Here's one to annoy the hooligans. Like every other walk of life, politics deals in stereotypes, which are hard to shift once fixed in the public mind. What follows is a small attempt to soften Patricia Hewitt's widely-held public image as a bossy, hard-hearted technocrat who helped murder the NHS, as distinct from save it.
I recently recorded Boom or Bust, a short Radio 4 series on tricky budgets with producer Jane Ashley. The last episode, which examined Norman Lamont's pre-election budget of March 1992 and John Smith's shadow budget counter-move, went out on Sunday night, though I fell asleep before it came on.
Hewitt, the future Blair cabinet minister, was a Kinnock staffer at the time and she described vividly how they struggled late into the night not to be wrongfooted by Lamont's crafty, pre-election budget tactic of introducing a new 20p starter rate of income tax instead of (as Labour expected) blatantly cutting the standard rate by 2p.
HEWITT: "I remember at some ridiculous hour in the middle of the night, early in the morning, I think we'd finally finished, we'd made the decision. I went down to the basement car park at the House of Commons, it was, ugh, it was dark, I don't think there was anybody else there, and I remember just getting into the car and driving home."
WHITE: "Feeling very mournful?"
HEWITT: "Feeling very worried, feeling very worried about what was going to happen ..."
She was right to be worried: Kinnock got hammered on tax and immediately resigned. It's radio, you couldn't see anything. But as she recalled that moment in a BBC studio the other day, I swear I saw her eyes fill with tears.
