out both her and her mother, left her with a lifelong dislike of the exposure that goes with public life. As a young girl, she told her father to keep her out of his ‘beastly politics’. My father’s connection with Labour was less genetic than my mother’s, but in many ways stronger. Unlike her, he was fascinated by politicians, and by the bustle of energy and argument that surrounded them. By the people who surrounded them, too. He was good friends with Marcia Williams, and became especially close to the quiet, stoical Mary Wilson, as she and I have always recalled whenever our paths have crossed since.
His own starting point was traditional, Old Labour politics. Maybe this was because his views were formed in the post-war years, when the division between Labour and the Tories was starker and simpler than it has since become. Maybe part of it came from his own DNA. He was born in Pinner, an outer London suburb not exactly famous for politics, or much of anything else. But his ancestral roots went back to the nineteenth-century Jewish community in Poland, then under Russian rule. His great-grandfather Nathan was said to have been involved in an anti-tsarist plot, and to have escaped retribution only by fleeing one step ahead of the secret police.
There is a temptation to suggest that my father inherited Nathan’s streak of rebelliousness and Jewish activism. Somehow, though, I suspect not. He never hid his Jewishness – indeed, he could hardly have done so. He spent nearly all of his working life as the legendarily smooth, gregarious and popular advertising manager of London’s Jewish Chronicle, the world’s oldest Jewish newspaper. Yet he remained a strident non-believer. I cannot recall his ever walking the short distance to Hampstead Garden Suburb synagogue, even on the Jewish New Year or at Yom Kippur; he certainly never took me there. Religion never figured in our lively dinner table discussions, although politics invariably did.
I suppose I was, however, dimly aware of my refracted Jewishness. Most Fridays I would have dinner with my friend Caroline Wetzler and her family, observing a form of Jewish family routine. Another of my closest childhood friends was Keren Abse, daughter of the poet and playwright Dannie Abse and niece of the outspoken Jewish Labour MP Leo Abse. I would occasionally go with my father to the offices of the Jewish Chronicle in Furnival Street, just off Holborn. His army of advertising salesmen and administrators were unfailingly deferential to him, and unfailingly kind to me. But my main Jewish Chronicle memory was when the man in charge of ad layout, Nat Goldstein, took Miles and me to the Hammersmith Odeon one evening shortly after my twelfth birthday, for a Beatles concert. I did not enter a synagogue until more than three decades later, for the wedding of my wonderfully loyal long-time executive assistant, Maree Glass. The ceremony was extraordinarily beautiful. I also found it oddly, and a bit regretfully, alien.
My mother and Miles, but especially my father and I, followed Labour’s internal debates and its battles with the Tories the way football fanatics would fixate on Cup runs or local derbies. Labour was not just our ‘team’, however. That does not capture the depth of the attachment: among our happy quartet of atheists at 12 Bigwood Road, Labour was more nearly a religion.
From childhood, it was certainly mine. Even before Harold Wilson left for Downing Street, I remember rushing home from school to listen to the results of the final ballot from which he emerged as Labour leader after Hugh Gaitskell’s death, then racing into the kitchen to tell my mother the good news. She never became carried away by such things. At election time, I would set out on canvassing missions around the Suburb – beginning, I am told, by tricycle at the tender age of six. Once, I even embarrassingly knocked on the door of Manny Shinwell, Defence Minister alongside my grandfather in the post-war government, to remind him to vote.
What I most absorbed from both of my parents was their love for each other, and for Miles and me. Both my mother and father had been married before. They met after the war at the London advertising agency Dorlands, where my mother, who had worked with the Quaker refugee service in the war years, had a job as a secretary, while my father was on one of the ad account teams. It appears to have been love at first sight, but it was complicated by the fact that my father was still married. My mother had divorced her first husband, the son of the Agriculture Minister alongside Herbert Morrison in the cabinet. My grandfather had been unhappy enough about that first marriage, feeling that my mother, then only nineteen, was far too young. She and my father kept their liaison pretty much secret until he was divorced from his first wife.
Even then, however, the idea of my mother having married as a teenager, divorced soon afterwards, and then married another divorcee did not exactly please her father, to put it mildly. I don’t know whether he had moral objections, but what is clear is that he did not relish the possibility of any gossip or criticism that might encroach on what mattered most to him: his political career. As a young boy, I would come to feel pride, respect and sometimes awe at my grandfather’s political status and accomplishments. Those feelings never entirely left me as I made my own way into national politics, but as I approached my teens, I also became aware of the effects of his all-consuming political ambition on those around him, above all on my mother. He visited us when he was able to drive himself across London from his home in Eltham, but his second wife did not make it easy, as she wanted to cut him off from his family and past friends. When he died in March 1965, a few months after I turned eleven, the first we knew of it was from a newsflash that interrupted the Saturday-evening film on ITV. My mother tried not to show her hurt, but I am sure she felt it as acutely as I did. She arranged for me to be excused from school to attend my grandfather’s funeral: my abiding memory of the occasion is of George Brown, then Labour’s voluble deputy leader, telling me off for my politically inappropriate dress sense – I was wearing a blue tie.
The authority in our family came from my mother. She was by far the quieter of my parents, but she was a source of unquestioned support for all of us. She had an elegance, almost a regality about her: my childhood friends and I called her ‘Duchess’. That is how I remember her to this day. But she had steel. Never raising her voice, she instilled in Miles and me a sense of good manners, of propriety, right and wrong. Her silent opprobrium when we strayed beyond the boundaries was far more effective than any scolding or punishment would have been.
My father was in many ways her opposite. Though his real name was George, he was universally known as Tony, ever since he had served as an officer in the Royal Dragoons during the war. He dressed impeccably, and had the bearing of a City gent rather than an advertising salesman. He had a wonderful, waspish sense of humour and fun, and revelled in being with people, until he shut the front door behind him each evening and propped himself up on his bed, smoking his pipe, surrounded by his books and newspapers. In his later years he became a Suburb personality as chairman of the residents’ association. He sallied forth almost daily, walking stick in hand, sometimes with his wartime binoculars around his neck, to ensure that Dame Henrietta’s sylvan planning restrictions were surviving the era of two-Volvo families and paved-over front gardens.
As a child, I remember feeling slightly embarrassed at times by the showman in my father. As an adult, however, I would come to recognise that much of my own political passion and public personality came from him. My brother Miles, who is four years older than me, and was always more tranquil and reflective, saw this earlier and more keenly than I did. Having gone on to qualify as a clinical psychologist, he contributed his insights into how each of our family jigsaw pieces fitted together for a biography the journalist Donald Macintyre wrote about me in the 1990s. They were striking and, I am sure, accurate. Miles was always much more like my mother, he observed, while I am more like my father. But growing up, the attachments we formed with our parents were a mirror image of this. I was much closer to my mother, rather doting on her, and Miles to my father.
Perhaps because my father and I were alike in so many ways, there was a certain friction between us. Especially where politics was concerned – and more than ever when my first-hand experience of Labour in the 1980s convinced me that the party had to take on the hard left if it was to survive. Even before then, it was clear that his view of Labour and mine were likely to diverge. I remember the two of us visiting a Suburb neighbour named Hans Janitschek on a bright Sunday morning in 1972. Janitschek was an Austrian writer who was then Secretary General of the Socialist International. A modern European Social Democrat, I remember him saying that he feared Labour was risking a ‘dangerous’ swerve to the left. Harold Wilson had lost the 1970 general election, and Tony Benn