and manifestos, was implanted in both of us like a memory chip.
Although all three of us sensed by early in 1988 that Labour was not going to win the next election without something dramatic happening, I think that the realisation affected Gordon and me a bit differently than it did Tony. While he was frustrated, and sometimes angry, about the party’s failure to put itself back in the running for government, for us, there was a deeper, more personal, almost existential, feeling of despair.
There was another bond with Gordon as well. I was spending almost all my waking hours trying to find ways of getting Labour’s message into the newspapers or onto the radio or television, and through them to voters. That was not just my job, it was a fixation. For Gordon, it was nearer an obsession. It needed not be about some grand policy announcement – it rarely was. It was not done in any expectation of our winning the major arguments, much less an election, against Mrs Thatcher. But Gordon plotted a ceaseless campaign of guerrilla strikes against the Tories. He was constantly reading ministerial statements, dissecting policy proposals, culling potentially damaging leaks of internal documents. Then, sometimes acting by himself, sometimes through Tony, and increasingly often in league with me, he would zero in on just the right newspaper or broadcaster, just the right news cycle, to strike the blow. For Gordon, this was deadly serious. He viewed the Tories not only as political opponents, but as a battlefield enemy. We might not be able to kill them, but he hoped, wound by wound, to bring them to their knees. His eye for tactical opportunities was extraordinary, and he showed a master craftsman’s delight and eagerness in trying to initiate Tony and me into the secrets of the trade.
For the first time I heard him expound on his core principle of political battle, and it would resurface many times, in many contexts, later on. Essentially, his argument was that our own policies weren’t necessarily key to scoring a communications or campaigning success – which was fortunate, because our own policies were hardly putting us in a strong position. The key, Gordon said, was to identify, magnify and exploit ‘dividing lines’ with the Tories. I became an eager co-conspirator. Given the challenge of finding a way to market the pabulum of the policy review, I began to see Gordon’s endless schemes to annoy the Tories as invaluable in my efforts to keep Labour in the public eye. His relentless urge to attack also gave me a sense that Labour had not given up the fight.
I saw Tony, too, as a huge asset, especially in conveying a sense of newness in Labour on television. Even before I arrived at Walworth Road, I remember having been bowled over by an appearance he made on the BBC’s Question Time. He was accusing the Conservatives of undermining civil liberties, but it wasn’t the substance of his message that most struck me, timely and apt though it was. I was impressed by his freshness, his fluency, his ability to talk politics in words that connected in a way so many of our frontbenchers seemed to find it difficult to do. I was keen to find ways of turning this to Labour’s wider benefit, by steering high-profile TV invitations his way.
My increasing promotion of Tony’s and Gordon’s media profiles did not escape the notice of some of their more senior colleagues. The first time I put Tony on breakfast TV, to rebut Tory economic policy before the 1987 election, I felt almost as if I’d taken my life in my hands. He was at that time a junior spokesman in Roy’s Shadow Treasury team. That afternoon, a redoubtable and undeniably more senior member, the Thurrock MP Oonagh McDonald, pinned me up against a wall behind the Speaker’s chair in the Commons. When Roy wasn’t available for an interview, she thundered, she was next in line. Did I understand? What on earth had I been playing at by putting Tony up instead? I assured her that there would be plenty of future opportunities for everyone, but I couldn’t help adding, ‘Tony was very good, wasn’t he?’ It was not what Oonagh wanted to hear.
Gordon’s first real chance to shine came a year and a half after the 1987 defeat, and it happened by accident. Both he and Tony had risen up the ranks since the election. Still too