The diaries of Giles Radice, who helped make New Labour, offer an alternative view of the party from the 1980s to electoral triumph, writes Theo Blackwell

Giles Radice, Diaries 1980-2001: From Political Disaster to Election Triumph Weidenfeld & Nicholson, £25

The diaries of Giles Radice – former long-serving Labour MP for the mining stronghold Chester-le-Street, pro-European campaigner, Labour ‘revisionist’ and Camden resident – provide an insight into the disputes and that marked the return of the Labour Party as a governing party. It is an account symbolising the voyage of a small number of progressive, Europhile Labour modernisers through the chopping seas of the 1980s.
From the publication of the Benn Diaries more than a decade ago, Radice writes in an increasingly crowded field.
The value of these diaries lies in their capacity as a corrective to other accounts and their ability to add distinctive flavour or perspective to how we see the period.
To employ a football analogy, readers will know the score already but the value and enjoyment comes from watching how the game is played and where you are sitting in the stadium.
Radice, a skillful right-winger, supplies the crosses. Key events are covered: the decisive Healey versus Benn contest for deputy leadership of the party in 1981, in which Radice played a role as one of Healey’s campaign managers; the miners’ strike; the Conservative disputes over Europe through to the first term of this Labour government.
The diaries also give a taste of what it was like to advocate politically unpopular policies within the Labour Party during the 1980s. A critic of Labour’s unilateralism, which he saw as increasingly irrelevant after the Reagan-Gorbachev Reykjavik summit, but popular within the party, the diaries detail the struggle away from the policies of 1983 towards the mainstream.
Treated are old faces from the 1980s including the “smooth” Kenneth Baker (“I have seen the future and it smirks”), the “arrogant and unpopular” Nicholas Ridley and some familiar ones – Michael Howard (“such a vile home secretary”). That said, Radice comes across as an honourable and fair diarist, noting his Conservative opponents’ virtues as well as faults.
The diaries show consistent support for a reformed and reforming Labour Party. In 1989 he argues for a party based “not on class or trade union domination but on reaching out to all citizens”.
Despite representing a heavily mining constituency, Radice stuck to his guns on the miners’ strike, angered by what he saw as Scargill’s foolhardy strategy and the resulting hardships faced by striking miners and constituents over the year-long dispute.
Revealing too is his account as shadow education spokesperson. Despite flak from teaching unions, and in a departure from Labour’s policy in the early 1980s, he argued for a common curriculum, exam reform, improving teacher training and performance and forging closer home/school links: issues now widely accepted by the mainstream.
Radice’s account is also interesting for its take on Blair, always tough and determined in the Diaries, and Blairism.
Blair once called Radice “a Blairite before Blair”, a description of which he is quite chuffed. Indeed, Radice’s 1992 Fabian pamphlet, coming after the disappointment of that year, Southern Discomfort, is credited in many policy circles as an intellectual source for New Labour.
It is perhaps surprising, then, that Radice is cool towards Blair’s Third Way. The notion that it represents the half-way point between Thatcherism and old-style social democracy, Radice finds “nonsense” although he quickly adds: “I suppose that by calling it the Third Way, Tony Blair gets it discussed in Tory newspapers.”
The diaries are also a reminder of Camden’s rich political heritage during these years. Although today the borough is home to a number of government ministers and political figures as it was in the early 1980s, it was home to the moderate set (some later SDP) in Kentish Town and Primrose Hill, with Radice an Inverness Street resident before moving to Highgate.
Following the 1997 election, Radice recounts his disappointment at not getting a big job in some poignant entries which no doubt echo the experience of a small diaspora of Labour politicians who fought the Conservatives, staved off the challenge from Militant, only to be superseded by their younger comrades.
There is real disappointment that New Labour has not taken a more pro-European stance, summed up perhaps by Radice’s suspicion that he did not get his coveted European minister job, precisely because he had established pro-European views.
For Radice the case is straightforward. His comment that support for active membership of the European Union “strengthens our political influence in the world and is essential to our economic well-being” is refreshingly clear, simple and my view, true.
He is proud of what has been achieved – “a Labour Party which has proved capable of governing the country,” if tinged with some remorse that it has “come too late for me”.
For Radice what remains for Labour is delivery on health and education and, crucially, the “fateful decision” to join the euro.
Certainly for those of us who thought that the big non-domestic issue of second term of a Labour government would be Europe, not Iraq, the diaries also represent a reminder of the European decision facing the country and the next government.
It is a decision which seems to be as relevant today as when Radice entered Parliament in 1973.

• Cllr Theo Blackwell is Camden Council’s executive member for Social Inclusion, Equalities and Regeneration.