I had not known that Bernard Donoughue was a junior minister in the opening period of Tony Blair’s premiership. The affable peer will always be best known for the part he played in the turbulent Wilson and Callaghan years, as the head of the No 10 policy unit – the subject of two earlier volumes of diaries. This third volume is an account of his return to the corridors of power.
Donoughue is quick to contrast his late-1990s ministerial backwater, as a parliamentary under-secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, with his former life at the heart of government. ‘It’s like shopping at Tesco after a lifetime at Harrods’, he says, complaining at the choice of government artwork available for his office walls, compared to the Constables and Gainsboroughs of old.
In the early months he provides the institutional memory and Whitehall know-how that his younger colleagues lack. But despite being aligned politically with Blair’s leadership he is an old-stager in a government where everything is ‘new’. His feelings about the prime minister veer back and forth, almost week by week, across 1997. He is dismissive in the early stages of the campaign, euphoric as Labour comes to power, and then by new year worrying about the decline of collective government and Blair’s personal protestations of integrity after initial scandals.
Earlier, in 1996, Donoughue unnerves Blair and his protégés by leading a cross-party Lords revolt to keep major sporting events on free television, raising the hackles of Rupert Murdoch (in the 1980s Donoughue had been sacked from his media empire and he relishes the fight). The peer makes a tongue-in-cheek joke to a Murdoch acolyte which causes offence, is told he must write an apology, and then ticked-off again when it is not sufficiently contrite. Donoughue assumes he has been passed over as a culture minister as a result, but it turns out that his appointment to MAFF is just part of the chaos of the reshuffle chessboard.
The gap between 1997 and today is now as long as the time separating Donoughue’s two periods in government and these diaries have the feel of history, not contemporary politics. Many of his preoccupations are from a different age: the advent of digital television, his support for fox-hunting, and Northern Ireland before the Good Friday agreement.
The political culture is also very different. How you react to Donoughue’s account of the life of an opposition spokesperson in the House of Lords will test whether your Roundhead or Cavalier instincts are stronger. This is a club-land world of elite social networking – a collision of business, media, the arts, politics and aristocracy (often at a race-course). After dinner with Conrad Black and a gaggle of high Tories, Donoughue writes somewhat defensively of his love of mixing and decries the tribal separateness of golf-club Tories, old Labour stalwarts and ‘sanctimonious’ Hampstead liberals. It now has the feel of an ancien régime. All the strengths and weaknesses of the Lords are on display. Readers will divide on whether Donoughue’s account is another exhibit in the case for its demise.
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Andrew Harrop is general secretary of the Fabian Society
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Westminster Diary: A Reluctant Minister Under Tony Blair
Bernard Donoughue
IB Tauris | 408pp | £25