102. Alan Johnson: From Blair to Starmer - What can Labour learn? (Part 2)

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0:41Welcome to The Rest is Politics, leading with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. And we're now here with Alan Johnson for part two. So Alan has introduced himself, his childhood, his fascination with Harold Wilson, he's just written a great book on, talked about his time in the trade union movement a bit and ending up as running the trade union movement and then a moment at which Tony Blair rings you up and suggests you become a member of parliament so tell us a little bit about firstly that transition you very kindly read my book I found entering the house of commons very weird what was your first experience do you remember entering the house of commons I remember it very well those days you could drive in through the gate yeah there was a couple of coppers there nobody even searched the car I think I drove there from where we lived in Crystal Palace.

1:27So it wasn't very long, sort of 20-minute drive. I went down to that underground garage and next to the space I parked in, next to it was an open-top two-seated sports car. And out of it unfolded Alan Clark. I mean, I say unfolded. It's Alistair's great friend. Don't get him going, Alan. Don't get him going. There's all of his 11 cars. Alan Clark coincidentally tried to give him a Bentley. Has he told you the story? No, no, really. He did, yeah. Were you at Power Swizz there? I was quite a pal to that. I never met him, but I followed him into the Commons. And he, as I say, leapt out of that car, had nothing.

2:02He'd come back into Parliament in the 97 election. Remember, he'd lost his seat. 92 came back for Kensington and Chelsea. Kensington and Chelsea, where I was born. He could have been my MP. And he put his hands in his pockets, nonchalantly ran his hands through his head. I had briefcases, documents, boxes, you know. I didn't know where I was going. This was a completely new world for me. I'd been to the commons, yeah, but not through that member's entrance and the little cloakroom with a bit of ribbon to hang his sword and all that. And I thought, I don't know where I'm going. I recognize Alan Clark.

2:35I'll just follow him. And I followed him up the escalator. And he's almost whistling. It wasn't quiet, but almost whistling. And I'd run along to try and keep up with him with all this stuff. and eventually you got because it was such a huge uh a majority you know rather like now i guess you had all these people wandering around didn't know where to go or what to do and you had little lockers to put your stuff and then it took you a while before you got some staff it was very traumatic i think is the main thing but you know we were on the government benches that always attracted me that's why in the end tony i think persuaded me not just because i was absolutely behind him, I'd stood up the only trade union leader to support changing Clause 4 of the Constitution.

3:20So you would have been seen as more on the right wing of the trade union movement in those days? Yeah. I suppose that's true. Although in Labour terms, talking about being on the right, we're all on the left. The people on the far left are just away with the birds or on a different planet. But all of us are on the left. We are democratic socialists or social democrats, whatever you want to call us. And so I quickly settled in, mainly because, and this is where I'm absolutely with you, Rory, because I read your fabulous book. I reviewed it as well and said it was fabulous at the time. So I'm not just saying it here.

3:50I loved my constituency. My constituency didn't choose me. I was imposed. when I took the parachute off and looked around in Hull, West and Hesel, I found a wonderful place, not just because I've always been interested in poetry, where here's the place where Andrew Marvel was the MP. Forget Larkin, Stevie Smith, not waving, but drowning, born in West Hull. Forget Larkin, I don't think you'd have said that during the campaign, would you? I wouldn't have said any of that, no. And when I got there, Larkin wasn't a great hero, by the way. There wasn't even a statue of him. But it was the biggest fishing port, distant water fishing port, in the world.

4:26It had been. And that had all disappeared overnight. You could walk across St. Andrew's Quay from one trawler to the others. There were 250 of them. And now there was just one. And through that slump, by the way, the trawler men were promised all kinds of things. Promised retraining, promised money, promised redeployment. They got nothing. They were classified as casual workers. Did you get any resistance to, you used the word parachute. So Stuart Randall was the MP, wasn't he? and he stood down and miraculously ended up in the House of Lords and you came in. Thank you, Stuart. Did you get any resistance because of that?

5:05And you're not a northerner. You're from London. Watford, he thought, was the North. Yeah, I did have an auntie, my mother's sister. Which you made a great deal of, I'm sure. She featured in all publications. Who married a soldier, a whole soldier, who was actually my mum's boyfriend. My auntie nicked him off of her. They went to Hull and had nine kids, so I figured I had a built-in majority. but they didn't all live in my constituency. No, I'd been there once. Not really, mainly because Stuart had an awful lot of problems through the age of militant and all that. He kind of was a bit of a matinee idol, pretending he was militant and then wasn't.

5:41I might be being unfair to him, but, you know, he promised he'd move to the constituency and never did. There was a vote of no confidence in him. He only won it by one vote. So in a sense, I came in and he had a different headquarters. there were two headquarters in here. I came in halfway through the general election and there were two headquarters and one Stuart had the key to and the other one he didn't. This is too traumatic for any of you to be funny and concise about it. But can you just tell us very briefly, what was militant for our younger listeners? If you think of momentum more recently around Corbyn, militant was in a way much more pernicious, much more pernicious and much nastier.

6:21And really it was one of the things that have happened ever since the Labour Party was created in 1900. These kind of off to the, on a different planet, far left groups decide the only way they can manage to get any power is to wear Labour's clothes to get elected. Couldn't get elected on their own platform. So entryism was a big thing, has always been a big thing. And they had very radical left wing peace. Very radical. I mean, the time of Wilson was crypto communist, they used to call them, and they were all over the place. But this was very, this was Trotskyist, basically. I mean, And, you know, they had no time for Stalin.

6:54What did Trotskyists believe in? I mean, they come to Trotskyists. I don't even understand. What were they thinking about? They believed Stalin was a sellout, basically. They believed that any attempt to, well, get a Trotskyist and I'll explain it to you. But basically, they felt that the revolution was betrayed. The revolution was betrayed because internationalism and, you know, ensuring that there was a proletariat, dictator to proletariat right across the world. That was the job and you don't compromise. And so I suppose that actually Tony Blair's rise to power and the move, Neil Kinnock and John Smith and Tony Blair was painful.

7:36I mean, more painful than conservative politics that actually, because presumably the people on the left felt very morally superior. They felt right was on their side. They were on the side of radical equality, revolutionary change, and you lot were a bunch of sellouts. So it must have been a very much more painful than conservative politics, these fights. Conservative politics might go that way. I doubt it will ever be as bad as in the early 80s. No, it's brutal. Yeah. Things Can Only Get Better, the great book by John O 'Farrell. He explains in the, and this is very much my experience of this, as I was in Slough at the time, Slough Labour Party.

8:10He describes a constituency meeting. They only had a bit of money, one leaflet to a big council estate. Should we make it about the cuts to local council and, you know, bin collectors not coming round or should we make it about Nicaragua? Militant were in the majority and they had to walk around this council estate delivering leaflets on Nicaragua. That's a great example of what things were like. So that's why when Jeremy Corbyn came in, some people on the right Labour Party would slightly tease him about talking about Venezuela and Palestine because they had sort of memories of a day when it felt as though people weren't talking about things that were relevant to voters.

8:45Absolutely. And, you know, we'd seen it. Jeremy had been there for a long time, you know, what he's doing now, which is not a Labour MP. The difference was he was sitting on Labour's benches. He's never, he's never. What, Tony? He's never brought into our constitution, particularly the new one. A bit, yeah. Tony sort of chased you down, a bit like he chased me down a few years ago, sort of didn't give up. Just talk us through how he kind of wore you down to become a candidate. You were sort of, I can't remember how your name first came up, but you were sort of on this list of people that we thought were good MPs.

9:16You were a big deal, right? I don't mean you were running a big union. I don't know about a big deal. It was a big union and we'd had a big victory. We stopped Heseltine and Major privatized in the post office. Everyone had lost those disputes, you know, whether it was rail, whether it was steel. And how did you win? Tell us a bit about the tactics. There was a great documentary about it, Michael Cockrell documentary about it. We employed the Tories PR agents and we got behind Tory lines and we got the Tories really, really rabid about the effect of this. Your local post office will close. You get the end of your Saturday delivery and all of that.

9:49Forget two deliveries a day. All the things that have happened post-privatization, by the way. But this was the early 90s. And because we won it, it was seen as a big thing. Tony was very pleased. And this documentary by Michael Cockerell that Tony might well have watched. I doubt it. It was a word in the right ear. It was about lobbying. And he made our campaign the centerpiece of a one-hour program. It was at least 25 minutes. Also, you were quite high profile just around the place and across the media. and you were very, very, you were clearly of our politics and you were also clearly a very good communicator.

10:21Because of that, really, I had a profile, only because of that. But no, I'm driving up Gypsy Hill. This thing that's like a brick next to me, which is apparently called a mobile phone, goes. I did pull over because I was late for my mother-in-law's birthday party, picked it up. I'd had a thing with Tony about a candidate election in Newport. Remember when Alan Howarth crossed the floor? And I wanted to talk to him because we had a good guy, Reg Kelly, who was in Newport, and we wanted to be assured that it was going to be a vote of the members. Angie comes on the line. Angie puts me through it at Tony.

10:52Tony says, yes, yes, no question of it. It's going to be an open ballot. And we'll win it. Yeah. But, he said, but, Alan, just as I'm trying to get away because I've got my mother-in-law, I hear you want to be an MP. I said, I don't know, I haven't told you that. Tony, I've got the slightest wish to be an MP. And I didn't have the slightest wish to be an MP. I mean, why would I want to go to the backbenchers? Anyway, he said, well, I'd quite like you to be an MP. You know the way he looks. I'd quite like you to be an MP. I thought, bloody hell, you know. Come and talk to me, he said. I was on the NEC Labor Party.

11:30So I went and spoke to him. I said, well, where would the seat be? He said, well, where do you want it to be? Because what we know now is all those MPs who were going to step down. We're going to put on the House of Lords. To spend more time with the Peerogers. He knew. He knew who they were. That that was coming up. But I mean, this is where I feel guilty because, I mean, you did it through a very unique route through the kind of Cameron's flirtation with primaries. I see so many of my colleagues who slogged away for years, moved the family to places where they thought the MP was going to, you know, breathe their last.

11:59And here was I being asked by the leader of the party. Did you think that there was a chance that you might become a minister? I mean, when you were thinking, am I going to really give up a job I really care about to be a backbench MP for the rest of my life? I wanted to be a minister. I didn't want to be. But it looked pretty certain. This is February 1997. And the leader of the Labour Party's made it clear that he wants you. So if you are reasonably competent... Should be all right. He never made any. There was no deal. He never said, oh, you're a banner. You have to, you know, you've got to make sure you...

12:26Tony never made deals. No. As we know. Is that right? Well, he didn't make money. We got a smirk from him. We don't know what that smirk meant. I didn't even try to argue that I want to be a minister. But, you know, I thought, am I going to get to 60 and look back and think, I missed that opportunity. Here's the leader asking me. And so I haven't thought it over. I didn't care where it was. And can I bring you in, to what extent were you involved in this sort of thing? Deciding someone like that should be an MP, deciding that someone might become a minister. I mean, tell us a little bit about you.

12:57Would you have chats with Tony Blair about this stuff? I can remember talking about the sorts of people that would be good. Tony definitely wanted some good new people coming at the end. He actually asked me at one point to get a seat. Do you wish he had? No, but - Yes, he does. He really wishes he had. Do you? Yeah, yeah. You wish you'd be an MP. Anyway, I said, do you want me to be an MP or do you want me to run the campaign? Oh, yeah. He said, you better do the campaign. But no, Alan was definitely one of the, I'd say, in the top few that Tony was quite keen on. So, yeah, probably. And were you involved in him becoming a minister?

13:25I don't know. There'd be discussions. I've got this suspicion that you were behind. I'm not becoming a minister. I was a minister. I was PPS same year I got elected to a wonderful woman called Dawn Primarola as Paymaster General. Then in 1999, junior minister, DTI, PUS, then minister of state. Then I get a phone call after the 2001 election, and I'm going over the Humber Bridge in the back of a government jag because I'd done something at Bishop Burton College, my role as DTI minister. And the phone rings. There's a reshuffle going on. And Tony said, Alan, I'd like you to go to education. I'd like you to be the minister for higher education.

14:06there's absolutely no word of a lie i said tony minister for higher education you realize i left school at 15 i never went to university he said precisely precisely the reason i thought your hand might be in this is because we'd unveiled the need for tuition fees at the back of the deering commission on higher education deering from hull my old mate from the post office as well and he had said, look, you know, those who benefit from higher education should make a contribution. And that included not students, graduates. Once they've graduated, once they're earning, blah, blah, blah. Perfect formula.

14:42I supported it instinctively. It was very controversial. The minister at the time was under the accusation that came to all of them. You're pulling up the ladder after you. You got a free university education with generous grants. Tony had clocked, And this is where I saw the hand of Alastair Campbell, that actually, if you put someone in there that didn't go to university, you're going to stand a final chance. I'm really touched that you assume that if something clever and smart and Wilsonian has happened, that it should be done to me. So I'm happy to take credit. I'm happy to take credit. moving on you went on from that to be the section state for health which is as famous to people say kind of the biggest train set in government this enormous over 100 billion pound machine million employees etc i mean that must have been an incredible responsibility and it must have been completely overwhelming to try to get your head around something so big so complicated you know hundreds of millions of GP appointments a year.

15:46I mean, how do you get your head around something like that? Well, this is now Gordon Brown. So Alistair's departed the scene. Tony's departed the scene. On the day he went, on the evening he went, Gordon said, well, you can stay at education if you want, but incidentally, I'm going to make it this schools and families thing. And I'm going to take higher education and further education, put it in another department, but you can do that if you want. My priority is health. And I'd quite like you to go to health. Well, you know, of course you go to health. I was really fortunate because the heavy lifting, we're now talking about 2007, the 10-year plan, and we're living this life again now, including Aradazi, mention him in a second, 10-year plan was well underway.

16:28We'd been recruiting nurses and doctors. The famous announcement Tony made on Sunday TV that he's going to increase the budget of the We were now going towards$110 billion. It's$160 now, but we're going towards$110 billion, which was incredible. Yeah. Investment per head of population. So Patricia Hewitt, my predecessor, had been through hell. You might remember nurses screaming and shouting at her at conferences. That's because she was sorting out the budgets of the local primary care groups. And Alan Milburn had done these big reforms. Alan Milburn had done his bit. Everyone had done their bit.

17:05I should warn you, Alan, that Alan Milburn is Rory's hero. Yeah, yeah. Well, he's a hero of mine as well. He's a good friend. And he's back doing the same thing again, I see, or is certainly in the picture. Gordon knew what he wanted to do on health. He knew exactly what he wanted to do, one of which was to say, look, there's this guy, Aradazi, who's a surgeon. And Gordon had been to a presentation that Aramade about a number of visits people have to make, the bus journeys to here, to there, to there, shifting healthcare to the communities, all of that. he said i'd like to bring our darsey in remember they were called goats government of all the talent that's right yeah i'd like to bring ara in as a minister and him to work with you as a minister of state now the first thing that springs to mind when you think of a major leading surgeon isn't humility no is it i mean let's face it no would this guy be satisfied to be a minister of state because it was ara who is a wonderful person by the way i mean you wouldn't know He used to, you know, at St.

18:04Mary's where he's a surgeon, he used to go in sometimes dressed as a porter because when he stepped in the lift as a surgeon, everyone drew back and bowed to him and paid homage. He went as a porter to see what the kind of reaction was to him as a porter. I mean, he's that kind of guy. There's no ears and graces about her. And we forged a very good relationship. And that was Gordon's idea. I had two great years. First of all, because it was two years, and I was usually moved on, you know, after a year. Utility player. Yeah, it was two years. We dealt with some really big issues. I loved everything about it.

18:39The NHS used to withdraw treatment from someone who couldn't get a drug. NICE, which was probably Alan Milburn's greatest contribution, by the way, NICE hadn't approved the drug. Just to explain to us, there's NICE. And they decide whether or not. They decide whether the drugs, yeah. And now all over the world, people follow the NICE judgments. Anyway, if someone who was terminally ill paid for that drug, if they could, for whatever reason, all NHS treatment was withdrawn from them. And it was barbaric. And everyone told me, including Andrew Leslie, who's my opposite number, by the way. He wasn't pressing for this.

19:15People told me, if you remove that, the whole of the NHS will collapse. And I got a very good surgeon called Mike Richards. We used to have some really good people around, not just our, you know, surgeons, health professionals. I said, Mike, have a look at this, because this seems to me to be absolutely awful. If we change this rule that's been there since 1947, will it mean the sky will fall in? And he came back and said, just do it. Just do it. So we just did it. And it's never been mentioned since. It's fine. Not many people can do that. But imagine saying, well, you might be a modest income and you've sold your house for this.

19:51Oh, I'm not going to treat you anymore. Go somewhere else. You mentioned that we're sort of back here again. So we talked about Aradazi's report on the podcast recently, and I pointed out that he wrote a very similar report in 2008. It feels like things are worse than they were. It feels like the economic situation is worse than it was. How can the government turn this around? On health? Well, let me just tell you a little anecdote. Aradazi's first report came out and said, GP surgeries ought to be open in the evening when people are free to go there. They go, why are they closed on Saturday mornings?

20:23big BMA campaign against it. Who joined them? The Conservative Party. Andrew Lansley joined the BMA in saying no to extended opening hours. Seems incredible, doesn't it? But that's what happened. How are they going to turn it around now? Well, I think to a certain extent, this is history repeating itself because the waiting times are now back. I'm not sure they're as bad. When we came in in 97, people waited years for a simple cataract operation. They waited at least 18 months. In fact, John Major had said under the Citizens Charter, no one will wait more than 18 months. Months. We were reducing it down eventually to an average of nine weeks, maximum of 18 weeks.

21:07Can you do that again? Yes, but you need help and you have to bring in all hands on to the pump. Do you? You do. Yeah. Well, you see that the way we did it and the beauty of it was a single tariff. You didn't pay extra because you were using the private sector. You didn't pay extra because it was one tariff. And that tariff applied for a hip operation, whether it's in the private sector or the public sector. So that's not only beyond. The budget now is$160 billion. But I guess where Alice is getting to, and certainly where I'm getting to, is that one of the things that helped you along with the reforms is Gordon Brown very significantly, and Tony Blair significantly increased expenditure.

21:46And health inflation has been much bigger than government spending spending for the last 14 years. So, Aradazi's report has just said that the government needs to put in tens of billions, 37 billion just on capital. Just on capital spending. Yeah, just on capital. So, I guess, I don't want to put you on the spot too much or put you into kind of tribal complication here, but surely one of the issues is that it's going to be quite difficult to sort out without quite a lot of cash. And the question is where the hell is that money coming from? It's going to be difficult, but that's capital, it's not revenue.

22:17So, Aradazi's making the point on that, that that backlog will just get worse if it's not sorted out. Others have said that. So leave aside the revenue issue. How can you raise money there? Well, we know the private sector have been sitting on wads of cash. We know there's been no public-private partnership since Hammond stood up in parliament in 2018. You were there, Rory, and said not just that PFI is going to go, I mentioned PFI in a second, but no form of public-private partnership. There's forms of public-private partnership out there, like the Lyft model that built the health centers all around the country that are not PFIs.

22:53They're not 90%, 10%, i.e. 90 private sector, 10%. They're 60-40. The developer actually is in charge of it, not the contractor. There are forms of public-private partnership that companies are willing to get involved in if we come up with the right model. There's not been any kind of model for nine years. That has to be one solution on capital while you wait for the revenue situation maybe, although there is£160 billion going into the NHS now. So you need that reform before any more money comes in. But you can tackle what is really, Aras pointed it out as the priority now, because why is productivity bad?

23:35Because they don't have good equipment. Okay, quick break and we'll be back in a minute.

23:43So you did trade, you did pensions, work in pensions, you did education, you did health, and you were also Home Secretary. I always thought you were in favour of identity cards. I was, of course. I introduced them. Right, but... Still got mine if you want to see it. But where are you now on the sort of the politics of immigration? Did we handle it well? Did we underestimate the impact? What should a new Labour government now be doing to tackle immigration as a political issue? Well, we didn't handle it in the way we're accused of handling it, i.e. an open door. That all comes from 2004 when the Eastern Bloc came in.