By his own admission, he is a big beast with an ego to match, not afraid to declare his own indispensability. ‘This was one of those moments when my not being in this particular post would have been disastrous,’ he recalls of September 1998. But â” to an extent that has been under-reported â” these memoirs are also full of self-criticism and personal vulnerability. ‘Real depression’ and the ‘black tunnel’ figure recurrently, as does self-reproach for his ‘arrogance’. He wishes he had not kept friends at bay. He looks back at his tapes for April 2002 and cringes at his vanity. ‘No wonder I got up people’s noses,’ he writes ruefully. He also concedes that his return to Cabinet as Work and Pensions Secretary in May 2005 was premature and asking for trouble. ‘In retrospect, I wanted it too much’ â” and, in six months, he had lost it all again, over his connections with a biochemical business.
How far might he have gone without the scandals? He certainly wanted to rise above the rank of Home Secretary, recording in December 2004 that ‘I have destroyed my chance of promotion’. His 2001 book, Politics and Progress, was a thoughtful personal manifesto, and dwelt intelligently upon many issues that are even more pressing now than they were five years ago: identity, multi-culturalism, localism, the proper limits of the State. He certainly hoped for more. But how much more?
In April 2002, he is intrigued when Peter Mandelson cross-examines him over dinner about whether he would be capable of taking on an even greater workload. In March 2003, Blunkett himself wonders if he might run for the top job. ‘I could do it, but the honest truth is that I would be only like a slightly more credible Bryan Gould’ (who was badly beaten by John Smith for the Labour leadership in 1992). He is affronted by stories that he has reassured Brown that he will not run: ‘I have never been in the way of his desire for the leadership, but nor have I stepped aside.’ Alas for him, the question is now academic.
‘Well, I did my best,’ says Blair to Blunkett according to a very early diary entry. Reading this book â” remarkable in many ways â” one gains a powerful sense of how much has changed since New Labour was swept to power in a mood approaching national enchantment, and how bitter the lees now taste. Even for a man of Blunkett’s formidable talents, all politics, in the end, is a strutting dance at the very lip of the abyss.
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