KATE HOEY:
LABOUR'S NEW MODEL WOMAN
The
Sunday Times Magazine (London) August 8 1993
Kate
Hoey is the face of the new-look Labour party. Less
right-on than right-wing, the MP for London's
Vauxhall, in the heart of "loony left"
Lambeth, has taken up the challenge of imposing order
on the chaos left in the borough after years of
council mismanagement and corruption. But, asks BRIAN
DEER, whose side is Kate Hoey really on - the
party's, the electorate's or her own?
It's
six-thirty in the evening, and upstairs at the
Brixton Neighbourhood Community Association two dozen
people are waiting to see their member of parliament.
They are a sad-looking bunch and have pitiful stories
to tell. A pensioner widow has turned up to complain
that her bathroom keeps flooding and nothing has been
done to fix it. An old man hasn't had hot water in
his flat for two years. A young family feel trapped
in their tower block because the lifts never work.
As
individuals, or in family groups, they take their
turn to file into a small room, to seek advice from
Kate Hoey, the Labour MP for Lambeth, Vauxhall -
whose constituency is a wedge of south London between
Brixton and Waterloo. "It took them twelve
visits to fix my heating," is how a young
fair-haired woman kicks in with her tale, after a
minute of personal detail. "They kept sending
different plumbers. And sometimes they'd say, like:
'We'll be round tomorrow.' And I'd wait all day. And
nobody turned up."
They
- in this and most of the other accounts that Hoey
will hear this evening - is shorthand for Lambeth
Council, believed to be the most incompetent,
defrauded and strife-torn local authority in human
memory. Vauxhall constituency is the heart of the
borough, and more than half of its 90,000 residents
live on the Labour-run council's estates. It's rare
for someone to come to one of these advice surgeries
and not say that They are involved.
"Mm.
Hm," says Hoey to the fair-haired woman, with a
curl of her wide mouth and a nasal mid-tone sound
that's somewhere between expectant and weary.
"And
then I said that I would go to court," the woman
continues. "And then the foreman came round
himself and fixed it all in one go."
"So
now they've sorted it out?" asks Hoey in an
upbeat voice, betraying a distinct northern Irish
accent.
"No,
no, no."
"No?"
"The
heating's working, but when the hot water was turned
on, there was a lot of black gritty bits in the
water, so I couldn't use it."
"Mm,
hum." Hoey repeats herself, definitely weary,
jotting a note on a pad.
"So
I reported it on quite a few occasions, and finally,
about five, six weeks ago, they came. And he couldn't
really understand why it - the water - was dirty.
I've never, ever had a bath."
"Is
your rent being paid direct, or are you paying part
of it?"
"I
just pay, like, the water rates."
"Water
rates for no water," the MP snorts, putting down
her pen as if signalling the consultation's closure.
"Yeah,"
says the woman, opening her next chapter of grief.
"And I am getting all this sewage coming up in
my bath."
It's
all pretty pathetic stuff - and, by the end of an
evening, you'd need a stone heart not to feel
disturbed by these people's plight. But you'd need
cloth ears not to catch what Hoey doesn't say
as she doles out sympathy. Her constituency
encompasses one of the poorest inner-city areas in
Britain, and she enjoys a Labour majority of more
than 10,000, but the words "government",
"Major", "Tories" or
"spending cuts" are not among her standard
responses. Instead, she'll agree with those who
suggest that their landlord - They - is to
blame.
"Who
are your councillors?" she may ask towards the
end of a discussion. "Oh really? Ah. Em."
Given
the woeful experiences that her constituents recount
and the borough's appalling reputation, she seems on
pretty safe territory to take this tack. Agreeing
with electors is not an innovation. On the jigsaw
puzzle of housing estates (which, after a veneer of
owner-occupation is stripped away, is pretty much all
there is in Vauxhall) you'll find that hatred of the
council transcends any political idea.
"Lambeth" is a dirty word, and Hoey knows
better than most how foully it can be spat by the
population.
In
the past few months, the borough has been rocked by
reports about unparalleled mismanagement and
corruption. According to sources ranging from the
council's own chief executive to the
government-leaning district auditor, tens of millions
of pounds have been improperly diverted. The level of
financial waste goes off any recognised scale. And
behind many apparent screw-ups that tenants bring to
Hoey are a web of elaborate bloodsucking frauds.
It's
a sad picture to paint of any public body, but that
it should be Lambeth Council has a special irony. They
are meant to be a socialist authority,
professing a better way than capitalist greed and
waste. If you believe the theory, people should be
queuing at Hoey's surgery, not to complain about
their water or lifts, but to praise Labour's New
Jerusalem.
For
people seeking help about sewage in their baths, of
course, the grand sweep of ideology isn't pressing.
But it was Lambeth which in 1979 - under the
Marxist administration of Edward "Red Ted"
Knight - organised the first public demonstration
against the Thatcher government. It was
Lambeth which, in 1986, saw Knight and nearly the
entire Labour group surcharged and disqualified from
office for refusing to set a rate. It was
Lambeth which in 1991 - under another left-wing
leader, Joan Twelves - failed to collect the poll tax
and opposed the war in the Persian Gulf.
But
now such ambitions have been crushed by the facts -
and this little borough that clings to the Thames has
become a microcosm of the collapse of socialist
systems that once spanned the globe. A formal
inquiry, headed by a senior lawyer, has been trying
to track the missing millions. The Department of the
Environment is poised to order the wholesale firing
of the borough's "direct labour" work
force. And the only reason why the government doesn't
step in and suspend the council is because They
are doing such an embarrassing job.
It's
a strange place, at the best of times, to be a member
of parliament, but Hoey has a specially weird
position in the beleaguered borough's affairs. While
MPs are normally chosen by their constituency
organisations, Hoey was picked by Neil Kinnock's high
command and imposed on local activists in a
by-election four years ago in a bid to modernise the
party's image. They, you see, are mostly of
the Left and she is emphatically of the Right.
From
the activists' viewpoint, it was an unforgivable
imposition, but Hoey has set about her mission to
reform with an evangelical zeal. After the Gulf War
fiasco (when some councillors were alleged to have
shouted "Victory to Iraq" in the town
hall), Hoey called on the party leadership to once
again exercise its power. Twelves - the leader - plus
her deputy, the chief whip and ten others were either
suspended or expelled from the borough Labour group -
and Hoey made no secret that she rejoiced.
"One
view is that Lambeth is a hardworking socialist
council, trying to do its best whilst getting a hard
time from the press, the government and from the
Labour Party," she declared in a typically
pointed written statement. "I totally disagree
with this view."
It's
big risk for any MP to confront their local party
workers, but Hoey isn't content to be just a woman of
strong words. After verbal and printed sniping, in
recent months she has launched an all-out war to
wrest control of the borough's affairs from the hands
of the "loony" Left. Already, her
supporters have seized key party positions - and she
hopes that, during the coming weeks, the candidates
selected for next May's council elections will be
overwhelmingly from her reforming camp.
But
even if she held an advice surgery every night of the
week it would be an uphill journey to stay popular.
As seen from the estates, They are Labour and she
is Labour - and for all her efforts, she is finding
it difficult to escape the political flak. "You
go along to speak to meetings on some particular
thing - on housing, or social services, or
anything," she explains, "and you spend the
whole evening being lambasted about Lambeth."
At
public meetings, she can usually fend off critics by
explaining that she's on their side. But face-to-face
in her periodic advice surgeries, things can get more
difficult. She usually carries a heavy business
briefcase to the sessions, but it doesn't contain a
list of desirable vacant properties. She wears smart,
bright dresses, but the pockets aren't crammed with
vouchers for cheap furniture. She has influential
Commons writing paper, but a Waterloo down-and-out
would need a stack of that to keep warm in winter.
One
mother who came, wanting to be given a larger flat,
got close to being abusive when Hoey pointed-out that
many others were worse off than she. "It's all
very well you sitting there and saying this, that and
the other," the woman stormed. "But I don't
think anybody can see it from my point of view. Every
time I go and see my councillors, They say the
same thing."
*****
On a
sunny morning a couple of days later, Hoey is sitting
in her car outside Clapham police station, anxious to
return to her Westminster office. Although her MP's
salary and a consultancy with London Weekend
Television mean that she could afford to cruise a
Merc or a Porsche, she chugs around Vauxhall in a
green Mini Cooper, and now she revs its engine as a
hint to a constituent that it's time to say goodbye.
Hoey
has just come out of the police station after a
meeting on crime prevention, but it's not officers
who are causing her delay. Stooping to speak through
the Mini's window is a Lambeth manager from the
district housing office next door, who had been her
previous appointment this morning and has since been
tagging-along. He's a Labour party member, and is
proving quite difficult for the MP to shake-off
diplomatically.
"You
must come back soon," he implores, like
he was kneeling in the gutter. "You must
come back and meet everybody."
Hoey's
clutch foot rises and the car's engine changes tone.
"How many of them live in Lambeth?"
It's
at times like this that she comes closest to her role
the new model Labour party's new model woman - here
to do a job for Kinnock. While Stuart Holland, her
predecessor as Vauxhall's MP, would have earnestly
pressed the public about shifts in wealth and power,
she primarily builds her image. She knows that the
deference shown to even the most obscure, selfish or
incompetent MP, means that a cheerful smile here, a
welcoming handshake there, is really all it takes to
be popular.
But
when she was picked to take on Lambeth, it wasn't
just her friendliness which landed her one of the
plum London safe seats. When Holland's resignation
led to a by-election in 1989, Arthur Scargill's
mineworkers and Ken Livingstone's GLC had already
been consigned to the dustbin. The Liverpool
Militants were already in terminal difficulty - and
the truculent south London borough was the last solid
English fortress of old-style, left-wing power. In
the modernisation of Labour, Kinnock's road back to
power, here was a job for a hard-nosed fixer.
Ideologically
speaking, Hoey has turned out to be just what Kinnock
wanted. Talking to the housing manager, she revealed
herself to be an enthusiast for hospital trusts and
the "purchaser-provider" division in public
services. She is for local management of schools,
compulsory testing and a rigorous national
curriculum. On welfare reform - which will affect
thousands of Lambeth mothers - she says she would
find it "difficult to justify" paying child
benefit to some mothers she knows.
"We
still believe in the ideals of community and of
people needing each other and working together,"
she says, when asked what makes the revamped Labour
Party distinctive from the Conservatives. "And
that there is strength and benefit to be had from
individuals having individual freedom and rights, but
working so that, ultimately, the best for everyone
will be obtained by - in certain areas - people
working together, providing a kind of support
mechanism for people who can't handle it as
individuals."
The
current Chancellor of the Exchequer, of course, would
say nothing particularly different (if perhaps more
comprehensibly) - and such vague thinking would make
nobody stand out in a crowd. But Hoey had another
virtue that set her apart from rivals for the Labour
nomination. Just as Kinnock's ability to defeat
Labour's socialists in the national party had relied
on his early record as a radical firebrand, so Hoey
was picked for Vauxhall because she really understood
the Left.
Although
she admits the details only under protest, before she
joined the Labour Party in 1972, she had been a
member of a Trotskyite outfit called the Spartacus
League - at the time perhaps the most loony of
British extremists. The league followed the Russian
revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg in expecting a
spontaneous workers revolt, and was so notoriously
penetrated by MI5, people joked that if security
service agents raised their hands en bloc they could
win every vote at meetings.
"I
didn't have much contact with ordinary people,"
she says today to explain this invaluable training in
sectarian manoeuvring. "So I didn't understand
their concerns."
Although
Hoey raised only five votes among Vauxhall's thousand
party members when she competed openly to succeed
Holland, she appeared to Kinnock's people like a
person who would fit with their broader ideological
designs. She had already twice (unsuccessfully)
fought the nearby marginal seat of Dulwich, as a
professed left-winger, and before that had been chair
of leisure services on Hackney Council, which at the
time made Lambeth seem like a model of sobriety. One
of her demands was leg-waxing on the rates.
At
Lambeth today, this kind of policy proposal could
raise you within months to, say, deputy mayor, and it
should have proved the camouflage to render her
position secure. But these days her power base is the
parliamentary party, and she prefers not to dwell on
the past. "If I had known you were going to go
into all that, I wouldn't have agreed to this,"
she declares in a prickly manner when her hard Left
days are raised. "I don't see that it's
relevant."
There's
a saying (possibly attributed to Denis Healey) that
if you're not a communist before you're thirty, then
you've got no heart, and that if you're still a
communist after you're thirty, then you've got no
brain. So, at the age of 47, these revelations are
unlikely to scar her with a loony leftist reputation.
In the modern game of images, in fact, she has the
opposite issue to address: whether her more mature
ideological stance makes her impossibly remote from
her constituents' lives.
This
may be Hoey's trickiest task of imagery, since the
new model woman enjoys a style of life well removed
from Lambeth's estates. Unlike Holland, who bought a
family house in the heart of the constituency, she
recently moved from Dulwich to a luxurious
Manhattan-style apartment overlooking the Thames at
Tower Bridge. Although ideal Through The Keyhole
territory, she's sensibly wary that it might look
iffy to Vauxhall folk. She banned me from visiting
there, much less give permission for a Sunday Times
photographer to drop by. "You will only go and
contrast it with a grotty slum in Brixton," she
said. To be honest, she was probably right.
She
gets good advice: she lives with a photographer, Tom
Stoddart, who she met at the World Cup competition in
Mexico, and they have been partners for the last
eight years. "I don't like wallpaper, so I've
left the bare bricks showing on the walls," is
how she described their home to The Sun. "The
bedrooms are more feminine - all pinks and pretty
colours. The carpets, walls and bed linen are all
pink, and I have loads and loads of plants."
If
she sounds like a winner from the late-eighties boom,
then that's possibly because she is. The Thatcher
years were kind to Hoey, seeing her vault from her
previous career as a PE teacher in a further
education college to the heights of one of the safest
and most convenient of parliamentary seats - from
which you can see the Palace of Westminster. And
unlike her fellow boomers who bust with the decade,
she hopes that her mission for Labour in Lambeth is a
job she can keep for life.
Other
MPs who have challenged their local parties have
often run into difficulties, but she is in an
unsurpassed position to build a personal vote. In
just the week of the Brixton surgery and the police
station meeting, for instance (during which I noted
Nazi memorabilia in the chief inspector's office),
she was able to slip across the Thames to chair a
church discussion at Waterloo with the Archbishop of
Canterbury ("I must confess that I am one of
Kate's constituents"), visit the local black
radio station ("We gotta signed picture of
Shabba Ranks") and go walkabout on a housing
estate ("The Department of the Environment is
paying for all that").
She
is the near-perfect operator on these kind of trips,
but there are moments when the new model Labour
party's image fleetingly slips from her demeanour.
One such instant occurred in the Clapham police
station, where she quizzed the inspectors about a
reference they had made to the "Territorial
Support Group".
"Do
they have special flashes, or something like
that?" she inquired, revealing with a charming
innocence that she didn't know who they were.
"No.
No," one of the officers put her right about the
notorious armoured squad vans that prowl her
constituency. "We used to call them the Special
Patrol Group."
*****
On
the following Monday morning, Hoey sits in her
Westminster office, glancing through a stack of mail
- most of which, she admits, is junk. The room is
big, with plenty of bookshelves, a round conference
table, her desk turned diagonally in a corner by the
windows and two armchairs, in one of which she's sat.
A moment before, she had distractedly spilt raspberry
tea (her favourite) on the carpet and had made weak
efforts to thin the stain by adding water.
Although
we asked to visit her home, the office in many
respects, is a better symbolic location. From this
nerve-centre, she is masterminding her crusade
against Lambeth's Left, and from an interconnecting
door to the next room comes the muffled voice of her
neighbour, Frank Field, the maverick right-wing MP
for Birkenhead, whose wars with his local party are
legendary.
Field
has been triumphant, and Hoey believes that she will
soon follow his example. Under a private deal with
the right-wing Union of Communications Workers, she
is currently channelling thousands of pounds through
her Westminster office to support a full-time
employee, a loyalist activist network and two
Vauxhall branches which back her.
But
in trying to change Lambeth, she doesn't have it
easy. While the media's "loony left" image
of the borough makes the problems seem obvious and
the solutions look clear, in the real world things
are a lot more muddy. Many of the hum-drum complaints
which are voiced at her advice surgeries can't easily
be pinned on socialist politics. And it may be hard
to draw up a balance sheet of success and failure
without questioning Hoey's contribution.
It
was she, after all, who advised the national party to
suspend, the former council leader Joan Twelves, who
was the widely-regarded as first effective
administrator since the old war-horse Knight was
disqualified. Twelves - a small and sometimes
diffident working class woman - lives in a council
flat near Brixton and, like Hoey, was once a
Trotskyite. But far from having caused the borough's
crisis, many observers think she was working to bring
it to light. "We created, for the first time, a
proper management," Twelves says. "It was
our changes which began to expose the mismanagement
and corrupt practices."
Hoey
rubbishes this claim, but there is evidence that
Twelves's removal helped to plunge Lambeth into its
present chaos. Labour's shrunken ranks throw up
little talent at the best of times to run Britain's
town halls, and after Knight was kicked out by the
Tories, and then the next generation by Kinnock,
members of all political views say that the present
turmoil is an only-to-be-expected result.
Surprisingly,
maybe, this argument finds some backing from the
district auditor, Paul Claydon, who issued one of the
much-publicised recent reports on fraud and
mismanagement in the borough. In December 1990 - four
months before Hoey danced on Twelves's political
grave - he wrote to councillors acknowledging
"real progress" in the borough's affairs
and "substantial plans for continuing
improvement". This year, he said, Labour's
suspensions and expulsions had made the council
"unstable" and had "increased the
difficulty of managing the Authority."
Deceptions
in Lambeth are unusually well-concealed, but this may
be one of the hidden truths that will haunt the
Labour Party. Many of her Vauxhall critics believe
that Hoey supported Kinnock and his image-conscious
leadership against her own constituents' interests -
and that the assault on the Twelves administration by
Labour had more of an eye on the Daily Mail's
national readership even than did the Tory's battles
with Knight.
Right
or wrong, this theory is widely accepted in Vauxhall
and has added to an atmosphere of bewilderment and
despair. During Hoey's period as the member of
parliament, the active party membership has halved,
its income fallen sharply, and there have been
countless allegations that party rules and agreements
are being broken on every sides.
"Everybody
fiddles," she says matter-of-factly, responding
to the claim that her trade union financial backing
amounts to a personal slush fund. "It's how it
is in the Labour Party. People on all sides fiddle
all the time."
But
organisational campaigns have a long history in the
Labour party of producing their own opposition. And
her uncompromising attitudes may be causing ordinary
members to polarise in unpredictable ways. "I
used to be for Kate," says Joe Callinan, a
right-wing councillor and last year's mayor.
"But I don't hold with an MP who attacks the
local party."
Sentiments
like this are a chill wind in Vauxhall, and may blow
the open the doors to Lambeth town hall for the John
Smith leadership's doomsday scenario. Instead of Hoey
ushering-in a period of moderation in Lambeth, some
fear they may see a swing Left, not the Right, and
even the return of "Red Ted" Knight.
"I certainly will put myself forward for
selection as a candidate for the council," says
Knight, now free of the disqualification imposed on
him in 1986. "There isn't any basis on which I
can be excluded."
Hoey
thinks that no Lambeth branch would pick Knight to
stand, since his candidacy would prove fatal at the
polls. But if he is the Devil, then the Deep Blue Sea
is that pro-Hoey candidates have stood in recent
council by-elections, only to be trounced by the
Liberal Democrats. And though the reports of town
hall corruption are the major factor, the Lib Dems
think that her anti-Left crusade is another reason
for their success.
"When
she attacks the council she is telling people not to
vote Labour," says Mike Tuffrey, the local
Liberal Democrat leader, who believes that Knight's
traditional Labour rhetoric would actually prove more
popular on the estates. "If they want to keep
power in Lambeth they have to go back to
confrontational, antigovernment politics."
That
Hoey's strategy has produced disarray in Labour's
ranks and boosted the Lib Dems' prospects has led
many of her opponents to wonder aloud if this isn't
really a secret goal. Even her own supporters think
that the minor party will take control of the borough
next year - a change that will delight those who want
a national political realignment. Not only would it
vanquish the Left, but the switch of such a
high-profile prize would reassure right-wing Liberal
Democrats who might otherwise defect to the Tories
over any parliamentary Lib-Lab pact.
Such
an elegant scenario, however, isn't something that
Hoey admits has ever crossed her mind. "I have
very little difficulty in agreeing with most things
that Liberal Democrats say," is as far as she
goes. "If the Lib Dems were to win for a year,
then it might shake things up. But I know that once
they got control they would keep it."
Since
there is every chance that this will happen, many
party members are wondering how it could be that
Lambeth might face the choice of Knight or the Lib
Dems. And since either would threaten her own
long-term security, they wonder why she sprayed
petrol on the fire. "She has an inferiority
complex over not being selected by the constituency
party and so she has never built bridges,"
suggests Michael English, a moderate local councillor
and himself a former MP. "And then, of course,
she grew up in Northern Ireland, so she is inclined
to see everything in terms of black and white."
*****
This
seems like a crude psychological explanation, but the
bizarre, factionalised, politics of northern Ireland
must have helped shape the person she is today.
Catharine Letitia Hoey grew up in County Antrim, near
Belfast, the daughter of smallholding farmers who
specialised in pigs. Her parents, Thomas and Letitia,
were liberal and, she says, "opposed to any
truck with the Orange Order", but she gained
Loyalist attitudes she never lost.
If
Hoey has translated Ulster's
"Catholic-Protestant" sectarianism into a
"Left-Right" split in Lambeth, however,
there is also the principle that like-and-like repel
- since she has much in common with her opponents.
Like Twelves, for instance, she is a former working
class women who bettered herself: the former Lambeth
leader being a Southend bricklayer's daughter and
Hoey pig-farmer's child. "We weren't walking
round shoeless or anything like that," she
remembers. "But we were very poor, and my mother
and father made great sacrifices."
When
Twelves (who is just two years the younger) was an
Essex girl, it was in a rural Ulster setting that
Hoey got involved in politics - awaking from the
innocence of childhood when she got into grammar
school, her best friend didn't and she learnt that
the wealthy just paid to get their children in.
"I remember being really upset about that,"
she says. "I felt that it was really wrong that
some people always had life so easy and others had it
so hard."
They
are origins, moreover, that have given her a
tough-minded attitude - and, as the borough's
scandals rumble on in the coming months, she plans to
press forward from her distinctively aggressive
corner for Labour's modernisation. The local party is
busy revamping its old-style socialist tradition, she
believes, and is spreading the false message that They
uncovered the corruption - making her more determined
than ever that now is the moment to strike against
their influence.
"The
time for gesture politics and for trying to change to
world through what Lambeth does is gone," she
says, looking at the clock, metaphorically lifting
the clutch to suggest our discussion is over-running.
"That time is finished and therefore the key
thing for any Labour council has to be to try to work
within government - whatever government -
requirements and to maximise the services that can be
delivered."
It's
a view of the troubled borough that would find
cross-party support, but it will make her few allies
among activists. They say that if you disagree
with Conservative government policies you must fight
them, with whatever institutions you have to hand.
And that if their own MP can't help in this struggle,
they should try to find one who will.
To
that she offers those famous last words the Labour
party around the country has often heard. "I
don't feel allegiance to anybody except the
electorate," she tells me. "I will do what
I think is right."
Read
"Rotten to the Core" on Lambeth Council fraud in 1993
Copyright,
Brian Deer. All rights reserved. No portion of this
article on Kate Hoey and Lambeth Vauxhall Labour
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