There were a few additional observations I wanted to add to my earlier review of Campbell’s fascinating diaries of the years he spent as Tony Blair’s press secretary, from 1994-2003.
One of the contentious policies the Starmer Government has been pursuing since the 2024 General Election is the levying VAT on the fees paid for private education. Campbell always was to the left of Blair on educational issues, advising him against sending his kids to the grant-maintained Oratory school, and he is a strong supporter of the current Government’s plans. This policy idea was originally floated in the early years of Blair’s leadership prior to him becoming Prime Minister – and when it came up he killed the idea stone dead without any debate. He considered it a tax on education and could not understand why any Government would even consider the idea. To him it was unthinkable. I mention this point simply to underline the fact that while the Starmer Government is obviously very far to the right of the policy positions taken during the Corbyn years, there remains some important differences between its policies and those of New Labour. Blair would never have countenanced something as radical as VAT on school fees – Starmer is pushing ahead with the idea despite a lot of well-resourced opposition and limited evidence that the policy is causing the party some electoral damage. In other words he is probably doing it because he believes it is the right thing to do, not simply because it is politically expedient.
The second point that I originally overlooked is an exchange Campbell shares (page 101) between himself and Mo Mowlam, at the time a shadow minister for Northern Ireland, who was to go on to play a key role in the Good Friday Agreement. At the time the Labour Party, still in opposition, was rocked by Harriet Harman’s controversial decision to send her children to grammar school. Campbell’s role as always was to ensure all Labour MPs stayed on-message and defended the party line, whatever their personal feelings on the issue. He recounts his version of events:
“We were still struggling to get anyone to defend her (Harman) on TV, but eventually I persuaded Mo to do it, only half jokingly saying that if she didn’t I’d reveal her stepchildren were at a public school.”
This is horrendous. A Shadow Minister is forced to go on television to defend a position she doesn’t agree with because otherwise a party official will expose damaging information about her family to the media. This isn’t a half-joke, it’s blackmail. The fact that Campbell thought it acceptable to include in this book – presumably to show how far he was prepared to go to support Blair – is appalling, and makes one wonder what dark arts and deviousness were left out.
Finally, during the 2024 general election campaign it was hard to find a single commentator not referring to Labour’s ‘ming vase’ campaign strategy. The phrase was used so relentlessly that it almost lost all meaning, so I was struck by the fact that the phrase is first recorded in these diaries. It isn’t just an echo of the New Labour strategy, it is the New Labour strategy.
“TB told me about his last dinner with Roy Jenkins at Derry’s….” I see you Tony, as someone carrying an exquisite, beautiful. hand-painted vase over a slippery floor and as you proceed across the floor, vase in hand, you can see your destination and you can see the likes of Harriet Harman and Clare Short lunging towards you, and you don’t know whether to run or tiptoe”.
In this original version of the strategy, it’s not the leadership who are going to drop the vase – instead they might have it struck from their hand by outspoken or clumsy Shadow Ministers or party spokespersons. So the strategy is not simply one of taking no risks, but also of shackling any Shadow Ministers seen as likely to say something out of turn. Roy Jenkins was a progressive Labour Cabinet Minister in the sixties and seventies, but had done his best to destroy the party in the eighties by setting up the SDP (which was to eventually merge with the Liberal Party to form the Liberal Democrats). You can interpret the fact that Blair adopted him as one of his senior (albeit unofficial) advisors as either evidence of Blair’s willingness to think outside the box and break rules, or of his innate conservatism.
The diaries were a mine of interesting insights such as this into both the Blair years themselves and their reflection in what might one day be called the Starmer years. Or maybe not.
I don’t think there is any question that Alastair Campbell’s obituary when it comes to be written will focus on the events of the last few weeks of this diary. For any readers for whom this is history rather than current affairs, a short summary: Alastair Campbell was Tony Blair’s press spokesman from shortly after Blair became leader of the Labour Party through the first two New Labour governments. He developed a fearsome reputation as a defender of the Government. The verb ‘to spin’ might have existed before Campbell and New Labour, but it came into common currency during those years. To give you some idea of Campbell’s reputation, all you need to know is that the character Malcolm Tucker from The Thick of It was based upon him.
After 9/11 America, led by George W Bush, was determined to depose Saddam Hussein. The premise for this attack was that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), or the capability to develop such weapons. Tony Blair was unshakeable in his support for Bush and the issue became a deep dividing line within British politics. To support the case for war a file of intelligence briefings (a dossier) was produced, purporting to demonstrate that Hussein had WMDs. A BBC report claimed that Campbell had interfered with the drafting of the report and ‘sexed’ it up, over-stating the strength of the evidence. Dr David Kelly, a government scientist who had allegedly leaked information on the dossier to the BBC ended up taking his own life. A judicial inquiry into these events, the Hutton inquiry exonerated Campbell but the accusation has stuck, primarily because it seems the sort of thing that Campbell would have done.
Campbell has spent more than twenty years trying to rebuild his reputation, but I suspect he will always be haunted by this accusation. The Blair Years is the first of what is by now a series of eight volumes of his extremely detailed diaries – over 750 pages covering 1994-2003, around a sixth of the total words written contemporaneously. The obvious question is to what extent these diaries have been edited or selected to present a positive view of Campbell and his role in New Labour, and specifically to exonerate him from the WMD accusations? It would be astonishing if not almost impossible to edit down that volume of writing without any element of spin. Choices must have been made, inevitably with the intention of presenting Campbell and Blair in the most positive light. Even if Campbell wasn’t such a notorious exponent of the art of spin, some recasting of events must have happened. I am possibly being naïve but I choose to think that this is a reasonably honest version of events. Campbell saw himself as a leading figure in the Blair administrations, more a chief of staff than a press officer. He was at the heart of the New Labour project, even if on some issues he found his personal views to the left of Blair. An early instance of this is when he tries and fails to persuade Blair not to send his children to a grant-maintained school, which went on to be a bit of a PR disaster for him.
Most of the time there is little effort made to provide context to the events being described – footnotes are few and far between – so the reader either needs to be familiar with the events or spend a fair amount of time flicking back and forth to Wikipedia. The overall effect is of a real-time account of several significant moments in recent British history, such as the death of Princess Diana, the foot and mouth crisis, and the British reaction to 9/11 leading through to the Gulf War. Throughout, Campbell’s portrait of Blair is consistent: he was a reforming Prime Minister often out of step with his party but driven by faith in the rightness of his own views, determined to reform institutions (such as the House of Lords) and with a broad interest in social justice. Campbell himself is by contrast more a traditional party man. The cast of supporting characters is large. John Prescott comes across as a surprisingly likeable ally, while Campbell makes little attempt to disguise his contempt for others such as Clare Short. The effect of some parts of the diaries is to confirm public perception of Labour figures – Peter Mandelson is undoubtedly Machiavellian, Gordon Brown is prone to outbursts of anger, and so on – there aren’t many revelations about politicians secret lives. Perhaps this is because so many other memoirs have been published. What was at the time an insight into what really happened – such as the story of Robin Cook breaking up with his wife on the way to the airport because a tabloid was about to expose his affair (a story sometimes presented as Campbell instructing Cook to divorce his wife) are now well known and all these diaries do is confirm them.
Campbell isn’t over-burdened by humility. Early on he becomes excruciatingly convinced Princess Diana is attracted to him. The Secretary General of NATO is quoted as saying in the context of the conflict in Kosovo “If you can, send me your man Campbell, that would be best“. He becomes good friends with Bill Clinton and George W Bush. I suppose everyone is the hero of their own stories.
While some of the narrative feels like ancient history, other sections bear strikingly similarities to the political situation today – a reforming Labour Government with a large majority after a long period of Conservative rule; a hostile media; cynical anti-politics agenda being pursued by the right-wing; Europe as always a divisive issue. Even electoral reform and changes to the House of Lords are back on the agenda. So these diaries should probably be studied by the new Labour Government. If they were to do so what lessons would they derive?
First, the Conservatives must not be under-estimated. They will be back, and the time to cement Labour’s position as the party of Government is now, not in five years time. The next Conservative Prime Minister may not yet be an MP (Cameron was not an MP when Blair was elected; Starmer was not an MP when Cameron was elected) but they aren’t one of Europe’s oldest political parties for nothing.
Second the media will be unrelentingly hostile and the Government needs to decide what it is going to do about that. What we mean by the media has obviously changed since 1997 with the advent of Facebook etc, but the right-wing tabloids are still stubbornly there and will not miss a chance to undermine the Government.
Thirdly major crises seem almost unavoidable. Whether it is the death of Princess Di, foot and mouth disease, the oil delivery drivers strike (first term) or 9/11 and the Gulf War (second term) and the global economic crisis (third term) there are going to be testing times ahead.
Is the portrait of Campbell that emerges from these diaries accurate? For example is his reputation for quite aggressive ferocity justified? I wanted to quote at length a description Campbell gives of a shouting match between himself and Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchequer (page 528) during the 2001 general election campaign. Brown had long been concerned about the negative impact of briefings by Peter Mandelson, who had been sacked twice from Cabinet positions:
“I went over to see GB in his office….and he was banging away at his computer. He had a pile of papers to the right and on the top had written 75 pence and below it, in large black letters, ‘who will silence Mandelson?’ ….
I tried to make a joke of it, but he was having none of it, went on a great tirade, said we were letting him destroy the campaign, undermine him, be ill-disciplined, on and on he went and eventually I lost it, said PM was nothing to do with me and I did not like the implications that I could be held responsible one way or the other for what he was or was not up to. “Well it has to stop” he said. “Telling me it has to stop suggests that in some way I might be responsible, and I fucking resent that….(continues at some length) I was suddenly conscious that I was jabbing my finger at him, and thought it better to leave.”
This is extraordinarily unprofessional conduct, but it seems there were no consequences for Campbell for swearing and shouting at the second most senior member of the Government. The word suddenly is revealing here – if the description can be taken at face value, he seems genuinely not to have realised he was shouting and being aggressive towards Brown for most of the exchange. If he treated the Chancellor of the Exchequer like this, what was he like with junior members of staff and journalists? Of course we don’t need to ask because there are multiple accounts of his behaviour. So yes, he was aggressive and either didn’t know or care that people were often genuinely scared of him.
Just one other thing I noticed: the back cover of the paperback edition includes the following quote from Matthew Parris, the Times columnist and former Conservative MP
“A brilliant, absorbing account….These diaries….will be gasped at, and relied upon, for decades to come. Buy them; they will suck you in”.
I was surprised to read this endorsement when Mr Parris himself appears only once in these diaries (page 308) as “The little shit Parris“.
One wonders what qualifications were hidden by the ellipses?
For Labour Party supporters in the UK, the wounds of the 2019 General Election (and the equally disastrous local and European elections earlier that year) are still pretty raw. 2017 raised hopes that a significant left-ward shift in UK politics was possible. The journey from highs of 40% in the polls and the strains of “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” at Glastonbury in 2017 to the losses of the Red Wall – possibly for a generation – and brutal defeat in 2019 was a collapse in slow time that looking back on is hard to bear. Revisiting the painful recent history of the end of the Corbyn era might even seem masochistic. But there are some important lessons for the Party which it needs to take on board more than ever as we start to navigate the post-Covid landscape, with a General Election widely forecast to be less than two years away, and with the Party still consistently lagging behind the Tories in the opinion polls.
Left Out was written by Pogrund and Maguire, two political journalists, in the aftermath of the 2019 election, and is based on hundreds of interviews with many of the key participants of the troubled period of the Party’s recent history. It specifically focusses on the 30-month period between the 2017 and 2019 elections. Although initially published in 2020, this edition was updated in summer 2021 with an epilogue covering the months after Jeremy Corbyn’s departure from the leadership of the Labour Party, touching briefly on the start of the pandemic, publication of the EHRC’s report into anti-Semitism within the party and Corbyn’s subsequent suspension and loss of the whip.
With all histories, it’s hard to find a precise starting point. The roots of Labour’s electoral disaster in 2019 go back a very long way. But the decline from 2017 to 2019 was dramatic. Labour performed better at the 2017 general election than just about anyone expected, coming very close to deposing Theresa May and forming a Government, albeit one that would have not had a working majority, even with the support of the smaller parties. It had campaigned on a platform which included acceptance of the result of the 2016 Brexit referendum. Logic therefore suggests it was the party’s change of policy on Brexit, to support a second referendum, that was responsible for its historic defeat. Furthermore, as Keir Starmer was Shadow Brexit Secretary and therefore responsible for the change of policy, it seems fair to conclude that he was wholly responsible for the party’s losses.
Left Out makes it clear this analysis is overly simplistic. Firstly, most Labour gains in 2017 were in remain-leaning university towns and in London. It made almost no progress in what were to later be called the Red Wall seats. The 2019 local and European elections emphasised that for Labour to embrace Brexit in the way it had in 2017 would be electorally calamitous – polling later in August 2019 showed Labour losing dangerously high levels of votes to the Liberal Democrats due to its apparent equivocation on Brexit/second referendum. (A short personal anecdote might fit here. While canvassing during the European elections I asked a colleague who worked in the Leader of the Opposition’s office what we should say on the doorstep if asked about Brexit, which of course was bound to come up. His reply was “As little as possible”). The pollster’s forecast was that Labour would drop to 138 seats. As it turned out the 200 seats it did win was therefore strangely a relief – it could have been a lot worse. In many cases the intervention of the Brexit Party (mentioned only in passing in this text) served to peel just enough votes away from the Conservatives to allow the Labour candidate to escape with their seat (Ian Lavery’s seat in Wansbeck, Northumberland being a good example of this).
It’s always tempting to try to find a single, simple solution to a losing party’s problems, but I am as sure as I can be that once the UK voted to leave the EU there weren’t any pain-free options for Labour: support Brexit and lose votes to the Greens and Liberal Democrats; oppose Brexit and lose votes to the Brexit Party and the Conservatives; try to sit on the fence (which was Corbyn’s tactic for a long time) and lose votes to both. So re-fighting the 2019 election with different Labour positions on Brexit is always going to be a losing game. That’s not to say defeat of the scale we saw was inevitable – there were clearly many catastrophic mistakes made along the way.
The picture that emerges from the minutiae of the factional and personal battles within LOTO (Leader of the Opposition) and Party HQ in Southside is one of little more than chaos, to which Corbyn struggled to bring some kind of order. He had a number of trusted deputies who kept things afloat for him for as long as possible, but even that couldn’t last. Personal criticisms of Corbyn himself here are fairly muted – this definitely isn’t a hatchet job – but at the same time it is impossible to read this account without getting the impression that he was out of his depth. Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell’s relationship with Corbyn was central to the initial success of ‘The Project’, the euphemistic name given to the ambitions of Corbyn and his core group of supporters. Once that relationship began to fray it was probably the beginning of the end for The Project. McDonnell seems to have been gradually distanced from Corbyn, firstly over the ever-problematic issue of Brexit (McDonnell was an early enthusiast for a second referendum and for Labour supporting Remain, despite the many claims that this policy shift was solely down to Starmer’s influence) and then subsequently over the role of individuals in LOTO’s office.
Left Out’s detailed accounts of the left’s favourite pastime, Judean People’s Front-style factional warfare, introduces us to many characters who now sit on the sidelines of political life, throwing stones via twitter at Starmer’s remodelling of the party. Director of strategy and communications Seumas Milne, Chief of Staff Karie Murphy, and an array of other characters who fought one another as hard as the Tories while the UK imploded crowd the pages. At the centre of it all sits Corbyn himself, worshipped by his followers (some of whom seemed to have joined the Jeremy Corbyn Party rather than the Labour Party), loathed by others who happily took the short walk to political oblivion via Change UK/The Independent Group rather than stay one minute longer in the same party as him. If you are in either camp then this book isn’t going to change your mind. Being pro-or anti-Corbyn seems a redundant exercise given the finality of the outcome of the election.
Inevitably given the context, the history of the Labour party 2017-2019 is one of mis-steps and missed opportunities. Certainly the response to the Shripal poisoning was a horribly mis-handled. When the news of the poisoning broke Corbyn suggested that the toxic substance that the police had gathered from the scene be sent to Moscow for testing. John McDonnell’s response is recorded here as “That’s fucking going to cost us the election! That’s fucking stupid. Who the fuck does stuff like that?” Another even darker theme was the issue of antisemitism. The many allegations against both him personally and against his supporters seems to have caused Corbyn much personal grief, but the presence in the party’s membership of people who were insensitive at best and plainly anti-Semitic at worst, combined with the leadership’s apparent tolerance anti-Semites, was condemned by first Jewish community representatives and subsequently the EHRC investigation. To his most fervent supporters Corbyn’s response to the EHRC, suggesting that the extent of anti-Semitism in the Party had been exaggerated and weaponised by his opponents, was principled and correct; to most others outside this group it looked insensitive and stubborn.
In the unlikely event you are undecided about Corbyn’s fitness for high office then this book, despite the attempts to be even-handed, will not have convinced you that he was the right man for the job, whether it be leadership of the warring factions of the Labour Party, or Prime Minister itself. This is not a book that attempts to understand the phenomenon that was Corbynism but to chart its defeat. Whether you can do one without the other is a fair question. But it is important to acknowledge that the polite revolution Corbynism threatened was not just what happened in Westminster. Corbynism was always more than that. The thousands of people that rushed into the Labour party before and after his election as leader were predominantly driven by a desire to make politics less cynical and unkind than previously. They joined for the best reasons; one of the tragedies of 2019 is how many have now left the party.
Perhaps the authors spoke too soon when they wrote in their epilogue: “Keir Starmer won power [if leadership of the Labour Party can accurately be said to wield any power] by embracing Corbynism rather than repudiating it. The Project’s legacy is a Parliamentary left that can no longer be ignored. “ (360). There are those that interpret Starmer’s every move since taking over as Labour leader as part of a careful plan to move the party away from Corbynism – certainly events at Labour Party conference 2021 and immediately after would suggest that he is now ready to make that break more definitely than previously.
The Reading Bug 