If it were not for the desperately sad, mind-numbingly awful events which these diaries expose, I’d be tempted to re-name them Malice in Blunderland and sit back and laugh. All human life, as displayed in Fawlty Towers, Dad’s Army and Alice’s adventures underground is here. Unfortunately.
If you ever believed that after John Smith’s death Labour developed a super-efficient, slick, well-greased (as opposed to well-oiled) machine capable of sweeping all before it at election times then you should also believe that pigs really do fly, the moon is made of green cheese and every politician shares the “I cannot tell a lie” philosophy of George Washington. If you believe any of that, then you’ll believe anything. They were a bunch of egomaniacal amateurs. We won not because of their brilliance but because the nation was irretrievably fed up with John Major and he couldn’t have won a raffle in which he bought all the tickets.
This book – the first of four – is an anthology of hate, of obsession, of compulsive briefing and continual leaking, of rampant ambition on the spree, of selfishness and foolish schemes, and of individuals determined to win at all costs, an attitude admirable for an England football team, perhaps, but this was not a team.
I like political diaries. They can tell the truth and are invaluable if those truths are recognised and acted upon. But truth, in politics as well as in war, is the first casualty. Take, for example, our two time loser Neil Kinnock, the man we once supported to have his finger on the nuclear trigger. If we accept Alastair Campbell’s account, which I do, he wasn’t to be trusted with a pop gun.
In July 1995, little more than a year after Tony Blair was elected leader, Kinnock and his wife Glenys dropped into Campbell’s holiday home in France where he and his family were about to enjoy a well-earned rest. Some hope, some rest.
“I could sense that Neil was gearing up for one,” writes Campbell. After politely “messing about” in the pool with Campbell’s young sons, Kinnock began asking questions about the Shadow Cabinet. “Anything I said about anyone failed to meet with his approval,” writes Campbell. Not least John Prescott, but Kinnock’s bilious disaffection with Tony Blair, despite lavish praise of him in public, “came bubbling out on the second evening.”
In a disgraceful, outrageous and unforgivable explosion of spite, replete with expletives and vulgarities, he embarked on a spasm of hatred in language at which a 19th century fishwife would have baulked and which qualified him to join the elite who couldn’t run the legendary whelk stall. Kinnock said it would be impossible for Blair to address education issues “because he had chosen to send his own son to the Waffen SS Academy.”
That kind of abuse I thought was long ago left to the likes of Robert Mugabe. That he should embroil a young boy and one of our leading Roman Catholic schools, the grant-maintained London Oratory School, in such vile invective destroys the regard I once had for him. I can only plead I didn’t know any better. If it had been me, after mature and reasoned consideration lasting less than a split second, I would have beaten the daylights out of him and thrown his body out of the house.
Kinnock’s uncontrollable extravagance expanded. Blair had “sold out” on everything – tax, health, education, unions, full employment, race, immigration, everything, he said – and then he accused Campbell of being ready “to take your 30 pieces of silver” (it’s funny how often militant atheists invoke the Bible for their rhetoric). And why did he say it? Because Blair (and Campbell) had gone to Australia to try to win the support of Rupert Murdoch and his papers in the next general election, something Kinnock was never able to do. And that was what rankled.
“By now his face was a wretched picture of hatred and rage,” says Campbell. “The word ‘purple’ does not do it justice. ‘You imagine what it’s like to have your head stuck inside a fucking lightbulb’” Kinnock raged, and Glenys said Campbell had to realise how much it had hurt Neil. The “it” being the Sun’s general election front page which asked, in the event of Kinnock winning, that the last person leaving Britain should switch out the light. It wasn’t future policy and a Labour victory which filled his thoughts but past grievances and his defeat. So let’s be brutal. If Kinnock couldn’t take being roughed up, he shouldn’t have played with the big boys.
I remembered when I read this passage how Kinnock had once told me that he wanted to nominate Robert Maxwell for a peerage. What was the difference between two newspaper proprietors that caused Kinnock to suck up to one while exploding with vituperation about the other? One massaged his ego and the other deflated it.
It was a relief to turn to the comedy again. Philip Gould, the “strategist” and pollster, was, like the White Rabbit, constantly reporting on his focus groups’ ramblings, and the latest opinion polls, provoking all around him the gloom of Private Fraser of Dad’s Army. The obsession with polls was ridiculous. Didn’t they know that a change of two or three points was meaningless? Down 13 per cent – catastrophe! Seeing that this left Labour with a lead of 26 points, I doubt if Major was consoled.
Harriet Harman, the unfeeling Sybil of Fawlty Towers, caused unending panic by sending her son to a grammar school. Our lead goes down! Dumping Clause IV caused more agony. Calling Labour New Labour – Campbell’s invention, apparently – roused more fears. Our lead goes down again (actually, it didn’t).
John Prescott, a Humpty Dumpty who always managed to put himself together again, was forever worried (but emerges, surprisingly, as one of the more sensible and loyal people around Blair). And in the middle of all the chaos sat the sullen, unco-operative, moody, muttering, grievance-ridden figure of Gordon Brown, waiting his time when he could emulate the Queen of Hearts and behead all of them, including, especially, the serpentine Knave of Hearts, Peter Mandelson. Robin Cook distrusted everyone – the feeling was mutual – but yearned to be the Chief Dwarf for Snow White Blair. And Blair was willing to suffer fools, if not gladly, in order to win victory, the sight of which most of his Parliamentary colleagues had forgotten. One could forgive him for biding his time:
“How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spread his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in,
With gently smiling jaws!”
Briefly, to sum up: Brown resented or hated everyone except the ever-faithful Charlie Whelan and Ed Balls – of whom Blair said after a meeting in which, according to Campbell, Balls “drivelled on” that in future he only wanted grown-ups to attend. Cook was too clever by half and didn’t like Brown. Mandelson proclaimed his innocence of leaking and no one believed him, started punching Campbell who, he said, in a peculiarly feline way, was “cruel” to him, and threatened to walk out but never did. Clare Short hawked her conscience around from one TV studio to another while an exasperated Blair made excuses for her. Harman, whatever the point was, never got it. Michael Meacher remained embedded as resident pest, though he faced strong competition from Mo Mowlam, and Campbell, obsessively industrious, records my advice to him when he took on his job to “think of Fiona”, his partner, but honoured it more in the breach than the performance.
They were all jumping at shadows, picking their way through the dictionary of political phrases and not realising nobody cared. The voters’ minds were made up. Looking back, they could even have lifted a passage from Through the Looking Glass for the new wording of Clause IV. Ready?
“Twas brillig and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe…”
The Alastair Campbell Diaries: Volume l, Prelude to Power, 1994-1997 edited by Alastair Campbell and Bill Hagerty
Hutchinson, £25
