Standing Down (4 page)
Authors: Rosa Prince
The Welfare Reform Bill cropped up in April 2012 like the iceberg before the
Titanic
– and Miss Teather’s career was sunk:
It’s not just a question of the impact on individuals. For me it was about motivation and why we were doing it.
That policy was a deliberate policy focused on headlines. It didn’t save any money and it didn’t have any good effect and all the impacts were negative. That night [of the final vote] I had to respond to an adjournment debate from the front bench and I was absolutely 100 per cent convinced that I was resigning the next day.
I had a set of conditions, and they were that I was never going to vote in favour of it, I was never going to evangelise about the policy, I wanted concessions in terms of mitigating funding for those who were affected and I wanted a review of the policy after a period of time. And I got those concessions.
In a way, I’m quite sympathetic to the plight of Nick [Clegg] in this situation. We had had some quite big rows in private about what the concessions should be and what was acceptable as a changed policy, but Nick was actually significantly more sympathetic than many other colleagues.
And Nick was in quite a difficult position. He had a minister who had been saying for nine months that she wasn’t prepared to support this policy. He was doing his best to negotiate.
The process of trying to work out what you really think in that situation and what your red lines are was for me quite purgative in its way.
I properly examined myself and my own motivations for being in politics and it felt a little bit like I’d taken all the pieces of myself out and laid them out on a table. I’d discarded pieces along the way and when they went back in they [were] in a different order.
And it wasn’t that I wasn’t at peace with the decision that I’d made; I’d very carefully thought through what I thought were acceptable conditions, and I’d met them and I knew that I’d done the right thing to stay in, but I knew that I wasn’t the same human being that I was before.
I threw myself back into the work on special educational needs but I went away in Easter to see a friend who lives up in Cumbria and I moaned at her for about three hours and she said, ‘You don’t want to stand again, do you?’
And I said, ‘I don’t know.’ But then I realised I was exhausted and thought, ‘This is not actually a very good time.’ You shouldn’t make big decisions when you’re in such a state – that’s not wise.
There’s a short-term thing where you fling your toys out of the pram and you walk, and everyone parades you as some kind of hero briefly and that’s not very attractive. Because the truth is much more complicated than that – the truth isn’t very black and white. And people who think it is have never had a difficult decision to make and probably ought to think that the world is a bit more complicated than that. I focused on finishing the stuff on special educational needs but, ironically, I knew my decision to stay in was still going to result in my being sacked.
I was pretty confident that I would sacked in the reshuffle. I’d been a pain and for a brief period of time I’d brought quite a lot of things to a standstill.
If you’re leading a party and you’ve got stuff to do, you can’t really be dealing with that.
I’m more sympathetic to Nick than you might imagine. I can see from his point of view how it was a monumental draw on his time and I dare say they probably thought, ‘There are worse things than this coming down the line. Frankly, if she couldn’t stomach this, she [can’t] really be dealing with anything else.’ We’ve had profound disagreements [but], on a personal level, I’m hugely fond of Nick.
Having, she says, lost all personal ambition amid the drama of the welfare reform legislation, Teather had a quiet word with Clegg, telling him she would like to be left in her post in the Education Department when next he came to reshuffle his team of ministers. It was not to be.
In September 2012, he asked her to stand down from the government:
I was quite well prepared for it. I tabled the draft legislation the day before on special educational needs, I finished all my parliamentary questions the day before, I finished all the signing. I was ready for it.
There was a part of me that was hoping to carry on, because I really wanted to see the special educational needs legislation through. I was genuinely sad not to get to finish that because that was my work and I had started it. But that was a lesson in humility, to hand that over to someone else.
When I first left I thought again, ‘This is not a very good time to make a decision [about standing down from Parliament].’ So it felt a little bit like I’d had this decision pending for ages and it was never quite the right moment to really sit and examine it.
You shouldn’t examine it after a period when you’ve been utterly miserable because that’s just a really bad time to take a decision and you shouldn’t examine it immediately after you’ve been sacked from government, even if you’d been expecting it, because that’s also a really bad time to make a decision.
But I really did need to make a decision. I set myself a process … which is that I was going to go on retreat, which is what I did. If you’re religious, it has an aspect on everything you do. It’s integral to who I am and how I make such a sensitive decision.
And because I’d had that, kind of, I suppose, vocation, it was important to me that I made that decision in that kind of context if I was going to leave.
The first time I went on retreat to Loyola Hall, your meals are taken in silence and I could tell that somebody round the table at lunchtime had recognised [me] and I just thought: ‘There’s nothing you can do about it, because we’re all in silence. It doesn’t matter what you think because I don’t need to hear it.’
You have to hear what everybody thinks all the time [in Westminster], and [on retreat] you didn’t, which meant I could actually work out what I thought.
I felt completely constrained [by] that period inside government, and even worse after government, because the direction of travel changed after I left. I came away thinking that it was time to leave [but] at that stage I had no idea what to do next, literally no idea. It was very strange – a total blank sheet of paper.
***
CV
Raised in Leicester; attended Cambridge University; worked as a charity worker for the Royal Society.
2001: Unsuccessfully fights Finchley & Golders Green
2003: Elected MP for Brent East at by-election; becomes ‘baby of the House’
2005: Becomes party spokesman on communities and local government
2006: Signs letter that results in leader Charles Kennedy quitting over his drinking; becomes education spokesman
2007: Helps secure release of constituent Jamil el-Banna from Guantánamo Bay; becomes business spokesman
2008: Becomes housing spokesman
2010: Elected MP for Brent Central following abolition of former constituency; becomes Children’s Minister
2012: Comes close to resigning over opposition to Welfare Reform Act; sacked in reshuffle; returns to back benches
2013: Announces she will stand down at 2015 general election
Jack Straw
, sixty-eight, was Labour MP for Blackburn (1979–2015).
‘I still get shouted at on the Tube and called a war criminal – but I have to take the responsibility of Iraq.’
***
Coming from a strong Labour family, [I got] the politics bug when I was thirteen at the 1955 election, reading one of the leaflets I was having to deliver in the rain and thinking I’d rather be doing what the chap on the leaflet was doing, which was to become the Labour MP for what is now Epping Forest.
It’s a bit like youngsters wanting to play soccer for England. Given my background, a council maisonette in Essex … the prospect that I could go on from there to [Parliament] was really rather distant. But I really wanted to be a Member of Parliament. I had this romantic idea.
Fantastically excited. All of a sudden I was a Member of Parliament. There was a hell of a wow factor for that.
I’d been here before [as an adviser], so I knew my way around. Making a maiden speech was a big deal. And in those days the whole focus of this place was on the chamber, because there weren’t any select committees. It was terrific. My mum was in seventh heaven.
I think the best of times was the period between ’94 and 2001 on the Home Affairs [brief]. We worked like stink on that programme. We did an astonishing amount of work. We were very well prepared.
As the party was collapsing with the formation of the SDP in late January ’81, a few months after that I got this terrible infection that knocked out my ear. And I got very, very seriously depressed because there was a worry the other ear would go. And it seemed to become an allegory for the state of the Labour Party.
The other acutely bad moment was in October 1995 when I screwed up in a debate with [Home Secretary] Michael Howard. Almost everybody forgot about it straight away … but I remembered it. I wasn’t properly prepared. But the chronic period was in ’81. It was terrible. The poison that was around inside the party was awful.
It’s a five-year parliament that made me decide. This election’s going to be in 2015, I’ll be touching sixty-nine, then I’ll be seventy-four by the following election. OK, there are plenty of other people who do stay on in their seventies, but I can do other things, including spend more time with my family.
My advice is enjoy it, it’s the best job in the world. It’s an astonishing privilege to be a Member of Parliament. Don’t keep looking over your shoulder. Get on with the job.
***
the full story
With a mother and grandfather who were strongly involved in the Labour Party, politics was ‘infused’ through Jack Straw’s family.
He first became active at the age of eight, taking numbers on polling day, and joined the party in 1960 having decided at the age of thirteen that he wanted to be an MP.
He achieved his ambition in fewer than twenty years, first serving in a political apprenticeship as president of the National Union of Students:
I worked for the NUS for three years altogether after I left university, which was a fantastic education.
I hit it lucky because it was the late ’60s and the British establishment and older generation were in a high state of neurosis about what to do about the younger generation, which of course included people who liked the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, to some extent drugs, certainly sex, and then revolting students.
I was very high profile. It’s extraordinary, sometimes I would be one of the main items on the
Nine O’Clock News
as it then was, [so] I’ve been well known since I’ve been a student.
Mr Straw moved to London and studied for his Bar exams. In 1972, and still involved with the Labour Party, he became, in rapid succession, a councillor on Islington Council, where he served alongside an Alderman called Ted Castle (husband of the legendary Labour Cabinet minister Barbara Castle), and then deputy leader of the Inner London Education Authority.
Two years later, he took the first step towards fulfilling his childhood ambition, putting his name forward for selection for the safe Conservative seat of Tonbridge & Malling. ‘I fancied a dry run,’ he says. ‘A Labour candidate was not going to win Tonbridge & Malling but I thought it would be interesting, basically, to find out if I wanted to be in politics.’
Mr Straw came in a respectable third, eighteen votes behind the Liberal candidate, and two days later Alderman Castle asked him in for a chat. He ended up working for Mrs Castle for two years, in a post now known as a special adviser – or SPAD:
I was flattered [but] I couldn’t make up my mind. It was a hung parliament, minority government. No one knew how long it was going to last, the country was in chaos.
I thought it had taken a long time to get this far, with my career at the Bar, [and] the practice was doing OK.
I finally went to see my head of chambers, a lovely old guy who was a Conservative MP. I put my dilemma to him and he said: ‘In twenty years’ time, if you had the choice, would you rather be on the High Court bench or in the British Cabinet?’
And I heard myself say: ‘Well, in the British Cabinet.’
It was great working for [Mrs Castle]. Like Margaret Thatcher, she could be very flirtatious [and] spent a lot of time on her appearance. She could turn on the charm with men. But underneath that was steel.
After Mrs Castle’s departure from the Cabinet, Mr Straw went to work for Peter Shore, the Environment Secretary, while casting around for a seat of his own. When Mrs Castle decided to stand down, Mr Straw was the obvious choice to replace her in her citadel of Blackburn. After a ‘quiet election’, Mr Straw walked into Parliament as an MP for the first time at the age of thirty-two.
With his SPAD background, Mr Straw found it easy to settle in, and was unbothered by the all-night sittings at a time where nearly half of debates ran past midnight. Divorced and newly remarried, but without children at that stage, the pace of Parliament suited him:
I started to go up through the ranks pretty quickly. I’d done alright in the House … I’d made quite a good name for myself, so I was appointed to the junior front bench within eighteen months.
One of the things that has enabled me to be successful as a minister was the fact that the fulfilment of my direct ambition was becoming a Member of Parliament. Some people will say: ‘That’s fine for Jack to say, he’s been on the front bench for thirty years.’ But I always saw this as my political home, so when I was a minister I was always here, even when I was Foreign Secretary.
I like the place. I think that it’s of critical importance if you are a minister that you stay in touch with your colleagues and don’t get up yourself.
After a happy first two years, things went suddenly and rapidly downhill when Mr Straw suffered a devastating blow to his physical and mental health during a particularly troubled time for the Labour Party. The SDP was threatening to take over as the mainstream left-of-centre force in British politics and although Mr Straw never wavered in his support for Labour, he found the defection of close friends difficult to stomach:
’81 was a kind of crisis period for me personally as well as for the party.
With my background, I’d worked really, really hard to get here I’d had plenty of false starts in my life, including my first marriage, and I just thought: ‘Oh, God, so close and yet so far.’
You used to see people in the tearoom on a Thursday night, say goodbye to them – ‘See you Monday’ – and on Monday morning you’d turn on the radio and they’d defected. They came within a whisker of forming the second-biggest party.
Mr Straw defied the opinion polls to hold his seat in 1983 and returned to the long slog of opposition – a time he says was made bearable mainly because he began to get satisfaction both professionally and in his private life:
I was lucky because I was advancing up the greasy pole – even though one felt the pole being pulled down into a swamp.
Our children were young [and] at the time I was pretty thankful that although I was on the front bench, and from ’87 in the shadow Cabinet, the responsibilities were much less.
The hours strangely … meant I could see the children in the morning, and quite often go home and then come back in the evening. So I used to take them to school, I did the doctors, the school assemblies.
The dissatisfaction returned however in 1992, after yet another election loss. Mr Straw came close to standing down, but was talked around by an old school friend who pointed out that he never knew what might be around the corner. What turned out to be around Mr Straw’s corner following the sudden and shockingly unexpected death of John Smith, the party’s new leader, was promotion to the role of shadow Home Secretary. By then, two men who had come in at the election after him, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, were making waves in the party. But Mr Straw insists he was not envious that it was they who were considered the obvious choice for the top two jobs:
After the ’92 election really I thought I was going to chuck it in. By that stage I was forty-five. I just thought, ‘Cripes, I’ve given up the best years of my life to the party. Maybe it’s time to go back to the Bar or go do something else. Maybe this simply ain’t going to work for me.’
John Smith dying was extraordinary. The night before we’d been at this fundraiser for this party where John Smith had said all he wanted was the chance to serve. I think he, as he did many nights, overindulged. And died. He was only fifty-six – no age at all.
Having then this pure chance of a change in leadership and Tony Blair becoming leader completely changed my prospects.
What I felt about Tony and Gordon was obviously that they were extremely talented. But also that, it was more obvious with Gordon, both of them were hungry for the job, and you have to be really hungry to get the job. And for a variety of reasons I wasn’t that hungry.
I didn’t really harbour that much of an ambition. I harboured an ambition to be in the Cabinet obviously, but not to be leader. I don’t think I felt a sense of envy of them [Blair and Brown] because at that stage I wasn’t certain I could have done the job of Leader of the Opposition.
I always had this inner idea that if someone came along to me and said, ‘You can be Prime Minister, Mr Straw, all you have to do is sign this form’, that I could have done the job OK. I wasn’t certain I would be able to do in real life what you need to do to get there, which is to be Leader of the Opposition, which is far and away the worst job in British politics.
I was never particularly close to Gordon. I had much greater fellow-feeling with Tony.
Tony asked me to be his campaign manager, partly because I’d not been particularly identified with him until then. I kept out of camps. I was Labour rather than being this camp or that camp. I was never directly associated as a Blairite or a Brownite, although I was closer to Tony; I tried to be my own man.
The following seven years were Mr Straw’s most rewarding time in politics, as, continuing Blair’s mantra of ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’, he saw off what he describes as the ‘pseudo-left’ view of law and order policies.
With a good three years to figure out what he wanted to do, when he got into government in 1997 he had the satisfaction of implementing his entire agenda before he was promoted to the Foreign Office in 2001:
That period was I think intellectually the most stimulating period I’ve ever spent in politics. For me it was intellectual liberation, we were able to talk about things that we hadn’t been able to talk about for years.
The Labour Party had been hobbled by this pseudo-left stuff about ‘you have to be nice to offenders’. [But] it does affect poor people, it affected us in our block, so push off.
Although he had expected to be made Home Secretary, he and his family were given a rude awakening to the full repercussions of what that meant on election night 1997 when ‘suddenly there were armed police in the garden’.
Those guards would remain with the family for the next thirteen years – a period that would involve highs and lows for his wife Alice and their two children, William and Charlotte.
One of the highs for the children was being taken along by their father when he was formally appointed to the post:
I went in the front door – you’re kept hanging around in the lobbies of Downing Street, pushed in little rooms as other people were dealt with. Then when [I saw] Tony, he said, ‘I’m going to make you Home Secretary.’ I said, ‘Thank you very much.’
He came out into that lobby and there were William and Charlotte and he said: ‘I’ve made your dad Home Secretary.’
[Charlotte] was fourteen, poor kid. It was a lot to cope with. [She] was at an inner London comprehensive school … and, just like that, Dad’s in an armoured vehicle with two large detectives and there are two big policemen with guns outside our house.
As Home Secretary, Mr Straw introduced ‘shed-loads of legislation on the ying and the yang side’, by which he means those laws welcome to the pseudo-left, such as the Human Rights Act and Freedom of Information Act, and those that were suitably ‘tough on crime’, including tackling anti-social behaviour and youth justice reform.
He is proud of getting the Terrorism Act onto the statute books before 9/11, of the RIPA law (the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act) and the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry.
By 2001, after Labour’s second election victory, he was looking forward to pastures new. And was again completely shocked by what proved to be around the next corner: