A Journey (4 page)

So he affected me deeply, as in another way did my mum. She was as different from my dad as it is possible for two people living together to be. Dad was more like me: motivated, determined, with a hard-focused ambition that, I fear, translates fairly easily into selfishness for both of us. Mum, by contrast, was a decent, lovely, almost saintly woman. She was shy, even a little withdrawn in company. She supported Dad politically as his wife and companion, but, as she used to confide in me occasionally, she was not really a Tory. For some reason – maybe to do with her Irish background – she felt somehow excluded; and she thought that some of the more Tory friends had fallen away when Dad took ill.

She died when I had just turned twenty-two. She had been ill with cancer of the thyroid. Looking back, it was clear she couldn’t survive, clear indeed that it was a minor miracle that she survived for the five years after she was first diagnosed.

But the shock of it. There is nothing like losing a parent. I don’t mean it’s worse than losing a child. It isn’t. I don’t think anything can be. I mean that it affects you in a unique way, at least if it happens when you’re young. Mum’s death was shocking because I couldn’t contemplate it. As she deteriorated and I was in my last months at Oxford, working hard for the final exams, Dad and my brother Bill kept from me the truth of her condition. I came home at the end of June and Dad picked me up from the station. ‘Your mother’s really very ill,’ he said.

‘I know, but she’s not dying, is she?’ I said, stating the worst so that he would reassure me, as I stupidly expected.

‘Yes, I am afraid she is,’ he replied. My world turned upside down. I could not imagine it. The person who had brought me up, looked after me, was always there to help and cherish me; the person who loved me without a consideration of my entitlement, without an assessment of my character, without wanting anything from me; the person who simply loved me: she would be gone.

Life was never the same after that. That was when the urgency took hold, the ambition hardened, the recognition grasped that life was finite and had to be lived in that knowledge. I miss her each day of my life.

With all the euphoria and celebration of election night rolling around me like a tidal wave, even with all I had to think of and to do at that momentous time, which was the fulfilment of my ambition, I thought of her and knew that though she would have been unutterably proud, it would not have altered one fraction of her love for me. It was already complete, entire unto itself. And, of course, more real than the transient adulation of 1 May 1997.

Now I saw my dad there in Trimdon, looking at me, realising that all his hopes could be fulfilled in me. As our eyes met, I knew also that we were thinking the same thought: Mum should have been there to see it.

I wrenched my mind away and got back to the business in hand. There were crowds everywhere. The Labour Club in Trimdon was ecstatic. We got a plane down from Teesside airport, and the results were paged in to Alastair as we flew. Big Tory Cabinet members were losing their seats, such as the Defence Secretary Michael Portillo and the Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind. It was a political earthquake. I sat with Cherie, collecting my thoughts for the Festival Hall. She knew what I was thinking and, as ever at times like these, could speak to me in a way no one else could. She told me that she knew it would be very hard, that bad times as well as good lay ahead, that politics begins like this but never ends the same way, that it was a privilege to do it, we had something genuine to offer and we would do it together.

In one of these ridiculous mishaps that happen, we lost our way to the Festival Hall and kept being announced by our campaign theme song ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ to the waiting crowd but, like the von Trapps, never actually appeared onstage. Finally we got there. My mental discipline was total. It was going to be a huge victory, therefore be even more aware of the responsibility. Don’t for a moment look as if the whole thing has gone to the party’s head. Look like a prime minister, not the guy who’s just scored the winning goal at Wembley.

It was not easy. I have come to the conclusion that one of life’s more annoying experiences is to be the only sober person at a party. Nothing can alter the fact that you are without drink and they are full of it. They are shouting, weeping and laughing, and you say, ‘Yes, thank you, it is a very special moment.’ There are cameras trained on you all the time; snappers snapping; scribblers scribbling. You smile, but you must not enter into the spirit; you embrace, but with a pat on the back; you thank, but with your effusion measured. There were familiar faces from the campaign, friends I knew from years back, people I had never seen before. For them, each greeting was a moment to savour; for me, a moment that had to be treated as a duty before passing on.

I saw Neil Kinnock, the Labour leader who had taught me so much, and the greeting was genuine, the warmth natural and irrepressible. But even with him, I was aware of the nervous gaze of Alastair directing me to the podium, aware that while others could relax, we were still onstage and the audience had to be pleased.

As Opposition leader, you carry great responsibility; to campaign for the top job in any country is onerous. You are the standard-bearer for your politics, your party and the beliefs both hold dear. Anyone who has ever run a campaign to win an election knows how big a task it is. There are a million decisions of organisation, communication, personnel and policy which have to be taken quickly and effectively. If you can do it well, it is good preparation and a real indication of leadership, but it isn’t the same in its impact on you as a person. From the moment the mantle is on your shoulders as prime minister, you understand that the scale, importance and complexity are completely different. They are not at the end of the same spectrum of leadership. You inhabit a new dimension altogether. There is something more: running for the job, you have a team and it feels like a team. Yes, you’re the leader, but your collaboration is so close, your intimacy so refined by experience, your interaction so governed by familiarity of an almost telepathic nature, that you feel like a family or a cabal of like-minded conspirators.

As I took the steps up to the podium and tried to push my mind and energy reserves on to the words I was going to say, I finally defined the root of the fear that had been growing all day: I was alone. There would be no more team, no more friendly clique, no more shared emotions among a band of intimates. There would be them; and there would be me. At a certain profound point, they would not be able to touch my life, or me theirs.

I stood on the podium and scanned the crowd. People were stacked up on Waterloo Bridge, massed not just outside the Festival Hall but around the Embankment by the River Thames, cheering, gesturing, waves of emotion reverberating through them. I felt the same impatience that I had felt all day, anxious to get the damn celebrating over with and get down to work; most of all, to see what it was really like to govern. But I put on my best face.

Just as I began to speak, the sun made its first appearance and the dawn started to come through with that rather beautiful orange, blue-grey light that heralds a good day. I couldn’t resist saying it, though as soon as I did I regretted it: ‘A new dawn has broken, has it not?’ This gave those already stratospheric expectations another and higher orbit. I swiftly tried to take them back to earth, emphasising that we were elected as New Labour and would govern as New Labour. Probably it wouldn’t have mattered what I said, but I was already obsessed with the notion that the country might take fright at the mandate it had given us, and believe that we may revert to the Labour Party of old, not the New Labour that we had promised to deliver. I sought to soothe and to settle, conscious that anything that smacked of hubris or arrogance, however faintly, would quickly return to haunt us.

Eventually at about 7 a.m. I went back with Cherie to our home in Islington in north London, now surrounded by people, to grab an hour’s sleep before going to the Palace to see the Queen and take the reins of government. It was strange to be back home with everything just as we had left it, knowing that we would sleep here for one or perhaps two nights more, and then leave forever.

The hour’s sleep revived me more than I expected. The results were now all in. Our majority of 179 over all the other parties combined was seismic, the largest in British history. Seats we had never won before, like Hove (which we kept even in 2005), had fallen to us. Some had returned to us for the first time since Attlee’s landslide of 1945. Places we assumed were true blue and unchangeable were now red: Hastings, Crawley, Worcester, Basildon and Harrow. And by the way, all stayed red through the following two elections.

Shortly after the polls had closed the night before and the exit polls had shown victory, John Major had called me to concede. He had been gracious, but it can’t have been easy. He had many strengths, but his weakness was he took personally the fact that I tried so hard to dislodge him.

It’s a strange thing about politics, but leaders and parties can be absolutely and genuinely outraged at what they perceive to be unfair attacks made on them (I dare say I suffer from this too, though I always fought the feeling), and yet seem completely oblivious to the fairness or otherwise of attacks they make on their opponents. When I look back on how we conducted ourselves as an Opposition, I admire enormously the professionalism but some of the tactics were too opportunistic and too facile. More than that, they sowed seeds that sprouted in ways we did not foresee and with consequences that imperilled us.

My attack on Major had always been political – weak leader, divided party – whereas the Tory attack on me was then, and continued to be, highly personal – liar, cheat, fraud, etc. So it was hard for Major to make the call, but he did and I paid fulsome tribute to him the next day (though I’m not sure that didn’t rub salt in the wound).

The other call I had taken was from Bill Clinton. That was great – he was really warm, plainly delighted to have a fellow third-way progressive in power – though I could tell that, as ever, he knew what I was thinking, knew the pitfalls ahead and was gently but clearly getting me ready for the change about to come.

The journey from Richmond Crescent in Islington to Buckingham Palace was extraordinary. People came out of their houses, thronging the route, waving, cheering. There were helicopters whirring overhead filming it live, and as they did so, people knew where we were and came out to greet us. It seemed as if the country had taken the day off. There is a strange unification at moments of great political change. People vote for many reasons. Some people vote for the same party regardless. (I voted Labour in 1983. I didn’t really think a Labour victory was the best thing for the country, and I was a Labour candidate!) Hordes of people vote from allegiance or tradition, and when the result is in and it really is the best thing for a nation that needs change, even those who vote against you join in the celebration. It is as if they had two votes: one they cast in the booth, the other they cast in their mind.

As we drove through the gates of Buckingham Palace there were more crowds, frantic to get a sight of the new prime minister. I could tell Cherie was very excited. As ever, I just wanted to get on with it. By now, I was straining at the leash of the convention, tradition and ceremony that delayed the doing.

I was shown into a little antechamber, outside the room where the Queen was. I suddenly became nervous. I knew the basic protocol, but only very vaguely. It is called ‘kissing hands’, the laying on of the Queen’s authority to govern. She was head of state. I was
her
prime minister. A tall official with a stick stood by me. ‘I should tell you one thing, Mr Blair,’ he began (note ‘Mr Blair’ until I had been appointed), ‘you don’t actually kiss the Queen’s hands in the ceremony of kissing hands. You brush them gently with your lips.’

I confess that floored me. What on earth did he mean? Brush them as in a pair of shoes, or touch them lightly? While I was still temporarily disconcerted, the door opened and I was ushered in, unfortunately tripping a little on a piece of carpet so that I practically fell upon the Queen’s hands, not so much brushing as enveloping them. I recovered sufficiently to find myself sitting opposite her. I had met her before, of course, but this was different. It was my first audience. There is much to say about the Queen. At this encounter, I noticed two things: she was quite shy, strangely so for someone of her experience and position; and at the same time, direct. I don’t mean rude or insensitive, just direct. ‘You are my tenth prime minister. The first was Winston. That was before you were born.’ We talked for a time, not exactly small talk but general guff about the government programme, the conversation somewhat stilted. Then Cherie was brought in to pay her respects, and the Queen relaxed more as they chatted. (Contrary to popular belief, Cherie always got on well with her.) Cherie was explaining very practical things we would need to do with the children and how strange it would be for them to live in Downing Street, and the Queen was generally clucking sympathetically. I fear I sat there looking a trifle manic, unsure how or when to end the conversation, focusing on what I would say on the steps of Downing Street and feeling, through lack of sleep, more than a little spaced out. The Queen understood it all, of course, and kept the conversation going for just the right length of time; then, by an ever so slight gesture, she ended it and saw us out.

‘This way, Prime Minister,’ said the tall chap with the stick as he ushered us down the stairs to the waiting car.

And so to Downing Street. After working the crowd, I got to the stand-alone pedestal that would serve me on so many occasions over the coming years. What I said reflected my incessant, gnawing desire to get away from the congratulatory euphoria – which I knew would mean little in terms of how we governed – and get down to business. I spoke of plans and programmes and policies – not a long speech, but clearly focused on what we would do when I stepped inside that door for the first time.