A Journey (50 page)

The speech was again about the nature of a changing society and its rules and order. For the purposes of domestic consumption back home, we had a passage in the speech about louts and on-the-spot fines. If we hadn’t, as Alastair rightly pointed out, we were going to Europe for ‘nul points’ with the British electorate.

Rather foolishly, I let him write the passage about the fines. It was a great piece of Alastair tabloidery. Except that, as can happen with this genre, it went too far, suggesting we would march the offender up to the nearest cashpoint and solemnly watch as they were forced to take out their money and pay the fine – i.e. a real on-the-spot, on-the-spot fine. Literal, but not practical.

‘You watch how this goes on the news,’ he said confidently as we settled into the seats of the RAF plane flying us back. ‘It’ll go big.’ And in that prediction, limited as it was, he was undoubtedly right.

Unfortunately, it was a classic example of a big argument being obscured by a small error. On-the-spot fines indeed came in, but they were more or less missed in the embarrassment of our not being able to defend them by reference to ‘cashpoint justice’.

It didn’t much matter in the end. The seeds of a far bigger development – a new framework of antisocial behaviour legislation – were sown.

The public presentation of the reform I wanted was not going well. The philosophical dimension had been felled by the WI; the policy dimension was stuck in the medieval vaults of Tübingen. Now it was the turn of the personal dimension.

It is always unconscionably dangerous for a prime minister to have teenage children. It is the proverbial accident waiting to happen. I have been blessed by having the most fantastic, generally understanding and only quietly rebellious children. When I remember what I was like at their age, I shiver to think of myself as a teenager transplanted to Downing Street.

I recall, back in the mists of time, my dad greeting me off the train at Durham railway station as I came home after my first year at Oxford. My unwashed hair was roughly the length of Rapunzel’s and I had no shoes and no shirt. My jeans were torn – in the days before this became fashionable. Worst of all, I was wearing a long sleeveless coat I had made out of curtains my mum had thrown out. All my dad’s friends were at the station, and their kids looked paragons of respectability beside me.

Dad saw the old curtains and visibly winced. They did kind of stand out. I took pity on him.

‘Dad,’ I said, ‘there is good news. I don’t do drugs.’

He looked me in the eye and said: ‘Son, the bad news is if you’re looking like this and you’re not doing drugs, we’ve got a real problem.’

As children go, my kids are great. But that’s the point – children do go.

Euan was sixteen and had just sat his GCSEs. To be frank, and if he doesn’t mind me saying so, they weren’t a huge cause for celebration, but he and his friend James, a lovely guy who became a Labour candidate in the 2010 election, decided to go out and celebrate nevertheless.

Around 11.30 on the night of 6 July, I was proceeding in an upwardly direction to my bed, when I thought I would look in on the said Euan, who I assumed must have been back in his room by then. The assumption was false. There was no Euan. Not in his room, not in the flat.

Cherie was away with her mum and Leo, taking a short break in Portugal.

Where the hell was Euan? I only knew he had been out with James. I phoned James’s mum, and got James’s number. I phoned him. He was not making a massive amount of sense, but the gist was he had last seen Euan wandering off in the general direction of Leicester Square.

I panicked. This is where being prime minister poses a few unusual challenges. I wanted to go and look for him. You do. You want to rush out and get busy. But I could hardly saunter up to Leicester Square and do a walkabout at midnight. I spoke to the policeman by the door at Downing Street, explained what had happened and threw myself on his mercy. Like a complete trooper, he announced he would go and search for Euan.

The next couple of hours were desperate. In my worry, I temporarily forgot the fact I had a huge programme on the next day. I was due to be down in Brighton, first to visit the Black Churches of Britain Conference, and then to do a special edition of
Question Time
, featuring just me, and centring on – yes, you guessed it – law and order and antisocial behaviour.

The wonderful Downing Street copper somehow tracked him down, and at around 1.30 a.m. he turned up with a very sorry-assed-looking Euan, plainly still the worse for wear, having been arrested near Leicester Square Tube station for underage drinking and being drunk in a public place. The circumstances and timing were not, shall we say, absolutely desirable.

I got no sleep that night. Around 2.30 a.m. Euan insisted on coming into my bed. Alternately, he would go into a mournful tirade of apology and then throw up. I loved him and felt sorry for him, but had a police cell been available I would have been all for moving him there.

Somehow, eventually, it was morning. The news had come out at roughly the time when Euan was being ushered back in the door of Downing Street. Police stations serve many admirable and necessary purposes, but they aren’t places to keep secrets. Alastair, who I had to speak to about press handling, thought the whole thing hilariously funny, going into what he thought was a very amusing riff about how
Question Time
would be, linking it without any sense of self-awareness to the debacle of cashpoint fines. I’m afraid I was completely beyond it all. I can make do with only a little sleep, but not no sleep. By some means – I suppose it must have been the train – I got down to Brighton and, clutching a prepared speech, went to where the Black Churches were having their conference.

I didn’t quite know what to expect. I didn’t know much about them then, though I came to know much more later in my time. In particular, I hadn’t realised how similar they were to American Black Churches – lively, inspirational, participational, all-singing and all-dancing.

When I walked in, there was a great roar of welcome. Of course, they all knew about Euan. It was big news. And it was meat and drink, if you’ll pardon the expression, to them. There was the prime minister’s son, falling from grace, yielding to the devil alcohol, straying from the righteous path; and here was the prime minister coming among them. Well, you can imagine.

It was like a revivalist convention. People were blessing and praying and calling out the Lord’s name. The main man, a total inspiration and lovely human being, got them all to hold hands and pray for me, for my family, for Euan. I did, at one moment, want to point out that, OK, he was drunk and shouldn’t have been, but all this seemed a little excessive – it’s not as if he was a proper criminal or anything.

But I didn’t and it wouldn’t have mattered a jot if I had. To them, the boy was lost and now was found, and that was all that mattered.

It certainly did revive me. I threw away my speech, got thoroughly into the spirit of it all and have to admit gave them as good as I was getting, cavorting shamelessly around the stage like some TV evangelist, doing a bit of whooping and hollering myself and having a ball.

By the time I got to the
Question Time
studio, I was fighting drunk on the Lord’s spirit. When the first questioner asked me a nasty question about whether my son’s antics didn’t make a mockery of my claim to be concerned about law and order or some such, I practically bopped him – verbally at any rate – and continued in that vein. ‘What did they slip into your tea at that religious thing?’ Alastair asked afterwards. ‘We should send you down there every week. On second thoughts, maybe not,’ he added.

We stopped off at a pub on the way back, much to the amusement of the locals. They were all thoroughly supportive of Euan and I heard in turn each customer’s tale of a similarly misspent youth. At moments like that, the British are very decent folk.

Once those various alarums and excursions were out of the way, Alan and I settled back down to the detail of the NHS Plan. We were having scores of meetings on it, several a week – examining, re-examining, re-re-examining over and again.

I realised that to sell it to a doubting and nervous party we would have to sweeten the pill of reform at points. Progressive parties can take their medicine and, once taken, feel and act better – but a spoonful of sugar helps it all go down. We had a number of positive factors to play with: the extra money; the extra staff: more NHS work to be secured from consultants in their starting years; more help for cancer and cardiac patients; an end to most mixed-sex wards; an increase in some types of hospital bed.

In return, we were opening up all the contracts of the professionals for renegotiation; breaching new ground with the private sector; changing the way the service worked to make it far more user-friendly; and, in essence, prefiguring an NHS that started to import twenty-first-century business concepts into the heart of the service.

Rereading it now, I can see all its limitations. Today it would be considered less than bold. And there were errors in implementation, to be sure. We paid more for the consultants’ and GPs’ contracts than strictly necessary (this later became a strong bone of contention with the Treasury), but in the long run, I considered it worth it. We set in place tracks of reform that in time would carry the system to transformational change. So: GP contracts were generous, but when we put the new contract into legislation, we inserted the right to open up local GP monopolies to competition. Nurses were given far more power; old demarcations between junior and senior doctors were collapsed.

The door was edged open for the private sector. The concept which, in time, was to result in foundation hospitals was introduced. And the whole terminology – booked appointments, minimum guarantees of service, freedoms to innovate – spoke of a coming culture of change, oriented to treating the NHS like a business with customers, as well as a service with patients.

For me, the process was itself extraordinarily revealing and educative. I started to find my proper points of reference when thinking of reform; began to articulate the concepts more clearly; assumed a more substantial confidence in the direction of change. I stopped thinking of it as a gamble with questionable empirical evidence, and started realising it was a clear mission whose challenge lay not in whether it was right, but in how it was carried through.

I date from that time, too, my clear break with the thinking that had dominated even New Labour policy up to then: that the public and private sectors operated in different spheres according to different principles. New Labour had indeed weaned the party off its hostility to the private sector, but now we moved on from the 1990s version of New Labour to something more consistent with a twenty-first-century mindset.

The truth was that the whole distinction between public and private sector was bogus at all points other than one: a service you paid for; and one you got free. That point is obviously central – it defines public service. But it doesn’t define how it is run, managed and operated. In other words, that point is critical, but at all other points, the same rules apply for public and private sector alike, and those points matter enormously.

For a public service, even one like the NHS, in the negotiation of contracts for buildings, IT equipment, technology, it is like a business. When it cuts costs, as it should if it can, it is like a business. When it employs or fires people, it is like a business. When it seeks to innovate, it is like a business.

So I began to look for ways, all ways, of getting business ideas into public service practice. Just as the private sector had moved from mass production and standard items to just-in-time, customised products, so should public services. Just as people could shift custom if one company’s service was better than others, so should customers of public services be able to do so. Just as private sector service was driven by risk-taking and innovation, so we should be freeing up the front line of public services to do the same.

I also came to have a sense, at times too obvious, of impatience with the view that all such talk was a betrayal of public service ethos. It seemed to me perfectly clear that if the status quo resulted in a poor service, then that was the true betrayal of that ethos; and so, if the poor service arose from the wrong structure, the structure had to change. In any event, I could see that so much of the language of defending ‘our public services’ was just obscurantist propaganda designed to dress up a vested interest in the garb of the public interest.

We took care in how we presented the plan, which was scheduled for launch at the end of July, just before the recess. I always liked to announce a few big things before the long summer recess.

It can be up to three months. Robin Cook – in his reforming zeal when Leader of the House of Commons – tried to shorten it, a proposal in which the media delighted and at which MPs groaned. Personally, I loved the long summer break. It gave everyone space to contemplate, holiday, work it all out and get in shape for the party conference season. Life is so frenetic when Parliament is sitting. And, of course, the media environment in which ministers work is so incredibly altered, with tons more media obligations. The pace of modern politics is breakneck, so a long recess really helps.

But the MPs need to be sent off for summer with a clear strategy. Hence, the end of July was always a busy time, as busy as I could make it.