Meet New New Labour's Mr Aspirational
James Purnell, one of the government's rising stars, tells Fraser Nelson that the new Prime Minister will do more than Cameron to help people fulfil their potential AJob Centre machine had been installed right outside James Purnell's office. It's one of the Department of Work and Pensions's new toys, matching up some of Britain's 1.6 million unemployed with its 638,000 vacancies. But why this device should be outside the desk of the Minister for Pensions is unclear. 'It is rather ominous,' he says, patting it. 'This wasn't there last week.'
Ask anyone in Westminster to name the rising stars under Prime Minister Brown, and Mr Purnell's name is routinely offered. He is young, articulate, laid-back and relatively unknown. The last point is especially important. Mr Brown wants to give his government a mixture of experience and novelty, so he wants to appoint some people the public have never heard of. Mr Purnell will be one of the key players in Labour's campaign for renewal before the election.
The irony is that he was around the Blairite gang long before the days of New Labour — due to a mixture of being good at golf and bad at law. As a student at Balliol in 1990 he applied for work for shadow Cabinet members and had offers from Martin O'Neill and Tony Blair. 'I hadn't heard of Tony Blair at all,' he says. 'But I was playing golf with my friend Tim Allan, who said, "Go for Blair, he's the coming man".' So Mr Purnell spent the summer squeezed in Mr Blair's tiny office, given an upturned bin to use as his desk.
He was rejected from law school the next year, but returned as Mr Blair's fulltime researcher and found himself put to use by Mr Brown. 'If you worked for one of them, you worked for the other too,' he says. 'They were interwoven.' He left Labour after the 1992 election, then worked in various roles with the IPPR think tank, with the BBC, with Islington Council and latterly as a special adviser in No. 10. In 2001 he was elected MP for Stalybridge and Hyde.
It is a typical CV for the new Labour MPs now being decanted from the backbenches: weaned on New Labour, with none of the socialist baggage their elders have had to drop. 'There has been a slow transformation in the Labour party, due to people who came into parliament in the last ten years,' he says. 'We didn't have to be converts to the ideas of Blair and Brown, we grew up supporting them.' And intriguingly, one of the ideas he suggests belongs to yesteryear is the convention that a ruling party governs using only its own members.
He says at the outset that there is 'no need' for a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. So why is Mr Brown offering jobs to them? Times have changed, he says. In the old days, 'Labour stood essentially for the working class and Tories essentially for the middle class. So you could have the big battalions lined up against each other, then one going in and implementing for four years. Then they'd go back to vote.' This, he suggests, was the narrative of the 1980s.
'But we do live in a much more plural society now. If people who are Lib Dems or Conservatives want to contribute to running the country, the public would think it really weird to say, "Well, you have exceptional ability in a particular area, but we're not going to talk to you because you happen to be not from our side of the political divide".'
Is this the new politics? Wouldn't the public find it more weird that one party wins an election, then gives political office to its defeated rivals? Mr Purnell adds a caveat: he does not believe the Conservatives are quite so open-minded. 'I don't see a huge desire for consensus in the Conservatives, nor do I see them as part of the progressive movement,' he says. Here is the p-word which many younger Labour ministers use regularly, as if steeling themselves for an era of minority government. Another is the a-word.
Aspirational' is a key phrase for the New New Labour set. Mr Purnell says he grew up in Guildford, and saw how Labour's language in the 1980s was alien to the `aspirational classes'. 'A mixture of Thatcher and Blair has made Britain a modem, aspirational country,' he says. 'And that is at odds with Conservatism. People do understand, no matter how uncomfortable it may be, that you have to change constantly.' The Iron Lady understood that better than most, I say. 'Yes, but Thatcher wasn't conservative with a small "c". And I believe that Cameron is. He's a traditional conservative.'
It's a striking theory — that Mr Brown is the heir not only to Mr Blair but Mrs Thatcher, because he carries the torch of reform which she lit and Mr Cameron would extinguish. But as a veteran of the Blairite battles with Mr Brown, does he seriously suggest that the former Chancellor will now champion the pro-market public service reform?
'I think that's a misinterpretation of Gordon. The real dividing line for me is aspiration. The question is: do you believe in a state that tells people what to do, or that empowers them to fulfil their potential? Look at what Gordon was saying through the last few weeks. It's quite clear where he stands. Look at what he was saying on education on Thursday [on city academies], it's quite clear he believes in that.' If he is speaking more from hope than expectation, it doesn't show. It's the determining characteristic of the Blairites-for-Brown camp.
Mr Purnell has few kind words for Mr Cameron. 'He has improved the technique of the Conservatives, but he is an unreformed Conservative. There's a big difference between what he thinks he need to say, and what he believes.' But hasn't Mr Cameron been mostly ahead in the polls? 'The momentum is now shifting our way,' he says. 'They are two points ahead in the polls. In 1995, we were something like 20 points ahead. Neil Kinnock was ten points ahead. It's not uncomfortable for us.'
Mr Purnell is incredibly modish. He's wearing a fitted open-neck shirt and shoes with purple laces, both from Paul Smith. He turned up a little late for the interview to fetch a cappuccino from his favourite shop. This sounds extravagant until you sip the poison that comes out of the DWP coffee machine, which I unwittingly tasted. I ask what CD he has in his machine — my favourite question to discern music taste. 'I don't have a CD player,' he smiles. He downloads them all on computer.
On the way out, I ask whether he'd like to be prime minister He says not. 'You can't go through your life with that ambition,' he says. Which is not really a denial, is it?
Previous page
