I did not have a deprived upbringing. I had an ordinary upbringing, in a twilight suburbia where postwar council estates nestled alongside small, detached red brick Victorian villas. I learned my politics there. Not in great northern cities, the Welsh valleys or crumbling urban estates. Not in places with great political traditions and dramatic folklore. I learned my politics in the small town of Woking in Surrey, where most people were neither privileged nor deprived but nearly everybody was struggling to get by, where university was out of the question for most and where nearly everyone went to secondary modern schools.
I knew that I was Labour, but I had little idea why. My parents, both teachers, were Christians, and I drew my values from them: compassion; support for the underdog; a sense that all people are born with equal intrinsic worth. But I was torn: I wanted to protect the poor yet I wanted talent to soar; I wanted fairness yet I wanted aspiration to be uncapped. I was not calm about all this; I was obsessed.
I could not make sense of politics, but I knew that politics was at the heart of my life. I remember joining the Labour party in the spring of 1965, when I was 15, and going to my first party meeting in the small, detached modern home of Terry Molloy in Highclere Gardens in Knaphill. But my party was to betray the people who lived here: ordinary people with suburban dreams who worked hard to improve their homes and their lives; to get gradually better cars, washing machines and televisions; to go on holiday in Spain rather than Bournemouth. These people wanted sensible, moderate policies which conformed to their daily lives and understanding. Labour had failed to understand that the old working class was becoming a new middle class: aspiring, consuming, choosing what was best for themselves and their families. They had outgrown crude collectivism and left it behind in the supermarket car park. I knew this because they were my life.
I was born in 1950 in Beddington, south London, into a family with many qualities but little ambition. This now seems derogatory; then it was not.
My father was not tall-about five foot nine-but he had a big voice and a strong presence. As a child he was beautiful and as a young man classically handsome, but he was never tidy and allowed his hair, first blond and then white, to flop carelessly around his forehead. It was always too long. His shoes were never quite clean, his suits were dishevelled, and his glasses were often held together with a paper clip.
He favoured ingenious solutions to household problems: handles were attached to doors by unlikely combinations of matchsticks and rubber bands; shelves would be fixed with a pencil stuck in a wall. He was like this not out of laziness or lack of aptitude, but simply because he did not care about the ordinary workings of physical things. All he cared about were his work, his family and his mission. And his mission was clear: to use his skills as a teacher to transform the lives of the children in his care.
He was born in 1913 in a large, detached Victorian house in the centre of Ringwood, near Bournemouth, the son of a tailor who travelled the New Forest measuring and making clothes. (I remember him with a tape-measure always around his neck.) My father was a country boy, swimming in the fast, clear water of the Hampshire Avon and catching trout with his bare hands. In summer he played cricket among New Forest ponies in Carvers, the great playing field that extended beyond the garden of his house.
He went to high school in Brockenhurst and then to teacher-training college in Winchester. His life, and his father's life before him, was centred on the New Forest. His politics were non-conformist, individualist, Liberal. Although he later joined the Labour party, he did so only out of pity-for I had become a rather hapless secretary of my local party; desperate for members, I begged him to help.
He was a fine and talented man who would have made a success of any career. But he chose to serve people, and in particular children, whom he loved. For him, to be a teacher was the summit of his ambition. He was totally committed to the concept of public service: he believed that you did things not to make money, but because they were right; you existed to make a contribution, to serve the public.
He started teaching on the Herbert Morrison estate in St Helier, Mitcham, which gave him his first taste of urban deprivation. Unable to serve in the war because he had lost all of one lung and a good part of the other to TB, he taught in makeshift air-raid shelters as enemy bombers raided south London. He met my mother during the war when he was bombed out of his digs and arrived, unannounced and homeless, as a lodger at her mother's house. They were married as the war ended in 1945, and then went to Barnsley for his next teaching post before returning to Beddington, where he took up his first headship at the tiny Church of England primary school.
My mother was Dutch. Her father, an artist and a communist, lived on a houseboat in Amsterdam. They moved to England before the war and she went to school in south London, before training to be a teacher in Chichester. She was tall and gangling, but attractive; her style was fresh and windswept. She too put service first, always wanting to teach, to contribute; but if my father's watchword was duty, hers would have been compassion. She was softer than he was, more romantic about life, more optimistic about the human condition-not an English pragmatist, but a continental idealist. Her bookshelves were full of bright orange early editions of the Left Book Club. She liked ideas, she loved politics. She was a socialist.
She was ill from an early age, with a degenerative condition of the brain which we never fully understood. My father said that when I was a child she would wander off and leave me to cry. My first brutal encounter with her illness came when she stumbled into the kitchen, her face covered with blood, her left hand crushed after tripping on the gravel outside. This was the first stage in an odyssey of illness which hung over my childhood and part of my adult life.
Periodically she would have fits, when she would lose consciousness and her breathing would slow alarmingly. Gradually she spent longer periods in hospital, the longest being at the Atkinson Morley Hospital in Wimbledon. There, she lay in bed next to a woman who, without warning, had lost the use of her mind. Her husband came to visit her each night, desperately upset that he could no longer speak to his wife, and she looked back, her eyes small seas of panic as the words no longer came. She had become a vegetable. This was my first contact with hidden tragedy; a subterranean world of blameless people whose lives are wrecked without warning.
My mother died on 24th June 1972 at 3am. I saw her last the night before, when she was grasping for her final breath. She held my hand and I said that I would always love her; it was the wrong thing to say and seemed to add to her panic about my father. Somehow she turned to me and managed to say: "Whatever you do, look after your father." I said I would, and I did. These were the last words she spoke to me, probably the last words she ever spoke. They came back to haunt me as he fought cancer during the General Election of 1992.
in 1954 we moved to Byfleet and then in 1957 to Brookwood, part of the borough of Woking. My father was head teacher at the Knaphill primary school, which I attended and where I was happy, although a little in the shadow of my ferociously successful elder sister, Jill. Our summers were spent in caravans at Highcliffe or Poole, or in my grandfather's house, playing in Carvers and sleeping in huge down beds, fishing in the same fast Avon waters which my father had swum in 40 years before.
The only black cloud looming was the 11-plus, which I had to take and was expected to pass. Every day, it seemed, the exam was mentioned, with assurances that I would do well. However, it was clear to me that my parents were bluffing and were terrified that I would fail. I was dyslexic and struggled at school. I was inundated with extra homework, old exam papers and tests to assess my intelligence. I refused to do any of it, resigned to my fate.
The day of the exam was awful. I walked into the room physically shaking, took one look at the paper and saw nothing but a blur. It was completely incomprehensible. I went home to lunch despondent but not desperate, determined to fight back in the afternoon, only to be greeted by my parents-my mother in tears, my father ashen-telling me that I had failed already. I hated myself; I hated the system.
My father tried to persuade me to let him find a better school than the one I was now resigned to, but I stood by my emerging egalitarianism and insisted that I should go to the same secondary modern as all the other children. At the time this gesture seemed commendable; now it seems priggish. Either way, this was the school from hell.
First, all the children there knew they were failures; already life had made its initial choices, and we were in the second division. Second, this was a secondary modern school pretending to be a public school. The headmaster, Mr Barnes, flounced around wearing his Oxford gown and addressed us as though we were at Eton. Third, there was the sadism. The extent of the corporal punishment is difficult to exaggerate. It was like an epidemic. Boys were caned in classrooms, in rooms behind classrooms, in lockers, in the hallway. We were caned individually, in groups, outdoors, indoors, upstairs, downstairs. Whole classes were lined up in front of fences for a collective caning. And if the teachers were bad, the boys were worse. I remember one boy who acted like a young psychopath, beating me up on the bus on the way home each night.
Then there was metalwork. Metalwork was at the heart of the school's rationale, preparing people for life not through using their minds, but through using their hands; we spent two full mornings a week doing it. Mostly we filed, but sometimes we were allowed to use the lathe. Always it was grindingly, gruesomely boring. We endured the misery of these lessons, thinking, "So this is it, then." When I hear people talk about vocational schools as opposed to academic schools, I still shudder. Most of those who claim to believe in vocational education wouldn't send their own children anywhere near it.
When I was 14, I was taken to the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough and shown a great open space which seemed to be one vast metalwork lesson, full of people filing and lathing and assembling and measuring. The teacher with us looked around with pride and said: "If you do really well in your O-levels, this will be your future." And Farnborough was for the children who did well. I was horrified: I was looking at the rest of my life. I decided to fail my O-levels and escape, which I did.
I do not mean to disparage those who work in places like the Royal Aircraft metalworks, or their contemporary equivalents; quite the opposite, I admire them. The people I disparage are those who fail to respect the struggle and tedium of most people's lives, which are dominated by work that is boring, unfulfilling and increasingly insecure.
At school I learned to respect people's basic impulse to work hard and try to get on. I began to understand the commonsense responses of "ordinary" people. I developed sympathy for hard-nosed attitudes on crime and defence. David Owen, in his book Time to Declare, describes how, as a student working on a building site, he came to respect the uncompromising views on defence of his fellow workers. This sounds condescending, but Owen was right. I developed a strong populist sense, at a very early age, that the opinions of the majority should be taken seriously.
When I hear ordinary people being criticised for their reactionary views on crime, welfare or aversion to paying taxes, I always ask silently: have you known the dreadful, repetitive tedium of manual work, not just in the university holidays, but for life; have you lived in cramped houses, in communities where walking the streets late at night is not safe; have you known the insecurity of work as clerks or office administrators, not poor, but never safe, and always worrying about the cost of providing for your family?
I sat in the shadow cabinet room as the self-interest and materialism that was gripping the electorate in the 1980s was described, during a polling presentation. I heard the tut-tutting of disdain from the assembled advisers and thought: you all live in big houses, have Tuscan holidays and drive large cars. What do you know about the way ordinary people live?
The secondary modern school lacked any ambition for its children. I was told that I did not have the ability to take A-levels. I had no idea what university was, but I was determined to go. Eventually I managed it, but almost no one else did, although nearly everybody in the upper streams was quite capable of doing so.
The best thing about school was my friends. Most of them were tough kids-Thatcher's children, although they did not know it yet. John Huntly was sensitive and intelligent and wanted to become a vet, which he did. He was my fishing and country friend. The rest of my friends were tough-minded and thick-skinned: Roger Gosden, the son of a carpenter; William Mitchell, a plumber's son; John Stuartson, whose father worked in a factory; Barry Richardson, the son of a soldier. These were not privileged boys; they were what would now be called skilled working class. They should have been Labour supporters, but they were not, because their fathers all wanted to get on. Roger's dad was endlessly improving his house, adding odd bits and pieces to it that did not really work. They would buy and test the latest offerings of the emerging consumer society. They were beginning to take holidays abroad. And they were tough about their politics. Every political judgement they made was rooted in hard, uncompromising commonsense.
With Brett Robinson, the son of a civil servant, I canvassed the whole of Woking-or so it felt-for the 1966 General Election. The tiny, grim, forbidding red brick houses of Goldsworth; the bigger villas further from the centre of the town; the overspill council estate of Sheerwater; the mishmash of suburban housing in Knaphill and Brookwood. Housing not pleasing to the eye because each owner, like Roger Godsen's dad, had tried to put his own stamp on it: small porches erected incongruously over front doors; cheap modern windows clashing with Victorian red brick walls; different shades of paint which owed no allegiance to the house next door; little extras stuck on to make the houses look better but making them much worse.
Even then their owners were tough on crime, tough on welfare, tough on the Soviet Union. They were fiercely patriotic, as was I. But in the course of their lives they had felt an almost tangible sense of British decline: the great postwar British confidence was ebbing away. They believed in fair reward for hard work; in responsibility; in standing on your own two feet. They wanted to get on, and they wanted a better life. Given the life they had, this was not surprising. They were early recruits to the new middle class. They just might have voted Labour in 1966, but it was easy to feel the aspirational appeal of the Conservatives. These were the voices, of my friends and their families, to which the left stopped listening. They were to become the new voice of Britain.
I left school at 16 with one O-level in geography. Already I was obsessed with politics. I loved canvassing and attending tiny political meetings addressed by the local Labour candidate, Michael Downing, in deserted church halls. I loved the posters we used to put up, and the leaflets we put through doors. After Harold Wilson won in 1966, I attended the huge rally in the Royal Albert Hall which Wilson addressed. But even though I loved it, I thought it could never be my life: it would always remain on the other side of the television screen.
With no prospects, I decided to join the 1960s. I knew it was happening, and I wanted to be part of it. There was scarcely a political demonstration or rock concert I did not try to attend, a peripheral figure wanting to be part of the times. In Swansea I tried to disrupt the Springboks' rugby tour by running on to the pitch, but made it only to the perimeter fence. At demonstrations in Grosvenor Square I joined in enthusiastically, from the back. In Bath and on the Isle of Wight I sat in the mud and heard distant groans and thought why am I here? I joined the Community Service Volunteers, working first in Pontefract with delinquent children, then in Camberwell, with recidivists released from long prison sentences. But the people at CSV thought I was using voluntary service as a substitute for life and threw me out.
I still dreamt of going to university. It took me months of Saturdays, poring over prospectuses in Guildford library, to find out that the new University of Sussex accepted students with no O-levels, so long as they had A-levels. I pounced, persuading East London College that I needed a couple of A-levels to become a social worker. Three years later, with four A-levels and still only one O-level, I got into Sussex.
The clouds parted and the sun came out. I studied politics, learned almost nothing, developed few new political ideas and refused to sit many of the exams, but this at last was the beginning of life. I rejected the diatribes of the student Marxists as mad nonsense, completely unconnected to the life I knew. Yet the International Socialists and the International Marxist Group dominated student politics at university. In the face of their rantings I defended bourgeois democracy, even going on University of Sussex television to defend the right of the Conservative MP, Andrew Bowden, to speak on campus. I was still not fully sure what I believed in, but I knew it was not banning your opponents. I managed a reasonable degree at Sussex, but I had learned little.
At the LSE, where I completed my master's degree in political theory, it was different. Here I was taught by Michael Oakeshott, the conservative philosopher. I studied Hegel, and for the first time found a system of ideas with which I felt comfortable. Hegel helped me to resolve the paradox which had consumed my early life: the clash between the competing claims of the individual and the collective. I had explored the ideas of Hobhouse and liberal socialism, but I was unable to resolve the dilemma. Making sense of this relationship was central to Hegel.
Hegel and Oakeshott are a good mix: the one seeing life as the unfolding of great ideas, the other as a struggle to get by in a world without meaning. In politics you need both these instincts. Oakeshott also introduced me to the idea of "intimation:" early indicators of deep underlying movements. This view of political change, of subtle intimations heralding the first emergence of deeper political shifts, has remained with me and I look constantly at public opinion for the first signs of subsequent bigger change. God knows what Oakeshott would have to say about this, but it is one of the things I do in focus groups.
The LSE helped me to formulate the ideas that have shaped my life, but I wanted to move on. I decided to try advertising. I did this in order to leave for a while the world of duty and responsibility I had come from. I wanted to experience capitalism in its rawest form. My father was horrified; to him it was a betrayal of my talent and a pact with the devil. But I learned to love advertising, and came to see that, although the market is not perfect, for the most part it works reasonably well, often very well. This was the opposite of the conclusion I had expected to find. I went in sceptical of business; I came out a qualified supporter.
In 1981 I started my own advertising agency with two friends, Brignull Lebas Gould Limited, which we sold after two years. I remained in advertising for a another year, but I had already decided that I wanted to start working in politics. I went to the London Business School for a year as an escape route, and on 1st June 1985, two months after getting married, sat down at home in Notting Hill and declared my political consultancy open. I had no money, no clients, no prospects, but one burning goal: to help transform the Labour party so that it would win elections again.n
