Nine years ago today, at about 7am on May 2nd 1997, I stumbled back to my small, pokey, smelly college room - a room bedecked with large-breasted calendars from men's lifestyle magazines and with small, plastic models of glucose and fructose molecules - to pass out along on my recently laundered bedsheets. Three hours later, I woke up, alarm buzzing, head split open by a nasty hangover, to the most beautiful, new, fresh, warm, sunny summer's morning. I'd just had a long, mad, freezing night as an unnoticed, whiskey-sodden part of the Oxford May-Day carnage on Port Meadow, along with assorted hippies, crusties, teenagers, sound systems, DJs, students and never-ending bottles of miscellaneous booze. Aside from vague memory of my best friend leading me back, shivering, cold and, incoherent to the centre of town across the misty meadows, wrapping me in her Ninjatune hoodie to keep me from passing out, that's about all I can recall from The Night Before.
And so, after barely three hours alcohol-sodden sleep, feeling only slightly guilty about the lectures I'd just skipped (who, in their adult life, really needs to know about the thermodynamics of glucose metabolism?), I wandered slowly to the coach station to get the bus to London. To go home. To vote for the very first time, in a general election.
Because this, really, was it. The Conservatives were finished. I'd helped out with the local Labour party campaign in Tooting during the Easter break, with a sense of utmost urgency. Door-to-door, handing out leaflets, engaging people in discussion in their nighties. After the false dawns of the previous campaigns, this was the last chance. The last hand to be played. The final gamble. If they fucked this up! If Tony Blair, with all his promise, with all our hope, with such incredible force of personality, failed now, then well... it felt like it would all be lost. Everything. Another five years of Tory government just didn't seem possible. So that bright, shining, gloriously fuzzy coach journey home to the capital sobered me up. It seemed, back then, to be an almost religious, metaphysical analogy for what the country was about to go through.
I wanted to vote Labour. I wanted to be part of it. As Freshers, keen, eager to impress, we'd spent a year talking about nothing else. I could have registered to vote in Oxford, voted yellow or Green to keep the Tories out, and been done with it. But I'd seen Red, I believed it all, everything they promised, everything they stood for - the rejection of clause 4; the primacy of the well-regulated market, the culmination of all the hard work Kinnock and Smith had put in modernising the party. Even this mysterious, unfathomable, American `Third Way'. The day, the country, seemed laden with history and I was back then, Blairite through and through.
And I remember the actual act, the actual insertion of ballot into slot, the loss of my democratic virginity, seeming ultimately so insignificant when compared to the build-up. The transition from Major minority - to Blairite adulthood was just a cross in a box. Just a cross in a box, with a pencil, folded, slotted into another box. I stood around for a few minutes afterwards expectantly... I wanted a fanfare. Or a certificate. Or something, anything to mark the occasion. I'd just voted! For the Labour party. In a general election. And, goddammit, they were going to win. I'd helped make history! But no, instead I smiled bashfully, awkwardly at the steward, wandered back to my mum's house up the road, grabbed a bite to eat from the fridge, jumped on the tube, then the coach, and wound up hours later back in Oxford, at my comfortable New Labour-leaning Oxford college, to watch the results come in.
We drank all afternoon and all evening, while we kept an eye on the glowing exit polls. It was actually happening. They - we - had done it. The Tories were finished. It was over. I was a child of Mrs Thatch, but this momentous, historical result meant the nightmare was over. No more sleaze, no more Quangos, no more lies, no more stumbling from crisis to crisis to protect a fragile minority while the country suffered. Stern-faced men in tailored suits on the Common Room television started to use words like `landslide' and `wipeout'. Jon Snow, animated as ever, just like the Rory Bremner pastiche, leapt around the widescreen as we sank pint after pint of pound-a-pint lager and kept a drunken eye out, cheering, for our home constituencies. And late that evening, was the Defining Moment we all remembered afterwards. Several hundred drunken students letting out a primal bellow, hugging each other, open-mouthed and flailing wildly, as Michael Portillo lost his seat to Stephen Twigg. Student legend had it that our bellow, our victory cry, could be heard across the city. The party went on and on, and it really felt like things couldn't get much better than this.
Nine years on, I'm nearly 30, and now everyone seems to ask where it all went so wrong. When will he go? Who will succeed him? Why did he have to do that? Are the Tories really that nice now? Because, as much as I was a child of Thatcher, my adult life seems to have been dominated by Tony Blair's New Labour project, with all its optimistic sheen and its vain, arrogant swagger and spin. Did `we' really win, back then on that balmy May evening? The question seems meaningless... who are `we' now? Where's that collective desire for change?
So thoroughly has Tony Blair and New Labour divorced ideology from politics, so huge is the vacuum of belief, so cynical the current climate, so competent the spin, that it now seems trendy to talk of `The Government' as one would remember the Captain of the Titanic - everyone knows the ship is sinking, but everyone wants to blame the icebergs. So today I find myself thinking back to that glorious, hopeful, hungover summer's day on the coach, with the beautiful rolling green sunlit hills that embodied that childish virgin optimism. Nine years, and nothing seems to have changed, and yet everything seems different. And that, ultimately, seems the ironic genius of New Labour's slogan all those years ago. Wherever you end up, whatever situation you find yourself in, be it at the beginning or the end:
Things Can Only Get Better.
