What did you learn from your time as Neil Kinnock’s chief of staff and how different is Labour now than it was then?
The most important thing is that the party is strongest when it works together and that applies to all parts of the party – MPs, councillors, affiliated trade unions, party branches. The party changed a great deal over the period from when Neil became leader in 1983 to when he finished being leader in 1992. If we compare 1992 and now, I suppose the single most important change of experience was of being in government. The problems of being in government are much more difficult than the problems of being in opposition. If you’re a reforming government, trying to make changes, that imposes problems and issues at every turn. It’s much more difficult to get unity when you are making changes. I think that developments like the National Policy Forum structure have achieved a much better dialogue about a process of change than we had before 1992, although a great deal has to be done to make it better.
Did you ever consider giving up politics in 1992?
I did for a short period, mainly because I was absolutely fed up with many aspects of politics. But fairly quickly I came to the view that I wanted to be involved, so I started looking for parliamentary seats. However, unlike some people, I never thought it was automatic that we would win the next election after 1992. I think it needed the leadership of Tony and Gordon to make that happen.
What else, other than their leadership, was important to making the party electable?
I think leadership is the single most important thing in politics, as the Conservatives are discovering at the moment. I think Tony and Gordon offered that leadership. The particular incidents down the track like Clause 4 have their own role, but I don’t think any of them were particularly significant as such. I think the most important thing was the direction that was being followed. The slogan ‘new Labour’ was about saying that Labour was different in some respects from its past. However, that wasn’t itself crucial.
How have you found the shift from being an aide to being an MP?
When I was working for Neil obviously I didn’t speak publicly. I’d been used to putting forward my arguments back in student politics and as a councillor in Hackney. It’s always difficult for anybody who is an aide having to keep their own counsel. I enjoyed it when I became an MP for that reason.
What did you think of the press’ view that the 1997 new intake were over-loyal automatons?
I thought that was a complete and utter slur. I also hate the ‘Blair’s babes’ phrase in the same way. The women MPs that were elected in 1997 were almost all outstanding individuals in their own right. Our new MPs were conscious, as they rightly should be, of the dangers of division for any political party. But that’s not to say that they weren’t active and engaged. When I was a minister I had a lot of very strong discussions with political colleagues who thought we were wrong.
So members shouldn’t just judge our MPs on the basis of whether they rebel in the House?
I’ve always voted with the leadership and I’ve done that out of practice unless there’s some immense issue that means that you have to break. You can achieve more by forcefully arguing in private.
As you did over the lone parent benefit cut?
Well, in the lone parent benefit case the question for me was: is it more effective to make the change by staying on board in voting terms and making the arguments within the tent or going outside the tent? That’s a judgement every politician has to make according to each particular circumstance.
How did you find your time as a departmental minister?
I felt that the civil service in general, with a few exceptions, was very, very unwilling to manage projects. They saw themselves principally as policy advisers, not as people to manage the process of political change, and were very, very unwilling to have dialogue with people outside that particular area and other government departments or with other organisations and the private sector.
Do you think people who said we achieved little in the first term need to be more aware of how difficult change is to achieve?
I don’t accept that little was achieved. However, I do believe that we have not been anything like effective enough in explaining, not just to the Labour Party, but more generally, that the process of change is a long and complicated one. The frustration about the need to deliver was largely because we didn’t explain strongly enough in the first parliament how the process of change took place.
Will your appointment improve this or just fuel those criticisms of centralisation levelled at the Prime Minister?
I think two things. First, I think my appointment is specifically intended by the Prime Minister to develop partnership between the government and all parts of the party. Second, what the Prime Minister is signalling is an absolute determination to ensure that we do deliver on our key policy agendas. That’s what he’s trying to signal and if people see it as centralisation, I lack some sympathy with that. I agree that services have to be locally delivered, but we need to be ruthless in ensuring the quality of those services is good enough.
How much of your new role is going to be about the presentation of government policy and the delivery of policy across Whitehall and how much to do with the connections between the party and the government?
I think they are very related. People elected the Labour Party, they didn’t elect the Labour government. So the question then arises: how can each part of the party contribute to delivering on the government’s objectives? In great national institution, like the health service or the education system, it’s not simply a question of government ministers pulling the switch. The government may have to change some aspects of its agenda when the party is in discussion with it. Party members want to be active participants and I say that they should be.
When there’s tension between party and government, which will you represent?
Well, that’s probably a tension I hope won’t happen. I’m appointed to the cabinet by the Prime Minister. The party will make its representations – through the General Secretary, the Chair of the party, the NEC and all the other vehicles – in exactly the same way as has always been the case.
What do you think the failings were, in terms of handling that relationship between the party and the government, in the first term?
I think there wasn’t sufficient dialogue in every respect and I think the Prime Minister was the first to say so. I think we have to ensure that the party is seen as supporting its various constituent parts, rather than requiring them to behave in certain ways. In the first term everyone was acutely conscious of the dangers of division because that was the history of our party and also the reason why the Tories had come unstuck.
Do you think we downplayed our radical achievements too much for fear of alienating ‘middle England’?
I’ve heard that argument but I don’t actually think it is true. We weren’t frightened to say that we had made changes to the environment of estates, the crime on estates, the poverty on estates or through policies such as the Working Families’ Tax Credit. Maybe we didn’t make the message coherent enough to really sell it. But I don’t think it was because we were frightened. Maybe we weren’t as confident as we needed to be about what we had actually achieved.
Why won’t we talk about redistribution and narrowing the gap between rich and poor?
It’s very easy to fall into the trap of saying that to make the poorest wealthier, you simply take wealth off the richest and give it to the poorest. Simple arithmetic indicates that it doesn’t work. What you have to do is get public services, particularly the education system, really delivering for people who are the poorest, as well as the direct input of money. I mean the money that’s gone in to pensions, the Minimum Income Guarantee, the minimum wage and so on. These are direct financial support for the poorest in society and it’s that direct financial support that’s a very effective way of helping people.
Do you think we did enough in the election to win support for Labour’s values and policies?
In one sense, by definition, we did do enough if our objective was to win the election. I think the leadership did say a lot, but the fact that people feel that we didn’t indicates we didn’t succeed in getting that across enough. There’s a real problem here, which is the more that we pointed out how much we have done, the more we played into the idea that we were complacent and arrogant and not listening to people’s actual experience.
Do you accept that many people are concerned about the government’s plans to involve the private sector in the delivery of public services?
There are a lot of things that have to be done to reform our public services. We have to build team approaches. We’ve got good partnerships in some services but not in others and we have to really work on getting joined up delivery. The talk of greater private sector involvement has taken on a massive significance but is misunderstood. The example I give was when I was given the job of trying to get the national grid for learning into schools. All the computers were bought from private sector companies and the training was done by a number of different contractors: some of whom were purely private, some of whom who were purely public and some of whom were a combination. But it was controlled by the public sector. That massive managerial exercise was done in a way which involved the private sector a very great deal. I don’t know how we would have done it if we hadn’t used them. Does that all add up to privatisation? I don’t think it does. We are against that and it won’t happen. We are talking about examining, in the case of each service, where the private sector can help and whether it has got anything to offer. I think to conduct the debate as though it’s a great sell out of the public sector is the reverse of the truth.
Isn’t this issue an example of how you should try and win the party’s support for an idea before pursuing it?
I think that in a sense it’s got blown out of proportion by some ideologues. I’m not talking about the trade unions here. I’m talking about some of our political opponents such as the Socialist Alliance. The public sector has always used the private sector. If you’re talking about privatisation, meaning going to the private market, having shareholders, charging people to use the key services – that was what the Tories were about. We’re not about any of that. I think maybe, on a PR point, it got talked up too much in the general election campaign.
Some feel the manifesto didn’t reflect the results of the party policy-making process, that it was all written in Downing Street?
I think there’s an element of truth in that picture but I think it’s quite a caricature. I think the manifesto this time had more input from party members, through the National Policy Forum process, than has ever been the case in history. The manifesto in 1979 was literally drawn up by a group of people in Number 10 without any engagement from the party or the country at all. After 1983 Neil tried to develop a policy-making process – the Joint Policy Forums – which allowed more of an input from the party and that had some impact. This the first time it has happened in government and it’s moving forward. Is it working well enough? Absolutely not! There are big chunks of the party – CLPs, MPs, trade unions and local councillors – who don’t feel they have been sufficiently involved in the process. It’s part of my job to work harder and make sure that happens. But I don’t think we start from the basis of failure, I think we start from the basis of limited success.
After the furore over the selection of candidates in Wales and London, do you think we need to look again in terms of how we select candidates internally?
There are constitutional reforms being put to party conference this year which will establish a standard form of selection process so that it works better. I regard it as an important part of my job to look forward to the election contests that are going to take place and work back from that to ensure we have a proper candidate selection procedure in which everyone has got confidence and that’s what the constitutional amendments will do.
Would you accept that mistakes were made in the first term, for example over Ken Livingstone?
Certainly, the way the dialogue was conducted.
Will you support the review of Ken’s position before the next selection so we don’t end with a situation where we either have to put a candidate against him, with the expectation that we would lose, or not stand someone?
I think the current position, which is the five year position, is the right position. At the end of five years he can re-join.
How are you going to respond to criticism of your own appointment in terms of the fact that there is already a chair of the Labour Party?
There’s a constitutional position and there’s a political position. The political position is that I think it’s silly for people not to welcome the idea that the Prime Minister, through my appointment, specifically wants to improve dialogue between the party and the government. That was his motive and I think that’s right. As far as the narrow constitutional point is concerned, the current Chair is the chair of the NEC and the chair of the party conference and I stated two days after I was appointed that I have no desire to take on those roles. They should continue as they are now, they should be elected as they are now. I will be one of the Prime Minister’s three nominees for the NEC and the question of what title I have and how that operates is always a delicate question. There will still be a General Secretary in exactly the same way. I’m not challenging any of those structures and I don’ t think that would be desirabe and that is certainly not the Prime Minister’s intention.