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Politics is like sport – a team game and united teams do best
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10 June 2011
I've just had a very nice morning helping launch the University and College of Football Business at Turf Moor, home of Burnley Football Club.
It has had rather less attention till today than the AC Grayling and Co New College venture, but it is in its own way as innovative, and it is actually happening - the first college to award undergraduate degrees in the business of football, allied to law, media and marketing.
All of the main broadcasters were there and I stressed that with football now such a big and culturally important industry, the amazing thing is nobody has thought of it before. Unlike the Grayling venture, which seeks to fill a gap being created by the disastrous 80per cent cut in the universities' teaching grant, UCFB is creating an entirely new area of academic activity, in a way that will be good for Burnley FC, good for the town and good for football. Indeed, I am confident students who come from around the world to learn about the football industry will end up teaching the industry a thing or two about how to get its act together.
Needless to say I was also asked about the so-called Ed Balls files in the Telegraph. Perhaps it was because I was in a sporting environment that I found myself talking about the importance of teamwork in politics as well as football.
It is no secret there were times when the Blair-Brown relationship was not great. My diaries, both those already published and those still to come, make clear that from my own perspective much of the negativity in it all came from the GB side of the fence. This latest flurry relates to 2005, but there had been plenty before - Charlie Whelan and all that.
I left Downing Street in 2003 but went back to work for TB on the campaign planning front pretty much full-time in the run up to the 2005 election. To that end I was centrally involved in getting GB to work properly with TB for the duration of the campaign. It worked in that we won, though I do think had things been better at the operational level in the run-up we could have secured a bigger majority.
I was also involved subsequently in the aftermath and the planning of what came to be known as a 'smooth and orderly transition.' So much of the material published today comes as no surprise.
As to what I draw from it, two things stand out. I always used to say to Gordon and his key people that if I had been them, I would have been as supportive as possible of TB. I think their interests would have been better served by that approach, as well as TB's, but I suspect they think I was thinking only of his.
Secondly, one thing that stands out from my diaries is that we were at our best when we worked together. It is right, as Ed Balls says today, that he and I worked together at times to try to keep TB-GB in a better place, but I think Ed would have to admit he was doing so very much from a GB perspective, whereas I always sought to see things from a team perspective too.
That is the lesson for Labour from all this today. We were a very successful government which achieved a huge amount. But we were at our best not just at our boldest, but when we operated as a team.
TB-GB was on one level a hugely successful political partnership. But it could have been so much better if GB and his team had understood the bigger team picture as sharply as they understood their own.
Ps .... Back on sport, well done to Roberto Martinez for staying with Wigan and turning down Villa. I feel sure lots of people in Burnley and Bolton will be reflecting on such loyalty to the smaller Premier League club tonight.
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History will say that Brown was the worst leader Labour ever had.
But the IMF agreed with him!
I very much agree with your views on team work. This is important in all walks of life be it sport, business or politics. I have read your diaries, the books by Anthony Seldon, Tom Bowyer, Andrew Rawnsley etc etc. I thought that Anthony Seldon gave an excellent interview on the relevations on Sky News this morning where he robustly rejected the criticisms of TB and also stated that the present Shadow Chancellor tried to bully him! Therefore, based on my reading, the disclosures this morning as reported in the Telegraph did not come as a shock. Yet they left me perturbed – perhaps the reality of seeing actual documents makes it more real.
After a great deal of soul searching, I did not vote for the party at the last election (after 40 years of support). I am still angry with all of those MP’s who contrived to destabilise TB and will never forgive them. Loyalty matters to me.
One of the Spanish team said that one of the reasons they won the World Cup was that they were all good friends and therefore gelled as a team. And the Barcelona players seem to have an almost telepathic understanding. Then there were those great scenes at the Champion’s League Final of Barcelona giving their manager the bumps. Can’t imagine any players having the courage to do that to that old curmudgeon Ferguson.
If I may be allowed an Old Fogey-ish moment, it would be great if football could go back to just being a sport and neither a multi-billion pound industry nor a subject of academic study. No doubt you will soon need one of the new degrees in football to get an unpaid internship as a ball boy.
yeh – wooh-wooh-wooh!
Oops, sorry, came over all yank colege school university then.
The under twenty world cup is startung today in rugger, Wales against the Argies at five today, on S4C live, available online,
http://www.s4c.co.uk/rygbi/e_index.shtml
England vee Ireand at the same time, shown, well, somewhere else somewhere!?!
“UCFB is creating an entirely new area of academic activity” – I don’t think this is quite right. I know that Warwick Business School have been running a programme for Football Managers, in collaboration with the PFA, for some time; and I’m fairly sure that both the University of Bedfordshire (formerly Luton) and the Institute of Football Management and Administration at Solent University offer a degree in this area. I suspect that there may be others. The Burnley programme may be distinctive in some way, but your general claim doesn’t seem to be right.
I have little interest in football these days – not really since Sheffield Wednesday paid the outrageous figure of £75k for Albert Quigley – but I cheered quietly when I heard the report about Martinez. Wonderful to see someone putting the honouring of a contract above personal gain.
It might be Milliband – though Foot was unelectable
HEALTH WARNING: The following post contains material that might be unhealthy to gilliebc. Please have appropriate medication (e.g. valium) BEFORE reading further.
Herr Goebbels,
If GB’s people had been “as supportive as possible of TB”, there was every chance that TB would not have stepped down. TB himself said at it was hard to let go and given all the other promises to GB that he had broken, it was probably quite “normal” for GB & his people to use more forceful methods.
The main thing that stands out for me from today’s revelations is that nobody appears to have been looking after the people of the UK. You know, the electorate. At a time when we had just had the 7/7 and 21/7 atrocities, it is absolutely appalling that TB, GB & their “people” were more interested in positions of power. It is also pretty obvious in all the various notes/memos/letters between TB,GB & their people, that the words were designed to strengthen the claims of each of them to power, rather than actually do something for the people of the country. According to you & others from the centre-left the Tories are in it for themselves & their rich friends & that’s fair enough. Now we find out that Labour is in it for themselves. All the words are just soundbites designed to win elections. Is this the great “progressive” politics that Labour keeps banging on about? If so, I hope Labour never ever win a general election AGAIN.
Teamwork,from a person who said that Brown had ‘psychological flaws’.
Why on earth would TB have even thought about stepping down in the first two terms after the landslides he achieved in ’97 and ’01? More importantly, why would anybody else consider such a possibility? They should have hung onto him for dear life!
TB’s talents as the main communicator and leader were head and shoulders above GB’s. I don’t think TB was quite as fussed about staying on as GB thought he was. GB I think just assumed that TB was as obsessed with being PM as he was. He wasn’t.
In fact in an interview prior to the ’05 election TB was still ruminating in an interview how he still wonders if he could have made it as a singer if he’d have stuck at the music industry. In other words, politics was not the summit of his aspirations and ambitions as an individual. Further evidence of which we continue to see today.
GB and his team should have listened to Bono.
But rather than becoming the political Lennon & McCartney, GB and his merry band of followers decided to branch out with his own solo career.
Unfortunately, it turned out that ‘Lennon’ (come on, it’s obvious who is who!) was in fact Ringo in disguise.
And GB soon found out it don’t come easy…
You said after the Scottish election which gave Alex Salmond a wealth of political capital that it came from his party’s clarity of message and clean execution of purpose.
We heard today on “Womans Hour” that Salmond is to use some of his political capital to try to tackle Scotland’s poor health. Talking of minimum pricing of booze and how Scotland’s women end up bearing the brunt of the consequences of macho drinking culture – assault, rape and poverty.
Those of us with memories of Harold Wilson’s governments will recall Barbara Castle being crucified in 1967 when she tried to get men to separate their beer from their motors, introducing the breathaliser and strict blood alcohol limits for drivers. Didn’t help in the 1970 election, for sure, she was hated in the popular culture and bar-room chat. The unspoken reason Labour lost it.
While Cameron’s team are keeping cosy with the brewers and the supermarkets it seems Salmond is willing to follow Barbara Castle putting principle first. Doing the right thing by his electors knowing it will be unpopular.
In the eight years since I gave up alcohol and the twelve months since the death of the first of my parents, grieving for the beer and the wine proved worse than starting to come to terms with the loss of my folk.
Dreadful but true. It’s the nature of the alcohol not the people attached to it.
Alex Salmond is brave indeed to step between a man and his drink and is to be respected for it.
quite unnecessary, undeserved and vacuous.
Blair should have just said in 1997, listen fool, I’m da PM and you da Chancellor, I’m the boss, and if you don’t like it, you win a general election.
Sadly Blair didn’t feel he could stand up to Brown, I would’ve took him head on and made it clear you either back me or I kick your ass bitch
I think the party is in danger of becoming distracted by the Blair-Brown era in much the same way that post 97 the Tories where mourning Thatcher and Major as her replacement. The issue isn’t about who was to balme for the last Government’s failure at the polls but how we win power back. We can only do that by taking this Conservative Government apart and by working to regain the public’s confidence. Otherwise we will be in opposition for years to come.
It seems AC you were on the Balls enemies list, spin that if you can!
History is a battleground of opinions. If you want to make statements like that then argue your case and back it up with a few facts and figures. What you say sounds like the beginning of a GCE ‘O’ level question, which would at least be followed by ‘Discuss’. Were Richard III and Oliver Cromwell villains or heroes or something else? We’re still arguing. H.A.L. Fisher and G. R. Elton will say one thing and Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm will say another, and we might say something none of them say.
I had to smile at your first sentence Steve Cooke, formerly known as Scooke 7 I believe? But the thing is since I found out that you have the same first name as my son, I simply can’t find it in me to have a go at you!
Completely irrational I know, but there it is. As AC himself doesn’t seem to have a problem with you reffering to him as Herr Goebbels, then why should I ?
Furthermore, I’m inclined to agree with parts of your post. Except of course the last bit.
I now this sounds stupid, but I truelly have a communication in mind from my marvellous daughter, with me stuck in Carmarthenshire, and her stucik in Surrey, with her, ahem!, mother.
She looks like me, and thinks like me, and it is ace, from what I have picked up online. If there was a song that would sum up my daughter, it would certainly be Mama Cass Elliot,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RhriAN7jME
Mama Cass Elliot, as a witch….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eA0Egmkmisc
Answer to first question – Iraq. Tony Blair and Labour lost a lot of support in 2003 especially in the muslim community. Tony should have stepped aside in 2004-5 though Gordon hadn’t got his gifts as a communicator or skills dealing with people. The trouble was there was no obvious successor ecept Gordon.