Labour’s lightweight shadow cabinet

Being at the launch of the 1997 Labour manifesto and watching the shadow cabinet take to the stage is one of my abiding memories from more than 20 years spent as a lobby journalist.

Even setting aside the star-turn Tony Blair, it was a veritable march of the big beasts — Gordon Brown, Robin Cook, Jack Straw, David Blunkett, John Prescott, Mo Mowlam. All of these people were major players with large followings and massive public profiles.

The less central figures also passed muster, including George Robertson (later a fine Nato secretary general), the ever-popular Donald Dewar, the clever and well-spoken Alistair Darling, suave Jack Cunningham, Margaret Beckett and Ann Taylor — solid contributors both — and that happy bruiser Frank Dobson.

Mowlam’s physical appearance that day — she was wearing a wig to compensate for the effects of radiotherapy and had put on weight from steroids — provoked a major story, with the Daily Mail describing her as ‘losing the battle of the bulge’ and her revealing soon after that she was being treated for a brain tumour.