The bushy black moustache which will replace Alastair Campbell
AA years ago I was at a Labour
party conference on behalf of the BBC and — this will not surprise you over much, I expect — missed its most important and defining moment. It was the vote for the party's National Executive Committee and the whisper was that Peter Mandelson would lose his cherished place. It was about the only thing in the whole week which hadn't been stagemanaged or gerrymandered, a moment of genuine drama and unpredictability.
I'd forgotten it was happening at all until someone at the bar — yes, of course, that's where I was — told me the vote was being held at that very minute, at which point I tore, like an overweight and very unagile mountain hare, past the elderly stewards and into the conference hall. But too late, too late. The result of the vote had already been announced.
I tapped some chap on the shoulder and rather breathlessly inquired if Mandy was on or off the NEC. He smiled and pointed in the direction of Labour's backroom team, hanging around the edge of the stage. 'Well, tell me: what do you think?' he asked.
I looked up and any doubt was immediately removed, It was a scene of the most fervent and consuming bacchanalia. Monkeys and apparatchiks and press officers were high-fiving and hugging each other, occasionally breaking off in spasms of uncontrollable mirth. It was jubilation on the scale of a World Cup victory over Germany. So goodbye, then, Peter.
Somewhere in that throng of celebrating Labour people was David Hill, who, it's pretty clear, will soon be replacing Alastair Campbell as Tony Blair's director of communications. Hill told me that the whole question of his appointment is 'up in the air at the moment' which, I suspect, means that it is a done deal. If you're a Labour supporter, you will certainly hope that it is a done deal, because Hill is that rare combination in contemporary politics: hugely competent and very, very likeable. If you're a Conservative, you should probably worry a little. I mentioned in these pages a few weeks ago that if Labour entered the next election with Campbell still prowling the halls, it would lose. With him gone, it does not mean that Labour will win, but the appointment of David Hill makes such an outcome rather more likely, for a variety of fairly straightforward reasons. I met the man when I first started working for the Labour party in 1983, right at the beginning of that long and painful process of transformation and modernisation which led — ineluctably it now seems — to a party shorn of ideology and eaten up by its own hubris, a party for which the only purpose of winning an election was to enable it to win the next one, and the one after that.
Back then, of course, Labour won nothing. We would prepare for the easiest byelection in the most rock-solid Labour seat and see the majority — and once or twice the deposit — swept away. It was like playing for the worst football team in the world: turn your back for a second or two and you'd be five goals down with the crowd streaming out of the stadium in despair.
David Hill, as Roy Hattersley's righthand man, was central to the process which led to the abandonment of Clause Four, unilateral disarmament and all those other wacko policies of the 1950s or, indeed, 1850s, which made Labour unelectable for 18 years. So, too, was Alastair Campbell, a friend of Neil Kinnock and, at that time, a political correspondent on the Daily Mirror. But the crucial difference between Hill and Campbell, precisely as it is between Kinnock and Blair, is that Hill changed with the party, rather than imposed change upon it. The imperative to modernise was, for a time, as difficult for us — and as ridden with doubt — as it was for some of the loyal activists in their local parties who still wished to nationalise the top 100 companies and forge a military alliance with the Soviet Union.
There is a discernible nostalgia and yearning for the Kinnock years within Labour at the moment and, perhaps, an acceptance from the Prime Minister — a Kinnock protégé, of sorts, remember — that the better qualities one associated with Kinnock's stewardship might not go amiss just now. I asked David Hill to define those qualities and his very first word was 'honesty'. (His next two words, by the way, were 'hard work'.) According to the latest opinion polls, the public has suddenly discovered that it no longer trusts or believes Tony Blair; so a little burst of honesty might not go amiss, you might think.
And gradually, although one might not have predicted or expected it. the Cabinet is filling up with Kinnockites. There's Pat Hewitt, formerly Kinnock's press secretary; John Reid, his former political adviser; and Charles Clarke, doing a rather good job, annoyingly, at Education. I used to see Charles quite often near the Leader's office. I never knew what he did. but I knew he was quite important. I was only 23 at the time, and his grave demeanour and large ears frightened me a little, I have to admit. But I suppose one has to get over such things.
Whereas the only true Blairites left in the Cabinet are Tessa Jowell and Geoff Hoon, Those early hopefuls of the first few Blair years — Mandelson, Byers, Milburn, Roche, et al. — have already departed the scene. And, call me cynical, but I reckon Geoff Hoon will do so very soon indeed, If Blair is looking for Cabinet allies, Kinnock's people are his best bet. According to Tessa Jowell, the only important differences, policy-wise, between Kinnock and Blair were those determined by the time in which each leader operated.
The revival of Kinnockism, then, is scarcely better news for Gordon Brown; there still persists, in some quarters, a degree of fraternal enmity between these two cadres.
Meanwhile, David Hill — now ensconced in the comfortable surroundings of Bell-Pottinger public relations — will be relishing a return to the political fray. His re-arrival will, I suspect, be welcomed by the lobby correspondents at Westminster and no less so by the party at large. He is as tough as Alastair Campbell, but he has that rather unfashionable penchant for straight dealing. He can be rude and peremptory. He supports Aston Villa, sported a politically incorrect bushy black moustache and, worse even than this, was once seen purchasing an album by Katrina and the Waves. It was at David Hill's house in the middle of the 1980s, that bitter and benighted decade for lefties pretty much everywhere, that I tasted guacamole for the first time. Despite the jig of delight at the party conference, that alone must give Peter Mandelson cause for hope.
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