I remain largely in agreement with Straw's low-key pragmatism but his warts-and-all assessment of Smith will make him a few more enemies
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Jack Straw, who says John Smith's immense inner confidence was not matched by courage. Photograph: David Levene
Whenever discussing the Blair government in its heyday an old chum and I found that he would take whatever Robin Cook's position was on, say, Europe or constitutional reform while I would instinctively align myself with the more sceptical instincts of Jack Straw.
Cook is long dead and I will resist rehearsing my still-held doubts about his approach to politics, though whenever I walk through a deserted House of Commons at eight o'clock at night I think of Robin's ardent commitment to "family friendly" hours with a wry smile.
Our last proper conversation was on the morning of the 7/7 bombings when we found ourselves walking across St James's Park towards Westminster after the tube system shut down. He said it would help if there were Muslim members of the G8 group of advanced industrial states. I replied that it would help if they did not cripple their own economies by backward cultural attitudes, to women for example.
But Jack Straw is still among us and this week has failed to resist the lucrative temptation of selling serialisation rights to his new memoirs (Last Man Standing, Macmillan, £20) to the highest bidder, which usually means the Daily Mail. Over three days I have therefore read about 6,000 words chosen by the paper and covering his stormy childhood, the Blair-Brown battles and Iraq.
To my surprise, I find myself still largely in agreement with Straw's low-key un-histrionic pragmatism across a swath of departments – Home Office, FCO, leadership of the Commons (like Andrew Lansley it was his demotion) and back at justice, one of a handful of ministers to last all 13 New Labour years. Perhaps it's not surprising. I am just a few months older, like him a metropolitan outsider, though – unlike Straw – a militant inactivist in my student days.
This fellow-feeling will get me into obvious trouble with the usual suspects when the book has been read in full by his critics. Straw has been caught up in whatever role Britain turns out to have played on the edges of the Bush administration's programme of extraordinary rendition of suspects. He is routinely accused of disregard for civil liberties – by what he would cheerfully call "Hampstead lefties".
Only this weekend the then-new home secretary was accused by the Independent on Sunday of appointing a judge, Mr Justice Stuart-Smith, to re-examine the Hillsborough disaster file in 1997 while making it clear that he had seen the papers and did not feel a second independent investigation was warranted on the supposedly new facts. The judge reached a similar conclusion.
On all these and many other controversies Straw either denies knowledge of what was going on (rendition), defends his conduct as being wiser and worldlier than that of Hampstead lefties – who did not grow up on council estates, as he did – or says the judge (now old and ill) should have been more thorough.
And then there is Iraq. I don't recall ever discussing it with Straw. But his defence in Tuesday's Mail is not so different from my own over the years. He didn't much care for the armchair hawks in the Bush administration (nor did Colin Powell, whose military No 2 at the state department, Richard Armitage, confided that "they ain't never smelled fucking cordite") and feared – rightly – that Tony Blair risked being taken for granted by the White House.
Pause for a lateral thought from the Lib Dems' Brighton conference. Nick Clegg faces the same dilemma in coalition with David Cameron that Blair did in the Iraq coalition with Bush. How do you balance loyalty with dissent, and when does constructive engagement become compliance?
But on the overall judgment Straw, whose father had been a conscientious objector in the second world war, himself a CND activist, concluded that Saddam had run rings around the international community for decades and detected keenness in France, Russia and China to let him off the hook again in 2002-3 to pose a renewed threat to his Gulf neighbours. UNSCR 1441 was meant to be a credible threat of war and – my phrase, not Straw's – war was the least worst option in the circumstances.
Would he have done it again if he had known the intelligence on WMD was defective and the postwar occupation would be a shambles? No, but life is understood backwards while being lived forwards, he notes. Most informed people believed the WMD data at the time. For all its current troubles Iraq is a better place today.
There's plenty more to chew on. I had not realised how difficult Straw's childhood had been, his parents constantly in conflict, young Jack the clever but unhappy scholarship boy at boarding school, his private grief (a dead baby, sudden, ringing deafness in one ear) and deep depression, eased with psychotherapy only in his 30s. My, what private pain we all suffer!
The Brown-Blair stuff is familiar and Straw's revelation that Blair encouraged him to consider challenging Brown for the succession ("you could do it, Jack") confirms a suspicion I had when he suddenly swapped glasses for contact lenses. In the end he decided he couldn't – and that Brown was unbeatable except by the electorate (and Brown).
One of the Mail's extracts did intrigue me. Straw is the first memoir writer of this period whom I can recall knocking the halo off John Smith. A lovely man, he says, a brilliant and witty debater, but his immense inner confidence was not matched by courage. He also lacked the essential leader's instinct to see over the horizon – for trouble ahead.
That figures. Straw's judgment is sharpened by the bitter row he had with Smith, Labour leader from 1992 to his sudden death two years later, over the need to modernise the party's commitment to Clause IV socialism – the nationalisation of everything. But again, his verdict on Smith's strengths and weaknesses (they included a ferocious taste for strong drink) are consistent with my own fond memories of him.
Unlike most current politicians Smith was largely unbothered by the press. "That was a load of rubbish you wrote about me today, laddie" was as far as recrimination usually went. A good attitude. But he once assured me that if Labour could recapture Edinburgh council it could do the same all over England at a general election. Like much else it struck me as optimistic. But it was the real John, warts and all.
By painting in the warts Jack Straw has made a few more enemies. Good old Jack.