Blunkett: the rise and fall (part 2)

Only the Daily Mail had made the controversy engulfing him its front-page lead. But another story worried the aides much more: in the Yorkshire Post, Lord Nolan, the first chairman of the anti-sleaze Committee on Standards in Public Life, had told the paper: "Blair should insist on ministers obeying the rules. I think that if anyone breaks the rules, they should be disciplined."

Mr Blunkett had admitted breaching the ministerial code by not getting clearance for three posts he took up after resigning as Home Secretary last December. Downing Street is adamant that Mr Blair did not sack Mr Blunkett, but Lord Nolan's comments certainly helped to tip the balance against him. "Nolan was not the decisive factor - but he was an important one," one insider told The Independent.

Was it a sacking or resignation? Although the official version of events was that Mr Blunkett resigned and Mr Blair was reluctant to see him go, Downing Street's jitters about Prime Minister's Questions suggest it was a bit of both.

The intervention of Lord Nolan was significant. The downfall of Mr Blunkett - who rose from poverty in Sheffield to become a possible successor to Mr Blair as Prime Minister - is seen by some at Westminster as a reassertion of the power of the Whitehall mandarins and watchdogs over our increasingly tarnished politicians.

Three other figures in the Whitehall machine played a part in the Blunkett resignation. A key mover was Sir Gus O'Donnell, the newly installed Cabinet Secretary. He ruled on Monday that Mr Blunkett had breached the ministerial code by not approaching the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments before taking up his three posts. Another was Lord Mayhew of Twysden, chairman of the advisory committee and former Tory cabinet minister. He wrote to Mr Blunkett three times reminding him that he should ask the committee's permission before taking on outside appointments. The fourth Whitehall figure to hammer a nail in Mr Blunkett's political coffin was Sir Alistair Graham, the current chairman of the anti-sleaze committee originally chaired by Lord Nolan. In a round of media interviews on Tuesday, he expressed his surprise that as senior a politician as Mr Blunkett did not know the rules laid down in the code.

On Monday, television crews had been tipped off that the Prime Minister would answer a question about Mr Blunkett, whose survival prospects were dominating the news agenda after The Independent on Sunday revealed at the weekend he had breached the code - and admitted doing so in a statement to the newspaper. A 90-minute meeting between Mr Blair and Mr Blunkett on Monday agreed that he should sell his family's shares in DNA Bioscience, one of the companies he worked for, and soldier on as Work and Pensions Secretary. But one fellow minister said: "The writing was on the wall. Tony agreed to see whether David could still do his job, but I think we all knew the answer."

His survival prospects dimmed on Tuesday when it emerged he had not told Mr Blair at Monday's session about a third post he had not cleared with the advisory committee.

Another factor in Mr Blunkett's eventual decision was believed to involve his acceptance of three paid speaking engagements during his five months outside government. Although he included them in the MPs' register of interests, they have not yet become public because he did so after the register was last published.

Mr Blunkett, once seen by ultra-Blairites as a potential "stop Brown" candidate when Mr Blair stands down, had few political friends left yesterday. There was a haemorrhage of support among Labour MPs, many of whom judged that his purchase of shares in DNA Bioscience was more of an offence than his breach of the ministerial code, since it looked "grubby and money-grabbing", as one put it.

Another critical factor was the lack of support for Mr Blunkett among his cabinet colleagues. Some of them have not forgiven him for the critical comments he made about them to his biographer, Stephen Pollard.

There was more sympathy for him in his native Sheffield last night. The city had certainly not seen his resignation coming. On Tuesday, Mr Blunkett told the Sheffield Star that he'd "done nothing wrong" and would not go. His change of heart left locals with a sense that a distant Westminster world had done for one of their own, according to the paper's editor Alan Powell. "To an extent, people feel he lives a double life; a normal existence as an MP and a glamour-and-glitter life in the Westminster village, which is a very bloody and paranoic place," said Mr Powell. "People feel he has been a victim of that place." His paper reflected that opinion, proclaiming yesterday that constituents - who returned Mr Blunkett in May with a 13,644 majority - would want to "shake his hand".

Mr Blunkett has travelled a long way from his humble roots. Born blind, because of a genetic mismatch between his elderly parents, Mr Blunkett did not realise that he was different from other children until he was sent to a special boarding school at the age of four. He talked like a sighted person, making remarks like "good to see you", and did almost everything that a sighted person could do. His first television appearance summed up his attitude to blindness, his social conservatism, and a flair for self advertisement. The BBC received a letter from a Sheffield teenager objecting to a shot of naked bodies, and invited him to London to be interviewed, not knowing that he was blind. He said later that he "could actually feel the sheer bewilderment, nay horror" when he turned up.

But there were, inevitably, limitations. Other politicians with busy schedules might wing their way through a meeting by sneakily reading the background papers while the meeting was in progress. Mr Blunkett could not do that. Some of his documents were transcribed in Braille, but many others were recorded on to tapes by his assistants, and Mr Blunkett's evenings were spent replaying the tapes, memorising the contests.

In addition to the handicap, which he described as an "inconvenience", he suffered a ghastly tragedy as a young man, when his father, Arthur Blunkett, foreman at a Sheffield gas works, fell into a vat of boiling water. Although the accident was attributable to the carelessness of another employee, the East Midlands Gas Board refused to compensate the widow on the grounds that the dead man was working beyond the normal retirement age and therefore she could not claim loss of earnings.

This experience shaped the left-wing views he held as a Sheffield councillor. As Sheffield's youngest ever councillor - he was first elected in 1970 at the age of 22, and was council leader from 1980 to 1987 - he championed numerous left-wing causes, including high spending, and unilateral nuclear disarmament, endearing him to constituency party activists. He was the only non-MP elected to Labour's national executive committee by the constituency parties.

But having entered the Commons in 1987, he rose quickly to the front bench, becoming shadow education secretary under Mr Blair, although he had never been close to him and had remained neutral during the leadership contest that followed John Smith's death. He showed a final spark of rebellion in his new job by threatening to put VAT on private school fees, for which he was instantly slapped down by Mr Blair and Gordon Brown. After that, his uneasy political relationship with Mr Blair developed into one of the closest alliances in modern politics.

Despite his past left-wing views on economics and nuclear weapons, Mr Blunkett had always been socially conservative on issues such as education, crime and personal behaviour. His strict views on these matters were forged in his personal battle to escape from the poverty and low expectations of his childhood. He considered that bad <BR>

social and school discipline hurt the poor more than the rich. His successful battle to overcome extraordinary disadvantages also caused him to behave in a manner that others found both arrogant and indiscreet. The most famous of his lapses was when he made scathing comments about Jack Straw, Tessa Jowell and other cabinet ministers to his biographer - though all he did was to say "on the record" what he would often say in private conversation. "He has shitbagged so many of us so <BR>

often that it's extraordinary to see him making stupid mistakes himself, and there isn't much sympathy for him," one former minister said yesterday.

Given the circumstances of his fall, it is a curious fact that his views on sex were puritanical, by normal Labour standards. He frequently railed against "political correctness" even in his left-wing days, and in opposition he was one of only two members of Labour's shadow cabinet to vote against lowering the age of consent for gays to 16.

Ultimately, it was his naivety and clumsiness in sexual relations that brought him down. He has written about the problems and humiliations he experienced as a blind teenager trying to meet girls. He married his first girlfriend, and fathered three boys, now all in their twenties. But the marriage ended when he moved to London to take up his position as an MP in 1987. During the whole of his spectacularly successful career in national politics, he suffered from private loneliness, which he thought he had overcome when he met Kimberly Fortier, the American publisher of The Spectator magazine. He believed her relatively recent marriage to Stephen Quinn, publisher of Vogue, was defunct, and when he learnt that she was pregnant, he thought he had a new family. The relationship ended instead in destructive mutual recriminations. He fought a court battle to establish his paternity of the boy, William, who is now aged three, and to gain access.

The conflict was made worse by mutual suspicion, because when details of the relationship were carried in the News of the World, just as it was breaking up, each suspected the other of leaking to journalists. The truth appears to be that neither was responsible for the leak: the newspaper had simply put a tail on both of them, and had uncovered in passing the names of other men Mrs Quinn was seeing.

Mr Blunkett had to resign from the Home Office in December over allegations that he used his office to speed up her nanny's visa application.

Having resigned, he took up his directorships and bought shares in DNA Bioscience because he felt he had been spending his older sons' inheritance on legal fees in his battles with Mrs Quinn. The shares cost him just £15,000 - and, despite his insistence on Monday that his sons would sell them, they may return a handsome profit. But he paid a heavy political price for them.