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Posted Sunday, Nov. 24, 2002; 2.02 p.m. GMT
The courage of his convictions is something David Blunkett comes
by naturally. Blind from birth, sent to a boarding school at
four where he was desperately lonely and steered toward becoming
a piano tuner, he learned to ride a bike, play cricket (the
ball had a bell) and toboggan madly down hills; broken bones
were just a cost of doing business. He remembers the smell of
his dad's rotting flesh as he slowly died after falling in a
vat of boiling water at work, for which his employer refused
compensation, driving him and his mother into "bread and
dripping" poverty.
Even so, he put himself through university, became a Sheffield
city councilor at 22, an M.P. at 40, and shed a left-wing past
to become a key ally in Tony Blair's overhaul of the Labour
Party. Now, as Home Secretary, he is at the heart of the government's
toughest issues: not only crime but immigration and asylum,
drugs, British identity, freedom of information and the fight
against terror. In a crowd of increasingly Identikit politicians,
he stands out to voters as a whole human being, confident in
his unvarnished views — and permitted by Downing St. to
utter them.
His politics defy easy categorization, a tough-love combination
of compassion, anger at injustice and old-fashioned Yorkshire
uprightness. Critics on the right think he is too enamored of
imposing targets on those who deliver government services. Critics
on the left detect too much bossiness too, shading into intolerance
and a willingness to pander to right-wing populism.
Blunkett has regularly offended many in his own party: saying
immigrants should meet "British norms of acceptability,"
offering Afghans $3,750 to return to rebuild their own country,
sending police into a mosque to arrest a family of asylum seekers,
suggesting that asylum seekers' children kept in remote accommodation
centers would be in danger of "swamping" local schools.
He says he takes no pleasure in offending his colleagues, but
is convinced they are out of touch. "I have a particular
view that the left has missed the boat in not grasping that
unless there is stability and order, progressive politics cannot
flourish," he says. The crime bill is for him a good example
of where his critics miss the point: "It's very difficult
to get a conviction in this country for anything. My upbringing
and my constituency tell me there's an audience out there that
wants the balance restored." If it is not, he suggests,
the hard right will gain.
Late at night and early in the morning he churns through documents
in Braille and listens to sped-up tapes of memos and correspondence.
His discipline and ambition could one day propel him to Downing
St. For now, he must hope his chief rival, Chancellor of the
Exchequer Gordon Brown, will let him fund more police and auxiliaries,
more probation officers, more cells to absorb more prisoners.
He will happily scrap for it all. "He figures he only gets
one stab at being Home Secretary," says an aide, "and
that he might as well get stuck in."
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