The Blunkett Tapes:My life in the bear pit is a book version of the audio diaries of the British MP David Blunkett. The diary details his time as a cabinet minister in the Labour government from 1997 to 2004.
A diary is a record with discrete entries arranged by date reporting on what has happened over the course of a day or other period. A personal diary may include a person's experiences, thoughts, and/or feelings, excluding comments on current events outside the writer's direct experience. Someone who keeps a diary is known as a diarist. Diaries undertaken for institutional purposes play a role in many aspects of human civilization, including government records, business ledgers, and military records. In British English, the word may also denote a preprinted journal format.
David Blunkett, Baron Blunkett, is a former British politician, having represented the Sheffield Brightside and Hillsborough constituency for 28 years through to 7 May 2015 when he stepped down at the general election. Blind since birth, and coming from a poor family in one of Sheffield's most deprived districts, he rose to become Education and Employment Secretary, Home Secretary and Work and Pensions Secretary in Tony Blair's Cabinet following Labour's victory in the 1997 general election.
The Cabinet of the United Kingdom is the collective decision-making body of Her Majesty's Government of the United Kingdom, composed of the Prime Minister and 21 cabinet ministers, the most senior of the government ministers.
The book was serialised in The Guardian from October 2006, and was published on 16 October 2006 by Bloomsbury. The diaries were also the subject of two episodes of the Channel 4 Dispatches documentary in October 2006, and were read on BBC Radio 4 as book of the week in October 2006.
The Guardian is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as The Manchester Guardian, and took its current name in 1959. Along with its sister papers The Observer and The Guardian Weekly, the Guardian is part of the Guardian Media Group, owned by the Scott Trust. The Scott Trust was created in 1936 "to secure the financial and editorial independence of the Guardian in perpetuity and to safeguard the journalistic freedom and liberal values of the Guardian free from commercial or political interference". The Scott Trust was converted into a limited company in 2008, with a constitution written so as to project the same protections for The Guardian as were originally built into the very structure of the Scott Trust by its creators. Profits are reinvested in journalism rather than to benefit an owner or shareholders.
Bloomsbury Publishing plc is a British independent, worldwide publishing house of fiction and non-fiction. It is a constituent of the FTSE SmallCap Index. Bloomsbury's head office is located in Bloomsbury, an area of the London Borough of Camden. It has a US publishing office located in New York City, an India publishing office in New Delhi, an Australia sales office in Sydney CBD and other publishing offices in the UK including at Oxford. The company's growth over the past two decades is primarily attributable to the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling and, from 2008, to the development of its academic and professional publishing division. The Bloomsbury Academic & Professional division won the Bookseller Industry Award for Academic, Educational & Professional Publisher of the Year in both 2013 and 2014.
Channel 4 is a British public-service television broadcaster that began transmission on 2 November 1982. Although largely commercially self-funded, it is ultimately publicly owned; originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA), the station is now owned and operated by Channel Four Television Corporation, a public corporation of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, which was established in 1990 and came into operation in 1993. With the conversion of the Wenvoe transmitter group in Wales to digital on 31 March 2010, Channel 4 became a UK-wide TV channel for the first time.
Blunkett is reported to have received £1m from his book, despite various criticisms made of it. Private Eye in particular has repeatedly lampooned the book by suggesting humorous alternative uses for the mountains of unsold copies of the weighty tome and printing "extracts" mocking the book as self-pitying.
Private Eye is a British fortnightly satirical and current affairs news magazine, founded in 1961. It is published in London and has been edited by Ian Hislop since 1986.
Prison Riots
As Home Secretary during the Lincoln Prison riots in 2002, Blunkett accused in his diaries the then Head of Prison Service, Martin Narey "of dithering over the riots"
Her Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for the Home Department, normally referred to as the Home Secretary, is a senior official as one of the Great Offices of State within Her Majesty's Government and head of the Home Office. It is a British Cabinet level position.
Sir Martin James Narey DL is an advisor to the British Government, and a former civil servant and charity executive. He served as Director General of the Prison Service of England and Wales between 1998 and 2003, and Chief Executive of the National Offender Management Service from 2004 to 2005. He was as Chief Executive Officer of the charity Barnardo's from 2005 to 2011. In 2013 he was appointed as a special advisor to the education secretary Michael Gove.
Narey has a different version of events. During a telephone conversation in October 2002 he told Blunkett he would not rush into ordering staff back into jail if it put lives at risk.
Narey is quoted in The Times : "Blunkett shrieked at me that he didn't care about lives, told me to call in the Army and 'machine-gun' the prisoners and - still shrieking - again ordered me to take the prison back immediately.
The Times is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register, adopting its current name on 1 January 1788. The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers, since 1981 a subsidiary of News UK, itself wholly owned by News Corp. The Times and The Sunday Times do not share editorial staff, were founded independently, and have only had common ownership since 1967.
"I refused. David hung up."
Narey also says he wrote up the details of the telephone conversation he took in a restaurant on the Isle of Wight on the evening of the riot and then reported it to senior Civil Servants as he was "disturbed" by it.
Narey claims that the Blunkett's reaction compared unfavourably with his Conservative and Labour predecessors and his successor secretaries, having seen four very closely — Michael Howard, Jack Straw, Blunkett and Charles Clarke. "I felt David’s response to a crisis was the least competent of those that I saw,” he said.
Michael Howard, Baron Howard of Lympne, is a British politician who served as the Leader of the Conservative Party and Leader of the Opposition from November 2003 to December 2005. He previously held cabinet positions in the governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major, including Secretary of State for Employment, Secretary of State for the Environment and Home Secretary.
John Whitaker Straw is a British politician who served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Blackburn from 1979 to 2015. Straw served in the Cabinet from 1997 to 2010 under the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. He held two of the traditional Great Offices of State, as Home Secretary from 1997 to 2001 and Foreign Secretary from 2001 to 2006 under Blair. From 2007 to 2010 he served as Lord Chancellor and the Secretary of State for Justice throughout Brown's Premiership. Straw is one of only three individuals to have served in Cabinet continuously under the Labour government from 1997 to 2010, the others being Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling.
Charles Rodway Clarke is an English Labour Party politician, who was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Norwich South from 1997 until 2010, and served as Home Secretary from December 2004 until May 2006.
Narey added: “It is important that officials feel confident in being able to speak the truth to power. Far too often in my experience, David terrified political advisers and those very close to him.”
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Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn, originally known as Anthony Wedgwood Benn, but later as Tony Benn, was a British politician, writer, and diarist. He was a Member of Parliament (MP) for 47 years between the 1950 and 2001 general elections and a Cabinet minister in the Labour governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan in the 1960s and 1970s. Originally a moderate, he was identified as being on the party's hard left from the early 1980s, and was widely seen as a key proponent of democratic socialism within the party.
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