Peter Mandelson - The Third Man - Life at the Heart of New Labour

Before long there was a string of further setbacks, unlucky events and own-goals. The most serious involved our most difficult policy problem: defence. In 1986, Neil had gone to Washington, where he managed to deflect the embarrassment of failing to meet President Reagan by saying he’d be back before the election. Since our disarmament policy would commit a Labour government to breaking ranks with America and NATO, the last thing we needed was a tête-à-tête at the White House. I and others, including Shadow Foreign Secretary Denis Healey, tried to talk Neil out of going. He was insistent. He had said he would visit before the election. Not to do so would look weak. I was left to record in my diary the vain hope that Reagan would either fall ill, or for some reason be unable to find time for a meeting before the trip took place. The President was in robust health. When Neil arrived in the Oval Office the meeting was bad enough, with a series of predictably chilly exchanges. Then Reagan’s spokesman emerged with a politically damning account for reporters. He said the President had not even needed the allotted half-hour to tell Britain’s Labour leader that his policies would undermine the Western alliance. Even a friendly feature by one of our few supporters in the travelling press, the Mirror ’s Alastair Campbell, could not curb the damage. A Gallup poll at the end of the month had us not only trailing the Tories, by nearly ten percentage points, but in third place, behind the Liberal-SDP Alliance.

I did my best to put a positive spin on it. I phoned the Press Association’s man in the Commons, Chris Moncrieff, and portrayed Neil’s surprisingly resilient remarks after the White House snub as stage one in a carefully planned ‘April fightback’ ahead of the election campaign. There was no such plan, much less any sign of a fightback. But it was one of those phrases that somehow take on a life of their own. By mid-month, although the polls gave the Tories a widening lead, we were at least back in second place. I knew we could still fall back. Although I told reporters that the polls showed that we were ‘back on course, and contending for power’, I truly believed only the first of these claims. ‘What I really feel,’ I wrote in my diary one evening in April, ‘is that we are back on course to remain in existence.’

When the election was announced on the second Monday of May, with polling day set for 11 June 1987, I felt more confident than I had a few weeks earlier. From command central in Walworth Road, I found myself working eighteen-hour days to keep on top of every facet of the campaign: speeches and appearances by Neil and others; decisions on advertising, posters and party TV messages; how and what we were briefing to the media. Philip’s daily cull and analysis of the opinion data was indispensable. As the campaign hit the road, I was in constant contact by primitive mobile phone with Patricia and, at key moments, with Neil.

Our frontman at news conferences and briefings was Bryan Gould, who had succeeded Robin as the shadow cabinet’s campaign chief. Born in New Zealand, Bryan had studied at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, become a television presenter, and had gone into the Commons in 1974. We hit it off immediately. He was articulate, self-assured, quick-witted and very good company, and I soon became good friends with both him and his wife Gill. He was also a huge asset to the campaign. His encounters with the media were amazing to behold. Entering the room with a few hastily scribbled talking points, he seemed capable of answering even the least anticipated question with fluency and lucidity.

Our first few days were steady rather than spectacular. Though even that represented a huge advance over 1983, it did nothing to cushion the blow of the first opinion polls. In two of them, we were back in third place. But soon, our carefully primed campaign engine got up to speed. Neil did too. His breakthrough moment came at the Welsh Labour conference in Llandudno in mid-May. He had been up much of the night fine-tuning a speech on a theme he had often promoted: freedom and opportunity. The words were strong, the argument deftly made. But the speech did not really take flight until he launched into a passionate, personal broadside against unfairness in Britain. ‘Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university?’ he began. ‘Why is Glenys the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it because our predecessors were thick? Did they lack talent? Those people who could sing, and play, and recite and write poetry; those people who could make wonderful, beautiful things with their hands? Those people who could dream dreams, and see visions? Was it because they were weak – those people who could work eight hours underground, and then come up and play football? Does anybody really think that they didn’t get what we had because they didn’t have the talent, or the strength, or the endurance, or the commitment?’ Of course not, he said. ‘It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand!’ There were not the conditions that allowed people who were free under British law truly to live that freedom.

Even watching on the TV at Walworth Road, I felt the power of his words. I knew that Neil on this form – genuine, spine-tinglingly eloquent, and speaking on the kind of social issues where the Tories were most vulnerable – would be key to the campaign. The imperative was to improve his connection with voters. We had already decided that our first broadcast of the campaign would focus on him. We had put it in the hands of a remarkable film-maker, the Chariots of Fire director Hugh Hudson. I’d first met Hugh the previous summer. He was one of a number of talented figures who wanted to do what they could personally to help revive and modernise Labour. Through the first part of the 1980s, such approaches had been routinely rebuffed or ignored. Eager to get Hugh involved, I asked him to produce a video of the autumn party conference. It was powerful, subtle, engaging, and perfectly captured the new ‘red rose’ image we were trying to bring to the party.

Before the campaign started, Patricia and I asked him to turn his artistry to Neil, in a party political broadcast. The aim was to confront his media image as weak, woolly and indecisive, and to project his personal and political strengths. When I first saw what Hugh had come up with, at a late-evening screening two days before it aired, I knew it had done the job. The media dubbed it ‘Kinnock: the Movie’. It opened with a fighter jet morphing into a seagull above the bluffs of south Wales. Using footage from interviews we had Alastair Campbell do with Neil, his family and leading party figures, Hugh created a portrait of a leader whose bedrock beliefs drove him to help others, and who had the determination and strength to turn his beliefs into action. The film segued into his assault on Militant at the 1985 conference. The climax was built around the Llandudno speech. The final scene showed Neil and Glenys walking hand-in-hand along the seacoast. It was breathtaking. The only question was what words we would put up at the end. Usually, it would be the campaign slogan or the Labour logo. When the screening was over I turned to Betty Boothroyd, a sympathetic NEC member and future Speaker of the Commons, who had wandered in to watch. She said, gratifyingly, that she had loved it. ‘What about ending the film with something besides the word “Labour”?’ I asked her. ‘Would it work to just put “Kinnock”?’ She agreed. Later, I would be criticised by some of her NEC colleagues for ‘personalising’ the campaign. I was guilty as charged. Amid all our policy ‘negatives’, Neil was one of our few potential positives.