Alan Johnson is midway through talking about the European Union when he says the magic words: “I don’t have to cater to a constituency anymore.” We’re deep in a warren of corridors within Westminster’s Methodist Central Hall, in an otherwise empty room lined with chairs. One table holds a small stack of mugs, and a coffee urn. It is not clear whether the urn has coffee in, or whether the room—which has the air of school classroom when all of the children have gone home—is where we are meant to be conducting our interview, at all. Like I said: the building is a warren.
The metaphor, I hope, writes itself. When I sit down with Johnson, he is just about to give the Prospect and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s fourth annual poverty lecture. More importantly, it is less than a week after a general election which saw political truisms across the house dissolve, to be replaced by a still-uncertain set of new rules and structures. Against expectations—not least those of his team—Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour have gained 32 seats. Meanwhile, the Tories, having called the election with a 20 point lead, ended up with 42 per cent of the national vote to Labour's 39. “I don’t think anyone will be recovered in terms of making sense of what’s going on,” Johnson muses. He is ready to make a judgement on one thing, however: “The person who lost is Theresa May. Big time.”
Johnson was first elected as an MP in the 1997 election, selected to be the Labour candidate for Hull West and Hessle just weeks before the election after Stuart Randall, the previous member for the seat, stood down suddenly. Made a minister by Tony Blair, he became Health Secretary in 2007 under Gordon Brown, who he was at one point touted as a possible successor to. Yet in 2010, Johnson announced that he would not be standing for the party leadership. Earlier this year, he announced that he would not stand as an MP in May’s snap election.
“It’s strange not being involved in it,” he says. Yet if Johnson is no longer on the frontline of party politics—if, as he says, he no longer has constituents to answer to—he is still a campaigner at heart. A long-term advocate of electoral reform, he suggests that this election makes it clear that it is time to look anew at changing our voting system. “Two of the last three elections have resulted in a hung parliament,” he says. “Everyone always says that the strength of First Past the Post is that it is decisive. Well, it’s not, anymore. We have a lousy, disempowering system, in my view.”
Johnson makes a comparison with Ireland, which uses a form of proportional representation (and keeps its citizens in the voting booth for considerably longer). “The voters there can play all kinds of tunes. They can say they like their local representative, but don’t want them to represent them in government. British voters are only trusted to put one cross on one bit of paper.”
There’s another thing that Johnston wants the public to be polled about—and it is equally predictable. Johnson headed up Labour’s “Remain” campaign during the 2016 EU referendum, and his second takeaway from this month’s election is that Brexit, like our voting system, has been shown up as not fit for purpose. “I think there’s going to be a stage where people will decide whether it’s worth leaving the EU,” he says. (A few days after our conversation, Survation releases a poll suggesting that the majority of British voters would support a second referendum.)
“I hope we reverse the decision,” Johnson says. “David Cameron plunged this country into uncertainty that we’ll not see the end of for at least five years. As for the vainglorious stuff from the Brexiteers—that we’ll jump first, and that the rest of the European Union will come with us—it’s absolute rubbish. With Macron in France, with the Eurozone recovering; all we’re doing is shooting ourselves in the foot.”
What should Labour's position be, I ask. Last June, Johnson criticised Corbyn for his “risible” performance for the Remain campaign, accusing the party leader of “undermining” his efforts (Johnson, in turn, was criticised by his fellow MPs for not doing enough). Was it not galling to see how well Corbyn has proven himself capable of campaigning after his performance in this election?
“I don’t blame Jeremy Corbyn for what happened,” Johnson says, straightaway. “I think he should have taken some responsibility, but getting out there and giving speeches was as good as we were going to get from someone who has long been anti-EU.”
Now, he says, “they’ve got to end this confusion.”
“Why is John McDonnell saying we have to leave the single market? I don’t understand this. Other Labour figures are saying we have to stay in, including Keir Starmer.”
He is particularly baffled by the suggestion we could keep “access” to the single market. “Either you’re a member, in which case you have access, or you’re not a member, and you have tariff barriers. Why aren’t we fighting? Why aren’t we saying to members of the European Union: look, we want to stay in this?
“I don’t understand Labour’s opening position on that being so confused.”
As for May’s opening position, Johnson is scathing. “The Tories’ idea of being ‘strong and stable’, or May being a ‘bloody difficult woman’—I’ve been a negotiator most of my life. That is not the way to negotiate. You need an element of charm, and trust. You need to reassure the people on the other side of the table that you’re not going to stitch them up. The worst way to act is in the way the Tories have.”
“My union mentor, Tom Jackson, said to me, ‘Don’t insult today the people you plan to negotiate with tomorrow.’ We’ve been insulting ‘Johnny foreigner’ all the way through this campaign. We act as if they don’t want what we want: prosperity, security, and economic growth. It’s absolute rubbish.”
David Davis, he says, seems to have been attuned to this fact. “His evidence to the select committee was very clear. Boris Johnson was acting as if it was fine, and we could just crash out. Then, of course, we had May’s letter to Tusk, which reinforced that. Davis was different.”
The question, then, is how to move forward. After the Corbyn surge, political commentators have been eager to point out that the old truism that one can only win in Britain from the political centre appears to be, at the very least, severely tested. Yet it is undoubtedly the case that there remains a significant portion of the Labour party who remain sceptical of its leader. Equally, there are conservative voters who are neither fans of a hard Brexit nor, importantly, fans of certain points in the disastrous Conservative manifesto.
"Austerity isn’t a class-based thing"
What about, I begin to ask, those people who feel they occupy that centre ground: the swing voters wedded neither to Corbynism nor Brexit-Mayism—“as most of our people will still be,” Johnson chips in. “The test of Corbyn, and what he represents, is whether they can reach out to those people.”
It depends, he says, “on whether Momentum becomes a version of Militant, and starts to judge MPs on whether they’re fully-fledged Corbynistas; whether there’s going to be a round of deselections; whether the doctrinaire left tries to take over the party, or whether they try to ensure that Labour continues as a broad church.”
“Momentum, by now, should have disbanded. Jeremy Corbyn by now is very safe,” he says. “I don’t see the point of a separate organisation which is just a fan club for the leader.”
But there is a sense that this is far from the biggest problem, and Johnson becomes more strident as he shifts to talk about the burden on compassionate conservatives. “We have to move towards tackling inequality, and particularly health inequality,” he says. “Theresa May, in her first speech as Prime Minister, stood on the steps of Downing Street, and said it is an ‘obscenity’ that if you’re poor, you die nine years earlier. That made lots of us think: that’s a real commitment here, to tackling health inequality.”
This is as much an existential question as a practical one—although Johnson stresses that we will not tackle inequality without taking on “the boring business of government.” “The issue for me is that society always believed in this post-war consensus; this brave new world after the war. The feeling was that the economy was a tool of society. Now people feel society is a tool of the economy.
“Austerity isn’t a class-based thing. Of course, there’s inequality between the top and the bottom, but in the middle, there’s a whole load of people who have been affected in all sorts of ways.”
Texts are beginning to arrive on Johnson's phone, confirming details of the speech he is about to give on the impact of Tory austerity—one which will take in his own story, from growing up in poverty in North Kensington to entering the heart of government. He cannot believe, he tells me, how many people seemed to accept the cuts introduced by Cameron. He shakes his head.
“When it’s gone on for seven years, it’s not acceptable.”
