How good was the BBC series on Blair and Brown?

Brian Lapping and Norma Percy started a revolutionary development in current affairs TV in the early 1990s with The Second Russian Revolution (BBC2, 1991). It looked at the rise of Gorbachev and the fall of Soviet Communism through the eyes of the people who were in the room where it happened. 

This established the template for almost a dozen series over nearly 30 years: looking at subjects from Watergate (1994), The Death of Yugoslavia (1995) and Endgame in Ireland (2001) to The Iraq War (2013), Inside Obama’s White House (2016) and Inside Europe: Ten Years of Turmoil (2019). The formula remained the same: take a major crisis or war, interview the key figures, intercut with well-researched still photos and archive footage, with stylishly shot images of key buildings and places to help with the editing. What was really crucial was access to the people who were there and the quality of the research, so the team asked the right questions and got the answers they wanted.

It was a true and tested formula and led to a whole genre of high politics TV documentaries. The latest example is the five-part series, Blair & Brown: The New Labour Revolution (BBC2, now available on BBC iPlayer). It traces the rise of New Labour from the arrival of Blair and Brown as young MPs, their ascent under Neil Kinnock and John Smith, the battle to succeed Smith, three triumphant election wins, Blair’s resignation in 2007 and Brown’s electoral defeat in 2010. Big events come thick and fast: the Irish peace process, 9/11, the Iraq War and the financial crisis of 2008. The central story running through all this is the bitter personal rivalry between Blair and Brown, bound up with the transformation of the Labour Party into a centrist party which could win three elections in a row for the first time in its history.

All of this is told through the eyes of the key figures involved. Blair and Brown, obviously, but also other leading Labour politicians — including Peter Mandelson, Jack Straw, Alistair Darling, Ed Balls, Neil Kinnock and Patricia Hewitt — plus a few (though not many) Conservative politicians. In addition, there are the backroom figures, the advisers, spin doctors, civil servants and junior ministers. Crucially, there are no historians or top journalists. No Peter Hennessy, John Sergeant or Andrew Marr. No long-term analysis, putting New Labour or these 13 years in any kind of proper historical context.  

This brings us to the first problem with the series, and with the genre in general. Too many of the interviewees are biased. Blair and Brown, obviously. Mandelson, ditto. Then there are their sidekicks. Ed Balls and Charlie Whelan are firmly in the Brown camp. Jonathan Powell, Patricia Hewitt, Douglas Alexander and Alastair Campbell are pro-Blair. The Tories – Michael Howard, William Hague, George Osborne – make little effort to give New Labour credit where it was due, but are out to settle scores. This is not disinterested history. Worse still, a lot of it is just plain gossip. Did Charlie Whelan really deserve so much airtime? He resigned as Brown’s press secretary in 1999, just two years after Labour were elected. He was an object of fascination to hacks for a while, but did he really matter? 

There are worrying gaps. No Cameron or Clegg, but also no Ed or David Miliband, Alan Johnson, Nick Brown, Charles Clarke, almost nothing of Blunkett. This formula depends on getting all the key people to make up for the grinding of axes by a few. Too much Campbell and Mandelson, not enough of other figures who might have given some much-needed balance. 

The second problem is: how illuminating is the series? How did the Northern Ireland peace agreement actually come about? Does the series properly explore Gordon Brown’s role in the decision to go to war in Iraq (barely mentioned)? Shouldn’t it have shown clips from Blair’s important speech attacking Clause 4 or his famous Chicago speech? There is far too much of Clare Short on the Iraq war, as the main critic of intervention in the Cabinet. You can see why she was steamrollered by Blair, Powell and Straw. She was a lightweight then and is a lightweight now, only in the Cabinet to give a voice for the Left. Unfortunately, Robin Cook, who was not, died not long afterwards.

This is one of the most interesting aspects of the series. It’s fascinating to see how many ministers were there to balance interests within the Labour Party (Prescott and Short, in particular) or because they had proved themselves as assistants, speechwriters or advisers (Douglas Alexander, Ed Balls, Ed Miliband, Patricia Hewitt). 

A stronger feature of the series is how it implicitly damns the media’s preoccupation with trivia and personalities: Blair vs Brown, Whelan vs Campbell, Mandelson, of course, minor events which get blown up as “crises” (sound familiar?). This took the place of asking big questions, then and now. How good a Chancellor was Brown, especially after 2001? Was spending huge sums of public money really the best way to change British education and the NHS? What about the imminent collapse of Labour in Scotland, not mentioned by anyone, even though Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling, Robin Cook, Douglas Alexander, Donald Dewar and John Smith were all Scottish Labour MPs? Was New Labour ever genuinely tough on either crime or the causes of crime? And, above all, why did New Labour implode within six years of Brown losing the 2010 election? How did Labour change from being the smart party (all those QCs and Oxford PPE graduates) to the stupid party under Corbyn? What was the responsibility of New Labour, if any, for this catastrophe?

The series also shows what a white and male world British politics was, barely a decade ago. Despite Angela Rayner’s ludicrous attack on the allegedly misogynist and racist Johnson government, in fact his Cabinet is the most diverse in terms of ethnicity and gender there has ever been. The visible comparison with the Blair and Brown era is a shock. British politics, especially at the highest levels, has come a long way since New Labour. As some of the women interviewed point out, the testosterone levels when Whelan, Campbell and even Brown himself were around, were far too high. Why was that allowed to happen? 

The archive and stills research is poor. Think of that extraordinary footage in the recent series on Thatcher of a garden party at Downing Street when Heath was Prime Minister and she was the only woman in a sea of grey three-piece suits. The only telling images in Blair & Brown were shots of Brown’s body language in the House of Commons when Blair called for intervention in Iraq. Brown’s terrible rictus grin explains more about why he was unelectable as PM than any psephology. People liked Blair. They didn’t like Brown. That’s it. 

The other problem with all the interviews is that there was so little hard data. How many were unemployed in 1997 or in 2010? What were poverty levels, absolute and relative, before and after New Labour? Focusing on who said what and to whom will not give you answers to these kinds of questions. 

Some of these are problems with the whole genre. Others are problems when you don’t have people as smart as Brian Lapping or Norma Percy in charge of the research and the editing. Before we get to a series about the dreaded Corbyn years, someone at the BBC needs to do some hard thinking. 

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