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

Still, in the end, as Private Eye put it, we had achieved a ‘brilliantly successful election defeat’. The feeling that weighed most heavily on me was that when the votes were counted, we had lost. Again. The sense of frustration and failure gnawed at me in the days, weeks and months that followed as I contemplated what Labour’s third straight defeat meant for the party’s, and my, future. The reasons we had lost were clear. I singled out ‘the three Ds: Deirdre, defence and disarray’. However alluringly alliterative, that told only part of the story. To have any hope of getting back into government, we would have to completely revisit the range of policies where we were simply, fatally, out of touch with the electorate: unemployment and health, education, crime, and of course economics, finance and taxation.

The election result also taught me something else. It was about people’s feelings and beliefs, and how they projected these onto those who stood for the highest office. The electorate intensely disliked many aspects of the Labour Party. As for Neil Kinnock, while people felt that he was right to stand up to the hard left, to reform Labour and make its policies more centrist, they also had a feeling that he was not very prime ministerial, that he was uncertain what he believed in, and that his wordiness masked a lack of knowledge. While many voters had a visceral dislike of Mrs Thatcher, and believed that her policies were divisive, were destroying industry, generating unacceptable social costs and harming public services, they nevertheless felt that she was strong, was probably what the country needed, that they should continue taking the medicine, and anyway, that there was no real alternative. For voters, feelings prevail over beliefs. People may be torn between their head and their heart, but ultimately it is their gut feeling that is decisive: they vote for the candidate who elicits the right feelings, not necessarily the one who presents the right arguments. Ideally, of course, that should be the same person. This lesson would shape what I thought and did over the next two decades, because it ingrained in me just how subtle political communications are – and how complicated elections are to run.

In the eighteen months or so after the election, I gradually lost heart that this would happen with the necessary urgency. Intellectually, Neil understood the need for change. The trouble was that his heart, and more so his soul, weren’t in the scale of change needed. Labour had to find ways of appealing to voters far beyond our old, loyalist core. We had to have something to say not only to the have-nots in society, but to the haves – a group of which Thatcherite Britain’s ‘new working class’ either already had, or aspired to, membership. At times, Neil talked the talk. ‘But,’ I reflected in a diary note after the election, ‘he is too much of a socialist, and he hates the idea of being seen by the party as anything different. That is where he gets the power and the passion of his performance.’ I knew Neil could inspire. The question, especially on the tough policy decisions we had to confront, was whether he could lead the profound change that was clearly needed.

Hoping to prod him and others into action, I commissioned Philip and the SCA to begin a thorough examination of the state of mind of Britain’s voters: what they valued in their lives and in their government; why they supported Labour or the Tories or the Alliance; what had convinced them, or might convince them, to switch sides. We had never done anything on this scale before. Nor had any other British political party. Patricia, as usual, jumped into the driving seat of a process that would end up taking four months to complete, drawing not only on polling and focus groups, but the work of experts in charting political, economic and social trends. That was step one. Step two would be to apply the lessons to policy. We needed an issue-by-issue policy review. This would not have happened without Tom Sawyer, the deputy leader of the public service union NUPE, whose position on the NEC had earlier contributed to the two-vote majority that got me my job. He went to Neil with the idea of a policy review immediately after the election, and convinced him to support it. What shape it would take, how far it would go, remained to be seen. But at least a mechanism would be in place.

The landmark public attitudes report was called ‘Labour and Britain in the 1990s’, and when I got the draft after the party conference in the autumn, it was even more sobering than I had expected. Its findings were presented to a joint session of the NEC and the shadow cabinet in November. Over two decades, our share of the vote had fallen by nearly 20 per cent, while Tory support had remained steady. Even more disturbing were the findings about why people voted as they did. In the case of the Conservatives, it was their tougher, more aspirational appeal. But more than a quarter of Labour’s shrinking base said they remained with us only out of residual loyalty. Among those who had abandoned us, there was a remarkable consistency in the reasons they said had driven them away. ‘Extremism’ came top, followed by the dominance of the trade unions, our defence policy, and finally ‘weak leadership’. It was not just the well-off who didn’t like us, but in an increasingly mobile economy, the role of manual work was decreasing. Share ownership and home ownership were rising, and more voters had the kind of aspirations which they said made them reluctant to elect a Labour government. We were becoming less and less popular, less and less relevant. In its X-ray of the British electorate, the SCA report had now told us why. Our image unsettled and alienated voters, our organisation and leadership dented their trust. Our policies clashed with their hopes not only for the country, but for themselves.

I still have my notes of the presentation meeting. Tony Benn called the report ‘useful’, but said the voters had simply been duped by rightwing ‘media propaganda’, and that Labour’s job now was ‘to change their attitudes through our campaigning’. In other words, ‘don’t compromise with the electorate’. Ken Livingstone said we had been too busy ‘reassuring international bankers so they’ll now vote for us’ to develop and present a strong, socialist alternative to Mrs Thatcher’s running of the economy. He also said we had shamelessly gone along with media attacks on the hard left, instead of defending them. Still, by far most of those in the room clearly understood the seriousness of the message in the research report, and the need for us to reconnect as a party with what voters actually wanted in their lives and from their government. What mattered was what they would do about it.

The short answer turned out to be not much. The policy review, which would not finally be published until two years after the election, had all the trappings of a serious exercise. I certainly spun it in the press gallery as the start of a real change, saying that nothing would be off limits. Seven committees, each chaired by the relevant shadow minister and an NEC member, were tasked to look at every major policy area. But while Neil set out a general vision of change, he made surprisingly little personal input to the process. He didn’t meet the chairs or want to float ideas. Neither arguing for nor rejecting anything, he seemed to be leaving the outcome up to the individual groups and shadow ministers. With no pressure to be radical, almost all of the review groups played it safe. There was one significant exception: Gerald Kaufman, who was now Shadow Foreign Secretary. He knew what he wanted, knew what Labour needed, and showed every sign of being determined to get it: a jettisoning of unilateral nuclear disarmament. As for the rest, they largely tinkered: except for Shadow Chancellor John Smith’s group, which committed Labour to higher taxes, by including a whole raft of new benefits pledges.