Free A Journey by Tony Blair Page B

party. When the Beaconsfield by-election came up in May 1982 and I thought about going for it, most people advised me against it since it was a no-hoper for Labour. On the contrary, John said, that was the very reason for doing it. No one could blame me, I would get national attention and be in a better position to have a crack at a good seat in the next election. He was right.
    After the 1992 defeat, when Neil Kinnock lost for the second time, John was the obvious choice for leader. He did superbly in the aftermath of the Exchange Rate Mechanism debacle, when Britain was dumped unceremoniously out of the precursor to monetary union, and by May 1994 had established a solid, though not spectacular, poll lead.
    But John had a health problem. In 1988, he had suffered a serious heart attack. He was at that time Shadow Chancellor. Gordon stood in for him and did magnificently, thus sealing his reputation as the coming man. After several months off, John came back, resumed his place and seemed to have recovered. However, he had, in part, suffered the attack because of his lifestyle. John was quite tubby, and though he was a great hiker, he was also a stupendous toper. He could drink in a way I have never seen before or since. I don’t mean he would ever be in drink when he needed to be sober – he was the complete professional – but if there was an Olympic medal for drinking, John would have contended with such superiority that after a few rounds the rest of the field would have simply shaken their heads and banished themselves from the track.
    When he led a delegation to China in the 1980s, of which I was a member, we ended up with some local Chinese bigwigs in Shanghai. It was a jolly evening and a fair amount of whisky, mao-tai and beer was drunk. As the night progressed – punctuated by frequent toasts – things got a little more competitive, and essentially the chief bigwig and John got into a drinking bout. The Chinese guy was holding his drink in great style and it was the closest I ever saw to John being outclassed, but I gave it to John on points in the end (I had switched to green tea several hours before), after he got the entire committee up on their feet to link arms and repeatedly sing a rousing if somewhat unintelligible chorus of ‘Auld Lang Syne’.
    John delighted in company. He loved going to the smoking room in the House of Commons after the vote, where in those days Tories and Labour would mix quite merrily, and where politics was taken that bit less seriously for a while. It was where F. E. Smith and Churchill would sit and talk like the two close friends they were, whatever hard words had been exchanged across the floor of the House (and some were very hard indeed). It’s a shame that such friendship is rare today, very rare. John would love to talk, reminisce, relax and wind down. Drink was a relaxant. In this regard, he was like Derry. They would never do it before a big occasion, but the two of them together betokened a monumental session that, if the time was free, could start at lunch and go on well into the night.
    Unfortunately, John could take a lot of it. I say unfortunately because it meant there was no cut-off, no circuit breaker, no warning sign and insufficient punishment the day after. For me, past a very limited point I would be ill, fall asleep and for sure be punished severely the next day; but both Derry and John could get up in the morning and joke about feeling under the weather, but actually be perfectly capable of meeting a reasonably challenging day.
    Of course, after the heart attack he had to cut back, and did so – he lost weight, and ‘bagged’ over a hundred Munros (Scottish mountains over 3,000 feet high) – but as the stresses of taking the leadership told on him, and as time progressed into 1993 and 1994, I noticed he was again starting to drink more than was wise. He felt like the old John, so he thought he could act like the old John. I should emphasise again that