Writing a Political Diary

           

            I have always been in love with political diaries. From Pepys to Benn they have been a permanent companion ever since I first stood for the Commons in Solihull in October 1974.

            Then I was devouring Richard Crossman’s detailed record of the 1964-70 Labour government. Harold Wilson stupidly tried to stop their publication. The 1968 generation of journalists and lawyers and Labour libertarians like Michael Foot swept all that to one side and for the first time voters could see a curtain fully lifted on life in government the day before yesterday.

            Tony Benn wrote endless diaries and no other Labour figure before or since matched the sheer weight of words Benn dictated nightly into his tape recorder. But who reads them now?

            No-one has matched Alan Clark for producing readable diaries with their vivid descriptions about a dying ruling elite, an Old Etonian’s effortless contempt for lesser breeds and constant mocking of his fellow Tory MPs and ministers.

            No-one has come close to matching Clark. Labour journalists like Chris Mullin and Alistair Campbell have produced copious volumes but often long after they were close to power. They are shrewd observer’s notebooks not based on hearing or seeing things from within the deep  bowels of Parliament and government.

            Before being elected in 1994 I had written political biographies and accounts of international politics. By trade a journalist, a métier most of my fellow Labour MPs, especially Tony Blair, regarded with deep suspicion, I was used to writing. Whenever I was researching a book or long article and came across a contemporaneous letter or diary entry it was like a diamond reflecting bright light from the more prosaic speeches, resolutions, memorandums, articles or interviews that make up most of the raw material of political writing.

            It was clear the Tories were going out and in Tony Blair, Labour had stumbled across a leader who was a winner after the losers like Callaghan and Kinnock.

            I decided rather pompously that I had a duty to keep a diary so that future chroniclers would have a record of words said, acts done, laws decided by the men and women who remain for all their faults carrying the unique responsibility of being elected by fellow citizens to legislate for all  within the nation.

            When Mrs Thatcher was elected in 1979 I went off to work with international trade unions in Geneva, living in nearby France, spending time in Poland working for the Polish union Solidarity, working with unions in the US, Germany, Spain, Nordic Europe as well as in South Africa with black trade unions, or South Korea where independent workers’ unions occupied factories and shipyards and paved the way to South Korea becoming a democratic state.

            I picked up French, German and Spanish and had good contact with all the democratic left parties in Europe. When I was elected in 1994 Tory MPs mocked me as the “Honourable Member for Geneva” but Blair once in power decided to use me as a PPS at the Foreign Office under Robin Cook and calling me to No 10 on his European forays along with intellectuals like Timothy Garton Ash or Jacques Delors’ biographer Charles Grant whose Centre for European Reform became the most important source of policy and ideas on Europe under New Labour.

            I noted down what these political and foreign policy grandees said in meetings with Blair and what Robin Cook said about the influence of Israel on Blair’s policy matrix. Cook’s special advisers came back in despair from a No 10 meeting where Alistair Campbell had told them to “get all the European crap out of Cookie’s speeches.”

            I was pro-European but witnessed how nervous and uncertain Blair after 1997 was on the EU with endless briefing from Gordon Brown’s epigones that Europe was a danger zone for Labour. 

            Political diaries are of course the product of their author. Years ago I read the bowdlerised version of the Chips Channon diaries edited by the Tory MP Robert Rhodes James. They revealed the depth of appeasement in 1930s Tory England. In a magnificent re-edit, Simon Heffer,  restored the diaries as Channon had written them, full of hate of Churchill, dislike of Jews, and an active gay life one reactionary judge away from prison. His description of Terence Rattigan’s syphilitic penis is an entry too far.

            There is a great deal of sex in the Commons which lobby correspondents draw a discreet veil over as they themselves are often rampant philanderers. The late Derek Draper boasted of having slept with two male members of the Blair cabinet. Lawyers insisted I take the reference out of my dairies as Draper could have sued me as obviously I had no other proof of his claim.

            The diaries that are worthwhile are those written from day One in the Commons and should have no ulterior purpose other than a daily description of what being an MP is like. I was struck reading Lewis  Namier’s account of 18^th century MPs how so little is changed in what makes an MP tick. Some grand figures rush out revenge diaries to prove they were always right and prime ministers often wrong. My dairies record Robin Cook’s unhappiness at the UK tailing in behind George W Bush when he bombed Iraq in February 2001.

            When Blair humiliated  Cook by demoting him from the Foreign Office after the June 2001 election the former Foreign Secretary turned on Blair with a spectacular resignation as the UK lined up with Washington to invade Iraq. Cook rushed out a book “Point of Departure” which claimed to be based on his diaries. A closer examination showed they were Cook’s appointment books and his interviews with a Sunday journalist who wrote up Cook’s memories of what he said or did.

            Sir Alan Duncan, also produced “diaries”, after his ministerial career was ended when Boris Johnson became Prime Minister. They read like a long vindication of every position he took especially on the Middle East and dumps on prime ministers 2010-19 who did not fully appreciate his political insights

            They are worthwhile for students of Britain and the Arab world but tell readers little of what being an MP is like especially as Tories entered their Brexit era with endlessly changing prime ministers and ministers.

            Douglas Hurd once  told me he hoped I was keeping a diary, but I changed the subject. Almost anything I said to Alan Clark ended up in his diaries but surely a diary is a private discussion between its writer and a computer screen or dictation machine not a variation of instant journalism.

            Altogether I wrote 2.2 million words covering the years between 1996 and 2012 when I left the Commons. They were destined for a university archive but with the chances Labour would in 2024 again win power as in 1997 I thought an edited down version of my diaries covering the first Blair government would be interest, even some utility to the new generation of Labour MPs and ministers likely to replace the Conservatives later this year.

            Politics is never dull and always worthwhile and if we want democracy we have to put up with politicians. I just hope somewhere there is a Tory MP recording the extraordinary turmoil of the world’s oldest political party as it goes through its Brexit years which began as I record with William Hague embracing full-on anti-Europeanism in the hope it would trip up Tony Blair.

            And I invite any Labour comrade if indeed Labour does take over this year to find time to write down what her or his fellow MPs say and do in the tea-room, bars, dining rooms, Terrace, and 101 committee rooms of the Palace of Westminster as well as offices in ministries where the fate of our nation is decided.

Denis MacShane was MP for Rotherham 1994-2012 and served as a Parliamentary Private Secretary and Minister in the Foreign Office 1997-2005. His book “Labour Takes Power. The Denis MacShane Diaries 1997-2001” is published by BiteBack.