Whatever it Takes: The Real Story of Gordon Brown and New Labour. Steve Richards

       PREFACE

      From the beginning the New Labour project was deliberately evasive. The term ‘new’, first used by Tony Blair on the day he became leader, was both an early clue to what was to follow and a red herring. Who could oppose a force that was new compared with one that was old? Most of us would prefer a new set of clothes to the older ones, at least until we find out more about what the clothes are like. But beyond a superficial attraction, where did the evasive adjective lead? The term was apolitical, like so many of the adjectives that were applied with such misleadingly feverish energy in the years that followed the emergence of New Labour.

      The clue was the act of depoliticization. Newness was neither a quality on the left nor the right. The red herring was the notion that the adjective paraded with such a flourish conveyed clear direction, a party moving away from its past towards a ‘new’ future, forward not back, as the party put it in a slogan for the 2005 election. Blair relished the meaningless metaphor more than any other. ‘I do not have a reverse gear,’ he told his party conference in 2004. Actually he used that particular gear quite a lot, as all leaders do. But the image tells us nothing about the values of an individual or the party they lead.

      The apolitical adjectives were not alone. Most of the rows that attracted so much intense attention for more than a decade were over issues relating to ‘integrity’, eruptions of ‘temper’ and personal rivalries. These were appropriately apolitical rows for the depoliticized decade. Debates about integrity can be staged about any public figure. They do not take us very far in discovering where these figures come from and are trying to get to, beyond an uneasy sense that their adoption of an apolitical adjective in the first place was partly because they were not entirely sure where they were going as a political force either.

      The subsequent internal divide within New Labour blurred further the original evasion. Suddenly in the mid-1990s there were Blairites and Brownites springing up from nowhere in large numbers. The noun became an adjective, the adjective a noun. I would not have been surprised if I had heard a cue on an interview programme along the lines of: ‘Joining me now is the Blairite, Tony Blair.’ Both adjectives were applied a thousand a times a day in attempts to shed light. Most of the time they obscured while purporting to clarify. Was a Blairite someone who was merely loyal to Tony Blair? Was a Brownite someone who was personally loyal to Gordon Brown? Did a Blairite espouse a set of values and policies distinct from a Brownite’s? If so, what were they?

      The lack of clarification enabled the creators of New Labour to build up a big tent of support in the early years, as David Cameron and Nick Clegg sought to do when they formed their coalition after the election in 2010. Cameron and Clegg proclaimed a ‘new politics’, the ubiquitous fresh-faced adjective in place once more. New Labour. New Politics. The coalition was not