“The tragedy of Gordon Brown is that we all thought he could do the job of Prime Minister. But when the time came it actually turned out it he wasn’t suited in terms of his character and constitution. He found being a leader and making that plethora of decisions which pile in on you very difficult.”
One of the more attractive aspects of heading down to London to interview Jack Straw was knowing, because the former Home and Foreign secretary had just announced his imminent resignation, that he was free to say anything. Of course, the necessity to maintain dignity and loyalty to colleagues remains, but no longer is there a party line to toe for Straw, nor any further visits from the whip.
Indeed it was evident from the outset that Straw was at ease, and felt the liberty to be wholly honest. His critique of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown was frank and direct, adding: “It’s not nice to see someone who desperately, desperately wants something, and then finds in a very public way that he might have been better doing something else.”
It was late October in Westminster. We were greeted in Portcullis House by Straw’s parliamentary assistant and shown to a fit-for-purpose ‘interview room’ upstairs, past those infamous(ly expensive) fig trees.
“Chaps, what’s the crack?” Straw asked as he delicately toddled through the doors.
“Well, it’s an interview about yourself and your career, in an attempt to help engage young people more with current affairs and the governing of their everyday lives,” I said, pointing to his seat and helping him with his microphone.
“So you’ve chosen somebody who’s 67 to talk to you about this…” We laughed – but both knew of the more serious problem. If political figures of any age lose touch with today’s students and youngsters, then the future of democracy and political participation will be put heavily at risk.
“Could I have a swig of water do you think?”
“Sure,” I said, “I’ll take the top off for you as I’ve just had some.”
“Don’t worry about it… unless you’ve got hepatitis or something I’m sure it’ll be fine.” He swilled from the bottle before hurling it at his assistant. “Who else have you had on Chat Politics then?”
“Well we interviewed Alan Johnson yesterday…” I began.
“Oh yeah. Alan said to me that he’d done this. I mean it was a very quick conversation as he was going one way, but he was pleased about it. He made a reference to rock and his music.” We went on to discuss Johnson’s autobiography, his “rickety” childhood, and his musical teenage years. “My own knowledge of music stopped in the 1970s but I’ve never pretended anything else,” remarked Straw. “Anyway, let’s go.”
The interview lasted around 30 minutes and proved to be an engrossing encounter. Plenty of time was spent discussing Straw’s role and influence in Tony Blair’s cabinet: the former Prime Minister this week said of Straw’s forthcoming retirement that Parliament would “lose one of the most able politicians of my generation” before labelling him “a true Labour giant.”
On Thatcher, Straw spoke of “a remarkable woman,” asserting that “she aroused strong enmity but you can’t take away from her that she changed political attitudes in this country. Nor can you take away the very courageous and very risky decision that she took over the Falklands. On that I did support her.”
And on foreign policy Straw described how “really important” issues, including the opening negations with Iran and the accession negotiations with Turkey, were left totally up to him.
“When Blair gave his momentous speech in the Commons before the Iraq War, you were sitting right next to him,” I said.
“I was.”
“Did you know then that some of what Blair was presenting as fact was in reality still uncertain?” It was an enormously uninventive question: whether he did or didn’t, the answer was always going to be a resounding ‘no’.
“No not at all,” Straw declared. “I knew that what I said in that half an hour could persuade some colleagues to vote with us. People may disagree with the decision, which I took as much as Tony, but there was no bad faith. Suggestions that Blair lied are totally incorrect and there’s no way the British Prime Minister, at least someone of Tony’s character, could or would have gone into the House of Commons to be mendacious.”
Straw stated in the 2010 Iraq Inquiry that he could have stopped Tony Blair going to war in Iraq. I questioned whether he really believed he had that much power. “It’s just a fact – not a piece of conceit – that if I had opposed Tony at that time there would not have been a majority and there would have been other consequences. So that was a heavy burden of responsibility. I came to the conclusion, albeit later than he did, that military action was appropriate against Iraq because of their failure to meet very clear mandatory Security Council resolutions. That’s what it was about.”
Straw went on to disagree with Alan Johnson over whether Blair was unfairly and prematurely forced out. Johnson, just a day earlier, told us that he thought Blair was ‘disgracefully pushed out’ to which Straw remarked: “Well he wasn’t – I mean – it’s not language that I would use. The problem was that Tony allowed circumstances to develop in which his own support of the Parliamentary Party was eroding.
“One of my frustrations is that if Tony had kept me as Foreign Secretary then I think I might have been able to save him from himself, but there we are.”
“And you were then still prepared to serve under Gordon Brown,” I prompted.
“Yeah, so was Alan.”
The matters of job stress and Ed Miliband followed, before we ended by looking back at his proudest moments in politics. “Blimey. I’d like to be remembered as somebody who did a decent job for his constituents, because it’s from that base that everything else flows. I think big politicians forget that at their peril.”
“The single thing of which I’m proudest was not only getting the Lawrence enquiry established, but also ensuring that all the recommendations were implemented, and I was relentless about that.” Straw ordered a public inquiry following the 1993 murder of Stephen Lawrence, which found that the Metropolitan Police was institutionally racist. “Black and Asian people say to me that it’s really helped change how they are treated in our society – that’s a big deal,” said Straw.
“It’s been great to be here at historic moments. The most interesting one where people saw that our democracy is alive and well, was on August 29th of this year, on the vote on Syria. We all surprised ourselves on that vote and it had repercussions across the world. Far from being America’s poodle, the effect of that vote influenced dramatically what then happened in the United States.”
See www.chatpolitics.org for further interviews.