UFO Info Week-End

And that was unlikely to have had wide circulation in leftish circles appearing

And that was unlikely to have had wide circulation in leftish circles, appearing as it did in Harpers and Queen.He was recruited by Mr Mandelson (then director of campaigns and communications) in 1984 as an advertising expert. Worse, the memo said, Labour was “not yet a cohesive, integrated political party sharing the same political ideology”.Mr Gould is one of the backroom engineers of Labour’s modernisation The last interview he gave was five years ago. A brutal self-assessment argued that Labour “is not ready for government”, that it did not have “a campaigning operation that can ensure victory” or a “political project that matches the Thatcher agenda of 1979, nor one .. to sustain Labour in government”. Then he went further, denouncing his critics in uncompromising terms. “I am a politician, not a psychiatrist,” the Labour leader argued in an interview in the Observer, “but if people seriously think that by going back to where we were 10 or 12 years ago we are going to win power, then they require not leadership but therapy.” But a timebomb was being primed.

Seamus Milne, the Guardian’s industrial correspondent, was sitting on a document which would bear out all the fears of the party’s left, and of those not close to the leader who felt themselves excluded.Mr Gould’s critique had been prepared more than six months ago, before the reform of Clause 4 Its conclusions were sweeping. In his first interview after his return he told David Frost there was no going back on modernisation. Roy Hattersley, the former deputy leader, had attacked the Opposition’s policy on opt-out schools.Mr Blair went on the offensive. The leader’s office had been accused of Stalinism, Mr Blair’s close ally Peter Mandelson, MP for Hartlepool, had been targeted, and there was bitter criticism of the party’s tactics in the Littleborough and Saddleworth by-election.

When he returned from his holidays he needed to reassert his authority after a summer of backbench bickering. Nor did it help when, two days after the speech, one of Mr Blair’s frontbench colleagues resigned, criticising his modernising agenda. When the Labour leader addresses a special meeting of the Shadow Cabinet tomorrow the mood will be the most muted since he took office more than a year ago. The Blair honeymoon is over.IT WAS hardly the start to the political season that Mr Blair wanted. Pursued down the platform, Mr Blair gave away nothing more than a rather forced smile. But encounters of this kind only happen after a political embarrassment of significant proportions – in this case one of the best-timed leaks of recent years.

The confidential document that surfaced in Tuesday’s Guardian was written by Philip Gould, a Blairite political consultant, and it pulled few punches. Labour, it warned, is not yet ready for government, needs a centralised command structure under the personal control of the leader, and a complete elimination of union power. All this on the day Mr Blair entered the den of old Labour with his first address as leader to the TUC.
By the time Mr Blair reached the conference, union bosses were queueing up to damn the document. Rodney Bickerstaffe, associate general secretary of Unison, suggested that Mr Gould should follow his namesake Bryan (the former Shadow Cabinet minister) into exile in New Zealand.

An interview for the BBC by John Edmonds, general secretary of the GMB union, had to be re-filmed because the first take was judged libellous.Worse than the one-day embarrassment at the TUC, the memo exposed tensions at the heart of the Labour leadership as well as raising doubts about party unity. “We don’t want to intrude on the original material we have in the museum,” he said “But it is a natural progression.”. FOR THE architect of New Labour it was a journey back in time. As Tony Blair stepped off the train at Brighton last Tuesday ahead of his address to the Trades Union Congress, he was greeted by the bearded figure of Peter Hitchens, the Daily Express “hit man” who hounded Neil Kinnock through the 1992 election.