In his first interview since resignation, ex-minister on New Labour’s failings – and the challenge ahead
On Thursday morning in a cafe by the Thames near Tower Bridge, James Purnell can see wild flowers with big purple heads, fronds of water reeds and roller-skating children on school holiday – a Kodak moment that encapsulates why he’ll probably never stand to be leader of the Labour party.
This is his “walk in the park” test. Can the leader of a political party go for a walk in the park, or a bike ride on Sunday, and not be trailed by special branch? Purnell’s observations of his political mentor, Tony Blair, led him to conclude no.
“I don’t miss TV interviews,” Purnell says of his previous life, leaning back in his chair. “I don’t miss doing the Today programme, with great respect. Not having a weekend, I don’t miss. I love having a weekend. I love not having a red box hanging over me.”
Five weeks out of frontline politics appear to have done him good. His sideburns seem in rude health. He has a tan and is lightly freckled, and he has traded his ministerial suit for a pair of fashionable indigo jeans.
Speaking for the first time about his reasons for quitting Gordon Brown’s government, Purnell says the person who gave him the best guidance when he decided to resign was an unnamed friend who told him to honest about what he thought. So he was, brutally, telling the prime minister to stand down in his letter to Downing Street.
“They said to me, ‘You can’t go very far wrong with the truth.’”
The former work and pensions secretary had been struggling with the truth since as long ago as December 2008. “Over the last six months I had been thinking: has the elastic stretched beyond where I feel I was being true to myself? I remember doing an interview with Andrew Rawnsley and having to find things to say that were just about true enough and that the letter of what I was saying was true enough. I thought: ‘This is too much – too much of a stress.’ That’s less about politics and more about what I said in my letter [about Brown]. There were policy things. But I’m not going to go there.”
The discomfort turned to decision as late as 11.30am on the Thursday voters were going to the polls. Only the day before, those running Labour’s reshuffle had rung Purnell to ask whether he would like the health or education brief. He opted for education.
But the next day, he says, the 10pm deadline – ministers were under orders to keep quiet until the polls in the European and local elections had closed – concentrated his mind.
Uncomfortable
At 11.30am on a park bench on a former council estate in his constituency he decided to go; at 2.30pm he ducked into his constituency office and wrote the letter in five minutes; at 5pm he told three national newspapers; and at 9.50pm he spoke to Peter Mandelson (“we had a disagreement”).
The other man he spoke to was the foreign secretary, David Miliband, which provoked another disagreement, though one based on a previous shared understanding.
“I think I put him in quite a difficult position by what I did,” Purnell says, leaning away from the Dictaphone and uncomfortable. Why? “Why? Because I raised a question for him which he answered in a different way. People asked why, given I resigned, he didn’t resign.”
Purnell says he and Miliband are extremely close, and that the foreign secretary has been “extraordinarily thoughtful towards me since my resignation. I’ve been amazingly impressed by his thoughtfulness and dedication to maintaining that relationship and he’s done it in a way that is clearly not scarred by the fact of what I did.”
In his time on the backbenches Purnell has set about arranging his thoughts, both literally and metaphorically – it took one weekend to arrange the books in his flat from A to Z (A Class Act, by his former cabinet colleague Lord Adonis, the transport secretary, to Emile Zola).
British government, he says, can be a bit of a “conspiracy against ideas” and he describes his opposite number in New Zealand telling him that her government is run as a kind of “beehive”, with ministers working in the same place and a Thursday evening drink when cabinet members compare notes.
So, as Tony Benn gave up politics to spend more time on politics, Purnell is giving up government to spend more time on policy. In September he’ll begin a three-year project at the Demos thinktank to “reinvent New Labour” for the next generation.
Purnell will not be shying away from the years when the sheen came off the New Labour project (the novel he’s just started happens to be Ian McEwan’s Saturday – 24 hours on the day of the anti-war march that crystallised Blair’s fall from popularity). He says the project that started off as a “broad tent” has now become a “gazebo”.
He says New Labour became “too small-c conservative” on schools policy and didn’t make the case for immigration. It was terrified of swing voters, but should put electoral reform to a referendum at the next election.
“We took the electoral furniture to be too fixed. We didn’t think about creating a new coalition and I think that’s what we need to do now. To be honest I think we were too conservative about our means, so it was easier to take on arguments on the left, not the right. So what I want to try and do now is be as radical on the left as on the right.
“I think we need to go back and clarify values which underlie new Labour and be very candid about what worked and didn’t work.
“If Tony was coming into politics now he would be saying we need to develop a new set of policies for what is relevant for today, not for 1994.”
He admits to nostalgia for that period but it’s a nostalgia like that for Britpop.
The Open Left team at Demos will solicit help from across the left. “We’re going to go through Labour values, match them to what we’ve done and then identify challenges and then organise a team around those challenges.”
Purnell’s critics call him a Tory, some a Blairite, others a Liberal and he agrees he is pretty liberal on social policy (he has been heard to joke that had Brown tried to make him home secretary he’d have told the prime minister he planned to let immigrants in and prisoners out).
But his resignation letter talked about the need for “stronger regulation and an active state”. He agrees the real prize for the next generation of Labour politicians is to weld together liberalism and social democracy.
The white rubber wristband he wears he says he will keep wearing until the UK hits its target to spend 0.7% of GDP on international aid.
“Individuals,” Purnell thinks, “collapse under the weight of their autonomy. It is important, but people don’t want to feel alone – they want to feel protected and they also have a concept of a good society based on compassion for others.”
He suggests that the writings of others at Demos, including his friends Richard Reeves and Phil Collins – which draw heavily on Amartya Sen’s recent writing on capabilities – go some way towards explaining that. But he adds: “I think they leave out the compassion we have towards strangers which is at the root of being an egalitarian.”
Of those alphabetised books, Purnell’s favourite is one called Market Socialism. “It’s not a phrase that is ever going to inspire a political movement but it does capture a lot of what I believe – that markets are a good means to spread power and create innovation but they can be yoked to leftwing goals and not to capitalism. There is a difference between capitalism and markets.
“People on the right are very sceptical about the state but people on the left believe the state is a good thing.”
Advice for Brown in advance of an election? To pledge universal childcare and a guaranteed job for every person out of work after one year.
But his ideas probably won’t be deployed by himself as a leader of the party. “The way I feel at the moment is it’s pretty unlikely I’ll want to go back into frontline politics,” he says.
“I never want to leave politics. I love politics, I love ideas and I was pretty excited by the Department for Work and Pensions but actually I get exactly the same kick, in some ways in a freer way, from the stuff I am doing at Demos.”
