Straw man: How to survive in politics and New Labour

IT’S conference week for the Labour Party and waiting outside Manchester’s historic Midland Hotel is a handy place for a bit of politician spotting.

Tristram Hunt, one of Labour’s rising stars, walks passed chatting away on his mobile phone, while in a coffee shop across the road Chuka Umunna, who’s been tipped as a future party leader, is engrossed in conversation. Veteran politician and activist Tony Benn then appears from round a corner sporting a rather natty-looking Russian hat and a couple of passers-by stop to do a double take, as many of us do when we recognise someone famous.

But it’s another Labour grandee I’ve come to see. At the age of 66, and having spent 13 long, and sometimes tumultuous, years at the top table of Government, Jack Straw is better positioned than most to comment on the trials and tribulations of running a country, and while some politicians who have held high office are content to slip slowly and readily into quiet retirement, he still has something to say.

Most political memoirs tend to be either badly written or as dull as dishwater but thankfully Straw’s autobiography – Last Man Standing: Memoirs of a Political Survivor – is neither. Straw, who appears in a sold-out event at the Ilkley Literature Festival tomorrow night, talks candidly about growing up as one of five children in a council flat, his battle with depression and the devastating loss of his first child at six days old.

He talks, too, about his political career, explaining the rationale behind his support for the war in Iraq and lifting the lid on the fierce rivalry between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

“I didn’t see any point in writing a memoir without being straightforward about my views and experiences. You have to pull your punches in some areas and I sought to be considered in my judgments about people, but I also thought it’s really quite important, as a matter of record, that people should know what it felt like to have these experiences,” he says.

You don’t survive more than a decade in government, including four years as Home Secretary and five as Foreign Secretary, unless you are a shrewd operator and Straw has repeatedly shown that he can bend with the political breeze, even when it whips up into a storm.

But the man widely regarded as one of our most distinguished politicians didn’t start out in life with a silver spoon in his mouth. Born in 1946, he came from what today might be termed a broken home – his parents divorced when he was young and he was raised by his mother. He did come from a politcal household – his father was imprisoned as a conscientious objector during the Second World War, while his grandfather was heavily involved with the trade unions. But it wasn’t until the 1959 General Election, when he went out delivering Labour Party leaflets, that he had his first real taste of politics.

He went on to study law at Leeds University in the mid-60s and during his time there became president of the Students’ Union. “I felt a sense of liberation at Leeds,” he says, “because it wasn’t so unusual to be on the left rather than the right and there was no snobbery. It was a very good place for me and it probably benefitted me more than if I had got into Oxbridge.

“It was a very exciting time, there was a lot going on in the world and Leeds United were doing very well. Although I watched more Rugby League up at Headingley because that was cheaper,” he says, smiling. “I learned the ability to run things, which is what you do in the Students’ Union.” He even made the front page of the Yorkshire Post when he was pictured as part of a group of “nasty lefties” who heckled the then Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, on the steps of Leeds Town Hall.

He went on to become Barbara Castle’s political adviser during Harold Wilson’s second government and then in 1979, at the age of 32, he became MP for Blackburn, a constituency he has served for the past 33 years. “Given that I’d had this fantasy of wanting to be an MP, to have come from a council estate and managed to do that was fantastic,” he says.

But if there was elation in reaching this long-harboured ambition, he couldn’t have envisaged his party being marooned in the political wilderness for the next 18 years. “I learned that you ignore the electorate at your peril. In the 1980s, there was a kind of institutional arrogance amongst some people in the Labour Party and some trade union leaders who thought they could shift the party to the left and take completely unattainable positions and that the public would elect us back into Parliament, because they didn’t like Margaret Thatcher, or John Major.

“It took a very long time for the penny to drop that the public wasn’t like that and while some people might not like 
Mrs Thatcher they were 
scared about us. That wasn’t 
to do with Neil Kinnock, who I thought was a really good leader of the Opposition, but it was to do with all the baggage we came with.”

That all changed in 1997, when Labour were swept to power. As one of the top Ministers Straw has faced plenty of tough decisions, none more so than making the case to go to war with Iraq.

“I believe the decision I took was the right one, at the time, based on the available evidence. But I pose the question in the book and answer it – whether if we knew then what we know now, would I have voted for the war? And the answer is of course not.

“The whole debate would have changed. But we didn’t know that and the great irony is Saddam Hussein had decided to do his very best to cover-up that he didn’t have WMDs [Weapons of Mass Destruction].”

He talks, too, about the rivalry between and Blair and Brown and in particular, the latter’s leadership failings.

“Tony knew how to be a leader and sadly we found that Gordon lacked that fundamental quality,” he says.

“Leadership involves intellectual qualities, which Gordon certainly had, but it also involves being able to organise and bring people together and gain their trust. You have to be able to cope on a day-to-day basis with the constant and multifarious demands on your time, to keep calm and a sense of perspective and some people can do it and some people can’t. Those of us who supported him found that he couldn’t really manage and I think the worst of it was he discovered that,” he says.

Straw ruminates over whether he should have challenged for the leadership when Blair stepped down. “I wouldn’t have won against Gordon. On the question of would I have liked to be Prime Minister? the answer is ‘yes’. But would I have liked all the hassle of getting there? The answer is ‘no’. In the end because I didn’t want it enough I didn’t stand.”

In 2010, he supported David Miliband during Labour’s leadership election with Andy Burnham as his second choice, hardly a ringing endorsement for the man who finally got the job, Ed Miliband. So does he now believe the younger brother is up to the job? “I liked Ed but I didn’t think he was ready for the job and for the first year I worried that I might be correct in that judgment, but in the last year I think he has hit his stride and found his voice.”

Looking back over his own career, he says that setting up and implementing the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry is his proudest political achievement. “There was nothing in our manifesto about that but it was of absolute profound importance and if I did just one thing that would be enough.”

On the downside is a review of the Hillsborough disaster he ordered in 1997 that failed to expose the police cover-up. “I regret the fact that it didn’t ‘get to the bottom of things’ which is what I thought it would do, and what I think the judge thought it would do. But it didn’t and the families have had to wait 14 years and that is a matter of great regret.”

Given everything he’s been through, though, would he embark on a political career if he was starting out again today? “Yes,” is his instant reply. “It’s full of risks, there are periods when it’s very disappointing and you have setbacks, but I feel fantastically lucky and really fulfilled as a result of what I’ve been able to achieve, far more than I thought I would. By the time I was at Leeds and became president of the union I thought I might be able to make a Labour MP, but I didn’t have an ambition beyond that.”

And how does he think history will look back on the Labour government of which he was such an integral part?

“There will always be a question mark over Iraq and, therefore, over Tony and me in particular. But in terms of our domestic record I think people will look back in a benign and approving way because we changed our society for the better.

“We changed the way black and Asian people were treated in our society, how gay and lesbian people were treated, how women are treated. We are light years away from where we were in the mid-90s and that’s because of a Labour Government. We also laid the ground for getting crime down, we made improvements in education and in the Health Service.”

As we wrap up he gets waylaid by one of the conference delegates eager to get a minute of his time. I leave him to it, but as I’m making my way out of the hotel a minute later I hear his voice from over my shoulder and he bounds over to shake my hand and thank me for my time.

You can view this simply as good manners or a savvy politician wanting to leave a good impression. Either way it’s a nice touch and in politics, as in life, it’s the little things that make all the difference.

• Last Man Standing: Memoirs of a Political Survivor, published by Macmillan, is out now at £20.