Читать книгу The Third Man: Life at the Heart of New Labour - Peter Mandelson - Страница 10

From the outside, 150 Walworth Road, near the Elephant and Castle in south London, was a handsome, red-brick battleship of a building. On the inside, it perfectly mirrored the party for which it was the national headquarters. The cramped offices, smoky hallways and paper-strewn conference rooms were disjointed and dishevelled. So was the machinery through which Labour made and presented what passed for policy. My cubbyhole consisted of a wobbly chair, a dodgy-looking three-legged table wedged up against the filing cabinet to balance it, a World War II-vintage intercom, and a dying spider plant on the windowsill behind me.

Barely two years had passed since our collapse at the polls. Michael Foot had retreated to the backbenches. He took the blame for the rout, but it more properly belonged to the party’s real masters: the Trotskyite entryists organised in Militant, and the ‘softer’, or at least subtler, leftists whom Tony Benn had been rallying ever since we lost power in 1979 – in fact, ever since we had lost power under Harold Wilson in 1970. The idea of Labour as a party of government, with any regard for what voters might actually feel, had been abandoned. Neil Kinnock, however, was now leader, and it was clear he saw the need for change.

A few days before I started work in October 1985, Neil had shown the flair, and the guts, that this was surely going to require. At the party conference in Bournemouth he had thundered against the hard-left Labour council in Liverpool, the epitome of how out of touch we had become. As I heard him speak, I couldn’t help but think back to Ted Knight and the Socialist Republic of Lambeth. ‘I’ll tell you what happens with impossible promises,’ Neil had said. ‘You start with farfetched resolutions. They are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and you go through the years sticking to that – outdated, misplaced, irrelevant to real needs. You end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council – a Labour council – hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers. I’m telling you – and you’ll listen – you can’t play politics with people’s jobs, and with people’s services!’ How long had I waited for a Labour leader to say that? The fight was on for a Labour Party that again served, and connected with, the interests of the people of Britain. A few weeks short of my thirty-second birthday, I was excited to become a part of it.

I arrived at Walworth Road with two all-consuming aims. The first was to do well at my new job. Despite my brave, and evidently successful, effort to sound supremely self-confident before the interview panel, I feared that I was supremely unqualified. Three years’ experience producing cerebral political television would not necessarily equip me to manage all of Labour’s day-to-day communications with an almost universally hostile press. It certainly hadn’t given me the skills or the experience to handle the other half of my brief: every aspect of the party’s campaigning, from pamphlets, posters and policy launches to preparations for a general election that was probably less than two years away. My other goal was to play my part in ensuring that Neil Kinnock’s vision of Labour, not Tony Benn’s or Ted Knight’s, won out. That would turn out to be harder still.

Tony Benn’s Bristol South-East constituency had been abolished by boundary changes before the 1983 election, and he had failed to be selected for the replacement seat, so it had been left to Party Chairman Eric Heffer to carry the Bennite banner in the contest for leader. With Labour still in collective shock from the scale of our defeat, Neil trounced Heffer. His only serious challenger, Roy Hattersley, was from the right of the party. But Benn was back now, having been returned to the Commons in a by-election at Chesterfield in March 1984, and was de facto leader of a vocal leftist core on the NEC. The traumatic year-long miners’ strike had also hurt Labour, and Neil. The party was again associated in the public mind with the vote-killers of 1983: ideological infighting, rhetorical excesses and trade union militancy. Neil would later say he wished he had got on top of the issue at the start, by denouncing the NUM for having failed to hold a proper national ballot. Instead, he was left twisting in the wind, feeling he couldn’t support the strike, and couldn’t disavow it either. The only benefit from his months of agony was that he and those around him had used the period to plan for a fightback against the far left, and a determined effort to reposition the party. Neil’s assault on Militant at the party conference had been the first step.

It is difficult to convey, twenty-five years on, how enormous the obstacles were. The Bennites and their fellow travellers were not the only barrier to the huge repair job we faced. Their Old Socialist certitudes had a resonance that went beyond their core supporters. Even many who understood that a state-run economy, unquestioned support for the unions or unilateral nuclear disarmament were impractical in late-twentieth-century Britain – and that they were certainly a guarantee that we would not get back into government – felt them to be somehow authentically Labour. With the radical conservatism of Mrs Thatcher taking hold in Downing Street, and Ronald Reagan’s in the White House, they felt almost automatically that we should be on the other side of the argument.

And it was an argument. Since September 1981 a group of passionately anti-nuclear women had planted themselves in a ‘peace camp’ at the RAF base at Greenham Common in Berkshire, in protest against the US Cruise missiles that were stationed there. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was enjoying a new lease of life. Mrs Thatcher was not only standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Reagan in agreeing to base US nuclear missiles in Britain. As she embarked on large-scale privatisation of the core of the old state economy, and curbed trade union strike powers, the default position for many in Labour was that whatever the Tories were for, we must be against. I understood this impulse. From my own Labour background, I knew it was part of the glue that held the whole party together. I recalled my own childhood experience of the annual disarmament marches from the nuclear research base at Aldermaston to Trafalgar Square. My family never marched, but in our own Labour Suburb way, we would pack my father’s Sunbeam with a roast-chicken picnic, drive to the outer reaches of the capital and watch as the throng made its way towards its final rallying point.

The problem was that a modern, relevant Labour Party could not operate on atavistic instinct. We could not make policy on the simple basis that everything that the Tory government – a comfortably re-elected Tory government – did was wrong. That risked not just failing to take on board policies that might be right, but could leave us opposing policies of far greater benefit to our own voters than anything we were offering. That was clearly the case with Mrs Thatcher’s programme to allow millions of council tenants to buy their own homes.

The structure of the party, too, was unrecognisably different then. As leader, Neil was in charge. Up to a point. The National Executive Committee, and indeed party conference, nowadays hold only nominal sway over policy. The trade unions wield nothing like the block-vote power they did then. But when I moved into my tiny third-floor office at Labour HQ, their influence was very real. The NEC, in particular, was the final voice on everything from paperclips to policy on nuclear weapons.

My immediate boss was the party’s new General Secretary, Larry Whitty. Over time, Larry and I would develop a good working relationship, but at the beginning we were on different wavelengths. A lifelong trade union man, he had a sentimental attachment to many of the policies and practices of Labour as it then was, and felt a kind of deference towards Tony Benn. I had been, at best, his second choice for the job. He had hoped for Nita Clarke, Ken Livingstone’s press chief at the Greater London Council, and would almost surely also have preferred David Gow, the Scotsman’s labour correspondent. At least Larry did not share the hostility of many others in Labour to modern communications techniques, which were seen as somehow Tory, and unclean. But he did worry that the changes I might bring about in Labour’s policy presentation would impact on the policies themselves, and that I would tread on the toes of those formally in charge of making them in the NEC. He was nervous that, as John Prescott had warned, I would ‘put my nose in the politics’. In this, Larry got me absolutely right.

Despite my private doubts, from the moment I arrived at Walworth Road I projected a sense of confidence. Partly, this was bravado. Partly, it was because I knew that any chance of my succeeding depended on it. But in one crucial sense I was confident. I was absolutely secure in my conviction that as long as we were saddled with the policies, the mindset and the public image that had led to our débâcle in 1983, Labour would never again be a party of government. And I was absolutely determined to help pull us back from oblivion. I may have lacked experience, even skills, at the start. But I did know what was wrong. Most of Britain’s voters, and almost all of the media, disliked us. Worse, they had simply stopped listening to what we said, or at least taking it seriously. My work in television had given me insight into and experience of modern communications. My job, which I set out to accomplish with a drive that sometimes bordered on obsession, was to make everything about Labour look and sound modern too.

I began, as I did whenever I embarked on a new job throughout my political life, by learning what I didn’t know, focusing on the most pressing problems, and taking early steps to fix them. I was very fortunate to know – or at least to have met – someone who I hoped could help me with all of this. I was first brought together with Philip Gould by Robin Paxton when I was at Weekend World. Philip was ‘in advertising’, Robin told me. He was clever, and a passionate Labour supporter. We met briefly before I left LWT, at a dinner hosted by Philip’s then girlfriend, an up-and-coming publisher named Gail Rebuck. In the intervening year, life had changed for all of us. The small firm Gail had co-founded, Century Press, had done so well that it took over the larger, better-known Hutchinson. She and Philip had married. Philip had set up his own communications consultancy. And I was at Walworth Road. Now, we arranged to talk again, over dinner at Robin’s home in Islington.

With his mop of long hair and oversized glasses, Philip made an extraordinary impression. I don’t know whether it was shyness or single-mindedness, but he barely made eye contact as he expounded for well over an hour on what was wrong with Labour’s image, presentation and political strategy, and how to begin fixing them. I had no way of knowing at that point where Philip might fit into that process, but in advance of our meeting he had sent me an eleven-page letter about how he might help me overhaul Labour’s presentational machinery. We discussed it at Robin’s dinner, and in much greater detail in the days that followed. A few weeks later, I took my first big decision. With a cheque for £600, a sizeable chunk of my budget, I commissioned Philip to conduct a stock-take of Labour’s communications and campaigning. Larry, to my relief, signed off on the idea. It would prove to be the best investment I ever made.

The party already had a contract with a public opinion agency, MORI. Our pollster-in-chief was its American-born chairman, Bob Worcester. His role was essentially to poll, crunch the numbers, deliver and explain the results. Philip was different. He reached beyond traditional opinion polls, assembling ‘focus groups’ to explain why people felt as they did about a policy issue or a political party, how this fitted into what they valued or wanted in their lives, and what it might take to change their minds. He gave Labour, and British politics, its first taste of rigorous, American-style political consultancy. By the time he delivered his sixty-four-page report in December, I knew what its main thrust would be, as I had been among the three dozen people – including Larry and senior colleagues at Walworth Road, and other figures in politics, the media and marketing – to whom he spoke in preparing it. He and I were meeting regularly. The core challenge was obvious to both of us. Labour had to stop seeing communications as something we did with, or to, ourselves. We could no longer, as my canvassing colleague in that council estate in Lambeth had put it, ‘refuse to compromise with the electorate’.

Looking back on the notes of my early conversations with Philip, I am struck not only by my concern about the obvious policy vulnerabilities that had hurt us in 1983. I felt there was a deeper problem: our inability to meet people’s concerns on basic issues affecting their daily lives: health, social services, housing benefits, the economy – and crime, or as I put it to Philip, ‘making people secure in their homes and on the streets’. We could produce policy reports, or catchy ideological prescriptions, but even our traditional supporters were no longer listening. Significant numbers of the ‘working class’ had turned away from Labour and backed the SDP in 1983. Many more had supported Mrs Thatcher. Faced with a choice between a dogmatic, ideologically pure socialism or a Prime Minister, even a Tory Prime Minister, who had allowed them to buy their council houses, it was no choice at all. ‘It’s not just a question of having a neat little formulation extracted from some document placed before the Home Policy Committee of the NEC, or some neat way of saying “You’re number one with Labour”,’ I wrote to Philip. ‘We can’t just get an NHS ambulance with a sticker saying “I Love the Welfare State” and launch a charter. People are not idiots.’

The stock-take report was blunt in its diagnosis and unflinching in its prescription. Knowing I would have to get it through the NEC, I made the language a bit more diplomatic in parts. But I left the core message unaltered. We were so bad at communicating with voters, so seemingly uncaring about what they thought or wanted, that we had become unelectable. No longer could the NEC, the leader’s office and the shadow cabinet haphazardly combine to produce press releases and policy documents, schedule press conferences and public meetings, and await Bob Worcester’s monthly reports in the preposterous expectation that we were on our way back. My office would become the central focus for all party communications. I would be supported by a new organisation we called the Shadow Communications Agency. Run by Philip and me, it would draw on the expertise of outside advertising and marketing professionals who volunteered their services. Also involved would be Labour’s advertising partner, the BMP agency of Chris Powell, older brother of Tony Blair’s future chief of staff, Jonathan. The SCA’s first task would be another stock-take, this time examining ‘every aspect of Labour’s corporate appearance’. Instead of relying on grassroots leaflet and sticker campaigns to get our message across, everything we said from now on would be decided and measured against one, revolutionary, objective: to win votes.

By the time I started at Walworth Road, Labour had ceded this kind of political marketing to the Tories. Larry’s predecessor as General Secretary, Jim Mortimer, had been scathing about the Conservatives’ 1983 campaign, vowing that we would never prostitute ourselves to the idea of presenting politicians and policies ‘as if they were breakfast food or baked beans’. It was a view that resonated with most of the party when I arrived. Not only was it naïve about modern politics, it was wrong about what motivated me. I did believe that there were parallels between political parties and the business and consumer world. Both had ‘products’: in our case, they were called policies, rooted in values. Both competed in the marketplace: in our case, the ultimate test of consumer judgement was a general election. For political parties as much as businesses, if you forgot your customers, if you were unaware of how they were changing and failed to communicate with them properly, they would soon forget you.

Still, our ‘product’ was different, and the difference mattered. I was driven by the conviction that a more modern, in-touch Labour Party would not just be more likely to win an election, but would lead to a fairer, more broadly based, more socially engaged and economically successful government than the Tories. It would be better for Britain. I have no doubt that I would have been good at marketing breakfast food or baked beans – or even the Tories – but I could never have contemplated doing so. The tools of communication might be the same; the aim, the ‘product’, and the driving political purpose were wholly different.

Making a start on getting Labour’s message heard, and making it worth hearing, was exhilarating. But the early months were sometimes brutally difficult. Politically, my position was delicate, to say the least. Neil and Roy had backed me for the job of Director of Campaigns and Communications, but I had been parachuted in, at what must have seemed an obscenely young age, to head one of the three key departments, and I felt that the veteran party operators heading the other two – Geoff Bish for policy, and Joyce Gould for organisation – although outwardly welcoming, viewed me with a mixture of suspicion and envy.

I did have some allies. Before I’d been hired, Neil had installed Robin Cook, the young Scottish MP who had run his leadership campaign, in the new post of ‘Campaign Coordinator’, reporting to the shadow cabinet. Robin had set up something called the Breakfast Group, which brought together pro-Labour figures from the advertising and marketing world to advise on modernising our approach. I saw the party’s situation as even more dire than Robin did, and with Philip and the SCA, I wanted to go further and faster. That produced tension, at least on Robin’s side. I vividly recall an early weekend brainstorming session. Robin was there, countryside-dapper in a silk waistcoat, florid shirt and corduroy trousers. He was not hostile to what I was proposing, but there was an unmistakable frisson in his comments. A sense of ‘Who’s in charge here? I’m the elected politician. I’m the shadow cabinet’s Campaign Coordinator. I’m Neil’s mate. Here’s this ex-television kid, who has come in and started auditing, stock-taking, questioning things, challenging them.’ It was understandable. Robin had put the foundation stones in place. Now, I seemed to be taking over the construction.

There was tension of a different sort with the other key member of Neil’s team who was already involved in remaking Labour’s communications and image. Patricia Hewitt, who had narrowly failed to be elected as an MP, was Neil’s press secretary. She was only five years older than me, but she had been involved in campaign work since her early twenties, having begun as press officer for Age Concern before moving on to head the National Council for Civil Liberties. I was a bit in awe of her. She had had two years of battlefield experience in trying to get the media to take a kinder, or at least less unkind, view of Neil and of Labour, and had drawn up a range of campaigning plans, including a project to target key seats at the next election. If I wanted to go further and faster than Robin, Patricia seemed to want to go further and faster yet. With the best of intentions, she not only encouraged me but actively drove me on.

By early 1986 I was working flat out. There were two parts to my job, and two parts to my day. I would spend the mornings at Walworth Road, and was always at my precariously balanced desk by 7.30. There, my focus was campaigning, specifically a major social policy launch that had been agreed – but not planned out, designed or organised – before I arrived. Neil had set the tone. Rather than settle for the familiar NEC emphasis on ‘fairness’, he had insisted that it bring in the theme of ‘freedom’ as well. He recognised that Mrs Thatcher had succeeded in making freedom, a classic liberal value, an asset for the Conservatives. We had to start reclaiming it. But what policies would we actually be promoting? How would we present them? What would the posters and the pamphlets look like? How, and where, would we organise the launch event?

I had been at my job long enough to know what the NEC would expect. We would invite the media to one of our down-at-heel conference rooms in Walworth Road, hand out a dense tome on Labour’s policies, display the leaflets and stickers we were distributing to party cadres around the country – and assail the heartless Tories. The assumption, or the hope, would be that if only we could drive home the fact that we cared more than the Conservatives, the voters would care more about us.

I was absolutely determined that the campaign, the first test of the new approach and new structure I was trying to put in place, would be unrecognisably different. The problem was that I had done nothing remotely similar before. I did not fear that I’d end up with something worse than our normal fare. Leafing through sheafs of our recent policy material, with its tired and predictable slogans and uninspiring artwork, I did not believe that was possible. I did fear that whatever I attempted might be neutered by the NEC. Or that it might disappoint Neil, and even more so, Patricia. Working at an increasingly fevered pace with Philip, the SCA, the designers and printers, I sometimes felt overwhelmed by the need to get every one of hundreds of details right, and by anxiety over how much could go wrong.

The second part of my day was spent on the other side of the Thames. After a late, quick lunch, often at a very lively but now defunct pizzeria in the Elephant and Castle called the Castello, I would drive to the House of Commons and base myself in Neil’s office. My job there was to patrol the top-floor offices of the parliamentary press gallery. It seems amazing to me now, but along with Patricia I was wholly responsible for making Labour’s case to the media, and through them to the country. It was the start of my career as a spin doctor. Yet ‘spinning’ does not begin to capture the difficulty, bordering on impossibility, I found in securing anything more than the most occasional word of praise for Labour. Virtually all the newspapers looked upon 1980s Labour as hopelessly extreme in its policies, out of touch with the country, and hobbled by internal bickering. Since that was largely true, there were limits to what I could do to convince the reporters otherwise. I tried, but mostly my job was damage control. It was frustrating, and it was exhausting.

My refuge was the cottage in Foy on the River Wye in Herefordshire that I had bought while I was at LWT. Set in a lovely, secluded spot on a horseshoe-shaped bend in the river, it was what you might call ‘compact’. There was a small sitting room and an even smaller dining room on the ground floor, and three tiny bedrooms upstairs. A bathroom had been built off the back. It was also the most wonderful home I have ever owned. I bought a slightly battered, blue-velvet suite of furniture for downstairs, and within a couple of months I had the wall between the two downstairs rooms knocked through to make a living-and-dining area, and installed a big brick hearth. There was an antique-looking dial phone whose cord stretched just far enough for me to sit with it on the step outside the front door. I also acquired a – barely – portable phone, one of those contraptions with a huge battery pack you had to sling over your shoulder wherever you went.

I drove up to Foy every weekend, often with friends, sometimes alone. I would read, listen to music, watch TV, cut the grass, dig the garden, build bonfires. I would also work, often trying somehow to get a positive story about Labour, or much more frequently to soften a damaging one, in the all-important Sunday papers. Every Saturday I would wake up and steel myself for the task of spending half the morning phoning round all the Sunday papers’ political journalists. Then I would go into the nearby town of Ross, where I would do a supermarket shop before taking my regular seat at a wonderful Hungarian restaurant called Meaders, for my favourite dish of layered meat and cabbage. Back at the cottage, I would try to watch whatever classic movie the BBC had on in the afternoon, then fall into a deep sleep before working in the garden or going for a walk while I prepared myself mentally for the first editions of the Sunday papers.

Usually I knew what disturbing bit of Labour news was coming, because a reporter would have phoned for a comment earlier in the day. It was often an assault on Neil’s moves to expel Militant members from the party, or an alleged split on some policy or another. Occasionally I would be asked what the party thought about the latest far-left pronouncement by Ken Livingstone, or even Ted Knight. Every week, for hours on end, I had to hose down stories or stop the forest fires spreading to other papers or broadcasters. It was relentless, lonely and dispiriting work, and almost always involved arguing hard with whoever was on the line. I constantly had to make snap judgements, in an unremittingly hostile environment.

I was on the way back from Foy in a driving rainstorm one Sunday afternoon, six weeks before our ‘Freedom and Fairness’ launch, when all the pressures of the job – working out what to do, the antagonism of the press, the sheer scale of the task of somehow making Labour credible again, the expectations of Neil and Patricia, and myself – finally came to a head. As the rain beat against the windscreen, I was alarmed to feel tears starting to roll down my cheeks. For weeks, I had been finding it hard to sleep through the night. I would get off to sleep all right, but always awoke long before dawn, feeling very anxious. Unable to get back to sleep, I would arrive very early at the office. By nine o’clock I would feel completely worn out, and my head would be aching; I seemed to live on paracetamol. I would somehow force myself through the day, trying to focus on meetings, campaign planning, dealing with the press, just to get through to the evening. I would reach home late, and go to bed feeling simultaneously washed out and tightly wound up.

I believed passionately in what I was doing in my new job, but as the weeks passed, I just could not see how I would handle all the obstacles, anticipate everything that might go wrong. I could not see light at the end of the tunnel. As I drove towards London that Sunday afternoon through heavy traffic, anticipating another week of struggle and sleeplessness, I suddenly felt unable to cope. I was just not sure I could stay the course. I was due to attend a concert that evening at the Royal Festival Hall with an old London Labour friend, Illtyd Harrington, deputy head of the GLC before he and the rest of the sane tendency were pushed out by Ken Livingstone. When I arrived, visibly stressed and out of breath, on the terrace outside the Festival Hall, Illtyd took one look at me and said, ‘Peter, what’s wrong?’ All the pent-up worries came rushing out. Illtyd told me that if I wanted to see my efforts at Walworth Road succeed, the first thing I had to do was take care of myself. He made me promise to see his doctor, Denis Cowan, the following day.

Dr Cowan was reassuring. There was nothing seriously wrong with me, he said. It was just the inevitable result of steadily building pressure, the demands of the job and the demands I was putting on myself. He prescribed three weeks of self-discipline, and sleep. I must arrive at Walworth Road no earlier than 9.30 a.m., leave at 5 p.m. sharp, take no work home with me, and be in bed by ten. He also prescribed sleeping pills for several weeks. I was very reluctant to take them. When I was growing up, medicine was rather frowned upon at Bigwood Road: getting my mother to dispense as much as an aspirin took some persuasion. But I followed Dr Cowan’s advice to the letter. Within a few weeks I dispensed with the tablets, and the crisis passed.

My recovery, and Labour’s too, really began ten days before the grand policy launch, with a campaign of another sort. It was the first by-election on my watch, in Fulham, caused by the death of the sitting Conservative MP. At least in this battle I had some handson experience, from Brecon and Radnor. But I knew it would be the first test of the kind of modern campaigning machinery I had put in place with Philip and the SCA, and that sceptics and critics on the NEC would be keenly eyeing both the campaign and the result. There seemed to be little realistic prospect that we would win. Worse, with the Tory government growing increasingly unpopular, many pundits seemed to think the likeliest winner was the SDP, whose candidate was none other than my old south London friend Roger Liddle.

I think that only a few weeks earlier I could not have faced the challenge. But I knew we had to make every effort to at least make the election close. With Philip’s constant encouragement, we organised a campaign for our candidate, Nick Raynsford, that was eye-catching, simple and, it turned out, extraordinarily effective. Both the Conservative, Matthew Carrington, and Roger lived outside the constituency – to be fair, in Roger’s case this was only by a matter of a few miles – but all our campaign literature was dominated by an engaging photograph of our prospective MP framed by one, strikingly presented slogan: ‘Nick Raynsford Lives Here’. The fact that local Labour supporters throughout the constituency began taping the image to their front windows made the effect especially powerful and amusing.

On the night of the election, 10 April 1986, Labour took the seat from the Tories. Roger finished a fairly distant third. This personal embarrassment for me was made even more difficult by the fact that Roger’s wife, Caroline, was also a good friend from my days in youth politics. When she spotted me at the election count, she gave me what my mother would have called ‘an old-fashioned look’. I could hardly blame her. I was sad that Roger had lost, and resigned to the likelihood that it would be some time before my friendship with him and Caroline could be repaired. At the same time, I was elated that our revamped campaigning team had met its first obstacle, and convincingly and unexpectedly cleared it.

Then came the ‘Freedom and Fairness’ launch. We had been working for months to make it unmistakably new, and it was. The result was a campaign document that not only included the kind of policy pledges expected of Labour, like increased child benefit, educational subsidies for young people and new housing opportunities, but was also about making individuals freer in their day-to-day lives. We promised a greater say for patients in the NHS, and set out measures against vandalism and crime. The design, too, was sleeker, friendlier on the eye. The SCA had given the brief to Trevor Beattie, whose talent for finding eye-catching, if sometimes controversial, ways to grab the public’s attention would later produce Wonderbra’s ‘Hello Boys’ ads. Instead of our old-style Labour stickers, we minted metal badges in edgy black, grey and silver.

In what would become a pattern for many of the changes we went on to make, I had a brief moment of drama with Neil as the posters and media packs were going to the printers. Three days before the launch, he called me in and exclaimed, ‘Where does it say “Labour’s Freedom and Fairness Campaign”? What’s this “Putting People First”? Where’s the title?’ Feeling much better, more confident – and more rested – than I had for some time, I assured him that both freedom and fairness were still at the centre of the campaign. What we had done was to bring together real policy ideas to put those values into practice. Just like the imagery and artwork, the point was to move beyond talking in a political language that would pass most people by, and, yes, to say directly that we were ‘putting people first’. As delicately as I could, I reminded Neil that he had signed off on every creative stage of the campaign along the way. Besides, I said, not quite truthfully, it was almost surely too late to change. But Neil was adamant. In the end, literally almost as the presses were beginning to roll, I arranged for the printers to include the words ‘Labour’s Freedom and Fairness Campaign’, in small letters, along the side of each poster and pamphlet.

The most striking change was the site of the launch. It was not in a scruffy room at Walworth Road, but in the International Press Centre near Fleet Street. By the time we got there, Neil had been won over to the idea, and the design, of the campaign. He was typically fluent and forceful in tying together the policy prospectus with the themes of freedom and fairness. A small girl whose parents had agreed for her to be featured as the main image in our publicity material had come to the launch, and Neil – wonderfully, spontaneously – lifted her aloft. The photographers loved it.

Less enthusiastic was Eric Heffer, who had turned up unexpectedly and stood scowling at me from the back of the room. ‘It’s disgraceful,’ he muttered. When I failed to reply, he continued: ‘It’s more than disgraceful. It’s disgusting! The NEC never approved this. Where’s the Red Flag? What is “Putting People First”?’ Stalking out, he delivered a parting shot. This was not the Labour Party he had joined, he fumed. It was just one of a series of heartening reviews. From the other end of the political horizon Norman Tebbit, the Tory Chairman, issued a blistering condemnation of our ‘slickness’. The press, too, sat up and took notice. Not only were there warm responses from our own camp, the Guardian and Tribune; the Economist saw the choice of venue as a sign that Labour was determined ‘never again to look dowdy or old-fashioned’. Even the FT nodded approvingly.

Heffer was right about one thing: I had never sought detailed NEC approval for the new approach and the new look. I knew I would never have got it. At the very minimum, there would have been endless debate over every dot and comma. The most that would have come out of it was a hugely scaled-down version that would not have had anything like the same impact. I did, of course, have the NEC’s endorsement for the central themes of freedom and fairness. I reassured Larry Whitty, as I had told Neil, that our job had simply been to find a new and effective way to get people to listen to that message.

This would set the pattern for much of my future dealings with Larry and the NEC. I recognised that they were my bosses, and was careful to follow the letter of their directives. But I hoped, and became increasingly confident, that by pushing the limits of the spirit of their decisions we could make a major impact on how the party and its policies were seen. I discovered one important tactic early on. When I received an especially heavy-handed policy pronouncement – on the economy, on trade unions, on defence – for our latest party publicity, I would have the text squeezed onto the right-hand side of the page. I would then sit down with the increasingly enthusiastic and hard-working team around me at Walworth Road, people like Jim Parish, Anna Healy and Jackie Stacey, and go through every vote-losing word, picking out the most attractive-sounding phrases – about growth and prosperity rather than state control, or support for a strongly defended Britain rather than unilateral disarmament – and highlighting them in big, attractive type in the wide margin.

Over time, I would find myself applying similar methods to almost every aspect of our presentation and communications. I remember one major policy pronouncement, otherwise fairly forward-looking, in which the NEC instructed us to insert the text of our socialist credo, Clause IV. It did go in, but not in the document that I initially released to the media, only on the inside cover when it was printed. I could do little about the rousing rendition of ‘The Red Flag’ that closed the Labour conference, but I could try to ensure that it was not the lasting image voters kept in their minds. In this, I usually failed, but sometimes I would be able to choreograph the final speeches so that the concluding hymn would come after live TV coverage had ended. If we couldn’t change the policy, at least we could change the way we were seen.

The reporters I dealt with every day were less easily finessed. They knew it was policies that ultimately mattered, and that ours hadn’t changed. My daily, and often nightly, dealings with the press did become less wearing, however. Their copy was still almost unremittingly hostile, but personal relationships were being built up. I was their one-man, one-stop source for what Labour was doing, thinking and saying. In that sense, they needed me. It went without saying that I needed them if our public image was ever going to change. Some of the journalists were simply cynical hacks with a settled, utterly negative, view of Labour dictated by their news desks. It was a narrative they knew by heart, and could write up almost automatically before heading off for a drink at the Press Bar or in Strangers, the meeting place for MPs and others on the Thames side of the Houses of Parliament. The facts, and what I or anyone else at Labour said, didn’t really matter to them.

My reputation for toughness, or worse, with the press began with journalists like that in these early days. But many of the more serious, and more influential, writers and broadcasters were at least open-minded. I think they also had a bit of sympathy for my plight as I struggled to find ways to give Labour a new, more reasonable face. Most weeks I would have lunch with one or another of these reporters – sometimes, at their invitation and on their expenses, at one of the fancier restaurants around Westminster, but more often in the Commons press cafeteria. I kept telling myself that over time, if and when Labour had a better story to tell, they would help us tell it.

Even in this part of my job, I sometimes had to look over my shoulder. The first problem involved Rupert Murdoch’s stable of British newspapers – The Times and Sunday Times, the News of the World and the Sun. After prolonged and fruitless negotiation, Murdoch had forced through the introduction of new technology, over the protests of striking print union workers, and opened up a new plant in Wapping. His titles continued to publish, with most journalists crossing increasingly violent and heavily policed picket lines. The NEC voted in a ban on any contact with reporters from the Murdoch papers. It was the classic 1980s Labour response. Not only was it on the wrong side of where most voters thought we should be, but in theory it would keep me from talking to the very journalists I needed if I was to have any hope of improving the party’s image. At the news conference at which I announced the NEC boycott, I duly asked the Times and Sun reporters to leave the room. I felt ridiculous. I also realised that to do otherwise would have been the equivalent of handing in my notice.

However, I made it a point privately to continue briefing, and talking to, the Murdoch journalists. In the Fulham by-election, that was obviously not going to be sufficient. Once the campaign got under way, reporters would build their day around each of the three parties’ main news conferences. They were not going to have the time – or presumably the desire – to oblige me by sharing a private Castello pizza to receive my daily spin on the campaign. If we wanted our side of the story to appear in Murdoch’s papers, we would have to include their journalists in our news conferences. Making common cause with Patricia Hewitt, and with the support and understanding of Larry Whitty, I persuaded the NEC to suspend its boycott for the duration of the campaign. As I had hoped, it was then quietly forgotten.

The ‘Freedom and Fairness’ launch was never going to be enough fundamentally to change Labour’s look or its image. The next step was more audacious, and had a more far-reaching effect. In Philip’s stock-take, we had told the NEC that we planned to review ‘every aspect of Labour’s corporate appearance’. Though I imagine most members glossed over this bit of advertising-speak, there was never any doubt in my mind where the remake had to begin. The defining core of our image was our fluttering red flag. Eric Heffer, as an NEC member, had seen the report when it came up for approval, but neither he nor the other sceptics would have imagined that we would actually go ahead and fold up the red flag. Had he realised this at the ‘Freedom and Fairness’ launch, he might literally have combusted. For months, we worked at finding a new logo. It was Neil who first suggested borrowing a symbol from the Scandinavian social democrats: a red rose. We all liked the idea, and I consulted the design expert Michael Wolff, of Wolff-Olins fame, who recruited the artist Philip Sutton. The rose evoked England’s gardens. It suggested growth in fresh soil. Sunlight. Optimism. The challenge was to ensure that it would pass muster – with Neil, but above all with the NEC – in time for party conference at the end of September.

In July, Patricia, Philip, Michael Wolff and I went to see Philip Sutton in his studio in south London. Hanging up on clothes pegs on a washing line running along the studio walls were scores of images of different roses. Over a stretch of two hours, we went around the room, gradually narrowing down our search for the perfect rose and agreeing a shortlist of half a dozen prototypes. Three weeks later the artwork had been refined on each of them, and we had to decide from a final batch of three. I picked what I thought was the best, and it went to Neil for his approval. He loved it – or almost: he wanted the stem shortened.

On the eve of conference, however, came a familiar last-minute hesitation. I had already got the design through the NEC publicity subcommittee. It was chaired by my early Walworth Road ally Gwyneth Dunwoody, who deftly and deliberately underplayed the significance of the party’s new symbol. It was just a ‘campaign logo’, she said. We had also designed a conference wallet to contain every delegate’s papers. It was salmon pink, emblazoned with the red rose and the word ‘Labour’ in big, bold letters. Now I was summoned to see Neil in his Commons office. His wife Glenys was there too, looking upset and worried. Neil was holding up one of our salmon-pink wallets. ‘Do you really think the mineworkers’ delegation are going to prance around conference holding this? They’re not going to be caught dead with these things,’ he said. ‘You can’t do it. There’ll be a riot.’ This time, it really was too late to change. I persuaded him it would be all right on the night.

It was. The entire backcloth of the conference platform in Blackpool was adorned with the new logo in all its glory. The red rose was printed on everything capable of taking its imprint. For Labour to pack away the red flag, as the fury of Eric Heffer and others soon made clear, was like Nike dumping its swish, or McDonald’s chopping down the golden arches. The red flag symbolised everything Labour represented in the public mind: socialism, nationalisation, state control. Everything, that is, that voters now liked least and mistrusted most about us. The red rose wasn’t just a design change: it represented a transformation in how the party would present itself. It had real impact, reinforced by our now ubiquitous new strapline, recognising the need to put people, not the party, first.

The change did generate comment and controversy in our ranks, though not in anything like the way Neil and Glenys had feared. Delegates eagerly collected their conference folders, taking two or three at a time, briefly raising the spectre that we might run out. If they were left on seats, they were stolen. In some cases, money changed hands amongst ardent collectors. That the media were excited – and through them the country – was not only important in itself, it had an immediate effect on the morale of party members. Here was Labour doing something well and eye-catching, beating the Tories at their own game.

On the final day of conference I brought a huge box of fresh red roses, minus their thorns, onto the stage for Neil and Glenys to throw to the delegates. There was a roar of delight. Catching sight of my broadcasting officer Tony Beeton, who would tragically die in the Paddington rail disaster in October 1999, I suggested that he and his tiny son Piers join Neil on the platform. Spotting the young child, Neil’s instinctive response was as it had been at the ‘Freedom and Fairness’ launch: he clutched Piers in one arm and held up one of the – long-stemmed – roses in the other, to shouts and cheers from the hall. It was an extraordinarily uplifting moment. At least briefly, I even allowed myself to indulge in the fantasy that it might provide a springboard for the general election, due in eighteen months but likely to come earlier.

We had had a good year. With Philip’s research suggesting that many voters saw Mrs Thatcher as polarising and divisive, we had actually arrived at conference with a small lead in the opinion polls. I knew Labour’s problems went much deeper, however. Branding, image, marketing, could do only so much. It was the product that ultimately mattered – especially if the product was a set of policies on which voters would decide what kind of future they wanted, and what kind of government they trusted to deliver it. The main reason we had lost in 1983 wasn’t that our campaign was amateurish and outdated – that had merely helped turn a defeat into a drubbing. It was our policies. We were in favour of nationalised industries, strike-prone trade unions and unilateral disarmament. We were against the free market, privatisation and widened share ownership, and even allowing council tenants to buy their properties. When it came time to choose, millions fewer opted for us than for the Tories, and we had only just edged out the SDP.

Our image and packaging were finally changing. Our product – as resolution after resolution at the party conference made clear – was not. Nor, much beyond Neil and his shadow cabinet allies, did there seem to be a huge appetite for change. Modernising Labour’s appearance and image was difficult enough. Getting any fundamental policy change through the morass of ideological bickering in the NEC, not to mention the trade unions or leftist local parties, was not just a matter of changing Labour’s landscape. It was more like draining a swamp.

After our conference our polling numbers lifted, but they fell off as attention turned to the Tories, who were busy getting into their pre-election stride with an array of new policies entitled ‘The Next Steps Forward’. Still, I entered 1987 feeling relatively upbeat. It was far too late for us to perform major surgery on our policies, but I was confident that we now had assets which could at least make this battle different from 1983. With our new communications operation, my hope was to emphasise what had changed in Labour. I hoped to build on our new image by promoting Neil as a different kind of Labour leader.

I had no doubt about the strengths of the people working most closely around him – Patricia Hewitt, and his chief of staff Charles Clarke, who I had known well since our days in student politics in the 1970s. As we geared up for election year, there was a real sense of shared purpose: to build a professional campaign around Neil as a leader who was showing vision and courage in modernising Labour, and could bring similar qualities to Downing Street. I believed this to be true. Although I had never managed anything remotely on this scale, I felt a new level of confidence about my grasp of modern campaigning methods, and in the team we had in the SCA and at Walworth Road. Within days of returning from our ‘red rose’ conference, we began planning for the general election campaign. Ultimately, dozens of people would be involved. Some of them – Charles, Patricia, David Hill, Chris Powell at BMP and of course Philip Gould – would go on to play important roles with New Labour a decade later. But the main connecting line was in the mechanics of the campaign we devised.

When we began mapping things out in the autumn of 1986, Patricia was not officially at work: she had just had her first child and was on maternity leave. Philip and I would gather around her kitchen table, with Patricia holding her baby daughter in her arms. Some of the features of the 1987 campaign looked new only in the hidebound context of the Labour Party. They were basic, common-sense changes in image, advertising and presentation. That alone would make a difference, but what was really new was the degree of detail, coordination and control we wired in from the start. We began with our ‘warbook’, although we didn’t give it that name until the process became political orthodoxy in the 1990s: an outline of our own and other parties’ strengths and weaknesses, and a point-by-point plan of how to make the most of each of them. Then came what was probably the most lastingly important innovation. We began setting out a ‘grid’ – a day-by-day map of the entire campaign, with a single policy issue and related narrative as well as a pre-planned visual context, to provide a compelling image for TV news and the following day’s papers. It was all bound together by Philip’s input – the most sustained, detailed and nuanced research and analysis the Labour Party had ever seen.

In February, however, things began to go wrong. On the surface, all was still to play for. Though we no longer led in the polls, we were trailing the Tories by only a point or two, and were comfortably clear of the SDP in third place. With the economy recovering, however, a Tory policy prospectus promising growth, reduced taxes and low inflation would be a tough case to answer. While Neil’s identity as a new kind of leader was gaining traction, so were escalating Tory assaults on Labour’s ‘loony left’. Worse, voters were about to be reminded of it all over again. The occasion was a by-election in Greenwich, prompted by the death of the veteran Labour MP Guy Barnett. Labour had held the seat for four decades – even, with a reduced majority, in 1983. If we had tapped into Philip’s bank of research in picking Guy Barnett’s prospective successor, we surely would have won. But under NEC selection rules, with a strong boost from her National Union of Public Employees sponsors, the nod went to Deirdre Wood, Greenwich’s representative on the London Education Authority.

Deirdre had history in Ken Livingstone’s GLC. She was realistic enough to recognise the difficulties her candidacy presented us with in the run-up to a general election. When she met Neil after she’d been selected, she told him, ‘Don’t worry, I won’t drop you in it.’ She didn’t. She didn’t propose nationalising Greenwich, or declaring London a nuclear-free zone. But with the Daily Mail taking the lead, there was an orgy of ‘exposés’, with spurious allegations about her private life and even mockery of her looks. It was a sustained assault which on more than one occasion reduced Deirdre to tears.

In 1983, Guy Barnett had a 1,200-vote edge over the Conservatives, with the SDP in third place. This time, the Tories concluded early on that they were unlikely to win. The SDP ran the candidate they had recently picked for the general election: an attractive, softly-spoken market researcher named Rosie Barnes, whose husband was a local councillor who organised her campaign. The SDP’s Liberal allies sensed that Deirdre’s selection made us vulnerable, and flooded the constituency with canvassers. As the campaign neared its end, our polling suggested that the Tories were encouraging tactical voting as well. Days before the vote on 26 February, we still held a lead. But it was tiny. The night before the election, journalists phoned me with advance word on the next morning’s coverage. The Tories had essentially conceded defeat, and the SDP were making a late surge. As the polls opened, I phoned Charles. ‘We’re going to lose,’ I said. ‘Heavily.’ When we did, by almost 7,000 votes, it was as if everything we had so painstakingly built up had crumbled away on that by-election dawn.

Before long there was a string of further setbacks, unlucky events and own-goals. The most serious involved our most difficult policy problem: defence. In 1986, Neil had gone to Washington, where he managed to deflect the embarrassment of failing to meet President Reagan by saying he’d be back before the election. Since our disarmament policy would commit a Labour government to breaking ranks with America and NATO, the last thing we needed was a tête-à-tête at the White House. I and others, including Shadow Foreign Secretary Denis Healey, tried to talk Neil out of going. He was insistent. He had said he would visit before the election. Not to do so would look weak. I was left to record in my diary the vain hope that Reagan would either fall ill, or for some reason be unable to find time for a meeting before the trip took place. The President was in robust health. When Neil arrived in the Oval Office the meeting was bad enough, with a series of predictably chilly exchanges. Then Reagan’s spokesman emerged with a politically damning account for reporters. He said the President had not even needed the allotted half-hour to tell Britain’s Labour leader that his policies would undermine the Western alliance. Even a friendly feature by one of our few supporters in the travelling press, the Mirror’s Alastair Campbell, could not curb the damage. A Gallup poll at the end of the month had us not only trailing the Tories, by nearly ten percentage points, but in third place, behind the Liberal-SDP Alliance.

I did my best to put a positive spin on it. I phoned the Press Association’s man in the Commons, Chris Moncrieff, and portrayed Neil’s surprisingly resilient remarks after the White House snub as stage one in a carefully planned ‘April fightback’ ahead of the election campaign. There was no such plan, much less any sign of a fightback. But it was one of those phrases that somehow take on a life of their own. By mid-month, although the polls gave the Tories a widening lead, we were at least back in second place. I knew we could still fall back. Although I told reporters that the polls showed that we were ‘back on course, and contending for power’, I truly believed only the first of these claims. ‘What I really feel,’ I wrote in my diary one evening in April, ‘is that we are back on course to remain in existence.’

When the election was announced on the second Monday of May, with polling day set for 11 June 1987, I felt more confident than I had a few weeks earlier. From command central in Walworth Road, I found myself working eighteen-hour days to keep on top of every facet of the campaign: speeches and appearances by Neil and others; decisions on advertising, posters and party TV messages; how and what we were briefing to the media. Philip’s daily cull and analysis of the opinion data was indispensable. As the campaign hit the road, I was in constant contact by primitive mobile phone with Patricia and, at key moments, with Neil.

Our frontman at news conferences and briefings was Bryan Gould, who had succeeded Robin as the shadow cabinet’s campaign chief. Born in New Zealand, Bryan had studied at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, become a television presenter, and had gone into the Commons in 1974. We hit it off immediately. He was articulate, self-assured, quick-witted and very good company, and I soon became good friends with both him and his wife Gill. He was also a huge asset to the campaign. His encounters with the media were amazing to behold. Entering the room with a few hastily scribbled talking points, he seemed capable of answering even the least anticipated question with fluency and lucidity.

Our first few days were steady rather than spectacular. Though even that represented a huge advance over 1983, it did nothing to cushion the blow of the first opinion polls. In two of them, we were back in third place. But soon, our carefully primed campaign engine got up to speed. Neil did too. His breakthrough moment came at the Welsh Labour conference in Llandudno in mid-May. He had been up much of the night fine-tuning a speech on a theme he had often promoted: freedom and opportunity. The words were strong, the argument deftly made. But the speech did not really take flight until he launched into a passionate, personal broadside against unfairness in Britain. ‘Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university?’ he began. ‘Why is Glenys the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it because our predecessors were thick? Did they lack talent? Those people who could sing, and play, and recite and write poetry; those people who could make wonderful, beautiful things with their hands? Those people who could dream dreams, and see visions? Was it because they were weak – those people who could work eight hours underground, and then come up and play football? Does anybody really think that they didn’t get what we had because they didn’t have the talent, or the strength, or the endurance, or the commitment?’ Of course not, he said. ‘It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand!’ There were not the conditions that allowed people who were free under British law truly to live that freedom.

Even watching on the TV at Walworth Road, I felt the power of his words. I knew that Neil on this form – genuine, spine-tinglingly eloquent, and speaking on the kind of social issues where the Tories were most vulnerable – would be key to the campaign. The imperative was to improve his connection with voters. We had already decided that our first broadcast of the campaign would focus on him. We had put it in the hands of a remarkable film-maker, the Chariots of Fire director Hugh Hudson. I’d first met Hugh the previous summer. He was one of a number of talented figures who wanted to do what they could personally to help revive and modernise Labour. Through the first part of the 1980s, such approaches had been routinely rebuffed or ignored. Eager to get Hugh involved, I asked him to produce a video of the autumn party conference. It was powerful, subtle, engaging, and perfectly captured the new ‘red rose’ image we were trying to bring to the party.

Before the campaign started, Patricia and I asked him to turn his artistry to Neil, in a party political broadcast. The aim was to confront his media image as weak, woolly and indecisive, and to project his personal and political strengths. When I first saw what Hugh had come up with, at a late-evening screening two days before it aired, I knew it had done the job. The media dubbed it ‘Kinnock: the Movie’. It opened with a fighter jet morphing into a seagull above the bluffs of south Wales. Using footage from interviews we had Alastair Campbell do with Neil, his family and leading party figures, Hugh created a portrait of a leader whose bedrock beliefs drove him to help others, and who had the determination and strength to turn his beliefs into action. The film segued into his assault on Militant at the 1985 conference. The climax was built around the Llandudno speech. The final scene showed Neil and Glenys walking hand-in-hand along the seacoast. It was breathtaking. The only question was what words we would put up at the end. Usually, it would be the campaign slogan or the Labour logo. When the screening was over I turned to Betty Boothroyd, a sympathetic NEC member and future Speaker of the Commons, who had wandered in to watch. She said, gratifyingly, that she had loved it. ‘What about ending the film with something besides the word “Labour”?’ I asked her. ‘Would it work to just put “Kinnock”?’ She agreed. Later, I would be criticised by some of her NEC colleagues for ‘personalising’ the campaign. I was guilty as charged. Amid all our policy ‘negatives’, Neil was one of our few potential positives.

The aims of our campaign had been to build up his stock as a new kind of leader, and in effect to camouflage most of the policy prospectus on which we were asking voters to put him into Downing Street. To a remarkable degree, we succeeded. In vision and planning, management and mechanics, our campaign made the vaunted Tory machine look staid, slow, stodgy. The day before the election, the New York Times wrote of how dramatically things had changed. Struck by the contrast between the Thatcher rallies staged by the Tories’ presentation supremo, Harvey Thomas, and our Hugh Hudson broadcasts, it concluded: ‘In 1979 and 1983, Mr Thomas’s rallies were the splashiest events around, yielding strong television images that helped establish the Conservatives’ primacy as the party with the most polished communications operation. But this year, the slickness of Mr Hudson’s films demonstrated Labour’s ability to beat the Conservatives at their own game.’ The article quoted a top London advertising executive as saying that we had ‘rattled the Conservative campaign, forcing them to spend valuable time repudiating Labour claims instead of concentrating on Tory successes’. It also praised the way in which we had managed to use the rallies we staged for Neil to ‘divert attention from defence to issues like health care, pensions and education – on which Mrs Thatcher, despite her lead in the polls, has been on the defensive’.

Realistically, however, our main rival was not Mrs Thatcher or the Tories. We were battling for second place, against the Liberal-SDP Alliance. In 1983 we had beaten them by only two percentage points, and well under a million votes. Even after our ‘April fightback’, the polls had intermittently shown us as neck-and-neck with the Alliance, or at times behind them. We faced the real prospect of finishing in third place. By polling day, I knew we had at least faced down that threat. From early in the campaign, especially since the Kinnock movie, we had drawn ahead. As I sat in Walworth Road on election night, the only question in my mind was by how much. I was exhausted. In one sense, it was lucky we had never really had a chance of defeating the Conservatives. By the end of the campaign I was so spent, emotionally and physically, that I had literally nothing left for the final sprint.

Bizarrely, there was a brief moment on election day when there was a suggestion that we might even win. Vincent Hanna, the BBC political correspondent, phoned me early in the evening. In a conspiratorial whisper, he said: ‘Peter, it’s Vincent. I have some very interesting information seeping out about the exit polls. You might just be in for a pleasant surprise.’ Swearing me to secrecy, and saying he could not go into detail, he continued: ‘You may want to get your “plan B” ready.’ I was intrigued, or more nearly astonished. I thanked him, but said: ‘For God’s sake, don’t tell Neil. It’ll get him all wound up.’

As Vincent had hinted, the first Newsnight prediction was for a hung Parliament. I still frankly didn’t believe it – I remember turning to Philip and saying, ‘If only …’ The exit poll corrected itself, and the Conservatives won, as we’d both known they would. Mrs Thatcher got a Commons majority of 102. Still, that was down by forty-two seats on 1983. We had gained twenty seats, and cantered home well ahead of the SDP-Liberal Alliance, by eight percentage points and nearly three million votes. We had survived. We had won the battle of the opposition. If the Greenwich trend had continued, we might well not have done.

I retreated to Foy that weekend. I was a tangle of emotions. The campaign had been more wearing than anything I had ever done in my life. I had never directed anything like it before, and had no benchmark against which to judge what I was doing. Every day was virgin territory. If it had not been for the two Goulds, Bryan and Philip, I am sure I would not have been able to carry it off. Never did I have more reason to be grateful for their support than on the first Saturday of the campaign, when I was suddenly confronted with the personal cost of my more prominent political role. The News of the World, Britain’s highest-circulation Sunday paper, was planning to use its front page next day to tell the country about my private life. I had never cloaked this in secrecy: I simply regarded my life outside politics as having no relevance to my public role. It didn’t preoccupy me, and I did not see why it should concern anyone else. The News of the World chose not only to target me, but to make personal allegations about Roy Hattersley and the Liberal Party leader, David Steel, as well.

I had been with my partner at the time for nearly ten years. He had also briefly been involved with a woman friend, with whom he had fathered a wonderful son – to whom not only his mother, but the two of us were devoted. What angered me was that the newspaper had decided to publicise this as well: identities, details, photographs and all. On Alastair Campbell’s advice, I telephoned the editor, David Montgomery, and told him that if he really wanted to ‘reveal all’ about me, he could go ahead, but including the name of the three-year-old boy involved, or his mother, would be an utterly unjustified violation of their rights to privacy. Montgomery was cold, monosyllabic, and seemingly could not have cared less. He shrugged off my request, and went ahead. Alastair, who was by my side throughout, shared my disgust.

I was told later that the News of the World ‘bombshell’ had been discussed with the Conservative Party’s high command. The Tories apparently saw this as a legitimate way of taking me out of the campaign. If so, it failed. I was fortunate that the pace and demands of the election left me little time to brood on what had happened. The rest of the media, in any case, ignored the News of the World’s prurience. But it couldn’t help but affect the way I felt about and responded to other media intrusions into my private life. It made me more determined than ever not to make concessions to those who are interested in the irrelevances of the bedroom over the Cabinet Room. This was nearly twenty-five years ago. Thankfully, the world has moved on, and with it, journalistic standards.

With the election over, I took comfort from knowing how much ground we had reclaimed since the chaos and crisis of the spring. The campaign had been a watershed for Labour. It had shown to the party, and the numerous sceptics in the media, that we could compete with the Tories in using the tools of modern political communications to get our voice through to voters. We were at least back in the game. It had been transformational for me as well. As the central figure in the Walworth Road operation, I was always going to receive more media attention than before. If it had all gone haywire, I would have got the blame.

In the final days, the young political editor of the Observer wrote the first major profile of me to appear in the national press. I knew Robert Harris only professionally then, though he would later become one of my closest friends. His piece highlighted the differences in Labour’s campaigning and communications since 1983. In explaining the role I had played, the obstacles I had had to overcome and the artifice I had occasionally had to use to get our changes through, he also unwittingly coined a label – sometimes useful politically, often uncomfortable personally – that would stick with me for the rest of my public life: the ‘Machiavelli’ of Walworth Road. Coming from him, this was not meant as an insult, and the rest of the profile was very generous, both about the campaign and my part in it.

After election day, there was far more praise than criticism, some of it from unexpected quarters. Tony Benn said we had run Labour’s best campaign since 1959, the one in which he had pioneered groundbreaking TV messages of his own. The review that most touched me, however, was a note Larry Whitty left on my desk the morning after the election. ‘Just in case it may on occasion have seemed I felt differently,’ he said, ‘can I record that I believe your efforts, political judgement and imagination have made this the most effective campaign the party has ever waged. Well done – and thanks.’

Still, in the end, as Private Eye put it, we had achieved a ‘brilliantly successful election defeat’. The feeling that weighed most heavily on me was that when the votes were counted, we had lost. Again. The sense of frustration and failure gnawed at me in the days, weeks and months that followed as I contemplated what Labour’s third straight defeat meant for the party’s, and my, future. The reasons we had lost were clear. I singled out ‘the three Ds: Deirdre, defence and disarray’. However alluringly alliterative, that told only part of the story. To have any hope of getting back into government, we would have to completely revisit the range of policies where we were simply, fatally, out of touch with the electorate: unemployment and health, education, crime, and of course economics, finance and taxation.

The election result also taught me something else. It was about people’s feelings and beliefs, and how they projected these onto those who stood for the highest office. The electorate intensely disliked many aspects of the Labour Party. As for Neil Kinnock, while people felt that he was right to stand up to the hard left, to reform Labour and make its policies more centrist, they also had a feeling that he was not very prime ministerial, that he was uncertain what he believed in, and that his wordiness masked a lack of knowledge. While many voters had a visceral dislike of Mrs Thatcher, and believed that her policies were divisive, were destroying industry, generating unacceptable social costs and harming public services, they nevertheless felt that she was strong, was probably what the country needed, that they should continue taking the medicine, and anyway, that there was no real alternative. For voters, feelings prevail over beliefs. People may be torn between their head and their heart, but ultimately it is their gut feeling that is decisive: they vote for the candidate who elicits the right feelings, not necessarily the one who presents the right arguments. Ideally, of course, that should be the same person. This lesson would shape what I thought and did over the next two decades, because it ingrained in me just how subtle political communications are – and how complicated elections are to run.

In the eighteen months or so after the election, I gradually lost heart that this would happen with the necessary urgency. Intellectually, Neil understood the need for change. The trouble was that his heart, and more so his soul, weren’t in the scale of change needed. Labour had to find ways of appealing to voters far beyond our old, loyalist core. We had to have something to say not only to the have-nots in society, but to the haves – a group of which Thatcherite Britain’s ‘new working class’ either already had, or aspired to, membership. At times, Neil talked the talk. ‘But,’ I reflected in a diary note after the election, ‘he is too much of a socialist, and he hates the idea of being seen by the party as anything different. That is where he gets the power and the passion of his performance.’ I knew Neil could inspire. The question, especially on the tough policy decisions we had to confront, was whether he could lead the profound change that was clearly needed.

Hoping to prod him and others into action, I commissioned Philip and the SCA to begin a thorough examination of the state of mind of Britain’s voters: what they valued in their lives and in their government; why they supported Labour or the Tories or the Alliance; what had convinced them, or might convince them, to switch sides. We had never done anything on this scale before. Nor had any other British political party. Patricia, as usual, jumped into the driving seat of a process that would end up taking four months to complete, drawing not only on polling and focus groups, but the work of experts in charting political, economic and social trends. That was step one. Step two would be to apply the lessons to policy. We needed an issue-by-issue policy review. This would not have happened without Tom Sawyer, the deputy leader of the public service union NUPE, whose position on the NEC had earlier contributed to the two-vote majority that got me my job. He went to Neil with the idea of a policy review immediately after the election, and convinced him to support it. What shape it would take, how far it would go, remained to be seen. But at least a mechanism would be in place.

The landmark public attitudes report was called ‘Labour and Britain in the 1990s’, and when I got the draft after the party conference in the autumn, it was even more sobering than I had expected. Its findings were presented to a joint session of the NEC and the shadow cabinet in November. Over two decades, our share of the vote had fallen by nearly 20 per cent, while Tory support had remained steady. Even more disturbing were the findings about why people voted as they did. In the case of the Conservatives, it was their tougher, more aspirational appeal. But more than a quarter of Labour’s shrinking base said they remained with us only out of residual loyalty. Among those who had abandoned us, there was a remarkable consistency in the reasons they said had driven them away. ‘Extremism’ came top, followed by the dominance of the trade unions, our defence policy, and finally ‘weak leadership’. It was not just the well-off who didn’t like us, but in an increasingly mobile economy, the role of manual work was decreasing. Share ownership and home ownership were rising, and more voters had the kind of aspirations which they said made them reluctant to elect a Labour government. We were becoming less and less popular, less and less relevant. In its X-ray of the British electorate, the SCA report had now told us why. Our image unsettled and alienated voters, our organisation and leadership dented their trust. Our policies clashed with their hopes not only for the country, but for themselves.

I still have my notes of the presentation meeting. Tony Benn called the report ‘useful’, but said the voters had simply been duped by rightwing ‘media propaganda’, and that Labour’s job now was ‘to change their attitudes through our campaigning’. In other words, ‘don’t compromise with the electorate’. Ken Livingstone said we had been too busy ‘reassuring international bankers so they’ll now vote for us’ to develop and present a strong, socialist alternative to Mrs Thatcher’s running of the economy. He also said we had shamelessly gone along with media attacks on the hard left, instead of defending them. Still, by far most of those in the room clearly understood the seriousness of the message in the research report, and the need for us to reconnect as a party with what voters actually wanted in their lives and from their government. What mattered was what they would do about it.

The short answer turned out to be not much. The policy review, which would not finally be published until two years after the election, had all the trappings of a serious exercise. I certainly spun it in the press gallery as the start of a real change, saying that nothing would be off limits. Seven committees, each chaired by the relevant shadow minister and an NEC member, were tasked to look at every major policy area. But while Neil set out a general vision of change, he made surprisingly little personal input to the process. He didn’t meet the chairs or want to float ideas. Neither arguing for nor rejecting anything, he seemed to be leaving the outcome up to the individual groups and shadow ministers. With no pressure to be radical, almost all of the review groups played it safe. There was one significant exception: Gerald Kaufman, who was now Shadow Foreign Secretary. He knew what he wanted, knew what Labour needed, and showed every sign of being determined to get it: a jettisoning of unilateral nuclear disarmament. As for the rest, they largely tinkered: except for Shadow Chancellor John Smith’s group, which committed Labour to higher taxes, by including a whole raft of new benefits pledges.

My confidence that we would rise to the challenge had been eroding for many months. In the aftershock of the election, there was a lot of talk about ‘change’. But not only was there a lack of real action, Neil’s position with senior shadow cabinet colleagues appeared to have weakened. I had a startling insight into the depth of the discontent in an uncomfortable midnight encounter with Neil’s two most influential colleagues. I was in Edinburgh for the international television festival two months after the election, and John Smith and his wife Elizabeth had very kindly invited me to stay with them. When I arrived after dinner on the first night, Elizabeth had gone to bed. I was greeted not only by John, but by the party’s deputy leader, Roy Hattersley, and their shadow cabinet colleague, the Glasgow MP Donald Dewar. With the three of them seated in a kind of horseshoe formation around me, it felt like a courtroom drama.

John and Roy did most of the talking. They were scathing about Neil, blaming my ‘image-making’ for propping up a leader who they were convinced was not up to the job. John conceded that Neil had proven a formidable party manager, and ‘infighter’, in dismembering Militant. But that was pretty much it. He was aloof, abstract, and a nightmare to deal with on any issue of substance. John’s view was that Neil didn’t have an ‘intellectual interest’ in policy. No matter how glowing the reviews he’d received during the campaign, he was ‘all froth’. Roy piled in, saying that Neil suffered from ‘a lack of assurance, a feeling of being beleaguered and being out of his depth’. That, Roy believed, was because he was.

It was deeply unpleasant, and I did not know how to respond. Neil was party leader. I felt admiration for him because of what he had been put through, and loyalty to him as someone who had at least begun to revive the party. I thought John, Roy and Donald were being harsh and unfair, and I told them so. I also pointed out that while Neil’s speeches may have been ‘froth’, without that froth we would not only have lost the election, we would have been left for dead.

The main senior figure advocating real, if undefined, change was Bryan Gould. At my urging, he had publicly said that Labour had to develop ‘policies for the 1990s’. But he was paying a price, in the shape of a whispering campaign against him. He was naïve, it was said. An upstart. The more he pressed for greater influence, the more difficult his position became. It culminated in his proposal to challenge Roy for the deputy leadership at the beginning of 1988. I knew how much Bryan wanted the job, but I could not support him. Neil was dead against the distraction of a contest, and I shared that view. The party was divided enough without another full-scale power struggle, in which it was certain that Eric Heffer would also join the fray. Besides, I was a Labour Party official. Both the leader, and of course the current deputy, wanted Bryan to reconsider. I did the only thing I reasonably could: I talked him out of standing, averting political bloodshed but introducing a lasting strain in our relationship.

I began to wonder whether I should shift my focus outside the party. At one point, I even applied for a job as Director of Communications at the BBC. But I wasn’t offered it, and I very much doubt that I would have accepted it if I had been. Having returned to Labour at a time that the party had begun to change, I could not see myself baling out before the process was over, one way or the other. Still, I found myself trying to work around Neil to present a public image of a party ready for fundamental change. I retained a real respect for him, and a warmth that had nothing to do with politics. Neil could be awkward in his relationships, but he had an enormous capacity for kindness, and one instance in particular touched me in a way I have never forgotten.

It was in the spring of 1988, nearly a year after the election. I was called out of an NEC meeting to take an urgent call from my brother in my office. My father had been under the weather for a couple of weeks with a chest infection. Neither of us had been unduly worried, but I spoke daily either to my mother or Miles about how he was getting on. When it became apparent that he was not improving, our family GP had referred him to the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead. My father and I had found a new closeness over the past year or so. The grating of our unacknowledged similarities had receded, and I was much more able to recognise and appreciate the flair, the assurance, the sense of caring about politics and people which I had got from him, while he was able to show the pride he felt in what I had accomplished, and the work I was doing. The previous summer, he had come down to spend a day in Foy. He arrived with a lovely blue ceramic ashtray, decorated with a red rose, which I still have. I cooked him trout and salad and new boiled potatoes. We walked and talked, and then he slept before I drove him back to the station. I had every expectation that we would have further time to look back, and forward, together.

But now, Miles was phoning with bad news. The ‘chest infection’ was being treated, but the hospital had done tests. My father had cancer, and the prognosis was not good. I could not help the tears coming as I sat, holding the phone, before I replaced the receiver. Whether it was by means of telepathy I don’t know, but Neil appeared at my side, put his arm round my shoulder and cradled my head in his arms. It would be difficult, he said, but love for a father is a source of strength. ‘You’ll get through. We’ll make sure you get through.’ My father died without warning two weeks later, from a heart attack. It was months before I was over the first, terrible sense of loss – thinking of the things my father had said, the clothes he wore, the jokes we had shared, his pipe, the conversations we had or that I wished we had had. The deeper, duller throb went on for much longer.

At work, I looked for whatever examples and agents of real change I could find. I still dutifully briefed the media about Neil’s speeches and over-egged the odd policy document, but I was spending much more of my time trying to boost the image of the few Labour MPs who seemed to understand that we had to reform radically or face terminal decline. In my search for articulate, forward-looking Labour spokesmen to deliver a message that would at least sound new on radio and television, I was increasingly drawn to two bright young MPs who had been elected in 1983, and had been inseparable allies ever since. They shared a remote rabbit-warren of a parliamentary office. Both were forceful, effective communicators, and both believed that Labour had to do more – much more – if it was ever again going to get a chance to govern. The senior member of the partnership, a couple of years older and with the longer political CV, was a thirty-six-year-old Scottish MP named Gordon Brown. His ally and protégé was an Oxford-educated barrister, representing Sedgefield in northern England, called Tony Blair.

I had first got to know them before the election. We were all in our thirties, and were excited to be part of the post-1983 rebuilding project. We were young enough to hope still to be in command of our senses by the time Labour finally got back into government. The initial attraction for me was that here were two MPs who possessed a quality all too rare on the Labour benches: they had an understanding of, and a facility for, modern communications. It was natural that I should want to use their talents to help get Labour’s message across, and that they should see a re-energised Walworth Road as an asset.

After the election defeat, this coincidence of interests gradually became something much more than that: a partnership, a trio, a team. In contrast to the detachment and drift of Neil’s office, Gordon and Tony conveyed focus, and exuded energy. Constantly batting ideas off each other, positioning and planning, they were like a pair of very close, if unidentical, twins. Tony had the sunnier disposition. He had an easiness about him, a facility for engaging in serious politics without appearing to take the stakes, or himself, too seriously. He had a gift for putting others at their ease, even other politicians. People liked him, and wanted to be liked by him. In a different way, Gordon had that quality too. For me, he certainly did. We had much in common. Like me, he had resolved at a young age to entwine his life with Labour. Like me, he was the political equivalent of a football anorak. An intricate map of Prime Ministers and pretenders past, of alliances and feuds, triumphs and failures, speeches and manifestos, was implanted in both of us like a memory chip.

Although all three of us sensed by early in 1988 that Labour was not going to win the next election without something dramatic happening, I think that the realisation affected Gordon and me a bit differently than it did Tony. While he was frustrated, and sometimes angry, about the party’s failure to put itself back in the running for government, for us, there was a deeper, more personal, almost existential, feeling of despair.

There was another bond with Gordon as well. I was spending almost all my waking hours trying to find ways of getting Labour’s message into the newspapers or onto the radio or television, and through them to voters. That was not just my job, it was a fixation. For Gordon, it was nearer an obsession. It needed not be about some grand policy announcement – it rarely was. It was not done in any expectation of our winning the major arguments, much less an election, against Mrs Thatcher. But Gordon plotted a ceaseless campaign of guerrilla strikes against the Tories. He was constantly reading ministerial statements, dissecting policy proposals, culling potentially damaging leaks of internal documents. Then, sometimes acting by himself, sometimes through Tony, and increasingly often in league with me, he would zero in on just the right newspaper or broadcaster, just the right news cycle, to strike the blow. For Gordon, this was deadly serious. He viewed the Tories not only as political opponents, but as a battlefield enemy. We might not be able to kill them, but he hoped, wound by wound, to bring them to their knees. His eye for tactical opportunities was extraordinary, and he showed a master craftsman’s delight and eagerness in trying to initiate Tony and me into the secrets of the trade.

For the first time I heard him expound on his core principle of political battle, and it would resurface many times, in many contexts, later on. Essentially, his argument was that our own policies weren’t necessarily key to scoring a communications or campaigning success – which was fortunate, because our own policies were hardly putting us in a strong position. The key, Gordon said, was to identify, magnify and exploit ‘dividing lines’ with the Tories. I became an eager co-conspirator. Given the challenge of finding a way to market the pabulum of the policy review, I began to see Gordon’s endless schemes to annoy the Tories as invaluable in my efforts to keep Labour in the public eye. His relentless urge to attack also gave me a sense that Labour had not given up the fight.

I saw Tony, too, as a huge asset, especially in conveying a sense of newness in Labour on television. Even before I arrived at Walworth Road, I remember having been bowled over by an appearance he made on the BBC’s Question Time. He was accusing the Conservatives of undermining civil liberties, but it wasn’t the substance of his message that most struck me, timely and apt though it was. I was impressed by his freshness, his fluency, his ability to talk politics in words that connected in a way so many of our frontbenchers seemed to find it difficult to do. I was keen to find ways of turning this to Labour’s wider benefit, by steering high-profile TV invitations his way.

My increasing promotion of Tony’s and Gordon’s media profiles did not escape the notice of some of their more senior colleagues. The first time I put Tony on breakfast TV, to rebut Tory economic policy before the 1987 election, I felt almost as if I’d taken my life in my hands. He was at that time a junior spokesman in Roy’s Shadow Treasury team. That afternoon, a redoubtable and undeniably more senior member, the Thurrock MP Oonagh McDonald, pinned me up against a wall behind the Speaker’s chair in the Commons. When Roy wasn’t available for an interview, she thundered, she was next in line. Did I understand? What on earth had I been playing at by putting Tony up instead? I assured her that there would be plenty of future opportunities for everyone, but I couldn’t help adding, ‘Tony was very good, wasn’t he?’ It was not what Oonagh wanted to hear.

Gordon’s first real chance to shine came a year and a half after the 1987 defeat, and it happened by accident. Both he and Tony had risen up the ranks since the election. Still too junior to be perceived as a threat to those at the top, and too bright and effective to be ignored, they were voted into the shadow cabinet. Tony was Shadow Energy Secretary, while Gordon was Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, under John Smith. By the time we arrived in Brighton for the party conference at the end of September 1988, I was not alone in having marked them out as faces for the future. For Gordon, the time frame was about to shorten dramatically. Two days after conference, John suffered a serious heart attack which meant that he would need several months’ rest before returning to work. On paper, Bryan Gould should have been in line to fill in for him. With his responsibility for Trade and Industry, he held the second-top economic brief in the shadow cabinet. But Gordon made it instantly clear that he was able, and ready, to fill the breech. Since no one with influence went to bat for Bryan, the arrangement was nodded through. I am sure that they, like me, felt that while Gordon lacked John’s political weight and dispatch-box experience, he had the intellect and policy grasp to be capable of holding the fort. Within weeks, however, he faced a first major test: replying for Labour to the government’s autumn financial statement.

It had all the marks of a distinctly unequal fight. In the Conservative corner, Nigel Lawson had been Chancellor since 1983. He was two decades older than Gordon, and had been in the Commons a decade longer. He had steadily lowered income tax, and since 1986 had built an economic recovery into an income and consumer boom. There were signs of trouble, however. Inflation was rising, and interest rates, which stood at 14 per cent, even more worryingly. Though this was Gordon’s first big set-piece parliamentary encounter, he at least had a strong argument to make, ‘dividing lines’ to exploit, a target to attack. That he would make his points effectively was something I never doubted: he, and Tony and I, had worked on rehearsing and refining them.

When he rose to face Lawson, he did much more than that. He spoke with confidence, vigour and verve. Lawson’s great economic expansion, he said, was mere sleight of hand, based on irresponsible levels of borrowing. ‘It is a boom based on credit,’ he said. Warning of trouble ahead, he ridiculed the Conservatives’ efforts to insist that all would be well despite their failure to live up even to their own economic forecasts. Then came the killer line, as Lawson sat grimacing, like an elephant improbably brought down by a mosquito: ‘The proper answer is to keep the forecasts and discard the Chancellor!’ When he had finished, to shouts of support from the Labour benches, I went up to the press gallery to gauge the reaction. I didn’t need to tell them Gordon had done well; they had seen it for themselves. But I felt we had witnessed something of real significance to Labour in this David and Goliath drama. ‘Today,’ I told them, ‘a star was born.’ The reason the Guardian’s Ian Aitken and others echoed the phrase the following morning was because all of us recognised that it rang true.

Part of what drew me to Gordon and Tony, and drew us together, was simply the way they did politics. So much of the Labour Party seemed weighted down by torpor and an acceptance of defeat. Morale reached a new low the week after Gordon’s Commons breakthrough, with a particularly painful by-election defeat in the ostensibly safe seat of Glasgow Govan. We lost it, with a swing of 33 per cent, to the Scottish Nationalists. Neil was feeling so despondent that for a brief period he even began speaking of stepping aside the following summer. I was feeling equally down. A fortnight later, I boarded a train north with Tony to join him at a meeting with his constituents. The contrast could hardly have been greater. Watching him use his mixture of intellect, humour and charm to communicate – with voters was like getting a blood transfusion.

The growing bond between Tony, Gordon and me was not only about politics. On policy, we also found much common ground. The specifics of the new Labour platform we envisaged would not take shape until much later. But we knew absolutely what had to go: the statist, unilateralist and class-defined prospectus that had lost us three straight elections and was surely going to lose us a fourth.

Two late-night entries in my diary, six months apart in 1988, chart the depth of my frustration and my growing certainty about what needed to be done. The first followed the NEC’s approval of the initial policy review reports. It reflected my relief at the vote, and my admiration for Neil’s role in arguing for and mobilising the support needed to secure it. But I worried about what hadn’t been accomplished, the risks we had failed to take, and where we might go from here. ‘The problem is that for all Neil’s courage and strength of leadership, he is let down by his lack of self-confidence and his seeming lack of interest in the detail of policy,’ I wrote. ‘It shows not so much in what he says and does, but in what he fails to articulate and to achieve.’ There was an ‘awful’ implication in this. I had begun to suspect that the country might never view Neil as prime ministerial material. He would end up being both ‘the hero and the fall-guy of history. The likelihood at the moment is that he will be the leader who restored and rebuilt the Labour Party but who could not clinch victory.’

The second snapshot is from a few days after my trip to Tony’s constituency in Sedgefield. ‘Increasingly,’ I wrote, ‘my role is revolving around the strong future leaders – Gordon Brown and Tony Blair – and the political nourishment and companionship I get from this group. They have such political gifts, and they know that on the present course we shall remain out of office for a generation. I have now become determined to be part of that successor generation. All my political ambition has returned with the challenge that they hold out.’

While I had not yet shared this with Neil, or even Charles Clarke, I knew something else as well. If I wanted to be part of creating a truly revived Labour Party, I could not do it from where I was – as a headquarters man, whatever the range of my influence. Like Gordon and Tony, I needed to be on the front line. I needed to resume a course I had abandoned, in disgust at the shambolic extremism of London Labour politics. I would seek election as a Labour Member of Parliament.