Alan Johnson: I know what it's like to be hungry and cold

Anne McElvoy
11 Mar 2010

Copies of the Evening Standard's hard-hitting series on London's dispossessed were sent to all MPs today, and one recipient who should understand it better than many of his colleagues is the Home Secretary, Alan Johnson.

At the Home Office, he sits pin-neat in his grey suit, silver tie and polished square-toed shoes - a look the right side of spiv.

Johnson is a rare type these days in a party of management consultants and Oxbridge policy advisers: he came up the hard way from a background in poverty and grammar school, leaving at 15 because he had to find a job to help with the household bills.

Decades later he caught Tony Blair's eye as a loquacious and smooth boss of the Communication Workers Union (CWU), and he has survived the turbulence of the Blair-Brown years to end up in one of the top jobs in Government.

At 59, and a former trade and industry, education and health secretary, he's the suave survivor of New Labour, who's cannily negotiating the clashes all around him.

I ask Johnson, whose tough upbringing in run-down Fifties Notting Hill has been well-documented, whether he recognises the deprivation the Standard exposed in our week-long campaign, The Dispossessed.

"Absolutely I recognise it," he says, "And it is a very good thing to be reminded of it: a very good thing to do. I know what it is like to be hungry and cold. And believe me, I wasn't going through that with a view to using it as a line when I became a politician. Almost all the kids around me were on free school meals."

I ask about the house in Southam Street where he grew up with his mother and sister after their father abandoned them. "It was horrible," he says abruptly. "We lived in various Rachman houses and then in another rented property. The owners were slum landlords. We had no bathroom and an outside toilet. Hard to imagine in that area now ... but that's what it was like."

One of the most fluent communicators in the trade, Johnson only falters when he speaks of his childhood. I ask about his father, whom Johnson hasn't seen since he left when the boy was nine.

"My sister got in touch with him. I didn't want to," he replies. Was there never a desire to say, look what I've achieved without you? "No," he says and looks down. His sister, Linda, was 15 when their mother died, and fought social services, preventing them from taking her little brother into care, to bring him up herself.

Johnson still looks genuinely uneasy at these memories and flushes when he speaks. "There was a lot less help and outreach then. The same problems do occur today of course - it's in my Labour DNA to do something about that. But there's more help available. We felt very much alone."

The brightness suddenly returns. "But really, I don't want to go on about this. It's like, '58 of us grew up living in a rolled-up newspaper,'" he says, aping the Monty Python sketch.

Johnson, who went on to be a postman and could only complete his education because the union paid for him to go to night school, married for the first time aged 17. The couple had two children together, but divorced in 1990. The following year he married a CWU secretary, Laura Patient, 14 years his junior. They have a young son.

The fightback on crime is the Home Secretary's beat, and this week, it's those dangerous dogs again. Why is he proposing a possible return to legislation which, under John Major, became a byword for badly conceived lawmaking because it was so difficult to enforce?

He says: "The problem with last time was that the legislation focused on places where dangerous dogs should not have been - public spaces and the streets. We now know that many of the problems arise in front gardens or in the house, when the dog attacks a child in the family. We will be much more targeted about what we're doing."

But really, microchipping dogs and forcing their owners to take out insurance, like some sort of canine Asbos? "They'd be a Dogbo, wouldn't they?" he muses. The serious special adviser asks me to record that this is, in fact, a joke and not what they are really called.

The Venables case hovers, like a ghost of failure and despair, over the week, and Johnson seems uncomfortable that the Government ended up - once again - trying to conceal information that has leaked into the public domain.

"Look, there is a worldwide injunction on revealing his identity," he says sharply. "Of course I would love to be able to give the identity and relevant information to James Bulger's mother.

"It's not as if this is an obstinate attempt to obfuscate on our part - and we're absolutely sympathetic to how she feels. But this is a criminal case now [against Venables] and the priority is that that can be carried out."

And the public right to know? "I don't think it is simply a case of that. There are good reasons for handling things as it has been done."

Venables is set to be tried, allegedly, for child porn offences. Does it not show that in the end the rehabilitation many hoped might be possible for the boy who helped take an infant's life did not work - another failure in Broken Britain?

Johnson points out that the number of child murders has gone down since the Seventies, but it is the outstanding horrors we remember. The Broken Britain theme irks Labour because it pokes at the delicate heart of the party's record on quality of life, not least for its core voters as well as the working-class Tories who boosted the swing to Labour - and whom the party badly needs to retain.

When we meet, Johnson is full of righteous fury because, he says, his crime figures have been tampered with by the Tories.

"They're ignoring the British Crime Survey although it is widely recognised as giving the most accurate picture of crime you can get," he says. And they've already been given a yellow card (by the Home Office permanent secretary) on the statistics they use."

Well, all right, oppositions on the verge on an election campaign do tend to suggest we are living in Sodom and Gomorrah, a state curable only by a new government. But isn't shadow home secretary Chris Grayling on to something when he points out that the "serious crime" figures exclude murder and manslaughter?

"This is about reported crime, and it is hard to report a crime when you're murdered," Johnson raps.

But then, the Government trumpets its own frankly implausible figure of a 41 per cent reduction in violent crime since 1997. Is Mr Johnson seriously suggesting the criminal classes have reformed since then? He parries about more police on the beat and better police methods, but it's a bit like being told exam results are always getting better.

In Labourworld, everything is always getting better, regardless of whether we think it's getting any good.

As for dear old Labour, he sighs when challenged about the January coup against Gordon Brown and says the "shenanigans" are over now: "Things are looking a lot better than they were. Never underestimate the seriousness of the British people when it comes to elections. They are focusing now on what really matters and that is to our advantage."

He accuses David Cameron of a "sense of entitlement" and says he dislikes the idea of politicians talking about a "patriotic duty" to vote a certain way.

But beyond the election, the survival of Mr Brown as leader remains deeply uncertain and Johnson has long been in the frame as a possible successor. So come on then Alan: will you, won't you?

"I haven't exactly sent that signal many times now, have I?" he teases. So I tell him you only need to do it once, like conceiving, and he roars that big ebullient Johnson laugh. "Fair enough, but on your example, I'm tempted to say, it is fun trying. But in politics 'never say never' is still a good rule. I'm not pushing myself forward though."

He turns 60 in election month, and thinks it is the role for a younger contender.

As I leave, he reminds me that I once suggested, should Labour lose, he could run for mayor against Boris Johnson. The thought seems to appeal. He is, after all a real Londoner. "I saw Boris recently and he sounded a bit worried about it!"

Johnson versus Johnson? Not such an bad idea at all.

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