Authors: Gordon Burn
Reg Keys had put himself up as an anti-war candidate to oppose Blair on his own doorstep. His son Tom was one of six redcap soldiers who had been murdered in a particularly brutal attack on a police station in Majar al-Kabir in Iraq in
2003. As no weapons of mass destruction were ever found, Reg Keys believed Tom had been betrayed by the government and died for a lie.
‘If this war was justified then I would not be here today. If the war had been just I would have been grieving and not campaigning,’ he said at Sedgefield after the 2005 count, where he polled 10 per cent of the vote. ‘If weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, then I would not have come to Sedgefield, to the prime minister’s stronghold, to challenge him on its legality.’ With both Blairs standing immediately behind him and all eyes on them (Cherie was widely believed to have opposed the war), he added: ‘I hope in my heart that one day the prime minister will be able to say sorry to the families bereaved by this war; I hope in my heart that one day he will find himself able to visit in hospital the soldiers who have been wounded by it.’
On 27 June, the day he finally stood down as prime minister to make way for Gordon Brown, Jonathan Freedland noted in the
Guardian
that here was no hint of a leader made to dip his head for the ‘fateful, lethal mistake’ of Iraq: ‘Unbelievably, he has choreographed his exit with a thousand send-offs: cheers at Sedgefield, a last hug at the White House, a final round of backslapping from European leaders last week, and yet another ovation from a Labour conference on Sunday.’
Freedland contrasted Blair’s lack of contrition with Eden in the wake of Suez, Lyndon Johnson in the aftermath of Vietnam, prime minister Begin and the Lebanon
war of 1982, ‘all of them broken by the knowledge of the suffering and death their decisions had caused’.
Eight months after the invasion of Iraq in March, 2003 – five months after Tom Keys’ death at Majar al-Kabir a few days before his twenty-first birthday – Tony Blair had invited George Bush to be his guest at Myrobella in Trimdon Colliery, and to lunch at the Dun Cow in Sedgefield. It was the first state visit by an American president in over eighty years and advance parties of FBI and CIA crawled all over everything for weeks in advance of Bush’s arrival. On the day, Air Force One touched down at Teeside airport. The motorcade of twenty armour-plated limousines with outriders, the presidential mobile hospital, the president’s personal surgeon, the full panoply of bomb-blast mitigation and mortar-spray protection made its way to Trimdon Colliery. After a tea break at the Blairs’ house, the procession continued along the winding lanes, bypassing the worst eyesores of Ferryhill and Fishburn, to the pub lunch in Sedgefield.
The protesters had been corralled at Sedgefield race course. With their loudhailers and their banners, they were marched by the police in an orderly fashion into the village in time to vent their anger at the president and prime minister, who smiled and shook hands for the cameras a safe distance away on their side of the wide cordon sanitaire.
The publican at the Hardwick Arms nailed a notice to the door that day. It said: No Presidents, No Prime Ministers, No Press. ‘They’re always on about how do you
”feel”,’ he said. ‘What do you “feel” about … How did you “feel” when … It’s none of their bloody business how I feel about anything. That notice wasn’t put there as a joke. I told them haddaway. Gan piss up your kilt.’
*
Early doors, Paul Trippett said, it was exciting for everybody. But after Tony became prime minister, especially after 9/11, and even more so after Iraq, just getting him into the club for ten minutes became a major operation. The installation of Hardstaff concrete TVCBs, a familiar sight at airports, stations and anywhere else construed to be under threat from a high-speed car bomb, staff clearances, sniffer dogs … It got too dodgy, for security reasons.
Paul has always lived local. When he was younger he had a reputation in the village as a bit of a lad. Motorbike, blond hair down to here. He did his time as a joiner, and then was steward at Trimdon Labour Club for many years. Paul was one of the group of ‘famous five’ Labour activists who talented-spotted Blair back in 1983 and, instantly smitten, threw themselves into getting him selected to stand.
Paul’s importance to the organisation was demonstrated on the day of the presidential visit, when he was seated between Blair and Bush for lunch at the Dun Cow. (‘What was it he said when you asked him about Iran?’ Tony whispered to Paul when the president was briefly out of earshot, pressing the flesh. ‘Oh, that’s between me an’ George, Tony,’ Paul replied.)
The first time he phoned Paul to ask for a meeting, he
was told that afternoon was difficult. He had on Ofsted report thing at the school in Trimdon, then he wanted to watch the European Cup qualifier between England and Russia at four, and after that he’d promised to take the grandbairns to the pictures. ‘Sorry, mate.’
The night Blair had come knocking on John Burton’s door to try to convince him that he was the right man for Trimdon there had been football on the telly and he had to wait to make his pitch until the match was finished, tie loosened, jacket off, showing his familiarity with the players’ nicknames and protesting that that was never a yellow! C’mon, ref!
(On the night of his audition as the singer for Ugly Rumours, Blair had turned up at the lead guitarist’s rooms at Corpus Christie in Oxford clutching a sheaf of neatly transcribed lyrics to the songs that made up the group’s intended set: ‘Live With Me’ and ‘Honky Tonk Women’ by the Rolling Stones; Jackson Browne’s ‘Take It Easy’; ‘Black Magic Woman’ by Fleetwood Mac; ‘China Grove’ and ‘Long Train Running’, both by the Doobie Brothers; and Free’s ‘All Right Now’. ‘Let’s go, honeys,’ according to John Harris, is something he was heard to say often in those days when he was in female company. In Gordo’s days as a student politico at Edinburgh, meanwhile, his hotties went by the name ‘Brown’s Sugars’, presumably all unaware of the cunnilingual and racial connotations of that particular Stones track.)
‘Tony chose Labour. I was born Labour,’ Phil Wilson said when he was elected to succeed Blair as MP. That was
true of all the ‘famous five’ – Wilson, Paul Trippett, Peter Brookes, Simon Hoban and John Burton – who had gathered at Burton’s house that night to watch the latest blow-in perform his dog-and-pony show for them.
Burton had become Secretary of the Trimdon branch of the Sedgefield constituency when it was reformed for the ’83 General Election. He taught PE and history at Sedgefield Comprehensive and the four younger men had once all been his pupils. In these times of fanatics, of
madrasas
and creepy politico-religious indoctrination, it struck him that the Trimdon cell had something vaguely sinister or maybe cabalistic about it. The charismatic leader, his devoted followers, the cave redoubt in the tribal lands of the little-populated northern part of the country, the prayers, the plotting, the paranoia, the chants. We’re in the magic mountains, where all the shadows have rainbows. Strange shapes from the magic mountain range. You read about these things in the papers.
Paul Trippett told him that he had in fact been to a weekend school on Holy Island that flew the banner of Labour Young Socialists but was actually a cover for Militant. There they were coached in what was known as ‘entryism’ – how to take over Labour branches and swing them to the hard left. Paul had sold copies of
Militant
Tendency
at weekends in the shopping centre, spent week nights leafleting. A donkey jacket and lank metal-head hair. Dave Spart.
Phil Wilson had followed a similar path. He left school with two O-levels and ended up working in the Co-op at
Peterlee and as a civil service paper-pusher at National Savings in Durham.
‘I came out of Militant,’ Paul said. ‘Militant wanted to fight Labour, and I wanted to fight Tories. I was the prodigal son returning, so there was never a problem with me.’
Paul and Phil had both just renounced extremism and begun to embrace the philosophy of a nicer, happier, kinder society that would be the hallmark of New Labour in the future and become fully paid-up members of the Labour party for a second time when opportunity, in the shape of the personable young public-school- and Oxford-educated barrister from London, came knocking. It seems they all sensed from the beginning that Tony was Cabinet material. And it seemed that Tony sensed that here at last was the tight little gang of proletarian tykes, a bit unfinished on the outside but hearts of gold underneath, that he had never had. ‘Where we going, fellers?’ ‘To the top, Johnny.’ ‘To the top of what, fellers?’ ‘To the toppermost of the poppermost, Johnny!’ It’s about fellowship, friendship, brotherly love. ‘One nation’, ‘the future not the past’, ‘renewal’ were the buzzwords. The totalitarianism of the totally pleasant personality.
From the outside, it looked as if handing on Sedgefield, one of the safest Labour seats in the country, like the (some thought, scandalous) handing on of the prime minister’s job on the bigger stage, was part of what the Americans know as a sweetheart deal (or palimony, in the case of Blair-Brown). In addition to any surrogate role he might have played in the constituency for Blair, Phil
Wilson had been employed at Number 10 and had also worked at Labour HQ at Millbank: he had been in charge of the ‘Prescott Express’ throughout the triumphant, Labour’s-coming-home 1997 election, helping keep JP on an even keel by pumping the bus full of Billie, Ella, Basie and Sinatra, all the old Parky favourites (as well of course as reporting back regularly to Tony on the state of mind of a strategically important colleague who was nevertheless considered to be a bit of a loose cannon).
But in July, in the low-key run-up to the by-election in which there was only ever going to be one winner, everybody was telling him that no kind of sweetheart deal was ever offered, and none accepted.
Paul Trippett insisted that for two years they had had to be on their guard against plans Number 10 might have been hatching to parachute some young hotshot in. They had come up with a counter-plan of their own just in case. Internally, they referred to this as ‘SCAB’: Sedgefield Constituency after Blair.
The basic thought they started to plant in people’s minds was that, after a decade of a virtually absentee Member of Parliament (which is how a significant minority of constituents regarded their celebrity PM), it was essential that the new MP be familiar with the area and be available to focus on all the meat-and-potatoes issues which inevitably in the Blair years had tended to be ignored. ‘I’ll go to all your fairs and fetes’: this was Phil Wilson’s solemn promise to all the people he was appealing to to get him elected.
Paul Trippett was going to give up his job running the Labour Club to become Phil Wilson’s full-time office manager and political adviser after the election. They had grown up together. They were both schoolboys at the time of the Kennedy assassination and could never have dreamed that they would themselves one day be part of a kind of Camelot-at-the-court-of-King-Tony in their own tiny little corner of the north-east of England. It was a word that Paul brought up himself in conversation. ‘When Camelot goes, like,’ he would say, or ‘With Camelot gone, as it were’, looking ahead to life in the new SCAB era.
Tony was starstruck. He liked rubbing shoulders with Sir Cliff and Bono and Barry Gibb and gladly accepted invitations to make use of their rock-star mansions. He was reported to be sick with nerves before appearing at the Brits and overawed at the prospect of meeting Noel Gallagher. He was relentlessly mocked in the press for the calibre of the guests he had down for supper at Chequers: Vernon Kay and Jimmy Savile; this was hardly the Rat Pack. Charlotte Church. She was hardly Pablo Casals.
And yet, in his natural inclination towards MOR and his familiarity with the stars of the more hummable end of the light-entertainment spectrum, Tony was closer to JFK in many ways than the mockers supposed. The Kennedy White House only came to be known as ‘Camelot’ when Jacqueline Kennedy called in Theodore White, the journalist, for an interview just after her husband’s death and revealed to him that the president liked to repair to their
private quarters and play the Broadway show album, featuring the songs of Lerner and Lowe sung by Robert Goulet and Julie Andrews.
Cherie Blair of course came from a showbusiness background. Her father, Tony Booth, was not only a famous face on television, best known as the Scouser layabout son-in-law of Alf Garnett in
Till Death Us Do Part
, he was also what used to be known in those days as a well-known ‘socialist firebrand’. (‘Feckless’ was a word also often used to describe him and, even in his anecdotage, is still sometimes used in connection with Tony Booth today. He was absent when Cherie married Tony in 1980, recuperating in hospital from the severe burns he had suffered in a drunken incident involving a five-gallon drum of paraffin, many bottles of Jameson’s, and two members of the SAS.)
Kennedy went to Hollywood and spent time studying Gary Cooper and Clark Gable to try to work out what charisma was, how you got it and what it took to make it work for you. Tony had access to Tony Booth and he used him not only to pick up tips to improve his acting; he also used his father-in-law’s very good contacts within the Labour party to get himself picked as the candidate for the Tory stronghold of Beaconsfield at a 1982 by-election.
The following year was Sedgefield, and he didn’t hesitate to wheel on not just Cherie’s father, but also Tony Booth’s partner Pat Phoenix, who by that time had become indistinguishable to audiences from Elsie Tanner, the big earth-mother figure of
Coronation Street
who she had been playing for nearly a quarter of a century.
Like Tony Booth, Pat Phoenix was a lifelong Labour supporter. She had been on first-name terms with both Wilson and ‘Sunny Jim’ Callaghan, the last two Labour prime ministers. (‘The sexiest thing on television,’ Callaghan had called her, as he cuddled her close on the doorstep at Downing Street for the benefit of the cameras while Harold Wilson, pipe in hand, looked on prime-ministerially.)