A Journey (51 page)

Before we got to the NHS Plan we had a stack of other things to do. We presented our Annual Report as a government to Parliament. This was one of our wackier innovations. The idea was entirely sensible: go through what the government had said it would do, and what it had done during the year. A sort of State of the Union address.

I finally binned it after the 2000 Report which I presented in mid-July to Parliament. It was a bit rushed. We ticked off the items we had achieved. Except some we ticked, we hadn’t done. There was a memorable so-called achievement we listed and ticked off, which was the building of a new sports stadium in Sheffield. The only problem was it didn’t exist. William Hague gave me a real old drubbing. Peter Brooke, a wonderful old Tory grandee, got up and asked what was the purpose of the photograph on page so-and-so, which turned out to be a picture of a packet of contraceptive pills. Tricky one to answer, that. Anyway, some ideas work, some don’t. This didn’t.

I decided that by bending over and inviting people to come and kick the government’s backside we weren’t advancing the cause of human progress much, and certainly not the cause of Her Majesty’s Government. So although binning the idea generated a certain amount of additional embarrassment, I was more than happy to suffer it to save a perpetual hiding being handed out each year.

On 27 July 2000, I presented the NHS Plan. It went well. There was enough to satisfy the backbenchers that it was a Labour document. And we had put down the markers for New Labour.

Around the same time, Andrew Adonis and I first formulated the academy idea for schools. It was still in its early stages, but the idea had germinated. It was based, in part, on the old Tory policy of independent technical colleges, but they had only created ten of them and then sort of shelved the policy. However, it aligned neatly with our thinking elsewhere: to give schools independence, to set them free from the local authority system of hands-on control; and to let them innovate, including in how they employed staff.

The public service and welfare reform agenda for the second term was gradually becoming defined. As we departed for the recess, I was in a reasonably jolly mood. I was no longer feeling my way, but finding it.

However, one cloud was gathering, and starting to spread with a rather deep shade of darkness. Gordon was managing the economy with all his power and skill, and that was no small thing – it gave the whole government ballast and weight – but there was a worrying pattern emerging that was more than conventional Treasury caution. It was clear that the direction of reform was not shared; not agreed; and not much liked. I noticed that the term ‘marketisation’ of public services started to be used in discussions between us, especially when his adviser Ed Balls was involved, and the term was not meant as a compliment.

The cloud did not obscure the sun or sky at that point, but it made me uneasy. I wanted a radical manifesto, and so did he – but did the term ‘radical’ mean the same thing to each of us? And how would he feel about the second term and the succession? An election was less than a year away if we were to go four years, the right time for a government which believes it can win again.

But, as I set off down to Tuscany and then to the Ariège in France, I felt we were in good shape to win a second term and win it well. Little Leo was proving a complete, unalloyed blessing: gorgeous, happy, a joy to others and to himself. It was weird having a small baby again; and weirder still in Downing Street. But right from the off, he was carried from room to room, from the switchboard to the foreign policy unit, a pocket-size piece of benign innocence existing in the maelstrom of the world-weary activities of government.

In the beautiful and venerable garden of the Strozzis’ palazzo in Tuscany, I wondered what the intervening months would hold in store. My conjecture ranged widely. But not for one moment did it stray into the realms of floods, fuel protests and foot-and-mouth disease. Just as well, really.

TEN

MANAGING CRISES

I
left for holiday at the end of July with the focus on public service reform. I came back at the end of August and found naturally that the focus had shifted to the thought that an election could be anticipated in May 2001; this was the run-up. The moment you begin a pre-election period, everything starts to be shaped around the election. The focus alters. The mind starts to think politically; the perpetual analysis and reanalysis about public sector reform gets displaced by polls, focus groups, anecdotal evidence of public opinion; the party people, exiled for years in the Siberia of party drudgery far from the centre of government, suddenly re-emerge in the halls of the Kremlin with renewed self-importance; and the wheels of the election machine start to turn.

For most of the party, the upcoming campaign would be centred on one simple ambition: to be the first ever Labour government to win two successive terms in office. For me, it was going to be about winning a mandate for more fundamental change. For me, the arguments about direction were long settled. The first term had proved we could govern. The second term had to be about what we were governing for: getting beyond the old established British ways, based in my eyes on a vision of the country no longer possible or desirable, and making us fit for the future. My boundless, at times rather manic lust for modernisation could occasionally be misdirected, but I was sure the basic thrust was correct: we needed to modernise the whole idea of the 1945 welfare state and public services, out-of-date systems of law and order and immigration, and our view of our role in the world. We had to use the twenty-first century as an occasion to renew ourselves as a nation. Thatcher had done the right thing in liberating enterprise and industry, but in becoming so obsessed with Euroscepticism, I felt she had still indulged the country in a view of itself that was simply no longer compatible with where we needed to be now, in this the year of the millennium.

I hadn’t by any means worked out all the right policy answers, but I had worked out the crucial failing of the first term: the mistaken view that raising standards and performance could be separated from structural reform. This was true virtually across the board; and especially so in the public services. Above all, we had to divest power away from the dominant interest groups, unions and associations, and put it into the hands of people, the consumer, the parent, the patient, the user.

So I came back after a long and good holiday rested, but also fidgety and anxious. I had to frame the political argument right to win. I had to frame our manifesto right to give ourselves a proper mandate for proper change. We had hoarded our political capital in the first term. We had to keep it high to win again and win big. But I knew the moment was fast coming when I would have to spend it. And by now, if I had ever been in any doubt at the beginning, I knew that this would mean a second term that was an awful lot tougher, more challenging and less popular than the first.

As if to bring this home to me, from the moment I was back until nine months later when we won the election, I was embroiled in the most bizarre mixture of divine and man-made crises.

Within hours of my return, I was posed one of those extraordinarily sensitive and difficult decisions that can occur at any time and frequently come in batches. The British troops in Sierra Leone had been brilliant, and were successfully reasserting the control of the democratic government, but sadly a group of soldiers from the Royal Irish Regiment caught up in the fighting had been kidnapped by the RUF. We received intelligence as to where they were. Charles Guthrie asked to see me urgently in my den in Downing Street. He told me that they could mount an SAS rescue operation.

As ever with Charles, he had the courage to recommend a course of action rather than simply leave the decision to me, but he warned me that casualties were likely. The RUF are crazy and well-armed people, he explained, and there is a risk both to the hostages and to the rescue force. The alternative was to continue trying to negotiate and hope somehow we could prise them out through that route. We could probably buy them out, but we both quickly agreed that would be a disastrous signal which would only provoke a rash of copycat kidnappings.

We sat there for a few moments staring at each other. It would have been nice to have called for more work to be done; to have probed for greater detail; to have asked for the plans and the drawings and goodness knows what else they would have been doing at SAS HQ in Hereford. But I knew that while it could all be seen, and seen again, the decision would remain the same.

‘Are you guys up for it?’ I asked somewhat redundantly.

He snorted. ‘The guys are always up for it, as you know.’

‘OK, let’s do it.’

We got all the hostages back, but we lost an SAS soldier. Charles called me up in the flat and told me himself. I wandered around the flat for a while, imagining who he was, what he looked like, how he had felt going into the operation, the nerves, the adrenalin, the realisation that death might be moments away, and I reflected on a life lost, a family in mourning. We could still be negotiating and he could still be alive.

‘I’m really sorry, Charles,’ I had started to say, ‘the trouble is if we hadn’t acted—’

‘You don’t need to say that,’ Charles broke in. ‘For what it’s worth, I have no doubt it was the right decision. It is very sad that we lost a man. But they are professionals. They know the risks. They do it because they want to do it and because they believe in it. There will be a lot of grief back in Hereford but also a lot of pride.’

With an election in the offing, it had been decided that I should do a regional tour in order to ‘reconnect with the people’. There is always something a trifle dubious about the ‘connecting with the people’ business. In modern politics, you have to pretend to be living the life the ordinary person leads, when, of course, you can’t and don’t do the shopping in the supermarket, fill up the car, go down to the pub for a few beers, the quiz night and a bit of banter. But everyone nowadays has to go through the elaborate pretence that the prime minister could and should do all that, otherwise he or she is ‘out of touch’, the worst criticism that can ever be made.

I can’t tell you how many cafes, fish and chip shops and shopping malls I would go into, have money thrust into my hand (yes, the prime minister must have real cash jingling in his pocket) and buy something, all in the interests of showing I was a ‘regular bloke’. One of the main reasons it’s total rubbish is that prior to going in, the place is staked out by armed detectives, the shopkeeper is quizzed for security and politics, there are around twenty cameramen and film crews, a few random protesters, passing eccentrics, ordinary but bewildered members of the public and occasionally a police helicopter whirring overhead. Which all amounts to something a trifle different from how your regular bloke usually buys his coffee or CDs. But it all had to be gone through, and the office – Alastair particularly – would get very snooty and irritated if I tried to complain that it was all daft.

The classic was me and Gordon buying ice creams on a trip to a park and playground in the 2005 election. The conversation with Kate Garvey went something like this: ‘Go and buy ice cream from that van there, one for you, one for Gordon, to show togetherness and being normal.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s absurd. I don’t like Mr Whippy ice cream, except with a chocolate flake stuck in it; and does Gordon look like your average ice cream buyer? Come on, it’s ridiculous, we’re two guys in suits, one is the prime minister, the other is the Chancellor of the Exchequer. What’s normal about it?’

‘Just do it,’ she said menacingly, ‘and don’t get a flake; it’ll make you look greedy.’ (Advice I ignored.)

Such visits usually would provide a proper quotient of amusement. As I wandered round the park that day, I met a working-class mum, grandmother, and baby in a pram. ‘You’re better-looking than on TV,’ the older woman remarked, sizing me up like a piece of meat.

‘You can come again,’ I said jauntily.

‘I just ’ave,’ she said, a story Kate regaled to an embarrassed Gordon.

Before the rounds of interviews anywhere near election time, I would have to go through a list of the price of everyday things like a pint of milk, a pound of butter, a shoulder of lamb. Bread used to produce lengthy debate about which type of loaf, white or brown, nothing too wholemeal, nothing too unhealthy, all of it done in the belief that if I knew such a fact, it would mean I might be going down to the shop near Downing Street (not that there was one) and collecting the groceries, which of course I wasn’t. But people have great faith in the power of such trips to ‘connect’ with the public, and who’s to say they’re wrong.

However, though I went along with it all, I always used to question the premise. The public aren’t stupid; they know the prime minister doesn’t really tootle off to the supermarket like they do. They don’t want to know that he actually does live like one of them, but they want to know that he could; and more important, they want to know that he feels like them, that they could get on.

This is nothing to do with upbringing or class or background. You can be an Old Etonian and get along with people; you can be from Trimdon Colliery and be hopeless with them. It’s about temperament, character and attitude. It’s also about being authentic. To be sure, if you aren’t naturally a bloke people would like to have a beer with and you’re running for office, it is a problem. It may be irrational, but it’s true. I always used to say to people about George Bush: don’t underestimate his appeal as a normal guy. You might not agree with him, but if you’re a voter, you would never think you would be uncomfortable or feel inadequate if you met him socially; you would think he would be nice and easy with you. And you’d be right.