Bryan Gould talks to Paul Anderson about the Evening Standard, Tony Blair, and why he quit British politics
Bryan Gould is still thinking of suing the Evening Standard for publishing an article under his name last week that was written by 19-year-old Nick Howard, the son of the Home Secretary.
"Many years ago when I was a law don I used to teach the law of libel," he says, sitting in his office at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, where he is now vice-chancellor. "And there's no doubt that I was libelled. The only question is whether it's worth doing anything about it in the light of the fairly prompt apology the Standard gave me last week." He hasn't done anything yet—but he's tempted because the Standard was just a bit lackadaisical. "It's at least worth getting an opinion on it. I still find it difficult to believe that it took them as long as it did—three-and-a-half days—to realise that anything was wrong. I mean, Nick Howard had sent the piece to four other papers. Surely someone on one of those papers must have noticed. Yet it was only when I discovered it that the Standard did anything."
Gould didn't see the offending article until after he'd read all the press commentary on it. "It was at the bottom of a pile of faxes sent me by my publisher," he explains. "I read them over breakfast last Thursday morning. I was astonished at the tone of the coverage and quickly realised from the quotes that things were being attributed to me that I'd never written. Then I came across a copy of the article itself." He laughs. "It bore no relation to what I was saying. But initially it was quite difficult getting it over to people that I wasn't complaining about being rewritten but that the article was not mine."
In the end, however, he managed to persuade the Standard late on Wednesday evening (New Zealand is 12 hours ahead of British Summer Time) that a completely different piece had been substituted for his original. The paper's editor, Stewart Steven, responded by setting up an internal inquiry into what had gone wrong, then published the story of what had happened in Thursday's edition, along with the article Gould had submitted in the first place and a grovelling apology to its author.
The cock-up soon eclipsed the supposed left-wing rebellion against Tony Blair as the silly season domestic politics story of the week. By the time Blair arrived back in Britain from holiday for the VJ Day commemorations—extracts from Gould's memoirs in the Guardian notwithstanding—the crisis alleged to be gripping his party had all but vanished.
Which only goes to show that the Labour leader is a very lucky man. What Gould actually wrote for the Standard is significantly more trenchant in its questioning of Labour's whole strategy than anything else that has appeared in the past three weeks—despite its assertions that "Tony Blair has had a brilliant first year as Labour leader" and "looks a racing certainty" to win the next election.
The core of his argument is familiar to anyone who followed his career in the four or five years before he bowed out of British politics last summer—but it hits a particularly sensitive chord with the Labour leadership now because it challenges directly the idea that Blair marks a fresh start for the parry. "Labour's new leader did not suddenly strike out in a new direction," he wrote. "He inherited an electoral strategy which goes back to the late 19803. It originated with Neil Kinnock after the 1987 election defeat, it was given new emphasis by John Smith, and it has now been carried to new heights by Tony Blair. That strategy is one of 'safety first'. Its essence is that Labour should do or say nothing which might conceivably alienate the voters."
And that, for Gould, is a major problem. "What happens if the Tories, by some miracle, recover their popularity and disaffected Conservatives are tempted to return to the fold as happened in 1992?" he went on. "What is to bind them to their current and perhaps temporary intention of voting Labour? Surely it would be more sensible for Labour, while they have the chance, to give these voters positive reasons for voting Labour so that they are less likely to revert to type if the Tories should engineer a brief recovery." So far, the Labour leadership has not made a reasoned answer.
Not that the former Dagenham MP is some wild revolutionary. His memoirs, published next month as Goodbye to All That, record the progress of an ambitious young man from a modest conservative family – a little less affluent than Blair's – from a colonial backwater. Born in 1939, he did so well at school and university that he made it to Oxford and a junior position in the Foreign Office. After that, it's a story of self-confidence frustrated by Britain's anti-meritocratic class system: a job as a promising young law don (in Oxford again), a spell in the 19708 as a promising young Labour MP for Southampton Itchen, a couple of years as a promising young TV journalist after he lost his seat in 1979. Then he won the safe Labour seat of Dagenham in 1983.
The glory years –the bits of the memoirs serialised in the Guardian last weekend—were in the mid-1980s, when, given a key job by Neil Kinnock, he became Labour's most promising all-round television performer. After that, however, he faded, after bitter in-fighting in Labour's upper echelons (faithfully recounted in the book). Removed from a front-bench economic portfolio in 1989, he said goodbye to British politics last year after losing his bid for the party leadership in 1992 to John Smith.
His problem was that he was a diehard s opponent of anything to do with European economic integration—and, by the time he was a contender for Labour's top job, the thinking left that was his natural constituency had embraced not just Europe but (for the most part) Europe even on monetarist terms. Gould left over Maastricht and what he saw as the failure of the left to mount a defence of national control of the economy. His memoirs are far from triumphalist.
Still, Gould is the first frontbencher from the Kinnock era to tell the story on the record, and he's sure that he has a relevant message even now. "I don't think that the situation has changed that much," he says of the past five years of British politics. "Underlying politics don't change very fast. In the 1980s, the left lost its intellectual self-confidence in the face of Thatcherism.
Towards the end of the decade, many people lost faith in Thatcherism, but Labour was so shell-shocked that it didn't take the initiative. The party is still cowering in the trenches, even though the Tories under John Major have no stomach whatsoever for defending the territory."
The alternative, he believes, is for Labour to become "more positive". But what does that mean? "We should say: 'Vote for us for a better health service, better schools, better public services. We'll intervene in the economy to secure full employment,'" he says.
Unsurprisingly, he has few illusions that anything of the sort will happen. "Of course, most people who are responsible for Labour strategy now will throw up their hands in horror at this and say: "That's exactly what people don't want to hear. They're terrified of government, they don't want to pay bigger taxes.' Well, I'm not saying that you'll convince everyone with a positive message, but the ground is much more fertile for this message than the current strategists believe. Labour will never have a better opportunity to put it forward than right now. The Tories are discredited. No one believes that they've got the answers.
"I'm not saying that you blurt out anything that's at the top of your mind—you work it out extraordinarily carefully, then you go and spell out three or four well-prepared policies in some detail. You really press those very hard, confidently. It's a commonsense, almost precautionary strategy."
For all this, Gould insists that his enthusiasm for Tony Blair is genuine. "I think Tony, by virtue of his general image and rhetoric, is a more convincing exponent of almost anything than John Smith or Neil Kinnock was," he says. "But this should encourage his advisers to give him his head more and allow him to be bolder in terms of substance. It's a pity that they can't put into his mouth words of more substance than they have done. He's striking the right poses. But my fear is that sooner or later – and we could be getting perilously close to this point – his opponents are really going to nail him on the disparity between the rhetoric and the substance."
But Gould has few expectations that his former colleagues in the shadow cabinet will save Blair from a grisly fate. "The difficulty that I eventually faced up to was that there weren't many people who took my view," he admits. "I still maintain that I represented between 35 and 40 per cent of party opinion in 1992 in the broad sense of people who wanted to see more radical policies, full employment and all of that. But I'm not sure there are too many that would go along the whole way with me.
"Take the current shadow cabinet: there are people like Michael Meacher, David Blunkett—we immediately start running out of names here—to some degree people like John Prescott, and then very soft left people like Frank Dobson and Jack Straw—they'd be instinctively sympathetic but for reasons of Realpolitik would never give me any support. They always saw their own career advance as much more important. Frankly, the difficulty is that there isn't a great body of people who think much further than the next shadow cabinet election."
Gould's book comes out next month and he'll be back in Britain to launch it. Not that he wants to come back permanently—"I really have no regrets about leaving," he says. And, although he remains fascinated by everything political and has good relations with the New Zealand Labour Party leadership, he has no plans to get into New Zealand politics. "The British Labour Party needs to take note of the monetarist turn that the New Zealand Labour Party took in 1984," he says. "To some extent, over the ERM, British Labour has seen the same thing happening already. The New Zealand experience is an object lesson for Labour in Britain.
"There's constant speculation here that I'm going to get involved in politics here. But I've no intention of doing so, and I've no regrets about leaving political life in Britain. Certainly when something like this Evening Standard nonsense crops up and the phones start going, both my wife and I say 'Thank God we're not involved in this on a permanent basis.' There's a life beyond Westminster and one of the problems with British politics is that too many people in Westminster don't realise that."
There but for...
Much fun has been had at the expense of the Evening Standard since it emerged that it had run a piece last Monday written by 19-year-old Nick Howard, son of the Home Secretary, under the by-line of Bryan Gould.
Surely someone would have thought that there was something a bit odd about an article by a man in his mid-fifties beginning: "I was three and a half during the Winter of Discontent, never watched Michael Foot give a speech on television and have no memory of the 1989 election campaign"? The editors at the Standard apparently thought Gould was imagining himself as a first-time voter – as the standfirst it published proclaimed.
But there was a whole lot more in Howard's effort that should have set the alarm bells ringing. Take this for starters: "The Labour Party developed out of Marxism and the desire for public ownership of industry was based on the idea that human nature is good, and yet is distorted by the workings of capitalism." Or this:"... even during the 1980s it was ideology developed from Marxism which motivated the Labour opposition to the privatisations and the union legislation." Gould would never write such simplistic drivel even if he were pretending to be a teenager.
Not that the rest of the press has very much to crow about. On Tuesday nearly every other papers wallowed the story unquestioningly. "The queue of malcontents attacking Tony Blair's leadership was joined yesterday by Bryan Gould," reported Patrick Wintour in the Guardian, adding that his criticisms were "similar to his assaults on Labour's two previous leaders". Jon Hibbs described Gould in the Telegraph as "the latest left-wing figure to undermine Tony Blair's leadership"; in the Independent, John Rentoul wrote of "an unexpectedly bitter attack on Tony Blair". According to John Deans in the Mail, Gould had "fanned the flames of revolt burning beneath Tony Blair"; in the Express, Patrick Hennessy had it that he had "launched the most powerful assault on Mr Blair since the Labour leader's year-long honeymoon was ended by MP Richard Burden's attack on his tactics last week". The Sun's Pascoe Watson wrote of "a devastating attack", and the other tabloids carried similar pieces without by-lines.
It wasn't until Tuesday afternoon that rumours started doing the rounds that all was not as had first appeared – and it was only late on Wednesday that Gould himself realised that the problem was not insensitive editing but that the wrong piece had been published under his by-line. On Thursday came the Standard's grovelling apology – and by Friday all the journalists who had taken the story at face value were having a good laugh at the Standard's expense.
As for NSS – well, we went to press too early to get the full story but late enough to excise all mention of Gould from last week's issue. With deadlines just a couple of hours earlier, we would have ended up with as much egg on face as Fleet Street's finest.
