Standing Down (2 page)
Authors: Rosa Prince
I knew it was going to be daunting. I felt the burden of responsibility on my shoulders that I was here now. This wasn’t theory, it wasn’t campaigning, it wasn’t hopes and dreams – it was reality.
As I walked in I really felt that, very strongly. Of course there was a degree of elation but it was massively tempered by reality, by the sense of knowledge that you really had to deliver.
We had done a lot of work. We wrote the first policy White Paper in seven weeks, which is a record, and we set up the process of reform there and then.
Because of the energy and the exhilaration, you’re carried. It’s like plugging into an electric socket, you are able to do things at a level you never thought you would be able to.
And, of course, the great thing about the education and employment brief was you got energised every time you walked into a school. Just feeling what was happening with those youngsters and the change that was coming about, you came out renewed.
Well, you could never say that about the Home Office. It was a different world altogether.
This might sound arrogant, but I think I settled in as a team leader, as a minister, well. I liked running a team, I was confident enough or arrogant enough to be able to give other members their heads.
On the other hand, I wasn’t good with colleagues in Cabinet. If I had my time again, I’d be a great deal more diplomatic.
I might not be any less bumptious in terms of not ever wanting to lose an argument and fighting my corner to the nth degree, but I might have tried a bit harder to understand other people and to understand how I got up their noses, because I undoubtedly did.
Here’s a thought: if you can’t see, you can’t see someone’s face. You do get the messages eventually from body language and verbal messages, but it takes a bit more time.
So I would say things that I believed, even if it was undiplomatic, and that obviously can get up people’s noses.
I also wasn’t as understanding of the constraints on other people as I might have been. I wasn’t, for instance, when I went into the Home Office, as fair to the enormous struggle that Jack Straw had had as I should have been. I … try to reflect, was I fair to other people? And sometimes I wasn’t.
The tenacity and pig-headedness that got me through in the first place can be a disadvantage when you’ve made it.
Gordon [Brown, the then Chancellor] I had some momentous clashes with him because we were clashing types of personalities, locking horns.
I think we understood each other. Gordon in my view, like all of us, is sort of [a man of] contradictions. So if you stood up to Gordon you got on with him a lot better than if he thought he could push you around.
It was easier with Tony because I could have quite vigorous conversations without falling out.
In 2001, Mr Blunkett left the Department for Education for the Home Office:
I was sad to leave because I’d enjoyed those four years enormously. I knew I’d been able to contribute to making a difference and naturally got a great deal of satisfaction out of that.
I was also privileged to be Home Secretary; I didn’t know we were going to have 9/11, of course. That changed my life, as well as everyone else’s, no doubt about that.
I had to take the equivalent of a PhD in three months in the law relating to the issues around counter-terrorism, surveillance, the proportionality [and] the balance between protecting the life of the nation and actually capitulating by allowing the terrorists to take away our civil liberties.
Mr Blunkett gained a reputation as being a hard-line Home Secretary, a label he did not reject:
Yeah, I was comfortable with it because the main victims of crime are people from areas like the one I’ve been privileged to represent.
It’s those areas, not the gated communities, that experience the drug pushers and the anti-social behaviour.
If I’d thought we’d got it wrong, I wouldn’t have backed it, I wouldn’t have done it. I felt it was very important that we didn’t cross a line and take away people’s civil liberties, but I felt that there was a danger that people were crying wolf.
I’m not apologetic about ID cards. I enjoyed having a card; I’ve still got my card. I used it twice, before the coalition abolished the right to use it, for travelling in Europe.
By 2004, Home Secretary Blunkett was at the peak of his powers and then, as he says, ‘suddenly it’s gone’.
A tabloid sting revealed his affair with a married woman, a messy situation that became ever more complicated amid disputed paternity and claims he had misused his position to help his ex-lover’s nanny obtain a visa.
Mr Blunkett spent tortuous weeks fighting for his job, but the end always seemed inevitable.
He understandably does not want to discuss those caught up in the private drama, but is open about the impact on him as a politician:
The overriding emotion was one of personal, deep hurt but also of the feeling that I’d let Tony Blair down and let my Cabinet colleagues down. The two went side by side.
The trauma inside my head as to: ‘What is going on here?’, ‘What’s happened to me?’, ‘I can’t believe this’, and, ‘Lord, I’ve really messed up for other people, including party members’. Because that’s what you’re there for – you’re not there for yourself, you’re there because other people knocked on doors and delivered leaflets and believed in you.
What I should have done … was to have stood down about three months earlier, when it was clear that there was going to be a clash between the personal and the political, and things were going to go drastically wrong. That would have been the sensible move.
Tony Blair had been reluctant to see him go, and brought him back to Cabinet following the general election just six months later in the role of Work and Pensions Secretary.
He was gone by the end of the year, forced to resign over allegations about his business interests, the details of which are lost in the mists of time but which he was ultimately cleared over by the Cabinet Secretary.
Mr Blunkett himself knows that the second furore was less about anything of substance than the feeling that he had returned before the bad taste from the initial scandal had altogether faded, a view he now shares.
Asked if his return was too soon, he says: ‘Oh yeah, by far. People had not had their pound of flesh by any means. And I was emotionally still traumatised, so I wasn’t thinking rationally. [I should have] stayed out until I’d got the personal [side] reasonably sorted. With hindsight, that would have been sensible.’
Mr Blunkett put his time on the back benches to good use and became involved in a number of charities including the RNIB, the Alzheimer’s Society and Sightsavers.
Like many MPs in their sixties, the prospect of fixed-term, five-year parliaments has focused his mind and led in part to his decision to stand down at the forthcoming general election.
As with so much of his life, his blindness is also a factor; having been cushioned to some extent by the support systems provided by the Commons, he is conscious of the energy it will take to adjust to life outside it:
I’m standing down because I think I’ve achieved in the House of Commons everything I set out to do and everything that’s possible for me to do as opposed to a fresh set of legs, new energy, representing the people I care about.
The two things I won’t miss are PMQs and advice surgeries. Bearing in mind I’ve been a councillor too, I’ve been doing them for forty-five years now, and that’s a sentence that no one should have to put up with.
You’ve got to give it 100 per cent, and I am, but I’m not sure I would be within five years … and if I can’t do it 100 per cent and I start not to want to do the advice surgeries, that has to be the time to go rather than when people think you’ve stayed too long.
Some old friends from school who have got guide dogs have said: ‘Welcome back to the real world.’ I think I can manage it now, whereas in my seventies I think I would just fade away. And I’m not yet prepared to fade away.
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CV
Born in Sheffield, blind from birth; attended University of Sheffield; became college lecturer and leader of Sheffield City Council.
1974: Unsuccessfully fights Sheffield Hallam
1987: Elected MP for Sheffield Brightside
1988: Becomes shadow Environment Minister
1992: Becomes shadow Health Secretary
1994: Becomes shadow Education Secretary
1997: Becomes Secretary of State for Education and Employment
2001: Becomes Home Secretary
2004: Resigns from Cabinet after it is revealed he fathered a child during an affair with a married woman, amid allegations he used his position to fast-track a visa for her nanny
2005: Returns to Cabinet as Work and Pensions Secretary; resigns amid accusations over his business interests
2014: Announces he will be standing down at the 2015 general election
David Blunkett is now married to second wife Dr Margaret Williams and has four sons from previous relationships.
Dame Joan Ruddock
, seventy-one, was Labour MP for Lewisham Deptford (1987–2015).
‘A Tory MP said to me during a Commons debate: “I’d like to strip-search you.”’
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I didn’t think of myself from the very beginning as becoming a Labour MP. I thought of myself being the Labour candidate, having a huge campaign to organise, money to raise. I just went for it and I have to say it was a terrific campaign. I was nervous, I was very nervous come to think of it, but euphoric when I got it.
It was very obvious to me that this was a cross between a boys’ public school and a working men’s club.
There were some staggeringly sexist comments. There was one occasion in a debate [when] I raised the [subject of] strip-searching women in Northern Ireland, and I heard a Tory opposite say, clearly, in a way I could hear it across the chamber, ‘I’d like to strip-search you.’ That was said in a debate; the Speaker didn’t turn a hair.
During the long period of opposition I got a place in the Private Members’ Bill ballot. That was one of my proudest moments because I saw through the laws on fly-tipping that are still used today.
I was hugely, hugely lucky to win a place twice [and] I [then] introduced the duty on local authorities to provide doorstep recycling of at least two materials. That’s given me very great satisfaction.
Those three days following the [1997 general] election. When Tony [Blair] came to the end of his list of placements [and] I wasn’t on it. I was completely devastated.
It just built up. First of all you’re totally euphoric. And then you just go down and down wondering, and then you become more and more fearful and then completely at a loss.
I was for years in opposition, then years with a Labour government, on the back benches, front bench, whatever. I’ve done it all, I don’t need to prove anything. I want to get out while I still have some energy and all my marbles because I’d like to be able to get a life.
I don’t think so but I can’t be absolutely sure. I’m not going to miss the job. I’ll miss my staff because we’re a very close team and I’ve enjoyed working with them over the years.
I’ve got a lot of things lined up and I’ve started some of them – not looking to earn money, although I could do with it.
I see my future very much in extended public service but in interesting new roles.
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the full story
Coming from the south Wales valleys, Dame Joan Ruddock’s family’s politics were unusual: Conservatives in an era when their neighbours were staunch Labour supporters.
It was the views of her community that proved more appealing, although at the outset her interests were in causes, rather than party politics.
A scientist by training, she experienced an early ‘epiphany’ that led her to quit her job as a geneticist: ‘I said, “Much as I love my science, actually I prefer working with people than bugs.”’
She first joined the homeless charity Shelter, then the Citizens Advice Bureau and, in 1979, having moved to ‘rural Berkshire’, unexpectedly found herself standing for Parliament:
We had the ’74 elections with a candidate who had come from some considerable distance, he was virtually never there. But the local people in the Labour Party were terribly passionate and we thought we must put up a good fight. The chairman at the time said: ‘We’ve got to have a local candidate, someone who’s got some credibility, who will really work hard, who’ll be here all the time – Joan, you’d better do it.’
Newbury was a marginal seat for the Lib Dems so all we achieved really was denying the Lib Dems a victory. I lost my deposit, but what I thought at the end of it was, gosh, I think I’ll do this again … I enjoyed it. Somehow I got the bug.
I didn’t have the concept of a parliamentary career to be absolutely honest, it was just a case of ‘I like fighting elections’.
By a strange twist of fate, Dame Joan was soon to find herself at the centre of British political life when the Prime Minister, Baroness Thatcher, took the controversial decision to allow the American government to site nuclear weapons at the Greenham Common RAF base – situated in the Newbury constituency.
She became heavily involved in the campaign to oppose the weapons, which led to her joining the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. A year on, in 1981, she became its chairman.
The role raised her profile – already high as a result of Greenham Common – and through the early 1980s, Dame Joan was a national figure. With the 1983 general election approaching, constituency Labour parties around the country began inviting her to become their candidate – offers she felt unable to accept.
Two years later though, while working at her day job in the Citizens Advice Bureau, she had another epiphany: ‘I thought to myself: “We’re dealing with the same problems year in, year out. Wouldn’t it be better to get somewhere where you can try to change things, so that people were not faced with these problems?”’
One of the constituencies that had approached her over the years was Lewisham Deptford, but, hoping to be selected for her hometown of Torfaen, Dame Joan turned it down. She came second in Torfaen, and considered giving up:
I had to think: ‘Do I really want to do this? I’m not so sure.’ The idea of going back to Wales, representing my home town, that was incredibly powerful.
Then I got a note from Harriet Harman [Labour’s deputy leader], who I didn’t know except by reputation. And Harriet said, ‘Joan, Lewisham Deptford is wide open, go for it’ – which is utterly typical of Harriet. She’s always looking out for other women. Answer: yes.
It took eight months, it was a very difficult contest, but I got it; and I’ve been here for nearly twenty-eight years.
Although Lewisham Deptford was a Labour seat, Dame Joan was nervous about her prospects and conscious that the two neighbouring constituencies were Conservative:
Election night was very bittersweet. We were all counting in the same place. Lewisham East [and] Lewisham West were lost and then we came to Lewisham Deptford.
By then I was really nervous … you are looking at every single bundle of pink papers going into baskets.
By the time she was declared the new MP for Lewisham Deptford, it was clear Labour had lost the election nationally. ‘That was devastating,’ Dame Joan says. ‘Of course I was very, very disappointed about my colleagues, but at the same time I couldn’t help but be euphoric myself.’
Dame Joan arrived at the House of Commons as one of just forty-one women MPs. It was a place she knew reasonably well from her days campaigning with CND, but she was ‘shocked’ by the working conditions nonetheless:
It was absolutely the worst place I’d ever worked, and I’d worked in the voluntary sector. The facilities were the worst I had ever experienced.
I remember naively asking for a map, because I have no sense of direction. I went to the library and they said, ‘Madam, security! There’s no map available of the House of Commons’ – which is a lie, of course. You couldn’t get anything. You were treated like a new kid at school.
I had never been the subject of sexist behaviour at work. In my last few jobs I’d been the director, I had been used to giving orders rather than taking them.
Always having my strings pulled, that’s how it feels, that you’re in the clutches of the whips from the minute you arrive.
I was naive enough to stand up at a meeting where they were discussing the allocation of offices and say: ‘What are the arrangements for making an application to have a non-smoking office?’ They said: ‘You’ll be lucky if you get an office at all.’ You were expected to sit in a room with a man smoking a cigar or a pipe. It was a sense of: ‘Oh, God, another silly woman.’
There were constant put-downs to the women. You had to really be very, very strong all the time, be very determined.
An awful lot of women from that time were essentially honorary men, for that reason. It was easy to be an honorary man like Mrs Thatcher or one of the boys like the Labour women.
I was absolutely determined that I am a feminist and I will be a Labour MP and I will always be a woman MP. I’m not going to pretend.
As a ‘national figure’ from her CND days, Dame Joan was aware that her high profile had the potential to put some of her new colleagues’ noses out of joint:
I perceived that this was not welcome, that people thought that I would consider myself more important, that I would consider myself to be a bit of a star. And so I decided as soon as I arrived to lower my profile, I was not going to try to be a star – I was going to try to be quite quiet.
When she was in Parliament, Dame Joan conscientiously dedicated herself to learning the job of an MP, despite the fear she felt every time she entered the Commons chamber:
I was totally terrified of it. My knees were knocking when I made my maiden speech. This is a woman who had spoken to quarter of a million people at big rallies, I’d addressed the United Nations; I had done it all. But in [t]here, in a small chamber with all your colleagues, it’s a very, very different situation. It’s very intimidating.
I just felt I had to do everything. I had to be good at everything. I pushed myself all the time. So I can’t say I got a huge amount of pleasure out of it. It was rewarding getting into a debate, making points, but it was really, really tough.
Within months, Dame Joan’s hard work was rewarded and she was asked to join the front bench, serving under John (now Lord) Prescott in the shadow transport team.
At the same time as she was finding her way in the Commons, Dame Joan’s personal life was undergoing a transformation as she fell in love with fellow Labour MP Frank Doran. The couple later married.
When Mr Doran lost his marginal seat of Aberdeen North at the 1992 general election, Dame Joan was ‘devastated’.
She says:
We knew he had a marginal seat, and I just blanked it. We’d both gone through a great deal of trauma, leaving our spouses, feeling huge amounts of guilt, and then we had to live very separate lives. He was always in Scotland.
And then [there was the] devastating news that Frank had lost his seat. I was still there waiting for my result and I had another three hours to wait.
I didn’t know what I wanted that night. I just had to keep my end up, I had to keep a public face, I had to make my acceptance speech smiling. I couldn’t tell anybody because if I told anybody I would have burst into tears. I just had to contain it, go through the thing, go to the party afterwards, and my heart was breaking.
Before polling day, Dame Joan had been approached by a rising young star in the party. But it was still a surprise when, following the election, the new Labour leader, John Smith, asked her to join Tony Blair’s home affairs team.
She says:
Just before we had gone away for the election, Tony Blair, who I didn’t know at all, had asked for my phone number. I remember thinking: ‘What’s that about?’
Then John Smith … calls and says that he’d like me to go to the home affairs team. I thought: ‘Oh no, after all I’ve been through, and now I’m being offered a horrible job on a horrible team; completely uninterested, I thought, in home affairs, and here’s a man I don’t even know.’
I had said I didn’t want to stay in transport, so I did want a change, but that was the last job I’d expected to be offered. It was looking like a gloomy start and I was feeling very down about Frank and we had no idea if our relationship would survive. So it was a very, very difficult time.
Mr Doran had worked with Blair before the election and persuaded Dame Joan to take the job. She ended up making a success of it, winning praise for her work on the 1993 murder of Stephen Lawrence, and found herself becoming friendly with Blair. Two years later, following the sudden and shocking death of Mr Smith, he became the party’s leader.
Dame Joan says:
Then [came] my fatal error. I thought we were really close friends, I’d been deputising for him in all sorts of places.
I thought he would discuss with me what I wanted to do. But of course the minute he became leader he completely changed and he just called up and said: ‘Joan, I want you to go to Gordon [Brown, then the shadow Chancellor].’
And I thought: ‘Why?’ I have absolutely no interest in Treasury matters, absolutely zilch. I just said to him: ‘Look, I don’t know anything about that area of policy and I want to go somewhere where I’ll do a good job, not somewhere where I’ll have to start from scratch and learn everything and I’m not even interested.’
It was something that other people then recognised from his whole role as Prime Minister – he would just put people in places just like that, regardless of their skills, their talents, their knowledge. He just played with people, he put them here there and everywhere without any thought of what was going to get the best value from that person.
So I turned that down, but it was absolutely fatal that I turned that down because it destroyed the rest of my potential ministerial career.
That was enough. I’m not saying it was enough in a spiteful way but I became a person of no consequence because I hadn’t done the right thing. I hadn’t gone to Gordon, which was the prize in a way.
Who but a silly person like me wouldn’t want to go to Gordon? But I always want to go places where I think I can do well, as opposed to go to places for status or [the] potential for climbing the greasy pole.
I think it was that he didn’t have time. He was moving so fast: why would he bother with somebody who was daft enough to turn down a shadow post with what had been his best mate Gordon, who undoubtedly was going to be Chancellor in the next government, which he was going to be Prime Minister of. Why wouldn’t I do what he proposed?
Even then he was perfectly fine. He said: ‘Well, find out what you want to do and you can do it.’