Voice of experience

The first thing I ask David Blunkett is: “What’s on your mind at the moment?” 

From a strictly journalistic point of view, this is a mistake, because it turns out he has quite a lot on his mind. What follows is like seven or eight Just a Minute contestants going back-to-back, made all the more impressive because Blunkett chooses as his subjects postsecondary technical education, citizenship lessons in schools, and sentencing reform. 

I quickly see why he is a source of counsel for the incoming Labour government – in which role he has, compared to other New Labour graduates like Peter Mandelson, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, kept a relatively low profile. He reportedly has a good relationship with Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, and he tells me that he is also working with the ministry of justice team to explore ways to tackle the prisons crisis. 

“I’m helping to try and sort out the criminal justice system, which isn’t providing justice, and in many respects, is criminal in itself.

“I’m speaking to both Shabana Mahmood, who’s the new justice secretary, and James Timpson, who is the new prison, probation, [and] parole minister, in September. I want to be as helpful from my own experience as I can be… including on one issue which I was partly responsible for, which was imprisonment for public protection, which went very badly wrong.” 

Imprisonment for public protection sentences, or IPPs, allowed judges to hand down indefinite sentences to people convicted of crimes which did not merit a life sentence but who were deemed to pose a danger to the public. Those imprisoned in accordance with an IPP would only be released when the Parole Board deemed it safe to do so. Even then, they would often remain ‘on licence’, liable to be returned to prison for indiscretions as minor as missing an appointment. Blunkett has described the policy as his biggest regret. 

“The judiciary were given it as a part of the menu of sentencing options and started to use it in very large numbers for inappropriate crimes, and we’re still trying to mop that up all these years later.” 

Born in 1947 in Sheffield, Blunkett grew up living with his mother, father, and maternal grandfather, and attended a boarding school for the blind from the age of four. His father, who worked as a gas works foreman, died in a horrific industrial accident when Blunkett was 12. Because he had worked past retirement, the gas board refused to pay compensation, leaving the family in poverty. 

My dad never pandered to the fact that I couldn’t see. He’d want me to do things with him and presumed that I would learn a way of being able to cope with it.

Blunkett’s early life has been extensively covered elsewhere, not least by Blunkett himself, and I am reluctant to make him go over old ground. But I do want to explore the differences between, and influence of, his grandfather, father and mother. How did these three totemic figures of his early life shape him? 

“Well, my grandfather, in part, got me interested in history. He had a history to talk about himself, in terms of moving around the country between the first and second world wars, seeking to get a job… literally on his bike, as Norman Tebbit used to put it – and the enormous challenge of high unemployment and near poverty. 

“That made a difference in terms of my perspective on learning from history both good and bad, and realising that it was only because of people’s struggle in the past that we were able to stand on their shoulders and take things further. 

“The second [figure] was my dad, who, as you know, died in a works accident. He had the work ethic coming out of his fingertips, and he never pandered to the fact that I couldn’t see. 

“He’d want me to do things with him and presumed that I would learn a way of being able to cope with it. And that was a strength, because he was there just saying ‘the world doesn’t owe you a living, you’re going to have to get on with it’. And that taught me both self-reliance and resilience.” 

His father’s approach to his blindness seems to have been adopted, at least in part, by Blunkett himself. In fact, I get the impression that he prefers to talk about things other than his disability. Is this fair? 

“I’ve never emphasised or highlighted not being able to see or its challenges. 

“The main [issue] was devoting sufficient time to the written agenda, to reports and policy papers and being literally on top of the job. I mean, [David] Cameron paid me a great tribute in 2015 when I stood down by saying I was never not on top of the job; but it was at a price. 

“I almost overdid it. I [was] almost, not consciously, but covertly thinking ‘I’ve got to be able to demonstrate that at no time am I not on top of the statistics, I’m not on top of the policy agenda, I’m not on top of the facts, because I can’t see.’ I probably overdid it, because people are sometimes not on top of the facts.” 

As far as Blunkett is concerned, there were some advantages to not being able to see, too. 

“In a perverse sort of way, it made me more honest. I’d sit in cabinet, and I’d be saying things which, if I could have seen the faces around me, probably [would] have made me pull back. I sometimes got the snorts and the coughs… but on the whole, I said what I wanted to say.” 

And what about the influence of his mother? 

“My mum taught me two things. Firstly, the strength of family and of kinship and of what it means to have that as a base in order to work outwards into community and national endeavour. But she also taught me, by dint of the fact that she was a pessimist, to be an optimist. [She was] always more worried about whether I was going to fall flat on my face… and just by dint of my personality and pigheadedness, that kind of drove me into saying, ‘No, I’m going to do it. I am not going to be infected with the pessimism that it’s not possible. I’m going to have a go at this.’” 

Blunkett says that his mother’s pessimism made him an optimist. But he was far from optimistic about Labour’s chances before the election. 

“I was. I thought it was much more like 1964 [in which Harold Wilson won a slim four-seat majority] than 1997, and I was wrong. I was wrong on two counts. One, I didn’t see Farage reemerging and the vote that Reform would take, which obviously made a big difference, and I didn’t see the absolutely overwhelming desire, whether people wanted Labour or not, to get rid of the Tories. 

“However, the percentage swing to us, had other things been different, would have [yielded] that 1964 majority. 

“Had you said to me at the beginning of the year… Labour will win on a 34 per cent vote share with a 10 per cent average swing, [I’d] have said ‘forget it’.” 

The underlying voting patterns Blunkett highlights reflect Labour’s super-efficient vote distribution. Has it left them in a dangerous position going into the next election? 

“It’s dangerous to be complacent about it. I think we should rejoice in the result, learn the lessons, and set about reinforcing the vote in those areas where we won, but only marginally. 

“The fact that this was a spread right across the UK, including seats like Liz Truss’s [which had] a 26,000 majority – I think that gives us legitimacy, but it also should give us pause for thought in terms of how we reinforce in those areas where we won because of the way in which people abstained or were prepared to give us the benefit of the doubt.” 

Perhaps part of the worry, I say, is that for years – perhaps going all the way back to 2008 – people have been very, very angry. Recently, this anger has been directed at the Tories; but, with Labour now in government, are they at risk of ending up on the receiving end? 

“I think that’s a danger that we should be aware of. I don’t think that the riots [this summer] were an indication of that. The riots were an indication of basic racism and thuggery. 

“However, even though we damped down expectations enormously, and we did – even more so than in ’97 – people will not remember. They’ll just think, in 12 months’ time: you’re the government, why haven’t you resolved these problems? So I think we’re going to have to gradually accelerate, almost like a rocket take-off.” 

When Tony Blair asked Blunkett which job he wanted in the last reshuffle before the 1997 election, he asked for the education brief. This made him one of the key faces of the New Labour project as he developed and implemented the ‘education, education, education’ agenda. Based on the detailed critique of the implementation of T-Level qualifications he shared with me earlier, education remains his passion. However, he is perhaps best remembered today for his time as home secretary – a very different role. I ask him whether he felt pressure to be ‘hardline’. 

“It wasn’t easy, because you have to deal with the difficult issues that are on your agenda every day. I used to wake up and think, how many items on the seven o’clock Radio 4 news will be about the Home Office? And it was usually three or four.” 

One of his sparring partners during this period was Shami Chakrabarti, then head of Liberty. He recounted in an interview with The House last year how he used to approach their disagreements, telling Chakrabarti that his job was to be home secretary, and her job was leading Liberty. What did he see his job as being, in this sense? 

“Well, her job was what it said on the tin – her job was to represent civil and human rights as strongly as possible. 

“My job was to deal with the here and now of the reality of the attack on the World Trade Center in September 2001, the consequent dangers of civil unrest – and people blaming others who were completely innocent for what had happened – the impact of inward migration, [and] at the same time wanting to balance it with sensible economic migration, and arrangements across the world for asylum seekers to be able to come to Britain, rather than having to work their way across the Channel. 

“And it’s very interesting, because Shami and I are both in the House of Lords; we served until earlier this year on the justice and home affairs select committee, and found ourselves agreeing to a point where it became a standing joke that we were like twins. That was because we now had a common agenda to follow. She didn’t have to see a political thug around every corner, and I didn’t have to see someone who was going to let off dangerous criminals or terrorists, right?” 

Theresa May, who’s a decent person, actually succumbed, as so much of the Tory party did over the 14 years to 2024, to the very far right

This bifurcation of his identity, into ‘home secretary’ on the one hand and ‘David Blunkett’ on the other, strikes me as a tricky act to pull off. Perhaps risky, too. If you see your purpose, while home secretary, as akin to firefighting, does it not become difficult to challenge right-wing narratives about immigration, including Islamophobic narratives? 

“You’re tackling the latest crisis whilst trying desperately to retain your values and your positive, proactive agenda. So, in my case, the 11th of September attack dislocated, for a time, quite a lot of what I’d set out to do. 

“You just have to live with that. I’m afraid it’s the nature of the business of being in power and in central positions. If you want an easy life, go and be a vicar. 

“I was proud to do it. And… if I was in the same place 25 years ago, I would do it again, having learned quite a lot, but it’s not a happy place to be, and it has been called the graveyard of politicians. [And] for very good reason. 

“Theresa May lasted the longest [in recent history], which was six years. But she had a very chequered period with a massive drop in police numbers, rising violent crime. 

“In 2013, the [hostile environment] agenda, which civil servants were caught up in because they were ordered to [be], in terms of making threats and making people’s lives a misery.” 

“And I think it was because Theresa, who’s a decent person, actually succumbed, as so much of the Tory party did over the 14 years to 2024, to the very far right. 

“I think the far right penetrated thinking and therefore policymaking, to the point where it changed the nature of the way in which they performed. Now I don’t pretend that there weren’t influences on me. Of course I had to take account of public opinion, and if not just the rightwing press, but if [TV news was] covering people coming across the channel in large numbers, no politician in a democracy could ignore that. 

“But there were no pressures internally, as there were on the Tories. Nobody ever came to me from Downing Street and said, don’t you think you’re being too weak… or too namby-pamby, nobody ever said that. So it was down to my judgment as to what the balance should be between being tough and sending the necessary signals and actually understanding human rights, civil liberties and how to build a cohesive society rather than a divided one.” 

There is undeniably something invigorating about Blunkett. While he mentions, more than once, his own supposed arrogance, in my estimation, he is the opposite of self-centred. I get the impression that, every day for the past 60-odd years, he has woken up and started thinking about better ways to organise our society for the benefit of all. 

Yet there is another side to this. His ministerial record in education is one of the most impressive in modern history, but his stint as home secretary was, as he acknowledges, more mixed. How is it that, in his own words, Shami Chakrabarti’s political twin could come to be responsible for a debacle like IPPs? I am troubled, as Blunkett himself is, that such a policy was introduced on his watch. 

Perhaps IPPs represent the pitfalls of separating man from minister. A degree of distance from the job – a professionalism of sorts – might well make a politician more suited to government. But clearly there is the potential to go too far – to stop thinking “what should I do?” and instead ask “what am I expected to do?” In other words, to start playing a role. 

Most of the time, at least based on the accounts of his cabinet colleagues, Blunkett kept on the right side of this line. During the recent general election campaign, however, Labour frontbenchers took such ‘roleplaying’ to its logical conclusion, with controversial policy decisions explicitly justified in terms of how they would affect peoples’ perception of the party rather than on their merits. At times, there was a sense that Labour was afraid of voters. 

Can we escape this debilitating self-consciousness? Or will asylum seekers always be worried about a new round of state persecution because, whatever ministers actually believe, tomorrow’s headlines are always just too important? Perhaps our best chance is to turn to those who, like Blunkett, have experienced the pressures of government, and come out the other side as determined as ever to make a difference.

Image credit: David Copperman / Department for Education and Employment, OGL 3 via Wikimedia Commons