Something I have discovered in the life is that there will always be people who like you whatever you do, those people who dislike or strongly dislike you whatever you do, and the remainder who are clearly indifferent. Encyclopaedias will have been written about Tony Blair before I die, and, whatever one’s views on his contributions to British politics, I would like to challenge any person with compassion not to find this personal extract from ‘The Journey’ inspiring. OK, fair enough, we’re all aware of the circular discussions about Blair’s Britain, but this is a very human, open, piece of writing, about the death of his mother, and the profound influence on him of his father, which I find deeply impressive on a human level.
In my case, my mother is alive-and-well, but my father passed away suddenly at the Royal Free NHS Hampstead on 10th November 2010 at 7 pm. My father has had a profound impact on my development as a person, and I particularly remorseful about the fact he would often allude to questioning himself about why I became an alcoholic. I am now in recovery for 40 months now, so I feel too that I have been successful in the first steps of ‘my journey‘. As it happens, I think my father was Tory for much of his life, with the same cognitive scheme as Tony Blair’s father, until the final few years of his life, when his thinking was very much like Tony Blair, particularly on the role of aspiration in society. My father was, after all, a very successful General Practitioner in Burgess Hill, from the late 1970s to when he retired in the mid 1990s. I can relate to Tony Blair’s description of his mother; my mother’s relationship to my father is virtually identical, except she has never hidden the fact that she is a Tory. I can also relate to the idea coming down from Oxford in their third term at the end of June, with his family having protected him from the details of his mother. For what it’s worth, I feel in retrospect that my father had been suffering for a very long time, without my knowledge. This is to my shame, for not inquiring enough.
Life is definitely a journey, but with I hope future happiness and opportunities, to match. However, at this current time, I am aware of the fact that we all have – finally – the same destiny.
But none of that defined the principal impact on my political development. What Dad taught me above all else, and did so utterly unconsciously, was why people him become Tories. He had been poor. He was working class. He aspired to be middle class. He worked hard. made it on his merits, and wanted his children to do even better than him. He did thought – as did many others of his generation – that the logical outcome of this striving, born of this attitude. was to be a Tory: to sides of the same coin. It became my political ambition to break that connection, and replace it with a different currency. You are compassionate; you care about those less fortunate than yourself; you believe in society as well as the individual. You can be Labour. You can be successful and care; ambitious and compassionate; a meritocrat and a progressive. Moreover, these are not alien sentiments in uneasy coexistence. They are entirely compatible ways of making sure progress happens; and they answer the realistic, not utopian,claims of human nature.
So he affected me deeply, as in another way did my mum. She was as different from my my dad as it is possible for two people living together to be. Dad was more like me: motivated, determined, and with a hard-focused ambition that, I fear, translates fairly easily into selfishness for both of us. Mum, by contrast, was a decent, lovely, almost saintly woman. She was shy, even a little withdrawn in company. She supported Dad politically, as his wife and companion, but, as she used to confide in me occasionally, she was not really a Tory. For some reason = maybe to do with her Irish background – she felt somehow excluded; and she thought that some of the more Tory friends hd fallen away when Dad went ill.
She died when I had just turned twenty-two. She had been ill with cancer of the thyroid. Looking back, it was clear she couldn’t survive, clear indeed it was a minor miracle that she survived for the five years after she was first diagnosed.
But the shock of it. There is nothing like losing a parent. I don’t mean it’s worse than losing a child. It isn’t. I don’t think anything can be. I mean it affects you in a unique way; at least if it happens when you’re young. Mum’s death was shocking because I couldn’t contemplate it. As she deteriorated, and I was in my last months at Oxford, working hard for my final exams, Dad my brother Bill kept from me the truth of her condition. I came home at the end of June and Dad picked me up from the station, “Your mother’s really very ill”, he said.
“I know, but she’s not dying, is she?” I said, stating the worst so that he would reassure me, as I stupid expected.
“Yes, I am afraid she is”, he replied. My world turned upside down. I could not imagine it. The eprson who had brought me up, looked after me, was always there to help and cherish me; he person who loved me without a consideration of my entitlement, without an assessment of my character, without wanting anything from me; the person who simply loved me; she would be gone.
Life was never the same after that.”
Extract from Tony Blair, “A Journey” Hutchinson, 2010
But – latterly – I have become aware of the fact that, whatever our journey in life, we do have the same destination; or junction, depending on your religious viewpoint.
