Anne Perkins: Follow That Tiger
Alistair Darling may find it helpful to check up on Barbara Castle's tenure as transport minister.
Alistair Darling, a man who makes no secret of missing his family up north while he is down south, has a torrid jubilee weekend ahead, a nightmare four days spent not celebrating half-term but mugging up his transport briefs.
So here is a small gleam in the fog, a cat's eye on a country road: in the 70 years since an obscure Conservative gave his name to the Belisha beacon, there is one minister who proved that it is possible to storm the department of transport and emerge from it not headed for the ministerial scrapyard but as a prime ministerial contender.
When Harold Wilson made Barbara Castle transport minister ("I need a tiger in my transport policy and you're the only tiger we've got") just before Christmas 1965, it was as hot a political spot as it is now. In 1965 the fall was taken by Tom Fraser, an elderly Scottish miner who'd been steered smoothly away from decision-making by his clever, Whitehall-tribalist permanent secretary, Sir Thomas Padmore.
In Fraser's 15 months in office, Sir Thomas allowed nothing to disturb the calm of his department. No scintilla of progress had been made towards the integrated transport policy lovingly crafted by the party in opposition. The track and station closures ordained by Dr Beeching carried on apace, more and more freight lorries took to the roads and private car ownership soared.
Barbara Castle, the woman no one - not even Michael Foot - could teach to drive, was promoted from the obscurity of the Ministry of Overseas Development to tackle the boiler-suited world of trade unions, footplates and motorway construction. She did not want the job, she claimed (maybe not quite plausibly). But in two and a bit years, she transformed a warring department and a moribund policy into the foundations of a plan for a genuinely integrated system. At the same time she catapulted her own standing from off-the-ratings at the bottom to off-the-ratings at the top, more popular than the prime minister.
At the department of transport, Mrs Castle was the first Blairite. Faced with problems only just registering in the public mind - gridlock in town and city centres, declining and under-resourced public transport and an insatiable public appetite for cars, she made a virtue of what worked, guided only by the principle that all forms of public transport needed to be accessible and affordable. Here and there across Britain are little memorials to her determination to devolve transport planning powers to local passenger transport authorities, empowered to take over buses and suburban rail services and even introduce congestion charging. She promised grants for infrastructure development, and insisted that the transport implications of other developments be considered.
She also inherited a deeply unhappy department. When they took over, Mrs Castle dug in "like an army of occupation", one of her ministers said. She listened to everyone's opinions, but took her own decisions. "You must always take a decision," she said. "You have at least a 50% chance of being right."
She built a huge popular success on what seemed her two major handicaps: first, she capitalised on being a woman. She was the most unashamedly sexy minister ever to sit behind a Whitehall desk and she invented the photo-opportunity to exploit it. There had to be a stunt a week. So there she was, on the front page, showing her knees, wearing a hat, blowing kisses, skipping out of helicopters in pencil slim skirts.
Second, she ignored her officials' lamentations that the motorway programme was nearly complete, and there was nothing left to do. On the contrary, she said, and turned every motorway opening into a government success story, unveiling miles of black-and-white tarmac and futuristic civil engineering. When Prince Philip spotted her name on the plaque unveiled by the Queen at the opening of the (first) Severn crossing, he ticked her off: "That's pretty cool. It was practically finished before you came along." Mrs Castle was unabashed. "I intend to be in on the act," she retorted. And she was.
Finally, in a necessarily long-term world she found something she could do immediately. She transformed road safety, introducing a revolution in the culture of motoring, with the breathalyser and the speed limit and seat belts.
Like all good politics, most of what she did now looks unexceptional common sense. But her programme was highly controversial. Her timid cabinet colleagues told her she was being authoritarian, over-prescriptive, profligate with scarce resources and wildly overambitious. Now we suffer the consequences of her numerous successors who couldn't handle the ride in the fast lane.
Mr Darling's new political landscape must look pretty bleak: no easy pickings, he no doubt feels as he starts to wade through the dense and technical briefs this weekend. All ministers today think their predecessors had it easy in the 1960s. They should remember it didn't look like that at the time.
Anne Perkins' biography of Barbara Castle will be published in spring 2003.
anneperkins@everall.fsnet.co.uk
So here is a small gleam in the fog, a cat's eye on a country road: in the 70 years since an obscure Conservative gave his name to the Belisha beacon, there is one minister who proved that it is possible to storm the department of transport and emerge from it not headed for the ministerial scrapyard but as a prime ministerial contender.
When Harold Wilson made Barbara Castle transport minister ("I need a tiger in my transport policy and you're the only tiger we've got") just before Christmas 1965, it was as hot a political spot as it is now. In 1965 the fall was taken by Tom Fraser, an elderly Scottish miner who'd been steered smoothly away from decision-making by his clever, Whitehall-tribalist permanent secretary, Sir Thomas Padmore.
In Fraser's 15 months in office, Sir Thomas allowed nothing to disturb the calm of his department. No scintilla of progress had been made towards the integrated transport policy lovingly crafted by the party in opposition. The track and station closures ordained by Dr Beeching carried on apace, more and more freight lorries took to the roads and private car ownership soared.
Barbara Castle, the woman no one - not even Michael Foot - could teach to drive, was promoted from the obscurity of the Ministry of Overseas Development to tackle the boiler-suited world of trade unions, footplates and motorway construction. She did not want the job, she claimed (maybe not quite plausibly). But in two and a bit years, she transformed a warring department and a moribund policy into the foundations of a plan for a genuinely integrated system. At the same time she catapulted her own standing from off-the-ratings at the bottom to off-the-ratings at the top, more popular than the prime minister.
At the department of transport, Mrs Castle was the first Blairite. Faced with problems only just registering in the public mind - gridlock in town and city centres, declining and under-resourced public transport and an insatiable public appetite for cars, she made a virtue of what worked, guided only by the principle that all forms of public transport needed to be accessible and affordable. Here and there across Britain are little memorials to her determination to devolve transport planning powers to local passenger transport authorities, empowered to take over buses and suburban rail services and even introduce congestion charging. She promised grants for infrastructure development, and insisted that the transport implications of other developments be considered.
She also inherited a deeply unhappy department. When they took over, Mrs Castle dug in "like an army of occupation", one of her ministers said. She listened to everyone's opinions, but took her own decisions. "You must always take a decision," she said. "You have at least a 50% chance of being right."
She built a huge popular success on what seemed her two major handicaps: first, she capitalised on being a woman. She was the most unashamedly sexy minister ever to sit behind a Whitehall desk and she invented the photo-opportunity to exploit it. There had to be a stunt a week. So there she was, on the front page, showing her knees, wearing a hat, blowing kisses, skipping out of helicopters in pencil slim skirts.
Second, she ignored her officials' lamentations that the motorway programme was nearly complete, and there was nothing left to do. On the contrary, she said, and turned every motorway opening into a government success story, unveiling miles of black-and-white tarmac and futuristic civil engineering. When Prince Philip spotted her name on the plaque unveiled by the Queen at the opening of the (first) Severn crossing, he ticked her off: "That's pretty cool. It was practically finished before you came along." Mrs Castle was unabashed. "I intend to be in on the act," she retorted. And she was.
Finally, in a necessarily long-term world she found something she could do immediately. She transformed road safety, introducing a revolution in the culture of motoring, with the breathalyser and the speed limit and seat belts.
Like all good politics, most of what she did now looks unexceptional common sense. But her programme was highly controversial. Her timid cabinet colleagues told her she was being authoritarian, over-prescriptive, profligate with scarce resources and wildly overambitious. Now we suffer the consequences of her numerous successors who couldn't handle the ride in the fast lane.
Mr Darling's new political landscape must look pretty bleak: no easy pickings, he no doubt feels as he starts to wade through the dense and technical briefs this weekend. All ministers today think their predecessors had it easy in the 1960s. They should remember it didn't look like that at the time.
Anne Perkins' biography of Barbara Castle will be published in spring 2003.
anneperkins@everall.fsnet.co.uk
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