Andrew  Rawnsley

SERVANTS  OF  THE  PEOPLE:
THE  INSIDE  STORY  OF  NEW  LABOUR


Penguin.2000. Revised 2001.

ISBN-10: 0140278508  

reviewed by Patrick Killough

-- Dog-loving Mandelson, who replaced the party's red flag with the red rose, was Labour's earliest and best "spin doctor," all powerful "Prince of Darkness," an MP since 1992. He was immediately part of the Gordon-Tony-Triumvirate within the party. On the 1994 death of John Smith, Peter Mandelson suddenly shifted his primary allegiance from Gordon Brown to Tony Blair, a betrayal that Brown never forgave.

-- Journalist Alistair Campbell became Prime Minister Blair's Press Secretary in 1997 and later virtual and relentlessly centralizing czar within a Blair administration soon infamous for spinning the British media. Campbell saw to it that the "number of Whitehall press officers ... expanded to 1,100" (Ch. 19, p. 177).

"... we have been out of power more often than in power, and won more arguments than elections" (Ch. 18, p. 363).

"I have taken from my party everything they thought they believed in. I have stripped them of their core beliefs" (Ch. 11, p. 195).

And Mandelson and Campbell showed him how to do it.
 "Peter Mandelson ... unwisely revealed ... that the purpose of spin-doctoring was 'to create the truth'" (Ch. 6, p. 103).

-- (1) The author generally declines to EMPHASIZE any one event more strongly than another. Everything is equally important or trivial. He leaves it to the reader to sort the wheat from the chaff. The exception is the unrelenting drumbeat of spin doctoring: New Labour biggies apparently never met a fact they wouldn't spin.

-- (2) Andrew Rawnsley nor his editor provides a badly needed Executive Summary.

What, after all, were the major challenges faced by and achievements of New Labour's first of three watches at the tiller (1997 - 2001)? To this detached American, these would appear to include at least the following: spinning the death of Princess Diana to the advantage of a media-deaf Queen; and helpfully reversing the reluctance to go to war over Kosovo and Yugoslavia's murderous Slobodan Milosevic; presiding over a prospering economy and finding more money than the Tories had both for education and for the national health scheme; devolving real power to Wales and Scotland while simultaneously introducing proportional representation there -- although not to UK-wide elections; modernizing the House of Lords; manuevering in and out of European integration, marginalizing Labour back-benchers in Parliament, largely ignoring the feckless Monarchy and coping tardily with a severe outbreak of foot and mouth disease.

-- (3) Low-key humor there is indeed in SERVANTS OF THE PEOPLE, just not as much as, say, in Major General Lionel Dunsterville's recently re-issued memoirs: STALKY'S REMINISCENCES. Was there really a media brouhaha over the proper form of air transport for the PM:  ("Blair Force One")?

-- (4) I think that my six predecessor reviewers for amazon.com have done justice to other workmanlike elements at play in the narrative of SERVANTS OF THE PEOPLE: the ultimately fatal fraternal dueling between pupil Tony Blair - mentor Gordon Brown ("smooth Jacob" versus "hairy Esau," as Rawnsley so biblically put it); the psychological makeup of New Labour's inner circle, including Peter "Prince of Darkness" Mandelson and press czar Alistair Campbell under whom the "number of Whitehall press officers ... expanded to 1,100" ; the important distinction between New Labour as Project and as Governing body; and much more.

-- Let's begin with New Labour's "Project" for the House of Lords and what actually happened. From scattered passages of SERVANTS OF THE PEOPLE I gather, perhaps not entirely accurately, that at a party conference after the May 1997 Parliamentarly election (or was it before?) Blair re-pledged to put the hereditary lords "to the sword" (Ch. 11, p. 203). Somewhere I also got the impression that Blair & Co. had originally announced the intention to do so sometime BEFORE the election. Well, did he? Or did an earlier Labour Project to do away entirely with the Lords give way to elastically pragmatic Blair's settling for mere "reform?" Must I google for that information, or is it clearly stated somewhere in the book and I just missed it, despite combing jejune references in the Index? In the event, after clever negotiations which spared the House of Commons a wasted year muscling its way into reform, New Labour soon enough reduced the hereditary lords by 650 (p. 203). How many hereditaries did that leave: 92?

-- Another theme that my better informed fellow reviewers might care to address is, with so many anti-Monarchists in the Labour Party (including, if I recall correctly, the Prime Minister's lawyer wife Cherie), why is Britain still not a republic? Were the Cromwells, father and son, simply two Republicans too many?

-- Britons needed no background history of the Labour Party from its founding in 1900. 

-- Brits did not have to be told that before Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and spinmasters Peter Mandelson and Alistair Campbell (the Big Four of New Labour, according to Andrew Rawnsley) the Labour party had always been the implacable, inflexible enemy of privilege, income inequality, the House of Lords and at times of the Monarchy itself. 

-- Brits did not require a "big picture" 10-page Executive Summary of the New Labour "Project" that Blair & Co. brought to Whitehall in 1997, or a sketch of the unexpected events that threw them off stride towards what they had promised to do and what they actually managed to accomplish during their first four years ruling Britain.

Founded in 1900, Britain's Labour Party was the champion of urban working people and labor unions. Labourites fought privilege, whether of the Crown, aristocracy or merely of the middle class. They won national elections now and then but never two in a row. By 1997 The Tories, under Margaret Thatcher and then John Major, had won four elections in succession, beginning in 1979. Thatcher had dismantled much of the nationalizing of industry done by Labour and promoted a freer economy.

By 1997 Labour was hungry for victory and Tony Blair was especially so. He argued:

"...we have been out of power more often than in power, and won more arguments than elections" (Ch. 18).

Blair would transform Old Labour into New Labour -- from Left Radical to Center Left. And win! Later he would admit:

"I have taken from my party everything they thought they believed in. I have stripped them of their core beliefs. ... What keeps it together is success and power" (Ch. 11).


What surprises and opportunities had Fate in store for New Labour? How did Blair &  Co. respond? Which of "the Project's" preplanned policies went forward to what extent?

Recall the sudden death of Princess Diana and how the media-deaf Queen reacted; Tony Blair's almost single-handedly reversing Europe's and America's reluctance to go to war over Kosovo; Blair's presiding skilfully with Gordon Brown over a prospering economy and finding more money than the Tories had done both for education and for the national health scheme; devolving real internal powers to Wales and Scotland while simultaneously introducing proportional representation there -- although not permitting it in UK-wide elections; modernizing the House of Lords; manuevering in and out of European integration, marginalizing Labour back-benchers in Parliament, making the Bank of England an independent power, largely ignoring the feckless Monarchy and coping tardily, clumsily and expensively with a severe outbreak of foot and mouth disease. That outbreak proved


In Rawnsley's considered judgment, by the end of Labour's third year in power (May 2000) New Labour had proven not to be anything like a bad government -- there had been no major catastrophes -- in places a good one but not yet a great government. For that to occur Labour must master its own factions, especially the cornerstone but fatal mating of Tony Blair with his onetime mentor Gordon Brown. Brown was a superior Chancellor of the Exchequer and master of economic policy. This power allowed the Chancellor to veto virtually at will soaring schemes of the idealistic Prime Minister.


I don't think that Andrew Rawnsley is himself a writer of orginal jokes. But he has an ear for those of others and uses them to illustrate a point. Someone, for instance, in the media, when Tony Blair seemed to be looking for ways to act more like an American President, wondered if he would be transported around Britain and the world in "Blair Force One" (Ch. 4). Of his perennially in hot water advisor Peter Mandelson, Tony Blair once wished that Peter would take Tony's advice as eagerly as Tony took Peter's. At the height of the foot and mouth disease crisis, a calf  named Phoenix rose from her slaughtered mother's side and caught the nation's fancy. New Labour's decision to spare Phoenix's life was a crowd pleaser and also led to a change of policy.

"The Phoenix story was the more nauseous when all else was carnage. ... Thus might the prime Minister who had presided over the mass slaugher of more than two million cattle, pigs, sheep and lambs be projected as the saviour of the calf that had melted the heart of the nation" (Ch. 23).

When wife Cherie became pregnant, Blair learned that some Britons acted surprised that their 40-something Prime Minister still had sex.


Old Labour was first and foremost the champion of the little fellow, and Chancellor Gordon Brown always put the poor and the disabled first in the budgets he crafted. Old Labour had long yearned either to abolish the House of Lords or at least to remove all its hereditary members, over 700 of them. Tony Blair promised to do the latter but in the end only did away with 650 of them, leaving 92 hereditary lords and ladies. 


Old Labour always had a strong Republican, anti-Monarchical component. Even Tony Blair's lawyer wife Cherie was Republican. Yet Tony Blair quickly grew fond of Queen Elizabeth II and left to some future Prime Minister the chore of ending the British Monarchy.