This article is from the February issue of Total Politics
You can tell a lot about people from their face. In this respect, at least, nature has been kind to John Denham MP. He is blessed with an honest countenance, one that was born to smile, and a natural twinkle in his eye that suggests laughter has rarely been far from him throughout his 58 years. He has a natural warmth that most politicians find hard to project. And he’s needed it in a Labour Party where, over the years, he’s often been viewed as out of step when attempting to help reshape his party – often with a southern perspective.
Denham decided earlier this year to step down from Parliament, and that it was best, also, to step down from shadow cabinet. Speculation immediately centred on the difficulty of working with Ed Balls, and disagreements with Ed Miliband about his conference speech. Denham denies that either is true, and emphasises that he is in complete accord with his leader. I put it to him that, having been in the cabinet 18 months ago, being PPS to Ed Miliband is a bit of a comedown. “I want to do a political job,” he asserts. “It means I can be there as somebody without a particular axe to grind, unlike you (ie, his interviewer), with preferment hopes for the future.” Ouch. I suppose I deserved that.
“I’m PPS, I like to think I’m also a good friend, a good supporter and one of the people Ed [Miliband] can turn to from time to time.” He certainly has the access, but he is very conscious of not treading on other people’s toes. “My most useful work is around Westminster, talking to colleagues, not sat in the leader’s office,” he says.
Most commentators would concur, as his leader is not having an easy time of it and Denham’s role will be crucial over the coming months. In many respects, it’s a case of ‘back to the future’ for Denham, with Labour having lost a swathe of southern seats in 2010 and a leader now pigeon-holed as being left-wing. “I don’t accept that characterisation,” says Denham. “What Ed has done over the past year is not given sufficient credit, given that we had our worst election result since 1928. To come back as strongly as we have with by-elections, councillors, members – and his sketching out his view of the world with a strong set of values – has been a real achievement.”
Denham thinks Labour is doomed in the south without that last element. “I see no way of reconnecting with the voters of the south without a strong set of values. The ability to be pro-business but yet critical of bad business, the ability to have values and responsibilities at the top and bottom, seems to me a key part of the message.” He feels that today’s Labour Party is a different animal from its early-1990s incarnation: “I was in a minority in my own constituency party, and Tony [Blair], Peter [Mandelson] and Gordon [Brown] were taking on a party that did not accept the need to change. The Labour Party is very different now.” Denham believes that once people decide the government’s approach isn’t working, they will open up to the Labour Party again. That’s why “the next two years are crucial, and it’s unrealistic to expect more progress than has been made so far”.
Despite having had an impressive career at the political top table, he is a Labour figure who has travelled largely under the national radar. It’s something he recognises himself, as he tells me a story about playing cricket (one of his passions) with a team of Southampton academics. As with many cricket teams up and down the land, each week there would be a fines book. He laughs loudly: “I got fined every single week for not having a Spitting Image puppet.”
Cricket, and sport generally, has played an important part in Denham’s life, and it has taught him a great deal. His love of cricket was so great, it led him once, as a young man, to occupy his headteacher’s office. As captain of his school’s first team, he learned that a match against the neighbouring school had been abandoned on Saturday morning because, yet again, no wicket had been prepared. The following Monday morning he tried to see his headteacher but his secretary refused to book the young cricket captain an appointment. So, during assembly, he let himself into the headteacher’s office and waited.
When the headteacher returned, Denham poured out his frustration, annoyance and unfairness about the way school sport was dealt with, how it wasn’t given sufficient priority – and, just in case he wasn’t being taken seriously, that the editor of the local newspaper was wicket-keeper of the local team. Denham was sent back to the common room, only to be summoned back a few hours’ later to be told he would be meeting the county sports adviser the following Thursday. But his headteacher also made him run a cricket club for younger boys, giving Denham an early lesson in understanding that rights and responsibilities go hand in hand – a point which he credits as central to his political philosophy.
It would be fair to say, though, that Denham had no interest in politics as he grew up. Although his father was from a very strong South Yorkshire Labour background, and had a tradition of trade unionism in his family, his mother was from a Surrey Conservative professional middle class. This is a man who could easily have fallen on either side of the central political divide, as he himself acknowledges.
As with many in the 1970s and 1980s, education played its part. “The defining issue from me, which made me see the world from one side of the centre as opposed to the other,” Denham says, “was the 11-plus. I went to a small East Devon village school. If you passed, you went to the comprehensive in Dorset, but if you failed you went to the secondary modern. I felt that division among my friends was deeply wrong.”
Despite these early experiences, politics wasn’t really discussed at home, and it didn’t get under Denham’s skin until later at university. At Southampton, as an undergraduate he studied chemistry and played a lot of cricket and rugby. It was only as a postgraduate, and when taking up a post as secretary of the Athletic Union, that he entered the world of student politics. Here he got to know people in politics, particularly the Labour Party and Labour students. He became president of the students’ union, and his political course was set.
Yet Denham is not, and has never been, a typically tribal Labour politician – possibly because of his family background and growing up in the south. He’s clearly clever and thoughtful and, to coin a phrase, prepared to think the unthinkable, something that hasn’t always endeared him to the Labour Party mainstream. He was a councillor in Southampton in the 1980s: “The whole of the 1980s for people like me was a time of constant rethinking and reappraising. In Southampton I was involved with a lot of people who were rethinking – not our values, but how to deliver them. We were slightly New Labour before we knew what it was going to be called.”
Denham points to his time as chairman of the housing committee, “where we developed one of the first social housing land strategies in the country. We identified every single piece of public land in the city that could possibly develop social housing, and then sat down with the Housing Associations and asked, ‘How are we going to develop the maximum number of social houses?’”
Essentially, he and his colleagues were doing things that were not seen as ‘traditional Labour’. They were rethinking Labour politics and how to connect with voters. This was partly inspired by his experience as a Labour candidate in Southampton during the thumping general election defeats of 1983 and 1987. “If you go from doorstep to doorstep,” he says, “and people tell you they used to vote for your party but they’re not prepared to do so any more, there are two ways of reacting. You can either think they’re wrong and they’ll come round, or you can try to engage. Once you realise it isn’t the values of the Labour Party they’re rejecting, then it’s possible to find a way back.”
Denham gives Labour’s reaction to the sale of council houses as an example. “There are two ways you can understand a policy like that,” he says. “As a bung, or some kind of crude financial incentive. Another is to understand that it was about how people felt about themselves, whether they felt they could become property owners. We managed to give the impression in the 1980s that we would rather people weren’t allowed to be anything other than a council tenant.”
But Denham and Southampton’s politics weren’t connected to either the centre or the national Labour Party. “It was probably only when I came to Parliament that I felt more connected with the national party,” he says. It’s interesting to note that one of Labour’s most clear-headed and forthright thinkers has been largely on the periphery of the party’s modernisation. Priding himself on being an independent thinker, he confesses he “wasn’t particularly intimate with Tony or Gordon”. That’s not to say he didn’t make significant contributions to the debate within the party, particularly about reconnecting with southern voters, who had largely deserted Labour.
“The critical thing,” he stresses, “was for Labour to become a party that recognised aspiration. The difficulty, including 1992, was that people expected the party to understand the homeless, the unemployed, the poor, who were up against it. But if you’re only seen as a party who speaks for those people, you have a problem. New Labour put together a coalition of people with strong aspirations who identified with the values-base of New Labour.”
However, that coalition fell apart, losing five million voters between 2001 and 2010, firstly, Denham believes, because Labour abandoned a unifying, values-based message for the south. Instead, it sought different headlines for different voters but ultimately alienated many people in all voter groups. Gradually, he says, it “the way we communicated what we were doing eroded our own values-base.” Secondly, their public-sector reforms, with marketisation, contestability and diversity, were too complex and failed to connect with people’s daily lives. Finally, Denham asserts that people concluded that “the rules of the game were not fair. Hard-working families –people who played by the rules, paid their taxes, tried to bring up their children right – weren’t getting a fair deal. Whereas a lot of others at the top, or on benefits, or who caused trouble, got resources devoted to them. We never captured that view of fairness, or constructed an approach to welfare or migration, or other issues that reflected those values.”
If there’s one core belief in Denham’s political philosophy that has served him throughout his political life, it is fairness. It runs through his speeches, inside and outside Parliament, in his actions as a minister and as a person. It’s difficult to argue that this is a particularly southern trait, but perhaps it is a ‘Middle England’ or middle class one that predominates in the south of England. Denham believes it comes from those he knows. “I don’t claim any particular insights; it’s just people I play cricket or rugby with, parents I’ve known in school, or people I sit next to at football – this is the language that they talk. I’ve only ever reflected back those values in what I’ve said politically.”
Of course, Denham did resign over a matter of principle – going to war in Iraq. As a Labour Party loyalist he found this incredibly difficult, made more so by the fact that close friends in government didn’t share his views or analysis. As he says: “I was taking a different view from people I liked and respected.” The issue for him was never about his career, but about whether he could publicly defend the decision. It would be one thing to vote for it in the House of Commons, quite another to go to local TV studios and say it was the right decision. “The moment this crystallised in my mind,” he says, “I had to go.” I ask him, looking back, how he felt about Blair. “I felt it was the wrong decision. You feel bitterly disappointed if someone you supported and respected takes a wrong decision, of course you do.”
Even today, Denham mulls over whether there was any way or any point at which it could have been stopped. “If there’s a big regret, it’s not having seen earlier where we might end up, so that you might have had an influence on the decision.”
Overall, though, Denham’s contribution to the Labour government was a distinguished one. He made an original contribution to every department in which he served, extending carers’ provision in pensions, setting up Primary Care Trusts in health, driving through Police Community Support Officers and community cohesion at the Home Office, and connecting innovation and research with higher education at the new Department for Innovation. His biggest regret is the debacle over capital investment in further education colleges, when the Learning and Skills Council lacked control and overspent its capital budget. It meant large numbers of projects were shelved and FE colleges took significant financial hits.
While John Denham still may not have a Spitting Image puppet, he will be quietly thinking and engagingly getting on with instilling some southern values into the Labour Party.
Rob Wilson is the Conservative MP for Reading East
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