07 Oct 2012 02:57:19
When Barbara Castle appointed the young Jack Straw as her special adviser at the social services department in 1974, she said she wanted him for his "guile and low cunning". She was not, presumably, disappointed. Straw went on to be a Labour frontbencher – in either the cabinet or shadow cabinet – for 23 consecutive years. In all that time, he resisted categorisation into any of the party's many strands of opinion and faction. After becoming an MP in 1979, he joined the leftwing Tribune Group and voted for Michael Foot as party leader. He also voted for Tony Benn as deputy leader against Denis Healey, a decision which, in this book, he rather ungallantly attributes to Castle's flawed advice. Thirteen years later, he managed Tony Blair's leadership campaign. Thirteen years after that, he managed Gordon Brown's.He was privy to most of the serious plotting against Brown and even emerged as the favourite not only to succeed the failing leader but to deliver the bad news to him. But a visit to Downing Street with the deputy leader, Harriet Harman, amusingly recounted in this book, ended with Straw merely telling Brown to "widen the political circle involved in election planning". Bennite, Kinnockite, Cookite, Blairite, Brownite: Straw somehow avoided all the labels, even though, by publishing an anti-clause IV pamphlet in 1993, he was in some respects an early outrider for Blair.
To dismiss Straw as an unprincipled and narrowly ambitious politician is to miss the point. Straw is tribal Labour; his maternal grandfather was a Transport and General Workers' Union shop steward, his mother a Labour councillor. At 13, he decided, while delivering leaflets in pouring rain during the 1959 election campaign, that he'd like to be an MP. The abiding principle of Straw's life is that Labour should be in power. What it should use power for is something he hardly seems to think about. He has never claimed to be a conviction politician. Rather, he is a managerial one, as was evident even when he was National Union of Students president, elected on a "radical" ticket but never seen without a tie. As a student politician, he worked with the Communist party, because he admired its organisation and discipline.
He records, with some pride, his skill at avoiding direct questions and showcases Castle's "guile and low cunning" comment below a chapter heading. He admits (five times, as meticulously recorded in the index) to "anorak" tendencies: his strongest passions are mostly to do with constitutional, administrative and electoral arrangements. He supported abolition of clause IV not because of strong views about the merits of private against public ownership, but because he thought it would help Labour get elected. As shadow home secretary, and then as home secretary, he proposed illiberal policies, such as increasing police powers and restricting jury trials, mainly because he didn't want Labour to be thought "soft on crime". By reputation a long-standing Eurosceptic, he unhesitatingly assured Blair that, if there were a referendum on the euro, he would support the government line. He dismisses an "ethical foreign policy" as an "unhelpful" label. Referring to Blair, he observes acerbically that "a 'world view' is a dangerous and misguided notion."
The big philosophical issues of politics – the role of the state, the limits of markets, the merits of egalitarianism – are scarcely on Straw's radar. Big pictures and big ideas are not for him. His habit is to amble along in roughly the same direction as everyone else. Still an MP, Straw voted for David Miliband as Labour leader, as most Labour MPs did, but now, like most Labour MPs, thinks Ed has "shown himself to be decisive and … made some difficult moves well".
These memoirs are better written than most. There is ample gossip and genuinely funny stories, of which the best concern a chief whip who made his point by squeezing Straw's testicles, and health and safety officials who stopped the union flag flying on Portcullis House. As well as waspish observations about personalities – Charles Clarke is "a quixotic contrarian" – there are revealing anecdotes. For example, when the Labour government won a Commons division on top-up university fees by just five votes, Straw warned Blair not to push his luck too far. "'Jack,' he replied, with blue eyes blazing, 'I'm always lucky.'"
The most absorbing part of the book concerns his traumatic childhood and early adulthood. He recalls, without self-pity, how his parents quarrelled bitterly and eventually parted; how, aged nine, he saw a maternal uncle beat up his father and, next day, found his father attempting suicide; how he was initially so unhappy at boarding school (to which he won a free scholarship) that he ran away three times in one week. Later, Straw's first wife developed anorexia and their child died at six days old. Straw himself suffered chronic tinnitus after an ear infection. Depression led him to consult a psychoanalyst whom he still sees occasionally.
But the section that will attract greatest interest is disappointing. He describes his decision, as foreign secretary, to support an invasion of Iraq as "the most difficult and momentous … I've ever made". He could, as he says, have stopped UK involvement. His explanation of how he reached his decision, however, is unconvincing. We learn almost nothing about the thought processes that led a former Aldermaston marcher – whose father was a conscientious objector in the second world war, whose mother joined the Peace Pledge Union in the 30s, whose second wife and children opposed the Iraq invasion – to support the most controversial deployment of British military force in nearly 50 years. Straw has nothing to say about American use of (and possible British complicity in) extraordinary rendition. Nor does he comment on allegations that US neoconservatives wanted him out of the Foreign Office; he attributes his bitterly resented demotion in 2005 to Blair's jealousy of his close relationship with Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state.
Perhaps there were no thought processes. Straw is a reactive politician, not a reflective one. There has always been a curious lack of passion to his politics and, on his own admission, he tends, because of his childhood, to bury his feelings. He says in a footnote that he was confirmed in the Church of England in his 40s, but gives no clue as to how deep his religious beliefs go.
The secret of what makes Straw tick may lie in his school holidays, when he worked for his uncle as a plumber's mate. He learned "to cut, bend and solder pipes, and much else". That was how he approached government and policy-making: he aimed to keep the water flowing and the boiler flues clear. He was New Labour's safe pair of hands, its trusty plumber, a much more competent than average minister. The conception of the project may have been flawed, fatally so in the case of the Iraq war. But it isn't a plumber's job to worry about the architecture.
