I was a Blairite baby: how Grace Campbell survived a childhood in politics
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Version 0 of 1. On 2 May 1997, Tony Blair made his first speech as prime minister. A few minutes earlier, a photo was taken of me, aged three, walking along Downing Street, in front of a frenzy of photographers, with a look on my face that expressed, very clearly, that I’d rather have been at home watching Teletubbies. This isn’t to say I wouldn’t later be proud of my dad, Alastair Campbell, for playing a key part in winning a landslide election for Labour (the first Labour win since 1974) – I have been ever since I was old enough to understand what that means. But at that moment, I was blissfully unaware of how political my life already was – and how much more political it was going to be. This week, Momentum launched Momentum Kids, a programme that plans to open creches at Momentum events and ultimately aims to increase children’s involvement in the Momentum movement, as well as to make life easier for parents. I suspect my parents would have found the creche useful, but they didn’t need much help with the political involvement: I was born, quite literally, into New Labour. My dad started working for Tony not long after I was born, and he continued to do so for the first 10 years of my life, when my mum also worked for Tony and Cherie. It was impossible to escape politics. Holidays were always spent with other New Labour people and their families, and dinner time discourse was almost always political. I knew nothing different. There were advantages. As my dad has written in his next volume of diaries (which, I feel loyalty-bound to tell you, is out this autumn), when I was waging a campaign to get a dog, I was able to get Tony to issue a prime ministerial order to my mum and dad. Molly duly arrived. Momentum’s initiative has been derided, rather unfairly, as “Tiny Trots”; maybe I was a Blairite baby. Even if this image of brainwashing is a bit far-fetched, it is true that I have inherited a lot of my parents’ views and attitudes. I have been raised to believe in social justice, equality of opportunity and supporting public services such as local state schools. I was also raised to believe that Tories are generally bad and the Daily Mail is even worse. But as I got older, I did realise that politics wasn’t always learned at home. I became more liberal than my father, and more feminist than my mother, and I had one surprising passion that has dominated my life from a young age and still forms my opinions on social justice: reggae. This independent sense of political self meant that there was now room for disagreement in our family. When I started sixth form, I remember that all of a sudden people in my politics class were asking me what I thought about the Iraq war. When the war began, I was nine, and too young to form an opinion other than noticing that there were demonstrations outside our house, and that Mum (anti) and Dad (pro) were arguing a lot. But when I was 16 I told my dad that, as much as I love him and want always to defend him, I think that, had I been old enough in 2003, I would have been on Mum’s side. Pity the political parent who has to put up with a rebellious teenager when they already have to put up with so much else. The unpleasantries politicians receive from the media and public can be far worse than that doled out to other public figures. Last week, when my dad and John McDonnell argued about the future of the Labour party on Question Time, I watched from the balcony with Jeremy Corbyn’s son, Seb, who is now McDonnell’s chief of staff. Everyone seemed to have an opinion on Corbyn’s leadership, some good, some bad. But watching with Seb made me realise that although our families lie on the opposite sides of the Labour divide, we both, as children of controversial political figures, have had to sit and watch people say horrible things about our fathers. (Cue tweets from Momentumites telling me my dad is a war criminal and how DARE I compare the two? That wasn’t the point, I’m talking about being a kid.) My brothers and I grew up with the children of the Blairs and the Goulds and the grandchildren of the Kinnocks. We’re all Labour now, which suggests parental influence is strong – and perhaps the Momentum plan will be a powerful way of reinforcing it for the kids who get taken along. But I can honestly say that my brothers and I have all acquired very different particularities: we’re the product of our childhoods, but our own people, too. Anyway, it’s not all Twitter trolls and disagreements over dinner: in the years of politics I have experienced, there have been some bad moments, but also some really funny ones. My dad and Adam Boulton fighting on TV in 2010, for example. The jokes moments are what I’m determined to focus on, and I’m currently developing and writing a sitcom for TV called Politicians’ Kids. Politics is a serious game, for sure, but life in my political family has left room for some serious comedy value. Thinking about it, the Momentum creche might yield some pretty hilarious moments, too. |