A Journey (54 page)

Then came the Hatfield rail crash on 17 October, when an Intercity express train derailed on the line from London to the North-East, which was one I travelled on regularly. Four people died, and it was a big shock, especially coming just over a year after the Ladbroke Grove crash, in which thirty-one people had been killed.

It led to a major examination of the state of the railways, the arguments about privatisation were reopened, and there was much agonising about what to do. The cause had been an unnoticed crack in one of the gauges, which was serious since it meant other such cracks might exist. We met the rail chiefs at Number 10 and JP, who was in charge of transport, was very heavy on them. He was probably right to be so, but I was immediately concerned about an entirely different problem.

The railway companies, encouraged of course by the Department for Transport, went on a very risk-averse course of action, which basically put all the trains on a go-slow. I knew that the moment the immediate shock of the accident evaporated, human nature being what it is, the public would go back to normal and what they would want would be the damn trains running on time, and there was no hope of that.

For about the next year, there was a pantomime played out between me and the department. I was desperate to get them to return to normal schedules, believing they were being too cautious. They were resistant, thinking I was taking risks. The number of meetings I had; bangings on the table, exasperation; exchanges of varying degrees of politeness with JP.

The later months of 2000 continued to be dominated by events piling in thick and fast. In October, Milosevic fell – a great moment, the streets of Belgrade alive with emotion and hope – and Donald Dewar, the First Minister of Scotland, died. He had been an excellent colleague, and though we were never close friends, I felt a strong tie to him. I trusted him. He had genuine integrity. Because of Derry and his wife Alison (to whom Donald had previously been married), I knew his children well. I had visited him a few weeks before his death, when he was recovering from an earlier illness which presaged a brain haemorrhage, in his flat in New Town in Edinburgh. Though I had known him for years, I had never visited his home and was rather astounded to see his very valuable collection of Scottish Impressionists and prints. ‘I never knew about this,’ I said.

‘I never told you,’ he replied, very Donaldish.

Politically, I always felt that, underneath it all, Donald was rather New Labour. He had a good mind and also a good spirit about him, an impatience with ideology and a hearty common sense about human nature. His loss in Scotland was irreparable. He was a father figure; a creator of Scottish devolution; and clearly a man of stature. His funeral was a very sad affair. I felt strangely like an outsider. It was very Scottish and very GB-dominated – he gave a brilliant oration, Gordon at his best.

I was also spending a lot of time on European business. The forthcoming Nice summit in early December was looming large, where we were going to decide the new voting rules for the EU, a mind-blowingly complex interaction of individual and national interests struggling to serve the collective European interest. I had Jacques Chirac to dinner at a pub in my constituency to discuss it all, where he managed to say that the food was superb, but with a little too much smirking from his entourage for my liking. Outside the pub, fox hunters were protesting.

Fox hunting; now there’s a tale. One of the strangest parts of politics is how you get into situations of unbelievable controversy without ever meaning to or wanting to. The fox-hunting subject resulted in one of the domestic legislative measures I most regret, along with the Freedom of Information Act. Both were great progressive causes (at least to some); both were the cause of inordinate political convulsion, and for what purpose, God only knows.

But fox hunting brought the most grief. The issue itself crossed boundaries of opinion in a remarkable way, zigzagging through swathes of Middle England, working-class heartlands and old-fashioned aristocrats. The thing was you could never tell people’s reactions to it. You had dyed-in-the-wool Tories for whom a ban was their ultimate political fantasy; and you had solid Labour blokes, whose right arm would have withered away rather than put a cross in the Tory box, who wanted to kill me because of the proposal to ban it.

People used to say it’s a class thing – and for some it was. For others, it was an animal thing. I remember a secretary from the Downing Street Garden Rooms coming to see me at Chequers while I was working in the study, and telling me with tears in her eyes that at long last justice for the poor little fox was to be secured. I used to have meetings with my advisers or the whips and just sit there and say: but people cannot feel that strongly about it; it’s impossible. Well, they do, they would tell me. And they were right. Gerald Kaufman – sensible, sane, loyal Gerald – said to me: if you don’t do this, I could never support the government again. He didn’t really mean it, of course; but he wished he did. The passions aroused by the issue were primeval. If I’d proposed solving the pension problem by compulsory euthanasia for every fifth pensioner I’d have got less trouble for it.

And here is a real political lesson. You have to ‘feel it’ to succeed in politics. That’s where instinct comes from, the emotional intelligence. By and large I do feel it, and so, on most issues, I get it. On this one, I had a complete lapse. I didn’t ‘feel it’ either way. I didn’t feel how, for fox hunters, this was part of their way of life. I didn’t feel how, for those wanting a ban, this was fundamentally about cruelty. Result? Disaster.

I was ignorant about the sport. I thought it a bit weird that people wanted to gallivant around hunting a fox, but having read my Trollope I understood it is a part of our history. What I didn’t understand – but boy, I understood it later – was that it is a rather large part of our rural present.

I made a fatal mistake by not shutting the issue down at the outset. Instead, I let it get running out of the blocks. Expectations were raised. On a TV programme I stupidly gave the impression it would indeed be banned. Of course I had voting form, having voted to ban it or said I wanted to or signed some petition or something. Anyway, I repeated my ‘position’ rather than reconsidering it. The moment I did so, I was defined. And so trapped. By the end of it, I felt like the damn fox.

The trouble was, as I say, I just couldn’t get it, but Philip Gould began telling me it was now an issue of trust. Sally, Hilary Armstrong, Ann Taylor – i.e. the big brass, the ‘if necessary we’ll take the world on and screw them all’ brigade – were telling me: fail to do this and you have a leadership problem. ‘I can’t believe it,’ I kept saying rather pathetically. ‘Start believing it,’ they would reply.

If I told you the contortions and permutations I went through to avoid this wretched business, you wouldn’t credit it. We had regional referenda, partial bans, civil penalties, criminal penalties – you name it, we considered it.

The protesters were predominantly Tory, of course, and at long last they had something to protest about. And protest they did, following me round blowing trumpets, clanging cymbals, shouting, singing, howling, chanting. It was quintessentially British. I remember George Bush was here for a visit when they were out all over the place, and he asked what it was about. I explained. ‘Whatever did you do that for, man?’ said George, as ever getting right to the nub.

Unfortunately, ‘Whatever did I do that for?’ was the question I began to ask myself after I started to educate myself about fox hunting – i.e. did what I should have done before I embarked on this rash undertaking. The more I learned, the more uneasy I became. I started to realise this wasn’t a small clique of weirdo inbreds delighting in cruelty, but a tradition, embedded by history and profound community and social liens, that was integral to a way of life. It was more broadly based and less elitist than I thought, and had all sorts of offshoots among groups of people who were a long way from being dukes and duchesses.

None of this means I wanted to take it up myself, or even that I especially liked it – ‘Vote Labour or the fox gets it’ was quite a popular slogan in several elections – but banning it like this was not me. Not me at all. Fox hunting mattered profoundly to a group of people, who were a minority but had a right, at least, to defend their way of life.

During the course of our summer stay with the Strozzis, we visited the beautiful island of Elba. We went to lunch with some of their friends and there happened to be a woman who was mistress of a hunt near Oxford, I think. Instead of berating me, she took me calmly and persuasively through what they did, the jobs that were dependent on it, the social contribution of keeping the hunt and the social consequence of banning it, and did it with an effect that completely convinced me.

From that moment on, I became determined to slip out of this. But how? We were obliged to allow Parliament a debate and the result was never in doubt: there would be a ban. In the end, there was a masterly British compromise – it was banned in such a way that, provided certain steps are taken to avoid cruelty when the fox is killed, it isn’t banned. So it’s banned and not quite banned at the same time. Hmm. Anyway, it was the best I could do, but not an episode of policymaking I look back on with pride. And I should think not, I hear you say.

When the law later came into force in 2004, Hazel Blears was in the Home Office. She phoned me up and said, ‘The police are asking: do you want this policed vigorously so we can get some prosecutions under our belt?’ After I replied, she said, ‘I thought you might say that.’

It reminds me that I won a bet with Prince Charles about this. Of course, he thought the ban was absurd, and raised the issue with me in a slightly pained way. I would explain the political difficulties. I’m not sure he ever quite grasped it – not surprisingly, since as I have confessed, I didn’t either, until too late. The wager was that after I left office, people would still be hunting. ‘But how, if you’re going to ban it?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know, but I will find a way,’ I replied.

Prince Charles truly knew the farming community and felt we didn’t understand it, in which there was an element of truth. Our farmers had a specific and uniquely British set of challenges: they had been through the devastation of BSE, and at that time still couldn’t really export beef except in very limited circumstances; farm prices had fallen; fuel costs had risen; floods had hit them hard. But the worst was about to come.

During the last months of 2000, we were holding regular meetings to prepare for the summer 2001 election. In November, we had an away day at Chequers and I very firmly said the danger was complacency; we had a real fight on our hands and we had to up our game. We were ahead again in the polls but I deliberately told Philip to downplay that and focus on the difficulties. We had an almost 20 per cent deficit on right/wrong direction, and though the Tories didn’t seem to be breaking through, I set out what I thought they could do if they galvanised a patriotic, anti-Europe, anti-immigrant vote and combined that with a sense of cynicism and apathy about us.

I said we had to get to the big choices about the future. I emphasised the need for reform as well as investment, and put at the heart of our appeal an offer of increased personal prosperity, through both a strong economy and improved public services.

Peter and Gordon had been rowing about the euro, with Peter ill-advisedly talking to the media about our position on the single currency. As usual, Gordon overreacted, but I was getting worried about the number of colleagues who had it in for Peter and the sheer venom of the GB lot towards him. As my close ally, Peter was at that time, of course, a target for Gordon’s supporters.

Then in early 2001, Peter was forced to resign for the second time. It was typical of the way so-called scandals erupt, hot mud is poured over all concerned and the victims are eliminated before anyone quite has the chance or the nerve to wait until the mud is seen to stick or not. Even more than on the first occasion, I deeply regretted it afterwards.

The
Observer
ran a medium-size story about Peter, having raised money for the Dome from the Hinduja brothers, Indian businessmen and philanthropists, then securing a passport for one of them. As ever, the way the story was handled turned into the issue, not the allegation itself. It is a real lesson in such things.

There would have been no problem if Peter had merely passed on the passport request or even asked that it be expedited, provided he had also sought to ensure that the proper procedures had been followed. As it happened there was absolutely no reason why S. P. Hinduja should not have been given a passport – he qualified, and as a wealthy and successful businessman, there was no issue about whether he could support himself.

But here’s what happens in such situations: I’m busy, Alastair’s busy, Peter’s busy (there had been another, far bigger story in the
Sunday Times
about Peter and Gordon which had preoccupied him). The story is medium-level. If you are not careful – and we weren’t – you get the facts just a fraction off, and then you are in the proverbial hurricane.

Peter said – and Alastair repeated to the media – that Peter’s private secretary, not Peter himself, had passed on the request. In fact, it transpired that Peter had mentioned it to Mike O’Brien, a Home Office minister.

It seems almost pathetic now when you look back on it. Because a wrong statement had been made to the media, they were able to turn it into a full-blown scandal. Peter, with the GB people strongly against him, was pretty much alone and without support except from me. It seems utterly bizarre, given what Peter subsequently became to the Labour Party during Gordon’s premiership, but back then he was as isolated as you can be in politics.