A Journey (109 page)

Of course, in the end, it is such an exciting and enormous thrill to be there and to do the job that none of the downside should ever blind you to the ineluctable honour of the upside. But after all, you’re only human, so you think: Yes, it’s a great honour, and simultaneously: You bastards!

People deal with the pressure in all kinds of different ways, both prime ministers and spouses. Some drink, some have a wild side, some crack, some find religion, some find special friendship. I do not believe anyone doesn’t have to deal with it, however. The pressure is too great. You always imagine the person of extraordinary character, strong, resolute, without fear and without doubt, willing to be alone and to stand alone, supremely confident astride the muddle of human affairs. Such a person doesn’t exist. To be human is to be frail. At points of supreme challenge, such confidence and courage can be summoned forth, as can acts of incredible selflessness and sacrifice, but no person is ever such a character all the time.

Then again, everyone needs to relax, to let their hair down, to be rid of the paraphernalia and pomp of power, if only for a fleeting moment. And if you ever get a person in charge who doesn’t need to do this, watch out. There will be trouble.

There is also a certain sadness that settles on you that never leaves. As will be apparent from this memoir, I am basically an optimistic and upbeat person. I think life is a gift from God and should be lived to the full and with purpose. Someone has to do the prime minister’s job and someone has to take the decisions, and how many times have I said what a privilege it is to do it?

But privilege though it is, you become aware over time of the consequences of each decision, good and bad. This is especially so when the decisions lead directly to life or death. I remember during Kosovo, when by mistake the allied forces bombed a civilian convoy in which children died. From that moment, I think, the sadness settled on me. I thought of the life those children might have had – the grief of the parents, the feeling I would have if it were my child. Now it’s true you have to reflect on those who would have died if you had refused to act. If we had acted as we should have in Bosnia or Rwanda, many lives would have been saved. But there would have been lives lost also. In Iraq, we forget the children that died under Saddam and would have continued to die had he remained in power. But it doesn’t remove the thought that there are those who would have lived had we not taken the military action to be rid of him. That thought never leaves you; and in the quiet watches of the night, it comes back insistently and with force.

I dealt with the pressure as well as most, if not better. But I had to deal with it. It may have appeared to slide off me, but that was an act. Underneath, it was there. However, I continuously tried to overcome my own demons by confronting them.

Those last months took a very special kind of immersion mixed with detachment. I had to be totally focused, but I knew it was coming to an end. So I operated at two levels: I was completely up for it and making policy decisions every day as normal; and I was mentally preparing to go, thinking about what I wanted to do, wondering what the future would bring.

The Queen’s Speech of November 2006 had law and order as its theme. We put up in lights the changes to the Home Office and the Department for Constitutional Affairs – now to be the Ministry of Justice – ID cards, plus another heavy dose of antisocial behaviour measures.

The reform programme of the ten years of government is known most for the constitutional changes and education and health reforms. Tuition fees, specialist schools, academies and trust schools; choice, competition, foundation hospitals, cancer and cardiac programmes: all these, and of course devolution, are obvious.

The motivation for the law and order changes and, in particular, the antisocial behaviour campaign, I have described before. Same with ID cards. But the completeness of these reforms never really took hold, in terms of popular analysis and imagination, in the same way as the other programmes. I believe this is a mistake. Law and order – and to an extent immigration – were to me utterly mainstream and vital points of what the government was about, as crucial to New Labour as academies or choice in the NHS.

The Queen’s Speech, and the actions over the subsequent months, took this agenda to a new point in policy. It was controversial, hotly contested in many parts of the media, opposed by Tories, Lib Dems and significant parts of the Labour Party. I knew Gordon would let it drop when he took over, but I wanted the agenda clear because I felt sure, and still do, it will come back.

I had begun the reorganisation of the Home Office and Lord Chancellor’s Department straight after the 2003 reshuffle. It had been the hardest of all, since it meant losing Derry Irvine, my idol and mentor, but we had been trying to get some modernity into the very old-fashioned way the criminal justice system worked. Having David Blunkett at the Home Office helped enormously because his instincts on crime were so good. Charlie Falconer and Peter Goldsmith were both fully onside. We made changes to the Civil Service leaders, and that had an impact, but it couldn’t all be done ad hominem. There had to be structural and institutional change.

My problem with the set-up was simple: it led to priorities that didn’t coincide with those of the government. The Lord Chancellor’s office was an amalgamation of three distinct roles: he was Speaker of the House of Lords, head of the judiciary and administrator-in-chief of the courts. For me it was obvious the roles were qualitatively different. What came last in the pecking order – the courts – was what mattered first to me, since that was where the effectiveness of the criminal justice system lay.

Likewise, the Home Office used to love all the constitutional stuff it handled – exercising the royal prerogative, the monarchy, titles, ceremonial matters, human rights, the Royal Charter, appointments, ecclesiastical matters, marriage and access to information – but what mattered to me was crime and immigration. I could feel its intellectual and political energy sucked into areas that were interesting to an elite class but left the lives of normal folk untouched. And they needed their lives touched by an effective ‘crime-fighting’ and ‘immigration control-enforcing’ machine.

Painful though moving Derry was, and as bumpy and chaotic as the aftermath of the constitutional reform to the office of Lord Chancellor became, the result was absolutely right. The House of Lords got an elected Speaker and sensibly chose a woman, Helene Hayman; judges were appointed by an independent commission; and the Lord Chancellor’s Department became the Department of Constitutional Affairs, focused on driving forward the reform and improvement of the justice system, and on reforming and safeguarding the constitution. In 2007, we then added prisons and probation to their remit, which again makes sense since fighting crime was one thing and dealing with the court process and offenders was another, best dealt with in the same department, as was the norm in most ministries of justice abroad.

So we moved the constitutional affairs brief out of the Home Office, changed the Lord Chancellor’s Department and beefed up the immigration, passport and citizenship part of the Home Office. We also needed to put them within a framework of laws that made sense of the modern world. Hence the antisocial behaviour legislation; the attempts to reform the terror laws; the tightening of the rules on asylum and immigration, the elimination of juries in complex fraud trials (which often collapsed after months due to their complexity, and tied up jurors’ time for periods that excluded professional working people from jury service). The DNA measures were a hugely important advance, fiercely resisted on civil liberty grounds that I thought completely spurious. Due to new DNA technology we could match the DNA of suspects against that of previous criminals and from crime scenes, and build a DNA database. The results have been dramatic. Old crimes have been solved and innocent people have been freed. If extended – and around half of crimes leave a DNA trace – the change to the whole criminal justice system would be immense. Of course, the information must be handled carefully and protected, but the possibility is there to make it very hard to commit murder without detection, almost impossible to commit rape, and dangerous for a criminal to assault someone.

We had another major row over the Proceeds of Crime Act. This was a reform of enormous purport, which in time will tip the balance of law enforcement in respect of organised crime towards the enforcers, not the criminals. We had begun this legislation in April 2005 with the introduction of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act. It led to the creation of the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) in April 2006. It had been, as ever, strongly opposed. The Tories and the Home Affairs Committee criticised the 2005 Act for the absence of a single UK border police force within the legislation, the Lib Dems were cautious over how well financed the agency would be, the Police Federation opposed the agency as they had concerns that they could lose the traditional independence officers enjoy and that their pay and conditions could be at risk, and the media questioned the overall value of the organisation. But it had given us, for the first time, the power to seize assets of suspected or convicted criminals on a basis that really did operate as a deterrent.

The whole business arose out of face-to-face meetings I had with police officers and residents in estates plagued by drugs and prostitution. Often the dealers or pimps would carry around thousands of pounds on them, or drive fancy cars. It was of course impossible to prove these amounts of money were the proceeds of crime, but allowing them to do this had two deleterious consequences. First and obviously, they could conduct their affairs more easily. Second and less obviously but to my mind very importantly, it gave them a cachet and status within the neighbourhood. Young men looked up to them. People feared them; and worse, some admired them. They were top dogs. The effect on the local community was awful. The Act gave the police the power to seize assets – money or property – after which there was an inquiry into whether they had been come by lawfully. Of course, it was a reversal of the normal rules of proof and evidence – that was the reason for the opposition, and understandably so – but I felt it absolutely necessary in the circumstances of modern life on those estates.

Having legislated, we then built on the foundation. Over time, we increased the powers and gave the police an incentive by allowing them to keep a certain per cent of the assets seized from suspected criminal activity. This policy offended virtually every Treasury sensibility, but in the end they agreed, and though we always fought over how much went to the Treasury and how much to the government, the principle was accepted.

The 2006 Queen’s Speech extended these powers still further: to establish a new Serious Crime Prevention Order preventing organised crime by individuals, or organisations, by imposing restrictions on them; to introduce new offences of encouraging or assisting a criminal act with intent, or encouraging or assisting a criminal act believing that an offence may be committed; and to strengthen the recovery of criminal assets by extending powers of investigation and seizure to all accredited financial investigators. Given my own way, I would probably have taken it a good deal further still, but we had broken new ground, as we had with the antisocial behaviour legislation; and once different people in government reflect and try to assuage the public demand, they will go back to this agenda and fulfil it.

Fear and personal insecurity are terrible factors in everyday life for too many people. Reduce them and the quality of living improves dramatically. Seizing this agenda, especially on antisocial behaviour, was one of my proudest achievements. There is a trade-off with civil liberties – there’s no point denying it – and though it was sometimes felt I was indifferent or dismissive of them, I truly wasn’t. I was very conscious of the need to protect the innocent falsely accused of being guilty.

Twice in my career I had good reason to thank God for the independence of the British judiciary and Bar: once in the Hutton Inquiry; and then when the ruling on the ‘cash for honours’ business was made. On both occasions, the lawyer came under intense and at points wholly improper pressure to do what a large part of the media wanted; and on both occasions, they made decisions according to the evidence. So I can bear witness to the value of the independent and impartial authority that keeps power in check, that protects the innocent and judges without fear or favour.

However, I could also see that ordinary people living without any protection in some parts of towns and cities were acutely vulnerable in ways the outdated system did not acknowledge. I’ve seen lawless places and places where people behave because they know they must. There is always a certain harshness in the latter. But believe me, put it to the vote and people know in which sort of society they would choose to bring up a family.

So we charged ahead on the law and order agenda, and even in the last days of office brought into effect some of the reforms.

We were less successful on the casino legislation. What a saga that one was! An interesting example, though, of how a public mood can be shaped.

We had, and still have, a problem with some of the old British seaside towns. In the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century people would flock to them, not minding the spasmodic evidence of summer, enjoying the arcades, sampling the entertainment, the end-of-pier shows, the carnival atmosphere. They were brash and bulging with good old-fashioned entertainment. Then in the 1960s came the package holiday and air travel. I remember going to Benidorm as it was taking off in the 1960s. I loved it. It was the first time I had ever flown. After a taste of Spain – tapas, Ducados and Rioja (bit underage, but never mind) – staying in the UK seemed tame and unfashionable. Gradually the seaside towns declined, and as the new millennium dawned they faced an unpredictable future; or perhaps all too predictably, no future. Blackpool was the classic example.