in Britain. As she embarked on large-scale privatisation of the core of the old state economy, and curbed trade union strike powers, the default position for many in Labour was that whatever the Tories were for, we must be against. I understood this impulse. From my own Labour background, I knew it was part of the glue that held the whole party together. I recalled my own childhood experience of the annual disarmament marches from the nuclear research base at Aldermaston to Trafalgar Square. My family never marched, but in our own Labour Suburb way, we would pack my father’s Sunbeam with a roast-chicken picnic, drive to the outer reaches of the capital and watch as the throng made its way towards its final rallying point.
The problem was that a modern, relevant Labour Party could not operate on atavistic instinct. We could not make policy on the simple basis that everything that the Tory government – a comfortably re-elected Tory government – did was wrong. That risked not just failing to take on board policies that might be right, but could leave us opposing policies of far greater benefit to our own voters than anything we were offering. That was clearly the case with Mrs Thatcher’s programme to allow millions of council tenants to buy their own homes.
The structure of the party, too, was unrecognisably different then. As leader, Neil was in charge. Up to a point. The National Executive Committee, and indeed party conference, nowadays hold only nominal sway over policy. The trade unions wield nothing like the block-vote power they did then. But when I moved into my tiny third-floor office at Labour HQ, their influence was very real. The NEC, in particular, was the final voice on everything from paperclips to policy on nuclear weapons.
My immediate boss was the party’s new General Secretary, Larry Whitty. Over time, Larry and I would develop a good working relationship, but at the beginning we were on different wavelengths. A lifelong trade union man, he had a sentimental attachment to many of the policies and practices of Labour as it then was, and felt a kind of deference towards Tony Benn. I had been, at best, his second choice for the job. He had hoped for Nita Clarke, Ken Livingstone’s press chief at the Greater London Council, and would almost surely also have preferred David Gow, the Scotsman’s labour correspondent. At least Larry did not share the hostility of many others in Labour to modern communications techniques, which were seen as somehow Tory, and unclean. But he did worry that the changes I might bring about in Labour’s policy presentation would impact on the policies themselves, and that I would tread on the toes of those formally in charge of making them in the NEC. He was nervous that, as John Prescott had warned, I would ‘put my nose in the politics’. In this, Larry got me absolutely right.
Despite my private doubts, from the moment I arrived at Walworth Road I projected a sense of confidence. Partly, this was bravado. Partly, it was because I knew that any chance of my succeeding depended on it. But in one crucial sense I was confident. I was absolutely secure in my conviction that as long as we were saddled with the policies, the mindset and the public image that had led to our débâcle in 1983, Labour would never again be a party of government. And I was absolutely determined to help pull us back from oblivion. I may have lacked experience, even skills, at the start. But I did know what was wrong. Most of Britain’s voters, and almost all of the media, disliked us. Worse, they had simply stopped listening to what we said, or at least taking it seriously. My work in television had given me insight into and experience of modern communications. My job, which I set out to accomplish with a drive that sometimes bordered on obsession, was to make everything about Labour look and sound modern too.
I began, as I did whenever I embarked on a new job throughout my political life, by learning what I didn’t know, focusing on the most pressing problems, and taking early steps to fix them. I was very fortunate to know – or at least to have met – someone who I hoped could help me with all of this. I was first brought together with Philip Gould by Robin Paxton when I was at Weekend World. Philip was ‘in advertising’, Robin told me. He was clever, and a passionate Labour supporter. We met briefly before I left LWT, at a dinner hosted by Philip’s then girlfriend, an up-and-coming publisher named Gail Rebuck. In the intervening year, life had changed for all of us. The small firm Gail had co-founded, Century Press, had done so well that it took over the larger, better-known Hutchinson. She and Philip had married. Philip had set up his own communications consultancy. And I was at Walworth Road. Now, we arranged to talk again, over dinner at Robin’s home in Islington.
With his mop of long hair and oversized glasses, Philip made an extraordinary impression. I don’t know whether it was shyness or single-mindedness, but he barely made eye contact as he expounded for well over an hour on what was wrong with Labour’s image, presentation and political strategy, and how to begin fixing them. I had no way of knowing at that point where Philip might fit into that process, but in advance of our meeting he had sent me an eleven-page letter about how he might help me overhaul Labour’s presentational machinery. We discussed it at Robin’s dinner, and in much greater detail in the days that followed. A few weeks later, I took my first big decision. With a cheque for £600, a sizeable chunk of my budget, I commissioned Philip to conduct a stock-take of Labour’s communications and campaigning. Larry, to my relief, signed off on the idea. It would prove to be the best investment I ever made.
The party already had a contract with a public opinion agency, MORI. Our pollster-in-chief was its American-born chairman, Bob Worcester. His role was essentially to poll, crunch the numbers, deliver and explain the results. Philip was different. He reached beyond traditional opinion polls, assembling ‘focus groups’ to explain why people felt as they did about a policy issue or a political party, how this fitted into what they valued or wanted in their lives, and what it might take to change their minds. He gave Labour, and British politics, its first taste of rigorous, American-style political consultancy. By the time he delivered his sixty-four-page report in December, I knew what its main thrust would be, as I had been among the three dozen people – including Larry and senior colleagues at Walworth Road, and other figures in politics, the media and marketing – to whom he spoke in preparing it. He and I were meeting regularly. The core challenge was obvious to both of us. Labour had to stop seeing communications as something we did with, or to, ourselves. We could no longer, as my canvassing colleague in that council estate in Lambeth had put it, ‘refuse to compromise with the electorate’.
Looking back on the notes of my early conversations with Philip, I am struck not only by my concern about the obvious policy vulnerabilities that had hurt us in 1983. I felt there was a deeper problem: our inability to meet people’s concerns on basic issues affecting their daily lives: health, social services, housing benefits, the economy – and crime, or as I put it to Philip, ‘making people secure in their homes and on the streets’. We could produce policy reports, or catchy ideological prescriptions, but even our traditional supporters were no longer listening. Significant numbers of the ‘working class’ had turned away from Labour and backed the SDP in 1983. Many more had supported Mrs Thatcher. Faced with a choice between a dogmatic, ideologically pure socialism or a Prime Minister, even a Tory Prime Minister, who had allowed them to buy their council houses, it was no choice at all. ‘It’s not just a question of having a neat little formulation extracted from some document placed before the Home Policy Committee of the NEC, or some neat way of saying “You’re number one with Labour”,’ I wrote to Philip. ‘We can’t just get an NHS ambulance with a sticker saying “I Love the Welfare State” and launch a charter. People are not idiots.’
The stock-take report was blunt in its diagnosis and unflinching in its prescription. Knowing I would have to get it through the NEC, I made the language a bit more diplomatic in parts. But I left the core message unaltered. We were so bad at communicating with voters, so seemingly uncaring about what they thought or wanted, that we had become unelectable. No longer could the NEC, the leader’s office and the shadow cabinet haphazardly combine to produce press releases and policy documents, schedule press conferences and public meetings, and await Bob Worcester’s monthly reports in the preposterous expectation that we were on our way back. My office would become the central focus for all party communications. I would be supported by a new organisation we called the Shadow Communications Agency. Run by Philip and me, it would draw on the expertise of outside advertising and marketing professionals who volunteered their services. Also involved would be Labour’s advertising partner, the BMP agency of Chris Powell, older brother of Tony Blair’s future chief of staff, Jonathan.