The announcement some weeks later had been greeted with the usual run of a) astonishment "You mean the prime minister has s.e.x? And with his wife?"; b) cynicism "Alastair Campbell commanded it as part of a diversionary tactic"; and from our children, c) mild disgust.
The birth itself was bizarre. There I was in a corridor with my detectives, listening and waiting as Cherie did a bit of preliminary shrieking and groaning, then going in and staying with her as he was born. The midwives were wonderful just really sensible, down-to-earth, no-nonsense people. Cherie was unbelievable. There are times with that woman when I am in awe. She kept working until the last minute. Gave birth on time and to order. Got out that night. And she was forty-five. It was pretty impressive.
It was a kind of global event. The next day I wandered out of Downing Street to say a few words as a proud dad, etc. I made the mistake of holding a mug of tea which had a picture of the other three kids on it, which was considered very cheesy, and I suppose it was. But for once I really did feel proud.
I then went back in for the official photo of Leo, having decided we would ask one photographer to do it and sell the pictures, giving the proceeds to charity. We asked Paul McCartney"s daughter, Mary, to do it. She was great, and the photos were superb. This was a minor miracle since the other kids teenagers by then behaved sensationally badly throughout the shoot and I could tell Mary thought they should have been given ASBOs.
I then had to do the proper modern dad thing and take paternity leave. It was bliss. Not because I adored looking after Leo (I"m afraid looking after babies at the eating, sleeping and other thing stage has never been my idea of fun, though I always did it). But I had two weeks to relax, miss PMQs and think about my speech to the Women"s Inst.i.tute, whom I had been told were a generally delightful and well-disposed group of people and before whom I had decided to drop my pearls of wisdom.
So on the morning of 7 June, just before PMQs (what was I thinking of?), I beetled along to Wembley. I remember reading the speech through in a little anteroom and having a vague premonition that maybe it might have been a little more appropriate as a lecture to a bunch of professors. Afterwards, and though I say it myself, the thing that was most annoying was it was actually a good speech thoughtful, well argued, and even if neither of those things, worthy of comment or critique.
I set out my reason why the absence of good manners among so many people was not a trivial thing but something that masked a decline in proper conduct that then expressed itself in far more serious ways. I talked about parents who sided with their children rather than the teacher who disciplined them; about how the essential courtesies are so often disregarded, and the culture to which this gives rise. I explained how we had to try to reverse this, not by pretending the clock could be switched back, but by recognising the world had changed and required a different system for enforcing good conduct in the absence of the pressure of tradition and family.
I thought the Women"s Inst.i.tute might see the sense of all that, and strangely, had there been fewer of them and had they been prepared to listen, they probably would have.
Instead, as I proceeded on to the platform and looked out at 10,000 of them and started my speech, I had an uncomfortable feeling. I am acutely audience-sensitive you have got to be in my profession and somehow I knew this wasn"t quite ringing the bell.
About ten minutes in, when I was starting to plough on and getting more and more uneasy, a whole lot of shouting and slow handclapping suddenly started up. The audience were revolting. To be frank, there"s not a lot you can do in a situation like that. You more or less freeze.
I looked across at the Women"s Inst.i.tute leadership on the platform. They were not encouraging. Eventually they intervened in a slightly "We"re sorry you"re having to listen to this but can you please and sorry to be a nuisance about this let him drone on a little longer" sort of a way.
That quietened the ma.s.ses somewhat, but only after a bit of grumbling and barking, and it was fairly clear I was on sufferance that might at any moment be revoked. The fact that the platform was showing the sort of leadership of your average French Revolutionary Committee in the presence of Madame Defarge didn"t help. I resolved to cut my losses, make some trivial extempore remarks and get the h.e.l.l out of there. Which I duly did. To be fair, the leadership recovered a little to thank me for my presence and generally did a bit of pro forma b.u.t.tering up. I smiled wanly and appeared to take it all in good humour, despite my largely unkind thoughts towards them all.
As I got into the back of the car to take me to Parliament and PMQs (and what a mirthless laugh the prospect of facing William Hague after that experience gave rise to), I shook my head. "What a disaster," I said to Anji.
The great thing about Anji was her indestructible and occasionally incredible optimism. She perked up when others perked down. She saw the silver lining long before the cloud. She was a positive life force, bashing down whole fields of negativity, basking the environs around her with beams of light, joy and hope amid the darkness.
She did not fail on this occasion. "Apart from the interruption I thought it went rather well," she said.
"Keep it plausible, darling," I replied.
Later that evening, over a drink, after a day of bulletins of humiliation and exuberant delight among my foes, and under Cherie"s influence, I got the giggles about the whole thing. After all, as she said, it had been a speech about the decline of good manners.
The second happening around the decision to make the case for reform of criminal justice didn"t fare much better, though its consequences were more far-reaching and ultimately satisfactory.
As part of the discussions with senior police officials about crime and disorder, I had been debating with them how to short-cut the normal and lengthy processes for establishing guilt in respect of more minor criminal offences.
Here was the problem. When I sat down with police who worked the beat, as I did fairly regularly, one thing recurred time and again. I used to ask: When someone is found drunk and disorderly, say, or creates a disturbance or a.s.saults another but the a.s.sault is not severe enough to result in any very serious sentence, what do you do? And more often than not, the reply came back: Nothing. It"s not worth it.
"Let me tell you what happens in the real world," I remember one policeman in Kent telling me, and he recounted how, for even a minor charge, there were reams of paperwork, a barrage of hearings and meetings and consultations with prosecutors and witnesses and how, most galling of all, the offenders who were habitual and knew the system, knew that it could be gamed. So they acted more or less with impunity.
That, along with other similar conversations, convinced me that, whatever the theory, obliging a full court process for minor offences meant in practice they didn"t get prosecuted. I had become a complete adherent of the zero-tolerance a.n.a.lysis if you let people get away with the small offences, the big ones follow. You create a culture of "anything goes", of disrespect; of tolerating the intolerable. And though all these offences could be called minor, the adjective was relative. I never even tussled with the bloke urinating in my street, but I never forgot the incident.
So if the reality, whatever the textbook says, is that the minor offences go unpunished, the whole system is in disrepute. It was an argument I was to have many times over the years. I didn"t win it, certainly not in the way the argument was won about choice in health, or academies in schooling, or tuition fees for universities. But sometime or other, a government will have to relearn the lesson. Banging on about law and order while accepting the "givens" of the existing legal system is like riding on Dr Dolittle"s pushmi-pullyu and wondering why you"re not getting anywhere.
After some debate, we alighted on the idea of giving the police the power to administer on-the-spot fines, "fixed penalty notices" as they came to be known. We had a fierce battle over it in the relevant Cabinet Committee. Even the Home Office wanted to scale back. The police were up for it and I was convinced it would give them an additional instrument of law enforcement. Today, hundreds of thousands of them are given and they are accepted as part of the system, though in my view they could still be used more broadly, and the amount of the fine should be increased radically. But they are there, to be built on.
I decided to announce this at a venue even more weird and inappropriate for the subject matter than the WI.
My Oxford friend Pete Thomson had always sung the praises, rightly, of the inestimable Hans Kung, a Catholic priest turned professor at the University of Tubingen in Germany. Hans was a distinguished scholar and author who had fallen out with the Vatican over his views on papal infallibility, and was considered a radical. He had also written books such as On Being a Christian On Being a Christian which were great works, reaching out to non-Catholics. He was years ahead of his time in the interfaith field, too. I fell out with him over Iraq, as I did with many people, but he was always courteous and generous. which were great works, reaching out to non-Catholics. He was years ahead of his time in the interfaith field, too. I fell out with him over Iraq, as I did with many people, but he was always courteous and generous.
At Pete"s prompting, Hans invited me to give a lecture at Tubingen. It is a beautiful ancient city, one of the few that escaped Allied bombardment. John Burton had once played there with his folk group. There is no plaque, though I should imagine there were a few records broken in the local taverns.
The speech was again about the nature of a changing society and its rules and order. For the purposes of domestic consumption back home, we had a pa.s.sage in the speech about louts and on-the-spot fines. If we hadn"t, as Alastair rightly pointed out, we were going to Europe for "nul points" with the British electorate.
Rather foolishly, I let him write the pa.s.sage about the fines. It was a great piece of Alastair tabloidery. Except that, as can happen with this genre, it went too far, suggesting we would march the offender up to the nearest cashpoint and solemnly watch as they were forced to take out their money and pay the fine i.e. a real on-the-spot, on-the-spot fine. Literal, but not practical.
"You watch how this goes on the news," he said confidently as we settled into the seats of the RAF plane flying us back. "It"ll go big." And in that prediction, limited as it was, he was undoubtedly right.
Unfortunately, it was a cla.s.sic example of a big argument being obscured by a small error. On-the-spot fines indeed came in, but they were more or less missed in the embarra.s.sment of our not being able to defend them by reference to "cashpoint justice".
It didn"t much matter in the end. The seeds of a far bigger development a new framework of antisocial behaviour legislation were sown.
The public presentation of the reform I wanted was not going well. The philosophical dimension had been felled by the WI; the policy dimension was stuck in the medieval vaults of Tubingen. Now it was the turn of the personal dimension.
It is always unconscionably dangerous for a prime minister to have teenage children. It is the proverbial accident waiting to happen. I have been blessed by having the most fantastic, generally understanding and only quietly rebellious children. When I remember what I was like at their age, I shiver to think of myself as a teenager transplanted to Downing Street.
I recall, back in the mists of time, my dad greeting me off the train at Durham railway station as I came home after my first year at Oxford. My unwashed hair was roughly the length of Rapunzel"s and I had no shoes and no shirt. My jeans were torn in the days before this became fashionable. Worst of all, I was wearing a long sleeveless coat I had made out of curtains my mum had thrown out. All my dad"s friends were at the station, and their kids looked paragons of respectability beside me.
Dad saw the old curtains and visibly winced. They did kind of stand out. I took pity on him.
"Dad," I said, "there is good news. I don"t do drugs."
He looked me in the eye and said: "Son, the bad news is if you"re looking like this and you"re not doing drugs, we"ve got a real problem."
As children go, my kids are great. But that"s the point children do go.
Euan was sixteen and had just sat his GCSEs. To be frank, and if he doesn"t mind me saying so, they weren"t a huge cause for celebration, but he and his friend James, a lovely guy who became a Labour candidate in the 2010 election, decided to go out and celebrate nevertheless.
Around 11.30 on the night of 6 July, I was proceeding in an upwardly direction to my bed, when I thought I would look in on the said Euan, who I a.s.sumed must have been back in his room by then. The a.s.sumption was false. There was no Euan. Not in his room, not in the flat.
Cherie was away with her mum and Leo, taking a short break in Portugal.
Where the h.e.l.l was Euan? I only knew he had been out with James. I phoned James"s mum, and got James"s number. I phoned him. He was not making a ma.s.sive amount of sense, but the gist was he had last seen Euan wandering off in the general direction of Leicester Square.
I panicked. This is where being prime minister poses a few unusual challenges. I wanted to go and look for him. You do. You want to rush out and get busy. But I could hardly saunter up to Leicester Square and do a walkabout at midnight. I spoke to the policeman by the door at Downing Street, explained what had happened and threw myself on his mercy. Like a complete trooper, he announced he would go and search for Euan.
The next couple of hours were desperate. In my worry, I temporarily forgot the fact I had a huge programme on the next day. I was due to be down in Brighton, first to visit the Black Churches of Britain Conference, and then to do a special edition of Question Time Question Time, featuring just me, and centring on yes, you guessed it law and order and antisocial behaviour.
The wonderful Downing Street copper somehow tracked him down, and at around 1.30 a.m. he turned up with a very sorry-a.s.sed-looking Euan, plainly still the worse for wear, having been arrested near Leicester Square Tube station for underage drinking and being drunk in a public place. The circ.u.mstances and timing were not, shall we say, absolutely desirable.
I got no sleep that night. Around 2.30 a.m. Euan insisted on coming into my bed. Alternately, he would go into a mournful tirade of apology and then throw up. I loved him and felt sorry for him, but had a police cell been available I would have been all for moving him there.
Somehow, eventually, it was morning. The news had come out at roughly the time when Euan was being ushered back in the door of Downing Street. Police stations serve many admirable and necessary purposes, but they aren"t places to keep secrets. Alastair, who I had to speak to about press handling, thought the whole thing hilariously funny, going into what he thought was a very amusing riff about how Question Time Question Time would be, linking it without any sense of self-awareness to the debacle of cashpoint fines. I"m afraid I was completely beyond it all. I can make do with only a little sleep, but not no sleep. By some means I suppose it must have been the train I got down to Brighton and, clutching a prepared speech, went to where the Black Churches were having their conference. would be, linking it without any sense of self-awareness to the debacle of cashpoint fines. I"m afraid I was completely beyond it all. I can make do with only a little sleep, but not no sleep. By some means I suppose it must have been the train I got down to Brighton and, clutching a prepared speech, went to where the Black Churches were having their conference.
I didn"t quite know what to expect. I didn"t know much about them then, though I came to know much more later in my time. In particular, I hadn"t realised how similar they were to American Black Churches lively, inspirational, partic.i.p.ational, all-singing and all-dancing.
When I walked in, there was a great roar of welcome. Of course, they all knew about Euan. It was big news. And it was meat and drink, if you"ll pardon the expression, to them. There was the prime minister"s son, falling from grace, yielding to the devil alcohol, straying from the righteous path; and here was the prime minister coming among them. Well, you can imagine.
It was like a revivalist convention. People were blessing and praying and calling out the Lord"s name. The main man, a total inspiration and lovely human being, got them all to hold hands and pray for me, for my family, for Euan. I did, at one moment, want to point out that, OK, he was drunk and shouldn"t have been, but all this seemed a little excessive it"s not as if he was a proper criminal or anything.
But I didn"t and it wouldn"t have mattered a jot if I had. To them, the boy was lost and now was found, and that was all that mattered.
It certainly did revive me. I threw away my speech, got thoroughly into the spirit of it all and have to admit gave them as good as I was getting, cavorting shamelessly around the stage like some TV evangelist, doing a bit of whooping and hollering myself and having a ball.
By the time I got to the Question Time Question Time studio, I was fighting drunk on the Lord"s spirit. When the first questioner asked me a nasty question about whether my son"s antics didn"t make a mockery of my claim to be concerned about law and order or some such, I practically bopped him verbally at any rate and continued in that vein. "What did they slip into your tea at that religious thing?" Alastair asked afterwards. "We should send you down there every week. On second thoughts, maybe not," he added. studio, I was fighting drunk on the Lord"s spirit. When the first questioner asked me a nasty question about whether my son"s antics didn"t make a mockery of my claim to be concerned about law and order or some such, I practically bopped him verbally at any rate and continued in that vein. "What did they slip into your tea at that religious thing?" Alastair asked afterwards. "We should send you down there every week. On second thoughts, maybe not," he added.
We stopped off at a pub on the way back, much to the amus.e.m.e.nt of the locals. They were all thoroughly supportive of Euan and I heard in turn each customer"s tale of a similarly misspent youth. At moments like that, the British are very decent folk.
Once those various alarums and excursions were out of the way, Alan and I settled back down to the detail of the NHS Plan. We were having scores of meetings on it, several a week examining, re-examining, re-re-examining over and again.
I realised that to sell it to a doubting and nervous party we would have to sweeten the pill of reform at points. Progressive parties can take their medicine and, once taken, feel and act better but a spoonful of sugar helps it all go down. We had a number of positive factors to play with: the extra money; the extra staff: more NHS work to be secured from consultants in their starting years; more help for cancer and cardiac patients; an end to most mixed-s.e.x wards; an increase in some types of hospital bed.
In return, we were opening up all the contracts of the professionals for renegotiation; breaching new ground with the private sector; changing the way the service worked to make it far more user-friendly; and, in essence, prefiguring an NHS that started to import twenty-first-century business concepts into the heart of the service.
Rereading it now, I can see all its limitations. Today it would be considered less than bold. And there were errors in implementation, to be sure. We paid more for the consultants" and GPs" contracts than strictly necessary (this later became a strong bone of contention with the Treasury), but in the long run, I considered it worth it. We set in place tracks of reform that in time would carry the system to transformational change. So: GP contracts were generous, but when we put the new contract into legislation, we inserted the right to open up local GP monopolies to compet.i.tion. Nurses were given far more power; old demarcations between junior and senior doctors were collapsed.
The door was edged open for the private sector. The concept which, in time, was to result in foundation hospitals was introduced. And the whole terminology booked appointments, minimum guarantees of service, freedoms to innovate spoke of a coming culture of change, oriented to treating the NHS like a business with customers, as well as a service with patients.
For me, the process was itself extraordinarily revealing and educative. I started to find my proper points of reference when thinking of reform; began to articulate the concepts more clearly; a.s.sumed a more substantial confidence in the direction of change. I stopped thinking of it as a gamble with questionable empirical evidence, and started realising it was a clear mission whose challenge lay not in whether it was right, but in how it was carried through.
I date from that time, too, my clear break with the thinking that had dominated even New Labour policy up to then: that the public and private sectors operated in different spheres according to different principles. New Labour had indeed weaned the party off its hostility to the private sector, but now we moved on from the 1990s version of New Labour to something more consistent with a twenty-first-century mindset.
The truth was that the whole distinction between public and private sector was bogus at all points other than one: a service you paid for; and one you got free. That point is obviously central it defines public service. But it doesn"t define how it is run, managed and operated. In other words, that point is critical, but at all other points, the same rules apply for public and private sector alike, and those points matter enormously.
For a public service, even one like the NHS, in the negotiation of contracts for buildings, IT equipment, technology, it is like a business. When it cuts costs, as it should if it can, it is like a business. When it employs or fires people, it is like a business. When it seeks to innovate, it is like a business.
So I began to look for ways, all ways, of getting business ideas into public service practice. Just as the private sector had moved from ma.s.s production and standard items to just-in-time, customised products, so should public services. Just as people could shift custom if one company"s service was better than others, so should customers of public services be able to do so. Just as private sector service was driven by risk-taking and innovation, so we should be freeing up the front line of public services to do the same.
I also came to have a sense, at times too obvious, of impatience with the view that all such talk was a betrayal of public service ethos. It seemed to me perfectly clear that if the status quo resulted in a poor service, then that was the true betrayal of that ethos; and so, if the poor service arose from the wrong structure, the structure had to change. In any event, I could see that so much of the language of defending "our public services" was just obscurantist propaganda designed to dress up a vested interest in the garb of the public interest.
We took care in how we presented the plan, which was scheduled for launch at the end of July, just before the recess. I always liked to announce a few big things before the long summer recess.
It can be up to three months. Robin Cook in his reforming zeal when Leader of the House of Commons tried to shorten it, a proposal in which the media delighted and at which MPs groaned. Personally, I loved the long summer break. It gave everyone s.p.a.ce to contemplate, holiday, work it all out and get in shape for the party conference season. Life is so frenetic when Parliament is sitting. And, of course, the media environment in which ministers work is so incredibly altered, with tons more media obligations. The pace of modern politics is breakneck, so a long recess really helps.
But the MPs need to be sent off for summer with a clear strategy. Hence, the end of July was always a busy time, as busy as I could make it.
Before we got to the NHS Plan we had a stack of other things to do. We presented our Annual Report as a government to Parliament. This was one of our wackier innovations. The idea was entirely sensible: go through what the government had said it would do, and what it had done during the year. A sort of State of the Union address.
I finally binned it after the 2000 Report which I presented in mid-July to Parliament. It was a bit rushed. We ticked off the items we had achieved. Except some we ticked, we hadn"t done. There was a memorable so-called achievement we listed and ticked off, which was the building of a new sports stadium in Sheffield. The only problem was it didn"t exist. William Hague gave me a real old drubbing. Peter Brooke, a wonderful old Tory grandee, got up and asked what was the purpose of the photograph on page so-and-so, which turned out to be a picture of a packet of contraceptive pills. Tricky one to answer, that. Anyway, some ideas work, some don"t. This didn"t.
I decided that by bending over and inviting people to come and kick the government"s backside we weren"t advancing the cause of human progress much, and certainly not the cause of Her Majesty"s Government. So although binning the idea generated a certain amount of additional embarra.s.sment, I was more than happy to suffer it to save a perpetual hiding being handed out each year.
On 27 July 2000, I presented the NHS Plan. It went well. There was enough to satisfy the backbenchers that it was a Labour doc.u.ment. And we had put down the markers for New Labour.
Around the same time, Andrew Adonis and I first formulated the academy idea for schools. It was still in its early stages, but the idea had germinated. It was based, in part, on the old Tory policy of independent technical colleges, but they had only created ten of them and then sort of shelved the policy. However, it aligned neatly with our thinking elsewhere: to give schools independence, to set them free from the local authority system of hands-on control; and to let them innovate, including in how they employed staff.
The public service and welfare reform agenda for the second term was gradually becoming defined. As we departed for the recess, I was in a reasonably jolly mood. I was no longer feeling my way, but finding it.
However, one cloud was gathering, and starting to spread with a rather deep shade of darkness. Gordon was managing the economy with all his power and skill, and that was no small thing it gave the whole government ballast and weight but there was a worrying pattern emerging that was more than conventional Treasury caution. It was clear that the direction of reform was not shared; not agreed; and not much liked. I noticed that the term "marketisation" of public services started to be used in discussions between us, especially when his adviser Ed b.a.l.l.s was involved, and the term was not meant as a compliment.
The cloud did not obscure the sun or sky at that point, but it made me uneasy. I wanted a radical manifesto, and so did he but did the term "radical" mean the same thing to each of us? And how would he feel about the second term and the succession? An election was less than a year away if we were to go four years, the right time for a government which believes it can win again.
But, as I set off down to Tuscany and then to the Ariege in France, I felt we were in good shape to win a second term and win it well. Little Leo was proving a complete, unalloyed blessing: gorgeous, happy, a joy to others and to himself. It was weird having a small baby again; and weirder still in Downing Street. But right from the off, he was carried from room to room, from the switchboard to the foreign policy unit, a pocket-size piece of benign innocence existing in the maelstrom of the world-weary activities of government.
In the beautiful and venerable garden of the Strozzis" palazzo in Tuscany, I wondered what the intervening months would hold in store. My conjecture ranged widely. But not for one moment did it stray into the realms of floods, fuel protests and foot-and-mouth disease. Just as well, really.
TEN.
MANAGING CRISES.
I left for holiday at the end of July with the focus on public service reform. I came back at the end of August and found naturally that the focus had shifted to the thought that an election could be antic.i.p.ated in May 2001; this was the run-up. The moment you begin a pre-election period, everything starts to be shaped around the election. The focus alters. The mind starts to think politically; the perpetual a.n.a.lysis and rea.n.a.lysis about public sector reform gets displaced by polls, focus groups, anecdotal evidence of public opinion; the party people, exiled for years in the Siberia of party drudgery far from the centre of government, suddenly re-emerge in the halls of the Kremlin with renewed self-importance; and the wheels of the election machine start to turn. left for holiday at the end of July with the focus on public service reform. I came back at the end of August and found naturally that the focus had shifted to the thought that an election could be antic.i.p.ated in May 2001; this was the run-up. The moment you begin a pre-election period, everything starts to be shaped around the election. The focus alters. The mind starts to think politically; the perpetual a.n.a.lysis and rea.n.a.lysis about public sector reform gets displaced by polls, focus groups, anecdotal evidence of public opinion; the party people, exiled for years in the Siberia of party drudgery far from the centre of government, suddenly re-emerge in the halls of the Kremlin with renewed self-importance; and the wheels of the election machine start to turn.
For most of the party, the upcoming campaign would be centred on one simple ambition: to be the first ever Labour government to win two successive terms in office. For me, it was going to be about winning a mandate for more fundamental change. For me, the arguments about direction were long settled. The first term had proved we could govern. The second term had to be about what we were governing for: getting beyond the old established British ways, based in my eyes on a vision of the country no longer possible or desirable, and making us fit for the future. My boundless, at times rather manic l.u.s.t for modernisation could occasionally be misdirected, but I was sure the basic thrust was correct: we needed to modernise the whole idea of the 1945 welfare state and public services, out-of-date systems of law and order and immigration, and our view of our role in the world. We had to use the twenty-first century as an occasion to renew ourselves as a nation. Thatcher had done the right thing in liberating enterprise and industry, but in becoming so obsessed with Euroscepticism, I felt she had still indulged the country in a view of itself that was simply no longer compatible with where we needed to be now, in this the year of the millennium.
I hadn"t by any means worked out all the right policy answers, but I had worked out the crucial failing of the first term: the mistaken view that raising standards and performance could be separated from structural reform. This was true virtually across the board; and especially so in the public services. Above all, we had to divest power away from the dominant interest groups, unions and a.s.sociations, and put it into the hands of people, the consumer, the parent, the patient, the user.
So I came back after a long and good holiday rested, but also fidgety and anxious. I had to frame the political argument right to win. I had to frame our manifesto right to give ourselves a proper mandate for proper change. We had h.o.a.rded our political capital in the first term. We had to keep it high to win again and win big. But I knew the moment was fast coming when I would have to spend it. And by now, if I had ever been in any doubt at the beginning, I knew that this would mean a second term that was an awful lot tougher, more challenging and less popular than the first.
As if to bring this home to me, from the moment I was back until nine months later when we won the election, I was embroiled in the most bizarre mixture of divine and man-made crises.
Within hours of my return, I was posed one of those extraordinarily sensitive and difficult decisions that can occur at any time and frequently come in batches. The British troops in Sierra Leone had been brilliant, and were successfully rea.s.serting the control of the democratic government, but sadly a group of soldiers from the Royal Irish Regiment caught up in the fighting had been kidnapped by the RUF. We received intelligence as to where they were. Charles Guthrie asked to see me urgently in my den in Downing Street. He told me that they could mount an SAS rescue operation.
As ever with Charles, he had the courage to recommend a course of action rather than simply leave the decision to me, but he warned me that casualties were likely. The RUF are crazy and well-armed people, he explained, and there is a risk both to the hostages and to the rescue force. The alternative was to continue trying to negotiate and hope somehow we could prise them out through that route. We could probably buy them out, but we both quickly agreed that would be a disastrous signal which would only provoke a rash of copycat kidnappings.
We sat there for a few moments staring at each other. It would have been nice to have called for more work to be done; to have probed for greater detail; to have asked for the plans and the drawings and goodness knows what else they would have been doing at SAS HQ in Hereford. But I knew that while it could all be seen, and seen again, the decision would remain the same.
"Are you guys up for it?" I asked somewhat redundantly.
He snorted. "The guys are always up for it, as you know."
"OK, let"s do it."
We got all the hostages back, but we lost an SAS soldier. Charles called me up in the flat and told me himself. I wandered around the flat for a while, imagining who he was, what he looked like, how he had felt going into the operation, the nerves, the adrenalin, the realisation that death might be moments away, and I reflected on a life lost, a family in mourning. We could still be negotiating and he could still be alive.
"I"m really sorry, Charles," I had started to say, "the trouble is if we hadn"t acted-"
"You don"t need to say that," Charles broke in. "For what it"s worth, I have no doubt it was the right decision. It is very sad that we lost a man. But they are professionals. They know the risks. They do it because they want to do it and because they believe in it. There will be a lot of grief back in Hereford but also a lot of pride."
With an election in the offing, it had been decided that I should do a regional tour in order to "reconnect with the people". There is always something a trifle dubious about the "connecting with the people" business. In modern politics, you have to pretend to be living the life the ordinary person leads, when, of course, you can"t and don"t do the shopping in the supermarket, fill up the car, go down to the pub for a few beers, the quiz night and a bit of banter. But everyone nowadays has to go through the elaborate pretence that the prime minister could and should do all that, otherwise he or she is "out of touch", the worst criticism that can ever be made.
I can"t tell you how many cafes, fish and chip shops and shopping malls I would go into, have money thrust into my hand (yes, the prime minister must have real cash jingling in his pocket) and buy something, all in the interests of showing I was a "regular bloke". One of the main reasons it"s total rubbish is that prior to going in, the place is staked out by armed detectives, the shopkeeper is quizzed for security and politics, there are around twenty cameramen and film crews, a few random protesters, pa.s.sing eccentrics, ordinary but bewildered members of the public and occasionally a police helicopter whirring overhead. Which all amounts to something a trifle different from how your regular bloke usually buys his coffee or CDs. But it all had to be gone through, and the office Alastair particularly would get very snooty and irritated if I tried to complain that it was all daft.