Time for a memoir moratorium

By Ben Fox

Two months after taking Labour’s severest beating in terms of vote share since 1983, two senior Labour figures are getting an indecent amount of media attention. But, sadly, not for the right reasons. This is a great shame because three of the five leadership candidates – Messrs Miliband and Burnham – have offered some excellent ideas on the party’s future and how we can win the next election, we are polling in the mid-30% again and the battle lines between ourselves and the LibCon Coalition are now clearly drawn.

Yet the Labour politicians getting the most coverage are Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson for flogging their memoirs – in Blair’s case apparently for £4m. In doing so, they threaten to undermine the re-examination of the party’s aims and values being attempted by the Miliband brothers and Andy Burnham, (and, to a lesser extent, in my view, Ed Balls and Diane Abbott) in a frankly squalid attempt to make a few quid that will damage their party into the bargain.

That Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair should write their memoirs is no surprise. It’s what big-name politicians do when their careers in the front-line are over. Having read an unhealthy number of political diaries and memoirs myself, I can confidently say that most are poorly written, self-congratulatory garbage, but some are of real historical value. Barbara Castle’s diaries are as detailed an account of the day-to-day work of government as you will find; Tony Benn’s give an insight on a political journey from right-wing technocrat to apologist for the Trotskyite militants who nearly destroyed us. The notorious Alan Clarke diaries are recklessly candid, but wonderfully written. Denis Healey’s autobiography is superb as are Roy Jenkins’ and Roy Hattersley’s. Our political history and discourse would be much the poorer if they hadn’t been published.

Of course, Blair and Mandelson have great stories to tell – Mandelson the great survivor of modern British politics, born with the party in his roots and at the heart of the party for the past 25 years. Blair, the most electorally successful Labour Prime Minister, who turned Labour into an election winning machine, but took us into the most divisive foreign policy initiative since Suez.

But why are Mandelson and Blair publishing their books when the leadership contest is still unresolved? Could they not have waited for a few years, a few months? Granted, Blair has been out of office for three years, and it’s not so surprising that he would have planned to publish his memoirs about now. But Mandelson was, three months ago, a leading cabinet minister. In other words, unless he’s capable of bashing out 10,000 words a day, he must have written at least some of his book before the election.

The Labour Party needs to renew itself, and re-discover what it believes in. It needs to be unified. The vicious infighting of the last few years must surely have driven home the old adage that divided parties lose elections. But none of this can happen if the old tribal wounds of the Blair/Brown/Mandelson years are re-opened. Settling scores may salve some egos, but will be an unhealthy distraction, potentially costing Labour time, votes and new members.

The LibCon Coalition could last six months, eighteen months or five years. It has just driven through the most regressive and socially divisive budget in a generation. Unemployment will soar, cuts to housing benefit, child benefit and the VAT rise will hurt the poorest and most vulnerable of our society – people who, at the last election, didn’t think Labour was on their side any more. Our party should be campaigning at local and national level to bring these people back home to Labour and to make sure that the coalition’s economic lunacy does not cripple Britain for a generation. The last thing we need is to go over the divisive personality driven politics that dominated 1997-2010 for the umpteenth time.

So, if we can’t stop the Blair and Mandelson books, can we at least have a ‘memoir moratorium’ rule? Maybe five years would be appropriate, so that politicians don’t cash in immediately on retirement? Labour politicians sometimes forget that they owe their careers to the party and to the movement. I don’t think it’s too much to ask that they wait before putting pen to paper.