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Spring at last. Renewal and regeneration. A new start. But not this year. The weather is awful, the government in trouble. Our style is bossy and with the project formulated and run by a small number of power-motivated men (no women at the top). So Cabinet Members and backbenchers alike become spectators relaying messages we don’t quite believe to people who don’t listen. The chosen ones listen only to focus groups, cutting out the traditional middlemen of the party because it’s like using carrier pigeons in an age of email.
The new system ain’t working because the people are ceasing to believe us. Not because they think we lied, like Harold Wilson, but because what we’re telling them now on asylum seekers, pensions, crime, improving services, defies the evidence of their own eyes, instincts and newspapers. They don’t believe it and are switching off.
Minds are switching off all over Britain and prejudices taking over. So all the last minute concessions, like being nicer to pensioners to compensate for calling them geriatric racists, more police in rural areas, Peter Mandelson coming back to put things right, just look like weakness and do no good at all. Hopefully the Easter recess will re-energise Tony, me and the party.
***
Tuesday 11 April
Suddenly realise I should be dining with the Lord Chancellor to get my certificate as a trainee policeman. Arrive at the Attlee Room, late, sweating, panic-stricken and in my crumpled suit. Everyone is elegant in evening dress, medals and cummerbunds. Lord Irvine graciously tells me there’s no need to be on my knees to get my certificate.
Back to the chamber to deliver a rant in favour of the proposed new Regional Affairs Standing Committee. We should have had one years ago. Each region should have its own with the Yorkshire and Humberside Committee, our equivalent of the Scottish Grand Committee - the Reet Grand Committee. Margaret Beckett expresses her pleasure at hearing me speak in favour of the government. Tommy McAvoy beams. My rise to power has resumed. Particularly now that we’re going to be nicer to pensioners. Mitchell for Secretary of State for Geriatrics. Or Geriatric Secretary of State? Polish my Zimmer frame in readiness.
Wednesday 12 April
The Dog Star rages nay the fools be out. Plus the teachers, the Post Masters, the brain damaged children, the North Eastern ship yard workers. A frenzy of lobbying and placards which makes it look as though the Tories are still in power. They’re trundled in and out of my office in relays and offered a full cream tea service for which Nolan requires me to change. Being Old Labour I find myself agreeing with the lobbyists. Fortunately, Shona pops in to put me right.
Tuesday 13 April
To Grimsby for the Crosland Memorial Lecture given this year by David Blunkett. We fill the Town Hall, and disarm the teachers before admission and David rises to the occasion with a brilliant analysis of the social purposes of education. Questions are at a less exulted level, being about student grants, pressure on kids, reams of paperwork and the rest of it.
Shona weighs in in defence of student loans so afterwards indignant party members demand to know why I didn’t give my views. "Because it wasn’t my bloody lecture" doesn’t satisfy them. They see the job of MP as attacking the government. Old and New Labour must transmit and justify government policy down to the people and relay the plaints of the people back up to government. New Labour concentrates on the first, Old Labour on the second. But we both face the same basic problem. No-one’s listening at either end.
Friday 14 April
Open the CAB’s new call centre to channel people all over Lincolnshire to the CAB and the service they need. I make the first call. "Why not ask about how to get rid of the mice that your wife’s sloppy housekeeping has encouraged?" says a bright reporter. My God. Some jokey remarks to that effect on front page news in the Grimsby Evening Telegraph. Must keep it from Linda.
Saturday 15 April
Is everyone’s surgery turning nasty in the way mine are? Endless complaints about pensions and asylum seekers (the two usually go together); all sorts of unusually obtuse problems and the standard run of housing, housing benefit, social security, and invalidity problems. Decide to get the full remix of "Things Can Only Get Bette" re-titled "They Have, But Not Much" to play at full volume through surgery.
Sunday 16 April
Grimsby Scouts St. George’s Day Parade. A week early but bigger than ever. We dignitaries exit to review the parade and the stand has been moved thirty yards down the road because last year it was underneath a flat inhabited by drunks who opened the window and shouted down at Lord Yarborough, the Mayor, myself and assembled Scout Masters "Keep quiet - we’re in bed". At three in the afternoon. They then turned up their ghetto blaster to blast us out. Eventually they recognised me and came down for a chat about their social security problems. I must have solved them. This year they were silent.
Tuesday 18 April
A much planned visit by Helen Clarke, Prime Minister of New Zealand, who’s seeing everyone of importance right up to Alistair Campbell. She’s to speak to the Labour Branch of the New Zealand Labour Party but our plans for a big meeting are frustrated by the Sergeant at Arms’ Department’s traditional practice of bumping meetings out of their chosen rooms for committees which probably don’t sit.
Hundreds turn up and aren’t allowed in. TV crews try to film and are stopped. We have to have a second over-spill meeting next door. Helen copes with both magnificently for two and a half hours despite having just arrived from New Zealand.
Her theory is that both Labour parties wandered astray in the Eighties, British Labour too far to the Left, New Zealand Labour to the Right, so both are reverting to norm, but over-compensating. I’d rather do it her way. The New Zealand Labour government immediately increased taxes, halted the privatisation of Accident Compensation and the over-use of consultants. All of particular interest to Labour MPs with the result that my chairmanship is denounced, "Too much preference to bloody Poms. She’s our Prime Minister, not yours".
Wednesday 19 April
I’m the major part of a one-man delegation to Chris Smith to ask him to back a National Arts Day on 24 June. This should be popular arts springing from the grass roots rather than something handed from the top down. Let’s stimulate all kinds of events under the same popular umbrella.
Unfortunately, the Arts Bureaucracy want to run things top down not bottom up. Chris explains that there are so many other events in Millennium year. It needs a powerful national organisation. The BBC are already organising a music festival. Plus a thousand and one reasons for doing nothing. I counter that with his blessing and backing we can raise the money in donations. Deadlock.
Leave sobbing to a final meeting with Helen Clarke at New Zealand House. "Why don’t you have a National Arts Day?" I ask. "What a good idea. Let’s have a word when I’m back from Gallipoli". No doubt Churchill said the same in 1915.
Thursday 20 April
The beginning of the Great Easter Rejuvenation. Flee the Fun Factory to take my grandchildren North. En route it begins to rain. Sykes’s nose bursts. Blood pours all over the front seat. He sits there whimpering. In the back seat the other two start fratching and screaming. The promised visit to Cleethorpes for donkey rides, the light railway and the Fishing Heritage Centre is ruled out by the rain.
Good Friday 21 April
Entire Mitchell Family is gathered at Mitchell Mansions (mysteriously omitted from Simon Simon’s survey of Labour’s Great Houses). Decide a grand outing. First Harry Ramsden’s where the grandchildren run riot and have to be taken out when they burst all the balloons. It’s now pouring but decide to persevere with my plans and visit Bolton Abbey. The gateman gloomily observes "T’abbey’s closed. Can’t you think of anything better to do on a Bank Holiday than give three quid t’t’Duke of Devonshire?" At the entrance is a message from the Duke hoping that we get "as much enjoyment from the Abbey as he and his family have done." Someone’s crossed out "enjoyment" and written in "profit". Today there’s neither. Drop my camera. Get soaked. Kids begin to cry. Set off back, miserably, on the long drive home.
Saturday 22 April
Second Great Family Outing. Worth Valley Railway to Keighley to meet their Yorkshire granny. The railway, Bob Cryer’s great legacy, is magnificent; thousands of enthusiasts come to worship at the shrine of a British Rail we all hated at the time.
My plan is less magnificent. Granny York isn’t there. Our party splits, part staying to meet her, the rest of us going to Oakworth Station to huddle in the waiting room round a coke fire as the rain pours. We reunite and go to Howarth, so full of folk the grandchildren are trampled underfoot. Archie (3) steals a plastic sword from a shop and runs up the hill hitting people. "I’d belt that if it were mine". Rain becomes a downpour. Drive home to find the yard flooded, water pouring into the cellar, and Granny Yorkshire waiting and very wet.
Sunday 23 April
Linda has won a free family portrait by a prize-winning photographer by filling in thousands of forms at Tesco. My protests that this is completely unnecessary with a top Grimsby photographer in the household are met with hysterical laughter and a comment from Sykes (age 7) that he’s fed up of being photographed by me. My attempts to get them to pose in a group beforehand are ruined when three grandchildren run away, and scream and sob when I drag them back.
My technique is wrong. The "Advice Prior to Sitting" sent to us by the professional says "on no account should you "warn" your children to behave themselves either before or especially during the sitting. This only puts children under pressure and precludes us from capturing their true personality" (or full obnoxiousness). For adults it says the "darker shades of clothing will make you look slimmer!". Linda appears all in black. It tells us to bring "anything you may consider to be a characteristic activity". Ours is bloody rows which start en route with Jonathan refusing to comb his long hair, and Susan opting for the Shirley Williams look.
Still, it should be a bonding experience and the photographer is a genius who hypnotises the kids, cheers me up by telling me to stand sideways to look thinner, gets a rare smile from Linda by lying that she’s lovely, and arranges the crowd spectacular to look almost like a family.
He then suggests a series of other pictures. I eagerly agree. Finally, he presents his bill. Hundreds of pounds per picture and only the first £50 free under the Tesco offer. I could have done that for free, I point out. Indignant cries of "but we enjoyed it" "no-one ever sees your photos" "you’re rubbish". Sulk for the rest of the day.
Go to Saltaire and up the Shipley Glen Tramway so the grandchildren can visit the little fun fair at the top. Rain begins again. The Tramway’s Easter Bunny trip (with free eggs) is cancelled. I’ve now begun to cough and sneeze. Bloody Sykes has given me his cold.
Monday and Tuesday, April 24 and 25
Family depart one by one. House empty. Mice dead and smelling. I’ve got ’flu wasting the precious opportunity to regenerate. Easter has been a rainy wash-out. Typical of New Labour. Doing nothing for the old.
Wednesday 26 April
Stir from my death bed to go to the Veteran Fishermen’s meeting to report on our attempts to get them compensation for the loss of their jobs in 1976. In fact, there’s nothing to report. After a quarter of a century this is still dragging on. The meeting begins well but goes off the rails as I cough and splutter desperately appealing for a sympathy I don’ get. "Are you sure you’re going to live long enough to get us what we’re owed?" "Shona’s doing a better job" and other cries, as the meeting breaks up into a welter of recriminations. "Labour does everything for the miners/Rover/asylum seekers/but nothing for us". Not my finest hour.
***
Nor my finest Easter. Perhaps it’s age and non-rising sap. I’ll go back to the Fun Factory unrefreshed, unreinvigorated and unrejuvenated for another tough legislative outward bound course.
The economy is turning sour as a result of three years of overvaluation crippling manufacturing. This is a scrap book for 1989. Activity kept up by loose credit and rising house and stock prices while black clouds gather. Yet if the Pound falls (which it won’t because our only exchange rate policy is prayer) the Bank of England will put up interest rates. It’s daft enough to put them up anyway.
No way out now except to get the Pound down massively and quickly which is the one thing no-one will do. The Bank can’t. The Chancellor won’t. The Prime Minister doesn’5 see the problem. The party’s spent so much time preaching the virtues of stability it doesn’t know the difference between that and rigor mortis.
It’s been like this before. Harold Wilson fought to keep the Pound up. John Major told us of the benefits of sticking with the ERM. Force of circumstances changed both but Gordon’s made of sterner stuff and Labour always goes down with the ship if it’s HMS Orthodoxy. Politics will get interesting again but not in a way anyone in their right minds would want. |
