Alan Johnson: ‘Cutting the winter fuel allowance won’t leave pensioners out of pocket’

The former Labour home secretary turned crime writer on the future of his party and drawing parallels between Harold Wilson and Keir Starmer

Is Harold Wilson the real role model Keir Starmer is taking for his premiership? Rather than the more obvious Tony Blair? The question has been asked many times since the July election. Like Wilson, Starmer is a pragmatic moderate without much political baggage, came from humble beginnings, had a career before politics, and ended long spells of Conservative rule.
It was not, protests Alan Johnson, the former Labour home secretary, a theory he wanted to promote when he settled down to pen a concise biography of Wilson. But his book, published this month within the first hundred days of Starmer taking office, will inevitably excite new comparisons.
“I didn’t write it wanting to make any links,” insists the 74-year-old politician turned memoirist and crime novelist. “I didn’t know Keir Starmer was going to win the election when I wrote it.”
Really, when the whole Conservative cabinet appeared to believe a Starmer victory was inevitable? Johnson gives me one of his trademark, warm, cheeky-chappie, toothy grins that dug him out of many a political scrape. 
“I do see it now,” he concedes. “But here’s the thing. Keir Starmer is older now than Harold Wilson was when he stepped down.” After winning four election victories – 1964, 1966 and twice in 1974 – Wilson resigned at the age of 60 in 1976. 
Breaking off intermittently to munch a lunchtime sandwich, Johnson is relaxed, almost jovial in his linen jacket and open-neck shirt when we meet, brightening up an otherwise unremarkable borrowed office in the City of London. Taking a step back from frontline politics – he resigned as shadow chancellor in 2011 and retired from the House of Commons in 2017 – is obviously suiting him well.  
And perhaps there is a hint of relief that he isn’t still in frontline politics, having to face the negative headlines over winter fuel payments to pensioners that have ended the post-election honeymoon. He had no interest in moving up to the House of Lords as senior politicians often do, he says, “though it would have been nice to have the chance to say no”.
How does he feel 62-year-old Starmer is doing thus far into his tenancy of 10 Downing Street? “Absolutely first-class in every sense,” comes the inevitable reply.
Even the decision to cut back on winter fuel payments? It was, after all, in Johnson’s tenure as secretary of state for work and pensions that pension credit was introduced to lift older people out of poverty. Now they risk falling back into it.
“It is just bizarre that I get the winter fuel payment, that Richard Branson gets it, even Sir Paul McCartney gets it, and we don’t need a few hundred quid extra. We are paying it to people who don’t need it. The people who do need it are the ones on pension credit and they will keep getting it.”
There is, though, a cliff edge, where many pensioners who do not quite qualify for pension credit but are hard-pressed will be out of pocket. “What about the triple lock? There is going to be an enormous increase in pensions this year.”
He points to how the incoming Labour government dealt with the recent riots. “That is Keir’s background” (as a former director of public prosecutions).  
Among the cities affected by the violence and disorder that followed three young girls being stabbed to death at a dance class in Southport was Hull, where Johnson was the local MP for two decades before standing down in 2017. He still lives nearby with his third wife, businesswoman Carolyn Burgess, a past president of the city’s Chamber of Commerce, 13 years his junior.  
Their marriage came a year after he divorced his second wife, Laura, mother of one of his four grown-up children. They had separated three years earlier, after her affair with his ministerial police protection officer. 
“Hull,” he recalls “is where the rioters went for three Romanian guys in the car, trying to drag them out.” Giving a 17-year-old boy who was part of that mob a 12-month detention order, a district judge described his offending as “some of the worst” he had seen. 
Johnson knows the people of Hull better than most – he’s now the chancellor of the city’s university. What made some of them behave this way?  
“There is a danger,” he replies “of getting into cause because, when you do, you start giving some credence to their actions. What [far-Right activist] Tommy Robinson wants people to feel is that these rioters are the dispossessed white working-class who have been left out of everything, ignored for years.”
Most of those people he watched rioting in footage of the disturbances in Hull didn’t fit that description, he says. “What I saw and recognised was people getting involved who love a punch-up. They’d be doing it at the football if they weren’t doing it there.”
He believes that the excuse being offered that the riots revealed an underclass who are excluded from opportunity and economic prosperity is just that – an excuse. “That’s not my experience of Hull where there has been a big transformation in education since I arrived as an MP in 1997. Then 75 per cent of kids left school at the earliest possible time with no qualifications. That all got turned around: new schools; new football stadium; Siemens coming to Hull; all these well-paid jobs.”
And then there is the racism. “That is basically what it was. There is someone here who is different from us. I wouldn’t say they are all racists, but they have gone for the Tommy Robinson line that ‘these people’ are here talking your jobs, taking taxpayers’ money, living in hotels’.”  
As someone who once ran the Home Office, he acknowledges that immigration remains an issue. When Labour was last in power, between 1997 and 2010, net annual immigration quadrupled.
“Under the Tories, net migration was meant to come down to the tens of thousands [a pledge made by successive Conservative prime ministers from David Cameron onwards]. It was a foolhardy, stupid thing to promise repeatedly and now look at what we have got – record immigration.”
Yet he steadfastly refuses to accept that the British public is against immigration. They just want there to be limits.  
“Generally the decent, thoughtful position on immigration is that it has been good for this country, that people should come here, speak the language, pay their taxes, and obey the law, but also that it needs to be controlled. There are very few people saying it shouldn’t be controlled at all.”  
His comments are not so far from the message Reform preached at the general election. “I can understand why people listened when we were in the EU and Farage would say, ‘but immigration is not controlled’. Now, though, we are out of the European Union. And we’ve had a points-based immigration system for 13 years. The people who come here legally now stand at 600,000 under the last government that said it should be reduced to tens of thousands. So I understand that frustration.”
And does he understand the same frustration about those who crossed the Channel in small boats? “Forget the people coming over in boats. That is a tiny number.” More than 20,000 have crossed in the year so far, up 3 per cent on the same period last year. 
“We need to do something about the issue with asylum seekers to get their claims turned around quickly. If they shouldn’t be here, send them back. That’s got to be done.” 
Johnson’s sunniness has dimmed. He is clearly uncomfortable getting into policy detail. His way of returning the talk to his book is unorthodox and typical. 
“The strange thing in Hull,” he says, “is that there were three shops there broken into [by the rioters]. They broke into Lush and a guy started handing out cosmetics. Then they broke into Greggs and did the same. The third shop was Waterstone;s but they didn’t break into it.”
He laughs. “I thought they might be coming out with some of my books.”
Growing up in the 1950s, in pre-gentrification Notting Hill in west London, Johnson, his mother, Lily, and older sister Linda occupied two rooms in a tenement building condemned years earlier as unfit for human habitation. His fly-by-night father, Steve, who played piano in pubs, had run off with a barmaid and was, “a dark shadow in our lives”, he writes in the first volume of his best-selling, award-winning memoir series, 2013’s This Boy. 
“Grenfell Tower wasn’t there then but was built later just about where we lived,” he recalls. “Not much else has changed. One of the details that came out after the fire was that the life expectancy of a teenage boy from round there today is 16 years less than for a similar boy born a few miles away in the smart parts of South Kensington.” 
When Johnson was 13, his mother died at the age of just 42 during heart surgery. The authorities wanted to take him into care, but Linda, 16, refused and persuaded them to let her look after him in a local authority flat in Battersea. At the nearby grammar school – he was a smart lad – his twin passions were music and writing. 
“I always wanted to be an author or a rock star,” he remembers. While working at Tesco, he recorded a single at 16 and almost made it as a musician (the subject of volume four of the memoirs – 2018’s My Life). Now he is topping the literary charts. 
Writing takes up most of his time today. “You don’t just knock it off in your tea break,” he jokes.
He puts it all down to an English teacher at Sloane Grammar School, Peter Carlin, still alive. This Boy is dedicated to him. 
The next two volumes of his memoir, 2014’s Please, Mr Postman (chronicling his time as a postie) and The Long and Winding Road (2016) about his political career after entering the Commons in the Labour landslide of 1997, also won prizes and plaudits.
“Then I got sick of writing about myself so I turned to crime. You can only squeeze so much juice out of a lemon, so I thought I’d try my hand at fiction. You’re not entitled to call yourself a writer until you’ve developed characters and plots.” 
And he has. The Late Train to Gipsy Hill (2021), One Of Our Ministers is Missing (2022) and Death on the Thames (2024) has amply demonstrated his versatility The first has just been optioned for a TV adaptation by the BBC. A fourth is on its way – Georges Simenon’s Maigret novels are his gold standard, he says – but it was put to one side so he could tackle the Harold Wilson biography.
Wilson, he says, was just as much a presence in the first half of his life as the Beatles (the titles of all four of his autobiographical books are songs written or performed by the band). “I was a schoolboy when Harold Wilson came to power, and a trade union official when he left power. I left school under Harold Wilson. I got married under Harold Wilson. I got a council house under Harold Wilson.”
That was in Slough. He married at 18, had three children by the age of 20, and settled down to work as a postman, rising to lead the Union of Communication Workers as its general secretary.
What intrigues him is why the pipe-smoking Wilson wasn’t more celebrated. “There is so much interest now in prime ministers, what with three in a fortnight, or whatever it was, and I was always slightly puzzled as to why Harold Wilson’s stock fell so quickly.”
His conclusion is that it comes down to a combination of factors: a lingering memory of his behaviour when he devalued the pound in 1967 that left him ever after with a reputation as “a slippery character”; his role in calling a referendum in 1975 on joining the European Union; and “the Lavender List and Marcia”. 
Marcia Williams, ennobled by Wilson as Lady Falkender (or “Lady Forkbender” as Private Eye had it), was head of his political office, one of the most powerful figures in all four of his governments, and also one of the most controversial. His resignation honours list in 1976, allegedly written by her on lavender notepaper, caused controversy because of its eccentric choices for royal recognition.
There was remorseless speculation at the time and since then that Wilson and Williams were lovers, something both of them denied, and successfully sued those who said it publicly. Johnson shakes his head. 
“I find it a hard story to believe. It just doesn’t fit with him. He was very good at promoting women and they never told stories about him being like a Boris Johnson character.”
He exercises the same caution at the recent revelation that Wilson also had an affair during his final period in office with Janet Hewlett-Davies, a press officer 22 years younger. Among his own sources, Johnson reports, is Sue Utting, who worked for Wilson alongside Hewlett-Davies in 10 Downing Street (and then much later with Johnson in his parliamentary office when he was an MP). “Sue didn’t think they were having an affair and she says she saw Wilson go upstairs every night.”
In the biography, he hails Wilson as decent, unpompous, kind, “a master of the political arts” and someone who improved the lives of ordinary people when in office. How many of those qualities does he see in Starmer?  
“You can draw those parallels with Wilson, not least because Keir has said that Wilson was his favourite Labour leader and has also said, ‘I’m not ideological’.”
The book also describes Wilson as a good speaker and having a “relaxed charm”. That isn’t Starmer. 
“Wilson had to learn to be a good speaker. One of his first speeches from the front bench was described by a journalist as ‘mountainous sandwiches of tedium’. He taught himself to do it, developed the cut-and-thrust and the repartee.”
So Starmer could get better with a bit of training? “Absolutely. He can learn.”
What about the relaxed charm, though? Despite his best efforts in repeatedly retelling the story of his early years, Starmer really struggles to connect with the public.  
“You can’t teach anyone relaxed charm,” Johnson accepts. “The analogy is with Gordon [Brown] who always looked severe but actually was much more fun to be with than he appeared. It’s is a trait that is common in politics that makes it impossible for them to be anywhere near natural when talking in a professional capacity.”
There are areas where Johnson would like to see the incoming Labour government go further and faster. On the economy, for example (he was for four months Ed Miliband’s shadow chancellor in 2010-11).
“You can’t do a [Liz] Truss. She had the right idea that we needed growth but the wrong formula for getting there. We’ve got mountains of cash that companies are sitting on and not investing.” The answer, he suggests, is to take a fresh look at public-private partnerships.  
Didn’t we try those under New Labour with the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) which bequeathed huge bills that taxpayers are still paying off? “We haven’t had any system of public-private partnership in this country since 2018 and there are other forms that are not PFI that could deal with some of the capital problems in the NHS.”
He is also keen, as Hull University chancellor, to see student tuition fees put up – never a vote-winner for a serving politician. “Like other universities, we are having to make savings, but we need to increase student fees with the cost of living.”
Wouldn’t more government funding for higher education work just as well? “That has to be a part of it, but I have never seen anything wrong with students who go on to higher education making a contribution. It’s not like school where you have got an entitlement.”
It is said firmly and finally. There was never, after all, an entitlement that allowed the young Alan Johnson from the wrong end of Kensington to go off to study for a degree. And he’s done alright for himself.
In an effort to resurrect the happy-go-lucky Alan Johnson before we end, I fall back on Harold Wilson again, and suggest to him that if we are looking for a similarly charming, unpompous, pragmatic and popular politician to follow in the footsteps of Labour’s most electorally-successful leader, perhaps we ought to be looking at him, not Keir Starmer.
The smile is flashing again. “Not at all. For a start I couldn’t smoke a pipe.” 
Harold Wilson by Alan Johnson is published by Swift on 26 September, £16.99 hardback