In the 1970s, Peter Hain was a liberal South African firebrand with a taste for civil disobedience. His rise up Whitehall’s greasy pole has prompted cries of ‘sell-out’. Is his new job as energy minister a promotion, or is Tony Blair sidelining one of the few radical minds in his government? Kevin Toolis reports
Her Majesty’s new minister for energy and competitiveness in Europe sits in his eighth-floor eyrie looking down on Parliament Square. To the right is Westminster Abbey, behind it the House of Commons. To the left lie the distant rooftops of his beloved Foreign Office. It’s a grey, blustery London day with the wind running up the river Thames just beyond the Commons.
If his predecessor Peter Mandelson had not fallen, then the new energy minister would have been somewhere else on this Monday morning. He would have been in Nigeria, and then Ghana, on a Foreign Office trip. And there were other plans, too: speeches to the United Nations Security Council on Iraqi sanctions and, inevitably, slots on Radio 4’s Today programme on the assassination of an African leader, or the worsening crisis in the Middle East. Instead, the new in-tray is filling up with briefs on miners’ compensation, the incidence of emphysema in Welsh villages and the distribution patterns of ultra-low sulphur petrol across the United Kingdom.
The next British election is two to four months away. Is this, then, the pinnacle of the political career of Peter Hain, “son of Africa”, activist, political firebrand of the 1960s and, according to what remains of the British left, a “sell-out” and a “war criminal”?
Depending on who you talk to, Hain’s shift to this new post is: a) demotion because of his big mouth, over-aggressive tactics and Foreign Minister Robin Cook’s annoyance at being overshadowed by his junior minister; b) promotion because miners’ compensation is tricky for New Labour and Prime Minister Tony Blair wants a good media performer in the job; c) a sideways shift that will secure Hain sufficient domestic ministerial experience to enter the Cabinet after the next election; or d) the penultimate move in a short but contentious ministerial career.
Hain adheres to option b), with elements of c) attached: “I got the call at 8.45pm to ‘Ring Downing Street’. Tony said, ‘I think you’ve done a great job at the Foreign Office. I want you back in domestic politics. I want my best people there.’ I don’t think it’s exile.”
But his shift sideways is still puzzling. Uniquely, Hain was one of only a few Foreign Office ministers in living memory actually to know anything about and be actively involved in the subject of his portfolio in this case, Africa before his appointment. “He was an excellent thing in the Foreign Office,” said a senior Foreign Office official. “He was very popular in Africa with lots of African leaders. Peter was always prepared to talk tough, talk straight. He will be sorely missed.”
But nothing is as it seems at Westminster. “Peter has tried to spin this 10 different ways,” said one party colleague. “If he is being promoted, how come he is being sent to the backwater of energy? His star has waned.”
The depth of enmity towards Hain, half in and half out with Blair, and still a relatively junior minister, is ferocious. In a recent New Statesman article, journalist John Pilger compared Hain to the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and accused the “murderous policymaker” of being responsible for the 500 000 civilian deaths that the UN estimates have been caused by the continuing sanctions regime which Hain supports. “He is doing exactly the opposite thing from what he was doing in the Seventies when he organised the stop-the-cricket tour,” says Pilger. “I made a film with him in the Seventies when he was wrongly arrested for a bank robbery in Putney. I took up his case. This is a guy who understood what the Americans did in Vietnam. And now he has become part of the straight line of US policy. He is an apologist for sanctions and bombing. He has become the fall guy.”
In retort, Hain does little to mask his own disdain. “I think, in the old days, Pilger was a good investigative journalist regrettably, I don’t know many people who take him seriously. To compare me to Saddam Hussein is, frankly, beneath contempt.” His voice breaks into laughter. “On this issue of sanctions, the left is divided. But the critics end up virtually apologising for Saddam. I have always been an opponent of tyranny. What the critics don’t like is that I take the debate to them.”
Most MPs struggle against their identikit peers to be selected for their seats and then they struggle in Parliament to get promoted, to get ahead. In contrast, Hain has been a political celebrity, whose role as a leading Young Liberal in stopping the 1970 South African cricket tour by threatening direct-action mayhem is burned on the political memories of the over-40s.
Hain’s tactics were so effective that Labour prime minister Harold Wilson believed further protests would destabilise his government, and so forced the cricket authorities to cancel the tour. It was a significant blow to the apartheid state and the beginning of the worldwide sporting isolation of South Africa. Even today, virtually everywhere Hain goes he is approached by European foreign ministers, photographers, ageing activists and old rugby fans, all eager to share a moment with the first political star they ever saw.
His political path is the antithesis of the New Labourite. Twice, he has ended up on trial at the Old Bailey: once, in 1972, on trumped-up conspiracy charges, and the second four years later on equally dubious but serious bank robbery charges. And twice, after determined legal struggles, he was found not guilty.
Being prosecuted at such a level is a devastating event even for an innocent man. “I slept worse than I have ever done, often waking in the night, ‘in the witness box’, and usually waking early in the morning with the whole incredible affair in my mind,” Hain recorded in his book, A Putney Plot?. After he recovered from the ordeal of the trials, Hain helped found the successful Anti-Nazi League, which in 1976 chased the then-resurgent National Front off the streets and denied fascism a publicly respectable front in British politics. Again, it was one of the most effective direct-action campaigns in postwar British history.
Conventional political respectability came later, a lot later. It was another 15 years before he was selected for the safe Labour seat of Neath in 1991. “I never imagined I would become an MP,” he admits. “I had always seen myself as an extra-parliamentary activist. Politics has become a career where people work to become an MP from when they leave university and then, if they are members of the ruling party, work to become government ministers. The weakness of the newer generation of MPs and ministers, not all of them, is that they do not have those political and ideological roots.”
As a political activist, then, Hain’s credentials are impeccable. He is the kind of politician we all think we like. He gets on well with his officials and with journalists. He is open, refreshingly candid and sort of honest. And he speaks his mind. He has called the French policy on Iraq “pretty contemptible”, and denounced South African policy on Zimbabwe, while labelling the Zimbabwean government itself as “uncivilised”. And he is not meanly sectarian; he doesn’t defend everything in the New Labour bible.
Hain’s entry on to the political stage could hardly have been more tragic or auspicious. He was born in Nairobi in 1950 and grew up in Pretoria. His parents, Walter and Adelaine, were members of the Liberal Party. After the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, the Hains, who had effectively become the party’s main organisers in the citadel of apartheid, automatically came under suspicion: the family home was raided by the security police, their mail intercepted, their phone tapped, and both parents detained before eventually being banned. Walter Hain was hounded out of his job as an architect and all future prospective employers were warned off.
In opposing apartheid, the Hains represented a tiny, but honourable, minority within the English-speaking white community. Most white “liberals” were anything but one horrified aunt placed an advertisement in the Pretoria News disavowing any connection with the Mrs Hain of the Liberal Party, who just happened to be her sister-in- law. But the ideological origins of the family in “liberalism” and not “communism” most white activists at the time were associated with the South African Communist Party and the African National Congress would have a significant bearing on young Peter Hain’s later political development.
The Hains had always opposed the use of violence but members of their political circle joined a small white terrorist group, the Armed Resistance Movement (ARM), that planted bombs. ARM was an amateurish affair, but one bomb exploded at Johannesburg station in July 1964 and killed two passers-by. A family friend, John Harris (25), was arrested, tortured and confessed to the crime. Harris’s wife, Ann, and their young son, David, went to live with the Hains in the run-up to the trial. All pleas for clemency were rejected, and Harris was sentenced to death and hanged at dawn on April 1 1965. Because his parents were banned from speaking in public, Peter, then 15 and dressed in his school uniform, was conscripted to read Harris’s funeral oration that morning. It was his first political speech. Within the hour, he was back at school.
A year later, the family fled to England and settled in Putney, south- west London. “My father was quite clear: ‘What we must do is become members of the community.’ There was among South African exiles true of all exiles a kind of limbo existence. People were constantly waiting to go back and never settling. We sunk ourselves into domestic politics. We were never going back. I joined the Young Liberals. I stayed in Putney politics until 1991.”
In late 1968, the South African government had refused to allow Basil d’Oliveria, a black cricketer, to tour with the English team in South Africa because of his race. The tour was cancelled. Despite the row, the Marylebone Cricket Club announced that the 1970 tour of England by the South African cricket team would still go ahead. Hain, a mechanical engineering student at Imperial College, London, had already formed a pressure group, Stop the Seventy Tour (STST), and announced that he and a few others were going to force the tour’s cancellation.
Their first move was to disrupt the 1968 Springbok rugby tour. The live TV coverage of protesters messing up the Afrikaners’ beloved game of rugby provoked fury in South Africa, and generated immense publicity in Britain.
Attempts by the organisers to thwart the demonstrators by switching venues at the last minute only led to further headlines and a deepening crisis. “Direct action” took hold as protests followed the Springbok rugby team around the country. Activists chained themselves to the Springbok coach, glued the locks on the players’ hotel rooms and threw vivid orange smoke-bombs on to the pitch for the benefit of TV cameras. The final score was STST one, Springboks nil. The 1970 cricket tour was called off.
The hippies who ran on to the pitch as part of the STST campaign gave a misleading impression of the personal lifestyle of the movement’s chief organiser. It may have been the era of free love, rock’n’roll and Lebanese Red, but underneath the long sideburns Hain was a moral puritan.
“In my personal life, I have never actually smoked dope it’s a terrible admission,” says Hain. “I did not like the idea. I had a fairly traditional South African upbringing. I just was not interested. I found it rather distasteful. I remember one Young Liberal conference, a whole group of people were smoking dope and one came up to me and literally tried to force the cigarette into my mouth: ‘Come on, Peter, try it.’ I have never had a problem with people smoking pot I just don’t want to do it. I have never had a problem with people getting drunk, Ijust have never been drunk myself.” The most dangerous radicals are always personal conservatives; every waking, hangover-free hour is devoted to the cause. Hain was an assiduous student and family man who married young, paid his electricity bills on time, saved for the future, and conscientiously sought the destruction of the apartheid state. His marriage, which produced two sons, lasted for 24 years and ended only last year.
Hain is hyperactive, a morning person who is probably happiest ringing his way through a 30-person-long phone task list at 8.30am. He is the author of 13 books, including the inevitable “political thriller”. The books are not great, but the sheer volume of them is quite an achievement.
Hain joined the Labour Party in 1977, and worked first as a political researcher for the Communications Workers’ Union and then, in the Eighties, twice stood unsuccessfully – as the Labour Party candidate in Putney, which has turned into a rising middle-class enclave.
In 1991, the Neath constituency, near Swansea, became vacant. Hain was a metropolitan shoo-in. It was a fix, but not a bad fix. Neath is partially Welsh-speaking, and it rains a lot on the roofs of the old car part factories that are now, like their former workers, redundant. Hain, with his slight South African accent, his smooth couture, his bright suntan and silver locks, is an exotic foreigner. But he is a determined constituency MP who holds 42 meetings a year. There is a full-time agent, an office and three secretaries. His majority is 17 000. Peter Hain is not going to lose Neath.
Hain’s original route into the Labour Party was via the left-wing Tribune group of MPs; eventually, he became chair of the Tribune newspaper board. His politics were typical of the time: redistribution of wealth, membership of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), anti-European Union, pro-trades union, anti-multinationals.
Hain is no pacifist, but he still retains his CND membership a real New Labour no-no, which is why he is careful to explain that he was never more than a rank-and-file member. It’s pretty clear that he no longer believes in unilateralism, but his continued CND membership has provided the Tories, not to mention his rivals in government, with convenient ammunition for sniping and parliamentary knockabout.
His retort to his Tory critics is pithy: “I still pay my 9 a year to Wales CND. I happen not to agree with CND’s line on the nuclear missile defence, but I am not going to turn my back on people in Wales who are doing some good peace work because of some Tory critics. To hell with them, frankly.”
More important, his CND membership was at the centre of a professionally damaging leak and subsequent row over the US missile programme last December that, according to the option a) theory, explains Hain’s removal from the Foreign Office portfolio. According to this theory, Hain had blundered into the radioactive political zone of Anglo-American nuclear relations by leaking a memo stating his opposition to the missile programme in order to curry favour with his old CND mates. It’s no real secret that Cook, Blair, the British government, the Europeans, the Russians and the Chinese are decidedly lukewarm about the updated version of the US Star Wars programme. But, as the US’s most compliant “ally”, no one in the British government has the courage openly to tell the Americans that their nuclear missile defence is a foolish idea that could provoke another arms race. The government’s policy has been to talk and talk about the programme to the Americans, hope the missile tests all fail, and shut up in public.
Enter the leaked memo, or at least a report of one, between Hain and Cook, where Hain expressed outright opposition to the US missile initiative. In private, the memo was fine, but public knowledge of its existence was a crime. An immediate leak inquiry was instigated to unmask the traitor. Hain is adamant that the leak had nothing to do with him. “Someone in the Foreign Office did it to damage me. I do not think it has anything to do with my switch to a very important job in the Department of Trade and Industry.”
Hain’s last book, Ayes to the Left: A Future for Socialism, contains much talk of economic inequalities, freedom of information bills and making sure the intelligence services are democratically accountable. It’s so far away from the New Labour norm that it reads like the manifesto of an entirely different political party from the one that Hain represents.
In mid-1999, Cook brought Hain into the Foreign Office. He was at first regarded a great success and genuinely innovative. He regularly had MI6 reports across his desk and is proud of the fact that he used that intelligence to name in Parliament Angolan sanction busters who trade arms for diamonds.
But within months he was involved in a whole series of diplomatic shouting matches. The first to blow up was Zimbabwe. Robert Mugabe and Hain initially met in London in October 1999. Famously, Mugabe patted Hain on the knee and told him he was a “son of Africa”. Things turned sour two days later, when Peter Tatchell, the gay-rights campaigner, sought to make a citizen’s arrest of the African leader at his London hotel for his persecution of homosexuals in Zimbabwe. Overnight, diplomatic relations plunged as Mugabe denounced the Blair government as “gay gangsters”.
As Hain and the Foreign Office quickly came to realise, shared past histories of struggle don’t count for much. “Mugabe was violently assaulting the opposition and manipulating the land issue, which he had neglected for 10 years, to get re-elected he was not going to listen to me or anybody else,” says Hain, who made a point of denouncing the Mugabe regime and was criticised in particular, as a white South African, for using the term “uncivilised”.
Hain has been attacked most vehemently over his outspoken support for a string of military interventions, including Sierra Leone. His biggest battle was over Iraq, where he came under sustained assault from many of those he would have regarded as friends. His defence is typically robust: “Firstly, I was responsible for the policy on Iraq. Secondly, I believe it. I don’t think it’s a perfect policy far from it but then you are dealing with an imperfect world, a horribly intractable position. I would not have started from here. I would have gone all the way to Baghdad and taken Saddam out.”
Hain has shifted shape, in the eyes of his enemies, from hero to arch- betrayer. He denies he has sold out. “I come from the left, I am proudly on the left. There is an endemic culture of betrayal on the left: waiting for the next leader to sell you out. Being in government and trying to move things forward is stressful. Those who try to put pressure on government are always one-sided. But so, too, is the established position and the interests it represents. I am not saying I am no longer an activist, but you assume different roles. I still respect extra-parliamentary activists. I might not agree with them. They can regard me as a sell-out. That is their problem.”
Most politicians are nobodies. They come and they go. They rule for a brief hour and they fall and disappear.
Hain is another kind of creature. He has been famous for 35 years, ever since John Harris’s funeral oration: his picture was in the papers the next day. He likes it. He has never had an another existence; he grew up writing press releases, giving interviews, taking command, organising campaigns. He is evidently good at it. He desperately wants to keep doing it.
Does he have a future in Blair’s next government? Is he on option c), on the path to greater things, or option d), on the way out? No one knows, apart from the true Blairistas in the Downing Street bunker. But there is something about Hain that probably makes him more dangerous to New Labour on the outside than in the fold. Come the June, I wouldn’t be surprised to see him walking down Downing Street on Thursday mornings for that Cabinet meeting.