1997

The final photo call, for the Blair family, outside No.10 Downing Street, on the 27 June 2007 looked overdue. Like finding a bag of Marks and Spencer pre-packed salad at the bottom of a fridge, way past its sell by date, the packet still bright looking and naturally, deceitfully, colourful but the contents, were shrivelled and mouldy, tainted and corrupt.
As the family stood for their final photo-call they appeared gauche and unwieldy, their dress sense finally syncing with their actual personalities. Cherie Blair in ‘fallen-women’ red, the daughter in a self-loathing, high-street floral print dress, both sons in ill fitting and blandly coloured suits; as if they were all at great pains too make their disrespectfulness look respectable to the long gone Ford Mondeo man. The youngest son, sharing with his father, not just a poor choice in clothing (gaudy chic), but also a bemused child-like expression of not really understanding the political punch line they were participating in.
I would like to think, in the intervening decade, that it had not always been so with this particular family and its father, that at some point I did respect them and did not, like I am here, firing off ‘cheap shots’ because it’s cathartic or whatever excuse I can slip passed you.
Then again, maybe I should have started with those cheap shots sooner rather than later.
Hindsight, it turns out, is a cruel master and it’s own time machine, which it likes to drag me back regardless of my protests.
The hesitation was gobsmacking, it was a fairly straightforward question: What is your password? The Higher Executive Office just stood there, fidgeting in a way that only seniorish civil servants could. I was sitting at his desk and he could have easily come round and entered the information himself. But whilst it was his desk, his banker’s lamp, his countless files tied up neatly with red ribbon and his over inked and over used Top Secret rubber stamp, it was my PC and he had reported a problem with it. And it was too early in the morning, with other calls probably piling up, contractors to deal with, and, I suspected, it was going to get a lot busier too on this 2 May 1997 and Tony Blair’s move and first day of work in No.10 Downing Street. A tourist stop, immediately adjacent to this one, No.70 Whitehall, a building housing most, but not all of The Cabinet Office Department of the Civil Service.
I tried again, inserting a please this time to avoid sounding like a broken record. The HEO looked down at his shoes as if they might somehow divulge the necessary information. He had boasted to me a few times about his wizard wheeze of buying cheap brown shoes in the sales and dyeing them black. With that anecdote it had just been a simple case of amusing him.
He looked back up at me.
“Wanker”, he said.
It seemed obvious now I thought about it and I typed it in.
IT problem dealt with, I left his office and headed back to my own. Midway there I got a call on my mobile, a novelty then. The call was from our central IT Dept in Office in Government Offices Great George Street, fondly known by its abbreviation as GOGGS. The Civil Service had abbreviations for everything, some new and some dusty archaic that probably belonged to the time when the Civil Service ran the Government, rather than the current situation.
The voice on my mobilephone belonged to Robin Berryman, my IT Manager. He was part hippy, part middle class conformist. He still carried his Woodstock ticket around in his wallet as a conversation piece, although when pressed on whom he saw on stage he confessed to be overcome by the moment and vague on the stage roster. Or, as I liked to think, high as a kite.
His usual jovial tone was gone this morning, replaced by a usually suppressed lack of social skills and a flat, emotionless tone. I suspected he had voted Conservative out of fear for his home and mortgage, a tactic that had always assured political harmony for bricks and mortar in the past.
Robin told me to get all the computers out of the departed Deputy Prime Minister’s Office, like now.
The inner and outer minister’s offices reminded me of the Mary Celeste. People had been here once, and not that long ago. Chairs were swivelled away from desks as their occupants had got up and departed. The desks were scattered with impersonal stationery and order forms for reprographics and faxing. Filing cabinets were empty though and any official looking documents were long gone. Maybe it was not the Mary Celeste after all, here were all the hallmarks here of a very successful coup.
I piled up computer base units and monitors onto a trolley that had been abandoned in the middle of the office floor.
This had been Michael Heseltine’s workspace, in a deal thrashed out with the now ex Prime Minister, John Major; Heseltine had become Deputy Prime Minister. I admired Heseltine, as I had Labour’s Dennis Healy, two men who should have been Prime Minister of their respective parties but allowed themselves to be sidelined or embroiled in diversions.
A month back I had held the door open for Heseltine, when exiting the Gent’s down the corridor from his office and he looked not just surprised but shocked. It took me nearly a week to work out his reaction; I held doors open for everyone regardless of grade or conscience. But I suspected that Michael was getting used to doors being let go of in his face. His party’s policy toward public sector workers had always been to reduce the numbers, cut the red tape, remove all these pen pushers and their cost on the public purse. Outsourcing had become the word that Civil Servants dare not speak of.
So now, it was payback time. We were such revolutionaries!
After wheeling the computers back into the office I checked the answer phone. Nothing, which I was not expecting given the day. There were two contractors due too but so far they were doing a very successful no show.
They were from a company call Digital Equipment Company, DEC, which had won the contract for running the Cabinet Office’s IT Helpdesk. DEC were a big and flourishing presence in the IT world and I would soon be working for them. I, along with my colleagues, had been outsourced.
However, it was crucial to understand that it was all really just governmental smoke and mirrors. Although DEC would pay our salaries the actual cold hard cash would be coming from the public purse; ‘pen pusher’ numbers would be down (five in this case) but the cost, on the public, would be the same. It was a magic trick really and everybody I knew brought into it wholesale.
There were a few more calls, mostly word processor related, where civil servants still thought in type-writer mode and the shock of the new, much like the photocopier and the fax before, had bewildered them greatly.
Back in the office and still no contractors.
The cheering started at full volume, naught to a hundred decibels in two seconds flat. It penetrated the single window in the office and it’s, weighed down with lead shot, bombproof curtain.
The new Prime Minister was arriving; driving through the gates that I had walked passed that morning. Those gates had been erected on the orders of one of Tony Blair’s icons, and would be going soon, of that I had no doubt. New Labour, as it had been re-branded, would be the people’s party and would welcome them back with open arms and freedom to walk down all the streets in London.
I wondered it the outsourcing to DEC would be stopped. Although maybe it was too far down the track for that, agreements had been signed, our bodies had been purchased and our ride well and truly pimped.
The cheering grew louder and I contacted my girlfriend, who was at home and pregnant with our son, new fangled mobilephone. Jackie sounded impressed and so was I. I held the phone above my head so she could hear the country more clearly.
An hour or so later, when the cheering had subsided the two contractors arrived bewildered and worn. On their way here, via No.10, some one had stopped them, plonked flags in their hands and told them to start cheering when the cavalcade arrived.
It figured really, that the private sector would be press-ganged into rejoicing while the loyal and cheap workers held their positions.
I went before I was outsourced, taking my IT skills into the public sector.
Now though, watching the Blair’s departure from No.10, on YouTube, without too much gloating, it feels like a coup but still looks like a circus.
And those gates across No.10 never did get taken down.