It seems somewhat apt that on the way to see the home secretary, Progress finds itself briefly detained by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate. Having been picked up from parliament’s central lobby by Alan Johnson’s adviser, a police officer stops us in our tracks when we reach the corridor leading to the secretary of state’s private study. The only person permitted to escort us there is the home secretary himself, we are told. Fortunately, Johnson – living up to his down-to-earth, man of the people image – comes to collect us.
It is the week following Patricia Hewitt and Geoff Hoon’s call for a secret ballot of MPs on the Labour leadership, and the day after a crucial PLP meeting at which Gordon Brown sought to rally backbench support and outline the party’s electoral strategy.
The man frequently tipped as a potential Labour leader is unafraid to talk about the so-called ‘snow plot’, claiming that, while ‘we could have done without it’, the ex-cabinet ministers’ stated aim – to sort out the leadership issue once and for all – has been fulfilled. ‘It was in a way a catalyst for moving off the leadership issue.’
Johnson continues, that even for those people who might wish to place a new occupant in No 10, the time to do so wasn’t now.
‘The time to get rid of your football manager, if the club’s not succeeding, is in the close of season or as results get bad, it’s not to do it at half-time. No manager has ever been sacked at half time. We are at half time in the electoral cycle, coming up to the general election.’
Johnson gives short shrift to a newspaper poll showing that Labour had lost ground following the latest challenge to Brown’s authority. Indeed, the home secretary believes the episode may ultimately boost public support for the Labour leader. ‘Gordon’s ratings haven’t been good, but there is a respect for Gordon and a recognition of his abilities, and I think there was a feeling that actually this was unfair. The British public don’t like people being stabbed in the back.’
Talking of polls, Johnson refuses to be disheartened by a Tory lead that has been hovering around the 10-point mark. He insists that ‘of course we can win the election’. ‘Just think of the poll ratings when we were ahead running up to the election in 1992 – there’s all kinds of parallels for the position we’re in. We’re not 20 points behind, or 15 points behind – we’re in winnable territory.’
Asked whether Labour’s poll problem was down to a failure to get across our message, Johnson replies: ‘We’d be deluding ourselves if we thought our problems was just that we’re not communicating properly. The Thatcher government, when they were becoming unpopular, the Major government, were thinking “actually everything we’re doing is right, we’re just not communicating it properly”.’ But he does acknowledge that Labour has done ‘some things that we have to accept we didn’t do brilliantly. We’ve been in government for almost 13 years, you can’t pretend that everything we’ve done over that period is absolutely spot on.’ He suggests anti-social behaviour as an area ‘we’ve cruised a bit on’ but he also warns against ignoring our record altogether – ‘if the public feel we have failed for the past 13 years they’re not going to pay too much attention to our vision for the next 10 years.’
Johnson suggests that the Conservatives’ campaign strategy is to convince the public that ‘they’ve changed and we’ve failed’. He’s ‘rankled’ by the suggestion that Labour has failed: ‘In my constituency since 1997, after 18 years of the Tories, 20% of kids left school with five good GCSEs. Now it’s 64%.’ He continues, ‘If you look at health and you remember two-year waiting lists and 24-hour waits on the trolley in A&E, and actually eight years people waited for a cataract, a simple cataract operation.’
The home secretary is also irked by David Cameron’s accusation that Labour has presided over a widening in the gap between rich and poor, branding the Tory leader’s figures ‘distorted and selective’. He cites a 2008 report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development showing the UK had done more than any other OECD country to tackle income inequality. ‘If you look at those statistics, at the bottom 10% against the top 10% and look at how their earnings went under Thatcher and look how they’ve gone under us … there’s a remarkable contrast,’ Johnson says.
Johnson believes that Cameron’s Conservatives are now reverting from their hoodie-hugging, pro-environment emphasis back to a recognisably Thatcherite agenda. ‘If you look at three things that were remarkable about Thatcher: she thought you could run the national economy like a household budget – that’s the Tory approach now; she was vehemently anti-Europe – that hasn’t changed on iota, given who they’re shacked up with; and saying our problem is big government – which is something Cameron is talking about all the time.’
Johnson is at pains to point out that the Tories’ home affairs policies – for example, an immigration cap, elected police commissioners and incorporating police into border controls – are lifted straight out of the notoriously reactionary 2005 manifesto (‘that Cameron wrote’). Puncturing Tory attempts to flatter Cameron with comparisons to Barack Obama, the home secretary says the cap on immigration was a policy adopted by George W Bush, and an unworkable one at that, having been breached seven times in the US.
Cameron’s refusal to name a figure at which immigration should be capped makes it impossible to have a meaningful debate, Johnson says. ‘Is it going to be so high it’s meaningless or is it going to be so low it damages our economy?’
‘With us, it’s not a cap – we’ve closed the door to unskilled people coming into this country from outside the European Economic Area. It’s not a set figure – it’s none.’
Johnson admits that Labour needs to do more to communicate what it has done on migration, pointing out that ‘50% of the population don’t know we’ve got a points-based system’. ‘MPs get letters saying “what we ought to do here is what they’ve done in Australia”. Well, we did that two years ago.’
Johnson argues that policies such as the introduction of e-borders, which will enable every movement into and out of the UK to be tracked by 2014, and ID cards for foreign nationals, demonstrate the UK has probably the most sophisticated border defence and tracking systems. ‘But the public hasn’t caught up with that, and certainly our political opponents and our opponents in the media deliberately talk about our open-door policy. We haven’t got an open-door policy but they keep saying it, as if the more they say it the more it will prove to be true.’
So does Johnson think that class-based attacks will be effective in dissuading voters from voting Tory? The home secretary is at pains to distance himself from the idea that he was part of an attack on class: ‘What I pointed out was that 64% of the shadow cabinet were educated at public school, that 90% of them were men and that a large wodge of them were millionaires. I pointed that out because on their website they mention the education of the ones who didn’t go to public school, so they know what this is about, and it’s not about a class war. I said right from the beginning – and I’ve probably got more right to say it than anyone else – Cameron had as much control over where he was born as I had. You cannot attack someone over their background or which school they went to.’
But Johnson is unapologetic about looking ‘at the Tories to see if they’ve really changed’. He says: ‘Cameron set out to create a different type of Conservative party’ but suggests instead ‘they’ve regressed away from the leadership of people like Heath and Hague. The last Etonian to lead them was in 1963.’ Referring to the Bullingdon Club dominance at the top of the Tory party, he jokes that he once sat on ‘the central committee of the Slough amalgamated branch of the CWU.’ ‘If three of us had ended up as the mayor of London, the chancellor of the exchequer, and the prime minister, people would say “that’s remarkable”‘, Johnson remarks. ‘The Bullingdon Club’s a much smaller clique and elite’ and if you are trying to decide whether ‘the Tory party has changed or not … it suggests that they haven’t’.