Labour Takes Power: The Denis MacShane Diaries 1997-2001 by Denis MacShane
The second sentence of Denis MacShane’s preface to these diaries is not one that anyone much worried about style would have allowed to appear in print:
“I honed my writing skills as a parliamentary candidate for Labour in 1974 and then as the youngest ever president of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) four years later.”
But it captures MacShane’s approach to life. While others are still struggling to get the first paragraph right, he has dashed off a piece for Le Monde, another for the International Herald Tribune, and has flown to a conference on the future of European socialism at which he meets a brilliant intellectual of whom no one else in the Labour Party has yet heard.
Both as a journalist and, from 1994 to 2012, as Labour MP for Rotherham, MacShane gets the story. In December 2012 he was sentenced to six months in prison for fiddling his expenses, an activity which used to be standard practice in Fleet Street, but about which the press became prosy when it was found to be happening in Parliament.
In these diaries, he describes his experiences during the first four years of the Blair government. They have been cut down from over two million to perhaps 140,000 words, so heaven knows what has been lost, though historians will eventually be able to consult the entire manuscript once it has been deposited in a university archive.
The great diarists – Pepys, Channon, Alan Clark – are indiscreet, and tell us about their sexual longings and adventures. MacShane does not. Nor does his book read quite like a diary, for he keeps explaining in the text who people are: “My old friend John Monks, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) General Secretary”; “My doctor brother Martin, his doctor wife Linda”.
This was presumably cheaper and quicker than putting in footnotes, but destroys the unpremeditated sound which one hopes for in a diary. I have just opened James Lees-Milne’s last volume of diaries, running from 1984-97. It is introduced, and abridged from the four earlier volumes covering this period, by Michael Bloch, who at the foot of almost every page provides succinct and valuable information.
What enchantments Lees-Milne offers us: the shadow of the dome of pleasure, floating midway on the waves.
MacShane reminds us of the hopes which attended the formation of the last Labour government, when it seemed, thanks to the election around that time of similar governments in France, Italy, Germany, the Nordic nations, the Netherlands and Portugal, that “a new progressive European democratic Left might be taking shape”.
He also reminds us of the hatreds between the Blairites and the Brownites: “They really do hate each other at the top,” as he records on 31st October 1999.
From 1997-2001 he served as Parliamentary Private Secretary to various Foreign Office ministers:
“It’s a bit odd as I know far more about European politics and the EU than any of the ministers, including the Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook. I speak better French than most FCO wallahs, or rather I speak contemporary political French and read Libération and Le Nouvel Observateur which plugs me into the French socialist government which has arrived at the same time as us.”
MacShane tends to dismiss those he disagrees with about Europe as xenophobes and racists. On page one he takes “particular pleasure” in the defeat in the 1997 general election “of that filthy little racist, Nicholas Budgen” in Wolverhampton South West.
Budgen, whom I knew well, was a delightful man who had the moral courage to defend unfashionable positions, but was certainly not a racist.
Charles Moore described, at Budgen’s memorial service in 1998, how he had once rung him pretending to be a racist constituent. Budgen said he supported a firm immigration policy, but when pushed to agree that all immigrants should be sent home he forcefully defended their right to be in Britain:
“His distaste was palpable. I can think of many more liberal-minded MPs who might have given less firm answers to someone they thought might vote for them.”
In September 2000, MacShane was called in to the Cabinet Room, along with Timothy Garton Ash, Charles Grant, Stephen Wall and others, to help Blair work out what to say in a major speech on the future of Europe to be delivered in Poland.
MacShane records that Wall at one point says:
“‘I don’t know, Prime Minister, but surely that’s rather Gaullist?’
“Blair looks at him, sticks up his right thumb and says, ‘De Gaulle, top man!’
“Stephen Wall blinks nervously and quickly replies, ‘Yes, indeed, Prime Minister. The general was a great man!’
“Oh boy. This is the real Tony: 100 per cent European and 100 per cent for the nation state. He goes on and on about ‘the nation state’ and I gently suggest that Europe consists of states which aren’t nations and which are sharing state power, but he doesn’t really understand the point I am making. Nevertheless, he is very flattering and insists that the paper I wrote on speeding up decision-making be circulated along with Charles Grant’s paper on Europe in 2010.”
Here is the great political argument in which MacShane takes part, and he is astute enough to realise that he may end up on the losing side. After a two-hour discussion of the speech, which Blair delivers a month later in Warsaw, MacShane calls the Prime Minister to one side, and assures him that in Rotherham, despite the fuel crisis which is raging, public opinion is not in “total meltdown”:
“He smiled, but rather wanly. ‘So it’s not so bad at the base, is it,’ he said. I hope I’m right. In the end, I cannot bear the thought of those racist, intolerant, homophobic thugs coming back from the Conservative Party and running Britain again.”
Once again, we see the tendency of in other respects civilised Blairites (though not Blair himself) to think the worst of their adversaries, and therefore to underestimate the chances of winning them over.
Moral condemnation precludes advocacy. Our opponents are such bad people that we should not stoop to argue with them. There is more than a hint of this attitude in Sir Keir Starmer.
I am surprised to find that on 24th July 2000, soon returning from a spell in Berlin, I had lunch with MacShane, who writes of me:
“He is hostile to the currency [the euro] and basically to the idea of greater partnership, power sharing and participating in the European Union. He is friendly and open, but I wish I hadn’t given him the time. Trying to get a Tory Europhobe to let go of this article of faith is like hoping to convert a Wee Free to Catholicism.”
The book ends on a joyful note. On Monday 11th June 2001 MacShane is called by Number 10 and Blair makes him a junior Foreign Office minister. He is on his way to becoming Europe Minister, in which role he served from 2002-2005.
MacShane expresses a number of sympathetic prejudices. He is horrified by the way Cook decorates his office:
“Robin has put up a ghastly John Bratby painting over his main desk. It used to be occupied by a giant portrait of a fighting rajah which was utterly appropriate for the monumental dimensions of the Foreign Secretary’s office.”
Cook’s Private Secretary, Sherard Cowper-Coles, to whom MacShane complains in a whisper, replies: “Oh, you want Palmerston or one of the imperial reminders, don’t you, Denis?”
“Too damn right I do,” MacShane records in his diary.
It occurs to me that we should regard him, not as a foaming radical, but as a Whig, a reassuringly old-fashioned figure, at home with adversarial politics, rude to opponents, at ease with the dashed-off article, appreciative of traditional pleasures, a convivial man untainted by puritanism, a European who sees the grand, imperial picture and who, when defending in the Commons the right of Britons living abroad to vote in British elections, is delighted to quote the Palmerstonian dictum, civis Britannicus sum, and horrified that this has to be explained afterwards to the Hansard reporter.