Author Archives: Paul Anderson

Paul Anderson, Tribune column 10 July 2009

“Hi,” said the American woman on the other end of the phone. “Are you Mr Anderson?” “Yes,” I said, expecting an offer of car insurance or the threat of a writ.

I was wrong. “Hi,” she went on. “I’m Myleen and I’m calling from Labour Party headquarters. Are you available to assist in the Norwich North campaign?”

At which point I fell off my chair. Well, not really – but I was surprised. It wasn’t just that the voice was American: I’ve been used to Westminster interns from across the pond for more than 25 years, and some of my best friends are from New York. Rather it was that I’ve not heard a squeak from Walworth Road since it actually was Walworth Road rather than a call-centre in Gateshead with a front-office in Victoria Street or whatever it is now. And the last time was to ask for money, not for me.

Don’t get me wrong. My local party in Ipswich is well organised and active, and I’m regularly bombarded with pleas for help by our brilliant and hard-working agent, John Cook. He has an uncanny knack of timing his arrival at your door with a giant pile of leaflets the only evening you’re at home in a week. But I expect my local party to stay in touch. Contact from HQ – and from a real human being (even an American) – is a bit special.

Perhaps, though, I should not have been surprised. Norwich North is not far from home, it is a very important byelection, and Labour needs all hands on deck. On 23 July – less than a fortnight hence – the voters there will decide who replaces Ian Gibson, who represented them as a Labour MP for 12 years before resigning the seat last month.

It is crucial for several reasons. Norwich North is one of the marginal seats that Labour must retain at the next general election if it is to have a chance of avoiding national defeat: Gibson’s 2005 majority was a little over 5,000. It is the party’s first electoral test since the debacle of the European and local elections last month, its first since Gordon Brown survived the cack-handed attempt-to-oust-him-that-wasn’t – and, most important, its first since the MPs’ expenses scandal left the front pages.

Gibson walked because he felt he had been treated unfairly by the Labour National Executive Committee panel charged with disciplining miscreants in the expenses scandal – and it’s hard not to sympathise with him (as his constituency Labour Party did). The records, as revealed by the Daily Telegraph, show that that he sold his daughter his London flat (on which he had claimed mortgage-interest payments from the taxpayer while she lived there rent-free) for less than its market value.

“Off with his head!” screeched the media, and Labour’s “star chamber” duly doled out the summary punishment, prohibiting Gibson from standing as a Labour candidate at the next general election. You don’t have to be a great admirer of Gibson’s hard-left politics to wonder why he was done over for not raking in gains from the property bubble when nearly everyone who did so has got off scot-free.

Whatever, the byelection will give the voters in Norwich North the chance to pass judgment on the quality of Labour justice. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the early money was on them giving Labour the thumbs down – and if they do the government will face a torrid summer. If they don’t, however, it might just act as the fillip Gordon Brown so desperately needs, a sign that all is not yet lost, that the corner has been turned, that the fat lady has yet to sing. And my friends in Norwich say they have a hunch that Labour can win. There’s no sign of popular enthusiasm for the Tories, they say, and people are beginning to get over the rage that motivated or demotivated them at the European and local elections.

Both the major parties know the stakes are high, and both have been campaigning vigorously in the constituency. Although both have been publicly playing down the significance of the contest, both are treating it as a dry run for the next general election. Labour’s message is simple, that the Tories will slash public services if they win power. The Tories counter that the government is lying about the state of the public finances.

As for me, I’m making no predictions, but I am going to catch the train to Norwich this weekend and do a spot of whatever the comrades need done, despite my reservations about the way Gibson was treated. I’ll be keeping quiet, of course, about where I’m from. Americans go down fine in Norwich. Tractor boys do not.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 12 June 2009

Where do you start? It’s difficult to think of a more depressing time for Labour supporters since – well, I was going to say the weeks after Labour lost the 1992 general election, but this is much worse. Labour’s failure in 1992 was like your team losing in the cup final. This is like watching the penultimate game of the league season when you’re three points adrift in the relegation zone and three-nil down and your players start brawling with one another on the pitch …

OK, that’s enough blokish football metaphors. But you get the point. In 1992 we were disappointed to lose when we hoped to win. This time, we are simply staring disaster in the face.

No matter how you look at it, the council and European election results are dire for Labour. In the English counties, the party lost nearly two-thirds of the seats it held and all four of the councils it controlled. Its projected share of the national vote was just 23 per cent, 15 points behind the Tories.

The Euro-elections were even worse. Labour’s overall share of the vote was 15 per cent, eight points down on its dismal performance in 2004. Labour was beaten in Wales by the Tories and in Scotland by the SNP. In the North West and Yorkshire regions, it lost sitting MEPs to the far-right British National Party, and in the South West and South East it trailed in fifth behind the Tories, UKIP, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens. Labour was fourth in the East and third in the West Midlands, with UKIP second in both. It came first only in the North East.

European and local elections are not reliable guides to the level of support for parties at the next general election. In general elections, turnout is usually much higher, and parties not already represented at Westminster hardly ever win substantial shares of the vote, let alone seats. In the past, governing parties have been battered in European and local elections and won large Commons majorities a year or two later, as Labour did in 2001 and 2005. But it would be unprecedented for a governing party to win after a performance as poor as Labour’s on 4 June.

Of course, Labour’s drubbing took place in exceptional circumstances. The resignations from the government of two cabinet members and two other ministers before polling day did it serious harm – Hazel Blears’s departure was particularly damaging, not least because it was so obviously intended to be.

What really made the difference, however, was the MPs’ expenses scandal. The message on the doorstep was the same everywhere: I normally vote Labour but I’m so disgusted with what those MPs have done that I’m not this time. The scandal undoubtedly hit Labour much harder than the other major parties. Labour is in government and has more MPs than the rest combined – and, more importantly, many hitherto solid Labour voters are furious at its MPs spending from the public purse the equivalent of a year’s skilled manual worker’s wages on property speculation and lavish lifestyles, all the while claiming to stand for fairness and the interests of “hard-working families”.

But the expenses scandal won’t just fade in voters’ memory as time goes by. The only possible way back for Labour is to get to grips with it this summer by chucking out every MP who has abused the system.

For now, everything else except economic management is a luxury – even coming up with brilliant new policy ideas. And this means that getting rid of Gordon Brown immediately (as advocated by several departing ministers, “rebel” backbench Labour MPs and the Guardian) would be the height of folly.

A leadership election over the summer would not just divert attention from cleaning up the Parliamentary Labour Party: it would make it nigh-on impossible. MPs called to account over expenses would protest vehemently that they were being victimised for supporting one or other leadership contender. The necessary purge would grind to a halt. Whoever won the leadership election, Labour would go into the general election, whether in autumn or next spring, with the expenses scandal still festering – and the result would be a wipeout.

In this light, it’s just as well that Brown was forced by the resignations of Blears and James Purnell to reshuffle the cabinet earlier than planned, so that all the credible would-be replacements for him had sworn undying loyalty in public before the European votes were counted. By the time the sheer scale of Labour’s European defeat had sunk in, pressure for the PM’s resignation had already dissipated .

Which isn’t to say that Gordon shouldn’t go – just that it shouldn’t be yet. There’s a good three months’ work still to be done. And after that? Let’s see …

Paul Anderson, Tribune column 15 May 2009

It’s that time of year again. I’ve got to sort out my accounts and file a tax return. I spent hours last weekend sifting through invoices, receipts, bank statements and wage slips, working out what to declare to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs about my freelance income and related expenditure for tax year 2008-09.

I used to hire an accountant to do it, but I realised that he was charging me £500 to fill in a form, so for years I’ve done it myself. It’s a lot easier now than it used to be, partly because I’m not doing as much freelance work as I used to and partly because HMRC has made it easier with self-assessment. Whereas ten years ago the process took three days, this week I did in one.

Believe it or not, I’m meticulously honest about what I declare to the Revenue. That’s not down to asceticism or stupidity: I had a nasty scare 20 years ago after I failed to file a tax return and was threatened with court action for not paying the £12,000 the Revenue told me I owed. It took a lot of grovelling to get out of that, but I learned my lesson. Ever since, I’ve sent the taxman a return soon after the end of the financial year that scrupulously details my economic activity.

Except … well, I do what everyone does. The income is always right, but the tax-deductible expenses are less precise.

I know I can’t claim travel to and from salaried work against tax but can claim travel for freelance jobs. Quite often, I have to go to London to do research as a freelance – but I also travel to London to get to my place of employment or just to go out. Of course, I keep all the ticket receipts, but by the time I do my accounts I can’t remember which was for what journey. Had I gone to the LSE library, or was I off to the Guardian for a shift? Or was that the day I spent canoodling in the park with the nubile Letitia? What the hell, the Revenue isn’t going to know, just put down 25 trips to London that are claimable against tax: it’s about right and I’ve got the paperwork to cover it. And so it goes with the share of the heating bill related to working at home and a whole lot more besides.

In other words, I do a certain amount of estimating, then put the ball into the Revenue’s court. And so far the Revenue has believed me. OK, we’re talking piffling sums – I earned £50,000-odd last year and only £5,000 was from freelancing. It might be that I’m such small fry I’m not worth bothering to catch. I like to think, however, that there is a bond of trust between me and the taxman. He hasn’t a clue what I earn or what I spend, but he accepts what I tell him because I’m not taking the piss.

You can see where this is going. If only our parliamentary representatives had taken a small fraction of the minimal care that most taxpayers take when filling in their tax returns, we wouldn’t now be facing a frighteningly complete collapse of public confidence in the entire political class.

They didn’t, however, and we are. The leaked expenses claims published by the Telegraph show that MPs of all parties have been taking the piss big-time for years.

True, the Telegraph paid for the info. True, the sums are not huge in terms of GDP or Sir Fred Goodwin’s pension – and, given the cost of accommodation in central London, £24,000 a year is not a ridiculously generous sum to allow non-London MPs for nights they have to stay in the capital. True, MPs are not particularly well-paid by comparison with bankers or lawyers. And of course the system for paying MPs’ expenses is absurd – although we only know how absurd thanks to the Freedom of Information Act.

But there really are no acceptable excuses for what so many MPs have done. Four nights a week in a modest hotel, rent on a two-bedroom flat in Pimlico, mortgage interest on a small town house in Kennington – any of that is fine. So too are a cleaner and a bit of gardening and home maintenance. Beyond these basics, however, it’s impossible to see any justification for claiming. Many if not most MPs have used expenses allowances to fund blatant speculation in the housing market, home improvements they could have afforded from their salaries and luxuries that are in no sense related to their work.

On the evidence so far, at least 50 MPs should resign in shame. But I’ll put a tenner on no one doing so (as long as I can claim it on exes).

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 17 April 2009

And there I was thinking the worst was over… As Neil Kinnock would have put it in his pomp, it is difficult to exaggerate how completely, totally and utterly Derek Draper and Damian McBride have let down the Labour Party.

OK, there are questions about how the creepy Tory blogger Paul Staines, aka Guido Fawkes, got hold of the emails the idiots exchanged. OK, the grand plans for a website publishing rumours about the sexual peccadilloes, drug use and mental health of leading Tories and their spouses never came to fruition. OK, it’s hardly Watergate.

All the same, the scandal takes the breath away. To put it bluntly, what the fuck did they think they were doing?

I am absolutely in favour of a full-on anti-Tory attack blog – as it happens, provoked by the oleaginous Dan Hannan’s dissing of the National Health Service on Fox TV the week before last, I was in the process of planning one myself when the scandal broke, though I now think it can wait a bit.

But the way you get at the Tories is not by spreading puerile defamatory personal tittle-tattle. David Cameron’s fitness for office has nothing to do with whether or not or why he visited the clap clinic at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford as a student many years ago: what counts is what a Cameron government would do for the funding of clap clinics. As for the supposed mental instability of a senior Tory politician’s wife – you what? There’s nothing to suggest there’s anything to the story. But even if it were true and you had evidence, you wouldn’t touch it in public, and in private, if asked, you’d express sympathy, warmth, tenderness, understanding, even solidarity. Only a complete shit would even think of doing anything else. And unless you have solid evidence for coke-and-hookers stories, just leave them alone because of the libel laws – and I say that as a confirmed coke-and-hookers man myself.

Seriously – I’m not into coke and hookers really, darling! It was a joke, honest! Why have you put the phone down? – this is the end of New Labour’s spin regime. And it’s time to state the obvious. Derek Draper, Damian McBride et al: what a bunch of tossers you are.

For all your cocksure swagger, you couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery. Your antics – not just in the past couple of months – have done incalculable harm to people’s faith in the democratic system in Britain and to the cause of social democracy. I thought you were rubbish many years ago, but now it’s clear to everyone. Charlatans. Liars. Incompetents. Now get lost, and don’t ever come back.

***

The Draper-McBride affair has prompted a lot of speculation about why the political blogosphere in Britain is dominated by the right – but no one has mentioned the main reason, which is money.

This might seem a little counterintuitive, because blogging – unlike self-publishing in print – doesn’t cost a penny. You write your piece, upload it to your personal website and that’s it. There’s no need to buy expensive desktop publishing software, there’s no printers’ bill and there are no postage or promotional costs. What could possibly be less elitist?

But that’s not quite the whole story. To generate traffic to your blog, you need to get a reputation both for the quality of your posts and their frequency – and that takes time most people don’t have.

I’ve had a blog for more than six years, and when I started I was full of enthusiasm for the possibilities of the medium, posting nearly every day and eagerly following dozens of stories.

Slowly but surely, however, I started to flag. Spending a couple of hours a day researching and writing for a blog read by a few hundred people simply wasn’t compatible with working full-time and all the other commitments of everyday life – and that was with a flexible work routine, a generally indulgent employer and no kids. Increasingly, I found I was posting my monthly Tribune columns, the odd review, lots of You Tube videos – and nothing else.

Would it have been different if I’d been a man of independent means? I’ve no idea, but I do know that being rich and not having to work is rather an advantage in the new media age. The most obvious case in point is Arianna Huffington in the United States, who has used her fortune to bankroll the Huffington Post website – but Britain’s Tory bloggers have got the upper hand at least in part because they don’t need to do anything else. Yes, it’s easier to be oppositional on the web than it is to support a ruling party. Yes, the blogosphere is inherently individualistic. But cash counts too. Give me loads of it and I’ll show you.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 20 March 2009

Most political memoirs and diaries are deeply disappointing. I know, because I’ve ploughed through hundreds of them in the past 25 years in the course of everyday political journalism and historical research.

The best – the diaries of Richard Crossman, Barbara Castle and Tony Benn on the Labour governments of the 1960s and 1970s, for example – are not only essential historical sources but also enthralling. The worst are utterly worthless. I have on the bookshelf by my desk half-a-dozen bland, plodding accounts of the Thatcher years by retired ministers that have remained unopened since the week before publication when I desperately searched through their pages for something – anything – that might make a diary story.

No one has produced anything quite as bad on the Blair era – though The Blunkett Tapes ran them close. But even the most intelligent and revealing New Labour memoirs and diaries up to now have been seriously flawed. Robin Cook’s The Point of Departure was telling on many things (and included a chapter on how Labour should renew itself that bears rereading today) but Cook was restrained by his intention to make his departure only temporary, an ambition sadly thwarted by his early death. And the extracts from Alastair Campbell’s diaries published as The Blair Years, although extraordinarily revealing on quite a lot, were edited to omit anything that might be embarrassing to Gordon Brown, making them rather like Hamlet without the ghost.

All of which makes the publication of Chris Mullin’s A View from the Foothills a real landmark. The diaries of the former Tribune editor and soon-to-retire MP for Sunderland South are the first no-holds-barred account of life inside the Blair administration – and hunch tells me that they will become as important for future historians as the Crossman, Castle and Benn diaries.

This is not because Mullin held high office: as the book’s title makes clear, he did not. He was a junior minister in the Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions from 1999 to 2001, then a slightly less junior one first in the Department for International Development and then in the Foreign Office, from which he was dropped in 2005, returning to the back benches.

But if Mullin was not a senior player, he has other things to offer. He is a great observer of people and a connoisseur of the absurdities of ministerial life: the speeches written for ministers by civil servants in impenetrable jargon, the endless futile meetings, the inability of senior ministers to delegate. He captures perfectly the tedium of the constituency MP’s existence. He is spectacularly rude – with reason – about John Prescott and Gordon Brown (but not about Tony Blair, whom he dubs “The Man”) and a perceptive analyst of what’s happening in cabinet even though he’s not there. And all of it is done in the clearest of prose with dry self-deprecating humour. I read it in a weekend and couldn’t put it down …

***

On a different matter entirely, I’ve been amazed by the hoo-hah in the past fortnight over the revelation in the Guardian that the historian Eric Hobsbawm had been refused access to his MI5 file.

My first thought was that it was rather mean of MI5 – the old boy is 91, and anything in his file could only relate to his activity as a member, from the mid-1930s, of the Communist Party of Great Britain, which breathed its last as long ago as 1991 – but hardly a big deal.

Others had different ideas, however. The Daily Mail went into full hate mode, denouncing Hobsbawm as an unreconstructed apologist for Stalin’s terror – and the Guardian responded with pieces arguing that the Mail was out-of-order because (a) Hobsbawm is a great historian and (b) it’s outrageous that MI5 kept files on members of the Communist Party.

There are several things that strike me as weird about this. First, I can’t see why Hobsbawm’s enduring sympathy for the Soviet Union – which is not quite the same thing as unreconstructed Stalinism, though he was certainly a Stalinist when Stalin was around – is news: he’s never made any secret of it. Secondly, I don’t understand why the fact that he is a brilliant historian should preclude criticism of his politics (or indeed of the influence his political allegiance has had on his historical work). And thirdly, I can’t grasp why it’s so outrageous that MI5 kept files on prominent members of the CP. For most of its life, after all, the party was a dedicated servant of a foreign power that had hostile intentions towards Britain (and between 1939 and 1941 was effectively allied with another foreign power that was waging war against Britain).

None of which is to defend the decision not to release the file. The cold war has been over 20 years now, and there is no excuse whatsoever for not opening the books on it – however embarrassing the results might be.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 9 February 2009

After more than 30 years of hoarding books, magazines, academic journals and newspaper clippings, I’ve decided to have a clear-out. I’m not going to get rid of any books – well, maybe a few duplicates – but everything else that can go will go. I can fit only two more bookcases into my house unless I let them take over the kitchen and the bathroom, and my cellar is so full of boxes that the electricity man had difficulty getting to the meter the other week. I really don’t need to hang on to 20 years’ worth of the Economist, because I can access it online or in the library; and I’m never going to look again at those mid-1980s issues of New Left Review that have now been stored in boxes for more than two decades.

Or at least that’s the theory. The problem with having a clear-out when you’ve let your hoarding get as out-of-control as I have is that it takes a vast amount of time and effort. First, you have to decide what goes – which is easy enough with the Economist and most of my clippings from the national press over the past ten years because all that stuff is available instantly online (at least as long as I have an academic job). But it gets more difficult the more obscure the publication becomes. Although I probably know a couple of people with, say, a complete run of Socialist Action, I’m wary of chucking out my collection just in case neither they nor the British Library or the Bodleian can locate a particular issue.

So clearing out also involves spending a lot of time reading and thinking. Is it worth keeping those tattered copies of Xtra!, the anarchist paper of the late 1970s, or the issue of Class War that was edited by Tribune’s current theatre critic, Aleks Sierz, 25 or so years ago? Yes, because the chances are high that Xtra! and Class War didn’t make it to the copyright libraries – and because they’re part of my own history. But what about the issue of the pro-Albanian Maoist Weekly Worker commemorating the death of Enver Hoxha? A worthless artefact with which I have no personal connection – but again yes, because it’s so weird. I have however decided not to keep Labour Weekly, the party’s official paper, or Sanity, the CND magazine, or most of my Fabian pamphlets.

Which brings me to the second problem: disposal. I currently have a vast pile of paper I have decided I don’t want any more, and I’m not sure what to do with it. The newspaper clippings have already gone into the recycling bin, but the rest is a headache. Some of it I can flog to a specialist secondhand dealer, and some I’ll give to local charity shops. But what about the 1,000 or so copies of the Economist? It seems a waste to put them in the bin – and I can’t put them all in it at once – but who the hell would want them and be prepared to collect? I really can’t be arsed with ebay…

***
The great thing about having a clear-out, of course, is what you turn up unexpectedly. I’d completely forgotten that I had such a large collection of articles and pamphlets on the split in the Communist Party in the mid-1980s over the miners’ strike and the Soviet Union – and I was surprised to find a box full of embarrassingly craven British and American left praise for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua from the same era.

What has really stopped me short, however, is the Labour material from the late 1970s and early 1980s. The sense of desperation and panic in the party between the IMF crisis of 1976 and the end of the miners’ strike in 1985 – through the Winter of Discontent, the Tory election victory of 1979, the slump that followed it, the defection of the SDP, the Falklands War, the debacle of the 1983 election, the miners’ strike itself – is palpable in every article I clipped and every pamphlet I saved. Labour hung on under Michael Foot and rebuilt itself under Neil Kinnock, but it was touch-and-go for at least five years.

I know it’s not done to wonder what happens if we lose in 2010 – and I still think Labour can win because I’m less pessimistic about the economic downturn than everyone else and believe the Tories can be exposed for the hopeless reactionaries that they are. But Labour’s bleak midwinter this past month is horribly reminiscent of 1979, and I’ve got a feeling in my bones that the party will be in opposition within 18 months. And awful as it was after 1979, there was a lot more energy and enthusiasm around Labour then than there is now. Be afraid, deliver those leaflets – and pray.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 6 January 2009

Sometimes it seems that everything in Britain these days is doom and gloom. The banking crisis has dragged on and on and the credit famine is now having a devastating effect on consumer confidence, the housing market and employment.

Every day there are announcements of new redundancies and business failures. Forecasts of collapsing house prices, negative growth and exploding unemployment range from the deeply depressing to the terrifying. Slump is upon us.

For anyone on the left, the political outlook is at first sight dire, too. The brief recovery in the opinion polls enjoyed by Labour in the autumn of 2008 appears to be over – and the Tories are back to being overwhelming favourites to win the next general election. Oh dear.

But is it all as bad as it seems? Well, at least it’s not as bad as it might have been. Granted, some of the economic projections of the past couple of months have been a lot worse than most experts expected at the beginning of 2008 – and there’s little doubt that a lot of people are now suffering, with more pain to come. But so far it hasn’t been a matter of economic meltdown. The overwhelming majority of Brits are still doing OK. And although the government has made mistakes it has given a pretty good impression of knowing what has to be done to get out of the mess we’re in.

To be sure, the failure of the October bank bail-out, which necessitated this week’s even-bigger emergency package, is an embarrassment; and it might well be that even this week’s efforts will not be enough to prevent wholesale bank nationalisation, which the government wants to avoid (for a mixture of good and bad reasons).

Nevertheless, Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling have not done at all badly in the past few months, dealing with a crisis unlike any other in living memory with confidence and some panache. More might well need to be done to restore credit to the economy, but they appear to have the will and daring to do whatever is necessary, at least in the short term.

Certainly they have been running rings around the Tories, although whether they continue to do so now Ken Clarke is back in the shadow cabinet is another matter. Clarke, unlike David Cameron and George Osborne, understands crisis management and is a formidable opponent for Labour. On the other hand, as became apparent within minutes of his being appointed, his differences with his Eurosceptic colleagues have the potential to reignite the internal Tory battle that more than anything else destroyed the party’s credibility in the 1990s and early 2000s.

It is less easy to be sanguine about the government’s medium-term plans. Sorting out the banks is the top priority, but once that’s done the state needs to intervene with a major programme of public works to boost the overall level of demand in the economy.

So far, the proposals that have emerged from government look back-of-the-envelope and unimaginative. Speeding up planned projects is fine as long as the projects are worth pursuing in the first place – say school and hospital investment – but the case is difficult to argue when it comes to the third runway at Heathrow Airport or the Trident replacement or hard-shoulder carriageways on the M1 and M25. What’s missing is the vision thing: plans for a high-speed rail network, a massive expansion in green energy generation and a large-scale revival of social housing construction. Yes, all that would take time to prepare and longer to put into practice, but Labour needs to have a bold programme it can introduce immediately after the next election: the work on it must be done now.

The good news is that the party appears to be in better shape to do that than anyone could have imagined six months ago. Last summer, Brown seemed to be on his last legs – and Labour looked ready to dissolve into poisonous factionalism.

However, the prime minister survived the conference, acted decisively on the economic crisis and performed a healing reshuffle (I never thought I’d welcome the return of Peter Mandelson to the cabinet, but it appears to have worked wonders for everyone but postal workers). The bounce Brown got might have been short-lived, but Labour now comes across as more united than for at least five years.

I’m still not optimistic about the next general election. Between now and then (and it must be 18 months away, mustn’t it?), there are all sorts of things that can go wrong – the economy most obviously, but there are also small problems such as the proposed Royal Mail sell-off, Afghanistan, Heathrow and June’s European elections.

There is, however, more than a glimmer of hope. Hunch tells me that 2010 could be Labour’s 1992.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 28 November 2008

Last week, one of my best friends died. I first met Patrick Fitzgerald at a meeting of the Oxford Anarchist Group in the first week of term when I went up to university in October 1978. It was in Danny Simpson’s Exeter college room in a house on Turl Street.

We were both 18, but Pat was a seasoned veteran. He’d been an anarchist for all of two years and a university student for one, having started at Keble at a tender age because he was such a brilliant mathematician. And he was rather suspicious of the influx of raw new recruits to the anarchist group from freshers’ week. He sat on Danny’s bed looking sullen, smoking, rigged out in unfashionable denim – flared trousers when flares were out – and a Chelsea scarf. Pat’s style was always his own.

We didn’t make friends at first. We were rivals over several girls – and Pat always won. But, through a shared enthusiasm for pills, booze and rock’n’roll, we bonded. And we became – literally – partners in crime.

I have no idea how he acquired the knack, but as a youth Pat was an accomplished cat-burglar. He was always one for digging up dirt – and one of his main means of doing it when he started out in the late 1970s was the break-in.

He burgled dons who were recruiting for MI5, and wrote up his findings in Back Street Bugle, Oxford’s alternative paper. He burgled the army recruitment office. And he burgled college bars for money – an enterprise that went badly wrong when he and two others were caught red-handed.

When the Oxford University Student Union had a general meeting at which the left hoped it would secure a majority to occupy a building that became the social science department library – the idea was that we’d turn it into a proper central students’ union that put on gigs – it was Pat who waited with the crowbar for the call that never came from the meeting. (He was waiting with Sarah Baxter, now of the Sunday Times, who had a bicycle.) It was Pat too who cut the outside broadcast link from Billy Graham’s Christian revivalist meeting in Oxford town hall that we disrupted as a protest against – well, Billy Graham.

I only once benefited materially from any of this, and only in a small way. The heist – and it was a great one – was of booze from an Oxford college boat clubhouse, the getaway transport a punt on to which crates of summer drinks were loaded before it was inexpertly floated a couple of miles down the river, where a waiting crew spirited the haul to their bedsits in east Oxford. Ten years later there were still unopened bottles of Pimm’s in many former Oxford anarchists’ parents’ drinks cabinets.

Meanwhile, Pat got serious. After he left Oxford, he started a doctorate at the University of Kent but soon decided that his vocation was as an investigative journalist. He did work for various radical magazines – including Tribune from the mid-1980s – and Fleet Street newspapers, but put his main efforts into books. British Intelligence and Covert Action, co-authored with the émigré South African journalist Jonathan Bloch, appeared in 1983. A ground-breaking exposé of secret operations since the second world war, it met a furious response from the political and military establishment, but its accuracy on all its key stories remains unquestioned. In 1987 came Stranger on the Line, co-authored with Mark Leopold, an exhaustive account of the British state’s enthusiasm for phone-tapping, and a side project, The Comic Book of MI5, with illustrations by the Irish cartoonist Cormac.

Pat was an enthusiastic hedonist, and at times in the late 1980s and 1990s he overdid it, but he kept up an impressive journalistic output, covering intelligence and security issues for Tribune and the New Statesman among others and earning money writing business travel guides. He was less obviously prolific in recent years – partly because of lack of outlets, partly because of poor health – but still managed a great deal, most recently doing a substantial body of work on a soon-to-be-published book on the war on terror with Jonathan Bloch and Paul Todd.

He’d not been well for some time – he contracted cellulitis earlier in the year, and the treatment had dragged on and on without apparently working – but his sudden death was a shock to all his friends, not least his partner of 20 years, Leila Carlyle, with whom he lived in east London. Frighteningly intelligent and well informed, immensely funny and above all extraordinarily kind, he will be missed. There’s a wake for him tonight (November 28) in the Calthorpe Arms in Gray’s Inn Road, London EC1, just up the road from Tribune’s old offices.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 31 October 2008

I hope that somewhere else in this magazine there is a cheery announcement that Tribune has secured financial backing and that this will not be the last issue. But I’m not sure there is, so I’d just like to take this opportunity to thank you, dear readers, for having me. It’s now more than 22 years since I first wrote for Tribune and 10 since I started this column, and your persistent poisonous sniping and personal abuse have sustained me through many a dark hour.

Seriously, if this isn’t the last issue – and I don’t think it is – it has been a damn close-run thing, as the Duke of Wellington didn’t actually say of the Battle of Waterloo. Perhaps it’s not quite as close as it was in 1988, when we ran a front page adorned with the words “DON’T LET THIS BE THE LAST ISSUE OF TRIBUNE” after the then board of directors decided to pull the plug in a week – this time, the magazine has had all of a month to organise a rescue. But it’s closer than at any time in the intervening two decades.

Of course, Tribune has a glorious history of financial crisis. It was launched as a newspaper in 1937 by two rich Labour MPs, Sir Stafford Cripps and George Strauss, as a vehicle for the Unity Campaign, a quixotic attempt to unite the Labour left with the Communist Party and the Independent Labour Party, with Cripps and Strauss putting up £18,000 of their own cash (roughly £800,000 in today’s money). They assumed they would achieve a break-even circulation of 50,000 in a matter of weeks and then recoup their investment – but in fact the paper used up all the dosh in nine months and barely hit 25,000.

Cripps continued reluctantly to subsidise its losses through 1938 and 1939 – a period when Tribune became an adjunct to the publisher Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club – but then lost interest and dropped out of completely in spring 1940 on his appointment as ambassador to Moscow, leaving control of the paper to Aneurin Bevan and Strauss. Strauss picked up the tab and continued to do so for several years – but he too blew hot and cold and dropped out on becoming a junior minister in the 1945 Labour government.

By the late 1940s, Tribune was on its uppers again and resorted to selling editorial space to Labour Party headquarters – and in 1950 it was forced to go fortnightly, resuming weekly publication only in 1952. Throughout the 1950s, it survived only thanks to non-stop fundraising, most of it from readers but some from anonymous rich benefactors. One of these was the maverick Tory press baron Lord Beaverbrook, who handed over £3,000 when his rival Lord Kemsley sued Tribune for libel.

The 1960s and 1970s were decades of relative stability for the paper despite a slow decline in circulation – largely because many of the trade unions were left-led and were persuaded to take bulk orders and solidarity advertising – and in the early 1980s Tribune’s finances were buoyed by advertisements from local councils under left-wing Labour control, particularly Ken Livingstone’s GLC. But in the mid-1980s the financial situation deteriorated rapidly. The unions, with membership in decline, tightened their belts and merged. The GLC was abolished by the Thatcher government and the rules on local council spending were tightened. By the end of 1987 it looked as if the writing was on the wall, and in early 1988, with circulation around 5,000, the board decided Tribune would have to close.

It didn’t, for two reasons. The paper’s readers rallied round magnificently, raising £40,000 in a little more than a fortnight, and the unions agreed to pay for a promotion campaign. That worked, but not quite well enough, and there was another minor crisis in early 1991 that led to the paper going down from 12 tabloid pages to eight for six months. In the meantime, however, we raised sufficient funds to buy desktop publishing equipment, which slashed production costs – and the rest of the 1990s were plain sailing.

There was another wobble in 2002-03, which was resolved by a consortium of unions taking ownership of Tribune and promising long-term investment – but by this spring they had got cold feet, and last month they decided that this would be the last issue unless a buyer could be found. Every time I’ve spoken to the editor since, he has expressed cautious optimism about the prospects. I’ve just been keeping my fingers crossed: I hope we haven’t used up our nine lives.

And the moral of the story? Well, there isn’t one, except that it has always been difficult to sustain left-wing newspapers. Whether it is more difficult now than it used to be is a moot point – but that’s for another column. If there is one …