Society
The New Statesman Profile - Peter Kilfoyle
Published 17 April 2000
Once tipped as a future Chief Whip, he has become new Labour's "critical friend". But does he have an alternative? Peter Kilfoyle profiled
The former minister Peter Kilfoyle is doing what he said he would do. He is spending more time with his constituents. The other day, for example, he visited the Dunlop production plant in his Liverpool constituency. "It's grim," he told me afterwards. "The management confirmed that closure was being contemplated. There were no complaints about productivity. It was much more to do with matters out of the workers' control, such as the high level of the pound." Fewer than a hundred workers in Kilfoyle's constituency are threatened with losing their jobs if Dunlop closes the plant, but in the view of their MP, it is another small nail in the coffin of manufacturing industry. What, he persistently asks, is the government doing about it?
That is not the only question posed by the government's new "critical friend", as Kilfoyle describes himself. During the Budget debate in the Commons, he launched a savage attack on the government's style and priorities. If anything, the subsequent reports underplayed the range of Kilfoyle's targets: an over-centralised administration was ignoring the English regions, he argued; ministers looked the other way while manufacturing suffered (not a word in the Budget about manufacturing, he pointed out); the government blamed the poor for their poverty when many people still could not find jobs; pensioners had been harshly treated.
This was an onslaught from someone regarded, until recently, as an admirer of Tony Blair. Kilfoyle actively campaigned for Blair during the leadership contest in July 1994. Mo Mowlam and he were the first two MPs to sign Blair's nomination forms. Kilfoyle moved on to become Blair's "numbers man" in the parliamentary party, ensuring that the votes were stacked up in favour of the future Prime Minister. He was spoken of then, and for some time afterwards, as a potential Chief Whip. He was an organiser, a fixer and a heavyweight bruiser.
But he was also a more rounded politician, with a political outlook of his own. This was based on two distinct experiences: growing up in working-class Liverpool in the 1950s and then, as an adult, confronting the Militant Tendency. A political party, he came to believe, required an attachment to ideology. For him, this meant an unswerving commitment to combat poverty and high unemployment. Extremists such as Militant, he argued, flourished in a political vacuum, when the mainstream of a party lacked its own clear ideology.
Kilfoyle was born shortly after the end of the Second World War, growing up in a council house where he was one of 14 children in an Irish Catholic family.
His father died when he was ten, and two of his siblings never made it beyond birth. But if he grew up in poverty, he also enjoyed the benefits of postwar social progress. Kilfoyle went to Durham University, where he studied geography and social anthropology. After two stints working on oil rigs, he returned to Liverpool as a teacher.
It was as a full-time regional organiser in the 1980s that he made his political mark. He was horrified at the rise of Militant in the north-west. From 1985, he was on the front line, carrying out Neil Kinnock's orders to purge the party of Derek Hatton and his colleagues. Kilfoyle described the period as the time when "we were trying to modernise policies away from the unelectable Bennites and reinvent party democracy by empowering our members". For several years, he suffered death threats and physical abuse.
The Blairites, some of whom were on the other side of the arguments in the 1980s, admired his political courage, recognising that, without Kilfoyle and others like him, there would have been no Labour Party for them to reform. Meanwhile, in Blair, Kilfoyle saw a man who could achieve the election victory that had eluded the party for so long and for which Kilfoyle himself had worked over so many arduous years.
Yet Kilfoyle was, from the beginning, profoundly sceptical of new Labour. Nor did he attempt to hide his scepticism in the run-up to the 1997 election. His review of Peter Mandelson's book The Blair Revolution, written in March 1996 for Tribune, stands even now as one of the most devastating critiques of new Labour ever written.
Kilfoyle accused Mandelson (and his co-author, Roger Liddle, who is now a senior member of the Downing Street Policy Unit) of showing "a palpable contempt for victims of the current order, with the implication that they are all feckless . . . his view of the poor is not new. It has characterised the Tories . . . since Victorian times. There is also revealed a profound lack of empathy with those young people on the margins of society. They are portrayed as a threat, not as a resource wasted by years of malign neglect."
Even more withering was his concluding observation: "To read that we are to 'colonise' issues, dump 'ideological baggage', pursue social engineering by paying people to marry (as in prewar Germany) creates a disturbing vista, evoking images more resonant of totalitarianism than democratic socialism. Throw in paranoia about organised labour, a demand for a unified ideology and the doctrine of the charismatic leader, and the impression is overwhelming."
Four years later, Kilfoyle stands by the review, although the threat of totalitarianism, or at least extremist politics, takes a slightly more subtle form. He suggests now that apolitical management preoccupies new Labour, which regards election victories almost as ends in themselves. He fears that extremists could flourish again in such an ideological vacuum.
He will return to this theme in a book, due to come out this summer, largely about his earlier political experiences on Merseyside. Some of Kilfoyle's Walton constituents believe that the book explains his resignation because it will carry implicit criticism of new Labour and some fairly direct comments about some ministers who were prominent during the turbulent 1980s, thus making it embarrassing for him to remain in the government. Certainly, his senior constituency officials rule out the theory that Kilfoyle left the government as the first step to becoming Liverpool's mayor; mayors, in his view, will be largely powerless and are just another example of the government's centralising obsessions.
Senior government insiders have another, less flattering theory. They are convinced that Kilfoyle had an over- inflated view of his own ministerial abilities. He had become disillusioned that he was not rising faster up the ministerial ladder.
There is no doubt that he found his brief ministerial career unrewarding. His first job at the Cabinet Office was grim. The Cabinet Office itself was then an unhappy place - as close as you could get to the claustrophobic paranoia of Hamlet's Elsinore. The first senior Cabinet Office minister, David Clarke, knew he was vulnerable from the moment he took office. So did Jack Cunningham, the second senior Cabinet Office minister. In those days, the other junior Cabinet Office minister was none other than Peter Mandelson, who had no doubt read Kilfoyle's book review.
Last June, Kilfoyle was moved to the Ministry of Defence, to a post he did not especially enjoy either. On one occasion, he refused to go to dinner with senior army personnel because he dislikes wearing a black tie, an act of defiance symbolising wider discontent with the job.
But Kilfoyle is emphatic that unfulfilled ambition was not a motive, although he does point out that junior ministers have virtually no influence over government policy. Kilfoyle's allies locally say that he resigned for the reasons he gave. He wanted to speak out more on issues that affect his constituents. His agent at the time of the last election, Steve Little, points out that Walton has pockets of high unemployment and a high percentage of elderly people on low incomes. He is convinced that Kilfoyle, " a man of great integrity", wanted to fight their corner as a local MP.
Kilfoyle has not discussed a longer-term strategy with many backbenchers, let alone ministers. His friends say he stays in touch with one or two like-minded colleagues still in the government, but no more than that. In the Cabinet, his views co-incide in some ways with John Prescott's, but Kilfoyle's allies say he is disillusioned with the Deputy Prime Minister. "Peter doesn't know what John stands for any more."
This is a little surprising, as Prescott is the Cabinet's only evangelist for regional government, one of Kilfoyle's passions. Apart from regional assemblies, he offers few alternative policies to those being espoused by the government. Even when he advocates regional assemblies, he provides little evidence to show how they would revive the economies of the regions. More widely, Kilfoyle himself admits that he has no great solutions. While cursing the impact of the high pound on manufacturing industry, he is not unequivocally opposed to the independence of the Bank of England, which has taken monetary policy out of the conventional political arena. He criticises Gordon Brown for his failure to mention the plight of manufacturing industry in the Budget, but doesn't say precisely what he would do to revive it.
Even so, Kilfoyle is an effective political operator, with a Blairite sense of how to manage the media.
His resignation, for example, was a model of artful presentation - a brief statement, followed by a relatively innocuous interview in the local newspaper and then a blast in a national newspaper a few days later to earn another round of headlines. More recently, the media were briefed in advance that he would be speaking in the Budget debate.
The publication of his book and a likely campaign to win a seat on the NEC this summer guarantee continued publicity.
In the current context of a high pound, manufacturing decline and hysteria about control freakery, he will make waves. But, for the time being, the first minister to resign from the Blair government over policy has a critique without a remedy.
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