Layard Happiness

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I’m happy that it inspired me to write my first novel. The idea came to me riding my bike. I became a man possessed until I finished it. I told nobody I was doing it until it was done. It was like an enormous force within me that had to come out. I was so happy when I wrote it, even though I cried a lot on the way, so happy when it was published, so happy at the letters I get from people who say I am glad I am not alone, just as happy that people write and say at last I understand it a bit.

That is about fulfilment. Taking the bad and turning it into something good, a more creative expression of an experience and a time when I thought I was going to die.

My best friend John Merritt died of leukaemia. His daughter Ellie died of leukaemia. I became chairman of fundraising of Leukaemia and Lymphoma Research. Today I visited the haematology centre at the university and saw how £2.5m of the charity’s money is being spent on clinical trials. I met patients and in talking to them, not only are they alive, but I feel John and Ellie’s memory are alive in the work I do for the charity. Get good from bad.

So for me, happiness comes through fulfilment, personal, professional, political. I am an obsessive and a perfectionist and neither of these things are compatible with contentment, of self or of others. Yet I argue they are the traits that have led to at least some fulfilment, and the deeper happiness that has brought. I can get a five figure fee for a speech to a bank. I’m not going to say No. But I get more out of the pitch to M and S to get them to become a charity partner.

So what other moments of happiness can I recall?

I remember being on my uncle’s farm in Scotland, getting a call from my dad, saying I had got 3 As in my A levels. That meant I got my place at Cambridge. But the happiness was because I had really worked and it paid off.

I didn’t much like Cambridge. Messed around. Drank too much. Year abroad I was actually quite happy – free, finding myself, busking, writing soft porn and making money – By my last year I was even fairly happy at Cambridge.

Messed around. Became a trainee journalist. Loved it. Met Fiona. Some great times together but we have had some tough times. Read the diaries. I think if either of us were less strong characters we would not have survived together. But enduring relationships are fundamental to the kind of happiness I am outlining. We row, we snarl, we hear but don’t listen. But I’m happy we stayed together. When my first book came out Fiona was asked to write a piece on living with Alastair Campbell. Like it was aids or malaria. ‘On balance I am glad we stayed together’. Wow! … yet be honest, it is about the best most long relationships can hope for. On balance … glad we stayed together. And of course kids. Everyone says they love their kids. Yet so many don’t act in a loving way. It is hard. I read my diaries and the truth is I tried to devote any spare time to them. But I know it wasn’t enough. Work/life balance is hard. We should put our kids first but busy people can’t and don’t. But I am at my happiest when I am at my closest to them. And I know this too – a parent is never happier than his or her least happy child.

Happy moments. So many in sport. Calum at Scunthorpe when Burnley got promoted. Rory in Barcelona when United turned it round in injury time. Grace at the end of the London marathon saying John would have been so proud of me.

Here’s a thought. So many of those moments had me in tears. This fulfilment thing runs deep. I cannot watch an Olympic ceremony without tears in my eyes. Often even the athlete isn’t crying. But I see the flag, hear the anthem and I cry with joy for that person and his or her fulfilment. It can be a Bulgarian who got gold for Greco-Roman wrestling, but it’ll still set me off.

Sport is responsible for so much happiness and joy. If someone said think of a week when you were really happy – a whole week – I might well go for the first Soccer Aid. Grew up wanting to be a footballer. I was rubbish. Aged 49 I am training under Ruud Gullit and Gus Poyet and I end up playing with Maradona in front of 72k people. I come off and Rory says ‘sorry Dad, you were so  out of your depth.’ I know. And I don’t care. I loved it. I was happy.

I learn so much from sport because I love building teams. None of the team I built have gone out and joined the slagging I get from the media hacks who don’t know me. Greatest moments of satisfaction in the job with TB – probably Kosovo and Ireland. Because of the teamship required.

One step up is friendship. I know a lot of people. I don’t have many close friends. Not real friends I would count on 100 per cent. Fiona. The kids. Others in my family.

I have lost friends. John. Richard Stott, my editor three times, including on my diaries. Mark Gault, who I lived with at university. My dad. We all know grief. How can we still be happy? Only by learning from the experience, and living with what we learned. You know what was the best soundbite I heard in my time in Downing Street. Well, one of them, and it came not from TB but the Queen, post 9/11. ‘Grief is the price we pay for love.’ I was sitting near Bill Clinton. ‘Did you write that?’ he whispered. No, I said. ‘Well find out who did and hire him’.

Alex Ferguson once said to me that the true friend is the one who walks through the door as others are putting on their coats to leave. Great definition. I am happy with the friends I have. Some you’ll know – him, Tony, Philip Gould, Brendan Foster. Others you won’t.

So I have a great family. I have a small number of close friends. I live in a friendly street. I support a football club and a political party and two charities which all mean a lot to me. I have a complex sense of national identity – I am British first, then Scottish, then English, then Yorkshire, then London, then European.

All of these things make me connected. And the reason why money does not automatically make us happy is because it does not automatically connect us. If I had to list the countries where I sensed greater happiness it would not be the UK, nor the US. It might be Australia. It might be Ireland, certainly before the crash. It might also have been Ethiopia or Mozambique. It was where I felt a sense of people as families as communities as a people. And wealth had little to do with it.

I am lucky enough to have had two careers, and now a third weird mix as I work out what unemployed antichrists do. I get a lot of professional opportunities and make a decent living. I am lucky enough too to give of my time and money to others – and survey after survey shows giving is as likely to make us happy as taking. So if I can conclude with one of the defining British statements … I mustn’t grumble …

I feel happy enough with the life I have lived and the life I am living. But I won’t know for sure until the day I die. On that happy thought. Thank you.

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