This is the kind of knockabout against political opponents the Commons adores. But Blunkett also told The Times on October 26: “Having gone through disagreements myself, I know how damaging it can be when people start joining in publicly.”
More fool him: this is an eyewatering performance. Yet these are the fruits of “hours of candid interviews” with his biographer, Stephen Pollard,in which Blunkett was “extremely forthcoming and helpful”. The words are dynamite, and could sink him.
Pollard first met Blunkett at a 1995 Fabian seminar and was intrigued by the paradox: on the one hand, a traditionalist, on the other, the creator of the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire. Blunkett’s career, he suggests, is a “metaphor for Labour itself”, in that it has moved from being loony left-wing to almost more right-wing than the Tories. “The Tories were right,” Blunkett now says unambiguously of Michael Howard’s Home Office (page 276). Labour’s league and pupil tests are Conservative policies carried out with far more rigour than the Major Government dared use. Yet he is still a supporter of unilateralism and an implacable opponent of the bourgeoisie who pontificate from ivory towers (or Islington).
I’ve known Blunkett for almost 30 years. From 1978 to 1980 I was the chairwoman of Birmingham Social Services Committee, while he chaired Sheffield’s. On one occasion I took a team to see how Sheffield handled care of the mentally disabled, for which it had a good record. Once Blunkett was convinced that we were serious, he treated us with courtesy and took us to lunch. We came away feeling that Sheffield provided excellent services, but at great cost, hampered by disdain for the voluntary or private sectors. Later Blunkett’s politicking took Sheffield from below-average unemployment before 1981 to the high level it has today. He never accepted that doubling rates and raising the red flag over Town Hall would drive out legitimate employers. The World Student Games (whose £147 million price tag his constituents will be paying until 2013) is his legacy.
Even in those days, he was remarkable, and not just because of his blindness. He was methodical, conscientious and an immensely hard worker who knew exactly what he wanted. The terrible history of his background is best told by Blunkett himself in his autobiography, On A Clear Day, from which Pollard quotes extensively. The blind boy sent to boarding school aged four is the adult who says that only those who have experienced deprivation can understand it. The clerk who fought his way to an honours degree against all odds is the Secretary of State who will not tolerate failing schools. The son whose mother struggled with lawyers for compensation after her husband died in a dreadful industrial accident is the man who saw off the pompous Derry Irvine as Lord Chancellor. There is no mystery or paradox here.
Blunkett’s journey made him a national figure long before he entered the Commons in 1987. When it came to reform, however, the Kinnock camp considered him “fundamentally untrustworthy”; he was seen as ambitious and self-serving. Pollard relies on published sources such as Tony Benn’s diaries and Colin Hughes and Patrick Wintour’s Labour Rebuilt (1990); what emerges is a naive, blinkered Blunkett who believed that Militant was not especially dangerous and failed to grasp the political necessity of destroying it. At the crucial 1995 party conference (when Neil Kinnock famously castigated the hard left) Blunkett nearly derailed everything by proposing a gentle review of Liverpool’s accounts. The results convinced doubters, but Kinnock was incandescent. Similarly, in 1994, Blunkett was not a fan of ditching Clause IV: it was the more astute Blair who saw that non-Labour voters had to be convinced that Labour had changed irrevocably.
Today Blunkett is probably the most old-fashioned of the Blair Cabinet. Instead of “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime,” we now have “tough on crime, and the fear of crime” — a very different agenda, consumer-based rather than treating perpetrators as victims. His philosophy derives directly from his roots. This is an unreconstructed, working-class Yorkshireman with a passionate belief in discipline, self-improvement and education. He has written “Give the poor money and they will still remain poor” (page 54). He is a eurosceptic. He is strait-laced: in 1994 he voted in favour of retaining the age of consent for gay men at 21 and nothing I, the proposer of the change, could say would budge him. He dislikes nudity or obscenity. He sees immigrants as pinching jobs. His current priorities for policing are “security, stability and order”. He has, in sum, more in common with Margaret Thatcher than he might care to admit.
Pollard is clearly a fan, highlighting the romantic, sensitive side of Blunkett and printing several of his poems. Also on show is what the journalist Anthony Howard has called a “natural bully”. Blunkett relishes his reputation for plain speaking: “I’ll just say what I think and if people don’t like it, they can lump it.”
There is a big ego at work here, one that takes umbrage at being patronised and is not averse to bad-mouthing anyone he deems incompetent. I don’t think Pollard trapped him into candid talk; I reckon Blunkett was only too eager. That may be because he sees himself as brilliant with journalists. Where most politicians keep their distance, Blunkett courts them. He takes family holidays with Paul Potts, the chief executive of the Press Association and a friend since student days; he is “close” to Paul Dacre of the Daily Mail, and to Les Hinton, the chief executive of News International, the parent company of The Times.
These days Blunkett doesn’t bother to persuade, but treats opposition to his proposals as personal and sees malice where there is only principled disagreement. His recent spats with judges over sentencing policy had him taking on the entire legal profession, but coincided with rising public disillusion over a Government that is great at making speeches and passing legislation, but hopeless at imple mentation. Fewer laws, better drafted, fewer targets and more attention to results might restore both the Government’s standing and his own. But for the latter, probably, it is now too late.
The Kimberley Fortier/Quinn business will be his downfall, but not because his stated support for marriage conflicts with his lover’s married state; the Conservative Opposition is in no position to criticise. For most people he is a sad figure, like Othello, one who loved not wisely but too well. The affair has, however, invited scrutiny of minor issues such as the nanny’s visa application. I would rather the criticism focused on why there is such a long waiting list for visas in the first place, but the media, like Blunkett, prefer to personalise issues, so he will be a target. If he weathers this row, there will be another. Sooner or later the loyalty he needs from colleagues whom he has insulted, in this book and elsewhere, will melt away.
Blunkett says he cannot imagine what he would do outside politics, his life for almost 40 years. He has toyed with replacing Blair, but that would take a miracle now. As long as he is an electoral asset, Blair will keep him, but soon after the election Blunkett will be 60 and the next generation will be baying at his heels. If he wishes to retire with accolades and sympathy, he could do worse than spend Christmas listening to a tape of this book, treat it as a fine epitaph and go.
- David Blunkett by Stephen Pollard, Hodder & Stoughton, £20.
