Like most people engaged full-time in politics, I was ensnared as a teenager. I grew up in the three-car capital of Britain – Gerrards Cross, in South Buckinghamshire. I went to a prep school (where, for a term in the 1930s, John Betjeman had been the games master), then on to the local grammar school.
So it was perfectly natural that in 1986 I should join the Labour party.
Middle class people in the Labour party in the 1980s went to extra-ordinary lengths to disguise their origins. Great sartorial and linguistic crimes were committed in the name of socialism: dropped aitches, poorly fitting clothes, vague mentions of having gone to ‘college’ rather than ‘university’. When I ended up as chair of the Salford University Labour Club, Gerrards Cross was moved to ‘near London’, and I added ‘Dukes Wood Estate’ to my home address in the hope that people might think it a tough housing estate, rather than tree-lined avenues and six-bedroom homes with gravel driveways.
As George Orwell discovered before me, coming from the lower-upper-middle class conferred absolutely no advantages whatsoever in Labour and trade union circles. Coming from the south of England was bad enough, but to be southern, and middle-class, was to be partially responsible for every crime against the workers, from the Taff Vale Judgement, to the suppression of the peasants’ revolt.
Then, in the mid-nineties, Labour underwent an epiphany. A young man called Tony Blair (who had knocked on doors on my ‘estate’ as a by-election candidate in 1982) told our party some home truths about how to win elections. The one I liked best was that unless middle-class southerners voted Labour, the party would never again form a government in Britain. So almost overnight, Tony Blair turned me from someone to be viewed with suspicion for not being related to enough coal miners, to someone representing a demographic segment without which Labour would lose for the fifth time in a row.
Tony Blair told the Labour conference in 1996 about meeting a self-employed electrician polishing his Ford Sierra in his driveway: ‘His instincts were to get on in life. And he thought our instincts were to stop him.’ The Sierra Sparks soon became Mondeo Man. He came to represent the kind of voters Labour needed to win over: aspirational, ambitious, living south of the Watford Gap, and wouldn’t have been seen dead voting Labour. At the core of New Labour was a set of instincts and assumptions which came to chime with people who lived in Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, Sussex, Hampshire, Kent and Essex. People who were not in trade unions, who worked in offices, who enjoyed going on holiday, who wanted to live in big houses with gardens, who hadn’t yet opted out of state schools or the NHS, and who were more concerned about street gangs than nuclear weapons.
It is already hard to believe it, but after 1997 Labour had more MPs in London and the south east of England than in Wales. Half of Labour’s gains in 1997 were in the south. People elected Labour MPs in places such as Watford, Hemel Hempstead, Milton Keynes, Reading, St Albans, Chatham, Stevenage, Wimbledon, Brighton and even Hove, actually.
Even in 2005 we held seats across the south like:
Basildon (3,142)
Dartford (706)
Medway (213)
Chatham & Aylesford (2,332)
Gillingham (254)
Sitingbourne & Sheppey (79)
South Thanet (664)
Brighton Pavillion (5,030)
Brighton Kemptown (2,737)
Hove (420)
Reading West (4,682)
Watford (1,148)
Luton South (5,650)
Stevenage (3,139)
Harlow (97)
Crawley (37)
South Dorset (1,812)
The lessons from Labour’s abject failures in the 1980s and stunning successes in 1997, 2001, and 2005 are simple, and apply to Cameron as much as Brown. If you stand on a centrist, moderate, common sense political platform, which seems broadly aligned with the values of people in the south of England, as well as your heartlands, then you stand a chance of winning a parliamentary majority. If you allow your opponents onto the centre-ground, you have a real fight on your hands. If you vacate the centre-ground, then book those seats on the opposition benches because that’s where you’re heading.
It is unclear whether Labour has yet deserted the centre ground. Higher rates of tax are usually to governments what death-watch beetles are to antique dressers. Nationalising banks and railways is traditionally not a vote-winner in the home counties. ‘More council houses’ is not a slogan to inspire people in commuter towns struggling with the mortgage. At face value, Labour seems to have little to offer people who shop in Waitrose, play golf, belong to the National Trust and read the Times. The results of the Euros this year do not auger well. In the south-east region, Labour came fifth, behind the Greens, with under 10 per cent of the vote.
But these are strange times. The impact of recession and the parliamentary expenses meltdown may be felt in strange ways. Anger at the bankers, fear of unemployment, rising house repossessions: these things may convince people in the south of England that Gordon Brown is the man to lead them down the rocky path.
There’s no such thing as political science, only political chaos theory. Each election creates its own rules and traditions. But there is still an iron law which applies, and which should obsess us in coming weeks: lose the south, and you lose the country.