The Long and Winding Road by Alan Johnson

Author:Alan Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2016-09-22T04:00:00+00:00

On that glorious morning of 7 May I’d bumped into Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s press secretary, outside Church House and he’d asked me what I expected to achieve in Parliament. It was a good question. My life had changed completely in a matter of weeks. In a way my almost thirty years in the Post Office had cocooned me. This was a chance to emerge from the chrysalis and take wing.

I had told Alastair rather pompously that while most new MPs were looking to make their mark, I felt I had nothing to prove. I’d get on with representing my constituents and trying to be a good backbench MP. It was an accurate reflection of my outlook. I was not consumed with a burning ambition to be a minister – let alone a Cabinet minister – and I wasn’t consumed by politics. I was reasonably well informed, but I didn’t scour the print media every day, or devour political biographies, or watch the Sunday-morning political programmes on TV. I certainly hadn’t formed ‘an opinion’ on every issue as proper politicians were meant to do. I had no wide network of contacts and I’d never been to a dinner party in my life.

I may have been a huge admirer of Tony Blair, and for his part, he had created a wonderful opportunity for me, but I was under no illusion that this made us bosom buddies. Collecting friends had never been a hobby of mine. In general, I’d rather avoid a conversation than have one. I’d always been that way – a bit anti-social. Now I found myself in a profession where conversation, dialogue and interaction were crucial to doing the job properly.

The part of my job that did suit me down to the ground was representing the trawlermen. I was happy in Hull but strangely unsettled in Westminster. To some extent my state of mind must have been a natural reaction to veering off in a new direction in my forties, leaving behind a world I understood and where I felt comfortable.

I was invited to say my farewells to the CWU at its annual conference in Jersey the day after my forty-seventh birthday. I spent two days there and was treated to a wonderful dinner by my friends and allies. Some delegates felt that a union somehow owned its general secretary; my enemies, on the other hand, were resentful of the fact that I’d departed of my own accord, thus depriving them of the opportunity to get rid of me. But from the union colleagues I’d worked alongside from youth to middle age there was nothing but warmth and humour. It wasn’t as if I’d gone off to become director general of the CBI, after all. And my close colleagues would flourish: Derek Hodgson achieved his ambition to be general secretary and Tony Young became Lord Young of Norwood Green.

I left them with a poem which I recited from the platform of the cavernous conference hall. Housman reflected my feelings of sweet nostalgia.

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