particularly troubled time for the Labour Party. The SDP was threatening to take over as the mainstream left-of-centre force in British politics and although Mr Straw never wavered in his support for Labour, he found the defection of close friends difficult to stomach:
’81 was a kind of crisis period for me personally as well as for the party.
With my background, I’d worked really, really hard to get here I’d had plenty of false starts in my life, including my first marriage, and I just thought: ‘Oh, God, so close and yet so far.’
You used to see people in the tearoom on a Thursday night, say goodbye to them – ‘See you Monday’ – and on Monday morning you’d turn on the radio and they’d defected. They came within a whisker of forming the second-biggest party.
Mr Straw defied the opinion polls to hold his seat in 1983 and returned to the long slog of opposition – a time he says was made bearable mainly because he began to get satisfaction both professionally and in his private life:
I was lucky because I was advancing up the greasy pole – even though one felt the pole being pulled down into a swamp.
Our children were young [and] at the time I was pretty thankful that although I was on the front bench, and from ’87 in the shadow Cabinet, the responsibilities were much less.
The hours strangely … meant I could see the children in the morning, and quite often go home and then come back in the evening. So I used to take them to school, I did the doctors, the school assemblies.
The dissatisfaction returned however in 1992, after yet another election loss. Mr Straw came close to standing down, but was talked around by an old school friend who pointed out that he never knew what might be around the corner. What turned out to be around Mr Straw’s corner following the sudden and shockingly unexpected death of John Smith, the party’s new leader, was promotion to the role of shadow Home Secretary. By then, two men who had come in at the election after him, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, were making waves in the party. But Mr Straw insists he was not envious that it was they who were considered the obvious choice for the top two jobs:
After the ’92 election really I thought I was going to chuck it in. By that stage I was forty-five. I just thought, ‘Cripes, I’ve given up the best years of my life to the party. Maybe it’s time to go back to the Bar or go do something else. Maybe this simply ain’t going to work for me.’
John Smith dying was extraordinary. The night before we’d been at this fundraiser for this party where John Smith had said all he wanted was the chance to serve. I think he, as he did many nights, overindulged. And died. He was only fifty-six – no age at all.
Having then this pure chance of a change in leadership and Tony Blair becoming leader completely changed my prospects.
What I felt about Tony and Gordon was obviously that they were extremely talented. But also that, it was more obvious with Gordon, both of them were hungry for the job, and you have to be really hungry to get the job. And for a variety of reasons I wasn’t that hungry.
I didn’t really harbour that much of an ambition. I harboured an ambition to be in the Cabinet obviously, but not to be leader. I don’t think I felt a sense of envy of them [Blair and Brown] because at that stage I wasn’t certain I could have done the job of Leader of the Opposition.
I always had this inner idea that if someone came along to me and said, ‘You can be Prime Minister, Mr Straw, all you have to do is sign this form’, that I could have done the job OK. I wasn’t certain I would be able to do in real life what you need to do to get there, which is to be Leader of the Opposition, which is far and away the worst job in British politics.
I was never particularly close to Gordon. I had much greater fellow-feeling with Tony.
Tony asked me to be his campaign manager, partly because I’d not been particularly
’81 was a kind of crisis period for me personally as well as for the party.
With my background, I’d worked really, really hard to get here I’d had plenty of false starts in my life, including my first marriage, and I just thought: ‘Oh, God, so close and yet so far.’
You used to see people in the tearoom on a Thursday night, say goodbye to them – ‘See you Monday’ – and on Monday morning you’d turn on the radio and they’d defected. They came within a whisker of forming the second-biggest party.
Mr Straw defied the opinion polls to hold his seat in 1983 and returned to the long slog of opposition – a time he says was made bearable mainly because he began to get satisfaction both professionally and in his private life:
I was lucky because I was advancing up the greasy pole – even though one felt the pole being pulled down into a swamp.
Our children were young [and] at the time I was pretty thankful that although I was on the front bench, and from ’87 in the shadow Cabinet, the responsibilities were much less.
The hours strangely … meant I could see the children in the morning, and quite often go home and then come back in the evening. So I used to take them to school, I did the doctors, the school assemblies.
The dissatisfaction returned however in 1992, after yet another election loss. Mr Straw came close to standing down, but was talked around by an old school friend who pointed out that he never knew what might be around the corner. What turned out to be around Mr Straw’s corner following the sudden and shockingly unexpected death of John Smith, the party’s new leader, was promotion to the role of shadow Home Secretary. By then, two men who had come in at the election after him, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, were making waves in the party. But Mr Straw insists he was not envious that it was they who were considered the obvious choice for the top two jobs:
After the ’92 election really I thought I was going to chuck it in. By that stage I was forty-five. I just thought, ‘Cripes, I’ve given up the best years of my life to the party. Maybe it’s time to go back to the Bar or go do something else. Maybe this simply ain’t going to work for me.’
John Smith dying was extraordinary. The night before we’d been at this fundraiser for this party where John Smith had said all he wanted was the chance to serve. I think he, as he did many nights, overindulged. And died. He was only fifty-six – no age at all.
Having then this pure chance of a change in leadership and Tony Blair becoming leader completely changed my prospects.
What I felt about Tony and Gordon was obviously that they were extremely talented. But also that, it was more obvious with Gordon, both of them were hungry for the job, and you have to be really hungry to get the job. And for a variety of reasons I wasn’t that hungry.
I didn’t really harbour that much of an ambition. I harboured an ambition to be in the Cabinet obviously, but not to be leader. I don’t think I felt a sense of envy of them [Blair and Brown] because at that stage I wasn’t certain I could have done the job of Leader of the Opposition.
I always had this inner idea that if someone came along to me and said, ‘You can be Prime Minister, Mr Straw, all you have to do is sign this form’, that I could have done the job OK. I wasn’t certain I would be able to do in real life what you need to do to get there, which is to be Leader of the Opposition, which is far and away the worst job in British politics.
I was never particularly close to Gordon. I had much greater fellow-feeling with Tony.
Tony asked me to be his campaign manager, partly because I’d not been particularly
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