Everyone has a unique upbringing, and mine was the making of me. It gave me my outlook on life, and my resilience. I spent a lot of my childhood in a children’s home, before going to a very small boarding school in Oxfordshire. It had started off as a home for boys, mostly orphans, from East London. Over time it became a school, but it still had a lot of children from either broken homes or military families. There was a wide social mix, and it worked well for me.
I had some really first class teachers, particularly my English teacher. He encouraged me to apply to Oxford, and he also ran the debating society. I became a keen debater at school, and he took me to debating competitions all round the country. That helped turn me into a politician.
When I was 15, I read Roy Jenkins’ biography of Asquith. It filled me with enthusiasm for progressive politics, as well as admiration for Roy as both a writer and a great reforming minister. I thought that being both an historian and a progressive politician must be the ideal life, and that’s roughly what I’ve become – though not with Roy’s distinction.
The SDP was formed within a few days of my 18th birthday; it was the first political party I joined. I started to form my political views in my mid-teens, and they have barely changed since: I was a modernising social democrat then, and I am a modernising social democrat now.
When I was a student at Oxford I campaigned for Roy to be the university’s chancellor, and in due course I became his biographer. I regard myself as Jenkinsite – his view of the world is pretty much mine. Indeed, we became close friends – despite the age gap – when I became his biographer and helped him with his brilliant biography of Churchill, published when he was 81. He was both a centrist politician and a very bold social reformer, which is an unusual combination in politics. Most people in the centre tend to be wishy-washy and don’t tend to challenge the status quo, but Roy showed it is possible to be politically moderate, commanding the respect of both sides in politics, while also carrying through bold progressive reforms – including, in his case, the legalisation of abortion and homosexuality.
In my ministerial roles at schools and transport, I have taken on the jobs because I had a clear sense of the big reforms that are needed. I have no interest in just holding office for the sake of it. No-one remembers ministers simply because they held office, but only for what they achieved.
I was an academic and a local councillor in my 20s, and I joined the Financial Times when I was 29. I expected I would spend the rest of my carer in journalism, and I would have been quite happy to do that. I love journalism, and I love writing. I was also a Lib Dem PPC in my early 30s. I hadn’t expected to get elected, so politics was a sideline.
When Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party he had made it abundantly clear that he was going to turn Labour into a modern social democratic party. When he succeeded in abolishing Clause IV it became clear to me that, ideologically, there was no separation between modernising social democrats who were Liberal Democrats and social democrats who were in the Labour Party.
Roy gave me the best advice. He said that as I believed what Tony believed, it was better to be in Tony’s party because it was a larger one. So I joined New Labour. But it was only a chance set of circumstances that led me to become personally involved. David Miliband was a friend of mine, and when he became Tony’s director of policy, he regularly asked me in to discuss policy ideas. Tony Blair then invited me to work for him after the 1997 general election as his education advisor. Even then I only expected to be at the Number 10 Policy Unit for a couple of years.
All of the ministers I worked with – David Blunkett, Estelle Morris, and Charles Clarke – were keen reformers in their own right. There was constant collaboration in policy development. You only get anything done on domestic policy from Number 10 if the prime minister and the relevant secretary of state are both signed up, so it’s essential that ministers develop and lead policy within departments. David Blunkett did just that. He was an effective reformer. I did my bit in contributing ideas and proposals. It was a collaborative and successful process. I hugely admire David; he is one of the most effective ministers we have had since 1997.
Some parts of the press dubbed me ‘Tony Zoffice’, or worse. If you’re in Number 10 and at all effective then that type of thing comes with the territory. You become a figure in your own right and lots of things are said about you, some of which are complimentary, some of which aren’t.
There was controversy in the wider party over some of our policies, particularly tuition fees. A large number of MPs were worried abut the electoral implications, but most of those I talked to supported the policy in principle, enabling us to expand student numbers and restore grants.
There were also big arguments about academies, largely because of concerns about schools which weren’t directly controlled by local authorities. However, we won support for the principle of radical reform to introduce new independently- managed schools with the management and ethos to succeed where comprehensives had failed.
Today we have more than 200 academies open, and their standards are rising far faster than the national average. Ed Balls jokes that he has opened more academies than I did, and I take that to be the ultimate compliment.
I had assumed that I would return to journalism after the 2005 general election, but Tony asked if I would go to the House of Lords and become an education minister. It was totally unexpected but I agreed, again thinking I would do it for a year or two.
From my time in Number 10, I had a pretty good idea what it was like to be in the front line of politics, but nothing actually prepares you for the event. I found the media intrusion into my family life quite hard to take at the beginning, but I soon got used to it.
A year after Gordon became prime minister I rather presumptuously asked him if I could go to transport in order to pioneer high speed rail. He agreed, so in 2008 I came here as a junior minister. I was absolutely astonished to become the secretary of state within a year.
As a minister I have always spent a lot of time out in the field. It’s essential that you have constant experience of the front line. I think I visited more schools as schools minister than any minister in the department’s history, and when I was minister for rail I went through a week of total immersion in the railways by going on a rail tour around the country.
I want to see railway companies committed to the long term development of the railways, and who are not just in it to make a quick buck. Many of the more successful franchises are for more than ten years, and we are seeking to make longer franchises the norm not the exception. It will also make the railways more responsive to the public. That’s a good thing. Our white paper on high speed rail will be published in March. High speed rail is the work of a generation, and it will take several decades to build a network. But I hope we can make a start soon. People worry about the cost, but even if we now go full-steam ahead with the planning, it will be 2017 before serious construction begins – well past the current recession and the next spending review.
All three parties have a commitment in principle to high speed rail. Over the next month the big challenge will be to translate that into a specific proposal – only then will it become a reality.
High speed rail is not just a transport reform but a fundamental social reform. It could do an enormous amount to bridge the north-south divide and strengthen links between England and Scotland. It could build a fundamentally better society.
I enjoy Parliament and answering questions and debates in the Lords. I also support the idea of an elected House of Lords. If the current House of Lords ended and there was an elected second chamber, then I would need to make a choice about standing for Parliament as a peer or an MP. I would be keen to do either.
I constantly read history. I love it. My greatest regret about my political life is that I don’t have any time to write, and it is a huge regret that I haven’t managed to write my biography of Roy Jenkins.
Unfortunately you can only do one job at a time though, and if I had enough time in this job to write an autobiography then I wouldn’t be doing it properly.
