David Blunkett
The Blunkett Tapes
My Life in the Bearpit
872pp. Bloomsbury. £25.
0 747 58821 X
Richard Crossman found the first Thursday in December 1964 something of a trial. The new Minister for Housing in Harold Wilson’s Cabinet arrived at his Whitehall office “in a fury” over a piece of self-serving presumption by his civil servants. Later, the phrase “Yes Minister”, which he had used ironically in the first entry of his private diaries, would inspire the television series whose enduring relevance is confirmed in The Blunkett Tapes.
Crossman proceeded to bawl out his private secretary, one George Moseley, and to impose amendments on a statement already issued in his name. (The press took no notice anyway.) On to Cabinet at eleven. “Nothing of interest there”, because Wilson was eager to be off on a trip to Washington – thereby giving Crossman the chance to sound off into his tape recorder on the importance of wide-ranging general discussion to sustain “cabinet government against prime ministerial government”. This was to prove a favourite theme of Crossman’s three-volume Diaries of a Cabinet Minister (1964–70) which caused such a sensation, as well as a failed injunction, when they were published in the mid-1970s; and the accusation of bypassing Cabinet has been levelled against two of the five Prime Ministers who succeeded Wilson, first Margaret Thatcher, now Tony Blair. Gordon Brown can no doubt expect to read it too.
Fast-forward forty years to December 2004 and David Blunkett’s record of a senior Labour minister’s day, which was also taped at weekends and which similarly uses Crossman’s device of explanatory passages in italics. Plus ça change? Up to a point. As with many features of the contemporary British state, there is reassuring evidence of continuity as to both form and substance in the way government grapples with policy and administration. But in other respects all is utterly changed. Most striking of all, as the late Anthony Sampson noted in his last anatomizing of Britain, Who Runs This Place? (2004), the new 24/7 media bursts intrusively into every corner of politics – and on to most pages of this book. Blunkett doubts if Crossman’s generation (he specifically cites Roy Jenkins) could have endured it.
Though many of them were combat veterans of the Second World War, he is probably right. By the December 2004 phase of his three-and-a-half-year term at the Home Office, Blunkett was struggling to survive a media offensive triggered by the News of the World’s revelation in mid-August that he had been having an affair with Kimberly Quinn (formerly Fortier), the American publisher of the Spectator. Many allegations of misconduct had been made in the intervening months, a lot of them untrue. But the claim, so stoutly denied at first, that Mrs Quinn’s nanny Luz Casalme’s United Kingdom visa renewal had been expedited (fifty-two days instead of the average 172) by the Croydon outpost of his sprawling ministerial empire was about to force his resignation.
In many countries a senior minister would have had to have murdered the nanny to pay such a price. What is clear from anecdotes throughout The Blunkett Tapes is that the author’s instinct is to help people beat the system’s shortcomings. It was the sort of thing he might have done for anyone’s nanny if he felt sorry for them. Thus, he fixes things for some Chinese students he encounters. He gives his own money to a destitute constituent who has been let down by the benefits system. He persuades truants he meets smoking in a Plymouth park to go back to school. He helps the then Editor of the Sunday Telegraph with a family passport problem – not the only Fleet Street editor he helped with this problem, incidentally: and both turned on him over the Casalme visa. Some of his gestures go wrong (“some people call me a bull in a china shop”), but they are human mistakes.
Blunkett’s account of his working day in December 2004 is thus more chaotic than Richard Crossman’s. That is because the day is more chaotic. Much, but not all, of the chaos reflects decisions he has taken as a minister, not least his hasty initial denial of the (fast-changing) visa allegations and his insistence on an inquiry, undertaken by a mandarin, Sir Alan Budd. Tony Blair warned him it would be a rod for his back. Blair’s too.
Inevitably, Blunkett’s blindness since birth also contributes to the sense of near-chaotic strain, all day and every day. If there is one thing which burdens almost every page of this over-long volume it is the discipline and hard work involved in being so dependent on others. For audio tapes every morning, for Braille texts which have to be tweaked to accommodate Alastair Campbell’s late amendments, for guidance across the road and help with canapés at receptions (they often pick ones he doesn’t like), the blind bull needs help negotiating corners of the china shop which sighted people take for granted.
“Mardy” is the Yorkshire word Blunkett deploys when he knows he is feeling sorry for himself. Blindness does not acquit him of his mistakes, but one has to be very callous (as many critics seem to be) not to acknowledge it in mitigation. “Didn’t he see her coming?” a worldly Tory asked me when the News of the World story broke. No, he didn’t; nor a single page of the ambiguous paper trail Sir Alan Budd later uncovered.
In early December 2004, there is also the small matter of Blunkett’s decision, on his own account the “biggest single mistake of my life in frontline politics”, to cooperate with the journalist Stephen Pollard’s biography of him. Serialization in the Daily Mail had hastily been brought forward, so that Blunkett had to attend what turned out to be his last Cabinet (until his ill-fated six-month restoration in 2005) painfully aware that caustic remarks he had made to Pollard about senior colleagues round the table had been circulating all week. He tells the tape-recorder that the session was a “chill cabinet – preserved for future roasting”. The big mistake had come back to undermine support just when he needed it. But it is symptomatic of Blunkett’s obsession with the media and, more understandably, with himself.
Crossman also sniped at colleagues and justified his own often foolish conduct in his Diaries. They all do. Reflecting their different ways of keeping and presenting a politician’s diary, not to mention the potentially damaging timing of publication day, Barbara Castle, Tony Benn, Paddy Ashdown, Robin Cook and (a special case) Alan Clark all settle scores and promote their draft of history. Blunkett, who is capable of generosity to friends like Mo Mowlam, Tessa Jowell and, especially, Tony Blair, does the same, but more so – and sooner. Jack Straw, Charles Clarke and Gordon Brown routinely feel his lash.
The comic feud with the fellow Sheffield Wednesday supporter, Roy Hattersley, is understandable. They compete for the affections of Enid, Roy’s mum and civic capo. Roy makes Blunkett-bashing a subject of his Guardian column, and David dislikes Roy and his dog. Buster is “basically a killer”, he tells his tape recorder, though he never seeks to change the law and have Buster put down. The parallel feud with John Prescott, frequently mentioned, is not explained (egotistical working-class rivalry?) and Blunkett resents the Deputy Prime Minister’s hostility even more when his rival’s transgressions are exposed. The well-meaning bull in the Cabinet’s china shop calls it “letting off steam”. To others it may sound like a man who has let years of growing political success, achieved against large odds, corrode his once sure judgement and inflate self-belief to the point of hubris. The book’s account of the dispute with the Director of Prisons Martin Narey, a similarly determined character, over the handling of the 2002 Lincoln Prison riot (“if I have to ring Geoff Hoon and bring in the army, so be it”) has most witnesses taking the side of Narey in saying that Blunkett over-reacted. That pattern recurs in similar disputes since publication of The Blunkett Tapes. As a genre, political diaries are usually more interesting than reliable: source material to be sifted warily by historians.
Of course, once his teenage sons, the anchor of his weekend routine in Sheffield, had left home, Blunkett was alone a great deal. Until his fatal dalliance with Kimberly Quinn, there was no one except his faithful dog to talk it all over with. Ted Heath had the same problem: things build up. But it was worse than that.
Dick Crossman was a member of the professional upper-middle class, the son of a judge, himself an Oxford don before becoming an MP for Coventry East in 1945. He married and had children late. There was a handy flat in Vincent Square, a family farm near Banbury, close to his Coventry constituency. His Diaries are peppered with references to theatre, opera and dinners with colleagues and friends across a wide spectrum of what Chips Channon, a political chump and therefore a wonderful diarist, did not hesitate in the 1930s to call “the ruling caste”. On that December day in 1964 when he shouted at poor George Moseley, Crossman and his wife, Anne, gave dinner at the Commons to Anne’s friend and her husband, who happened to be a senior employee at the construction group Costains. “Housing Minister in secret talks with top builder: Sleaze charge denied”, as it might be reported today.
In varying degrees, most political diarists enjoy a privileged life, inherited or earned, outside the day job as well as within it. The Benns go to Stansgate (“I didn’t do a hand’s turn of work, just sat on the grass or beach with the children playing”, Tony records), Mrs Castle to her cottage, Alan Clark to Saltwood Castle. David Blunkett is a child of the industrial working class, a rare beast in any Labour Cabinet, whose father died horribly by falling into a vat of boiling water at the gas works when Blunkett was twelve.
Yes, young David did go to boarding school, as newspaper assassins claim, but not that sort of boarding school. At blind school they did not expect him to sit exams and wanted him to become a piano teacher. Part of his downfall is a very evident, human desire for some of the things which his upwardly mobile working-class contemporaries had already started to acquire: good food and “a decent bottle of burgundy”, visits to Ascot, second homes in France (the Blunkett cousins have one), a grace and favour rented home on the Duke of Devonshire’s Chatsworth estate (which David Blunkett himself in due course acquired).
Lord Beaverbrook did as much for Nye Bevan. But that was then. Chips Channon’s ruling caste has largely vacated the political stage and the progressive upper-middle-class milieu which helped sustain Crossman and his kind has not recovered the old intimacy with Labour since the Social Democrat Party split twenty years ago. Hence some of the strange people who inhabit Blair’s court and wander in and out Blunkett’s Diaries – though it must immediately be conceded that Wilson too tolerated his share of weirdos and chancers. The no man’s land where “socialists meet socialites” (another anti-Blunkett jibe) has always been dangerous ground for Labour politicians, especially susceptible poor boys, especially in the New Labour-meets-new-money era.
Blunkett’s evident susceptibility to the Queen, a fellow dog lover, to Prince Charles (even though he stinted on the wine), above all to assorted tabloid editors whose attentions were doing him much more harm than good, is disturbing enough. Visiting Annabel’s nightclub was surely suicidal. Just two visits were enough to allow Sally Anderson, an estate agent, to entrap him. By the time she and the Sunday People withdrew their damaging claims that he had made her pregnant (there had been no affair) the self-styled “sucker” had resigned a second time. As with the 2004 crisis, the immediate cause was essentially trivial. Foolishly, Blunkett had bought £15,000 worth of shares in a bio-science firm between his Cabinet posts. Predictably, he lost the money. Unluckily, he failed to register the interest properly, though he did try.
So what useful purpose do these Diaries serve, apart from helping a child of poverty feel financially more secure again after having spent his savings on a legal fight with Kimberly Quinn to assert parental access to their young son William? There is not much in the way of titillation in that department. Blunkett has been much mocked for insisting that “my private life is private”, while publishing his near-contemporary thoughts and feelings about so much, but he tries to defend the line he has drawn in the sand. His ex-wife Ruth, whom he similarly protected, loyally refused tabloid kiss-and-tell cheques in 2004.
The result is not satisfactory. He uses “I” a dozen times on as many pages, but then so do rival diarists. He often refers fondly to his children, Alastair, Hugh and Andrew. So does Crossman, whose vivid pen portraits of colleagues and staff would raise feminist eyebrows now: his Permanent Secretary, the formidable Dame Evelyn Sharpe, Crossman describes as “a biggish woman, about five feet ten inches, with tremendous blue eyes . . . [dressed] quite expensively, but rather uglily”. The incorrigible Alan Clark would have mentally undressed “The Dame” before concentrating on her secretary. Blunkett does little such character portrayal. He is acutely aware of others, chiefly through sound, but not in that way. It is a pity.
There may also be good Family Court reasons not to mention Mrs Quinn (“my friend”) by name or to provide any details of the pyrrhic legal victory he won to get access to the boy he knew to be his fourth son – Blair seems to have warned him against that too, the book hints. But the effect on the narrative is odd, even prim. Those curious as to why the affair went wrong must seek answers elsewhere.
As with much of this book, Blunkett’s explanation of both policy and context are harder to follow than their Crossman equivalents. Thus the narrative concerning the six charges, first levelled by the Sunday Telegraph on November 28, 2004, which proved the coup de grâce, is incomplete and confusing. In contrast to his media prosecutors, Blunkett seems to think that four of the six were “just nonsense” and that the killer fact – Ms Casalme’s expedited visa – remains a mystery rather than an offence. He declines to explain why in 2002 he wrongly gave Mrs Quinn two first-class rail tickets to Sheffield, tickets intended only for MPs’ spouses (“even though she was not my spouse”); readers are left puzzled by his insouciance.
Two dominant features of The Blunkett Tapes will be of use to specialists and historians, if not to the general public, which has hardly flocked to buy the book. One is the Yes Minister theme of civil servants’ deference, provided you do what they say, which so exercised Crossman (whose own tapes, incidentally, run to 3,000 pages covering a shorter and arguably less senior ministerial career). In the continuing test of wills, Blair, Brown, Blunkett and others have struggled to get better value out of the Whitehall machine, to make it work more effectively to achieve the desired “outcomes” of policy where it affects voters. In doing so, they have been less respectful of established process and more impatient than is often wise. Iraq, only a subplot of this book, is the chief case in point.
It has led to over-centralization, from all those targets for classrooms, NHS wards and town halls, to the “Bonapartization” (Jonathan Powell’s boast) of Whitehall itself. The results where they matter most, among Britain’s residual underclass, the lumpiest lumpenproletariat in Western Europe, have been mixed. The metropolitan commentariat which dismisses New Labour’s efforts are as ill-placed to make the judgement on improving sink estates as the cosseted senior civil servants who privately share the journalists’ disdain. Blunkett repeatedly makes this point: it is a good one.
Thus in his tapes, and almost certainly in his office, he rages against officials who “lose” the £150 million children’s fund in the education budget, who fail to spot a political landmine or find the paperwork that will save him (or his luckless immigration minister, Beverley Hughes) from their doom. At the same time the “permanent government” of senior officials uses Blair’s name to bully ministers into acquiescence and find excuses for not doing what they are told. There is little evidence here of politicization of officialdom: quite the reverse.
In Crossman’s Diaries, broadsheet newspapers such as the Times or Guardian get far more index references than the tabloids. The press and broadcasters are treated like employees – or even voters – certainly to be housed and fed, but not treated on equal terms. The idea of Benji the Binman going through the Crossman family rubbish in search of the “Secret Builders’ Dinner” bill would not have been considered. Nor would Crossman have dashed off to have drinks at the Sun on the night of a resignation. Or written without irony, when the Sun supported him in one campaign, that “at least one newspaper is trying to tell the truth”. And it is not just the tabloids. When he gets home to Sheffield after losing his job, a brutish BBC producer knocks at his door and asks the shattered Blunkett if he would mind walking up the path again because the cameraman missed the shot. I lost count of absurdities like this. As with the civil servants, when Blunkett is not deploring media mendacity and incompetence, he is hugging the media close. It does not speak well of his critical judgement.
Harold Wilson, too, was destructively obsessed with the media which was flexing its muscles (who now remembers the “slagheaps affair”?) even in the 1960s and 70s. Its power is harder to ignore now, though some Cabinet ministers still manage to do so and to prosper quietly. Even Blunkett wonders if there is a “halfway house” between Fleet Street’s ducking stool and French privacy laws that protect government extravagance and worse.
Are we better governed today, despite all this? Probably yes. Wilson’s Rolls-Royce Cabinet debated wrong-headed economic policy for days on end before arriving at inconclusive results. Blair’s Mondeo Cabinet has a better economic record and has struggled to remedy the persistent failure of Attlee’s welfare-state model to redeem the lives of the poorest. As for presidential government, Blunkett’s testimony confirms that, if it was ever an aspiration, it was an incidental one which failed. Events ensure that it always does.
