‘Reid should not stand in Brown’s way’

9 December 2006

Neil Kinnock on the Home Secretary’s ambitions, and Cameron

He has seen the Prime Minister at close enough quarters to know the toll that it is taking on him. ‘It’s crushed his confidence and optimism at times, but he knows how much worse it is for the Muslim fathers of those kids who are in Iraq and Afghanistan. He would say these are the people we should be thinking about without any piousness or false humility, because that’s the way he is built.’

Kinnock does not, however, share Mr Blair’s affection for President Bush. ‘It has nothing much to do with him being a Republican. Damn it, Abe Lincoln was a Republican. My concerns about Bush from day one or before he was elected — or not elected — emanate from the people he has chosen to mix with: the Project for the New American Century group, for instance. Bush’s father, when he was president, said Wolfowitz and Perle and all the people who put that together were no more than fringe thinkers.

‘These fringe thinkers, just a few years later, were to be found in the West Wing advising his son and they published a strategic doctrine of the United States of America. Their unilateralism over a wide spectrum of policy — trade, development, defence, international relations in general — causes deep concern among people in the United States of America and more widely.’

Not all conservatives are baddies to Kinnock these days. He could see virtue in John Major, if not Mrs Thatcher, and he has some time, too, for David Cameron. ‘He is very sparky, smart fellow. I have only met him once or twice, but I observe him. I think, however, that he has taken a decision on strategy which requires him to appear to be shallow. He knows that elections are fought and won on the middle ground. He also knows that he really can’t shift Labour off the middle ground.

‘And so all he can say for the time being is “I am on the middle ground too”.’ Get to election time, and that will change to “We are the compassionate, decent, reasonable, wonderful, touchy-feely Conservatives who are also on the middle ground but the thing about us is that we are new” and that’s about it.

‘But I am not going to be scornful about the direction in which he is taking his party. I approve of it. There are, however, clearly people in his party who do not agree with him, and I think if he is going to be convincing he is going to have to take them on. He mustn’t do it because he wants to provoke a Bournemouth moment — when I took on the Militant Tendency in the early days of my leadership — or a Clause 4 moment. He’s got to do it because he feels in his heart it’s the right thing to do.’

Tim Walker is Mandrake editor and theatre critic of the Sunday Telegraph.