The beginning is pretty boring. Clare has no snappy turns of phrase. Her prose plods along. She gives us a potted history of her early life at home and in the Labour party, and also explains what it was like to be a serious-minded woman in a parliament where men such as Alan Clarke, an appalling old misogynist, turned up drunk and played for laughs. "I objected and told the Speaker I knew we weren't allowed to say another member was drunk [why on earth not?] but there did seem to be a problem." The papers all reported that she had wrongly accused the minister of being drunk.
"I remember being horrified at the fawning attitude Tory M.P.s adopted to their ministers and particularly to the Prime Minister."[Mrs Thatcher. The Tory Party constitution is very hierarchicial and the M.P.s are forced to toady if they want to get promotion. Everything depends on what he/she thinks of them. Mostly it works as it suits the Tory personality, but recently, under Mr Johnson, it does not work as his behaviour in sacking 21 democratically elected M.P.s is not acceptable or precedented, and yet they dare not call him out.]
She was clearly a very dedicated constituency M.P., trying her best to ease a way through the problems of the people who come for her help. During this time, in 1983, Mrs Thatcher's divisive politics meant that there was high unemployment and deep divisions. Like all Labour politicians then, Clare had a passionate commitment to equality of opportunity and ending race and sex discrimination which was opposed by the Tories at the time. She points out also that Labour has a strong libertarian tradition - they are not communists - they believe in free elections and the rule of law. They did not want to nationalise all the industries either, but thought it right that the utilities - gas, electricity, telephones and water - should be in public ownership becaue they are crucial to basic wellbeing. The model is called "the mixed economy".
But back in 1983 the party was being torn assunder by the Trotskyist "militant tendency". Clare was probably quite tolerant of the zealots. She thought of the Labour party as a broad church, but gradually the membership moved against the extremists and most of the Labour M.P.s began to understand that the church had to have walls. The miners' strike from 1984-85 was a bitter dispute that caused a great deal of suffering and pitted the Southern police against the Northern miners in pitched battles. Clare read about the mining industry and realised that change must come to it as they used antique pits and methods, but judged that the change was being managed brutally by the government. Then came the print unions' dispute with the Murdoch newspaper offices' move to Wapping, an equally brutal and mismanaged change.
[All this happened when I was in my early 20's and I knew a tough young Met policeman who liked the action up in Yorkshire, fighting the miners. I was against it because I know the North and the South are one nation. I was brought up to admire the laconic grit of the North. The odd thing is that the awful divisions were just as shocking as things are now, if not more so, but when you are young I suppose it doesn't depress you quite as much. I was depressed in my 20s but I thought it was because of personal things that had happened in the past, which was probably partly true. I wasn't brought up to have a strong psyche, but I guess I was also depressed by all the events reported on the news and in the papers. It seemed that there would be no end to it all.]
The Labour Party had to change and Clare was elected to the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party. This body supervised the development of policy and the administration of the Labour Party and in the ten years that Clare served, and they reformed all the old policies and had the necessary task of expelling the Militant M.P.s from the Labour Party. They supported Neil Kinnock and John Smith, successive leaders, in making the party electable. The most contentious item was Unilateral Nuclear Disarmament. When Neil Kinnock went to see Ronald Reagan to demonstrate that he could be treated as a future Prime Minister, he was snubbed over unilateralism. Policy was changed. Labour stayed with its commitment to nuclear disarmament but gave up the unilateralist element - they would barter the weapons in order to secure disarmament from others.
Clare was hounded and bullied by the Sun newspaper for opposing their printing daily pictures of naked women (some very young) on page 3. She found it coarsening and degrading to society as a whole.
Mrs T was forced out of office in 1990 after the mistakes of the Poll Tax policy and the resignation of Geoffrey Howe. The next election was in 1992 and by then Labour was in a much better shape to present a credible opposition. Clare resigned from the Shadow front bench because she wanted to speak against the first Gulf War, whereas the Labour Leader, Neil Kinnock, wanted her to be silent. She resigned in order to say that after Saddam Hussein had been driven out of Kuwait we "should seek the removal of all non-conventional weapons - nuclear, chemical and biological - from Israel, Syria and Iraq. She said we should also settle the Palestinian issue by giving the Palestinians their state based on the West Bank and Gaza". She was clear that Saddam Hussein must be made to withdraw from Kuwait, but wanted to speak about foreign policy throughout the Middle East.
Clare resigned from the Labour front bench three times but each time the Leaders understood that she was defending her principles and were not slow in promoting her again.
In the 1992 election Labour won a larger share of the vote but the Tories won with a reduced majority. One of the features was the large Labour rallies where members were bussed in to "adore" the Leader. Clare did not attend these rallies. She spent her time contacting voters in her own city of Birmingham. On the day of the election the Sun's headline ran: If Neil Kinnock wins today, would the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights? On the next day it published the headline It was the Sun wot won it. Clare Short believed that these headlines caused the soon-to-be leader of the Labour Party, Tony Blair, to court the Sun and give its owner, Rupert Murdoch, access and political favours, although she did not believe the Sun's actual influence was as great as Blair thought.
The News of the World smeared Clare because she had campaigned for justice and against corruption in the West Midlands Serious Crimes Squad. She complained to the Press Complaints Commission and the scandal-sheet was forced to print the adjudication in a full page. At the same time Clare's husband was dying of early onset dementia - eventually failing to recognise her. His illness began in 1980 and progressed into strange and inexplicable behaviour, then a sad decline, and he died in 1993.
Before Tony Blair, the Leader was John Smith, a popular and beloved Labour politician. He asked Clare to work on women's representation in the Labour party. Clare tried to build a party that was more women-friendly, and this seemed to her to make the whole organisation more open and enabling. She knew that fewer people than ever before were willing to involve themselves in party politics and that the quality of local councillors and M.P.s was deteriorating. Led by the NEC, Labour worked hard to draw a much wider range of people into the party and to offer political education and training in how to chair meetings, speak and organise. They wanted to renew the party and make it a means of empowering local people to become active politically and improve their community.
John Smith died in 1994 much to the sadness of the Parliamentary Labour Party. He was a team player and also won the confidence of the electorate, according to polls.
His deputy, Margaret Beckett stood for leader and Clare supported her and helped with her campaign. Other runners were Tony Blair and John Prescott. Clare did not believe that Blair had real Labour values at heart, but knew that most of the cabinet would vote for him because they felt his was the face that could win Labour an election. John Prescott was voted Deputy Leader because the Party believed that his strong Labour values would anchor Tony Blair. Gordon Brown and Tony Blair were both "Modernisers" and decided amongst themselves that Blair would stand as leader. He won with 57 per cent of the vote.
Blair immediately decided to rewrite Clause 4 of the Party's Constitution which stated the Party was committed to the public ownership of industries. Clare helped with some amendments to the redraft and argued the case for change at the NEC. Blair sent her a handwritten thank you note.
She was elected to the Shadow cabinet and Blair gave her the brief for transport. She did the necessary research and worked for a year preparing a considered and serious transport policy. Rail privatisation was very unpopular in the country but Blair and Brown did not want to commit to renationalisation. All the work Clare did was pushed to one side and Blair offered her a job in Overseas Development instead.
As well as the shift to a media-dominated system of decision-making, Blair moved rapidly away from Labour's tradition of collective policy-making. Policy had been made by sub-committees of the NEC, was considered by the NEC who put it forward to Conference. It was therefore thoroughly thrashed out at every stage. Under Blair, Labour moved to policy being decided by the leader and his entourage, collective decision-making being marginalised, but an expectation of total loyalty to the line laid down. This must have been an endless torture to Clare, She had worked on the NEC, examining and making policy for many years, long enough to know a sound policy from a faulty one. She had become something of an expert in collaborating intelligently. Suddenly she was expected to seem enthusiastic about policy that had not come through the proper channels, which had been dictated in a hurry by an inexperienced pair of men who were interested mainly in how the story would play in the press, and which she had no faith in.
She was lucky to get the International Development brief because Blair didn't take much interest in it. In 1997 Labour won the election and I will report on the Iraq part of the story in Part 2
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