After Ben Bradshaw was selected as the Labour candidate for Exeter in 1997, Peter Mandelson apparently said: “Bloody hell, where did you come from?” Bradshaw had been a journalist, BBC Radio’s man on the ground at the fall of the Berlin Wall. He won the seat, at the age of 36, surfing the wave of enthusiasm for Tony Blair. Perhaps more importantly, as an out gay candidate – only the second in British parliamentary history – he proved that the country had had enough not just of the Tories in general but of raging homophobes. Adrian Rogers, Bradshaw’s election rival in a seat with a Tory majority that he overturned, notoriously described homosexuality as a “sterile, disease-ridden and God-forsaken occupation”.
I meet Bradshaw in Portcullis House, his office filled not with grumpy staffers but two youngsters learning the ropes, which gives it a slightly festive, end of term mood. It’s a bit like seeing Hugh Grant in real life: remembering him so well as a constant screen presence in the Blair and Brown years – armoured by power, softened by charm, with the faintly suspicious air of a guy who finds everything a bit too easy – now a bit more bashed about and much more real. Bradshaw won’t be standing again at the next election and his openness about it is disarming. “One reason I have absolutely no misgivings about stepping down,” he says, “is that I’m still traumatised by Brexit. It was such a disaster for the country.”
He served his time under Blair, the first term as a backbencher and the second as a junior minister. He’s known as a Blairite – you could even call him an arch-Blairite, depending on your mood – but was personally closer to Gordon Brown, in whose cabinet he served as a health minister, and later as secretary of state for culture, media and sport. He has been on the backbenches for almost 14 years – not a fan of Ed Miliband (“He was never going to win. I remember thinking very strongly: ‘We’ve chosen the wrong brother’”) or of Jeremy Corbyn, whom he held at least partly responsible for Brexit. He’s not in Keir Starmer’s inner circle, but he is a super fan: when Starmer was campaigning to be leader, Bradshaw was among his most diligent phone-bankers, calling around local parties garnering support. I ask him about Starmer’s famous pledges – 10 promises to Labour members that made him sound a lot like Corbyn-in-a-tie, including taking utilities back into public ownership and abolishing tuition fees. Did Bradshaw know that those pledges weren’t going to last? “I didn’t know, I didn’t care. I thought the pledges were a mistake,” he says.
That brings us up to the present day, with the Labour party as popular as it’s been since Bradshaw’s arrival 27 years ago, in a political landscape denatured by Brexit and the chaos that followed. There’s a lot he won’t resile from. “I still think Tony was right on Iraq, I know that’s a very unfashionable view,” he says, drawing out the vowels in “view”, as if trying to stave off me leaping in and yelling at him. Asked whether, in retrospect, he saw anything in Labour’s three historic terms that laid the foundations for the mass disaffection of the years since – whether that was the wage stagnation that nobody talked about or New Labour’s “intensely relaxed” approach to the super-rich – he says he’s not an economist. He saw the schools being built and the NHS back on its feet. He saw higher living standards (fair – while they weren’t talking about wages, they were fighting child poverty). “The transformation of the life chances of the young people in my constituency was the most important thing and I could see it happening in front of me.”
But if he won’t waver in his loyalty to Blair or Brown, there are other things – his support for transgender rights, for Palestinian rights – that put him on the left of the party. In talking to Bradshaw, who hasn’t changed in 27 years, you see up close how much the Labour party has. People who now think they are channelling Blair have forgotten how optimistic, receptive, principled and radical the early years were, economics aside.
Born in 1960 to an Anglican vicar father and primary school teacher mother, Bradshaw was the youngest of five by over a decade. It was a progressive, politically active family: a lot of shouting at the TV, plenty of running for office (one of his brothers stood for parliament, as well as his maternal grandfather, who stood in Crewe as a Home Rule Liberal). They lived in rural Norfolk until Bradshaw was 13, then moved to Norwich, which is when he joined the Labour party. He went on a German exchange trip when he was 18, fell in love with his exchange partner, and was in that relationship for the next 12 years, through his German degree at Sussex, his early career at the BBC and the extremely early death of both his parents. His mother died of early onset dementia when he was 19, nursed by him and his father, who died five years later, having “never really recovered”.
It is “quite common, among politicians,” to be bereaved so young, he says.
Bradshaw was never involved in student politics: “It was still a kind of radical hotbed and I found it not very fulfilling or worth spending time on. I was busy coming out and having a good time, as most people do.” But part of his motivation for standing in 1997 was that Rogers was “masquerading as a reasonable moderate, and I thought: ‘If I’m the candidate, that will smoke him out.’” It worked like a charm: at one point, Rogers said, “Bradshaw is a homosexual, works for the BBC, rides a bicycle, speaks German: he’s everything about our country that is wrong.” Bradshaw describes one voter on the doorstep as saying: “I’ve been a lifelong Conservative, but I shall be voting for you because my brother was a homosexual in a less kind age and took his own life.”
Bradshaw wells up at the memory. I won’t say I routinely disbelieve what politicians say they hear on the doorstep, but it’s the first time I have heard anything recounted so sincerely, not working the angle. “Ordinary, decent people in Exeter were far further ahead than the media and political climate at the time suggests.”
To think how divided the country was on sexuality in the 90s – given that Bradshaw’s dad was fine about him being gay, reacting very much as a mainstream liberal Anglican would today – is interesting, but is it that different now? “It’s weird for me, having started my political career in a public discourse dominated by gay equality, having thought that was all done and put to bed, now leaving after 27 years and it’s come back. It’s a different moral panic, but with similar traits: trans people are presented as a danger to women and children. You know, I was considered a danger to children: ‘It’s a social contagion.’ We were thought to make people gay – that’s what section 28 was about. The level of fixation, all the same tropes: we are getting that now about trans people. It’s very distressing, but it’s much more distressing if you’re trans.”
Bradshaw and his husband, BBC producer Neal Dalgleish, have several close friends who have trans children. The pair have been married since 2006, but have been together since 1995; it actually made the news in 1997 that the new MP’s “gay lover” had been given a House of Commons spouse pass. It felt like a beautiful new dawn.
As loyal as he was to the early New Labour project, Bradshaw has never been very chummy with other MPs. He was always a bit of an outsider. He didn’t come up through party ranks by the special adviser route or the National Union of Students. There were no British politicians at his and Dalgleish’s wedding; he never socialised around Westminster and its famously plentiful bars. “It’s not a place I’ve ever found conducive to …” he trails off.
“Anything?”
“Not really. Not good governance. Not good decision-making.”
By 2001, he had been made the minister for the Middle East and international security, where he dealt with 9/11 as well as Israel and Palestine, but he was only in the post for a year. He got shuffled to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) in 2003 and heard later that it was because of his opposition to licensing F-16s to Israel. “Look, I’ve always been a supporter of Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East,” he says carefully. “It’s probably an unusual position for somebody who is seen as a centrist, but that is my view. I have never understood why some people, on the right as well as the left of the Labour party, find it difficult to recognise the boundary between legitimate criticism of Israel and antisemitism.”
Maybe in 2001 it wasn’t difficult; in recent years, the party has tied itself in knots under Corbyn and Starmer, with hundreds of members kicked out for antisemitism. Israel, meanwhile, has been accused of genocide in the international court of justice. So it actually is difficult. But never mind. “As far as I’m concerned, [the antisemitism controversy] was a nightmare the party has woken up from,” Bradshaw says. In other words, the internal conflict has been resolved to his satisfaction. If you’re of the mind, as the New York Review of Books once put it, that the row was a “ruinous proxy” for the war between the left and the centre of the party, then that makes sense. His guys won.
If Bradshaw was moved to Defra as punishment for being too anti-Israel – “People said that afterwards; I never had that conversation with Tony” – it was a hell of a long exile, lasting until Brown became prime minister in 2007. He had crunchy jobs under Brown: “One of the reasons that Gordon promoted me to the cabinet was because, through some of his toughest times, I was the person who would get wheeled out by Alastair [Campbell] to defend him on the Today programme, and there weren’t always a lot of those kinds of people around.”
By the time the 2010 election came round, he “thought the likely outcome was a Tory government. I was pleasantly surprised we deprived them of a majority.” He remembers feverish discussions with Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats, trying to stitch together a red-yellow coalition. A cabinet colleague wanted to throw in the towel, but Brown was adamant: “Don’t give up power, because once you give up power, you don’t get it back for a very long time. And he was right. But, looking back, Clegg had already decided he wanted to go with Cameron.”
Recalling the days that followed, he says: “I’m not supposed to talk about my conversation with the Queen, but everyone else does. In my valedictory one-to-one, she was very concerned for Gordon’s welfare, and I said: ‘Look, he’s rushed back to Scotland with Sarah and the boys, and that’s where he’s happy. That’s where people appreciate him.’”
I probably won’t remember, he says, one of his biggest regrets: that he stood for Labour deputy leader in the 2015 wrangles, thinking that the top job would go to Liz Kendall, Andy Burnham or Yvette Cooper, while Corbyn was racing past them on the outside. “I spent the whole summer traipsing round these bloody hustings, I spent a lot of my own money which I couldn’t afford, only to come last and see Jeremy Corbyn elected leader.” There’s more wry humour in this than chagrin. Water under the bridge, of course; he’s happy with where the party has landed.
I tell Bradshaw I’m relieved he is resolute on trans rights; it’s only a week since shadow health secretary Wes Streeting U-turned and said he’d been wrong to say trans women were women. If Streeting is at all indicative of the new mainstream Labour view, the score looks very much Daily Mail one, principles nil. “He’ll be fine,” Bradshaw says. “Don’t worry about Wes.”
His confidence reminds me of something, but I can’t remember what until later: in February 2016, I asked Ken Clarke whether he was at all worried about Boris Johnson going full-metal Brexit for personal advantage. “Oh, they’re all pro-European,” Clarke said reassuringly, about the whole Johnson family. “He just wants to make his entry into the fray a little more theatrical.” They’re funny, politicians: however well they know each other, they still trust each other.
Bradshaw tells me he’s not entirely sure what he will do next – but he plans to spend a few months after the election in Sicily. He gives me some of the capers from his garden there. Someone later tells me that this is the most New Labour thing ever: finding common ground over identity politics, and celebrating with Italian capers. I agree, but say I would never write that, as “identity politics” is reductive, and I love capers. I feel as if we’ve remembered the worst of Blairism and are now fighting over the wisdom of revivifying it, which will never make sense unless we remember the best of it.