Room at the top

"EXCUSE me, do you know where North Terrace is?” The young man by the war memorial in the centre of Crook shakes his head and says: “Not round here.” A different tack. “Do you know where Hilary Armstrong lives?” His face breaks into a smile and he points to a red gate on the corner of the dipping green. “Most round here know that one,” he says.

Ms Armstrong has been MP for North Durham since 1987, as her father, Ernie, was before her, from 1964.

Propped up by the sink inside the house by the red gate is a black-and-white picture of Mr Armstrong with Bobby Robson, holding aloft West Auckland’s first World Cup.

But the line goes further back. Ms Armstrong’s father, John, was a miner in Crook who, fired as much by Methodism’s flame as a burning love of socialism, became a county councillor.

So, it is an era that is ending, as 64-year-old Ms Armstrong stands down at this election.

“I remember when I got married in 1992, at the reception Dad loved talking to Tony Blair and John Burton about what Tony was trying to do to the party,” says Ms Armstrong, sitting in the large kitchen. “Dad was absolutely committed to education – we used to spend hours and hours talking about education policy – but he knew the party was letting a lot of people down.

“It had lost touch with the ambition of ordinary working people and was hung up with its internal obsessions, so he was really thrilled to see what Tony was doing.”

Ms Armstrong played her part, too. She’d known Mr Blair since he’d beaten her to the Sedgefield seat in 1983, and it was she as a party fixer who helped win the milestone “one member one vote” decision at the 1993 party conference, going up and down in a lift four times before a union had worked out how to abstain.

“Tony would always say that I was political to the end of my fingertips,” she says. “I don’t just see issues, I see them in a wider political context.”

After New Labour came to power in 1997, Ms Armstrong held several junior ministerial posts, helping establish the Sure Start children’s centres and the regional development agency network – key components of Labour’s record.

“I was regions minister when Gateshead was offered the Sage because Newcastle had turned it down,” she says. “When it came to the final crunch, they were a bit short of money and I went to John Prescott, and he said: ‘Poncey music in Gateshead, what do you want that for?’, but now the Sage has really touched the whole of the region.”

She came to the fore, though, after 2001 when she was chief whip during the fraught period when Mr Blair was trying to persuade the country, and his backbenchers, of the need to go to war in Iraq.

Ms Armstrong was with Mr Blair during his darkest moments in spring 2004.

“He never got depressed,” she says, “but he did take it all to heart. He was really worried about whether he was persuading the Americans about this blessed roadmap to Middle East peace and then, of course, there were other challenges at home. He was being very well pushed from next door, ‘when are you going?’, and he was worried about the effect on his children, in particular.

“We had to persuade him that he was doing alright, really, and that he couldn’t control everything and his duty was to stay rather than to go.”

The chief whip had to get Mr Blair a Commons majority to go to war, and Ms Armstrong was accused of strongarm tactics.

“I never bullied at all,” she says. “Clare Short thanked me for the way I had dealt with her but subsequently castigated me on the radio. You just have to accept that, because the whip can never go out and say what actually happened.”

The decision on the war is possibly the defining moment of Mr Blair’s 12 years in office.

“You can run away from decisions but eventually they come back,” she says. “It was hard, but I’m not a pacifist.”

Uppermost in her mind was the need for the United Nations to be counted, and the fear that Saddam Hussein was dangerous.

“I still believe that those weapons were somewhere, and he certainly had the capacity and probably the will to use them,” she says. “I really don’t know what happened to them, whether he’s buried them or shifted them over the borders, but he certainly had them.”

As the talk moves on to the next stage of her career, her words become less staccato. She’d chosen them so precisely when discussing the war but suddenly, even though she’s not the most demonstrative of people, her enthusiasm bubbles out.

“I really loved the job at the Cabinet Office,”

she says. “It was getting back to what I came into politics for.”

She talks in detail about reducing the number of homeless roughsleepers, and she talks with pride about her scheme, piloted in Durham, to give every pregnant girl aged 19 or younger a nurse until their child is two.

SHE accepts, though, that politics is in crisis. Politicians have to learn to handle accountability better, but the public need “to think through more positively what they are looking for” from their politicians.

In her future, she intends to see more of her husband and her football club, Sunderland.

She will be chairing the Tony Blair Sports Foundation, and working for voluntary organisations at home and in Africa. She even hopes to devise a tourist trail up Weardale, visiting historic Methodist chapels, in the footsteps of John Wesley.

She believes she leaves her constituency in a better condition than when she took over, with the minimum wage and working families tax credits making “a huge difference”.

“I’m really, really upset that I’m going out when a recession is biting. However, unemployment levels are much, much lower than when I came in and that is important,” she says. “I have seen huge improvements in schools – pretty much every single school has had work done to improve it, every single school has more staff, and the attainment of children is improving, in some places in leaps and bounds, and that is just great.”

She tails off, almost wistfully. “I have been incredibly lucky and privileged,” she says. “It has been a wonderful opportunity to meet people I would never have met, to go to places I would never have been able to go, and to be involved in the most important decisions.”

Now she is handing her seat at the top table of history to somebody else.