Читать книгу: «Back from the Brink: The Inside Story of the Tory Resurrection»

PETER SNOWDON

Back from the Brink

The Inside Story of the Tory Resurrection

To Julia, with all my heart

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Introduction

ONE: The Makings of a Landslide

TWO: Lost in the Wilderness May 1997–June 2001

THREE: Staring Into the Abyss June 2001–October 2003

FOUR: False Dawn November 2003–May 2005

FIVE: Signs of Life May–December 2005

SIX: Leaving the Comfort Zone December 2005–December 2006

SEVEN: The Great Escape January–October 2007

EIGHT: Riding High October 2007–September 2008

NINE: Crunch Time September 2008–April 2009

TEN: Aiming for the Summit May–December 2009

Sources

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

‘We will be tested. I will be tested. I’m ready for that … So yes, there is a steep climb ahead. But I tell you this: the view from the summit will be worth it.’ David Cameron could not have chosen a more apt metaphor to describe the journey his party has to complete if it is to return to power. The scale of the task is formidable. Thirteen years ago, the British people ejected the Conservative Party from office in a landslide. So modest has the Conservative electoral recovery been since 1997 that the party Cameron leads into this year’s election is barely halfway up the mountain.

In order to win the general election with an overall majority of one, his party has to achieve something quite historic: it would have to win 117 seats, and a swing from Labour of 6.9 per cent. Not since 1931 has the party managed to make up so much ground in one election. The greatest swing the Tories have achieved since the Second World War is 5.2 per cent, in the election that brought Margaret Thatcher to power in 1979. Then, the Conservatives went into the election with 277 seats. Now the party has just under two hundred. David Cameron will have to emulate the success Tony Blair accomplished in 1997, transforming the electoral landscape of Britain in just one night. It is a very tall order, but for all the difficulties they face, under Cameron the Conservatives stand a far better chance of success than at any time since 1992 – the last time the party won a general election.

The thirteen years since Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide victory have been a chastening experience for a party that had become used to power. Before 1997, the Conservative Party’s dominance was such that the twentieth century became known as the ‘Conservative century’.¹ The party was in office, either with a working majority or as the lead partner of a coalition, for two-thirds of the century. By contrast, Labour won power with a majority above single figures on just three occasions: 1945, 1966 and 1997. In most cases Labour governments were swiftly expelled from office by a resurgent Tory opposition. The party’s extraordinary success in recovering and holding on to power was due to its ability to adapt its policies and its appeal. More often than not, the Conservatives used their time in opposition wisely. The clearest example is after Labour’s landslide in 1945. Within six years the Conservatives were returned to office, having revitalised their organisation and conducted a wide-ranging review of policy. Although Winston Churchill retained his standing as a popular war leader, his party had become deeply unpopular and out of touch by the end of the Second World War. By learning the lessons of defeat after 1945, the party was able to move on and forge a new direction.

The defeat in 1997 left the Tories with fifty or so fewer seats than after the Labour landslide of 1945, but the subsequent period in the wilderness would be far less propitious. The roots of the party’s recent difficulties can be found in the Thatcher revolution. Mrs Thatcher and her government transformed British politics. The Conservatives’ electoral success in the 1980s was due in large part to her forceful and determined leadership. But when she began to lose touch with the country after her third successive election victory, it would not be long before many in the party turned on her. The Tories’ appeal to voters narrowed. They had become identified with the free market and individual freedom, but were perceived as being indifferent to social problems.

The bitterness that stemmed from the trauma of Mrs Thatcher’s downfall and the divisions that underpinned it would sap the party’s appetite for power in the 1990s. New Labour was born out of the rise and fall of Mrs Thatcher. Only by adapting to the Thatcher revolution did Labour find a way of becoming electable again. After eighteen long years in opposition it was desperate to win office, and as a result it embraced the formula that had sustained the Tories in government for so much of the twentieth century: adaptability and a hunger for power. The Conservative Party lost these qualities long before 1 May 1997.

In failing to adapt to the realities of the new political scene, the Conservatives dug themselves into an even deeper hole after the Labour landslide in 1997. Ignoring the public mood, they retreated to the margins of political debate, choosing a succession of unelectable leaders through a combination of bitter enmity and ideological fixation. So grave was the malaise that had taken hold of the party, and so weak was its leadership, that in the autumn of 2003 it teetered on the brink. The prospect of a third consecutive electoral defeat devastating the party was very real.

In their own peculiar ways, each of the three leaders between 1997 and 2005 – William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard – attempted to broaden the party’s appeal in opposition. Why and how they failed forms the story of the first half of this book. While Howard was unable to attract greater support among the electorate, the party began to regain a sense of discipline and purpose after years of infighting and recrimination. But the personal feuds and ideological differences that had beset the parliamentary party since the early 1990s threatened to return with a vengeance after the defeat in May 2005. Annihilation had been averted, but the Tories had recovered little ground.

The emergence of a new generation of modernising Conservative politicians, led by David Cameron and George Osborne, untainted by the dying days of the last Tory government, is pivotal to this story. If the Conservative Party’s decline was shaped by the legacy of Margaret Thatcher, the twists and turns in its resurrection have been influenced by the other commanding figure in British politics of recent times: Tony Blair. By learning the lessons from New Labour’s electoral success under Blair, this new generation of modernising Tories have succeeded where their predecessors so visibly failed.

In December 2005, David Cameron achieved something few before him had ever accomplished. In just four and a half years he had gone from novice backbencher to Leader of the Opposition. He would have the same amount of time to pull the party back to the centre of British politics and reinvigorate it to the point of being a credible alternative government. It would be an audacious undertaking for a thirty-nine-year-old politician. The second half of Back from the Brink tells the story of how Cameron has sought to change his party. In essence, he has tried to heal old wounds and restore a sense of balance to Conservatism by reviving a concern for social reform.

Cameron’s project to modernise the party has given it a new lease of life, yet at times it has seemed perilously close to falling apart. There have been three moments when his leadership was under severe pressure: after Gordon Brown became Prime Minister in June 2007; in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis in October 2008; and during the expenses crisis in May 2009. On each occasion, the Conservative Party’s recovery was at stake, as was Cameron’s authority as leader. The fact that the Cameron project was in peril on each occasion exposes the flaws in the party’s strategic direction, but at the same time it throws light on the tactical agility of its leadership in bouncing back.

David Cameron’s mission to revive the fortunes of the Conservative Party has encountered reversals, yet it remains intact. Whether voters believe that he and his party are ready to take on the responsibility of governing the country is still to be seen. In Gordon Brown, the Conservatives face a battle-hardened Prime Minister who has been at or near the summit of British politics for the best part of two decades, both in opposition and in government. Brown is a great survivor: he has seen off two plots from within his Cabinet to remove him in the last two years. For the man Cameron describes as ‘a steamroller who just keeps going’, the general election will be a hard-fought battle to the end.

Much is at stake for both the old warhorse and the young pretender of British politics. For Brown, leading Labour into a fourth term would represent the most impressive recovery by an incumbent government in modern history. For Cameron, forming a government would end the longest uninterrupted period in opposition his party has endured since 1832. A fourth successive election defeat, however narrow, would represent a massive failure for everything Cameron has sought to achieve in the past four years, and would reduce the party to a state of acrimony and division. If the Conservatives cannot win amidst the economic gloom that pervades the country in 2010, when can they?

Based on more than 120 interviews with figures from across the Conservative Party – from successive leaders to representatives of the grassroots – this book tells the story of how a once formidable fighting force in British politics stared into the abyss before making its way back to be in contention for power. By talking to a wide range of party insiders, both on and off the record, I hope to have built up a candid and unvarnished account that sheds new light on a dramatic tale of decline and renaissance.

The Conservative Party may have come back from the brink of disaster, but rediscovering its winning formula has been far from easy. As David Cameron and his party prepare for their steep climb to the summit in the months ahead, it would probably be best if they did not look down. Theirs has been a long, harsh and often painful journey. I hope that readers will find it a compelling one.

Peter Snowdon

December 2009

ONE The Makings of a Landslide

As the sun rose on a fine spring day, an exuberant Tony Blair left a rally on the South Bank of the River Thames and headed for his Islington home to catch a few hours’ sleep. Blair had spent much of the early morning soaking up the adulation of friends, colleagues and supporters. ‘A new dawn has broken, has it not?’ he exclaimed to a party that had not won a general election for twenty-three years. On 1 May 1997 the country had placed its faith in Labour after the party had spent almost two decades in the wilderness. Friday, 2 May would usher in a new regime in Downing Street and a new era for British politics.

There was not much left of the old regime. It had been swept from office in a landslide. ‘I remember driving back to London from Cornwall at 5 a.m. and realising that there were great swathes of the West Country that no longer had a Conservative MP. I didn’t drive through a single Conservative seat until Wiltshire.’¹ Sebastian Coe, the former double Olympic gold medallist, was one of 178 Tory MPs who lost their seats. From Lands End to John o’Groats, voters had purged themselves of a party that once dominated Britain’s electoral landscape. Half the parliamentary party had been wiped out overnight: only 165 were left standing by the morning. The party had polled just 31 per cent of the vote, its lowest showing since 1832, the year of the Great Reform Act. Middle England had deserted the party in droves. Leafy Birmingham Edgbaston, true blue since the Second World War, was the first of many seats to fall to New Labour’s advance as Tony Blair led his party to victory with an overall majority of 179, a post-war record. Not one Conservative MP was returned to Westminster from Scotland or Wales. The surviving rump represented the outskirts of London, the Home Counties and a retinue of rural shires and market towns. The Liberal Democrats, recording the best result for a third party since 1929, sliced into Tory heartlands, picking up votes that had been cast tactically to ensure total defeat of John Major’s government.

Seven Cabinet ministers lost their seats, including the Foreign Secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, and the charismatic Defence Secretary, Michael Portillo. Portillo’s defeat in Enfield Southgate, a plush suburban district of north London, was the biggest scalp of the night. His should have been a safe seat. Iain Duncan Smith, a backbench MP in nearby Chingford and Woodford Green, had realised that he and Portillo were in trouble. ‘Labour was all over seats like mine and Portillo’s. We spent the final week of the campaign working my seat as if it was a marginal. I held on but everywhere around me went.’²

For some time before the votes were cast, Michael Portillo had been contemplating life in opposition. Halfway through the campaign he summoned Andrew Cooper and Michael Simmonds, two bright young aides from Central Office, to his home, and gave them a piece of paper on which he had sketched out the themes for a leadership campaign in the aftermath of a Conservative defeat, asking them to finish it off.³ Portillo had passed up what might have been his best opportunity to lead the party only two years previously. When Major threw down the gauntlet in June 1995 by putting himself forward for re-election as party leader after three years of backbiting, the ‘darling of the Right’ refused to stand against him. It soon emerged that he was in fact planning to challenge Major if the contest went into a second round, after engineers were spotted installing telephone lines outside what was to be his campaign headquarters. ‘I appeared happy to wound but afraid to strike: a dishonourable position,’ he later confessed.⁴ Two years on, Portillo’s hopes of making a second attempt began to slip away when an opinion poll in the Observer just days before the election suggested that Enfield Southgate was too close to call. ‘Tell me why this is wrong,’ he asked Cooper, who oversaw the party’s private polling.⁵ Cooper was unable to reassure an increasingly worried Portillo, and from that moment onwards he began to come to terms with the possibility of defeat. This may explain his dignified reaction on the night, in contrast to the sourness of others who could not believe that the electorate could be so ungrateful.

As the campaign wore on, many Conservative MPs did however foresee the fate awaiting them. ‘I was seduced in the first week into thinking that this was much easier than last time,’ Seb Coe recalls. ‘But then I realised that people were actually being polite and just wanted us off their doorsteps.’⁶ It was the same for the legions of aspiring Conservative candidates hoping to make it to Westminster. Among them was David Cameron, a fresh-faced thirty-year-old corporate communications executive who was standing in the Midlands seat of Stafford. On paper, it was a seat that the Conservatives hoped to hold, despite recent boundary changes making it less secure. Initially he thought he would have a 50:50 chance, but as polling day neared his optimism drained away. Cameron was struck that during the last few days of the campaign many voters refused to look him in the eye, and braced himself for the worst.

Back at Conservative Central Office in Westminster’s Smith Square, a bunker atmosphere prevailed. Morale had been quite high in the early stages of the campaign, but the more seasoned party officials knew the game was up. ‘We were defending seats that were simply unwinnable. It might have been marginally better if we had fought a more defensive campaign,’ says one. ‘Everything was thrown into the campaign,’ recalls Archie Norman, the former boss of the supermarket chain Asda and one of the few new Tory MPs elected that night. ‘It was the most money ever spent in any election campaign in Britain, but also the least effective money that was ever spent.’⁷

The Prime Minister’s aides were encouraged by his confidence at the beginning of the campaign. The famous soapbox, which he had used during the election five years earlier to such good effect, was dusted off. But deep down, Major knew the cause was lost. For two years he had been coming to terms with the probability of defeat. ‘You can never be certain in politics, so you have to go on fighting,’ he says. ‘But we had been in government too long. Splits over Europe had made us unelectable. If the Tory Party had been composed of 330 Archangel Gabriels, we would have still come second.’⁸ The opinion polls spoke for themselves. Labour’s average rating had rarely dropped below 50 per cent since mid-1994, while the Conservatives had consistently languished at 30 per cent or below.⁹

Major hoped that a long six-week campaign would allow New Labour’s ‘hollowness’ to be exposed under the pressure of scrutiny. Yet the reverse happened. The Tory campaign unravelled when it emerged that many candidates, including David Cameron, wrote in their personal election addresses that they would not countenance Britain joining the European single currency. This contravened the government’s official policy, which was that neither the time nor the circumstances were right for entry, which the press labelled ‘wait and see’. ‘Like me or loathe me, do not bind my hands when I am negotiating on behalf of the British nation,’ Major appealed to his own party in one of the most surreal moments of the campaign. Britain’s uncertain relationship with Europe had plagued his premiership and was now engulfing the party’s campaign in the full glare of the public. ‘The destruction of John Major’s government was suicidal – it was manic,’ says Ken Clarke, Major’s Chancellor, who was one of the most pro-European ministers in the Cabinet. ‘There was an underlying assumption that because we won elections anyway people could behave in this extraordinary fashion, and with any luck we would be returned to office by getting rid of all the pro-Europeans and re-electing the Eurosceptics. The idea that we were all about to be buried in a self-inflicted landslide never crossed their minds.’¹⁰

The early indications at 5 p.m. on Thursday, 1 May were that the election result would be far worse than the Conservatives had imagined. Major had hoped that he could confine Labour’s majority to forty or fifty. Indeed, only a few days earlier party officials had predicted that the Conservatives might win 240 seats. Late in the afternoon Major, who had returned to his Huntingdon constituency in Cambridgeshire braced for defeat, received a phone call from Central Office confirming that the party was heading for catastrophe. As the evening wore one, his closest aides thought he looked as if he had been in a car crash.¹¹ At 10 p.m., the BBC and ITN broadcast exit polls predicting a Labour majority of between 160 and 180. By midnight, two hours after the polls had closed, the first results showed a massive 10 per cent swing right across the country. When Labour’s tally reached a hundred seats, the Conservatives had barely moved into double figures. By 2 a.m. the extent of the rout was becoming clear. Stafford was one of countless Tory seats to fall to Labour’s unrelenting advance. A defeated David Cameron and his wife, Samantha, left the count down but not out. He rang Michael Green, his boss at Carlton Communications, to ask for his job back as director of communications. As the result sank in they collapsed onto a sofa together, exhausted. Cameron thought to himself that he had better get on with life for a few more years, but knew that he would give politics another go. Although this was his first taste of defeat, being on the losing side was something that he was going to have to get used to for years to come.

In Conservative Central Office, a large downstairs meeting room had been prepared for a drinks party ahead of Major’s return to London. But the bottles were unopened and the shellfish lay untouched. ‘Everyone was just holding themselves together. It was utterly bleak,’ a senior party official recalls. William Hague, the thirty-six-year-old Welsh Secretary, cut a lonely figure as one of the few ministers on duty in party headquarters overnight. He would have the unenviable task of greeting defeated Cabinet colleagues as they returned to Central Office in the early hours. As dawn approached, a bank of camera lights lit the elegant and imposing façade of the building. Just as Tony Blair took to the stage across the river, a crowd of people including jubilant Labour supporters gathered in Smith Square. ‘Tories, Tories, Tories … Out, out, out!’ they chanted at full volume. ‘This was their night,’ said one official besieged in the building. ‘You really did feel as if the helicopters were coming to take us off the roof.’ By the early hours of Friday, 2 May, the Conservatives had well and truly been airlifted from government and dropped into the wilderness of opposition. It was far from clear how long it would take them to return, if indeed they would return at all.

From High-Water Mark to Downfall

Rewind the clock by a decade, and the scene in Smith Square could not have been more different. From a window in Central Office, a victorious Mrs Thatcher, her husband Denis and Party Chairman Norman Tebbit waved to supporters and party workers below in the early hours of Friday, 12 June 1987. It was a scene of jubilation. Mrs Thatcher had led the Conservative Party to its third successive victory since coming to power in 1979. No other Prime Minister had achieved such a feat in the twentieth century. A majority of 101 would ensure her a third full term in office.

Mrs Thatcher was at the apex of her powers as she embarked on her third term as Prime Minister, but she would be gone within three and a half years. Although an admiring party lay at her feet, all was not well at the heart of government. Her assertive style of leadership had already knocked noses out of joint, including that of Michael Heseltine. Ever since the flamboyant Defence Secretary resigned in 1986, at the height of the Westland Affair, there had been a king across the water. Heseltine would prime himself as a potential successor, around whom dissent could coalesce. Although he had served in her Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet, Heseltine was not ‘one of us’, as Mrs Thatcher liked to term her allies. He was from the ‘One Nation’ mould of Conservative politicians, who had dominated the party since the Second World War. They were more consensual and not so steadfastly wedded to the free-market principles that informed much of the Thatcher revolution. After the 1987 general election Heseltine had to bide his time on the backbenches. In the meantime, the ‘Iron Lady’ seemed unstoppable.

‘“Can’t be done” has given way to “What’s to stop us!”’ she declared to the party faithful at their annual conference after the election. If her second term had laid the foundations by curbing the power of trade unions and introducing a wave of privatisations, her third would extend the Thatcher revolution to the inner cities, which lay depressed amid industrial decline, and the unreformed public sector, particularly the National Health Service and education. The remaining dragons of ‘state socialism’ had to be slain with the help of market forces. It was an ambitious and bold programme that inspired a whole new generation of Conservatives. One of them was an impressionable David Cameron, who in 1987 was in his final year at Oxford University studying Politics, Philosophy and Economics. ‘David was a total fan of Mrs T but feels that a mythology has grown up around her that is not connected to reality,’ a friend recalls. ‘He understands that she was fortunate in having a divided and weak opposition, but that she was also quite tactical and smart in knowing when to withdraw. To him, she was a canny politician who knew how to duck and dive when she had to.’

By the beginning of 1988, however, she had become a command-and-control Prime Minister. With many of her internal critics dispatched, including Heseltine, she began to take her Cabinet for granted. William Whitelaw had been the rock of that Cabinet since 1979. He was a dependable deputy who tirelessly worked the corridors of power to ensure that the Prime Minister was kept out of danger and in touch with the party mood. ‘Every Prime Minister needs a Willie,’ she famously proclaimed. His retirement as Deputy Prime Minister in January 1988 meant that he was no longer around to act as ‘the one-person fire brigade for collective restraint’, as the Whitehall chronicler Peter Hennessy described him.¹² The powers of Mrs Thatcher’s well-honed political antennae, which encouraged caution when necessary, were beginning to diminish just as she became convinced of her own invincibility. ‘She lost her touch, and her feel for colleagues, which had been good, left her,’ recalls Ken Clarke, who sat in her Cabinet.¹³ This was never more apparent than in her deteriorating relations with her two principal lieutenants, Sir Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson.

Howe, her Chancellor and then Foreign Secretary, and Lawson, his successor as Chancellor in 1983, believed that the government had to conquer inflation, the scourge of Britain’s post-war economy. The rising cost of living had been a dead weight on the British economy for years, particularly during the recessions of the 1970s and early 1980s, when inflation rarely fell below double figures. Although taming inflation had been central to the Thatcher revolution from its inception, it had yet to be achieved. Her lieutenants urged her to consider a Europe-wide solution. The European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) could provide stable exchange rates with other European currencies, helping to bring domestic inflation under control. This was not to Mrs Thatcher’s liking: she believed that it could be mastered by controlling the domestic money supply. But her Chancellor, emboldened by his tax-cutting budget in 1988 and a booming economy, pressed her to consider joining.

European solutions were not exactly to the Prime Minister’s tastes by 1988. Ever since she signed the Single European Act in 1986, which heralded closer cooperation within the European Community on a large range of policy areas, she had had her doubts. She had fought hard to win a rebate from Britain’s contribution to the EC budget earlier in her premiership, but had not taken much interest in the Community’s affairs since. ‘Europe hadn’t been on the political agenda much before the Single European Act. Ironically she was the architect for the EC’s revival [as a federalist project],’ Iain Duncan Smith reflects. ‘It was sold to her as a market mechanism, and because she was so adamant about markets, she agreed.’¹⁴ For the Prime Minister, a properly functioning common market did not mean ‘ever closer’ political and monetary union across the EC. ‘We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them re-imposed at a European level,’ she declared to an audience in the Belgian town of Bruges on 20 September 1988. She called for cooperation between ‘independent sovereign states’, rather than integration which sought to create ‘some sort of identikit Euro-personality’. It was a warning shot fired straight across the bows of other European capitals, and indeed some of her most senior ministers at home. The British Prime Minister had declared that she was firmly on the ‘Eurosceptic’ side of the argument. It was for others to decide whether to be with her or to stand against her.

Four days after Mrs Thatcher delivered her landmark speech in Bruges, a twenty-year-old David Cameron walked through the doors of Central Office to join the Conservative Research Department. The CRD was a traditional recruiting ground for ambitious graduates eager to begin their political careers, and in many cases had been the first step on the ladder to high office: Michael Portillo was but one of its alumni. As the engine room of Central Office, it pumped out high-quality research briefings for senior Tory politicians. Cameron was handed the Trade and Industry, Energy and Privatisation brief with which to cut his political teeth.

More importantly, he would befriend a group of young men and women who would become his closest aides and colleagues for years to come. Among them were Rachel Whetstone, Edward Llewellyn and Ed Vaizey, all of whom became future political allies. The ‘Smith Square set’ joined the party when Thatcherism was at its high-water mark. ‘We were all convinced that we were on the right side of the argument in politics,’ says one. ‘We were pro-enterprise and hated state bureaucracy.’ The head of the CRD, Robin Harris, was a disciple of the Iron Lady. ‘Robin was a great Thatcherite footsoldier, so he wouldn’t have let anybody through the door who wasn’t committed to the revolution,’ says Guy Black, who was head of the Political Section. ‘We came to be known as the “brat pack” in the press – there was nothing other than loyalty to Mrs T.’¹⁵ For them, Mrs Thatcher was known simply as ‘Mother’.