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Post by mouse on Aug 31, 2010 8:37:38 GMT
HomeJournalistsAndrew GilliganFarewell to Jack Straw – the ultimate modern politician The Labour politician is ending his 30-year political career, but how much has he got to show for it, asks Andrew Gilligan. By Andrew Gilligan Published: 8:29PM BST 12 Aug 2010
Jack Straw has announced his retirement from front-line politics Photo: Geoff Pugh Consider this: it is the middle of August. Much of the alternative news on offer concerns Robbie Williams, Naomi Campbell and house prices. Yet when Jack Straw, the former Justice Secretary, announced his retirement from front-line politics the other day, The Daily Telegraph could summon only 94 words to mark the event. Even the Guardian managed just 450 – on page four.
May I say to honourable and right honourable readers (sorry – Mr Straw's style is catching) that I see today's column as, principally, an opportunity to redress this injustice. Mr Straw – Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Leader of the House and lately Shadow Lord Chancellor – has held two of the highest offices of state. He has given many important speeches about enabling empowered communities. The lack of coverage is a mean and grudging reflection of his many policy accomplishments over a lifetime in top-level politics, such as… er… membership of the Privy Council, for instance. And then there was his courageous stance on… er – well, look, doesn't 30 years on the Labour front bench count for anything these days Straw's House needs reform, not the Lords Labour's troubles worse than in 1981 split, warns Jack Straw Jack Straw blocked reform of MPs expenses, says former watchdogYet that, in fact, is why we genuinely should mark Mr Straw's political career – because his career is his accomplishment. He was the prototype – the Sinclair C-four-and-a-half – of the new political class.
Until the 1960s and 1970s, many of our statesmen had, in previous lives, been things, done things, even sometimes made things, if only money. Marples was a businessman; Bevin, a labourer and union organiser; Wilson, an Oxford don. But the problem about being, doing or making things is that it sometimes means that you also end up believing in things.
Mr Straw was among the first of our politicians to have passed through those clearly more valuable training grounds, the presidency of the National Union of Students and a special advisership to a Labour cabinet minister (Barbara Castle, 1974-77). His only paid employment outside politics was briefly as a barrister and journalist.
Yet for all the slurs about "professional politicians", it is clear that Mr Straw, too, had beliefs. The difference is that his were, necessarily, only apparent in retrospect. We learnt of his doubts over the Iraq war, for instance, some years after that unhappy event. How much more helpful would it have been to have known at the time! We only understood, too, that Mr Straw had been a Brownite all along some years after we understood that he had been a Blairite all along.
What he should have been all along, of course, was an official. To his flexibility was added eloquence, high intelligence, and a gift for intercourse with different people (despite his role in the Iraq war, he never avoided his thousands of Muslim constituents, and was never in serious electoral danger from them). All these gave him the ability ably to serve the system, whichever system was in charge at the time. These were not ignoble talents – but they were the talents of a top civil servant, not a politician.
As a result of that great error in his career choice, the scourge of the police (in Opposition) ended up telling MPs that reports of British complicity in torture were "conspiracy theories". The former liberal lawyer signed a memo saying that the proper place for Britons captured in Afghanistan was Guantanamo Bay.
Straw's last action on Labour's behalf was a symbol of his entire career: a U-turn on the party's support for electoral reform, which may not even end up buying the desired short-term political advantage. He was the Andrei Gromyko of British politics, deftly adapting himself to every change of wind, but dedicating his life to blocking the progress of actual change.
It is tempting to say that we will not see Mr Straw's like again. But the problem is that we shall see his like again, time after time after time. Still, I'll be buying his promised memoirs – if only to find out what can possibly be in them.
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Post by mouse on Aug 31, 2010 8:38:14 GMT
wonder if they will all sing blowing in the wind on his last day in the commons
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