Veterans of Labour’s 1997 victory party at the Royal Festival Hall – by the end, the dancefloor looked like a war zone strewn with dozing bodies – will remember the sense of disbelief and excitement as the scale of the landslide started to materialise.
David Hill, the less self-publicity-prone of the hugely effective Labour press team, gave out a deep-throated “what?!” as he reeled away in disbelief at the sight of a startled Stephen Twigg defeating Michael Portillo in Enfield Southgate. That night, unexpected seat after unexpected seat fell into Labour hands.
After 18 years in the wilderness, celebrations did not come any sweeter than this. As the victorious candidates flew down from their constituency counts to greet each other and the now well-established revellers at the Festival Hall, the euphoria overflowed, as did the drink. Gordon Brown even smiled at Peter Mandelson, who found time to dance with John Prescott to the appalling campaign song on repeat, Things Can Only Better.
Tony Blair, up at Sedgefield, stone-cold sober and increasingly daunted by the scale of his victory, received reports of the wild celebrations going on down by the Thames and rang Hill to tell party staff they were going over the top and needed calming down. Hill told him: “We are about to end 18 years of consecutive Conservative government and I think it is going to be a little hard to make them all look sombre.” From my dim recollection, the idea that Hill was not going to let things go to his head just this once was entirely illusory. That horse had long bolted.
On finally arriving at the Festival Hall at about 6am, Blair addressed the emotional crowd, many of whom had been witness to previous Labour false dawns, including the bitter disappointments of the 1987 and 1992 elections. Looking around, there were so many faces that had tasted nothing but repeated electoral dejection.
Blair would come to immediately regret it but, looking at the sky changing hue, he impulsively said: “A new dawn has broken, has it not?” In his autobiography he admitted he knew he had “sent the already stratospheric expectations into another and higher orbit”.
By contrast, the immediate challenges facing Keir Starmer are somewhat different. His landslide, unlike 1997, was not a surprise but a seismological certainty. Nor can anyone accuse him of raising unrealistic expectations. It is hard to over-excite an expectant nation’s pulse if your key campaign offer has been stability. He campaigned in the dogged dutiful prose in which he intends to govern.
But like Blair, Starmer now faces the perils of transition from opposition to government, a transition that takes place on adrenaline and caffeine.
Blair recalled that “the moment the mantle is on your shoulders as prime minister, you understand that the scale, importance and complexity are completely different [as in opposition] … you inhabit a new dimension altogether”.
There was also, at least for Blair, an expected sense of loneliness. “There would be no more team, no more friendly clique, no more shared emotions amongst a band of intimates. There would be them and there would be me,” he wrote.
Indeed, the very first words to Blair by the cabinet secretary Robin Butler as they sat in the cabinet room were: “Now what?” It is a legitimate question and ultimately one only the prime minister can answer.
For a while the answer to what happened next was a honeymoon. Alastair Campbell, Blair’s press secretary, recalled that for the first few months the Labour government was given “the benefit of the doubt”. Its missteps were passed over by a media pent up for change and entranced by the novelty of New Britain. But gradually the bureaucracy, grind, frustration and mistakes of governing kicked in.
Out of government, Blair and his chief of staff Jonathan Powell have reflected deeply on what went wrong with the transition to government in the first term. The list is long. Some ministers with no experience or aptitude for administration; exhaustion after the plans for the first 100 days run out; battles for resources with the Treasury leading to ministers briefing against one another.
It is also a challenge for the civil service, Nick Macpherson, the Treasury permanent secretary in the 10 years to 2015, recently recalled. “Fail an early ministerial test and it can cause a lot of damage to the relationship between the permanent secretary and the secretary of state,” he said.
Lord Macpherson said the culture change involved in Whitehall adjusting to a new government could be as difficult as adapting to new policy priorities. He recalled that in 1997 Kenneth Clarke, the outgoing chancellor, never came into the office before 9am and regarded breakfast meetings as “completely pointless”. The Treasury press office had one mobile phone.
On Brown’s arrival, Macpherson thought he had been really clever by getting into the office at 8.30am, only to find Brown had been in the Treasury since 5.30am disturbing a flustered caretaker who had to locate the keys to the chancellor’s office.
Such has been the distracting internal Conservative chaos inside No 10 that many Whitehall departments have been left on autopilot. Although the civil service is said to respond best to clear instructions, it will be a culture shock to have energetic, focused ministers determined to make an early impact.
Shadow ministers were all warned that time passes in a flash in office, and the speed of transition of a manifesto idea to a reality on the ground is what will count.
Powell feels Labour’s larger first-term strategic error was in part due to the Blair team being too cautious and pulling its punches on its initial reforms, saying: “It is far better for an incoming government to take the radical policy steps early on when its political capital is at its highest.”
Blair, for his part, felt he was only properly on top of being prime minister at the point when he was required to leave.
But guess who is likely to be driving the Starmer team hardest from the sidelines? On Tuesday the Tony Blair Institute will be hosting a “future of Britain” conference dedicated to Blair’s current theme of how technology is transforming public services. Soon it will be time for another new dawn to break.
