Tony Blair’s first 100 days offer a warning from history for Keir Starmer
The headline has already been written, the lead story extracted. Bong! Tony Blair gatecrashes team photo of New Labour’s women MPs! Bong! Minister for Women, Harriet Harman, didn’t want him there! Bong! She says he looked like a ram tupping 101 ewes. And later: “Have you ever had a proper job?” a sceptical Jeremy Paxman asked two of Blair’s freshly dubbed “Babes”. The past really is a foreign country. They do things more patriarchally there.
The Reunion (Radio 4, Sunday) got some of the old band back together to tell of the new government’s first 100 days in 1997, and had a much subtler and more resonant story to tell than this single takeaway news item. Its task, with former cabinet ministers, civil servants and spads, was to revisit that optimistic moment in postwar British history and reveal how it felt to be behind those closed doors.
The rapid transfer of power, as is ever the case with Britain’s roll-on/roll-off approach to regime change, was captured in vignettes. Jack Straw remembered a police protection unit arriving at his house in Blackburn more or less as soon as the exit poll fanfared a landslide. Sue Nye, who worked for Gordon Brown, drove him to a deserted Edinburgh airport in a hire car and had no idea where to deposit the vehicle’s keys. One short night flight later, they were met at Stansted by the motorised outriders of the state.
The programme’s clear and present peg – the accession of another Labour government after many years of Tory rule – went unspoken till the last. But echoes chimed throughout. A new leader uniting a party of unelectable squabblers. Tick. A determination to rebuild ties with Europe. Tick. A prevailing paranoia that even the faintest triumphalism could lose them everything. Big tick. Jonathan Powell referred irritably to “that blasted vase the Labour Party has to carry everywhere”.
We heard that Blair, requesting a government car for all the family, wisely turned down the armour-plated Rolls-Royce on offer. It was the same nous for personal branding that found him walking to his first Queen’s Speech, for he was the people’s prince, while Her Majesty travelled by gold coach and mounted guard. “Tony was a mad keen walker,” suggested his aide Anji Hunter as a feeble explanation, adding in mitigation that “he was incredibly popular then”.
Would Keir Starmer and co be happy to hear these ghosts of another victory giving advice, wondered host Kirsty Wark? “I think so,” said Straw. “Why not?” However gripping the granular detail, it might have been more instructive if The Reunion had focused instead on Blair’s final 100 days. In that bright new dawn of the first 100, the potholes and pitfalls and, post 9/11, bomb craters were not yet visible.
But the seeds of civil war were planted as soon as the close-knit huddle that created this victory entered Whitehall’s portals. “Everything becomes very separate,” said Harman. “Our friendship group was not the point any more.” Perhaps that is the klaxon from history. The garage band who grew up together were suddenly travelling to stadium gigs in separate limos. And the lead singer thought he was the messiah.
The Life Scientific (very) lightly grills Bill Gates
While we’re on saviours, there was a dearth of racy news lines from with Bill Gates on The Life Scientific (Radio 4, Sunday). In theory it’s quite a coup to land half an hour of the Microsoft founder’s time. In practice, he talks like his own MS bot. No wonder he didn’t bat an eyelid that one question put to him was generated by Microsoft’s AI tool.
Nor is the affable presenter Jim Al-Khalili quite Paxman with an MSc. “I gather that…” he kept saying as he tiptoed deferentially into another softball question. We gathered that Gates plays pickleball but also tennis, likes reading and Slow Horses, got sad when his school friend died in a mountain accident and when Melinda divorced him but is happy to have three kids and a grandson and he eats cheeseburgers. “There’s a lot of diversity in billionaireland,” he affirmed.
He was excused from having to answer a question about his association with Jeffrey Epstein. After a brief sprint through the coding years, the unstoppable rise of MS-DOS and the world domination of Microsoft Office, the science-y section covered his humanitarian commitment to inoculating vulnerable populations against potentially fatal diseases.
The conversation broke briefly into a trot when Gates was asked about the conspiracy theory that Covid vaccines he’d funded were part of a Microsoft plot to inject microchips and control minds. “You’ve got to have a sense of humour,” he said, evincing no sign that one had been programmed.