Free A Journey by Tony Blair

himself pretty worldly-wise. Labour Party politics following the defeat of 1979 was a bit like revolutionary France at the time of the Thermidorian Reaction, full of infighting, intrigue and bitter recrimination. The MPs were regarded by a large section of the party as sell-out merchants who had ‘betrayed socialism’. They responded as MPs do, with a mixture of courageous defiance, abject capitulation to the mob, and agonised dithering as they worked out which way the tumbril was heading.
    Through Tony, Cherie fixed me up to see Tom. I had been toying with the idea of standing for Parliament, but I was unsure. Tom invited us to have a late-night drink in the Commons Bar, since he had to stay in the House to vote. I went in the door at the gate where they queue for PMQs. Security was looser in those days. I went up the steps, and on my left passed Westminster Hall, where Charles I had been tried, where kings, queens and the occasional statesman lay in state, and where the damaged but still recognisable statues of knights from ages past were set high up in alcoves along with the banners of ancient battles.
    I walked into the cavernous Central Lobby where the public wait to meet their MPs, and I stopped. I was thunderstruck. It just hit me. This was where I wanted to be. It was very odd. Odd because so unlike me, and odd because in later times I was never known as a ‘House of Commons man’. But there and then, I had a complete presentiment: here I was going to be. This was my destiny. This was my political home. I was going to do whatever it took to enter it.
    Cherie was rather startled by the effect on me. I was literally pacing up and down the place, drinking in its atmosphere, studying its architecture as if by looking at the building I would discover the secret of how to get there not by invitation, but by right. As I write this now, suddenly I retrieve the feeling from the shelf of old sentiment where it has lain so long, and I miss Parliament. By the time I finished in June 2007, almost thirty years later, I had had enough, I wanted out and away. But now, as I examine my emotions then, I get some of that passion back. The Bar had its attractions – and it was certainly a wealthier place – but to be a Member of Parliament, to be one of the legislators of the land, to walk unhindered through those hallowed corridors and chambers; what excitement, what an adventure, what a sense of arrival at a new and higher level of existence.
    Tom thought me a pretty strange bird that evening. We had barely been introduced when I started plying him with questions. How do you get here? What can you do for me? Who do I see? What do I do? How shall I do it? ‘I didn’t realise you were in such a hurry,’ he said, amused at my behaving like some hyperactive child.
    Tom gave me my first union introductions and invaluable advice about the low ground of Labour politics. From then on, until the Beaconsfield by-election in 1982, I pursued my goal without relenting. And then after that by-election, I redoubled in my determination until Sedgefield came to me at the very tail end of the 1979–83 Parliament. When it looked as if all was lost and I had resigned myself to sitting out the 1983 election, I had even decided to abandon the London Bar, move to Newcastle and take Nick Brown’s council seat, Nick having been chosen to fight the safe constituency of Newcastle East. The plan was then to take the neighbouring constituency of Wallsend, later to be Steve Byers’ seat. In my desperation, I had contacted Dad’s old chambers and made enquiries. In the end I never had to do it; but the fact that I would have done it is a measure of my desire.
    As for my views on the Labour Party, these were evolving almost as fast as my ambition. I took care not to depart too far from the party mainstream opinion at that time, much to the left of where it had been; but I was nevertheless aware from the beginning that we were in the wrong place. I admired