John McTernan: Blair, Brown and what a number 10 political secretary actually does

John McTernan was Political Secretary at 10 Downing Street during the last two years of Tony Blair's government, and when he came to the 'Blair Years' course which I teach with Dr Michelle Clement and Professor Jon Davis , he explained why is such a special job.

“Political secretary is a really old-fashioned term,” he told our graduate students. “I was called director of political operations, because there was a certain desire to have a kind of corporate atmosphere. But political secretary, that's Marcia Falkender's job.

Marcia Williams, later Baroness Falkender, was a member of Harold Wilson's kitchen cabinet who looked after the Prime Minister's personal and political interests. “Political Secretary, that's the job I did; I will go to my grave as political secretary. It is one of the great privileges of my life to have taken on one of those roles that almost no one in the Labor Party gets to play."

His job was, says- it, "to bring the political perspective to strategic decisions and decision-making. You don't define; you just go, 'what about the unions, boss?' Or, 'what about the elections?'" Taylor - the leader of Political Unit No. 10. But after Tony Blair won his third election, McTernan succeeded Pat McFadden - who had been elected to parliament - as political secretary.

Because Blair had announced he would not stand again before the election, McTernan had limited means to persuade MPs to back the Prime Minister: "You can't promise people that they could become a minister in the future. We had three years tops and ended up with two, so I didn't have much change. Brown's ascendancy was coming to fruition."

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Yet Blair still managed to achieve a lot in his last two years, with McTernan in a central role as a Labor Party employee at the heart of No 10. His work was different from those of special advisers, political appointees who are employed by the contribu able: “There are political special advisers, there are communications special advisers, there are event special advisers, there are forward-looking special advisers, and no doubt now social media special advisers. I was in the pre-iPhone days; I was BlackBerry.

After Blair won his third election, McTernan (left) took over from Pat McFadden

(Getty)

As the head of the political bureau, his job was to manage all relations with the parties, because a prime minister, in addition to being the head of the country and the president of the cabinet - bringing together all the government departments - is also the leader of a political party. This involved managing relations with all components of the Labor Party, including MPs, local parties, devolved regional and national parties and trade unions, and also dealing with the organizational aspect of the elections.

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Among the MPs, one of McTernan's jobs was to organize the “Q Group” – Q for Questions. Working with Keith Hill, who was Blair's Parliamentary Private Secretary, "the Prime Minister's eyes and ears within the parliamentary party", he would "orchestrate" the questions posed by loyal MPs in the House of Commons.

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He was also proud to have organized a group he called the Non-Bitter Former Ministers: "It's really important because the people who get promoted to minister are loyal to the government and they vote the line on every question. It turns out that when they go to the backbenches and have no chance of returning to government, they discover a thing called a conscience. And every time they have an idea that conflicts with the government, they vote against the government. is never threatened by any question, whatever the subject, because if they know each other and they know the world, they know the answer to a question even if it is off topic

McTernan would give the group briefings, so they could help communicate messages that supported the government, and Blair in particular. But it was a time of constant infighting: “For a while I had a spy from Camp Brown who found out about it, so they had someone posing as an unbitter former minister. I found out about this because Tony told me that Gordon was asking why I said something to the band. He then ceased to be invited to the ...