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Election 1997 20th anniversary: “Were you up for Portillo? Sort of.”

01/05/2017, 09:51:19 PM

In a series of pieces, Uncut writers look back at election day 1997. Tony Sophoclides was a political adviser to John Prescott and closely involved in the key seats campaign

The morning was knocking up in Enfield Southgate and the afternoon Brentford and Isleworth. For two years I’d been immersed in the key seats campaign and finally polling day was at hand.

Everything about Labour’s campaign in 1997 had been focused on 91 seats to secure a majority of 45. By May 1^st our returns pointed to big wins in these seats and a new swathe of seats was targeted in the final week.

Looking back with hindsight, you wonder if we should have expanded the target list much earlier but at the time the fear of failure was stamped on our psyche. To even contemplate a comfortable victory was to tempt disaster.

Canvassing went well but still I was edgy. Some of team Prescott met at a pub in Westminster at about 2030 before heading over to Festival Hall for the party an hour later.

Only then did I relax.

Walking in, you knew it was a party. Word of the swings being reported on the ground had got through and there was a feeling of huge expectation.

Various celebs were dotted around the Festival Hall, including Richard Branson. Labour had tried so hard to get him to back us, only for him to tease but not commit. Yet here he was, at the party.

A group of us ended up chatting to him when he did a very odd thing, which is apparently one of his common tricks.

We all shook hands with him when after a few moments he asked one of our number, Sue Haylock (who worked for JP then and still does), the time. She looked at her wrist but the watch was gone.

Branson opened his hand and there it was. Even with all that was going on that evening, I clearly recall wondering how on earth he had time to learn and perfect that trick when he was meant to be running a mega-million pound set of businesses.

The evening rolled on as did the booze. Maybe a little too much.

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Election 1997: 20th anniversary: “Just let yourselves out quietly when you’re finished”, said Her Majesty’s High Commissioner to South Africa

01/05/2017, 06:48:48 PM

In a series of pieces, Uncut writers look back at election day 1997. Stephen Hardwick had been a shadow cabinet adviser to John Prescott and moved to South Africa to work for the ANC shortly before the election

“Where were you for Portillo?” Drinking white wine and whooping with delirium at the UK High Commissioner’s residence in Bishopscourt, Cape Town, with half of Nelson Mandela’s ANC Cabinet, and my comrade-in-arms, Mike Elrick.

There are worse places to watch the BBC election night coverage than amid the great and the good of South Africa’s first democratic government and as a guest of the fabulous (and late) Maeve Fort – who knew how to throw a party.

But why there?

I’d been working as an adviser to the ANC Chief Whip, Max Sisulu, for a year by then, and Mike, who had been a press officer for John Smith, had joined me six months in. After four years as John Prescott’s speechwriter and policy adviser, I’d quit because I had wanted to ‘do something’ to support the new ANC government in South Africa.

As far as I was concerned, by mid-1996 Labour was nailed-on for a big win, and I felt that I’d done my bit. So while my contemporaries among the Shadow Cabinet advisers – the Milibands, Ed Balls, Yvette Cooper, Pat McFadden and co – would be heading for government or Parliament, I was already there, working ultimately for Mandela.

So on election night, there was a huge projector screen and a BBC satellite feed set up in a grand and spacious dining hall. There was fizz, I recall, to get things started, and waiters circulated topping up bottomless glasses of chilled whites and fruity reds. There was also buffet and the most enormous wheel of cheddar.

It was the scale of the rout that was so shocking, and as seat after seat fell, we Brits kept looking at each other with growing disbelief and, in some cases, unalloyed joy.

Around 2am I called John Prescott to congratulate him. He was on his way from Hull to London and he told me that he’d been up to Sedgefield to see Tony Blair earlier that day and that he was going to be Deputy Prime Minister and Secretary of State for Environment, Transport and the Regions. I’m still proud that I was among the first he told.

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Picking the right shadow chancellor is more important than the deputy leadership race

12/06/2015, 11:03:31 AM

by Kevin Meagher

Being deputy leader of the Labour party is a bit like being president of a golf club. The role is largely honorary, conferring on its incumbent a level of artificial seniority, safely removed from the actual running of things. At least with the golf club, you might get a few free rounds. The reward for being deputy leader of the Labour party is the graveyard slot on Thursday morning at the party conference.

Historically, it’s been used to bring balance to the leadership, so, in essence, the post-holder represents the losing wing of the party. So it was with Denis Healey and, later, with John Prescott. Occasionally, a bone is thrown to show the party’s progressive tendencies. So working-class Ted Short replaced snooty Roy Jenkins and Margaret Beckett became the first woman deputy leader (and interim leader following John Smith’s death).

The only interesting pitch in recent years, from someone hoping to become the rear portion of this particular pantomime horse, came from Jon Cruddas when he went for the job back in 2007. He promised to forego a frontbench role and instead concentrate on the unglamorous task of developing the party’s organisation. Most other contenders are happy to inherit this pitcher of warm spit on the basis that an upturned bucket offers the chance to step-up.

But it doesn’t. Labour’s next shadow chancellor is an altogether more important appointment for the future of the party. Whatever analysis is eventually settled on to explain the party’s dire election defeat, routinely finding itself 20 points behind David Cameron and George Osborne on questions of economic credibility and who voters trust to manage their money was surely a huge part of it.

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If working class apathy with Labour becomes permanent, then the party’s over

24/10/2014, 03:00:29 PM

by Kevin Meagher

Twenty years ago, I took my father to hear John Prescott speak at Bolton Town Hall as part of his Red Rose tour. This was one of those “ra-ra” events on the road to the triumph of 1997. Optimism was high. Promises were easy. The Tories were a shower and New Labour had the answers.

In his inimitable podium-thumping style, Prescott told the packed hall that the capital receipts from council house sales of the 1980s – that local authorities were banned from spending – would be released in order to build new houses.

This was one of the party’s big policy promises at the time. It would address housing shortages, (that were already apparent), as well as putting hundreds of thousands of building workers, like my dad, back to work after the deep recession of the early 1990s, which had hit construction particularly hard.

It was the kind of rooted, common-sense measure that spoke directly to millions of voters like him at the sharp end of a Thatcherite economy that had left the North in the deep freeze. Now, it was our turn. Fast forward a decade though and things didn’t quite work out as planned.

By then, Prescott’s capital receipts pledge had turned into the Decent Homes Programme. A £19 billion pound effort to renovate dilapidated social houses with new bathrooms, kitchens and roofs.

In reality, it saw expensive contractors soaking up oodles of public cash. According to the House of Commons’ Public Accounts Committee, costs of the programme doubled to £38 billion by 2010, without creating extra new homes or the scale of jobs that sort of public investment should have done – (or, indeed, that Prescott had promised would happen that night in Bolton).

What the last Labour government did deliver was the lowest rates of new house-building since the Second World War. Unfathomably, Labour ministers were more concerned about helping Middle England’s property values to appreciate than they were in tackling housing shortages for first-time buyers or putting construction workers back to work.

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Cook and Prezza can teach the shadow cabinet how to do opposition

28/09/2011, 01:15:51 PM

by Kevin Meagher

“My top demand of my shadow cabinet, my party, my team, is this: ambition”.

So said Ed yesterday. But not all agree that message has been getting through.

“This is a Tory government that’s doing some outrageous things and we haven’t had many words of protest”, says a less than impressed John Prescott. “Ed, you’re the leader, get a shadow cabinet who’ll do that”.

Fortuitously, the rule change passed earlier this week now allows a Labour leader to dispense with the ritual shadow cabinet elections, thus presenting Ed with a tempting new freedom. But rather than release his inner Alan Sugar, he should withhold firing any of his coasting colleagues. For now.

Like any responsible manager, Ed should look to see how he can develop his team rather than hand them their marching orders. After all, that is what “good” business people do.

Anyway, a reshuffle at this stage looks like a panic measure, an implicit acceptance that this first year has not yielded all that it might have against the backdrop of the government’s swingeing cuts and inept economic management.

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Friday caption contest: #wheresthegovernment special

05/08/2011, 09:56:09 AM

HT to the great @johnprescott

UPDATE: JP will be picking his favourite caption and the winner will receive a signed copy of his book. You’ve got until Saturday evening to get your efforts in…

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Thursday News Review

30/06/2011, 05:53:38 AM

Strike day

Thousands of furious workers are staging a mass walkout today to fight Government plans to savage their pensions. The strikes by around 750,000 teachers and civil servants will be the biggest day of industrial action since Margaret Thatcher was PM in the 1980s. Hard-pressed staff have already been hit by savage Coalition cutbacks and are incensed over proposals to hammer their pensions. Thousands of schools in England and Wales will be closed today while ports and airports will be disrupted. Driving centres, courts, job centres and even Downing Street will also be affected. Last night Dr Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said the Government was morally responsible for the strikes because it was trying to steamroller through unfair changes to pensions and had failed to negotiate. She added: “Deciding to strike is not a decision we take lightly. This is the first time ATL members will be involved in a national strike in our 127 years. – Daily Mirror

The coalition government faces the first industrial uprising against its austerity measures today as up to 750,000 public servants strike over planned changes to their pensions. A third of schools are expected to close and two-thirds of universities have cancelled lectures. Benefits will go unpaid, court cases will be postponed, police leave has been cancelled in London and airports are bracing themselves for backlogs at immigration. Mark Serwotka, leader of the Public and Commercial Services union, said it was the most important strike in his union’s history. “Everything we have ever worked for is under attack,” he added. The government was trying to avoid inflaming the situation. David Cameron told the Commons: “What we are proposing is fair: it is fair to taxpayers but it is also fair to the public sector because we want to continue strong public sector pensions.” He said Labour was avoiding the issue, accusing the party of being “paid for by the unions [so] they can’t discuss the unions”. None of the four striking unions, with members in schools, colleges, universities and the civil service, is affiliated to the Labour party. Nearly every other union is poised to move towards strike action by the end of the year if the bitter standoff over public sector pension reforms is not resolved. Roads in central London will shut as thousands of people march in demonstrations that will be echoed across the country. Police leave has been cancelled so officers can cover for striking police community support officers, call handlers on the 999 lines and security staff. – the Guardian

As many as 750,000 teachers and civil servants are expected to join today’s strikes. Millions of others face severe inconvenience or financial loss: from parents who stay at home because their children’s schools are closed to people wanting to enter or leave the country. It should be stressed that not all public-sector staff will be striking. Many NHS staff, transport workers and others are not involved, although their unions do not exclude action in future. This is nothing like a general strike, nor even a strike by the whole public sector – though there are those on both sides of the public-private divide with an interest in presenting it as such. There is no doubt that many public sector workers are angry, frustrated and disillusioned on the very specific issue that is the focus of today’s protest: moves by the Government to change the terms and conditions of public-service pensions. And they are not completely wrong when they argue that long-standing terms of employment are threatened or that pensions have been a plus for the public sector in recruiting and keeping staff. But these arguments ignore the bigger picture. In pension provision, Britain is rapidly becoming two nations. One nation can look forward to a pension which, while not necessarily qualifying for the description “gold-plated”, is secure and bears a predictable relation to salary and years of service. The other nation – which comprises the vast majority of the working population – increasingly cannot. In most private companies, secure final-salary schemes are a thing of the past. Contributions are higher, the returns mostly lower, and the pensionable age higher than in the public sector – if there is a pension scheme at all. – the Independent

Prezza hits the campaign trail as election day looms

Former deputy prime minister John Prescott put tackling unemployment at the top of the agenda as he joined Labour’s Inverclyde by-election candidate on the campaign trail on Wednesday. Speaking just hours before the polls open, Mr Prescott said Iain McKenzie’s message was “jobs, jobs, jobs”. He added: “I am delighted to be out and about in Inverclyde today supporting Iain McKenzie to be a strong, local voice in Westminster. He’s a local man who knows this area like the back of his hand. Iain didn’t just arrive in Inverclyde for the by-election. It’s about jobs, jobs, jobs. Unemployment here is too high. The Tories are ruining the economy, punishing families and hurting decent people just looking for work. Inverclyde needs a local champion to go down to Westminster and fight the corner. That’s why I’m here to back Iain.” – stv.tv

Voters in Inverclyde go to the polls later to elect a new member of the UK Parliament. Polling stations in the constituency will be open from 0700 BST until 2200 BST. Labour is defending a 14,416-vote majority in the Westminster seat, also being contested by the SNP, Tories, Lib Dems, and UKIP. The by-election is being held to find a replacement for David Cairns, who died from acute pancreatitis in May. Sophie Bridger is standing for the Liberal Democrats, Iain McKenzie for Labour, Anne McLaughlin for SNP, Mitch Sorbie for the UK Independence Party and David Wilson for the Conservatives. – BBC News

EU budget grab

David Cameron is facing pressure to veto the latest ‘ludicrous’ cash demand from Brussels after it announced plans to slap three new taxes on Britain. The European Commission yesterday revealed budget demands which would cost UK taxpayers £10billion. In what Treasury officials viewed as one of the most outrageous power grabs in recent memory, they demanded the right to raise a Europe-wide sales tax. Brussels bosses also called for a new financial transaction tax, which critics say will hurt the City of London and leave consumers with higher borrowing costs. And they unveiled plans to let Brussels grab a chunk of green taxes which are already being levied on polluters. In total, the commission demanded nearly £100billion extra for the EU’s budget between 2014 and 2020. British taxpayers would have to pay £10billion more over the seven-year period – an increase of £1.4billion a year on the current British annual payment of £13.3billion. – Daily Mail

Which one are you again?

One in four people thinks Ed Miliband is his elder brother David. A similar proportion of voters believe that David is actually Ed. Nine months into his leadership of the Labour Party, the findings of the ComRes survey for The Independent do not paint a flattering picture for Ed Miliband, as he steps up his efforts to convince the people that he is a prime minister-in-waiting. Other members of his Shadow Cabinet are even more anonymous. The only good news is for Ed Balls, the combative shadow chancellor who stood against the Milibands for the Labour leadership last year, and who appears to have made more of an impact on the electorate than the two brothers. He was correctly identified by 68 per cent of the 2,000 voters who were shown photographs of eight senior Labour figures and asked to put one of five names to their face. Ed Miliband was named accurately by 64 per cent of those questioned but 23 per cent thought he was his brother David. David was identified by 61 per cent but 26 per cent thought he was his brother. The other five Shadow Cabinet figures tested by ComRes were recognised by only three or four in 10 voters, suggesting that the Opposition team is struggling to be noticed and many Shadow Cabinet members remain in the shadows. – the Independent

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The show goes on: bring back Prezza

20/04/2011, 03:30:23 PM

by Kevin Meagher

John Prescott was supposed to have gone to seed with the passing of the Blair era. His future lay in regaling well-heeled passengers on cruise liners about his forty years in Parliament. But the old sea dog keeps coming back into port. So much so that his retirement from the frontline is barely discernable.

Labour’s Emeritus Deputy Leader has been busy. He led the Go Fourth campaign to get Labour ready for last year’s general election. He has become an unlikely star of Twitter, supplying a constant stream of characteristically pithy opinions. In fact, he has transcended politics altogether and entered popular culture.

He had a cameo role playing himself in the BBC comedy Gavin and Stacey. Then he popped up presenting a documentary about class with wife Pauline. Now he’s sending himself up in that advert for a price comparison website (which he says helps fund his office in the House of Lords).

And when he’s not busy leading the charge against AV, he’s rattling cages about the phone-hacking scandal; jousting on Channel Four’s zeitgeist-y 10 O’clock Show the other week with former News of the World hack Paul McMullen.

Some retirement. But there’s not much effort involved. Prescott’s secret is that the words coming out of his mouth are the same as the thoughts in his head. That nanosecond between brain messages forming into words is detectable to the electorate. They know that politicians apply a filter before saying anything. They sense they are not being told the unvarnished truth. That’s why all MPs are bunched together in the public’s mind as conniving charlatans. (more…)

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The real battle for the future of the English regions is just beginning

04/11/2010, 03:00:36 PM

by Kevin Meagher

THIS time of year, as the bonfires blaze and the fireworks bang, many keen regional devolutionists will commemorate waking up to find a different political revolution (albeit one with more modest aims) had bitten the dust. Tomorrow is the sixth anniversary of the ill-fated referendum on an elected regional assembly for the north-east of England.

As you may recall, back in 2004, Labour promised referendums would be held in the north-east, north-west and Yorkshire and Humber regions about whether each should have an elected assembly.

The powers on offer were not vast. At that stage, frankly, neither should they have been. This was never a call for mini-parliaments. Or regional prime ministers. Or declarations of UDI. It was about creating small, strategic bodies to democratise decisions taken by unaccountable public officials and act as all purpose galvanisers, instigators and cajolers for northern interests.

In the end, just the north-east, long thought to be the likeliest harbinger of regional devolution, was given the go-ahead. The government had got cold feet, fearing the message about “creating another tier of bureaucracy” was too potent. So it cancelled the other two votes. The entreaties of campaigners in those regions counted for little. For a government hooked on winning things, the prospect of a triple whammy defeat was too much to bear, so they sought to minimise the political fallout. (more…)

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Conference diary: the morning after, part 1

26/09/2010, 11:47:42 AM

Union chiefs toasting Ed Miliband’s success last night should be on their guard. Uncut understands that John Prescott is likely to fail in his bid to become the party’s treasurer, pipped to the post by Unite’s Diana Holland. As with the leadership, it appears that union votes were the decisive factor. Hell hath no fury like a Prescott scorned.

* * *

Changes on Team Ed? Spectators surprised at the vigour with which Neil Kinnock campaigned for our new leader will have noted Rachel Kinnock leading Ed on his tour of the victory circuit. Rachel has been a senior advisor over the past few months, and is likely to be a key player in his leadership team. More mysterious is the sudden disappearance of Polly Billington, Ed’s chief spinner. She was apparently not returning calls last night, and hungry hacks were being re-routed to other aides. Where are you Polly? Give Uncut a call.

* * *

Great excitement in the Uncut office yesterday when we received a tip from a senior Labour insider. “David’s in first”, came the message. Excitedly, we prepared to unleash our scoop to the world. Then we learned that our comrade had merely got on the train to Manchester, and seen David Miliband sitting in a first class carriage. He was in good company.

* * *

If Peter Mandelson was planning to do a turn at conference, Uncut advises him to stay away. Already identified by Team Ed as the source of much of the “bile” directed at their candidate, he has now been fingered by Team Dave as a key factor in the their defeat. Last night disappointed DM staffers were identifying Peter’s interventions at key moments as the turning point in the contest. “It was Peter that lost it for us”, said one exasperated aide.

* * *

Touring the bars in the early hours in our bid to bring our readers the most juicy conference morsels, Uncut bumped into David Clark, Robin Cook’s former special advisor. “Much more of this and you should change your name to Labour Half-cut”, he said. It’s under consideration.

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