SOME OF HIS BEST FRIENDS ARE LIBERALS
Rowan Pelling talks to Jack Straw
about sex, drugs, burglary and Blackburn Rovers
A MATRONLY lady from the Home Office reception desk escorts me to the seventh floor. In the lift she winks at a col- league, `I'm very important today. I'm tak- ing a visitor to see Uncle Jack.' This makes sense: if Blair is Father Tony, the evange- lising local padre, then Jack Straw is the avuncular parish elder. And, as befits the master of MI5, the tag has sinister over- tones: the last politician widely known as `uncle' was, of course, Joe Stalin.
I am ushered in to a palatial room, about ten times the size of that of The Spectator's editor. One half is desk and kowtowing space, the other looks like the set of Richard and Judy's breakfast TV pro- gramme: a quadrangle of floral sofas round a coffee table. And here is the Home Secre- tary, moving briskly towards me in shirt- sleeves and braces. He looks every inch the man who has spent the past few days co- ordinating the anti-terrorist committee, Cobra, and inventing codenames like 'Invic- ta' for its operation. Sometimes, Straw says drily, problems just 'drop out of the air' when you're home secretary, and you just have to deal with them. The startling mani- festation of this is the hijacked Afghan air- liner sitting on the Stansted runway. But Straw's eyes are glinting. I suspect he is enjoying a rare chance for a gung-ho adven- `I've decommissioned my bow and arrow.' ture. This suspicion is reinforced when he says that such operations make worthwhile all the dreary dress rehearsals.
The hijacked aeroplane undermines my theory about home secretaries: if all goes well, no one praises them; if it doesn't, they get lambasted but have no chance to redeem themselves with deeds of derring- do. No flak jackets for them. And Jack Straw could have done with body armour in the past month. There he was, girding his loins to propose legislation which would, abolish trial by jury, his energies channelled against a bleating flock of `woolly liberals', when, wham, shells explode all around him. Human-rights activists were appalled when Straw said he was 'minded' to let General Pinochet leave the country; feminists were enraged when he let Mike Tyson enter the country; and Radio Four listeners were incensed by his claims that the English had a propensity to violence. Add to these the simmering rows about the not-so-free Freedom of Infor- mation Act and his measures against asy- lum-seekers, and you will understand why I expected a man besieged.
`Is home secretary the worst job in the Cabinet?' I ask, nestling into a sofa. Straw is perched close to me, in a ministerial arm- chair, good ear tuned in — he's deaf in the bad one — and an aide chaperons us from beyond the coffee table. He laughs and tells me that his friends are always gently asking whether he is OK. But he's buoyant; he loves his job and says who wouldn't, after 18 years in opposition. It's a challenge; Straw loves challenges. Even avoidable embar- rassments like the Mike Tyson debacle? The fight was known about two months before the problems with Tyson's criminal record made front-page news. Straw looks slightly weary, and his coffee cup clinks against its saucer (throughout the interview the china rattles when he gets rattled). `There are lessons to be learnt within the organisation about things like that,' and he relishes a little detour on the need for administrative improvements — it's like hearing Baden-Powell talk about camping.
If administration is Straw's forte and pas- sion, woolly liberals are a pet hate. 'I'm not anti-liberal,' he says unconvincingly. 'On race and people's private lives I am classi- cally very liberal.' Up to a point, Lord Cop- per. I point out that his 'liberal' measures often have a sting in the tail. He is rightly proud of his record on race relations, but has stripped away benefits from asylum- seekers. And Straw may be lowering the age of consent for homosexuals to 16, but his Bill has an illiberal amendment which makes it a criminal offence for teachers and social and care workers to have sex with charges who are 16 or over. I point out that there is really no need for restrictions since this kind of behaviour carries social and professional consequences so severe that only desperados would contemplate it. You can't legislate for lunatics or lovers. Straw defends the amendment on the grounds that the lack of controversy suggests a 'fairly wide acceptance'. He won't countenance my suggestion that the lack of controversy is a direct result of this measure being offered as a sop to the Daily Mail to arrest fears of homosexual orgies in the dorm.
My qualms about Britain's sex laws are given equally short shrift. Why do we have the strictest sex laws in Europe? Straw responds by saying 'Do we? 1 haven't made a study of it.' Then he bangs on rather predictably about child abuse and our duty to children, and I respond, rather predictably, by saying that paedophiles buy Mothercare cata- logues, not adult erotica, and that it's easy to agree on the kind of images that most responsible adults feel to be abhorrent — children, red setters, that kind of thing. If porn is so corrupting, I say, surely he'd be worried for his family when on holi- day in porn-saturated France? Straw looks at me as if I'm deranged: 'This aspect of French life has entirely escaped me and the People in the bar in the little French vil- lage where I go, but there you are.' Can our Home Secretary be that naive? Has he never heard of the Marquis de Sade? And what about Romance, the French art- house film released to cinemas in the UK last November, with explicit images of penetration and erections? Straw looks blank. He has 'no plans for changes to our legislation'. I decide there and then against telling him that 'Jack Straw's Castle' is 19th-century slang for the female pudenda.
We've done sex, but what of drugs? The `drugs Tsar', Keith Hellawell, said in an interview last week that the police should. Concentrate their efforts on hard drugs, and, perhaps, the penalties for possession of soft drugs should be reduced. Mo Mowlam has made nods in the same direction and Lady Runciman's report on drug use is rumoured to endorse the belief that cannabis has medicinal benefits. But Jack's having none of it. `I have no plans whatsoever to take away the penalties for cannabis. If cannabis is a controlled drug, then there should be penalties for its misuse.' Why is cannabis on the list of controlled drugs if alcohol isn't? `A very good question,' says Straw, ominous- ly. 'Alcohol has been in our society for very much longer.' Has it? I ponder. Could there not have been some Iron-Age dopeheads? Straw is getting impatient. He admits the `lack of symmetry' between alcohol and drug controls, but says: 'Because you can't do everything, it doesn't mean you shouldn't do anything.' Eek. I knew it: if he could, he'd ban the lot. And not, one feels, because Jack Straw is joyless or puritanical (the man's even got a slight twinkle) but because he thinks the needs of the vulnerable minority override the desires of the responsible majority. He tells me that Dutch society sur- vives drug trafficking because the social and family structure outside Amsterdam equips them to resist temptation more effectively than our 'heterogeneous society'. I leap on this exultantly. So he believes that nannying is a good thing. don't accept that for a moment,' Straw says. But look at him. He's marching us in an orderly crocodile down an aisle lined with joints and girlie mags. How can we become adults without learning self- restraint?
Straw dislikes nit-picking around moral grey areas. He likes muscular arguments centring on clearly identifiable targets. Hence his attacks on 'squeegee merchants' and 'aggressive beggars', on noisy neigh- bours and unruly children. 'How children are brought up is a public matter as well as a private matter'. (Cripes, that one put my ovaries into permanent hibernation.) These are the kinds of problem that affect Straw's natural constituency — i.e., the upwardly mobile council-home tenant (which is what Straw himself once was). Is he perhaps slightly indifferent to rural populations? 'I am most concerned with those who are most likely to be victims of crime and dis- order and they often happen to be found in urban areas.' But he admits that crime in rural communities can have a larger impact. Just as well, since I have come armed with complaints from the locals of my mother's country pub in Kent. Burglars on the rampage, I say. No, no, Straw responds: burglaries are down in Kent. Not in my village, they're not. I attack again: the police station in Sevenoaks has closed down and the nearest one is Tonbridge. Police numbers in Kent have gone up over the past 20 years, says Straw. (I later find out that Kent police have responsibility for the Eurotunnel and were given extra man- power; it doesn't seem to register at a vil- lage level.) Finally, there are the local hunt members who have been viciously attacked by balaclava'd antis wielding pick-axe han- dles and club hammers. Four needed hos- pital treatment. The Kent police did not intervene or ask protesters to remove their balaclavas. Straw says he can't comment on individual cases, but shows no sign of the outrage that he feels about inner-city dwellers troubled by winos or unsavoury neighbours.
Time is running out and I haven't asked any of the big questions. `Have you ever been up Barbara Castle Way?' I inquire. 'Of course,' he says, wondering what I am get- ting at. I am referring to the stretch of dual carriageway in his con- stituency, Blackburn (Castle was the previous MP). My assistant is from Blackburn and I'm required to tell the Home Secretary that her friend's nan always takes the long way round rather than risk being stuck in Babs Castle Way. And why, I demand, did Lancashire have the biggest fall in crime in 1999 (10 per cent)? Coinci- dence, says Straw. Whose portrait does the chairman of Blackburn Rovers have on his office wall? Straw answers correctly: Baroness Thatcher's. He says that he and Thatcher are the only two honorary vice-presidents of Blackburn Rovers Foot- ball Club. They don't attend matches together (Straw once called her 'that evil woman'). He leaps up and fetches a large glass rose-bowl, a tribute from the club. In his excitement he loses his grip and the bowl almost plunges to the ground almost, but it's a save! Does this safe pair of hands covet any other Cabinet post? `There's plenty I'd do; I don't know about "covet".' Is being Home Secretary as good as being Prime Minister? 'It's different, although there are similarities.' Should Tony fall under a 38 bus, the Labour party need look no further.
That's how I left the Home Secretary: poised and ready for action, quiet energies ruthlessly channelled, a very sharp mind and a slight tendency to use legal jargon not unlike his contemporary at Leeds Uni- versity, Dr Harold Shipman. Thank heav- ens Straw put all his energies into being a politician.
Rowan Pelling is editor of the Erotic Review.
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