Old Newscast: How Labour Won In 1997 (Part 1)

Summary

Newscast: Old Newscast – How Labour Won In 1997 (Part 1) BBC News | Released July 25, 2026

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Overview

In the kickoff to Newscast’s summer “box set” series, Adam Fleming delves into the seismic 1997 British general election—the vote that swept Tony Blair’s New Labour into power after 18 years of Conservative rule. Joined by veteran journalists Kirsty Wark and Jeremy Vine, the episode interweaves recollections from inside the campaign buses and parliamentary press galleries, charting the unraveling of John Major’s government and the rise of an unprecedentedly disciplined Labour Party.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

Setting the Scene: The Political Climate of the Mid-90s

• Conservatives Beset by Scandal & Division

  • Years of Tory government (Thatcher then Major) gave way to relentless infighting, “sleaze” scandals (notably “cash for questions”), and economic disasters such as Black Wednesday [06:00].
  • Kirsty Wark notes: “There was lots of things going wrong...the whole idea of economic competency went out the window. And then we also had problems in Europe, so it was like the last of days.” [06:00]

• Labour’s Transformation

  • Tony Blair’s takeover in 1994, following John Smith’s sudden death, ushered in “New Labour” with a focus on relentless message discipline and media handling.
  • Jeremy Vine, reflecting on reporting from the Blair campaign bus, recalls: “I was really grieving the professionalism of the Blair outfit.” [04:22]
  • Compared to the chaos on Major’s campaign, Blair’s buses felt like “control freakery” leading to a period where “politics is what happens inside parties, not between them. And there was nothing happening inside labour for at least eight years after that.” [05:19]

The Role of John Smith and the Labour Shift

• John Smith: The Quiet Architect

  • Debate among panelists about how much credit Smith deserves for Labour’s turnaround.
  • Mark Mardell: “He reached the absolute moment of maximum impact…And then he was dead less than a week later.” [08:16]
  • Kirsty Wark pushes back: “He absolutely made the weather for what happened in the rest of the 1990s...he said that what these votes will show is that a parliament is the settled will of the Scottish people. And really from that moment on, there was no resiling from that.” [09:14]

• Blair’s Takeover and Party Transformation

  • The transition to Blair is framed as both a generational and ideological pivot:
    • “Smith to Blair was a change from old Labour to new Labour.” [10:33] – Nick Robinson
    • Debate about whether the change was smooth (“quite smooth is what I’m saying” – Wark, [11:04]), or profound and contentious.

The Build-up to the Election

• Conservative Instability

  • Major’s embattled leadership, eroding majority, and frequent resignations:
    • “If you’ve got 650, mainly men who are quite old in a room, i.e. the House of Commons, you’ve got quite an attrition rate.” [16:33] – Mark Mardell
    • Stories of obscure MPs threatening to resign if local demands weren’t met illustrated how fragile the government had become.

• Tory Dread vs Labour Discipline

  • Conservative campaign floundered, as Labour’s relentless message and image management paid off.
  • Labour’s optimism mixed with paranoia over possible mistakes:
    • “Labour was still worried. They went between incredible optimism and confidence to absolute terror that something was gonna go wrong.” [13:58] – Kirsty Wark

• Labour’s Media Allure

  • Blair’s campaign received unprecedented media attention, endorsements, and even the support of iconic pop culture figures like Oasis’s Noel Gallagher.
    • “The excitement of it all, that whole fairy dust of endorsements, the fact the sun backed Blair...Where was the opposition?” [13:58] – Kirsty Wark
    • “There are seven people...giving a little bit of hope to young people in this country. That is me...and Tony Blair.” [13:35] – Noel Gallagher, The Brits 1996

Campaign Trail Anecdotes & Party Machines

• Battle Bus Life

  • Jeremy Vine reminisces about the polished Labour campaign, contrasting with Conservative disorganization.
  • “They had three buses and it said something like New Britain, New Labour, vote for the future. And then occasionally one of the buses would be overtaken by a van saying buy your sausages here.” [04:22]

• Press Relations & Control

  • Tight message discipline sometimes shut down informal moments:
    • Story of Alastair Campbell stealing Jeremy Vine’s cake during a campaign stop: Blair’s inability to react naturally symbolized the tightly controlled operation.
    • “His eyes dart around as if he's calculating the electoral effect of the scandal. And then he just says, we're making progress and walks off.” [21:18] – Jeremy Vine

The Broader Cultural Moment

• Labour’s Modern Image

  • Blair’s appeal extended beyond traditional Labour voters, buoyed by a sense of cultural renewal and celebrity embrace.
  • “A new dawn has broken, has it not?” [03:44] – Noel Gallagher

• End of an Era for the Conservatives

  • The image of John Major with “head in his hands” epitomized exhaustion and resignation at the close of 18 years of power.
  • “That John Major head in hands photo is the seminal photo of the whole thing.” [18:39] – Nick Robinson

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Labour’s Professionalism:

  • “I was really grieving the professionalism of the Blair outfit.” [04:22] – Jeremy Vine

• On John Smith’s Sudden Death:

  • “He reached the absolute moment of maximum impact...and then he was dead less than a week later.” [08:16] – Mark Mardell

• On Blair’s Leadership:

  • “Smith to Blair was a change from old Labour to new Labour.” [10:33] – Nick Robinson

• Pop Culture Endorsement:

  • “There are seven people in this room tonight who are giving hope to young people in this country...and Tony Blair.” [13:35] – Noel Gallagher

• On Conservative Decline:

  • “The image was John Major...puts his head in his hands...that John Major head in hands photo is the seminal photo of the whole thing.” [18:39] – Nick Robinson

• On Media Message Discipline:

  • “His eyes dart around as if he's calculating the electoral effect of the scandal. And then he just says, we're making progress and walks off.” [21:18] – Jeremy Vine

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [01:14] – Introduction to the “Old Newscast” summer series and setting the political scene
• [03:55] – Guests introduce their roles in the 1997 election coverage
• [04:22] – Insights into the professionalism of Blair’s campaign bus vs. Major’s chaos
• [06:00] – Recap of Tory sleaze and economic woes
• [07:02] – The legacy and passing of John Smith
• [09:14] – Scottish Labour and the “settled will” for a Scottish parliament
• [13:35] – Noel Gallagher’s pivotal endorsement at the Brits
• [15:47] – The strategic timing of John Major’s election call
• [16:33] – Conservative attrition, parliamentary math, and chaos in the dying days
• [18:39] – Iconic head-in-hands John Major image
• [19:13] – Firsthand account from the Labour battle bus
• [21:13] – The “cake incident” – control freakery illustrated on the campaign trail
• [21:44] – Episode wrap: Labour’s momentum, Conservative malaise, and tease of Part 2

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Tone & Style

The episode is conversational, nostalgic, and rich with journalistic banter—swinging between sharp political insight, personal anecdotes, and occasional humor. The stories vividly conjure the sense of a country on the brink of momentous change, through both the exhaustion of the outgoing regime and the brash optimism of “Cool Britannia.”

Transcript

[Nick Robinson]

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[Adam Fleming]

hello. So over the summer, while Laura and Paddy are taking a well deserved break, we have decided to give you a box set of old newscast episodes. So over the next six weekends, Old Newscast is going to tell the story basically of 30 years of British politics, but but through the medium of six crucial votes. So I'll be joined in the old newscast studio by friends of the podcast and people who were there at the time to try and tell the story behind the story of those moments. Moments which, let's face it, really shaped 21st century politics in the UK. So we are starting this summer series by revisiting the general election of 1997. So to set the scene, first of all, by 1997 the Tories have been in power for 18 years and 11 of those were under Margaret Thatcher. John Major took over from her as prime minister in 1990, kind of surprised everyone by winning the 1992 general election. But by 97 the party was just being rocked every day, almost every hour by allegations of sleaze and just big political splits over policy. In the meantime, Tony Blair had taken over the Labour Party in 1994 following the sudden death of its leader, John Smith. And after almost two decades in opposition, Blair' rebranded new Labourer is surging in the opinion polls in quite an incredible way, then holding on until the last possible moment on 17 March 1997. John Major calls the general election.

[John Major]

Good morning. I'd like to formally confirm that I've seen Her Majesty the Queen this morning and sought her permission for a dissolution of Parliament and a general election on 1 May. I'm delighted to tell you that Her Majesty has consented to that. I would expect prorogation.

[Adam Fleming]

So what was it really like as a journalist behind the scenes following New Labour's supposedly super disciplined campaign? And how did it feel in Conservative HQ in the run up to Major calling time on his own government? That is what I'll be discussing in the first summer installment of old Newscast with two friends of newscast who were very much there.

[Newscast Intro/Outro]

Newscast, newscast from the BBC.

[Mark Mardell]

Tony Blair is to be Prime Minister and a landslide is likely.

[Noel Gallagher]

And if you don't got anything about you, you get up there and you take Tony Blair's hand, man.

[Tony Blair]

Education, education and education.

[John Major]

So, right, okay, we lost.

[Noel Gallagher]

A new dawn has broken, has it not?

[Adam Fleming]

Hello, it's Adam in the old newscast studio and joining me down the line is Kirsty Warwick.

[Noel Gallagher]

Hey.

[Kirsty Wark]

Hello.

[Adam Fleming]

And what were you doing in 1997?

[Kirsty Wark]

1997, I was following the election and then I presented the election program in Scotland that night.

[Adam Fleming]

And here in the studio with me is Jeremy Vine. Hi, Jeremy.

[Nick Robinson]

Gosh, you're taking me back here.

[Adam Fleming]

That's the point of the format.

[Mark Mardell]

I think I was 32 or something. Oh, you're 1997.

[Adam Fleming]

And did you have you had a specific deployment, didn't you?

[Nick Robinson]

Well, I was in the political unit with people like Mark Mardell, Nick. Nick Robinson, John Sargent. And I was told to go on the Blair battle bus. So I ended up in that situation where I was really grieving the professionalism of the Blair outfit. So they, they had three buses and it says something like New Britain, New labor, vote for the future. And then occasionally one of the buses would be overtaken by a van saying buy your sausages here. So we thought that was as exciting as it got, that the message was broken up by an advert for mince pies or whatever. And then I was talking to John Sopl, my colleague who was on the Major bus, the John, he said this

[Mark Mardell]

like chaos here, it's like the decline

[Nick Robinson]

and fall of the Roman Empire.

[Mark Mardell]

And I suddenly realized this is going to be a problem, this. They're so tight that. And actually after 97 I realized politics is over.

[Nick Robinson]

And I left.

[Adam Fleming]

Right, okay. Because the control freakery of the Labor

[Nick Robinson]

Party because politics is what happens inside parties, not between them. And there was nothing happening inside labor for at least eight years after that.

[Adam Fleming]

Because they were so disciplined.

[Nick Robinson]

So disciplined.

[Mark Mardell]

Yeah.

[Adam Fleming]

Let's rewind a little bit.

[Kirsty Wark]

Happening, but a lot in Scotland happening.

[Nick Robinson]

We had a very true, but not

[Mark Mardell]

in so much argument among labor in Westminster.

[Kirsty Wark]

Well, that was the zip, as you say, that was that, you know, it was still. Was it still? Tim Allen, along with. By then, Alistair Campbell. Come in, Mandelson. Mandelson was out very quickly after his first scandal, remember?

[Adam Fleming]

Should we rewind a little bit? And Kirsty, just remind us of what the dying days of John Major's Conservative government was like and remind us of what sleaze was.

[Kirsty Wark]

Oh, well, there was lots of things going wrong. There was scandal after scandal, there was sleaze, there was cash for questions. But remember that we also had Black Wednesday, so the whole idea of economic competency went out the window. And then we also had problems in Europe, so it was like the last of days. John Major came in in 1990 when Mrs. Thatcher tearfully left. And after that, it was a kind of. It was a kind of management of decline. And it certainly wasn't Scotland for sure, because obviously Labour had a complete hegemony in Scotland. They were the establishment. And that's really what led to some of the interesting stuff that then went full speed ahead before the election, which was, you know, you had 1992, you had Kinnick, you know, falling out, and you had John Smith coming in, and that's when things started to ratchet up and there was a change of atmosphere ahead of the 1997 election.

[Adam Fleming]

And Jeremy, Tony Blair gets all the credit, doesn't he? But actually, John Smith, before he died, put in a lot of the groundwork.

[Nick Robinson]

I would.

[Mark Mardell]

Yes, that's true.

[Nick Robinson]

I mean, when he was Shadow Chancellor under Kinnock, he released a shadow budget which blew the 1987 election for them. So let's not forget that. And he was someone off the record in Labor Squared as saying he's less busy than he ought to be and less clever than he thinks he is. So he was on the receiving end a lot. Clearly a great man and a titan of old Labor. And actually, the funny thing was, I mean, sad, funny, just before he died, he reached the absolute moment of maximum impact, John Smith. And I don't know if you remember

[Mark Mardell]

this, Kirsty, but a whole load of

[Nick Robinson]

things went wrong for John Major at the same moment, or went wrong for Britain. One of them was that the grand national didn't start, and the other one was that a hotel in Scarborough was filmed falling into the sea and John Smith did this fantastic Prime Minister's questions where he says, here he is, the Prime Minister with the non Midas touch in a country where the grand national doesn't start and the hotels fall into the sea.

[Mark Mardell]

And I thought, blimey, this guy is

[Nick Robinson]

the next Prime Minister. And then he was dead less than a week later. I came in that morning early on the. The Westminster shift because I was just one of the sort of bunnies running around the, the Westminster unit, which to me was the greatest job I've ever had. And someone said he's had a heart attack in the shower. And. And it was. I had to go down to labor headquarters which was then in Woolworth Road. And the first person I saw was Phil Willis, who since died. But he was in tears and. And I thought, whatever's happened here is massive. And then that we didn't have news channel, we didn't have five live. So it was a breaking story, news flash across all the outlets, BBC1, BBC2. And they came to me on the phone and I actually, I remember saying, I think they said, what'll happen next? And I said, I think it'll be Tony Blair. So it was kind of obvious that Blair was the only one who was going to do it.

[Adam Fleming]

I remember somebody coming into our chemistry class in school to say that John Smith had died. Like that's how the news got broken in those days.

[Nick Robinson]

Yeah, it was a shock and it was terrible.

[Kirsty Wark]

It was such a shock. But the thing about John Smith was, and I kind of disagree, I think he absolutely made the weather for what happened in the rest of the 1990s. Because what had happened was you had labor votes in Scotland being delivered in sack loads. And they had been being delivered in sack loads for a very long time. And essentially they were the establishment in Scotland, but people were voting for them. And there was this huge democratic deficit which was what both John Smith and Blair understood. There was the democratic deficit. And then he said John Smith. And these were the words, you know, you can see from. These are not these words, but you can see from the votes that have been delivered election after election after election. And we had no problem with militant in Scotland. There was none of that. It was a. It was a staunch kind of Old Labour plus New Labour. And then he said that what these votes will show is that a parliament is the settled will of the Scottish people. And really from that moment on, there was no resiling from that. So he dies dreadfully, sadly in 1994. And I can remember at the funeral, I mean, what was so desperately sad. But I have to say that people were looking at Blair and they were looking at Brown and they were looking at Mandelson in the church.

[Nick Robinson]

I remember that because I remember them. Prescott said we all look like the mafia here because they were all dressed in black coming out of this beautiful church. And it was, do you know the funny thing about it, Kirsty? I, I, my, I called my grandmother who's dead now, but she was, you know, classic granny figure on the right, you know, and she was in tears. And I thought labor are now central to British political life. I would disagree on. I think, I think Smith to Blair was a change from old labor to new Labor.

[Mark Mardell]

But I think there was no problem.

[Kirsty Wark]

It was quite smooth is what I'm saying, I think.

[Mark Mardell]

Oh yeah, for sure.

[Nick Robinson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Unidentified Speaker]

I think, I just think that the,

[Mark Mardell]

the whole, the whole maxim of, of

[Nick Robinson]

the Smith labor was one more heave and it, it quite possibly wouldn't have worked.

[Adam Fleming]

But I mean incremental change.

[Mark Mardell]

Yeah, you just give it.

[BBC Reporter]

Come on.

[Mark Mardell]

We lost in 83, we lost in 87.

[Nick Robinson]

We lost. They had, they had obviously lost in 92 as well under Kinnock. And they to major incredibly. And then they think okay, well one more push will do it with the same stuff. And it was Blair who said no, we've got to completely change the party

[Mark Mardell]

for better or worse because they obviously, I think they're still reeling from the

[Nick Robinson]

effect of having Blair as leader who

[Mark Mardell]

arguably wasn't part of the Labour Party at all.

[Adam Fleming]

Well, we could get a sense of Tony Blair and the story he was trying to tell to his party in the country from this clip from the Labour party conference in 1996.

[Tony Blair]

You Labour new members and I'm proud of them. But let me say this to you. I don't forget that this party only survived for new members to join because the old members stuck with it through thick and thin. Let me try and explain this to you. I wasn't born Labor. I

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[Tony Blair]

came Labor.

[Adam Fleming]

And also just in terms of. There was such a groundswell because the Gallagher brothers are at the. The Brits in 1996 and Noel backs Blair to be Prime Minister.

[Noel Gallagher]

There are seven people in this room tonight who are giving a little bit of hope to young people in this country. That is me, Arkid, Bonehead Quiggsy, Alan White, Alan McGee and Tony Blair. And if you'd all got anything about you, you get up there and you say Tony Blair's hand man is a man. Power to the people.

[Kirsty Wark]

Actually, what happened in the run up to the election was even journalists, and perhaps more print journalists became to be quite an infant. Enthralled to Blair, enthralled to New Labour. The excitement of it all, that whole fairy dust of endorsements, the fact the sun backed Blair. Remember, you gotta remember what was happening there. The effect of opposition. Where was the opposition? I mean, where was an effective opposition at that point? But Labour was still worried. They went between incredible optimism and confidence to absolute terror that something was gonna go wrong.

[Tony Blair]

The.

[Mark Mardell]

I was going to say the opposition

[Nick Robinson]

of course was William Hage and the Conservatives. And William Hague later described himself as being on the night shift. And I had to go to that first Conservative conference in 1997 where they were wiped out. And we. One of the stories that happened was that Alan Clark, kind of very. Not dissident, but let's just say unusual MP had given a fringe event where he said, of course the solution to the situation in Northern Ireland is just

[Mark Mardell]

shoot 600 people in one night and

[Nick Robinson]

the US UN would make a about

[Mark Mardell]

it, but the problem would be over for 30 years.

[Nick Robinson]

And the whole room applauds and the

[Mark Mardell]

Conservative HQ are in such disarray they actually have to deny its official policy. So I thought this is, this is going to be a long road back

[Nick Robinson]

and I'm watching Kemi Badenoch to see can she skip the night shift. Yes, really interesting.

[Adam Fleming]

And Well, I mean we're skipping through multiple timelines very quickly here. So let's go back to our. Let's go back to our original timeline. It's going to be, it's gonna be great when we're. We're all in the same ex Journalist, benevolent home in our 90s.

[Unidentified Speaker]

But.

[Adam Fleming]

So I think we're there now.

[Nick Robinson]

Yeah, I think so.

[Adam Fleming]

The election hasn't even happened yet in our timeline, 1996, all the shenanigans are happening at the Labour Party conference. Then Major calls the election and Kirsty, he goes quite long, doesn't he?

[Kirsty Warwick]

He goes very long.

[Kirsty Wark]

He thinks that what he's going to do is going to. I just think what happened was he actually thought that something would crash and burn for Labour on the way of that long, long, long road to the election. But actually, in fact, the opposite happened because Labour actually got their act really together. They spent an awful lot of money. It was before there was any rules, really, about what to spend in elections. They obviously had a very plush bust that Jeremy went on, but that was the least of it. And so what you had was they made great preparation. They didn't do anything. As you know, 1997 was not the age of social media, but they got out there and they infused people. People.

[Mark Mardell]

The joy of being a political correspondent

[Nick Robinson]

then in the Westminster lobby was this.

[Mark Mardell]

That.

[Nick Robinson]

That month after month. I hadn't realized. If you've got 650, mainly men who are quite old in a room, I. E. The House of Commons, you've got quite an attrition rate.

[Mark Mardell]

You've got people keeling over.

[Nick Robinson]

And John Major had one, squeaked a

[Mark Mardell]

majority in 92 and gradually he went into a minus. Yeah. And you're then governing as a minority party and we.

[Adam Fleming]

And wheeling in people from hospital to.

[Nick Robinson]

And using the. The Ulster Unionists and whatever. Jim Molyneux, you know.

[Mark Mardell]

So we had a thing at the weekend. Someone.

[Nick Robinson]

Someone rings from the newsroom and obviously they always come over as if they know everything and you're sort of running to keep up. And they said, there's been a resignation

[Mark Mardell]

threat from John Ghost. I don't know who the hell that is. Do you know? No, Kirsty, No, I still don't. Okay, so I'm looks. I'm. Who the hell I say. What? You're joking?

[Adam Fleming]

Let me.

[Mark Mardell]

Let me chase this up. Turns out Sir John Ghost is the

[Nick Robinson]

MP for Hendon and he's threatened to resign the party whip unless the new

[Mark Mardell]

hospital is built in his constituency. I'd never heard of this guy, but that was.

[Adam Fleming]

So he's the Tory chaos.

[Mark Mardell]

He leads the news, calling for a

[Nick Robinson]

new hospital in Hendon.

[Mark Mardell]

Once they realized anything, they did got on the news. I met someone the other day.

[Nick Robinson]

She said, oh, my.

[Mark Mardell]

You.

[Nick Robinson]

My father was a Tory mp.

[Mark Mardell]

You won't know him.

[Nick Robinson]

I said, well, try me.

[Mark Mardell]

And she said, this guy called David

[Nick Robinson]

Martin, I said, yeah, he resigned as

[Mark Mardell]

PPS to Douglas Hurd over Europe. And she said, how do you do that? I said, well, he let the news,

[Adam Fleming]

yes, because that was. That was how fragile the government was.

[Nick Robinson]

Thing was a big thing and. And it finances itself, that chaos, that's the trouble.

[Kirsty Wark]

It does. But also, you could see, I can remember, the kind of sense of, you know, head and hands as the election campaign continued and they were dealing with questions and debates about Tory sleaze, about Europe, way back to things that happened in the early 90s. Black Wednesday kept coming up, Tory disarray kept coming up. You know, it was there after 18 years, there was just an inevitability that something was going to change. And so you had people, I'm absolutely sure we're Conservatives, we're thinking, you know, we're going to vote tactically because actually, I don't actually think that this can survive in this form for much longer.

[Nick Robinson]

And there's always an image. And the image was John Major and I think he was told he was making a speech at a dinner and they said, would you. We'd love. It's traditional. The person speaking does a little limerick. Could you write one? So he puts his head in his hands to think up this limerick. And this, that John Major head in hands photo is the seminal photo of the whole thing. Although I think it much better regarded now.

[Mark Mardell]

Hugely. Looks. Seven years. That looks.

[John Major]

That's a.

[Mark Mardell]

That's a lifetime.

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Yeah.

[Adam Fleming]

Right, so the election is underway. Jeremy vine is on this fabled battle bus. Jeremy, do you remember this?

[BBC Reporter]

Labor are paying a daredevil camera crew to follow theirs. Front seats are for invited journalists. And then through here, moving towards the rear, are the people who work in the engine room of Mr. Blair's campaign. For example, Angie Hunter here, who is his personal assistant. And then moving through here is Alastair Campbell, Mr. Blair's press secretary, who's with

[Nick Robinson]

him almost all the time.

[BBC Reporter]

And then the Labour leader himself. What are you working on, Mr. Blair?

[Tony Blair]

I'm working on the speech.

[BBC Reporter]

There will be many speeches as Mr. Blair attempts to put dividing lines between his party and Mr. Major's. Not all that easy when many say Labour's biggest advances have come because they've moved closer to the Conservatives. Jeremy Vine, BBC News on the Blair campaign trail.

[Adam Fleming]

Why does everyone have a higher voice

[Nick Robinson]

on the past and sort of posher as well?

[Noel Gallagher]

Yeah.

[Adam Fleming]

Interesting.

[Mark Mardell]

His speech.

[Nick Robinson]

We all used to take bets on which bits of the Speech would be in which order? Because he had certain key phrases, you

[Mark Mardell]

know, I believe as a country, you

[Nick Robinson]

know, we've got to move forward. And he would put them all in different orders. And so we sometimes, we would duck out sometimes and just, just sort of watch from a distance or just be there. And there was a speech. I remember there's a day we went to Southampton, he was in the university lecture theater making his speech. And then we, we sort of. And I was in the canteen actually eating a piece of chocolate gateau and

[Kirsty Wark]

oh my God, you remember that detail.

[Mark Mardell]

A large piece of chocolate ghetto.

[Nick Robinson]

I remember this very well. And there was then this applause. So we said, okay, they're all coming out.

[Mark Mardell]

Campbell comes first. And as he walks past my table, he grabs my fork and he just kind of stabs the gateau with it and takes a large piece, puts it in his mouth and walks off almost without breaking his stride.

[Adam Fleming]

This is why you remember what you're eating.

[Mark Mardell]

Oh, exactly. So then Blair comes out behind Campbell. He sees all the press there, says,

[Nick Robinson]

hi guys, how you doing?

[Mark Mardell]

You know, and I say, well, not very well because your press secretary just ate half my ghetto. And this amazing man who'd answered questions on the bureau and the minimum wage

[Nick Robinson]

and the health service and etc, just

[Mark Mardell]

couldn't process the gateau comment.

[Nick Robinson]

You know, his eyes dart around as if he's calculating the electoral effect of the scandal. And then he just says, we're making progress and walks off.

[Mark Mardell]

I thought, oh, I've jumped him out

[Nick Robinson]

of the groove there. That's what's happened here.

[Adam Fleming]

Yes, you said something that he just couldn't.

[Mark Mardell]

He couldn't. And it was like Reagan, you know,

[Nick Robinson]

when he had any problems, he would just say, we're heading in the right direction. And I thought, oh, that's when you hear someone say, we're making progress. That's the now the default, the emergency button.

[Adam Fleming]

So that is where we will leave episode one, where the 1997 election is simultaneously underway but not even being called yet on our slightly garbled timeline. So who knows where episode two will take us. Jeremy, thank you very much. Thank you, Kirsty. Thanks to you too.

[Kirsty Wark]

Thank you.

[Adam Fleming]

So those were the vibes behind the scenes in the two main parties. And in 1997 it really was a head to head for the Conservatives and Labour, unlike the multi party politics where much more accustomed to. Now Kirsty and Jeremy will be back in the next episode of Old newscast where the 1997 election campaign really gets going with possibly almost certainly even more impressions, and we'll get some details about what everyone was having for their lunch at various points, and that episode will drop in your podcast feeds on Sunday. Speak to you then.

[Newscast Intro/Outro]

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