It had all the marks of a distinctly unequal fight. In the Conservative corner, Nigel Lawson had been Chancellor since 1983. He was two decades older than Gordon, and had been in the Commons a decade longer. He had steadily lowered income tax, and since 1986 had built an economic recovery into an income and consumer boom. There were signs of trouble, however. Inflation was rising, and interest rates, which stood at 14 per cent, even more worryingly. Though this was Gordon’s first big set-piece parliamentary encounter, he at least had a strong argument to make, ‘dividing lines’ to exploit, a target to attack. That he would make his points effectively was something I never doubted: he, and Tony and I, had worked on rehearsing and refining them.
When he rose to face Lawson, he did much more than that. He spoke with confidence, vigour and verve. Lawson’s great economic expansion, he said, was mere sleight of hand, based on irresponsible levels of borrowing. ‘It is a boom based on credit,’ he said. Warning of trouble ahead, he ridiculed the Conservatives’ efforts to insist that all would be well despite their failure to live up even to their own economic forecasts. Then came the killer line, as Lawson sat grimacing, like an elephant improbably brought down by a mosquito: ‘The proper answer is to keep the forecasts and discard the Chancellor!’ When he had finished, to shouts of support from the Labour benches, I went up to the press gallery to gauge the reaction. I didn’t need to tell them Gordon had done well; they had seen it for themselves. But I felt we had witnessed something of real significance to Labour in this David and Goliath drama. ‘Today,’ I told them, ‘a star was born.’ The reason the Guardian’s Ian Aitken and others echoed the phrase the following morning was because all of us recognised that it rang true.
Part of what drew me to Gordon and Tony, and drew us together, was simply the way they did politics. So much of the Labour Party seemed weighted down by torpor and an acceptance of defeat. Morale reached a new low the week after Gordon’s Commons breakthrough, with a particularly painful by-election defeat in the ostensibly safe seat of Glasgow Govan. We lost it, with a swing of 33 per cent, to the Scottish Nationalists. Neil was feeling so despondent that for a brief period he even began speaking of stepping aside the following summer. I was feeling equally down. A fortnight later, I boarded a train north with Tony to join him at a meeting with his constituents. The contrast could hardly have been greater. Watching him use his mixture of intellect, humour and charm to communicate – with voters was like getting a blood transfusion.
The growing bond between Tony, Gordon and me was not only about politics. On policy, we also found much common ground. The specifics of the new Labour platform we envisaged would not take shape until much later. But we knew absolutely what had to go: the statist, unilateralist and class-defined prospectus that had lost us three straight elections and was surely going to lose us a fourth.
Two late-night entries in my diary, six months apart in 1988, chart the depth of my frustration and my growing certainty about what needed to be done. The first followed the NEC’s approval of the initial policy review reports. It reflected my relief at the vote, and my admiration for Neil’s role in arguing for and mobilising the support needed to secure it. But I worried about what hadn’t been accomplished, the risks we had failed to take, and where we might go from here. ‘The problem is that for all Neil’s courage and strength of leadership, he is let down by his lack of self-confidence and his seeming lack of interest in the detail of policy,’ I wrote. ‘It shows not so much in what he says and does, but in what he fails to articulate and to achieve.’ There was an ‘awful’ implication in this. I had begun to suspect that the country might never view Neil as prime ministerial material. He would end up being both ‘the hero and the fall-guy of history. The likelihood at the moment is that he will be the leader who restored and rebuilt the Labour Party but who could not clinch victory.’
The second snapshot is from a few days after my trip to Tony’s constituency in Sedgefield. ‘Increasingly,’ I wrote, ‘my role is revolving around the strong future leaders – Gordon Brown and Tony Blair – and the political nourishment and companionship I get from this group. They have such political gifts, and they know that on the present course we shall remain out of office for a generation. I have now become determined to be part of that successor generation. All my political ambition has returned with the challenge that they hold out.’
While I had not yet shared this with Neil, or even Charles Clarke, I knew something else as well. If I wanted to be part of creating a truly revived Labour Party, I could not do it from where I was – as a headquarters man, whatever the range of my influence. Like Gordon and Tony, I needed to be on the front line. I needed to resume a course I had abandoned, in disgust at the shambolic extremism of London Labour politics. I would seek election as a Labour Member of Parliament.
The Three Musketeers
My search for a seat in the Commons need not have ended my role in organising Neil Kinnock’s last realistic chance to become Prime Minister. But it did. By the time of the next election, my relations with Neil would be much more distant, while with Charles Clarke they were badly strained. With Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, however, they were not only closer: the three of us had become a political partnership, convinced that the party had to transform itself if it was to have any hope of returning to government. We were also fairly sure that neither Neil nor his likely successor, John Smith, could deliver that change.
I first broached the subject of looking for a parliamentary seat with Patricia Hewitt at the start of 1989. She smiled, an increasingly rare occurrence. Far from trying to argue me into staying the course with Team Kinnock, she had given up trying to convince herself. Working in the leader’s office, she was even more frustrated than I was about the prospects for the policy changes needed for renewal. With criticism of his leadership rising, Neil was in brooding, bunker mode. A change had come over Charles as well. His ebullient, can-do confidence was less in evidence, as was the banter with which he had always entertained, and sustained, the Kinnock operation – ‘Why, it’s Jolly Pierre!’ he would invariably greet me in my first years at Walworth Road. While I had undoubtedly become a bit less jolly myself, Charles’s morale had clearly suffered from the strain of projecting and promoting, protecting and preserving, Neil’s leadership against critics within Labour, and the media without.
Neil mistrusted, feared, and often despised the press, and would be upset by every unfriendly headline. He was using Patricia less and less, but blamed her when things went wrong – with sometimes distressing results that Charles did little or nothing to alleviate. She had begun helping Clive Hollick, a business supporter of Labour who headed the Mills & Allen billboard giant, in his efforts to equip the party for government over the longer term. Mrs Thatcher had entered Downing Street in 1979 with the core of a programme and a political identity – built, with Keith Joseph, largely on the work of a US-style think tank called the Centre for Policy Studies. There was no left-of-centre equivalent. With Clive’s backing, that was remedied, with the establishment of the Institute for Public Policy Research. Shortly after we spoke, Patricia left to become Deputy Director of the IPPR.
I mentioned my plans to Charles a few days