Andrew Rawnsley - A nation reborn? Election 1997 | Politics | The Guardian
Andrew Rawnsley
Friday 2 May 1997 22.19 EDT
First published on Friday 2 May 1997 22.19 EDT
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Some tears have been shed by the little lamented losers. Some champagne has been spilt by the victors. Parliament Square does not, however, run red. It has been a bloodless revolution, an electoral coup executed in the solitude of the polling booth. That is the British way. Two men switch limousines and power flows from one to the other, the transition effortlessly, peaceably and almost invisibly lubricated by the Civil Service.
Quiet this revolution may be but it is nevertheless emphatic. Many of those opting for change may have done so not because they thrill to New Labour but because they were sick to the gut of the Conservatives. The aggrieved and insecure middle classes, having punished the Tories, will soon put Labour on the most testing probation. The Blair Government may last 15 years or it may survive just five. Some of the allies it won in opposition and some of the promises it made from there may not last five months on the hot anvil of government. The brave new world that was born in the early hours of Friday morning will eventually end in grief. One way or another, all governments do.
Yet, dilute the excitement with whatever doses of scepticism you feel appropriate and there is still no question that on Friday morning Britain woke up a different country. It may be a trick of the light, but it feels like a younger country. The first person to notice this will have been the Queen. For the first time she has a Prime Minister who was born after the beginning of her reign.
When Tony Blair's party last won an election he was still the lead singer in a college rock group; when it last had a working majority he was still in short trousers; when it last had a landslide he was not even a twinkle in his father's eye. The average age of the Cabinet has dropped by about 10 years. In spirit they are 20 years fresher than the faces they replace. The dying years of the ancien Tory regime saw a weary trudge through disillusion, impoverished expectations and increasing paranoia about Britain's place in the world. Simply by being fresh to government, Labour offers at least the illusion of marking a new beginning, and is offered the opportunity to make it a reality.
A knackered generation of politicians gives way to an untested generation. The twenty and thirtysomething party workers and policy wonks who celebrated the triumph at the Royal Festival Hall were inebriated with liquids more potent than alcohol: optimism and enthusiasm. Tomorrow belonged to them. To every problem they believe there is a solution - even if they haven't yet found it.
The pendulum does not just swing; the torch passes from one generation to another, a fact that will be most apparent in the Prime Minister's residence itself. The sound of young children will echo around the house of power for the first time since Asquith was in power. On Thursday evening we had a Prime Minister who bought his casual wear at Dunn & Co; since Friday morning we have had a Prime Minister who buys his leisure shirts from Gap. Macaroni cheese is no longer the dish of choice in Downing Street. It is more likely to be tortellini pesto.
Happy Eater will receive no more free publicity as the Greasy Spoon by Appointment to the Prime Minister. When the Blairs dine out, they and their security detail are more likely to be found at Pizza Express. The majority of MPs will no longer be doing their shopping at Harrods. Saturday morning finds the typical Blairista in the aisles of Waitrose.
Gone is the Prime Minister who used the honours list to remember old cricketers. In his place is a Prime Minister who prefers to spend his time with young footballers. After six and a half years under a leader whose vision was of a Britain wearing a cardigan and slumbering over a warm beer - following more than a decade under a leader whose world view was rooted in Victorian values - we now have a Prime Minister who styles himself a 'modern man'.
His definition of modernity - that he grew up on the Beatles and didn't smoke marijuana - may still seem rather middle-aged to quite a chunk of the population. But to many - especially those tasting the bitter-sweet sensation of being ruled by a man younger than themselves - the country feels a little more spritely.
Deprived of office, the Tories look even more aged than they did before they were ejected from it. Overnight the history-makers are ancient history. For 18 years the only politics that have really mattered have been the politics of the Conservative Party. If I asked you to name the leading Ministers of the Thatcher and Major governments, I expect you would do quite well. Now try to name their shadow counterparts. Yes, it's hard. Everything the opposition parties have done for nearly two decades has essentially been a footnote to Conservative governments.
That Tory bottoms should be glued to the rear seats of limos, that Tory voices should give permanent secretaries their marching orders, had seemed to be the natural order of things. Not just to them but to us. Tory assumptions and attitudes have been implanted deep in the national mind.
Their language - the language of 'market testing', 'profit centres' and 'throughputs' - has been the lingua franca of Whitehall and far beyond. Their wisdom - in which private was always to be preferred to public, the demands of the have-lots superior to the needs of the have-nots - became the received wisdom. On the long march to electability, Labour has acquiesced to many of those Tory nostrums and adopted much of their language. But Labour Ministers will bring an alternative set of values to office. At its most essential, it is the difference between Margaret Thatcher when she said that 'there was no such thing as society' and Tony Blair when he says 'we achieve more together than we do alone'.
Labour in office will be governed by different priorities, prejudices and blind spots. It will have different pressure points. It will make different enemies. It will have a different circle of friends.
Even before the purge of Tory placemen and women from the quangos has begun, the Establishment has been reshuffled. The dinner tables of power have been relocated from Belgravia to Islington. The Adam Smith Institute will no longer find an automatic audience for its pamphlets in the inner circles of power.
The Institute for Public Policy Research will have every Minister on its mailing list. Lord Stevens is out; Lord Hollick is in. The Spectator, which has wielded an influence far in excess of its circulation over the Tory years, now speaks to and for an impotent Opposition.
The New Statesman and the London Review of Books are the magazines you will be more likely to find on Ministerial coffee tables. Modesty should prevent me from saying this, but - heck, why not? - the Guardian and the Observer are in. The Telegraph titles are out. The views of the Tory press and their proprietors will still matter to those struggling for control of what remains of the Conservative Party but their editorial hotlines to Number 10 have been disconnected.
The opinions of Tory backbenchers, upon whom so much airtime and print was lavished when they held a government's vulnerable bits in their fists, will matter less than a damn to the big picture. Bill Cash? Teresa Gorman? Teddy Taylor? Who? Who? Who?
As we adjust our sense of news values to the reordered political landscape, the jockeying for the leadership of the Tory Party will be given its proper priority, which is in a distant second place to the sharing of the spoils within the Labour Government.
Slowly but surely we will become acquainted with a whole new cast of political players, many of whom are spending this weekend still breaking it to their families that they have unexpectedly found themselves as MPs. With them will come new plots and new controversies and inevitably new disappointments and new scandals.
The most influential pressures upon the Labour Government will come from the other side of the political spectrum. This is not a way of saying that the unions will be racing down Pall Mall to park their tanks on Prime Minister Blair's front lawn. If they were so minded, they would find Gordon Brown standing there with a bazooka. It is to say that ministerial doors will be closing to the Country Landowners' Association and opening to Shelter. Most of all, it is a commentary on the types of people who will have the ear of MPs and Ministers. Though there is some overlap, Labour people swim in different social pools to Tories. The influence of bankers and brokers begins to wane; that of teachers and doctors starts to wax.
Some of the changes implied by that will take time to manifest themselves. Mr Blair is leery of grandiose rhetoric about a dynamic first 100 days - not least because that was how Harold Wilson used to talk, and look what happened to him. Yet the emphasis of government will change quite dramatically in three big areas.
The first is education. Though the Conservatives were interested in it as a subject, their interest was only ever academic when not one Cabinet Minister sent his own children to the same schools as the majority of the population. Eton is out; church schools are in. Tony Blair will be the first Prime Minister to send his children to state schools. That is a large fact, rather larger than the precise nature of the school which they attend.
I am not entirely convinced that energy and purpose, even in the abundance which he promises to apply, will be sufficient to make all the difference he pledges without additional resources. And that money is going to be very hard to find within the public-spending straitjacket which Labour has put on to prove its fiscal rectitude.
But having a Prime Minister obsessed with raising standards and opportunities is the sine qua non of doing anything about them. Then there is the distribution of power within the United Kingdom - a concern to the Conservatives only once they were threatened with losing their monopoly control over it. Scotland will suddenly start throwing its political weight around, possibly so much so that England will not feel entirely comfortable.
It would do so even if Labour were not committed to its ambitious programme of constitutional reform. This will be a very Scottish government. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is a Scot. The Foreign Secretary is a Scot. The Lord Chancellor is a Scot. The leader's birth certificate makes him a Scot. The accent of the Cabinet has changed from Middle English to Lowland Scottish.
Third, there is Europe. Here, I think, Mr Blair faces his hardest choices. Crudely summarised, at the Amsterdam Summit or if not then at some point soon afterwards he will have to choose between staying friends with Roy Jenkins and remaining pals with Rupert Murdoch. My hunch is that, buttressed by that huge majority, he will seek to educate the public mood away from Euro-paranoia and allow the natural pro-European majority in the House of Commons to start expressing itself.
It is a long, long time since we had a Prime Minister who could not only speak French, but speak it with sufficient fluency not to embarrass us or himself in front of the French.
Where and how it will end no one can safely predict. That a revolution has begun no one can surely doubt.