A Journey Read Online Free Page A

limited, was going to be enough to govern a country?
    Someone lurched up to me – the first of many that night – and said, ‘Isn’t it incredible? You are going to be a great prime minister, Tony, you really are,’ to which I’m afraid I said, ‘Oh, bugger off.’ How could he know? How could I know?
    Around midnight we called David Hill, a very sane and solid individual who was the party press officer down at Millbank, and started to bark at him that the party staff were going over the top in their celebrations, that it looked complacent and they should all calm down. ‘We are about to win the biggest victory in our history and end eighteen consecutive years of Tory government,’ he said. ‘I think it’s going to be a little hard to tell them all to look sombre.’
    I turned my attention to what I was going to say. There would be three speeches: at the count when confirmed as an MP; at the local party meeting in the Labour Club in Trimdon Village, just up the road from my constituency home; and at the Royal Festival Hall in London at around 5 or 6 a.m., where a big event had been planned for the party faithful and the media.
    I discussed the content with Alastair Campbell, in charge of communications. He had been like a rock throughout the previous three years. In my experience there are two types of crazy people: those who are just crazy, and who are therefore dangerous; and those whose craziness lends them creativity, strength, ingenuity and verve. Alastair was of the latter sort. The problem with them is that they can be mercurial, difficult and on occasions erupt with damaging consequences. Above all, you must realise you can’t tame them; you can reason with them, but the thing that makes them different and brilliant is the same thing that means they don’t conform to normal, predictable modes of behaviour. And they are always on the edge. In the later stages, before he left at the end of 2003, Alastair had probably gone over the edge. Like all creative people, he can snap, but for most of the time – especially in those years of Opposition and the first part of government – he was indispensable, irreplaceable, almost an alter ego. Along with Gordon and Peter Mandelson, he carried out with near genius the political concepts of New Labour and was able to give them media expression in a media age. Funnily enough, on policy he was really much more Old Labour. In mood, that night, he reflected mine: he too felt flat, almost anticlimactic. We went over what I would say, and as I withdrew from the euphoria around me we focused on what each of the speeches needed to emphasise: first speech, family; second, party; third, country.
    My only real emotion came when I spoke about my dad. As I gave my speech at the count, I saw him there with tears of pride in his eyes. I thought back on his life: a foster-child in Glasgow; his foster-father a rigger in Govan shipyard; his foster-mother a strange mixture of fanatical parent – she refused to give him back to his real mother – and militant socialist; in his youth, secretary of the Glasgow Young Communists; then to the war as a private, ending it as an acting major and Tory, when virtually everyone else made the opposite political journey.
    He became an academic, a practising barrister and then an active Conservative. The one safe Tory seat in the north of England was Hexham and for the 1964 election he was a racing certainty to be the candidate. He even had his own slot on local TV. He was bright, charming and ambitious to an unnatural degree. He fitted the mould the Tories were looking for in a changing world: no one could argue class with him. He knew it, had lived it and had learned to escape it.
    Then one night that year, after his usual round of meetings, social events and hard work, he suffered a serious stroke and was near to death. He survived, but for three painful years he had to learn to speak again. I remember how my mother helped him, day after day,