'It will take years for my reputation to recover'
The sight of Hazel Blears brandishing her cheque on TV may prove the most enduring image of the whole expenses furore. But how did this straight-talking, working-class MP become the focus of the scandal? And can she possibly survive it?
- The Guardian, Thursday 21 May 2009
Gordon Brown and communities secretary Hazel Blears. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA
There she sat, ashen-faced and uncharacteristically shaky: a Labour politician I first met 23 years ago, who has since come dizzyingly close to the top of the Westminster tree - but was now in no end of trouble. For four seconds or so, Hazel Blears held up a slip of paper, and the great expenses scandal got its keynote image: the penitent minister, the cheque for a cool £13,332, and yet more proof that we are living in very strange times indeed.
Among high-profile Labour MPs, it is Blears who most embodies the expenses controversy. There are worse offenders on both sides of the Commons; unlike some, she is not being accused of breaking the law. But she sticks out for two key reasons: not only is she in the cabinet, but her whole political shtick over the last decade or so has been based on the idea that she is a working-class outsider, dismissive of Westminster's indulgences and forever rooted in her native Salford.
There is, of course, one other theory about her status as the government's most visible expenses casualty: that though there are senior ministers who should arguably be in as much disgrace - Geoff Hoon and Alistair Darling spring to mind - she has been turned into a flak-catcher in revenge for her criticisms of Gordon Brown's leadership.
In addition to a range of up-to-the-limit expenses claims, the key aspect of Blears's story goes like this: in April 2004, she apparently "flipped" her designated second home from Salford to a property in Kennington, and then sold the latter for a profit of £45,000 - having informed the Inland Revenue that the south-London home was, in fact, her primary residence, thereby avoiding the payment of capital gains tax. With some credibility, she claims the "flipping" was merely the result of a long fight to persuade parliament to let her designate her Salford home as her primary address (until 2004, Commons rules meant that ministers' London addresses had to be listed as their main homes), but that still leaves the question of why the change was not registered with the taxman.
In this scandal, it seems that money not only gets you in trouble, it might also get you out. So, in the wake of the news that Tory MPs had been instructed to reach for their pens, Blears appeared on TV and said that though there was "no liability" for capital gains tax on the London property she had sold - which, thanks to a strange loophole in tax rules, is true - she was going to pay the Inland Revenue the "equivalent" of what she would have owed if there had been.
Relative to where she had been only days before, this was an incredible fall. Earlier in the week, she had taken a high-profile pop at Gordon Brown in an Observer article that called the government's record of communication with the electorate "lamentable", and featured the memorably Thatcher-esque line "YouTube if you want to". In response, there was a flurry of talk about her political clout - even suggestions she might rise above finishing sixth out of six in the 2007 deputy leadership election, and end up with the Labour party's top job.
And then she tumbled, with a loud thump. Blears remains in the cabinet - though it seems pretty certain that, along with Jacqui Smith, she will be dispatched to the backbenches in the wake of Labour's inevitable drubbing in next month's European elections. The prime minister told a Downing Street press conference on Tuesday that her behaviour had been "totally unacceptable" - surely the kind of brutal language designed to serve notice of her sacking. There again, the last few weeks have seen whispers that she may either resign first and cause Brown no end of grief - or somehow hang on, lest she brings down other cabinet ministers with her.
There is another possibility. Such is the great spasm currently convulsing Westminster, there is a slim chance that this most loyal and passionate of New Labourites could be deselected by her local party and cast into the political wilderness.
I first encountered Hazel Blears in 1985, when she was a 29-year-old solicitor and Labour councillor with frizzed-up hair and Ben Elton glasses, and I was a Thatcher-hating 15-year-old. We initially met in the Cheshire town of Knutsford - where, prior to a takeover by a gang of Trotskyists given their instructions by the shadowy force known as the Militant tendency, I was in charge of the local branch of the Labour party Young Socialists, and she was our constituency's prospective parliamentary candidate - on to a loser, but apparently determined to fight for every last vote.
Both of us, in our different ways, were trying to spread the Labour gospel among unbelievers, for the seat in question was Tatton, then held with a crushing majority by the soon-to-be-notorious Tory MP Neil Hamilton, whose own fall - a portent, perhaps, of the current meltdown - was then a decade away. When our youth branch had its inaugural meeting in a Knutsford pub, Blears drove the 20 miles from Manchester and made an enthusiastic speech that alluded to the fact that Labour's under-30s section was in the grip of ultra-lefties (among whose beliefs was the idea that MPs should only be paid the average worker's wage), but apparently concluded that this was no bad thing. "I know people think the YS is too radical," she said, "but I think that radicalism is a good thing. It keeps the party on its toes."
I soon quit the Young Socialists and went off to university. Blears, meanwhile, continued along the path that would lead her to a safe seat in her home city. She arrived in the Commons in 1997; her first run of impeccably pro-Blair appearances led the Times's then-sketch writer Matthew Parris to call her "Mr Blair's little ray of sunshine". She soon became the parliamentary private secretary to that great Blairite believer Alan Milburn, following him from a spell as a health secretary, through the Treasury, and back to health for his four-year spell at the top of that department. In 2003, she became a minister of state at the Home Office; a year later, she was given the brief of minister for counter-terrorism; and in 2006, she made it into the cabinet, as the chair of the Labour party and minister without portfolio.
Blears brought New Labour qualities that were in fairly short supply. Blair and co were always in danger of looking bourgeois and metropolitan - whereas Blears, like David Blunkett and John Reid, could package the government's policies in a very old Labour idea of working-class rectitude. She is usually stridently optimistic and combative - as seen in her recent duel in print and on video with the Guardian's George Monbiot. Better still, she has what Denis Healey famously called a hinterland (her two big non-political passions are tap-dancing and motorbikes), and a sense of fun that led eventually to promotional T-shirts featuring the words "I'm nuts for Hazel". James Purnell, it is fair to say, cannot do this.
In reductive terms, her credo goes something like this. She is a zealous advocate of what she calls the "empowerment agenda", whereby people in danger of social exclusion take more decisions for themselves, and - note the characteristically blunt language - "it's not about well-meaning middle-class people doing good things for working-class people". She is also one of those Labour high-ups who has confidently voiced New Labour's illiberal, tabloid-friendly side, whereby immigration and crime are the issues to watch, and a tough line - and here we alight on one of the most striking casualties of the expenses crisis - always has to be taken on malingerers and benefit cheats.
In her case, all this has always been about Salford, the classically post-industrial city that sits next to Manchester and which Blears mentioned in the cheque-waving interview no less than eight times. This is where she was born and raised, the daughter of a trade unionist who worked in a bakery with a brother who, as she is fond of reminding people, is now a bus driver. If you go back to her maiden speech in the Commons, it is all there, in a portrait of home pitched somewhere between Keir Hardie and Gracie Fields: "The qualities of Salford men and women shine through the adversity of their everyday lives. They were, and still are, people with courage, determination, wit and compassion, and they have an unrivalled ability to see through falseness and to expose insincerity."
Having not crossed paths with her for almost 20 years, I met Blears on her home turf in 2004, when I was writing a primer for disaffected Labour voters called So Now Who Do We Vote For? She seemed as composed and self-confident as ever: friendly at first, though when my serial misgivings about the Blair government came out, things got rather testy. On the tape, there is a lovely moment when I mention Iraq for the second time, and one of her aides instantly pops her head round the door and tells me to wind things up.
I wondered whether her passage from apparent leftwing orthodoxy to enthusiastic New Labourism had caused her any moments of unease, but apparently not: "I don't think I've ever had to really swallow hard and sort of grit my teeth and think, 'I'm going to accept this policy even though I really don't like it'," she said. "I haven't had moments like that." There then came a quote that has lately taken on a grim resonance: "And that's probably because my own personal journey has mirrored the political journey of the party."
And then there was Salford, usually used as a means of shutting down the conversation. When we argued about the unpopular introduction of tuition fees, for example, she kept nudging the conversation back to her home turf. "If you look at my constituency, most of my young people will benefit enormously from getting grants re-introduced, from getting fees remitted," she said. She had no time for those rebellious Labour MPs who quite reasonably worried about such issues as skyrocketing student debt: "If those people thought about it properly, and were really rooted in communities like mine, they would see that the whole argument about tuition fees is a complete sham."
Rather masochistically, I eventually went back to Salford for more when I reprised a handful of encounters from the book for an item screened on BBC2's Newsnight. I was relatively new to political interviewing and this time I came armed with a bagful of stuff, including a copy of the Butler report into the use of intelligence in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq. We spent an hour playing a pretty futile kind of interview tennis, with her growing ever more irate, and me getting increasingly frustrated. When I pushed her on the government's love of the private sector, she eventually accused me of being "obsessive-compulsive", which was perhaps not the cleverest thing to say on camera. When the film was broadcast on Newsnight, they put that bit at the top of the programme, accompanied by the inevitable look of camped-up concern from Jeremy Paxman.
Two years ago, sensing that Blair was on his way out, and a meaningful conversation about the Labour party's future might be back on, I decided to rejoin, something I included in a comment piece for the Guardian. In double-quick time, Blears wrote a piece for the Guardian's Comment is Free website, which was headlined "On the side of the angels". It was a funny old read, to say the least. "I am delighted that John Harris has rejoined the Labour party after an absence of a decade ... I remember him as a keen Young Socialist, in distinctly un-socialist Tatton, when I was Labour's candidate against Neil Hamilton in 1987. Now that he is a celebrity author and cultural commentator, I am even more pleased to see him back in the fold."
With an awful prescience, she went on: "Our parents' generation saw political activity as something to benefit the community. Today, people see politics as something to benefit politicians. This is a travesty."
Earlier this week, I got hold of one of Blears's aides and asked if the minister would speak to me. As it turned out, she insisted on responding to a handful of questions via email, though that hardly dimmed the impact of her answers.
"This has been my worst time in 30 years of political life," she said. "What matters is how people feel, and they feel let down. It doesn't really matter that the Commons authorities made me designate my London flat as my main home when I became a minister, and I fought to have that designation reversed because my main home is Salford first, last and always. I know there are some people who believe I own three homes, when of course I have a house in Salford and a one-bed flat in London.
"I know people are very angry, and it will take many months for that anger to subside. I know paying money to HMRC [Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs] to the equivalent amount as if I had been liable for capital gains tax doesn't fix things. But I do hope that, over time, people will respect me as a political activist and someone driven by values."
I wondered: having written the cheque, what else did she think would be necessary for her to begin to recover from what had happened? And to take things down to brass tacks - given that there was no actual tax liability - had her cheque actually been accepted?
"The cheque was walked round to the HMRC after people saw it in my hand on the TV," she said. "It was received by a senior official, but I don't know yet what they intend to do with it. I am clear that I don't want it offset against future tax liability. If they return it, I will make an equivalent donation to a good cause. I have used my savings to cover the cheque - I didn't have such a large amount sitting in my bank account. I know it will take many months and years for my reputation to recover. I intend to throw myself into political campaigning and activism even more than I do at the moment, and as an MP I can continue to speak for people without a voice."
She has written and spoken many times about the high calling of politics and the fact that politicians deserve better than public hostility. How much danger did she think that idea was now in?
"I have always said that politics was in danger of looking like a way for people to benefit themselves, rather than serve the public. This is ... very unfair to all those elected representatives who champion their communities, work hard, make personal sacrifices, and don't expect much reward or thanks."
In the wake of what has happened to her, did she think she could play a role in such a process of political renewal?
"I know it will take time, but I want to be part of the solution. There aren't many working-class MPs in the Commons, and I believe I represent a constituency and a politics which needs to be represented."
There was one last question. If some Labour MPs are to be deselected, where did she think lines ought to be drawn? That, she said, "really is a matter for the NEC [National Executive Committee] and local parties to decide."
On Tuesday, Labour's NEC met to consider exactly that. The details of what was decided are still unclear (indeed, at the time of writing, the final wording of its decision had still not been released), but its biggest move was the setting up of a new panel that will apparently consider not just the cases of MPs who have broken the Commons' rules, but those who might have brought the Labour party into disrepute. On GMTV the following morning, Brown said this: "There are many cases where people will be suspended, where people will have to stand down at the next election and no longer be candidates for the Labour party."
Might this include Blears? One NEC member I spoke to yesterday said that the meeting had got particularly heated when it came to issues surrounding the sale of MPs' houses. Blears's name had not been explicitly mentioned, but the possible implications were obvious. Might she have to stand down as an MP? "I certainly wouldn't rule that out," he said.
This is what political life is currently like: the expenses story is moving so quickly that today's outside chance can turn into tomorrow's distinct possibility. In Blears's case, moreover, there is a very interesting sub-plot. In 2006, her constituency was one of three hacked down to two by local boundary changes - which led to a new seat of Salford and Eccles, and the current MP for the latter, Ian Stewart, challenging her for the nomination and losing by 174 votes to 79. "The right people in her old constituency are 100% loyal," one local source told me, "but there are a lot of people from Eccles who don't like her. This could be their chance to get even.
"I've been a Labour party member for more than 30 years," he went on. "And I'm sitting here thinking, why am I doing this?" For him, the expenses crisis was the final denouement in the long story of New Labour's perilous distancing from its own grassroots.
Yesterday, another Labour insider sent me an email that crisply made the same case: "The expenses scandals are the logical conclusion of Mandelson being intensely relaxed about the rich being filthy rich - the managerial political class wanted their share."
In that context, whether deservedly or not, one aspect of Blears's fate is probably now assured: she and her cheque will surely be as much of an icon of the last days of the Blair-Brown years as such faces as Neil Hamilton and David Mellor were of the near-fatal Tory decline of the mid 1990s.
Such is the tragedy summed up in the email she sent me this week. To repeat: "I know it will take many months and years for my reputation to recover." Give or take the personal pronouns, she surely speaks for her entire profession - though it is a token of these weird times that some people might read those words and detect a bit too much of Blears's trademark optimism in them.
- guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
No comments:
Post a Comment