A chill Cabinet
Matthew d’Ancona
THE BLUNKETT TAPES: MY LIFE IN THE BEAR PIT by David Blunkett Bloomsbury, £25, pp. 896, ISBN 074758821X ✆ £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 In a taped diary entry for April 2003, David Blunkett describes a terrible dream: ‘a dream that had all the undertones of being on the outside, of being alienated, of being given the cold shoulder, of being friendless and leaning on a stick, having fallen out with Tony Blair and then having challenged him in the middle of a speech in the Commons and humiliating him by raising something that left him floundering.’ Well, you don’t have to be Freud to analyse that particular nightmare. This is an important book, though not for the reasons many anticipated. On the subject of his private life, and the personal background to his first Cabinet resignation, in December 2004, Blunkett has nothing to say, except to express his ‘regret’ for some of the claims he made at the time. Those looking for salacious detail will be sorely disappointed. If anything, there is a mournful sense of honour at work in these pages, a longing for redemption.
At heart, however, this book is really about government and the practical experience of being a very senior politician. Its model is not Chips Channon or Alan Clark — although Blunkett identifies with the late Tory’s horror at being out of the loop — but Richard Crossman, whose diaries the author cites explicitly. The book is scarcely a beach read, not least because at more than 800 pages it tests the biceps. But for those with an interest in how New Labour worked, and didn’t work, it is essential stuff.
The theme that runs through the book with compelling fury is the frustration of a dogged reformer with the machinery of government. From the start, when he becomes Education Secretary in 1997, Blunkett is astonished by the inertia he and others encounter, from the poor quality of letters being sent out by his department to the Swedish Braille transcriber that arrives in his office and churns out gibberish. He recalls Tony Blair’s father, Leo, writing to his son at Number Ten, signing his letter ‘Your Loving Pa’ and the Political Office sending a pro forma reply addressed to ‘Mr L. Pa’.
At the Home Office, he is no less horrified by the failure to make progress on civil contingencies, admitting that ‘it is clear already that we have not got things in hand in the way that we are having to reassure the public that we have’. His clashes with the Immigration and Nationality Directorate are epic. In November 2001, he rages that ‘the staff at the Home Office seem to have no connection with the fact that what they do, how they re-use the money and how imaginative they are will make a difference to people’s lives’. In early 2004, he still thinks his department is ‘in sleepysleepy land’ on migration: a fair assessment, it would appear from subsequent events. On 7 July, he records with horror that ‘the news media were ahead of the material being presented to us’ in a meeting of the emergency Cobra committee, as the death toll crept up.
Yet Blunkett is astute enough to grasp that it is he and his colleagues who will take the rap if their efforts are judged by posterity to have failed. The memoirs fragmented, chatty and interrupted by italic musings written subsequently — are shot through with a sense of despair that this government did not do more to ‘embed change’ and that, even where it did achieve results, there was often reversion to type. In March 2004, he visits two schools in his constituency and is appalled that ‘we were back to happy clappy’ and that there was insufficient emphasis on basic literacy. Looking back at October of that year, he describes sentencing as ‘one of those many circles I was asked to square, and I failed to do so’.
Blunkett is inclined to lay much of the blame at the door of unreformed Whitehall. But the toxic brew of personalities that was the Blair era certainly had a big part to play in these failures. He clashes frequently with his predecessor at the Home Office, Jack Straw. In October 2001, Derry Irvine is described as behaving at Chequers ‘like one of the characters from One Foot in the Grave’. The author fights with John Prescott over ‘process’, and Prescott exudes ‘hatred and bitterness’ at a Christmas party in 2004 after the hugely embarrassing disclosures in Stephen Pollard’s biography about Blunkett’s opinions of his colleagues. During the same period, he compares the atmosphere at a Cabinet meeting with that in ‘a chill cabinet, preserved for a future roasting’.
Indeed, the relationships at the heart of these diaries are not with women, but with Blair and Brown. He watches the Prime Minister at the closest possible quarters, appalled by his workload. ‘Tony is killing himself,’ he records in October 2001, ‘He’s just completely doing himself in — it’s frightening.’ By July 2003, after the invasion of Iraq, he knows that something fundamental has changed for his friend and boss: ‘I like him, I respect him and I despair for him.’ They are close enough for Blunkett to hum a song from South Pacific to Blair in an effort to cheer him up. But Blair’s growing anxiety about his ally shines through, and he is more prescient than Blunkett in November 2004 in grasping that his tumultuous private life is leading him towards very hot political water.
With Brown, his relationship is less stable. ‘I do find Gordon very hard to negotiate with,’ he says in July 1997. ‘Every time something is raised he becomes defensive, but you simply have to override it.’ Sarah Macaulay, Brown’s future wife, brings about a rapprochement. The two men continue to clash like bulls, but always seem to preserve a residual respect and affection for one another. It is perfectly clear to this reader that Blunkett has not given up hope of some post under Prime Minister Brown.
By his own admission, he is a big beast with an ego to match, not afraid to declare his own indispensability. ‘This was one of those moments when my not being in this particular post would have been disastrous,’ he recalls of September 1998. But — to an extent that has been under-reported — these memoirs are also full of self-criticism and personal vulnerability. ‘Real depression’ and the ‘black tunnel’ figure recurrently, as does self-reproach for his ‘arrogance’. He wishes he had not kept friends at bay. He looks back at his tapes for April 2002 and cringes at his vanity. ‘No wonder I got up people’s noses,’ he writes ruefully. He also concedes that his return to Cabinet as Work and Pensions Secretary in May 2005 was premature and asking for trouble. ‘In retrospect, I wanted it too much’ — and, in six months, he had lost it all again, over his connections with a biochemical business.
How far might he have gone without the scandals? He certainly wanted to rise above the rank of Home Secretary, recording in December 2004 that ‘I have destroyed my chance of promotion’. His 2001 book, Politics and Progress, was a thoughtful personal manifesto, and dwelt intelligently upon many issues that are even more pressing now than they were five years ago: identity, multi-culturalism, localism, the proper limits of the State. He certainly hoped for more. But how much more?
In April 2002, he is intrigued when Peter Mandelson cross-examines him over dinner about whether he would be capable of taking on an even greater workload. In March 2003, Blunkett himself wonders if he might run for the top job. ‘I could do it, but the honest truth is that I would be only like a slightly more credible Bryan Gould’ (who was badly beaten by John Smith for the Labour leadership in 1992). He is affronted by stories that he has reassured Brown that he will not run: ‘I have never been in the way of his desire for the leadership, but nor have I stepped aside.’ Alas for him, the question is now academic.
‘Well, I did my best,’ says Blair to Blunkett according to a very early diary entry. Reading this book — remarkable in many ways — one gains a powerful sense of how much has changed since New Labour was swept to power in a mood approaching national enchantment, and how bitter the lees now taste. Even for a man of Blunkett’s formidable talents, all politics, in the end, is a strutting dance at the very lip of the abyss.
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