As many a Home Secretary would say and some indeed have, there is no guessing from which direction a story will suddenly emerge to completely surprise you. On the day Alan Johnson meets up with Tribune, it’s the plant food mephedrone, now used as a recreational drug, which has suddenly caught attention.
“But things are much easier now the Ministry of Justice deals with prisoner releases and escapes”, says Johnson.
So is the Home Office now “fit for purpose”, rather than the “inadequate” and “dysfunctional” department it was when John Reid warned of its failings at the time he held the same job back in 2006?
“Yes unequivocally”, is Johnson’s unhesitating response. “If you look at the capability review that we do throughout Whitehall, and which every department has to go through, the Home Office was bottom or next-to-bottom back then. Now it’s up near the top.
“But you can also look at the fact that there were boxes of files that went back to William Whitelaw’s day when he was Home Secretary”, he adds, referring to the former Conservative politician who left the post in 1983 and died more than a decade ago.
“There was a legacy of cases on asylum and immigration that had just been hidden away – just like the foreign-national prisoners that Charles Clarke suffered over.”
Johnson insists all of this is being tackled now. “The legacy cases will be cleared by next year. Foreign national prisoners will virtually be cleared. The way the whole place runs is totally different”, he says.
“I think there’s a good argument to say it was virtually unmanageable before”, he adds. “The Home Office had this huge, unwieldy empire that’s gradually come down to crime, counter-terrorism and immigration – and that’s manageable.”
Labour’s relations with its affiliated trade unions have come in for sudden scrutiny with the strikes by Unite cabin crew at British Airways causing great anxiety in party circles. Conservative politicians are delighted at an old tune conveniently presenting itself, particularly one so easily recalled – unlike the trickier tale of Tory vice-chairman Lord Ashcroft and his undeclared non-dom financial status.
How much blame will Labour suffer due to Unite being one of the biggest donors to the party’s funds? And how much rethinking of the relationship between Labour and the unions does Johnson believe needs to happen?
“There’s been a lot of rethinking already actually”, Johnson points out. “When we came into government, it was very clear that two things had helped to keep us out of power for 18 years. One was the perception that we’d just increase taxes for the sake of it. The second was that we were in the pockets of the unions.
“That wasn’t good for the unions and it wasn’t good for us. But the fact that one member, one vote came in was a huge, huge change”, he says of the constitutional amendment to Labour’s rules instituted by former Labour leader John Smith in 1993.
“Before, unions had gone to the Labour conference and to local selection meetings with a block vote. It was very unhealthy and hugely controversial – but we put the relationship with the unions on a much healthier basis.
“The stuff the Tories are trying to generate just won’t wash”, Johnson declares. “There’s not much else we need to do to get the relationship right.”
He has long been a supporter of proportional representation and happily welcomes Gordon Brown’s recent conversion to the alternative vote for Westminster – or to at least having a referendum on the issue, should Labour be in a position to offer one after the imminent general election.
But what does Johnson make of the late nature of the apparent conversion? “As Roy Jenkins famously said, when they have power, political parties don’t want the reform, and when they want the reform, they don’t have the power”, he says.
Lord Jenkins would also have known the absolute truth of that saying, given that his own Independent Commission on Electoral Reform – commissioned by then Prime Minister Tony Blair – was roundly ignored when it concluded on a proportional system to put before voters in a referendum, as promised in Labour’s 1997 manifesto.
“His report wasn’t ignored”, Johnson insists, “but even in his pomp Tony Blair would never have been able to get that through Parliament. It was simple realpolitik.”
“We are genuinely divided on it”, he says of Labour’s current position. “We’ve got many PR advocates and we have many anti-PR diehards. There was a debate in Cabinet and a fiercer debate in the Parliamentary Labour Party – but we came together and united behind the alternative vote.
“The issue of proportional representation isn’t going to go away – and I’ll continue arguing for it as long as I have breath left to breathe”, he says. “It is actually inevitable and really it’s just a question of when.”
Johnson’s personal background sets him apart from his parliamentary colleagues. He was orphaned at 12 and brought up by his 15-year-old sister. He left school with no qualifications when he reached 15 and stacked shelves at Tesco before becoming a postman at 18. He was married with two children by this point.
So what does he say to white working-class voters in Hull who accuse Labour of abandoning them? At the European elections of 2009, Yorkshire & the Humber, in which mega-constituency Johnson’s Hull West & Hessle sits, won a British National Party MEP.
“I say over and over again that this argument that we’ve abandoned the working class is nonsense. What was Sure Start all about?” he demands, pointing to the Government’s programme to give the best start in life to every child by bringing together early education, childcare, health and family support.
“What was the minimum wage about? What is going from spending £460 per head of population on the NHS to £1,680 per head this year?” He is willing to go on reciting a long list of policy initiatives.
“Let’s face it, and Tribune knows this, we’ve lived in a party where there is a kind of culture of betrayal that’s dogged Labour for years. ‘What have they ever done for us?’ people ask. You just have to remind them of the road we’ve taken over 13 years”, he says.
“That crazy argument cannot be sustained beyond the saloon bar of the Dog and Duck on a bad night with someone whose ignorance outweighs their wisdom.”
And what, finally, of the leadership? Last year, Johnson featured in some MPs’ hopes of replacing Gordon Brown at the top of the Labour Party. His easy manner, distinctly unprivileged background and history of backing positions that come to be seen as inevitable – on unions, the need to dispense with the old Clause IV and electoral reform, to name just a few – would appear to commend him.
“I don’t think it’s going to happen”, he says. “It’s not factored into my diary of the future.”
What of all the opinion poll findings that Brown himself is a drag on Labour support, that the party is more popular than its leader and would do better with someone else at the helm?
“I think Gordon becomes less of a drag, if drag he was, the closer people get to actually putting their cross on a piece of paper.
“There is no split within the party”, Johnson points out. “Any change would purely be us pushing someone forward who looked more televisual.
“People don’t have to love Gordon, or think that he emotes enough or that he’s got a great smile. They just have to trust him as having better judgment and integrity on the important issues. He has – and I think that will win for us.
“Which means that, whenever Gordon decides to step down, I’ll be in my dotage”, he laughs, “and far too old.”
