Politicians, their wives and even their fundraisers, want to put their side of
the story and tell us what they felt about it all. They want voters to buy
their books or, at the very least, to read the extracts serialized in the
newspapers which vilified them at the time. They know this requires
disclosure of personal or political intimacies – for John Prescott bulimia,
for Cherie Blair a Balmoral pregnancy, for Michael Levy a growing sense of
betrayal. Nor do they intend to omit their own version of the
Tony-and-Gordon relationship; all of it in readily digestible television
media-friendly form.
Probably because all three authors here remain fundamentally loyal to the
Labour cause, none of these memoirs contains a “killer fact”, a revelation
of the order of Peter Mandelson’s secret £373,000 mortgage which led to his
resignation at the end of 1998. In 2008, a comparable fact could only
involve Gordon Brown. Lord Levy and Mrs Blair blame the Chancellor of the
Exchequer’s brooding impatience for the decade-long feud. Mrs Blair also
claims that the 1994 Granita restaurant pact is a myth: Gordon had already
conceded primacy, but dared not tell his acolytes. Prescott, a more
impartial witness who also saw most, acknowledges Brown’s sulky, destructive
conduct (“just like a husband and wife rowing”), but lays most of the blame
on Blair’s repeatedly unfulfilled promises to hand over power after 2003.
“Gordon is the only friend I have lost”, Levy recalls Blair saying. None of
this adds more than titillating detail to what we already knew, and the
authors, who do not claim to have kept detailed diaries, but quote extensive
passages of verbatim conversations, must be treated gingerly.
Prescott’s book, the one with the swear words, was ghostwritten by Hunter
Davies, who successfully captures the future Deputy Prime Minister’s tone of
voice (“oh aye, we were great little boppers”, he says of his dancing teens)
which is cheerfully demotic, often chippy. Levy’s Tiggerish account was
polished by another journalist, Ned Temko, who parades all his client’s
acknowledged faults, his insecurity, pushiness and vanity, yet renders him
hard to dislike. Mrs Blair appears to be her own typist. If she were not a
successful QC, her breezy style could earn her a decent living as a magazine
writer: her text is peppered with phrases such as “dead impressed” and
“dignity is not the word”, and such sentiments as “for me flying on Concorde
was a dream come true”. But her book – the most rounded of the three – is
warm, often humorous, at times painfully sad. The generous reader learns to
forgive her. “I fancied him rotten and still do”, she says of her husband.
The Queen was “clearly very fond of Tony too”. None of which has prevented
these three post-Blair autobiographies from being savaged, sometimes in the
very newspapers which chose sensational extracts for serialization. To
denounce the authors for undignified and mercenary backbiting is to ignore
the bargain made: not so much cash-for-honours as cash-for-dignity.
Yet these memoirs can be read with more pleasure than disdain. What they shed
most light on is not score-settling or hurt feelings (though they contain
plenty of both) but a largely wholesome story of ambition and social
mobility in post-war Britain. They chart the careers of clever, assertive
children of the respectable upper working class – born in 1938 (Prescott),
1944 (Levy) and 1954 (Blair) – all of whom went a lot further in life than
they might have had reason to expect growing up poor but mostly happy in
Yorkshire and Cheshire, Jewish East London, and Crosby on Merseyside. They
tell good stories about indomitable mums and grannies, grammar schools and
Ruskin College, Oxford; about the kindness of teachers and strangers
(Brendan Behan was nice to young Prescott as Philip Larkin was not; Alan
Sugar stood by Levy; a host of friends surround Cherie). They also evoke the
power of strong marriages and close-knit family life. Very different though
they are – two homemakers and a barrister – all three redoubtable wives in
these books, Pauline, Gilda and Cherie, would strangle crocodiles for their
men.
Has ten years of a Labour government, expressly committed to improving the
life chances of children like these, made it more likely that talented
youngsters from poor backgrounds will succeed today? These are not books
which assess policy issues in such terms. Prescott, the 11-plus failure
always determined to prove himself, frequently invokes his successes and
defeats. Levy, the accountant who makes a fortune in the pop music business,
then stumbles across the Blairs when fundraising for Jewish charities,
believes in Blair’s vision of a Britain which is “caring, tolerant, fair and
modern”. Mrs Blair, who joined the Labour Party at the age of sixteen, is
here confirmed as more left-wing (and more impulsive) than her husband, whom
Prescott initially dismissed as an “SDP type, a bright young middle-class
lawyer living in Islington”.
Tribal Labour loyalists as they are, all three authors offer personal
narratives in which events in the larger world, even Iraq and Tony Blair’s
battles with Gordon Brown, are largely heard as background noise. Iraq gets
seventeen index references in Mrs Blair’s book, Michael Levy one; Carole
Caplin, her fashion-and-fitness adviser, gets forty-six, including one where
Bill Clinton has to be rescued from her attentions; Alastair Campbell
warrants seventy-one. It is Campbell’s wary assessment of Caplin (“trouble”)
which prevails, surprisingly late in the day, after much damage had been
done by her Australian conman boyfriend, Peter Foster. Mrs Blair’s defence
of her over-trusting conduct is believable and easy to understand in the
context of the loneliness of No 10 wives, about which she wrote in The
Goldfish Bowl: Married to the Prime Minister (2004). In her case, the
ambition of a feminist lawyer to be an active “first lady” increases her
frustration, because officialdom initially blocked her. She seems happiest
when writing with engaging candour about the politics of the Bar. For a good
Catholic girl she is also unexpectedly frank about sex: when Cherie sleeps
with Tony on their first date, she is also juggling two other swains.
Such entertaining digressions mean that the most sustained public policy
examined in these books comes from Levy’s attempt to persuade readers that
his role as No 10’s special envoy to the Middle East was not just a reward
for his brilliant fundraising, nor a consolation prize for not being made
“the new Lord Goodman”. The Middle East was a suitable arena for his skills
as a networker – “schmoozer” is a better word, he says – one who was
acceptable to both Jewish and Arab leaders. Even the fearsome Hafez al-Assad
of Syria is seen to kiss him on both cheeks, something, incidentally, which
Cherie Blair does to Prince Charles – though she suspects it annoys him.
Such liberties may be taken more readily with the House of Windsor than the
House of Assad. Levy claims a modest role (he is immodestly modest in an
engaging way) in helping to set up the abortive 1999 Syrian–Israeli talks in
West Virginia, and much else. He may exaggerate his role, but he did get on
well with Robin Cook – whose dismissal from the post of Foreign Secretary in
2001 prompted Levy’s first serious misgivings about Blair – and he was
clearly engaged in more than vanity diplomacy.
The driving force behind A Question of Honour, however, lies in the title, its
shadow cast over every chapter. On the night of July 11, 2006, Levy was told
by his lawyer to report next morning to Colindale police station, where he
would be arrested on suspicion of “conspiring with others” to raise loans in
return for promises of peerages and of conspiring to hide those loans. On
legal advice, Levy sticks to his formal statements and to his belief that he
has done nothing wrong. After Blair had furtively invited the Brownite
venture capitalist, Sir Ronnie Cohen, to “help” with fundraising in the
financial panic of the 2005 election campaign, Levy had come close to
resigning, on his wife’s advice. Instead he stayed on – “the biggest mistake
of my life” – and was persuaded by Blair to follow the Tories through a
loophole in his own legislation: undeclared loans. Reading what he calls
“the damaging police and media narrative” in the press over the next year,
Levy acknowledges only one retaliatory briefing, a complaint that he feared
being “hung out to dry” by No 10. Long aware that his old friend and tennis
partner now needed him less, Levy, the sensitive only child, came to wonder
how much politicians are just in it for themselves. His account is generous
towards his press and police tormentors – prime suspects for most of the
leaks about his problems – but the old intimacy with Blair was never
recovered. Don’t be bitter, he tells himself; but he struggles to succeed.
Readers comparing all three accounts may sympathize. Personal insecurity is
central to each of these stories. Levy has his “Hackney size chip”, which
neither money nor much-quoted praise can lift. A similar need for
reassurance afflicts Cherie (“that bottom, those hips”), eldest daughter of
the runaway rogue of an actor who repeatedly shamed all three of his
families: “will I ever get another erection?”, Tony Booth asked his
daughter, after nearly burning himself to death. It is even worse for
Prescott, shy eldest son of one-legged Bert, a Dunkirk-wounded railwayman,
womanizer, sometime JP and perpetual scrounger of free drinks and tickets.
When John made his greatest speech, winning the vital one-member-one-vote
ballot for John Smith in 1993, Bert, sponging a drink as usual, failed to
congratulate his son. No career plan, such as that of becoming another Rose
Heilbron QC (Cherie’s heroine), attended Prescott’s teens. But he battled
through, met and married his beautiful hairdresser and discovered an
underdog’s talent for fighting injustice. Initially it was within his own
corrupt Seamen’s Union, which did not welcome troublemakers and bundled
Prescott off to university to get rid of him. That would happen throughout
his career; the “beautiful people” of New Labour were always sending John
off to Europe or Kyoto, never inviting him to dinner at Chequers or to their
cliquey cabals. It is perhaps in his favour. “I began to suspect I was being
used”, he mused in 1997 before calling Blair a “little shit” who must never
do it again. But, of course, he did.
Lord Levy could have told Prezza that; as could the loyal Cherie Blair QC,
typing in Connaught Square, a Penelope still awaiting her globe-trotting
spouse. In their own ways, each of these memoirs serves to remind us what an
operator Tony Blair was. Memoirs of the Brown court will be less fun.
Lord Levy
A QUESTION OF HONOUR
Inside New Labour and the true story of the cash for peerages scandal
310pp. Simon and Schuster. £18.99.
978 1 84737 315 1
Cherie Blair
SPEAKING FOR MYSELF
The autobiography
421pp. Little, Brown. £18.99.
978 1 4087 0098 3
John Prescott
PREZZA, MY STORY
Pulling no punches
416pp. Headline Review. £18.99.
978 0 7553 1775 2
Michael White is an assistant editor of the Guardian, whose political
editor he was from 1990 to 2006.
