Standing Down (22 page)
Authors: Rosa Prince
In his role as Minister for London, Mr Raynsford was responsible for overseeing the formation of the Greater London Authority.
He says:
The referendum on creating the Greater London Authority was a high point. We knew we were going to win but we won every single London borough and that was so decisive. It was so clear that there was a will on the part of London to have a new authority. It felt a very creative period with a lot happening.
I then had two years as Housing and Planning Minister. We did some very good things. I look now at the Decent Homes Programme that has transformed the condition of a lot of the housing stock and some of the pioneering work.
Mr Raynsford took his role as Housing Minister to heart, moving into one of the government’s model projects, at the Greenwich Millennium Village. ‘It’s a great place to live and it works,’ he says. ‘That’s a high, being associated with that.’
In 2002, have been given responsibility for the fire service, he was faced with one of the most testing times of his career, as firefighters went on strike. During negotiations to resolve the dispute, the government agreed to work with the force to bring about a different approach to the job, focusing on fire prevention:
I remember reading myself into the job when I was given the responsibility, this figure just came out at me that half of the people who die in domestic fires were dead before the alarm was raised. So however good the firefighters were, and they’re very good at getting out to a fire quickly, it’s never going to save half the people. And so prevention’s vital. Actually I feel quite proud of the way we turned what was a potential disaster of a large dispute into an opportunity.
In the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks on New York, Mr Raynsford was put in charge of planning for a similar disaster in London:
We ran an exercise testing how we would respond in a simulated attack on the Underground, Bank Underground Station, in 2003. And two years later it happened for real [the 7/7 terror attacks on public transport in London].
Some of the lessons learnt in the test were put to good effect. So that was important.
Like many of his peers, Mr Raynsford struggled with the 2003 decision to go to war in Iraq.
He says:
I was actually very cautious and not very convinced about the need for us to be involved but in the end I gave my support.
The doubts were all about whether it was really possible in a very different culture to achieve regime change.
I gave him [Tony Blair] my support and I now think it was a mistake but there you are. That’s history. You do reach some bad judgements.
Mr Raynsford says there will inevitably be failures and frustrations during any ministerial career: ‘There have been lots of disappointments, there always are. There are lots of failures, there are lots of missed opportunities, there are things you would like to have done better.’
One of his disappointments is the failure in 2005 of the government to repeat its magic in London and set up a regional assembly in the north east of England.
He puts the blame down to the change in the atmosphere post-Iraq, the lack of drive from Downing Street for a project that was largely seen as Lord Prescott’s baby, and the failure to grant the proposed assembly any substantive powers:
The north-east referendum wasn’t a crushing disappointment because it was very clear to me for some time that we were going to lose it. It came at the wrong time and the package hadn’t got enough power. That was pretty clear way before the actual vote itself in the referendum. So on a particularly cold night in Sunderland I was disappointed but not surprised.
With the 2005 general election approaching he ‘let it be known I’d done my time as a Minister of State’ and that the only job he would then accept was one in Cabinet. Instead, when the call came, it was to offer a move to the Treasury in another middle-ranking position. He turned it down and returned to the back benches:
I’d done eight years, I’d gone I think as far as I thought I was likely to go as a Minister of State. Had I been offered a Cabinet job I think I’d have taken it. I said that to John Prescott in the run-up to the 2005 election.
He thought I deserved promotion but I didn’t get it so I just thought, this is time for me to go. I had eight really good years in the government, I enjoyed it a lot, I think I achieved quite a lot and think I was quite effective, but if nothing else was going to be offered beyond what I’d done I think at that point of time that was a point to call it a day.
The 2005 election brought joy as well as disappointment. His former secretary, Alison Seabeck, was elected MP for Plymouth North, and some time afterwards, the two fell in love. They went on to marry in 2012.
He says:
We’d both been previously married and one of the curious things that happened was not working together any more after 2005; in a way it reminded us just how strongly we felt about each other.
She was down in Plymouth half the time and I was here, but it became clear that there was a very strong bond and I’m extremely happy with the outcome.
Mr Raynsford had assumed the transition to the back benches would be a traumatic one, but almost immediately he got caught up in the campaign to fight the government’s decision not to build a station in Woolwich on the new Crossrail line.
The battle allowed him to deploy the skills he had learned at the start of his career, on the Channel Tunnel committee, and again ten years earlier when he fought to bring a Tube station on the new Jubilee line to North Greenwich, something he sees as having a ‘curious symmetry’.
The constituency became increasingly demanding, as Greenwich and Woolwich were selected to host a number of events at the 2012 Olympic Games.
Wanting to see the games through, Mr Raynsford decided not to stand down in 2010. He was determined to ‘face down’ a group of vocal residents who did not want the equestrian events in Greenwich Park.
‘Convinced’ he was right, and determined to give ‘leadership’ on the issue, he helped ensure the games went ahead. Watching the event take place in the sunshine in Greenwich Park was the highlight of his career.
After the games, Mr Raynsford felt the time was right to announce his retirement. He is looking forward to it, although he speaks regretfully about holding his last constituency surgeries. He remembers how ‘the hairs on the back of the neck stood up’ when he was told at one that Britain was the best country in the world because it was the only place a ‘poor African refugee’ could turn up and speak directly to their Member of Parliament.
If, as he expects, his wife is returned in Plymouth North, Mr Raynsford will be able to maintain a lifeline to the Commons.
As for not being an MP any more himself: ‘On the whole I feel pretty good about it,’ he says.
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CV
Born near Northampton; attended Cambridge University; became director of housing charity Shelter.
1986: Elected MP for Fulham at a by-election
1987: Loses Fulham at general election
1992: Elected MP for Greenwich
1993: Becomes spokesman on London
1994: Becomes shadow Housing Minister
1997: Elected MP for Greenwich & Woolwich on redrawn boundaries; becomes Housing Minister
1999: Becomes Department of the Environment Minister
2001: Becomes Local Government Minister
2002: Becomes Minister of State for the Deputy Prime Minister
2005: Returns to back benches
2013: Announces he will stand down at the 2015 general election
Nick Raynsford divorced and remarried fellow Labour MP Alison Seabeck and has three children from his first marriage.
Sir Andrew Stunell, seventy-two, was Liberal Democrat MP for Hazel Grove (1997–2015).
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It was at my fifth attempt so I guess I was quite persistent. I fought Chester three times and then was selected for Hazel Grove … to fight what was then expected to be the 1990 election but turned out to be the 1992 election. We didn’t win. We were 923 short – one doesn’t forget these figures – but we did win in 1997.
The place in those days provided a hopeless experience for new joiners. I’ve never been to a public school but in many ways it was like the first day at a public school where you had to be ritually humiliated to get in.
The Localism Act. I think it’s going to be a bit like the Education Act of 1944, which was passed in a time of war, and probably at the time wasn’t seen as doing very much, but actually shaped education for the next thirty years.
The Localism Act is the same. What there is there is a really significant piece of legislation that is going to shape things, and you can already see it flowing through. There’s stacks of stuff there, gradually taking hold, and it will be really important in the future.
A bad time was when Charles [Kennedy] went. I think it was inevitable because of where we were but I think it was very, very sad and I personally had attempted to keep the balls in play but I had been unsuccessful, so I guess that was pretty much a bad spot.
An important reason is I’m seventy-two and with fixed-term parliaments I’d be working then ’til I’m seventy-seven. The way that I do the job, and I think most Liberal Democrat MPs do the job, with a huge focus on the constituency as well as all the parliamentary stuff, it’s not a job where I would ever feel comfortable just running along in neutral.
No, not at all. I shall have a very deep pang of regret if the Conservatives win the seat, but I’ll be delighted if my successor Lisa Smart wins.
I’ve got a family, I’ve got a few grandchildren now, I’ve got a wife, so there are a few people I can fit in where some of this stuff has been before.
My wife and I are taking time out in most of June, July and August to see what each other looks like, really, and then take a view about the future, and we’ll see.
Don’t believe anything people say about this place. If people say it can’t happen or it mustn’t happen or it never has happened, always be ready to challenge it.
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the full story
Sir Andrew Stunell grew up in a family in which, he says, ‘politics and politicians were positively frowned on’, and he didn’t join the Liberals until his late twenties. Outraged at the treatment of Kenyan Asians who were denied British passports in what would become one of the first immigration scandals, he threw his lot in with the only party whose MPs were prepared to speak up on their behalf.
He says:
I joined the party in 1968 because of one specific event, which was the decision by the Labour government to take away the UK passports of Kenyan Asians. At that time the only MPs in Parliament who voted against that and spoke against that were the Liberals and for me that was a very important issue and I joined the party.
When I joined I found out the other things Liberals felt were important, like fairness and equality at home and abroad, and so I had the good fortune, having joined on one particular issue, to find out that a large chunk of what Liberals fought for and stood for was stuff I agreed with.
By the mid-1970s, Sir Andrew was working as an architect and living in Chester. Despite his growing family – he and his wife had five children – he felt the time was right to step up his involvement.
He first ran, unsuccessfully, for the local council and four years later stood for both Chester County Council and the parliamentary seat, at that stage held by the Conservatives. He says:
Why did I do it in the first place? I suppose like everybody else who starts, you stand at the foot of the ladder and you look up and you think, if I can’t do better than those people I will shoot myself.
The honest answer is I have never enjoyed any election I have taken part in. I think it’s a process you obviously have to go through but it’s a testing one, even if you’re only doing it to encourage the others. I won my seat on the council but obviously didn’t win my seat to Parliament.
Having taken an interest in overseas issues as a student and afterwards, Sir Andrew surprised himself with how much he relished being a member of the local council, describing it as ‘fascinating and rewarding’.
Localism would remain a key interest for the remainder of his career and in 1981 he abandoned architecture to work in politics full time as head of the Association of Liberal Councillors, a body that supported the party’s local politicians. The job made him ideally placed to meet many of the party’s future rising stars.
He says:
In that very small world I became famous as the person who knew about council budgets and how to deal with situations where there was no overall majority and the balance of power and all those kind of things. I had gradually transitioned from doing that in my weekends and spare time to that being my full-time job.
As the 1983 election approached, Sir Andrew was determined to stand for Parliament for a second time. Defeat did not put him off, and he was the candidate once again in 1987.
His opponent on all three occasions was Sir Peter Morrison, the late Conservative MP who has since been exposed as a paedophile. He says:
The MP that was successful in each of my three elections was Peter Morrison, and I had a personal view about Peter Morrison long before people developed a public view about Peter Morrison.
He would have been a good person to beat and there was some motivation, if you like, at that level, competitive motivation, as well as a feeling that there was something to be done when I get there.
The three times I stood in Chester I got exactly the party’s national percentage poll so we didn’t exactly add a lot of value with our campaigns, but we worked very hard and after you’ve done the first one you think, ‘Next time I would do different things.’
By the end of the 1980s, Sir Andrew had all but given up on being elected to Parliament, when a contact from Hazel Grove got in touch:
Having had three goes at Chester and thinking that maybe it wasn’t going to happen for me, I was invited to put myself forward for Hazel Grove quite insistently.
I certainly couldn’t have done it without the active partnership of my wife, Gillian, that’s for certain. We’ve got five children and maybe one way or another the electorate knew better than us, because I didn’t get into Parliament until all but one of them had left home.
We made a collective decision, my wife and I. We’d definitely uprooted ourselves from Chester where we’d got deep roots and were quite well known and moved to Hazel Grove, where none of those things were true, and started again.
Sir Andrew lost by less than 1,000 votes in 1992 but stuck with it, and in 1997 was elected with a majority of nearly 12,000. Winning, after all those years, felt ‘good’.
Sir Andrew’s experience of Parliament was confined to visiting a few times a year to attend meetings:
My first experience was: this is an institution I can change for the better. I didn’t feel overawed by it, I felt really concerned that nobody here had taken seriously the business of taking the place up to speed.
I thought the institution was not welcoming or friendly and not very competent either.
I remember going to the Table Office … with two written questions and one of them was about a local school that was awaiting a decision by the secretary of state. My question was: ‘To ask the secretary of state whether he’d taken a decision.’ And the question was rejected by the Table Office on the grounds that ‘whether’ is not a parliamentary word. You have to ask ‘if’.
One of the things I worked on very hard was to make it a better experience for people coming in in 2001.
If the Commons itself wasn’t a friendly place, Sir Andrew felt comfortable with many of his new colleagues:
A lot of the Liberal Democrats who gained a seat at that election were people I did know well because they were people with the same local government background.
I wasn’t particularly in contact with the Liberals who had been here historically. Some of them, in the nicest possible way, were institutionalised. So there were two cultures in the party in ’97, there was a group of us who came in and thought that we knew a lot more about it than our predecessors. It didn’t take too long for those of us who knew what we were talking about to come out on top.
Having fought and lost four elections, Sir Andrew was older than most of his peers in the new intake.
He acknowledges he was a ‘late starter’, adding:
I didn’t arrive in my twenties or my thirties, so there are lots of opportunities for career development that haven’t happened. On the other hand, it’s the Liberal Democrats, for goodness sake, so it’s not like if I’d be Prime Minister if I’d come twenty years earlier.
I wasn’t ambitious in the sense of ‘I think in another five years I could be party leader.’
Other people might think differently, I don’t think I’ve ever been ambitious for office. I wanted to see things done rather than to be too fussed about what the title was of the person that did it.
Despite himself, Sir Andrew was promoted quickly by leader Paddy Ashdown, becoming the party’s energy spokesman and Deputy Chief Whip:
I’m pretty sure I was put into that position because I was well-known to the new cohort. I got involved in energy policy and … because of my background in building and construction, I could get into it in a bit more depth perhaps than others.
I suppose I did what most MPs do, which is find, sometimes by accident, some niche areas where you can develop your expertise and deploy your skill, as well of course as doing all your constituency work and constituency campaigning.
As a member of one of the smaller parties, Sir Andrew assumed he would never serve in government. ‘I didn’t find it frustrating in the sense of a burning ambition thwarted, but obviously it’s always frustrating when you know you’ve got a better solution that no one’s listening to or [is] prepared to put into place,’ he says.
After the 2001 election, Sir Andrew was promoted to Chief Whip, a task he claims was simpler than being group leader of a large county council:
In a way it was easy, we were in deep opposition … and the Blair government’s reform agenda was very close to ours, and so it wasn’t really very challenging in the sense of getting the party to be facing in the right direction at the right time.
One of Sir Andrew’s proudest moments came in 2003, when, under his stewardship, Liberal Democrat MPs voted unanimously against the war in Iraq.
He says:
I know for a fact that not one of the Liberal Democrat MPs regrets voting against the Iraq War, but at the time it was not a clear-cut decision and it had to be talked about and worked on really quite hard inside the parliamentary party to get to that. As Chief Whip I probably delivered that result.
Another high came a year later, when he won the Private Members’ Bill ballot and introduced what would become the Sustainable and Secure Buildings Act, designed to make new buildings greener and safer.
As Chief Whip, Sir Andrew worked closely with leader Charles Kennedy, who he had admired since the 1980s. It wasn’t always an easy task:
I’ve very often made the remark to Charles himself even: he’s an absolutely fantastic person when it comes to the very big decisions but do not ever leave him with detail to deal with.
So [he was good on] things like making the right call on the invasion of Iraq, and, for me, an earlier decision, going back to the coming together of the Social Democrats and the Liberals [to form the Liberal Democrats in 1988].
It’s history now, thank goodness, but there was a very public row about the name of the new party and Charles, as a Social Democrat, was the person who stood up at a conference and said, no, no we should be Liberal Democrats, and cemented the whole thing together when it could have just flown apart.
As the 2005 election approached, the Chief Whip was hiding a disturbing secret: the leader was drinking heavily and it was beginning to affect his performance.
They made it through without it becoming public, but the whispers grew louder and eventually Mr Kennedy was ousted in a putsch by the party’s MPs.
Sir Andrew describes it as the hardest time of his eighteen years in the Commons: ‘The interesting thing is that it wasn’t really a public problem in the sense that we continued to be successful electorally in local government and the outcome of the 2005 election was OK. But yes, it’s true, behind the scenes things were difficult.’
Things settled down for the Liberal Democrats with the arrival first of Sir Menzies Campbell and then Nick Clegg as leader.
As they approached the 2010 election, Sir Andrew never dreamed that he was on the cusp of becoming a minister.
With no clear winner, he was a member of the four-strong team that negotiated the agreement to form the first coalition government since the war.
He says:
It wasn’t at all clear it would always be the Conservatives. The arithmetic was a real tease because if you added us and Labour together we would not have had an overall majority and therefore would have required either the active or passive support of another party.
We had a discussion with the Labour Party in which we did point this out to them. They were very gung ho about us joining them, but I think they thought what they could get was a Lib–Lab pact, like it had been in 1978, where basically the Liberals simply went along with Labour in the Callaghan government.
And I, as someone who had been on the outside at that point, all my experience in local government showed that the Liberals had completely misplayed their hand in that Lib–Lab pact.
When we said, ‘The numbers don’t add up,’ they said …‘Don’t worry, we’ve got the nationalists.’
Had any other basis for a deal been there then we might have explored what they meant by ‘We’ve got the nationalists.’