General Election 2015: Politics is the messy art of compromise, unpopular as it may be

In the end, sometimes being willing to wait a little to make it possible to get a really lasting outcome is more important than a pyrrhic victory

David Blunkett joins the Labour candidate for Redcar Anna Turley on a campaigning visit last month (Getty Images)

There is no truer word than the saying that just as you learn to do the job well, the opportunity to do it disappears. Politics is like that. You learn as you mature, you mature to a point, and then the next generation understandably believe it is their turn.

I have certainly learnt a great deal in the 45 years I have been an elected representative at local and national level.

I have been deeply privileged and fortunate to serve eight years in the Cabinet and to have made many friends in politics who have stood by me through thick and thin.

One lesson I was taught many years ago by my old tutor, the late professor Bernard Crick, was that politics is a messy business. The problem is I didn’t really get the message early enough that I had to compromise. One of my failures was to want to get my own way. The electorate like that, they don’t get – and often don’t want – compromise. Yet it is necessary.

In the Cabinet, as I have often reflected since, I was a pain in the butt to my colleagues. This sprang partly from the tenacity that led me to overcome the many obstacles that were put in my way.

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But in the end, of course, sometimes being willing to wait a little to make it possible to get a really lasting outcome is more important than a pyrrhic victory.

The second lesson that I have learnt in politics is that it is necessary to create a tide of opinion that will embed what you are endeavouring to achieve, carry it forward and ensure it is difficult to undo.

That is the lesson of the NHS, but sadly not the case with some of the things I was really proud of in my years in government.

For instance, the Sure Start programme that Dame Tessa Jowell and I developed and hoped would be a lasting commitment to long-termism in social policy. Or the child trust fund which this Government did away with.

Or, talking of the next generation, the education maintenance allowance that has done so much to encourage young people in my constituency to take the bridge between school and adult life. This too has also been a victim of short-termism in a coalition government. The third lesson is a simple one. You will achieve things if you are prepared to put in the hours, to be a little more patient than sometimes I have been, and above all believe in participative and engaged politics.

That is why I am looking forward to working with colleagues in the University of Sheffield to find new ways to reaching out to those of the electorate who need democratic politics most but are most likely to be disengaged.

Whilst those with wealth and privilege to protect themselves from whatever happens to our economy and our key services will be voting on 7 May, the ones who often despair of politics most, and who see it as an irrelevance to their lives, are least likely to.

David Blunkett, the former Home Secretary, was a Sheffield MP from 1987-2015