For a while, it looked very realistic indeed. Mrs Thatcher was being battered by protests against her Community Charge, or ‘poll tax’. She was in lethal cabinet combat with her Chancellor Nigel Lawson over whether Britain should join the Exchange Rate Mechanism, a system whereby currencies’ exchange rates were fixed within a series of narrow bands, linked to the German mark, intended to stabilise currency swings in preparation for a single European currency. Lawson wanted Britain to join. Mrs Thatcher did not, and had put him in his place by bringing in his rival Alan Walters as her economic adviser, a move that eventually provoked his resignation. In March 1990 I helped mount a by-election campaign against the Tories in Mid-Staffordshire, which we won with a 21 per cent swing, essentially by making it a referendum on the poll tax. In May, we made further gains in the local elections. By the end of the party conference season in the autumn – and the end of my five years at Labour headquarters – two separate polls showed us with a double-digit lead over the Tories.
I left Walworth Road in October 1990. Neil had the good grace to join me at a farewell reception for journalists, and he and Julie Hall presented me with my farewell gift: a huge portion of fish and chips, and mushy peas, all wrapped in a copy of that morning’s Daily Mirror. A few days later, Philip and Julie drove down with me to Foy for one of my final weekends before the cottage was sold. As Charles must have suspected, I continued to speak with Philip, and received summaries of his polling and focus group data, his analysis and strategy memos.
I had hoped that my job at Walworth Road would go to David Hill, Roy’s chief lieutenant. I felt his experience, seriousness and good relations with the media would mesh with Colin’s youthful energy and flair. That idea foundered on Neil’s unwillingness to have a ‘Hattersley man’ running the show. When I then lobbied for Colin to be promoted, Neil was supportive, and voted for him on the NEC. But his own staff spread the word that Colin was too close to me, encouraging NEC members to go for John Underwood, a former TV reporter who they thought would be a safer, and more easily manageable, pair of hands. Underwood saw the job very much in traditional Labour terms. Instead of acting as a change-maker, or in fact personally promoting Neil, he worked in concert with other shadow cabinet and NEC members, whatever shade of opinion they held. He and I overlapped for my final months. He lasted in the job for about a year, and when he decided to leave, in mid-1991, David was finally brought in.
I had been gone only a few weeks when the entire political landscape suddenly changed. After another test of wills over European monetary union – this time with her Deputy Prime Minister, Geoffrey Howe – Mrs Thatcher was challenged for the leadership by Michael Heseltine. She won the first ballot, but not convincingly enough to ward off a second vote. Initially, she said she would contest it, and win. Yet when one minister after another told her the game was up, she accepted the inevitable. On 22 November she announced that she was resigning as Prime Minister. Heseltine, having wielded the knife but failed to finish the job, could not strike again, and by the end of the month John Major – with just three months as Foreign Secretary, and a year as Chancellor – became leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister.
Neil was ecstatic. ‘It’s fantastic, kid,’ he beamed when I saw him a few days later. He had always felt rather intimidated by Mrs Thatcher, and had feared that Heseltine – rather than the untested, unpolished and uncharismatic Major – would follow her. I believed that Heseltine would have suited us in the long run. I thought he was too mercurial, too impulsive, too flawed a politician to unite his party behind him. Whatever John Major’s weaknesses, I felt he was sure to benefit simply from not being Mrs Thatcher, a leader the country had always respected more than liked. I also thought that we had made Major’s job easier: by focusing so much of our political fire on Mrs Thatcher, we had made her the issue with voters, rather than developing the policies necessary to defeat the Tories. I did not, however anticipate how strong Major’s political position would become in his early months in office. Domestically, he was the un-Thatcher; abroad, like Mrs Thatcher in the Falklands, he had a good war: the joint US and British operation in January 1991 to force Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi troops out of Kuwait.
Far from being at the centre of Labour’s response, I was now out of a job. My time at Walworth Road had transformed my political life. When I arrived, I was a junior producer of high-brow political television. Though it had not always been easy, I had acquired the tools of modern political communications and campaigning, and applied them in a way that had transformed Labour’s approach and image. At first, leaving was a shock. It was as if I’d run a marathon, or stepped out of the ring after a fifteen-round fight, to find that once the adrenalin rush subsided I was left with the aches and pains, and no new challenge to work for.
But the period before the general election would broaden and invigorate me in other ways. My first bit of good fortune was to have Dennis Stevenson as a friend. Though he was nearly a decade older than me, I had got to know him when I was chairman of the British Youth Council and he was head of one of its member organisations, the National Association of Youth Clubs. He became something of a mentor, first in my youth activity and then on every step of my political and professional life. Bright, cultured, generous with his time, he gave unfailingly wise advice on how Labour might modernise its economic policy and detoxify its image with the business community. Now he offered me a four-day-a-week position at the business consultancy he had created, SRU. As in my early days at LWT, I probably learned more than I contributed. I did work hard on a number of projects that were certainly a change from Walworth Road. For one client, I travelled to Denmark and the Netherlands to explore the market for chilled desserts. I was determined to pull my weight, especially since Dennis had agreed to let me build my schedule around my commitments in Hartlepool. Dennis, his high-octane partners like the London style guru Peter York, and their clients opened up a window on the business world. I got additional work with the help of another friend, the founding Weekend World editor John Birt, who was now Deputy Director-General of the BBC. I took on a part-time consultancy advising the corporation on how the different parties’ policies might affect it after the election.
My most important new connection with an old friend was political. Roger Liddle and I had drifted apart since the mid-1980s, first because I had moved away from Kennington, and then because we found ourselves on different sides of the Labour–SDP schism. The Fulham by-election had been painful for both of us, and especially for his wife Caroline. While we had had almost no contact since then, it was typical of him that when I came under attack during my selection campaign in Hartlepool, he leapt to my defence. I was accused of having come close to abandoning Labour and joining the SDP at its birth in 1981, but Roger, who had been part of the many hours of late-night discussions I had had with close friends at the time, refuted the suggestion.
When I was selected he sent me a note of congratulations, and we began to see more of each other. He was still in the SDP, or more accurately in the now merged Liberal Democrats, but he was starting to drift back towards Labour, or at least to see the possibility of accomplishing within a new kind of Labour Party the social democratic project that had inspired his original breakaway. He had set up a consultancy firm called Prima Europe, specialising in advising businesses on the implications of British and European regulation, and he now offered me a small, part-time role which I gratefully accepted. Roger would become a constant presence in my political life. Over the two decades that followed, I can honestly say that between them, he and Philip Gould informed every political, strategic or policy judgement I made. Early on in politics I had developed an ability to make decisions and stick with them. I also knew the importance of getting the decisions right. I invariably relied on Philip and Roger to reach a settled point of view.
By late 1991, I was concentrating on winning my own seat in Hartlepool. My direct involvement in preparations for Labour’s general election campaign was limited to a detailed note, at David Hill’s request, on the lessons to be learned from 1987 – ranging from the need to keep a tight day-to-day hold on events, messages and media coverage, to the imperative of avoiding burn-out in the final stages by setting aside time simply to sleep, as well as having a final-week