The former Labour MP, now living with terminal cancer, has written a memoir of his colourful career. He talks about his faith, his contrarian spirit – and what he learned from his friend ‘Mrs T’
rank Field thinks of his new book,, as his “death mask”. Partly because the memoir is his last word on the highly distinctive features of his singular, principled career. But also, awfully, because doctors told him that cancer would likely finish him before he finished it. When we met last week he was full of different emotions, but the principal one he expressed was perhaps blessed relief; that writer’s relief of having met his deadline, of having got it done.
“I’ve always thought the House of Lords should be manned by good people,” he says with a smile in his voice. “I’m going to get there soon with the help of Daniel [his assistant who sits with him during our interview]. I’ve been out now in a wheelchair. It’s too cold this week. But when it warms up we will make it over there.”
The first meeting of the cabinet subcommittee Welfare to Work in 1997, with Frank Field back row, fourth from left.He wonders if I have any faith, and I explain that any tiny sentimental attachment I had for the Church of England disappeared with the synod’s“Yes,” he says, “the church is wicked on that. I’m speechless about it. I remember having an argument on it with Mrs T [who conflated homosexuality with sin]. Surely, I told her, it is faithfulness one is after. And integrity.
There was a short time when it looked like Field might be the philosopher king of Blair’s third way politics. In 1997 he was asked to be radical in his ideas for reform of the welfare state; when he was, Blair promptly sacked him. “He used me, which was OK, I was perfectly happy to be used,” he says now.“No, he didn’t talk about [belief] to me. If I sent something I’d written to him, he would say, ‘Of course, I agree with a lot of this, Frank.’ But he wouldn’t be specific.
Field’s father was a working-class Tory, a labourer in a crucible factory. “He went there from school as a labourer and retired as a labourer. He was building kilns with carbon blocks. It did his lungs in, and in the end, it did him in. He was bitter because he’d won a scholarship to the Blue Coat school and his parents were having none of it. Instead he left school at 14 and went to work.”“I was probably very annoying. I can guess why he had a few goes at me.