101. Alan Johnson: The Prime Minister We Never Had? (Part 1)

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2:10Welcome to The Restless Politics, leading with me, Rory Stewart. And with me, Alistair Campbell. And Rory, he likes our guests to have a backstory. And he particularly likes backstories where the guest has emerged from some terrible poverty in their childhood and gone on to great things. And our guest today, Alan Johnson, certainly fits that bill. In fact, his childhood is the subject of one of several bestselling memoirs that he's written, all of which have Beatles songs as their title. And in addition to that, he's most recently written a biography of Harold Wilson, former Labour Prime Minister.

2:51He's written novels. And before all that, of course, it was one of our best ministers, I would say. Five different cabinet positions. Definitely one of our most reliable, put it that way. I've been downgraded. I started off as best and now I'm reliable. Best and most reliable. And also somebody I think that a lot of people in the Labour Party kind of saw as prime ministerial material. But I don't know if Alan ever did. And we'll maybe talk about that a bit as well. Alan, thank you for joining us. Give us a sense, please, first of the world you grew up in and what the difference is between the world you grew up in and the world today, what we wouldn't recognise about your childhood today.

3:27So the world I grew up in was photographed by a famous photographer called Roger Main, who just had an exhibition at the Courtauld at a place called Southam Street in North Kensington, London West 10. Not Notting Hill. We never called that Notting Hill. Notting Hill was the posh end, you know, up where the Albert Hall was and places like that. Yeah. Near where Rory lives. This was a poor area, always a poor area. tragically most recently defined by Grenfell Tower because the slums we moved out of, they then built high-rise flats, one of which was Grenfell. So it was that bleak post-war world. There were slums everywhere.

4:04I mean, the government should have pulled these houses down. They were condemned as unfit for human habitation in the 1930s, and we were still living in them. And Roger Mayne captures the squalor of the outside. I described a squalor on the inside. What was the squalor? What was in the house? What wasn't in the house that people would take Well, there was no electricity for a start. So I lived my first six years by gaslight. And a little guy used to come on a bicycle to light the gaslights out in the street. And our mother used to tell us it was the Sandman come to send us to sleep. So one room, then progressing to two rooms and finally three rooms as lots of people lived in.

4:39multi-occupied basement and then three stories no electricity as i said no hot water no heating no toilet no bathroom a butler sink on the landing in one place but if you wanted to go to the toilet we were on the top floor when we moved down to 149 southam street you had to come down three stories go down to the basement out to the backyard right at the back of which was this awful carsy that you didn't want to visit when the sun was shining, never mind in the middle of the night. And so these buckets, you know, I suppose in posh houses, it would have been called something else, but we had buckets.

5:17And because you had to go down on that journey to empty the buckets, you didn't do it that often. There were flies, there were vermin, these houses were jerry built, terribly overcrowded. Roger Main, just look at a Roger Main photograph and you'll see what it was like. You said, well, is this true? There was a time where the difference in life expectancy between North and South Kensington was the same as that between North and South Korea. No, that's now. 16 years now. We know from Grenfell. Now? Yeah. We know from Grenfell the statistics now. I mean, we've got them all over the place. They say you go on the Underground, get on the Jubilee line at Westminster, go seven stops to Canningtown, your life expectancy goes down a year with every stop.

5:58Nothing to do with London Underground. It's the same if you go on the bus. But that is the famous statistic. Because of Grenfell, people looked into the difference between North and South Kensington. And it's still North Kensington is a very poor area. South Kensington is a very plush area, Royal Borough of Kensington. But you couldn't get a bigger contrast. And it just happens to be the same contrast as between North and South Korea. And you mentioned your mum. Your dad sort of disappeared earlier. Yes. My poor mother. Well, my book is really the story of two amazing women who happened to be my mother and my sister.

6:32My father was feckless is probably a good word, but he also, worse than feckless, he came home drunk and used to beat my mother up. So I say in the book, and it's very true, my sister is two and a half years older than me. And he took a great responsibility for bringing me up. When your mum died? Yeah, we started as a two-parent family. Then we were a one-parent family when my father did a moonlight flit when I was eight. And then we were a no-parent family. So my sister had a very important role in that. Because your mother died when you were 12? She died when I was 13, just turned 13. But the happiest day of our lives, me and my sister say, is when our father left.

7:08And people say, well, that's a strange thing. Well, no, it's not. It's great if there's a happy family there. If your father has beaten up your mother and you hear it in those places because the walls weren't very thick. There was, you know, at least one family on each floor, sometimes two, four stories. You heard it all in graphic detail. And he was an awful, very cruel man. And we were very pleased when he ran off with the barmaid from a pub called the Lads of the Village, and we never saw him again. And when you became like a public figure, never got in touch or never? No, never. Do you feel good about that?

7:41Are you just glad he's never been part of that? I'm fine about that. He means nothing to me. But my sister got in touch. But my sister was the heroine here. So she had fought battles with my father, stayed up to protect my mother when she got to about age of 10, cooked my Christmas dinner when she was eight and I was five. And he had gone off with his girlfriend over Christmas. My mum was in and out of hospital all the time. She had a condition called mitral stenosis, which first of all had to be diagnosed. It's the valve between the two chambers of the heart, and it had to be cleared every so often.

8:11And in the end, people still get it now. What's happened now is you can replace the mitral valve with a plastic version. She was one of the very early people who that was trialed on. They'd done it in America, and she was convinced by a heart surgeon at Hammersmith Hospital, which was a local hospital to us, but a great cardiac hospital, to have the operation. Not many people have had it, but you'll extend your life for 20 years. She died in the operation. So she shouldn't have been in those conditions. She had the misfortune to have married a feckless husband. So the tragedy, the hard life, people said to me, you had a hard life.

8:47I didn't have a hard life. The hard life was my mother, and in many ways, her generation. You say you didn't have a hard life, But I guess most of us grumble about our lives, but we didn't have our father walk out and our mother died at the age of 12, grew up in that kind of poverty. I mean, how have you, how do you think that's through in terms of your own life, your mental health, trauma, the kind of influences it's had on you? Well, I think I'm fine. I wouldn't like to be psychoanalyzed, but everyone around you just don't know. Recommend Alan. Just look at the Roger Mayne photographs. Everyone around us lived like that.

9:20And there were harder stories than that. I've read harder stories of people who had it much harder. And they had it hard in Leeds and Liverpool and Glasgow. My mum was a Liverpudlian from a family of 11. Her life, if you want to talk about a hard life, her life was hard. But we were the benefits, me and my sister, at that post-war generation. Tell us a little bit about her life then, just for a second, about her childhood and how your mother grew up. So she was one of 11, born to an Irish mother and a Scottish father in Liverpool. so her mother had had 11 children by the age of 38 died at the age of 42 her mother had died age 42 my mother's maternal grandmother my mother was always convinced there was some curse of the female line that meant she would die at 42 and she did precisely at 42 but because she was the eldest girl second eldest of the 11 but the eldest girl she had to take on the kind of all the responsibilities.

10:18So that was very tough. My grandfather, my maternal grandfather, he wasn't entirely a liberal person, like most of the men weren't with those big families. So she had to struggle, left at the first opportunity, aged 18. War had been declared, 1939, went to London, joined the NAFI, met my father, who was a pianist, concert pianist, and he was a lance corporal, played the piano in white gloves uh you know was a very good musician very good pianist and uh they got married and he took her back to where he came from the other thing that the area i come from is famous for is rillington place number 10 rillington place was just around the corner to us where christie killed all of those women were they under the floorboards under the floorboards in the wall uh and it's also area it's also yeah state ages at a field day down there So just to conclude this real life crime episode, Kelso Cochran was murdered on the corner of my street.

11:16Kelso Cochran, the Stephen Lawrence of his time, 1959, Bank Holiday Monday on the corner of the street. I tell the story in this boy. My mother had come around and seen these teddy boys. He was a West Indian carpenter coming back from Paddington Hospital. And they knifed him to death on the corner of our street. Suddenly there were cameras. Southam Street was famous. And it's still not resolved. No one was ever arrested for the murder of Kelso Cochran. But there is a little blue plaque outside the Warwick Arms, and I hope it's still there, on the corner of Goulburn Road and Southam Street, that records the life of Kelso.

11:50And you mentioned your sister as being the heroine of your life, really. So how did that transpire, that she essentially became your guardian? Well, for a start, as we grew up, as I've mentioned, my mum was in and out of hospitals, so Linda was looking after me, particularly after my father went when I was eight, but also before then because he was never there. So she was working hard to clear my mother's debts. The electricity was always cut off. My mum had six, seven different jobs cleaning at the posh houses, top end of Labrack Grove. And we used to go with her, by the way. And we used to feel sorry for the kids we heard about there because they were sent away to school when they were seven or eight.

12:29And to us, well, you were worried. That to us, that was deprivation. We felt sorry for them. Oh, you see? So she had all of these jobs. When my mother died, I said to my sister, well, what do we do? Because she said to me, don't tell anyone. Don't tell anyone at school. Don't tell anyone. The authorities will come and take you away. We were under the radar system of whatever social services were around. I got free school meals. Linda got free school meals. That was good. That was really, really helpful. But they didn't seem to notice. You know, we were two kids. She was 16. I was 13. And she said, don't tell anyone or they'll come and separate us.

13:07And then through the door came an offer of a, my mother lived her whole life waiting for a council house. That was everyone in our street. That's all you were waiting for was a council house. The idea you could afford to buy your own house. My mother on her own, you know, with a clean as char lady's wage. So through the door after she died came to Lillian May Johnson, my mother, offer of a council house in Welling Garden City. I'm often glad I didn't take it because Grant Shapps would have been my MP. But anyway, leaving that aside, my sister marched straight around. She was very forceful, Linda.

13:38She got the electricity put back on. She matured very quickly because she had to. She worked from the age of 11 to clear my mum's debts at Berriman's on the corner shop because we would always get stuff on tick. And Mr. Berriman never refused this. But in the end, the bill got quite large and Linda started working for him. Anyway, she marched around to the council, said, my mum's dead, but me and my brother all have this. She's lived in Australia for 40 years, but she still has this naive view that she was right that that council house offer should have been in the family you should have been you know you died but you it passed on to your children anyway the guy at the council said don't be silly i mean the age of majority then was 21 wasn't even 18 so into our life came this wonderful social worker and he came around and said right alan you're going to foster parents in chelsea Linda who'd left school just trained to be a nursery nurse you'll go to Dr.

14:34Bernardo's big headquarters in Ilford and you'll continue your studies to be a nursery nurse while you live in there and he stepped back I think Mr. Pepper his name was it wasn't Sergeant Pepper so much as I knew but he said Mr. Pepper stood back waiting for a round of applause my sister tore into him you know I could see her now hand on hip nose wagging this big Linda shaped flea in Mr. poor old Mr. Pepper's ear he went away and got us a place two kids council flat linda went to look at it she said it's the worst i never saw it worst place council must have thought two bits of kids would give them the worst place that you can you know she said the previous tenants had taken the doors off to burners firewood the interior doors it was awful she rang mr pepper up put her four pints in pressed button a and said uh about this we're not accepting it and mr pepper said it was flabbergasted I said, look, do you know what I've been through?

15:28She said, well, you go and look at it. If you think you can live there with your family, come and look me in the eye and tell me, and I'll think about it again. We never heard of that again. We got this lovely masonette two-bedroom, first time we'd ever had an indoor toilet, at number 11 Pitt House on the Wilberforce Estate in Battersea, which meant we had to go south of the Thames. That was traumatic. Of course, of course. But we got over that, and we had two happy, until my sister got married when she was 19, we had two happy years there. She moved to a house in Watford with her first husband.

15:58He put down a mortgage on a semi-detached and she wanted me to go to Watford. I said, I'm not moving to the north. I put my feet down. I put my foot down. You got into grammar school, is that right? I was in Sloan Grammar School. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you sat at the 11 plus? Passed the 11 plus. Linda passed her 11 plus. Mainly, I mean, we knew our mother saw that as the route out of those conditions. She was very important to her that we passed. and once we'd passed although holland park comp was just starting off well that was the posh family sent their kids there to my mother that wasn't a grammar school and actually my mother was still alive of course when we went around and got interviewed byst clement danes uh where frank field went to school so walterst john's in battersea and they refused and we thought my mother thought that we were interviewing them to see if school was good enough for her son we soon realized they were interviewing us to see if the sun was good enough for their school and it must have been a bad year at sloan grammar school in hortensia road king street just off the king street in chelsea because i got in there uh so that was great you know the early 60s on king street in in chelsea so apart from the king's road apart from living the king's road and the 60s what was school like i mean did you do well at school it was awful so my first novel i dedicated to my English teacher, Peter Carlin, and he was great.

17:21And so was the guy who taught his history and economics, Peter Pallai, who'd escaped the Hungarian revolution and was teaching in our school. And they were two young teachers. And I liked the subjects, but Mr. Carlin wasn't my English teacher until I was 14. I left at 15. So it's my last year. They inspired me. Nobody else did. And I've talked to Mr. Pallai and Mr. Kavoth, of whom are still alive at a great age. And you still call him Mr. That's nice. Do, actually. It's very difficult not to. But they both told me about the French teacher, Mr. Harris. I would say, Dolly Harris, you know, he was so boring.

17:52People dozed off in his lesson. He dozed off in his own lessons once, I remember. And Peter Conley told me, well, you do remember, you know, he only had sort of conversational French. He wasn't a French teacher. He was a chemistry teacher. People think, you know, the grammar school era was wonderful. It wasn't wonderful the grammar school era if you didn't pass you're 11 plus the motivation for me not just you know my mother would approve and we wanted to please our mother it was if i'd failed i'd have gone to the god-awful isaac newton secondary modern school for boys at the bottom end of the portobello road that was a blackboard jungle and you kind of knew that and you sensed that you'd be very uncomfortable there but that's where 80 percent of kids went all right alan loads more to talk about.

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20:11so your sister married young you married young as well didn't you had three kids by no time yeah my sister got married at uh 19 i think it was i got married at 18 so i beat that and then worked in a sorting office well first i tried to be a rock and roll star but i didn't want to spend much time on that. I made a record when I was 16, all that. But then, so worked in Tesco's, stacking shelves. And then when I was 18, I joined the post office as a postman in Barnes, London, Southwest. And did you have political views then? Yeah. Same Mr. Carlin, who was this mentor to me, this great teacher. He introduced us to George Orwell, got us all reading Animal Farm, passing the book between our hinge-lidded desk to read a page each and then passing it on.

20:54And he explained the subtext. This is 1964, the year after the Cuban Missile Crisis. We were going out into a world, a third of which population lived under communist rule. And he explained the subtext of Animal Farm and the Bolshevik Revolution and who the different characters were. Fascinating, absolutely fascinating. I was always a reader. My mum dragged us to the Labrogrove Library as soon as we were old enough to turn a page. And I read so much Orwell very quickly. And he was a democratic socialist. And I decided very soon, I was a democratic socialist, but always tempted down that route.

21:31Unlike Harold Wilson, who we'll talk about in a minute, I did read the first volume of Das Kapital and kind of used to show off about surplus value, my deep knowledge of surplus value. But there was always Orwell warning against totalitarianism, that route. So you flirted with communism? I never even flirted. There's some things there that says I was a member of the Communist Party. I wasn't. I used to read, you know, Newsline sometimes. Which is the World Revolutionary Party. Can you take us about this? Because it's something that Alistair doesn't want to talk about because he hates dissension within the left.

22:01So whenever I try to get him to talk about Trotskyites and the Communist Party and all sorts of things, he says, no, no, I don't want to talk about that. It's all too painful. I don't want to go there. Given it's now ancient history and it's not going to get everybody up in, and maybe it's a route into your book on Harold Wilson. Give us a bit of a sense of left-wing politics in the 60s and 70s and what the spectrum was, you know, because I'm trying to understand, I mean, who is Tony Benn? Who's Jeremy Corbyn? What are Trotskyites? What are Stalinists? How did the Labour Party relate to communism?

22:28What was this whole story? Well, well before that, before I could judge the Parliamentary Labour Party or what was happening in politics, I was into the trade union movement. So once I was a postman, very quickly, I became a local representative and then became the branch chairman and then went to conferences and all of that. This is the UCW communications worker. Yeah. They were called the union of post office workers then. And had a great general secretary called Tom Jackson. And all these, with the big hand Obama stuff. And we were in a seven week strike when I was 20 in 1971, which was very formative.

23:02That's when workers withdraw their labor or really. It's nothing to do with coffee striking. But the Communist Party of Great Britain were very influential in the trade union movement. And these were great characters, I have to say, in my union, a guy called Morris Stiles, kind of hammer and sickle tattooed onto his chest. They believed in something fundamental and they lived by their beliefs. Dear old Morris would give his money away and lived in a place in Brixton that could have been furnished better than it was. And he was a full-time union official by then. And, you know, this idea of a worker's state appeals to a worker who's seen what the capitalist state can do, if you like, to some of the issues about my mother's life.

23:45But there was always Orwell holding me back. I was never attracted to the idea of dictatorship of the proletariat, which is dictatorship. This idea, the more you read about it, the reason you disagree and why so many working people disagree is false consciousness. And I put that down to Orwell. I put that down to him. He died before I was born. But, you know, you can learn a lot as an autodidactic that stands you in good stead. And of course, Tom Jackson and people like him, the main story of the trade union movement were people who stood against that and stood for the Labour Party. Joe Gormley, good example in the NUM.

24:19Before we get into the names, though, this is very important, isn't it, in the whole history of the British left, which is the trade union movement often had a more sort of, I guess, kind of what we'd now call a more patriotic, less communist element to the British left. And that somewhere in this whole story, leading into Wilson and your book, is the story of why Britain and the British Labour Party, unlike European left-wing movements, never went quite so left-wing. And the trade union movement is part of that story, right? Yes. at a time when trade union leaders were powerful figures and had control over their local shop stewards is when that control broke down.

25:00And that largely happened over the Second World War. And they found themselves unable to intervene that things like in place of strife and Wilson and Barbara Carson, all that came up and the need to stop this incredible level of almost anarchic strike action. Local shop steward would decide, withdraw the labor. People at union headquarters It was never got, never mind regional level, never got anywhere near it and found that suddenly all the people were out on strike and they had no levers to pull to get them back in. It's a sad story. But basically in the Labour Party at a time of blocked votes and all that, all bad stuff, they were keeping the Labour Party on the straight and narrow, if you like.

25:38So the vast majority of the PLP, Parliamentary Labour Party, were solid supporters of the Labour Party. and the Labour Party famously said by Morgan Phillips, one of its general secretaries, owes more to Methodism than Marxism. And actually that does bring us straight to Wilson because Wilson's politics were forged in nonconformist, congregational religion, Methodism, really. Why Wilson? Why did you choose to write about Harold Wilson and maybe remind younger listeners a bit about why they should be interested in Harold Wilson? Like you two, yeah. Well. Thanks, I'm not even... What year were you born?

26:12I'm 67. Yeah, so that means... 1957. 57. Okay. So I can... All right. You were seven when Wilson was elected. Yeah, but I was very, very precocious. I'm being nice to you, Alistair. Yeah. Well, like you, Rory, who weren't around at the time. Why Wilson? Because Swift Press, who should be commended, by the way, they realized that there was a lot of interest in prime ministers, mainly because they'd been six in a fortnight, wherever it was. But if you wanted to know about Gladstone or Churchill, you had to pick up a volume that's like, you know, 1 ,500 pages and doorstep. And Penguin had been running this series of great monarchs, you know, condensed 30 ,000 words.