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Returning from New Zealand to Pomerania is depressing. From a young country to an old one, a clean country to a dirty one, a country run for people, to one run for the elite.
I don’t want to be back but should never have gone. Alistair Campbell has let things disintegrate. After two and a half years of herd-like sycophancy the press has reversed polarity and started biting the hand that’s fed them so well. It doesn’t matter. It’s all trivia of no concern to the people. Yet suddenly we’re portrayed as a party at the end of its tether, doomed to defeat, divided and deceitful and incapable of fulfilling our promises.
All rubbish. This is pundits over-compensating for previous over-sycophancy. Yet it symbolises the end of the Golden Weather. From here on in it will be more difficult to blame every problem on the Tories (though that won’t stop us). This is not the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning. We’ll now need stronger, tougher and more expensive policies to solve deep problems which haven’t disappeared in the face of a bit of cash and a lot of smiles.
We came in hands tied to prove ourselves safe and respectable: no increase in Income Tax, lean and mean spending, orthodox, safe, economics and plunged into two years of constitutional tinkering to give the troops something to do but now we must do what we were elected for: improving the lot of the people, ending poverty and turning health, education and local government round. That demands far faster economic growth, higher taxes, more jobs and a big increase in public spending and borrowing.
If we tell that to the nation: "we’ve shown we’re safe. Now give us the tools to finish the job" they will. Otherwise the Third Way becomes puncture repairs.
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Wednesday 19 January
Having been re-selected for Parliament I now face a greater challenge. Selection of photos for the Great Parliamentary Photo Exhibition in March. A few Peers drop in to ensure that the three ruthless judges aren’t too sympathetic to the Commons. The judges’ task is huge. More entries than ever before, including one from Diana Organ which holds everything up for an hour to puzzle out whether it’s great art or a processing fault.
Baroness Hilton is there to stop "Wigging". Our former chairman brought in far more photos than the permitted ten entries to substitute new ones every time one was rejected. Today Hilton’s vigilance is annoying because I’d counted on working the same trick and brought in seven hundred photos, loosely stuck together as "montages".
She terrorised Lord Cranthorne into accepting less than six choices, drove out MPs who sidled in hoping to slip in extra prints, and hung around determined to defeat me. I kept putting off lunch until the late afternoon and eventually hunger drove her away. I then produced my massive collection. Six selected. Two up on last year. If you can’t abuse power why bother to hold it, as President Mitterand once told me.
Evening
To the Young Solicitors’ Group at the Law Society. A hostile reaction to my plans for legal reform. An even nastier one to Lord Irvine’s which I don’t bother to defend if only because they’re indefensible.
Using the Lord Chancellor’s technique of "when in doubt attack Fat Cat Lawyers" enrages one woman who announces that she’s trained ten years as a barrister to earn £10,000 a year. My facetious reply that she should apply for the Minimum Wage arouses the audience to anger. But I had them with me all the way. To Fleet Street.
Night
Return home to watch the New Labour Clobbering Machine trundled out to crush Ken. It’s a sickening spectacle. A pack moves in. The media make incredible accusations about destroying the City of London. The Guardian carries a two page spread of abuse. Leader One and Leader Two tell us that the government will fall and Michael Foot return to the leadership if Ken gets selected.
Hopefully this overkill will be counter-productive but if the party does select Ken our leaders will have to campaign for Steve Norris.
Requiring us to choose between them and anything s undemocratic centralism of the worst kind for Labour is dead without debate and discussion. Suggestions for change can’t be treated as a slight on the leadership bringing Tony hurt and angry to threaten the reincarnation of Arthur Scargill, Ted Night and Red Robbo.
Thursday 20 January
The longer I’ve been away the more our majority has gone up as we recruit more millionaires to ensure that we don’t revert to a class based sectional party. Yet Tommy McAvoy tells me that this increase must re-double vigilance and the majority still includes me. So I have to stay behind to pass a Bill which the Tories don’t even bother to vote against.
Ours not to reason why. Though this loyalty makes me very late in collecting my labrador, Jake, who’s been in kennels while we’ve been in New Zealand and doesn’t enjoy being woken up at midnight to walk home. He protests loudly all night resulting in angry complaints from the neighbours. Tomorrow he’ll have to sleep inside, meaning an angry row with Linda.
Monday 24 January
A light legislative day but the brute majority is still whipped in at ten o’clock on the grounds that there are "votable motions" and we never know what Eric Forth will do.
Eric now inspires terror in four hundred Labour souls devotedly trying to build a New Britain to find their loving work vandalised every night. We should get Eric a useful job on the New Deal to stop him sinking into vandalism as a way of life.
The Forth Way is a nocturnal terror regime in which a small band of dedicated Forth Estaters keep the entire Labour Party out of bed to wear down morale. Our Whips fall for his threats because they’ve no higher wisdom than to trundle in the entire majority every time rather than a team of night-watchmen who have no beds to go to, plus the Pay Roll vote whose higher salaries include a lost-sleep allowance. Tonight the mere threat of Eric brings us all in to be sent home again. He never turned up. Mondays are probably his night for Methodist churches.
Tuesday 25 January
Day out at the Dome, courtesy of British Telecom. I thought they’d issued me a personal invitation until I turned up at the pier to find 300 Peers, bishops, MPs, staff and children. The Mother of Parliaments must be deserted. Will Eric Forth sneak in and seize power?
Sail down the Thames in a state barge pushing myself into the Senior Statesman compartment with Gerald Kaufman and several Peers who pretend not to notice me.
After watching virulent anti-French propaganda disguised as a Blackadder film we are turned loose in the Dome at risk from the gangs of school children. I stick closely to Gerald. His committee does endless reports on the Dome so everywhere we go people bow and curtsy. Eventually, though, he forces me to cut the apron strings and face the Dome on my own.
I’ve always thought it a waste of money. It is. Yet in politics it’s no use being right on your own, far better to be wrong in Peter Mandelson’s company. I remember the long film diatribe in which he ate a hamburger while fulminating about combating defeatism and showing that Britain could do it. He has. Though it still doesn’t have a purpose.
Kids love it but political correctness has stopped us building the Super-Disneyland with rides, whizz rounds, monsters and fun they’d prefer. So an architectural triumph no one can find a use for is relegated to moral improvement which is either boring or empty. Like the Faith Zone. No one is contemplating the Third Way or worshipping at the tomb of the unknown Lottery player who paid for it all. Get the tube back to the Fun Factory. Has Eric Forth been sighted yet?
Evening
Remove those great Parliamentarians, Pitt, Fox, Gladstone and Disraeli from their plinths. Replace them with Eric Forth and Willie Ross, heroes of the Bore Wars. Just like the Boer Wars a small team of sharp shooters holds the massed might of the British army at bay for a whole night.
The guerrillas are helped by our generalship. Our top brass stayed away. No-one told us what the Disqualification Bill was about or why it had to be pushed through now and in one night. The Whips didn’t appear to know but merely repeated a mantra of "next vote in an hour". Which it never was. They then went to ground. Visitors to the Whips’ offices found them as crowded and as lively as the Marie Celeste.
I did a patrol of the darkened building with Frank Field and Malcolm Wicks looking in every available cupboard to see if Tories were hiding for an ambush. They weren’t. So when the voting figures revealed that a majority of our two hundred was being kept up all night to crush a band of 15 or less I went to bed hoping it won’t damage my career prospects.
Wednesday 26 January
The House is still in Tuesday which mars the celebration of Labour’s first thousand days now modified to 999 days of triumph and one of total screw up.
If we make such a mess taking on the condotieri of conservatism how will we fare against its forces: the big battalions, the big companies and multinationals, the big self-interest of the big boys and girls. Should we apply for an aegrotat?
Don’t be grudging, Austin. Labour’s been very successful. A thousand days of triumph and modernisation, even if capitalism, Public Relations and the Big Five accountancy houses have done better than peasants and workers. It’s been very boring for backbenchers but sometime soon, when we’ve done all the fiddling second order constitutional bits, we can get on with improving the lives and lot of the mass of the people. If Eric Forth lets us! |
