David Blunkett has walked a political tightrope his whole life. Was it worth it?

Lord David Blunkett describes his political career as a balancing act. It’s a metaphor he returns to a lot over the course of our hour-long interview. There was the “tightrope act” he walked between two different strands of left-wing politics during his seven-year stint as Sheffield Council leader in the 1980s. Then, when he served as Home Secretary in Tony Blair’s cabinet — arguably making him the UK’s third most powerful politician — he was “having to ride two horses” at once, protecting the nation from the worst effects of globalisation while also ensuring Britain took its place on the world stage. 

“I’ve always been trying to get across to people that politics and public policy isn’t binary,” he says, sitting in the spacious but modestly furnished living room of the home he shares with his wife in Ecclesall. “There are nuances here that you have to take account of and ‘yah boo’ politics doesn’t cope with that.”

The problem with trying to do two things at once is that it can require double the amount of energy. If you straddle the backs of two horses, there’s always the danger you’ll hit the ground. Luckily for Blunkett, even at the age of 76 his stamina for the balancing act of politics seems inexhaustible. For example, despite leaving local politics behind almost 40 years ago, he still finds the time to give the current council leader Tom Hunt some friendly advice. “I try not to do too much of telling him how it should be done, because he’s got to find the way himself,” Blunkett says. “But we do have good chats.” 

Even the fact that he has found time to speak to The Tribune — after arranging our interview months in advance — speaks to this desire to keep a full calendar. When I contacted his Parliament email in mid-December, I expected to receive no reply. Instead, I heard back from him a little over three hours later, not only agreeing to meet with me but also offering his thoughts on The Tribune. Even as I am on my way out the door, I can hear the start of his next appointment, with charity Teach First, beginning over Zoom.

He has always been this way, it seems. The job of Home Secretary, which he held from 2001 to 2004 after serving as Education Secretary, required Blunkett to process mountains of documents. As a blind man, Blunkett had these read aloud and recorded onto tapes, which he trained himself to listen to and absorb at twice their normal speed. In Stephen Pollard’s biography of Blunkett, a minister who served under him says he quickly learned not to try to keep up with his boss. “It’s impossible,” the minister told Pollard, “he outdoes ordinary human beings.”

Is he ever going to slow down? He insists that he already has. “A tiny bit,” he clarifies. Rather than wading through correspondence on a weekend, he might now go to the football. “If I’m brutal with myself, I’m probably still doing too much,” he says. “I'm genuinely afraid of an empty diary, where I would become bored, literally, to death.” He also simply loves politics, far more than most other things he can think of doing with his time. “Whilst I would love to ride a bike, I can only ride a tandem. It needs somebody on the front,” he says. “I like gardens, but I'm no good at gardening. I would drive not only myself but my wife crazy if I was hanging about at home at a loose end.” There will come a day, he concedes, where his “body will say enough”, but until that day arrives, he has no plans to fully retire from politics.

Depending on where you fall politically, this is either heartening or chilling news. Even two people notionally on the same end of the political spectrum might have to agree to disagree. Blunkett, it seems, is something of a political optical illusion — the picture that you see depends on the angle you view it from. In the 1980s, he spent seven years as council leader of the “People’s Republic of South Yorkshire”, during which time Sheffield twinned with the Soviet mining town of Donetsk. By the early 2000s, however, he was being described as “the most right-wing, authoritarian home secretary in living memory”.

For some, there seemed to be a simple explanation for his seemingly ambiguous political leanings — over time, as he assumed more power, his true colours emerged. In a 2005 article for Direct Action, Sheffield anarchist Mark Barnsley insisted that any talk of ‘socialism’ during Blunkett’s time at the council “was never more than empty rhetoric”. David Heslop, a Conservative councillor during Blunkett’s time at the reins, told the Spectator in 1998 that he believed his political opponent was “genuinely left-wing” back then, but seemed “totally different” after joining Tony Blair’s cabinet. “I have never worked out which is the real one,” Heslop added.

Ask Blunkett, and he’ll tell you he’s only ever been one man — it was the world that moved around him. “I’ve got no regrets about the time I was on the council, because we were of the moment,” he says. The behaviour that saw the council under his leadership labelled a red menace, such as declaring Sheffield a nuclear-free zone, were political gestures. “They were us saying to the rest of the world ‘we’ve got a different way of thinking and we want to be heard’,” he says. “At the time, it was right. It wouldn’t be now.”

What he felt Sheffield needed in the 1980s was an antidote to Thatcher and a free-market approach that was destroying the city. “Combating Thatcherism and all it was doing to the area made my politics much sharper and much more cutting edge than it otherwise would have been,” he says. At the same time, however, he was “very sceptical of the top-down, welfare, old Labour approach”. He didn’t want to hand people solutions like a benevolent patriarch; Sheffield’s ordinary people needed to feel involved in the process of improving the city. 

Take his transport policy as council leader, which he still counts as one of the proudest achievements of his entire career. Bus fares were heavily subsidised — the typical journey cost less than five pence, around a tenth of the average price in other cities — but it was important to him that they weren’t scrapped entirely. “We charged the tuppence just so that people knew they were contributing, that this wasn’t just some freebie out of the sky,” he says. “You put a bit in and we’ll put quite a lot in, and we’ll make it work.”

Even at the time of his election as council leader, he points out, he was considered the more centrist candidate by the rest of his party. “I always considered myself – and still do – to be firm left,” he says. “I used to joke about it. Hard left was brittle and likely to break under pressure, and soft left was too malleable.” He was “always against” the efforts of more militant members of Labour to try to steer the party in a “much more revolutionary” direction, he adds. “I didn’t believe that it was possible in the UK context to make that happen anyway, even if it was desirable.”

But surely, I point out, there must have been some movement along the political spectrum over the years? In the late 1980s, Blunkett helped author an unofficial tract on The Labour Party’s Values and Aims that insisted “the community must control the ultimate means of production”. By the late 1990s, when he was Education Secretary gunning for the job of Home Secretary, he was promising to make his predecessor Jack Straw — considered quite hard-line at the time due to his known contempt for “aggressive beggars, winos and squeegee merchants” and calling for a curfew for children — “look like a liberal”.   

Again, Blunkett insists, it was just a matter of context. “My politics changed to the degree that we were now in government rather than opposition,” he says. “We were dealing with very different circumstances to the ones in the 1980s and we had to reform and modernise Britain to take on those challenges.” Thatcher’s government was fixated on its battle against “the enemy within” but, a decade later, New Labour was trying to work out how Britain should deal with the rest of the world.

Nothing made the need to look outwards more apparent than a single catastrophic event three months into Blunkett’s time as Home Secretary. It was the day of his first speech in the new role, reportedly labelled D-day on calendars in his private office. It was also the day two planes hit the World Trade Center in New York City. “We’d been concerned, as a country, with the threat from Irish Republicanism,” he recalls. “Our eyes had been very much on the domestic threat.” Suddenly the government was left scrambling to adjust to a “new globalised threat” and his job, in particular, had changed overnight. He’d wanted, before taking the job, for “the citizenship agenda, the communitarian agenda” to be as much of a priority as the country’s security. Life had other plans.

It is during his time as Home Secretary that Blunkett introduced the measures that would forever change his public image in the eyes of many. This included detention without trial of foreign suspects, and authorising MI5 to start collecting telephone data in bulk — although he maintains that his response was a proportionate response to the threat. While he could hardly have been accused of still being “loony left” while serving as Education Secretary for Tony Blair’s New Labour government, this earlier four-year period of his cabinet career is far less controversial than the one that followed. 

He’s keen to ensure it’s not over-shadowed. “You’ve jumped Education,” he points out when I first ask about the Home Office. He describes the work in his Education Secretary role as “transformational” — he was able to secure the funding needed to cut class sizes and boost basic standards of numeracy and literacy. Education has always been his first love in politics, he later adds: “I believe it’s a liberator and equaliser in a way that other policies struggle to achieve.” By contrast, his work in the Home Office “was central to everything that was happening” — so he’d do it all over if he had his time again — “but it was very painful and personally extremely difficult”.

Did he feel wounded when people described him as an authoritarian at the time? “Well, the Guardian did,” he says (the Independent did so too, while the Economist at least wondered about it). “I had very good memories of writing for the Guardian in the 80s and 90s. I was a bit disappointed… I was clearly not communicating as well as I might have done that this wasn’t a right-wing agenda.” 

Yes, he argues, he sometimes sought to be firm as Home Secretary — to “clamp down on drug pushers and anti-social behaviour,” as he puts it, such as by championing the expanded use of now-controversial ASBOs — but he insists he “didn’t see it as being a hard nut” for its own sake. “I saw it as being something that was protective of the people I represented and grew up with,” he says, although some might point out that the people committing anti-social behaviour were his constituents too. Still, he adds, “what people sometimes misunderstand is that crime and antisocial behaviour affect the poor more than they do the rich.” 

He says he could see that gangs and “the disintegration of traditional norms” were making life for people in Parson Cross, where he grew up, more difficult. (As we reported last year, the city’s most deprived areas are still having to reckon with higher levels of anti-social behaviour.) These residents couldn’t afford to simply move house to a more well-heeled area to escape such problems. “I used to say to Alan Rusbridger, who was then editor of the Guardian, ‘I don’t expect anybody to put up with what you and I wouldn’t put up with in our lives and where we live’. I think Sheffield still benefits from that, where it’s still the safest large city in the country.”

At the risk of splitting hairs over an off-the-cuff remark, this does not seem to be strictly, numerically true. According to a graph comparing the crime rate per 1,000 residents reported to police forces covering the country’s major cities, the safest city last year, by a long way, was Newcastle. Then again, you might argue, these figures represent crimes from the force’s whole catchment area, not just the cities in question — and is reported crime the best metric of safety anyway? Blunkett, it’s clear, is basing his assertion on a feeling that Sheffield, often called “the biggest village in England,” has a healthier sense of community. “With all the challenges that we face, we still have better social cohesion. We avoided riots, all the way back from 1981 to 2011 and beyond,” he says. “It’s very hard to hold onto that, and complacency is something we should avoid like the plague.”

Blunkett’s Guardian-reading critics might retort that Sheffield’s ability to avoid the riots was not necessarily down to having a firm hand when it comes to weed-smoking teenagers. Take the riots of 1981 — which spread from Brixton to cities like Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds — fuelled by racial tensions and inner-city deprivation. Talk to some Sheffield residents who remember this period and they actually will credit Blunkett with preventing the disorder from spreading to this city, just not by being tough. Chris Andrews, one of the founders of the legendary Leadmill music venue, maintains that there were no riots in Sheffield because Blunkett seized the opportunity presented by the project to get young people into useful work, in return for funding the bulk of construction on the building with council money. As Andrews told The Tribune last year, “The Leadmill was built by the unemployed skilled men of Sheffield, training unemployed kids in brick-laying, plumbing, electricity, plastering.”

But many people like the idea of a politician being tough on crime and Blunkett has always been open about his desire to give his constituents what they want — hence the need to move with the times, as the public shifts with them. Take his track record on LGBT rights: in the 1980s, he was quoted as saying that he felt “revulsion at the idea of touching another male”, but he admits that “revulsion” not a word he would use today and points out that he later introduced a reform of the sex offences act, “which was the last bit of putting right the challenges of the Oscar Wilde era.” To some, this makes him a champion of the common people. To others, as Anthony Howard wrote in The Times in 2004, it makes him nothing more than “an instinctive populist”. Blunkett says he “used to smile at being called that,” and that it’s especially funny now the word has been largely adopted to describe right-wing politicians. “It’s now about Boris Johnson and popular Conservatism — ‘popcorns’, as I call them.” 

The difference between him and the likes of Johnson or Trump, however, is that these figures “use democracy to remove democratic norms like decent dialogue” by “using facts and opinion as the same thing”. The version of politics he espouses is about “being close to people, understanding where they come from and inspiring them to want to be engaged,” something he feels is impossible to do without offering them the policies they actually want. “Otherwise people become so disillusioned with democratic politics that they turn away from it and then they’re very susceptible to the siren call of the far right.”

It continuously comes back to the idea of balance. In Pollard’s biography, for example, Blunkett explained that the Home Office measures to stomp out anti-social behaviour, which made some people view him as hard-hearted, were a necessary trade-off to get voters to tolerate more liberal policies elsewhere. “People will put up with me suggesting that we give community sentences to people if they know that we’re tough where appropriate,” he is quoted as saying. Laid out like that, Blunkett’s politics seem highly strategic, perhaps almost Machiavellian. (Blunkett later described speaking to Pollard for the book as “the biggest political mistake” of his life and it seems to have hastened his second resignation. He tells me that its author “was clearly paid a great deal to take opportunistically the chance to embarrass not just me, but my colleagues”.)

I suspect the man himself, however, would characterise himself as being led by his heart. It’s certainly led him astray before — after all, it pulled him into the affair with journalist Kimberly Quinn, which ultimately ended his chances of becoming Prime Minister, which some felt was a realistic prospect at the time. Blunkett resigned from Blair’s cabinet not once but twice over the fall-out after their three-year relationship became public, as he fought in the family court for his right to see the son he and Quinn had together after she returned to her marriage. “Over that period, the public searchlight on my private life was totally destructive,” he says. 

If he had his time again, he would have told Blair he needed to win his legal battle before returning. “I came back too soon,” he says, having accepted a job as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions less than half a year after resigning as Home Secretary. “I was in the family court when I returned to the cabinet and that is very, very difficult.” Had he held off, perhaps he could have stayed. Then again, he doesn’t totally regret it. “Certainly fighting for my son was the right thing to do,” he says. “He’s now 21 and I wouldn't be the person I am if I no longer knew where he was and what he was doing and was able to support him.” 

It was a good choice and a bad choice. As usual, it’s not a simple binary and he won’t quite come down on either side.

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