A Journey Read Online Free

was afraid because I knew this was not just another stage on the same journey. Now we would enter a new and foreign land. I was afraid because I felt instinctively that its obstacles and challenges were of an altogether different order of complexity and difficulty. I was afraid because, intent as I was on destroying the government, I could see over time that, even when it was in the right, once public opinion had gone sour it didn’t seem to matter whether what it did was right or wrong; and that once the mood had turned from the government and embraced us, the mood was merciless in its pursuit, indifferent to anything other than satisfying itself. I was afraid because, at that instant, suddenly I thought of myself no longer as the up-and-coming, the challenger, the prophet, but as the owner of the responsibility, the person not explaining why things were wrong but taking the decisions to put them right. Deep down – but fighting its way to the surface – I realised I knew nothing about how tough it really was, nothing about how government really works, most of all nothing about how I personally would react when the mood turned against me, as I knew it would.
    Down in London in the HQ at Millbank (the building from which Labour ran its campaign, and a byword for electoral ruthlessness) the partying had begun. In the hall in my County Durham constituency where the votes were being counted, the air was of almost manic excitement. The Labour people naturally were suffused with it, but even the Tories, Lib Dems and assorted others had a sense of history.
    There is a strange consequence of the parliamentary system whereby the prime minister is an MP with a constituency in which they stand for election like any other candidate. It is at one level very humbling, for at that moment you are just the constituency candidate, you stand on a platform along with the other candidates as the returning officer reads out the result. Odd, but very democratic and rather good. But of course, since there is so much coverage given to high-profile battles, the constituencies of the prime minister and Leader of the Opposition do not have only the mainstream parties standing, but also countless other candidates seeking publicity for causes (or sometimes just seeking publicity). They had such weird and wonderful names, such as Screwy Driver (Rock ’n’ Roll Party), Boney Maronie Steniforth (Monster Raving Loony Party), Jonathan Cockburn (Blair Must Go Party) and Cherri Blairout-Gilham (the Pensioners’ Party)! Each party has the right to send some of its people to the count, and there in the hall they were all mingling as I watched the national race on TV upstairs.
    Pretty soon, the scale of the victory became clear. This was not a win. It was a landslide. After about two hours, for a time I actually became worried. The moving line at the bottom of the TV screen was showing over a hundred Labour seats. The Tories had just six. I began to think I had done something unconstitutional. I had meant to defeat the Tories and do so handsomely; but what if we had wiped them out? Fortunately, a little later their tally began to mount, but the majority was clearly still going to be historic. People started to relax and have a drink. I remained completely sober. I had work to do. There would be speeches to make; messages to give; tones to get right; comportment to maintain that needed to be consistent with the magnitude of the win.
    It was at this point that my emotions began to diverge from those of virtually everyone else around me. As they became more and more buoyed up with the vastness of the victory, I became more and more weighed down by the burden of responsibility that was about to fall on me. I know this sounds completely bizarre but I even became slightly irritated with it all. Couldn’t they see what a great big job it was? Did they really think a manifesto written essentially to capture a mood, and whose details were deliberately and necessarily