How time flies. Is it really 30 years since I looked across a room and saw a future prime minister utter an obscenity?
Disconcertingly, it is. And as my mind drifts back to April 1992, memories of the UK political scene loom large.
A year and a half earlier, the Conservative Party had deposed Margaret Thatcher, replacing the triple election-winning force of nature with the much-ridiculed John Major.
After the debacle of the so-called poll tax – Thatcher’s riot-inspiring replacement for the property rates that funded local government – the Tories were in a bad way, and Major’s hapless image wasn’t helping.
Back then I was a 23-year-old journalism student on a ten-month vocational course at Darlington College of Technology. Taking after my late, communist-leaning father. I was also a bit of an outspoken leftie, bordering on the obnoxious at times.
Heartened by the opinion polls, I was therefore looking forward to the election of Neil Kinnock as Labour prime minister. A new dawn for Britain after 13 years of the Conservatives!
Needless to say, it didn’t quite work out like that.
The electorate at large were less enamored of Kinnock than I was, and collectively cringed at his embarrassing, dad-dancing outburst at a pre-election rally in Sheffield. His cries of: “We’re aw-riight! We’re aw-riight!” mortified most of the nation.
Major, meanwhile, who’d taken to standing on a soapbox to speak to voters face-to-face and listen to their concerns, had the wind in his sails, even if many of us weren’t aware of it.
During a work experience placement with the Northern Echo, I followed the election trail with various reporters. As one of them drove me to a job in Darlington – a marginal that the Conservatives would ultimately lose to the Labour candidate, Alan Milburn – she told me that, while she wasn’t a Tory, “I don’t think Kinnock is fit to be prime minister.”
Working for the BBC
On polling day, April 9, I had freelance work lined up with the BBC. In the election five years earlier, the corporation had been badly outclassed by ITV, which more often than not had been first with individual constituency results.
To remedy this, the BBC hired journalism students to assist its reporters on the night. Each would be assigned to a different count, and as I was Darlington College’s golden boy that year (no false modesty from me, folks), I was given Newton Aycliffe Leisure Centre in County Durham, where two counts were taking place.
The plan was as follows: as well as being a radio journalist’s gofer, I was tasked with speaking to the returning officer minutes before each declaration. Via a dedicated hotline, I would then phone the results through to London so that the BBC could flash them up on screen at the appropriate moment.
As I say, there were two counts going on in the sports hall: one for Bishop Auckland, held by the amiable Labour stalwart Derek Foster, and the other for Sedgefield, held by the rising star and shadow home secretary, Tony Blair.
Shortly before the polling stations closed, the radio guy – who’d come out of retirement to make up the numbers, I seem to recall – asked me to visit the TV lounge and note down the results of the BBC and ITV exit polls at 10pm.
For a minute or two I had the room to myself, till suddenly Blair and another man – his election agent, presumably – charged in, looking perturbed.
Destiny calls
Without so much as a “do you mind if we change channels?”, Blair switched to ITV and stood there, a picture of tension: his hands gripping the television stand, his face almost pressed against the screen.
Up came the poll results: Conservatives 41%, Labour 37%. At the eleventh hour, voters had decided en masse to stick with Major.
“Fuck,” said Blair under his breath.
Whipping out his mobile phone – a new invention that only big shots used – he was briefed on the Labour Party’s talking points and left the room to deliver them on ITN. Unless they could achieve a parliamentary majority (which they did, in the end), the incoming Tory government would be illegitimate. That was the line.
Blair’s nickname in the press back then was ‘Bambi’, and as I watched Mr Smiley-Smiley Nicey-Nicey simper his way through the interview, I couldn’t believe what a phony he was.
From my point of view, the rest of the night went well. The outcome of the election cheesed me off but, by way of compensation, I beat ITV to the punch twice, earning a bonus from the BBC each time. Hey, £240 for a night’s work wasn’t to be sniffed at in 1992.
My impression of Blair – based on nothing more substantive than observing his interactions in the sports hall and catching him glare at me (I was probably staring) – was that he was a ruthless, ambitious bastard.
It’s entirely possible that I misjudged him, of course, but seeing him perform his gosh-golly-oh-shucks nice-guy act, as he delivered a saccharine acceptance speech, was a remarkable foretaste of the political era to come. I daresay Boris Johnson isn’t much different.
Kinnock’s successor, John Smith, would die of a heart attack two years later, aged 55, enabling Blair to change his party and his country in ways we couldn’t imagine in the early nineties.
In those heady days post-1997, when my idealistic self desperately wanted New Labour to succeed, I quashed whatever doubts I had about the young prime minister’s personality. Older and more cynical, I watched them resurface in the years that followed the invasion of Iraq.
While Blair was in power, I relished wheeling out my Newton Aycliffe anecdote. And in fairness, the reaction of a Labour councillor in Essex is almost certainly how millions of Britons feel:
“I’d have been disappointed if he hadn’t said ‘fuck’.”
Photo by Steve Houghton-Burnett on Unsplash
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