Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first tip for stardom. Throughout his twenties, Jim Murphy suffered this affliction. Before Tony Blair led the Labour party he was starting a Blairite revolution in the National Union of Students. His slogan, ‘realism, not revolution,’ made a cover story in the Sunday Times magazine. No list of young talent in the mid-1990s was complete without him. Yet only now, 11 years after his election, is he beginning to blip on the national radar.
The 40-year-old minister I meet in the vast Foreign Office room is a lot quieter and more bashful than the student firebrand I once saw shouting down far-left activists in Glasgow. As I walk in he jumps out of his seat and makes me a cup of tea, chatting non-stop. He asks about Alex Salmond — why does he get good press? Do I think the Tories still lack hunger? It feels almost anti-social producing my notebook. But if I were him, I’d want to talk about anything but his job: pushing the hated Lisbon Treaty through parliament.
As Europe Minister, I ask, doesn’t he have the worst job in government? He must sell a treaty which the public do not want, and do not believe is any different to the old constitution on which they were promised a referendum. ‘My job,’ he says, slowly, ‘is to repeatedly try to explain and discuss how it is different in substance and consequence from the old constitution.’ A tough task, I say, given the long list of European leaders saying the two documents are substantially the same.
‘The building blocks of your argument aren’t very strong in that the rest of Europe hasn’t said it’s the same,’ he says. I quote Bertie Ahern and Angela Merkel, but he stops me. ‘There are quotes from every leader in Europe saying the Treaty is different to the constitution. There just are. Sure, we can trade quotes at each other — the Prime Minister of Luxembourg says this, someone in Slovenia says that.’
But what about the House of Commons European Scrutiny Committee — surely what it says must be taken seriously? ‘Of course, but it said the Treaty is substantially the same for those countries who have not secured the opt-outs which Britain has. We have a unique deal.’ He is technically correct, but the Committee went on to say it was ‘not convinced’ that the UK version of the Treaty wasn’t ‘substantially the same’.
Mr Murphy knows the arguments against this Treaty, and knows how to fight them: drag your opponent down into minutiae. I could swear I detected a smile when he used phrases like ‘third pillar’ and ‘Schengen aspects of justice’ as if he was daring me to put them into this piece and see how many readers I would lose.
But surely, I ask, he accepts widespread hostility to the Treaty. For example, he recently explained his case on a video posted on a Labour party website. ‘Ask a question,’ it says — and underneath are comments from the public with questions like ‘Is this legal?’ and ‘How can you look at yourself in the mirror?’ alongside phrases such as ‘mealy-mouth spin’, ‘running scared’, ‘total breach of faith’, ‘blatant lies’ and worse.
He gives a resigned sigh. ‘The first email I received in this job said: ‘Congratulations on your appointment. I’ve watched the careers of all of your predecessors and I am certain you will die a lonely death and be buried in a traitor’s grave.’ Was it from Frank Field? I ask. He just laughs (he won’t say whether he believes the whip should be withdrawn from Mr Field for campaigning for a referendum. ‘I like Frank,’ he says. ‘I try to play the ball, and not the man’). But as to those nasty emails – ‘I’m relaxed about personal insults. It’s the way it is. I grew up in a Glasgow housing estate. I can take it.’
Now we’re getting to it. Mr Murphy is the son of a plumber and a dinner lady, who grew up in a deprived estate boarding his wealthy constituency of East Renfrewshire. Opulence sits next door to squalor through the city: this cruel juxtaposition has become its trademark and it can have a radicalising effect. “I grew up on the most outermost street in the whole of Glasgow, my constituency is one street away from where I grew up. The difference in life expectancy, I think, is seven years as you cross that street.”
In 1980 his father was out of work and went to South Africa where he found work plumbing. The Murphy family spent six years there. He worked as a joiner in an abattoir, an experience which turned him vegetarian. ‘I went to work that morning, I had bacon before I left. I got to the slaughterhouse where they were killing pigs and I’ve never touched meat since.’
And he almost ended up in the South African Defence Force. ‘Every Thursday you had to go to school in army uniform, and do drill all afternoon. You didn’t do history, biology, science, you just marched up and down to get ready to go to the army. It was ludicrous. Ludicrous.’ Conscription was, then, compulsory for whites – and when Mr Murphy turned 17 he had to leave the country to avoid it. “I left South Africa when the army came and knocked on the door,” he says.
What did his parents think of all this? ‘Without going into too much detail my two brothers and I were brought up in a council house in Glasgow – a lot of people have a lot worse life, immeasurably worse – but Dad wanted a better life for us.’ How bad was his estate? ‘It is one of the poorest places in the city. Mum and Dad wanted a better life for us – and it has been good for us. One of my brothers has stayed there, another is in California. Anyway, I don’t know how I got into this introspective answer – but there were worse off people.’
It is wrong to say Mr Murphy was radicalised. The whole point to him, from his student politics days onwards, is that he did not don a Che Guevara T-Shirt as was the trend in the city. He became a moderate. Being ‘poor in Glasgow’ politicised him, he says — along with ‘being white in South Africa’. But when he stood for what was than Eastwood in 1997, it was almost an act of defiance. Sure, it was the neighbouring constituency to the scheme he grew up in – but it was also the safest Tory seat in Scotland (in a time when this was not an oxymoron).
‘I didn’t expect to win and the truth is I didn’t try to win,’ he says. ‘The Labour party needed a candidate at Eastwood, I grew up near Eastwood, I stood as a candidate and we did very little campaigning.’ So he expected defeat – and a safer seat next time. ‘At the age of 29, not yet having had a family, it was something I would have loved to have done later in life.’ His girlfriend (now wife) had, to put it mildly, mixed reactions. ‘She was close to tears — and not tears of joy’, he said. ‘She said: what does this mean? And then, in front of people, she asked: does this mean you’ll have to go to London?’.
The irony is that his winning Eastwood meant he’d do very little of London. As his colleagues started climbing the greasy pole in Westminster, he had to spend all his time campaigning. ‘I had to work every minute of every day in East Renfrewshire to have any chance of being re-elected. So in those first few years I just tried to establish myself. Whether people voted for me or didn’t vote for me, I would do my best and that seems to have worked.’
As he knows, this is an understatement. He started campaigning the day he was elected and started what he calls ‘retail politics’. ‘You meet people where they are,’ he says. Instead of a s urgery, he goes to surgeries in supermarkets, train stations, places where voters can be found. By 2001 he had a majority of 9,000 – and turned this former stronghold into one of Labour’s safest seats.
And this is what Jim Murphy does: sells the unsellable. First he sold Blairite reform to the NUS, then converted the Tories of East Renfrewshire. As a government whip he sold tuition fees and Foundation hospitals to Labour backbenchers. And his prize for this is to sell the Lisbon Treaty to the British public. When he explains why it recalls his original ‘realism, not revolution’ slogan.
‘The reason why I was made Europe Minister is because I am a realist. I don’t come here with any great baggage or emotional attachment to Europe always being right — far from it. But I think that, if Europe can work more effectively, people’s perceptions will change.’
Might people’s perceptions change for the better if Tony Blair would stand to be European Union President? ‘I think it would be great. He’s a big character with international recognition. I haven’t spoken to him to know if he definitely wants it. The Prime Minister of Luxembourg fancies it.’ But would he actually back Mr Blair? So far, Mr Brown has been cagey about this. ‘If he did want to do the job, I think he would be great at it and I would be interested in helping him make it happen.’ So, finally, a ‘yes’ from London.
I ask how he’s spending the half-term recess: the answer, of course, is constituency work. ‘I’m going back to my old school, where 42 per cent of the pupils are now Polish. Next year the majority will be Polish.’ But doesn’t this just sum up Labour’s failure, I ask, that one in four men in Glasgow is living off benefits and yet so many immigrants find work so easily? And isn’t the reality behind his boasts of new jobs that almost all have been created by immigrants?
It is like lighting a tinderbox – he was quite calm when talking about Europe but question Labour’s record on social justice and he’s off. ‘That’s not true,’ he says, about the immigrants. Yes it is, I reply. ‘We’ve created 2.7 million new jobs’ But that’s if you include pensioners returning to work, which is a bit of a cheat I say. We go too and fro like this for a while and he calls a truce. ‘A big question is underpinning this exchange of figures we’re having: why is it someone can get a bus from Warsaw and walk straight into a job?’ Agreed, I say, especially as there five million Brits on benefits.
‘Look at Glasgow for example. It has a higher level of unemployment and a higher level of vacancies than the UK average and yet some people – I have to be careful here – they don’t connect the vacancies with the people who are unemployed.’ It is, perhaps, a polite way of saying that immigrants are taking or creating all the new jobs while 26% of the second city of the empire are on various types of out-of-work benefits.
‘So what should we do? One is continue to look new ways to help those deemed hardest to help. My family challenge was poverty, it wasn’t disability, it wasn’t illness, it wasn’t all the other things, it was one dimensional, it was grinding poverty, one dimensional deep and grinding poverty.’ And poverty which his father escaped by going to South Africa and working as a plumber there (aged 60, his Irish-born father still works on a building site). Mr Murphy portrays this was a simple choice, against today’s more complex poverty.
‘With the growth of drug dependency, lone parent families an awful lot of people have very complicated needs. So the welfare system has got to be better at coping with all those complicated needs. But also the welfare system has got to be less tolerant of people who just refuse to work.’
We’re soon into the 40th of my allocated 30 minutes, and he has batted away two civil servants who say his next visitor has arrived. He is no longer welfare reform minister (his last job under Blair), but is almost evangelistic about settling my doubts about Labour’s record on poverty. ‘The Labour party was founded on the right to work, the creation of the welfare state and all the great reforms of the past were about the right to work, full employment and the right to work.’ I ask if he would say (as James Purnell, the new Work & Pensions Secretary, did) that Britain has ‘full employment’ now. ‘Statistically,’ he says. ‘But the problem is they are economically inactive.’
An honest answer. In 1944, when William Beveridge defined ‘full employment’ as unemployment of less than 3%, he would hardly have imagined that three times this figure would be on other out-of-work benefits. But Murphy does not belong to the type of Labour politician who claims to have conquered it by dint of reclassification and statistical fiddle. Indeed, he sees this as a betrayal of his party’s values. ‘The Labour Party and the trade union movement was never based on the right not to work for those who are able and capable of doing so,’ he says.
He points to a new, attitudinal problem. ‘There was a period where it was a matter of working class pride that you didn’t rely on benefits,’ he says. The period that his father grew up in, I ask? ‘That’s right. There was a pride and dignity in work. Deindustrialisation where whole streets have no one in work, I think, changed the culture in some communities about attitudes to work.’ This is the crux of the issue: joblessness has lost its stigma. I say that ten years of Labour is long enough for him to stop blaming ‘deindustrialisation’ – ie, Thatcher. He says no matter what you blame it on, the corner has been turned.
‘I honestly believe we are gradually changing that round. If you look at the numbers of incapacity benefits it is falling.’ A third civil servant comes in, and shoots him a steely glance. ‘One minute,’ he says, unconvincingly. But it’s my fault. I’m trying my luck, asking who the last band he went to see in concern (Snow Patrol) and what he thinks about the rise of Englishness which would (as the late Robin Cook argued) ban Scottish MPs like him from running a devolved department like health or education.
‘I’m pretty comfortable with the resurgence of Englishness. I think it’s a great thing,’ he says. ‘The fact that the Scots celebrate St Andrew’s Day, the Irish have St Patrick’s day and – St George’s Day, well, you almost miss it. I think a positive celebration of Englishness strengthens the UK’s culture and our democracy actually.’ This sounds horribly off-message, especially when you remember a certain Prime Minister’s Britishness agenda. But he alights on a Unionist point. ‘My family came here from Ireland 50 or 60 years ago but they never left the United Kingdom. In political terms, that’s where I am – a Unionist.’
When I finally walk through the door out of his office, a wall of officials are looking murderously at me. There was indeed a real visitor we had kept waiting: Fiona Gordon, political secretary to the Prime Minister. Mr Murphy blanches. ‘Oh, I didn’t realise it was you,’ he said. She pretends not to mind. I make for the exit. ‘OK, Fraser, hope that you got all I said about Gordon,’ he says, with a wink. In fact, he didn’t mention the Prime Minister once. Given that his job is to take all of the flak over Europe, that’s probably just as well.
An abridged version of this interview is published in The Spectator.
Comments