Читать книгу Back from the Brink: The Inside Story of the Tory Resurrection - Peter Snowdon - Страница 7

The suddenness of losing power is very brutal. After eighteen years in office, opposition was a strange and lonely place for the Conservative Party. Bereft of ministerial cars, red boxes and armies of civil servants, the surviving 165 Tory MPs would somehow have to regroup. In the dying days of government, the party often looked as though it would break apart over divisions on Europe. Yet to John Major’s credit he held it together. The price, however, was a catastrophic electoral defeat.

Leaderless and Powerless

‘When the curtain falls it is time to get off the stage, and that is what I propose to do.’ With those words, John Major tendered his resignation as leader of the Conservative Party on Friday, 2 May, before going to Buckingham Palace to offer his resignation as Prime Minister to the Queen.

As he then headed to The Oval to watch Surrey play cricket, he left behind him a party in a state of shock. There were many Tory MPs who wanted to see him resign the party leadership immediately, but he was held in affection by the grassroots in the country. Stripped of the responsibility of running the country, some of his allies argued strongly that he could steady the party’s nerves in opposition. Lord Cranborne, his chief of staff during the election campaign and Leader of the Lords, and Alistair Goodlad, the Chief Whip, pleaded with him that the party had a better chance of staying together if he remained as leader until the autumn. It would give time for the party to elect his successor and to come to terms with defeat. ‘It would be terrible,’ Major retorted, ‘because I would be presiding with no authority over a number of candidates fighting for the crown. It would merely prolong the agony.’¹

The agonising had already begun in Central Office. As a triumphant Tony Blair made his way up Downing Street in bright sunshine on his first day in office, the young guns in the Conservative Research Department stared gloomily at the television screens. ‘We just didn’t know where to go or what to do,’ recalls one. Others, like George Osborne, a twenty-five-year-old former member of the CRD and special adviser to Douglas Hogg, the outgoing Minister for Agriculture, understood the magnitude of events. ‘Curiously, George was quite excited,’ recalls a friend. ‘He was on the losing side, but he sensed this was a big moment in British politics.’ Little did Osborne know how long it would take for his party to come to terms with the events of that day and the night before.

The new House of Commons offered little solace for Conservative MPs. As they filed onto the opposition benches for the first time since 1979, they must have felt like an endangered species. The chamber overflowed with the amassed ranks of the 419-strong Parliamentary Labour Party. As caretaker Leader of the Opposition, John Major hastily assembled a Shadow Cabinet. Having lost seven Cabinet colleagues, he could barely muster a full complement of shadow ministers to oppose Blair’s Cabinet. Several had to combine portfolios, including Major himself as leader and Shadow Foreign Secretary, after Malcolm Rifkind’s defeat. There were no MPs from Scotland or Wales to serve as Shadow Secretaries of State.

A triumphant Blair rubbed the Conservatives’ noses in their defeat. As he delivered his first speech at the dispatch box as Prime Minister, two Tory Eurosceptic MPs, Bill Cash and Sir Michael Spicer, rose to their feet at the first mention of Europe. The government benches heckled and laughed at their interventions, and Blair duly congratulated them and their fellow Eurosceptics on ‘the magnificent part that they played in our victory’.²

There was a mixture of emotions within the surviving members of the parliamentary party. Some were relieved just to be there at all. ‘Even people like Gillian Shephard with huge Tory majorities hung on by the skin of their teeth,’ the former Home Office minister Ann Widdecombe recalls. ‘Nothing will ever equal that defeat – it was shattering.’³ Another survivor, Liam Fox, vividly recalls a senior colleague telling him in the Commons tearoom that it was ‘wrong to assume that this was the worst it could get’.⁴ A complete electoral meltdown had only narrowly been avoided. A third of the parliamentary party had majorities under five thousand – any further swing from the Conservatives to Labour or the Liberal Democrats would place their seats in peril. The other two thirds were more secure, but that presented another problem: complacency. ‘The 1997 defeat was so bad that the party was reduced to a group of MPs who thought they could survive come what may,’ says the former minister David Willetts, who was seen as one of the few leading intellectual lights left in the parliamentary party.⁵ Reaching out to the majority of voters who had turned their backs on the Tories, particularly in marginal seats, would prove difficult, as so few MPs could claim to represent them.

The party had also suffered from the impact of the Referendum Party during the election. Formed by the Anglo-French billionaire financier Sir James Goldsmith, it pledged a referendum on Britain’s continuing membership of the EU. Goldsmith had been unhappy that the Major government had not undertaken to hold such a referendum, although it had promised one on Britain’s possible entry into the single currency. He invested millions of pounds of his own fortune to promote the new party. Although it polled only 800,000 votes (just 2.6 per cent of the vote), Goldsmith led a high-profile campaign and fielded 547 candidates, predominantly in seats where none of the other candidates favoured a referendum. Most of the seats it did not contest were held by Eurosceptic Conservative MPs (of whom many were swept away regardless). According to expert analysis, only a handful of Tory seats fell as a direct result of the intervention of the Referendum Party, although some contend that it may have cost the Conservatives between twenty and twenty-five seats.⁶ Nevertheless, the existence of Goldsmith’s single-issue party was certainly something the Tories could have done without as they headed towards defeat in 1997.

What has never been revealed before is that Goldsmith was provoked into action by the maverick diarist and former Tory minister Alan Clark. Clark had retired from the Commons in 1992, disillusioned by the downfall of Mrs Thatcher. He was not a particular admirer of Major’s, and was firmly on the Eurosceptic wing of the party. He soon regretted his decision to leave politics, and as the Major government’s problems worsened, he was desperate to find ways of reviving the Tory cause. An old friend of Goldsmith’s, Clark was aware that the financier was becoming increasingly disenchanted with the party’s policy towards Europe. During a visit to Goldsmith’s ranch in Mexico in February 1994, Clark took it upon himself to suggest that the Conservatives might offer a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU at the next general election. Goldsmith was apparently led to believe that Major himself sanctioned this. But when he subsequently asked Major whether he was going ahead with his ‘promise’, the Prime Minister was aghast, telling him he had no such intention. Goldsmith accused the government of bad faith, and prepared to launch his own campaign and party. ‘The Referendum Party was an entirely Alan Clark ramp,’ a senior Tory figure insists. ‘Clark had no sanction to make any such deal.’

Desperate to return to the Commons, Clark was elected as Tory MP for Kensington and Chelsea in the 1997 election, without opposition from the Referendum Party. Goldsmith died a few months after the election, while Clark’s revived parliamentary career was cut short by his death in September 1999. Alan Clark was an idiosyncratic Tory on the right of the party, who was best known for his philandering and his vivid diary account of the Thatcher years. But his cameo role in the dying days of the Major government, which further fanned the flames of the European debate, deserves a footnote.

Shortly after the election, some commentators, including the former Irish Prime Minister Garret FitzGerald, asserted that the Conservatives lost primarily because over four million of their ‘natural supporters’ either stayed at home or voted for the Referendum Party. A powerful myth was born which had the effect of reinforcing complacency among senior figures in the party, such as the Eurosceptic former Party Chairman Norman Tebbit, who argued that the road to recovery lay in mobilising this hidden mass of Tory support. These claims were hotly disputed by the party’s private pollster, Nick Sparrow of ICM, whose research showed that 3.5 million former Tory voters had switched directly to Labour and the Liberal Democrats. But a significant number of Tory MPs were more inclined to believe the Tebbit version of events. ‘Some of the new MPs thought that getting rid of John Major and firmly opposing Euro entry would herald a return to popularity,’ recalls Ken Clarke. ‘But they had no experience of opposition, and they acted as if nothing had happened.’⁷ Clarke was one of only thirty-six Conservative MPs who had been in the Commons before Margaret Thatcher led the party to power in 1979.⁸ Alongside the lack of experience of opposition, the prevailing mindset was that the party would be returned to office once the electorate realised the error of their ways. As one MP, Liam Fox put it, ‘Too many people thought after 1997 that we were having a glorified time-out.’⁹

The ‘Anyone But Ken’ Leadership Contest

John Major’s sudden resignation propelled the party into an immediate leadership contest. The most likely front-runners were already out of the race: Michael Heseltine suffered further heart problems immediately after the election, while Michael Portillo was not even in Parliament. The surviving ‘big beasts of the jungle’ from Major’s Cabinet entered the ring. Ken Clarke’s support came mainly from the pro-European wing and the centre of the party, while Michael Howard, Peter Lilley and John Redwood pitched their appeals to the Eurosceptic right. William Hague, the young Yorkshireman who had served in the Cabinet for just two years in the relatively junior role of Welsh Secretary, considered his options. He initially accepted an offer from Howard to be his deputy and Party Chairman, but was persuaded by friends that Howard would not win. He quickly cut himself loose from the deal, and decided to stand for the leadership himself. Howard had been tainted by an outspoken attack from one of his former colleagues at the Home Office, Ann Widdecombe, who said that he had ‘something of the night about him’. Howard’s tough stance on law and order as Home Secretary had won him plaudits from the right, but he had become a polarising figure both inside and outside the party.

Hague saw an opportunity to present himself as the candidate who could make ‘a fresh start’, as the youngest candidate and the one least associated with the old regime. But footage of his speech as a sixteen-year-old Young Conservative to the 1977 party conference would haunt him. ‘Half of you may not be here in thirty or forty years’ time, but I will be and I want to be free,’ he had declared, with Mrs Thatcher applauding in the background. Like Major in 1990, Hague had the advantage of having the fewest enemies within the parliamentary party, and like Major he had risen from humble beginnings. As a comprehensive schoolboy in Rotherham he had been a member of a rare species: a Young Conservative in a traditional Labour-supporting area where iron and steel were the staple industries. He was inspired by the speeches of Winston Churchill, collected volumes of Hansard and spent hours learning great political speeches by heart, a talent that would serve him well in years to come. A prodigious student at Oxford and a successful management consultant at McKinsey’s, Hague was destined for a successful political career. In 1989, aged only twenty-seven, he had been elected to Parliament as MP for Richmond, in his native county. At the time of the 1997 leadership contest this was still the last time the party had won a by-election.

Hague was affable and, crucially, he was a Eurosceptic. Having pledged not to join the single currency ‘for the foreseeable future’ in his leadership campaign, he appealed to the growing ranks of sceptics on the Tory benches. He was also largely untainted by the struggles over Maastricht. Projecting himself as the youthful candidate who could modernise the party and reform its creaking organisation, he attracted support from the younger generation of Tory party workers and former ministerial aides. Among them was George Osborne, who became an enthusiastic member of Hague’s campaign team. ‘George felt William was the only candidate to take his argument to the country and get a professional campaign going,’ one insider recalls. ‘We tried to involve the party more and make the argument that it had become out of touch.’

Another young Tory to take an interest in Hague’s campaign was the defeated candidate for Stafford, David Cameron. Cameron and the younger Osborne vaguely knew each other from the Major era, but the five-year age difference meant that they had moved in slightly different circles. ‘David was the hot-shot special adviser while George was a lowly person in CCO to begin with,’ observes a mutual friend, and as Osborne made the step up to being a ministerial aide, Cameron had left his equivalent role at the Home Office for fresh and well-paid pastures at Carlton. But when Cameron went to support one of Hague’s campaign events he felt like a spare part, and decided to concentrate on life outside politics. While Cameron’s involvement with the party in Westminster receded, Osborne’s was about to intensify as Hague’s campaign gathered momentum.

Standing in the way was Ken Clarke. Clarke was one of the few senior Conservatives of whom the public had a favourable impression after the landslide. He was credited with having managed the economy reasonably well after taking over as Chancellor from Norman Lamont in 1993, steering it towards low inflation and modest growth after the difficult years of recession. Laid-back and straight-talking, his fondness for Hush Puppies, jazz, birdwatching and the odd cigar endeared him to the public, if not to some of his more strait-laced colleagues, and opinion polls and surveys of constituency chairmen showed him to be the popular choice for leader in the country. To Tory MPs, Clarke’s main asset was his ability to perform both in the Commons and on the airwaves. ‘He was the big beast who could knock down Labour,’ says Widdecombe, one of Clarke’s supporters. ‘He did extremely well, appealing beyond the pro-European wing of the party. After all, he had been a reformer in the Thatcher–Major governments in health and education. So we took it for granted that he could win.’¹⁰ In the first ballot, on 10 June, Clarke duly emerged as the front-runner with forty-nine votes to Hague’s forty-one. Howard and Lilley were knocked out of the contest.

But ultimately Clarke’s pro-European views would be his Achilles’ heel. Knowing that his attraction to the idea of a single currency was anathema to a large number of Tory MPs, he made the fatal mistake of entering into a Faustian pact with the arch-Eurosceptic John Redwood, who remained in the race. On paper, it was a sensible move: Redwood had obtained thirty-eight votes in the first ballot, and if these were transferred to Clarke in the second, he would secure victory. But the partnership stretched credulity for many Tory MPs and commentators, and when Howard and Lilley promptly declared their support for Hague, he emerged as the unity candidate from the centre-right who could beat Clarke. By far the most important endorsement, however, came from Lady Thatcher, who was horrified that Clarke might win. Her very public declaration of support outside the House of Commons – ‘It’s William Hague. Have you got the name? Vote for William Hague to follow the same kind of government I did’ – would prove decisive.

In the third and final ballot on 19 June, Hague emerged with ninety-two votes to Clarke’s seventy. He had picked up almost all of Redwood’s supporters, many of whom had been persuaded by Lady Thatcher’s intervention. Nearly seven years after leaving office, her influence on Tory politics remained strong. The leadership election confirmed that being anything other than a Eurosceptic was an insurmountable bar to leading the party. This was the ‘anyone but Ken’ contest. The result defied the reality that Clarke was the most popular choice outside the confines of Westminster. ‘We needed more time to think things through,’ regrets Michael Simmonds, a Central Office official. ‘All of the old ideological arguments about Europe were fought out in the leadership election. We needed to look at the country and realise why people didn’t like us and start afresh, but we just didn’t do that.’¹¹

Starting from Scratch

At just thirty-six years old, William Hague was the youngest Tory leader since Pitt the Younger in 1783. Conservative MPs had skipped a generation in choosing him in preference to his older rivals, who carried too much baggage from the Major years. ‘The depth of the defeat in 1997 was so great that the new leader would be deprived of any capital and credibility,’ recalls Daniel Finkelstein, who became Director of Policy under Hague. ‘William had to create that authority himself.’¹² Hague himself acknowledged the scale of his task. ‘I thought it would be a long haul and it would take two parliaments to recover, but I also thought that there would be a chance of making reasonable progress by the next general election.’¹³

A few months after becoming leader, Hague received friendly advice from John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister, who had led his centre-right party to power in 1996 after thirteen years out of office. He was the first overseas leader Hague met after becoming party leader. After seeing Tony Blair in Downing Street, Howard visited Hague in the Commons, where he said, ‘You know, William, there’s only one thing harder than the first year in opposition.’ ‘What’s that?’ asked the Tory leader. ‘It’s the second. You’ve just got to understand how hard this is.’¹⁴

Hague tried to establish his authority by building a team capable of reflecting the balance of opinion within the party. So depleted were the ranks of Tory MPs that he did not have a huge pool of talent to choose from. ‘If we did have a supply of wise people – who were they and where were they?’ asks Finkelstein. ‘Many were simply not present in the aftermath, having lost their seats, and others drifted off, not to be seen in the wake of the storm.’¹⁵ Clarke refused to serve: ‘William offered me deputy leader but we would have fallen out straight away.’¹⁶ Their conflicting views on the single currency would have held up any meaningful progress on other issues, such was the strength of feeling about the issue. Clarke’s return to the backbenches was a blow given his popularity in the country and among the party grassroots, as was the departure of Michael Heseltine, who decided to leave the frontbench following his heart problems. Hague did appoint nine former members of Major’s Cabinet, including Peter Lilley as Shadow Chancellor, Michael Howard as Shadow Foreign Secretary, Brian Mawhinney as Shadow Home Secretary, Gillian Shephard as Shadow Leader of the Commons and John Redwood as Shadow Trade and Industry Secretary. Lord Parkinson, architect of Mrs Thatcher’s 1983 landslide victory, made a surprise return as Chairman of the party. Norman Fowler, another veteran from the Thatcher–Major era, returned from the backbenches to shadow John Prescott’s super department of Transport, Environment and the Regions. Hague promoted several figures from across the spectrum, such as the arch Maastricht rebel Iain Duncan Smith, who became Shadow Social Security Secretary, and pro-European David Curry at Agriculture. Others moving up to the top table included former ministers David Willetts and Francis Maude. Only Fowler could claim any real experience in opposition, having been in Mrs Thatcher’s Shadow Cabinet before 1979.

Establishing an office for the new Leader of the Opposition was a lonely business. Hague relied on the help of former MPs like Seb Coe and Charles Hendry, who had worked on his leadership campaign. ‘We just started from scratch. You tend to forget that once you have been in government that long, there is no structure waiting for you to go into opposition,’ recalls Coe, a close friend of Hague’s. ‘We arrived in the opposition block in the Commons to find that the phones were disconnected. Blair had operated out of a high-tech unit in Millbank, and we only had Central Office, which looked like the scene of a car crash.’ Hague asked the former Olympian to become his chief of staff, and Coe began to assemble a team to run Hague’s private office, but it would take time for even the most basic duties to be fulfilled. ‘It was not unusual for letters to be unanswered after six months,’ he recalls.¹⁷ Hague appointed George Osborne as his Political Secretary and Secretary to the Shadow Cabinet. It was all a far cry from the well-oiled Whitehall machine to which the party had had access for eighteen years. ‘George didn’t even have a proper list of phone numbers so he could let them know when the next meeting was,’ a fellow aide recalls.

Life in opposition soon exposed the weaknesses of a party organisation that had fallen into disrepair. Archie Norman, a new MP, was given the task of revamping Central Office as Party Vice-Chairman. A former colleague of Hague’s at McKinsey, Norman had successfully turned around the supermarket chain Asda. As a businessman-turned-politician, he was shocked at what he found. ‘We had an old-style telephone exchange with two women connecting wires for us,’ he recalls. ‘Eventually, we installed a new telecom system. Even then we only had two computers connected to the internet in the entire building.’¹⁸ It was no match for Labour’s modern headquarters in Millbank Tower, fitted out with the state-of-the-art campaigning tools including the ‘Excalibur’ computer, which enabled party officials to rebut attacks at the touch of a button.

Such was the shortage of funds that Norman enlisted friends to help redecorate the building at weekends. The Conservatives were effectively bankrupt: the general election had left the party £8 million in the red, and the auditors warned Lord Parkinson that they were not sure whether they could sign off the accounts. Norman and the new Party Treasurer Michael Ashcroft had to find £3 million of savings from the budget, mainly by making large staff cuts at Central Office, and Ashcroft personally bankrolled the party to the tune of £1 million a year between 1997 and 2001.¹⁹ If it was not for his generosity and that of a few other wealthy donors, it is doubtful whether the party’s central organisation could have remained a going concern.

Shaking up the Party

Hague’s advisers were daunted by the task ahead of them. ‘It was really difficult to know where to start,’ Coe recalls. ‘We weren’t on anybody’s radar screen, and nobody was thinking of building long-term relationships with us. It was going to be hard pounding.’²⁰ Archie Norman took the initiative by writing a memo to Hague outlining what he should do in his first hundred days. He urged the new leader to create a fighting party machine with a mass membership. ‘I doubt that he thought it was the most pressing issue, but he was seized with the idea that he should be a reformist leader, and asked me to make it happen,’ Norman recalls.²¹ Hague saw the logic of party reform: ‘We got on with these reforms at the beginning partly because I thought there was no point adopting a lot of policies when we had just been booted out of office after eighteen years. There was also a valid feeling that the MPs had let the party down by squabbling among themselves. We felt the grassroots needed to exert themselves.’²²

The structure of the party was largely unchanged since the days of Benjamin Disraeli in the nineteenth century. The voluntary party in the country continued to be subservient to the leadership in Parliament. Archie Norman, who was soon promoted to Chief Executive of the party, began to sweep away the cobwebs and start afresh. He drew inspiration from New Labour’s experience in opposition after 1994. An open-plan ‘war room’ would bring together campaign staff, press officers and the CRD. Just as Peter Mandelson made enemies with his make-over of the Labour machine in the early 1990s, Norman’s businesslike manner was not universally popular. ‘I was going to deliver it and I didn’t mind how much resistance there was,’ he recalls.²³ Parkinson played good cop to Norman’s bad cop, helping to smooth relations. ‘He had no flair for persuading people – he thought he was there to save politics, but he could not understand that he was a novice,’ says Parkinson.²⁴ In reality, the party desperately required the dynamism of a new broom like Archie Norman to help revive it after years of decay.

On 23 July 1997, Hague used his first major speech as party leader to promise a ‘democratic revolution’. His proposals would give members a vote in leadership elections, just as Labour had introduced ‘one member one vote’ in the early 1990s. He set the ambitious target of increasing party membership from 400,000 to a million within four years. For the first time the party would have a constitution, with the creation of a single board to take overall control over both the professional (Central Office and constituency agents) and voluntary (grassroots) wings of the party, although it would still be weighted heavily against the rank and file, with only five of the seventeen members representing the grassroots. Despite Hague’s proclaimed desire for decentralisation, the board and its sub-bodies would actually centralise power within the party, extending the control of national officials over local associations. What most pleased the grassroots, however, were the plans to give them a vote in leadership elections.

Hague sought the party’s endorsement for his election as leader and his six principles of organisational change (‘unity, decentralisation, democracy, involvement, integrity and openness’). As there were no alternatives on offer, this ‘back me or sack me’ ballot, held just before Hague’s first conference as leader in October, was supposed to be low-risk. Nevertheless, almost a fifth of the membership rejected their new leader, on a paltry turnout of just 44 per cent.

The greatest obstacle to Hague’s ‘democratic revolution’ was his parliamentary party. MPs fiercely defended their right to elect the leader. Some proposed an electoral college to include party members, with MPs retaining the lion’s share of the vote. Hague was happy to allow the grassroots to vent their fury at the parliamentary party. Many were unhappy at being let down by the sleazy behaviour and divisions among MPs that had preceded the landslide defeat. The first party conference after the election would see fireworks. ‘I deliberately let them rebel and gave them half a day at conference to do that, and boy, did they rebel,’ recalls Hague. ‘They demanded a bigger share of votes in the leadership election and they told off the MPs in no uncertain terms.’²⁵ When Sir Archie Hamilton, the Chairman of the 1922 Committee, the body that represents backbench Conservative Members of Parliament, rose to speak in defence of MPs he was booed and heckled. The mood suddenly changed. MPs finally relented on the issue, agreeing to a two-stage process whereby they would vote in a series of ballots to select the final two candidates, who would go forward to a ballot of all party members.

Democracy had come to the Conservative Party, but it came at a time when members were leaving the party in droves. Membership had fallen from one million in 1987 to 400,000 in 1997, while the average age of party members, which had been sixty-three in the early 1990s, continued to rise.²⁶ A shrinking party in the country could now exert real influence, but this presented new problems. ‘Entrenching your changes in a democratic party is the right thing to do, but democratising an unreconstructed party and then trying to change it is incredibly difficult,’ argues David Willetts. ‘The leadership tried too hard to attempt to please the Tory press, which had an agenda that was resistant to change.’²⁷ It was a criticism that rang true: Hague’s reforms looked good on paper, but they overlooked the fact that the real work that needed to be done was in changing the party’s policies and broadening its appeal.

In his first year as leader, Hague succeeded in performing one of the largest overhauls of the party organisation in over a century. In February 1998 a ballot of the membership almost unanimously approved his ‘Fresh Future’ reforms. But few in the outside world would even notice, let alone give him credit. ‘I had some confidence that we would soon get going again. Our first party conference was very successful. The first few months did seem to go to plan, but then it became apparent that none of that was making any difference in the country. Whatever we did, it just wasn’t cutting through to the voters at all,’ Hague recalls. In fact Hague had wanted to go much further in changing the public face of the party, which was predominately male, white and middle-class. There were only thirteen female Conservative MPs after the 1997 election. ‘We wanted a woman on every candidate shortlist, and there was a lot of resistance amongst MPs and activists, and so we dropped that to win acceptance of the constitution,’ Hague says regretfully. ‘We should have had a bigger row and forced it through, but at that time things like that were regarded as very un-Conservative.’²⁸ Had he been bolder, the public might have taken more notice. It was a mistake that he would make a habit of repeating.

The first tests of public opinion after the election did not bode well. Basking in its honeymoon, Labour recorded average opinion poll ratings of 55–60 per cent for the rest of 1997, while the Conservatives languished at 23–26 per cent.²⁹ Blair’s satisfaction ratings as Prime Minister broke all records. ‘I don’t know if there was anything we could have done about this,’ recalls one of Hague’s senior aides. ‘We were bit-players in the drama in which Tony Blair was the main character.’

Although the Conservatives retained the safe seat of Uxbridge in a by-election in July 1997, the next time voters went to the polls the party would get the shock of its life. Having lost Winchester, a traditionally safe Tory seat, to the Liberal Democrats in the general election by only two votes, the defeated Conservative MP, Gerald Malone, forced a by-election in November 1997 after contesting the result in the courts. The party’s director of campaigning in Central Office, Tony Garrett, told senior staff on the morning of the by-election that the result would be ‘too close to call’, and agents on the ground in the cathedral city believed that there would be only two thousand votes in it either way. When the votes were counted, the Liberal Democrat MP, Mark Oaten, was returned with a majority of over twenty thousand. ‘It was a huge eye-opener. There was a tendency for us to think that the electorate would wake up after the general election and feel that they had overshot the mark,’ recalls Francis Maude, who was then Shadow Culture Secretary. ‘Here we were giving them the chance to say, “Sorry guys, we didn’t mean to do it,” and put right what was meant to be a Tory seat. A lot of colleagues just didn’t get it. There was something deeply wrong; we were totally in denial.’³⁰ Maude, who had been out of Parliament between 1992 and 1997, was one of a small number of MPs around the Shadow Cabinet who began to recognise how unpalatable the Conservative Party had become, and how powerful the mood for change in the country really was.

Getting Round the Kitchen Table

For all the changes to its organisation, the Conservative Party had not come to terms with defeat. Inside Central Office there were a few figures who understood the depth of the problem, and realised that the party’s relationship with the electorate had completely broken down. In an organisation sapped of intellectual energy and drive, they cut lonely figures. Among them was Andrew Cooper, who had overseen the party’s private polling since early 1996. Having previously worked for the former Labour Foreign Secretary David Owen, who helped to form the breakaway SDP in 1981, he became a supporter of John Major at the 1992 general election before joining the centrist think tank the Social Market Foundation (SMF) as head of research. Daniel Finkelstein was another former member of the SDP and director of the SMF, who joined Central Office in 1995 to develop policy. Finkelstein and Cooper were two of the brightest officials in Central Office: they had as sophisticated an understanding of public opinion as anybody in the party. Hague appointed Finkelstein to direct policy, while Cooper was given the unenviable task of devising a strategy for recovery.

Cooper had been influenced by Michael Portillo’s speech at a fringe event at the 1997 party conference. Portillo’s lecture, ‘The Ghost of Conservatism Past, the Spirit of Conservatism Future’, was a blunt assessment of how the party had come to be regarded in the 1990s. His shock at how he himself seemed to embody the party’s unpopularity had caused him to consider what had gone wrong. Cooper shared Portillo’s analysis: ‘Although there were clearly parts of the Conservative government’s record that led to its defeat, the reaction on the doorstep during the 1997 campaign was more about the party’s character, not about its beliefs. They disliked our motives and us as people,’ Cooper says.³¹ The party had become completely estranged from ordinary people’s lives and concerns. His research showed that the majority of people had accepted that a dose of Thatcherite medicine had been necessary to cure the economy of its industrial relations ills and the scourge of inflation. In fact, the party was credited with the economic recovery in the mid-1990s, despite the calamity of Black Wednesday, and some polls during the 1997 general election showed that Major and Clarke were more trusted to manage the economy than Blair and Brown. But the state of the public services, principally health and education, had emerged as a key public concern during the 1990s. Instead of responding to this, the party became obsessed with Europe, holding a conversation with itself rather than with the voters.

An aficionado of American politics, Cooper seized on a phrase used by the senior Democrat Congressman, Dick Gephardt, to explain why the Republican Party had done so badly in recent mid-term elections. The Republicans had become obsessed with impeaching President Clinton for various misdemeanours in office, rather than tackling the ‘kitchen table issues’ that mattered to people. ‘We needed to think about what ordinary hard-working people talked about around the kitchen table, and show that we shared their values,’ says Cooper. His strategy paper ‘Kitchen Table Conservatives’ starkly laid out the deep-seated perceptions of the party. It suggested ‘ten-thousand-volt shocks’, bold, dramatic gestures ‘to make people sit up and go, “Wow, that’s surprising, we wouldn’t have expected them to do that.”’³² Cooper unashamedly borrowed from New Labour’s polling guru and chief strategist Philip Gould, whose recent book The Unfinished Revolution charted his party’s long spell in opposition and its recovery. Cooper recommended that Hague do the following: ‘a high profile expulsion by the [party’s] ethics and integrity committee ([which says] we will not tolerate sleaze); an impatient confrontation with the Carlton Club (we are inclusive); a speech saying that we deserved to lose the general election (we are not arrogant and we are listening); a clear position on reform of the House of Lords (we have changed)’.

When Cooper presented the paper to Hague, Chief Whip James Arbuthnot and a number of other close aides in November 1998, the leader lapped it up: ‘I agree with almost every word of it.’ ‘I wish I had asked him which words he disagreed with,’ Cooper now says. He was surprised at how little discussion there was. ‘Unless anyone objects, this will be our strategy,’ Hague instructed. A few days later, Cooper made another presentation to Hague and the full Shadow Cabinet. ‘From now on I want you all to be clear that I shall promote and reward exclusively on how closely you stick to this strategy,’ Hague declared. After this, no one was willing to express outright opposition to the paper, and in the discussion that followed everyone tried to find something in the paper that they could be positive about. But it was clear to Cooper that they were unconvinced. Sure enough, many of Hague’s colleagues ignored the new strategy in speeches, parliamentary questions and media appearances. Hague instructed Cooper to have one-to-one meetings with the Shadow Cabinet to find out what their reservations were. Only one, Gary Streeter, the Shadow International Development Secretary, appeared to understand what was expected: ‘So what you’re saying is that we need to do everything differently?’ ‘Yes, exactly,’ Cooper replied.³³

Hague encouraged groups of backbench MPs to go to Cooper’s presentations at Central Office. They left unimpressed. Many blamed the election defeat on John Major for being ‘weak and useless’ or ‘not right-wing enough’, or felt that Tony Blair had ‘pulled the wool over people’s eyes, nicked our policies and millions had stayed at home rather than vote for us’. Disappointed with the complacency of Conservative MPs, in January 1998 Cooper wrote a follow-up paper entitled ‘Conceding and Moving On’, a phrase taken straight out of The Unfinished Revolution. New Labour had understood that the Conservatives had won the argument on some issues, particularly the Thatcherite settlement of the economy and the demise of trade union power, and so had to ‘concede and move on’. Only by ‘letting go’ could Labour really change. This argument touched a very raw nerve. While many backbenchers dismissed Major’s leadership, frontbenchers who had served in his government were not prepared to have its record traduced. ‘We should have taken a strong line: we had left with a golden economic legacy and said that nobody can manage the economy better than we can. That should have been our robust approach,’ argues Ann Widdecombe, one of the most colourful former ministers from the Major years. ‘We disowned the past, and it was the single biggest mistake we made – we began making it with William Hague and have been making it ever since. We went crawling around saying, “Oh no, we’re terribly sorry, we really are going to change,” and the question was, to what and from what, and nobody really had an answer.’³⁴

It was a view that resonated with the rank and file, who detested the thought of ‘doing a Blair’ to their party. In 1997 Hague had begun to make amends with the electorate by apologising on behalf of the Conservatives for taking the country into the ERM, leading to the débâcle of Black Wednesday. However, the party’s own research showed that most voters did not think the Tories had apologised at all. The irony was that the most vociferous defenders of the Major government happened to be those who had been most critical of the Prime Minister at the time. ‘No matter how often you replay the video of the last election, we always get wiped out,’ was Finkelstein’s riposte to an argument that showed that many senior Tories simply refused to have an honest debate about how their party had lost, and what its purpose was in the modern world. This was no longer a world torn by the divisions of the Cold War: the bogeymen of the left were now few and far between, but many on the right had failed to notice.

By the spring of 1999, the ‘Kitchen Table’ strategy had been reduced to Shadow Cabinet discussions about appearance. ‘We had great debates about whether we should wear suits and ties or open collar shirts on TV,’ recalls one shadow minister. ‘There was not really any profound discussion about the real issue which was the character and perception of the party,’ says Oliver Letwin, who had been elected as a new MP in 1997. ‘I remember feeling utterly alone. It wasn’t a discussion that anybody was having. Colleagues weren’t talking about it, nor were the think tanks. We talked about other things, like Europe and tax, but not that.’³⁵ Emotionally, many MPs had been so stunned by the 1997 defeat that they were unable to ‘let go’ and understand what the country really thought of them.

Responsibility for the demise of the ‘Kitchen Table’ strategy lay with Hague himself. As leader, he failed to convince his senior team of its merits, despite his enthusiastic endorsement. Neither did he lead by example. ‘It still puzzles me that he never followed it,’ says Cooper. ‘I frequently found myself challenging him on things he did and said, pointing out that they did not accord to the strategy. He had been elected leader on a reforming ticket, but he is not by nature and temperamentally a modernising person; he’s traditional in most of his instincts and attitudes – he loves the rough and tumble of politics. It was almost like he wanted someone to give him an off-the-shelf way of doing it.’³⁶ Hague himself confessed to not being fully convinced by Cooper’s strategy: ‘It was thoughtful and correct, but it was an incomplete analysis. It was more a public relations strategy, as it didn’t really tell us what to do – it was more of a diagnosis than a prognosis. I didn’t find anything in the “Kitchen Table” stuff that was going to give us success then – maybe it would ten years later, but there was no guarantee we would be around in ten years’ time.’³⁷

In fact, Cooper’s strategy was more operational than Hague suggests, and included a set of guidelines for Hague and his shadow team to follow. He advised them to start ‘talking about the future, not the past’, ‘using the language of people, not politicians’ and ‘being for things and people, not just against them’. These suggestions may not necessarily have been a panacea, but at least they offered an avenue that Hague could have pursued.

Ultimately, Hague was not confident enough to lead a thorough rethink of the party’s position. Almost two years into the job, his leadership was not secure. In December 1998 he had suffered the humiliation of the Tory leader in the House of Lords, Lord Cranborne, brokering a deal with Tony Blair to save ninety-two hereditary peers whose seats in the House of Lords were threatened by proposed constitutional reforms. Hague was opposed to the government’s plans to remove the right of all of the 750 hereditary peers to sit in the Lords until the party formed its policy towards reforming the Upper House. Cranborne’s secret deal with the government left Hague no choice but to sack him, but the episode gave the impression that he was not in control of his party.

Hague was also painfully aware that the party’s average poll ratings showed no sign of improvement, stubbornly hovering below 30 per cent. The traditional Conservative-supporting newspapers cried out for vigorous opposition to the Labour government, but Blair was enjoying a prolonged honeymoon as the economy continued to grow. Feeling the pressure, Hague urged the Shadow Cabinet to be more combative. ‘We were providing a running commentary, saying no to everything, so that people could remember how negative and rude we’d been about Labour at the end of each week, but had no better idea about how a Conservative government would make the world a better place,’ laments Willetts.³⁸ ‘William’s big problem was that he was not strategic – he was flying by the seat of his pants all the time,’ says another frontbencher. The central question about how the party tackled its past would soon erupt into a full-blown row that threatened Hague’s increasingly precarious position.

Lilley’s Taboo and Hague’s Wobble

With Hague and his Shadow Cabinet unconvinced by the ‘Kitchen Table’ strategy, coming to terms with why the party had become so unpopular would be far from straightforward. The next opportunity arrived when Peter Lilley, Hague’s deputy, tried in vain to draw a line in the sand under the party’s Thatcherite inheritance. This exposed a real taboo within the party about acknowledging the limits of the Thatcher revolution while understanding how the political landscape had changed since her fall. The conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan adeptly summed up the tension when he wrote that the Tories were ‘as culturally inept as they were economically successful. They created the substance of the new country but they couldn’t articulate it.’³⁹

Lilley had been associated with the Thatcherite wing of the party. His notorious rendition of ‘I’ve got a little list’ from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado at the 1992 party conference included a jibe at ‘young ladies who get pregnant just to jump the housing queue’. It was a performance that would be played over and over again on the airwaves, much to his embarrassment. However, he was also one of the party’s clearest thinkers, alongside Willetts, and his attempts as Major’s Social Security Secretary to reform the welfare system in the 1990s had earned him respect throughout Whitehall. Hague asked him to conduct a review of policy in June 1998, when he relieved him of his role as Shadow Chancellor while promoting him to the deputy leadership.

Lilley embarked on a consultation exercise called ‘Listening to Britain’, in which shadow ministers would meet nurses, teachers and other members of the public and ask what mattered to them. He was not encouraged by his colleagues: ‘They all wanted to stand up and give a speech. I said, why start off giving a speech if you are there to listen?’⁴⁰ What Lilley could distil from his review helped to inform the R.A. Butler Memorial Lecture which he delivered at the Carlton Club, the social hub for Tory grandees, on Tuesday, 20 April 1999. By coincidence, on the same evening over a thousand Conservatives would descend on the Hilton Hotel in Park Lane for a dinner to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Mrs Thatcher’s first election victory. Both the timing and the substance of Lilley’s lecture set the stage for a damaging row inside the Shadow Cabinet. ‘Once he gave it all hell let loose,’ recalls Willetts. ‘No one realised that it was lighting the blue touchpaper.’⁴¹

Lilley argued that the party had settled the economic and industrial questions of the 1980s on its terms, and now the debate had moved on to the state of the public services. This chimed with Cooper’s analysis. In characteristically logical fashion, Lilley sought to underline the point. ‘We were associated in the public mind, rightly or wrongly, with hostility to the public sector,’ he recalls. ‘As far as the NHS was concerned there was a feeling that we wanted to flog it off to our friends in the City and make people pay at the point of care. They were absurdly false caricatures, because we had never done any of those things whilst in power.’⁴² Only if the party succeeded in ‘slaying the myths’ about privatising the NHS through the back door would the public begin to listen to what it had to say about reforming the public services. ‘It was a way of getting onto gentler territory for the electorate, but those messages were a little too early in the life of a badly dented and uncertain party,’ says Coe.⁴³

Various drafts of Lilley’s speech had been circulated to Hague and the Shadow Cabinet, but much as with the discussion over the ‘Kitchen Table’ document, there was surprisingly little debate before it was given. ‘We let it go through without enough attention because we were thinking about other things,’ claims Hague.⁴⁴ It is more likely, however, that no one bothered to read it properly. Lilley’s speeches were not known for creating much press coverage, and in view of the clash with the Thatcher anniversary dinner, it was decided that key sections of the speech would be briefed to the papers as a major statement about the direction of party policy. The press had a field day over the timing. Headlines such as ‘Tories: We Won’t Privatise Hospitals’ on Monday would be succeeded on Tuesday by ‘Tories: We’re Abandoning Thatcherism’.

Lilley believed that lobby journalists, particularly those from The Times, had their own agenda: to destabilise Hague’s position before local elections in May. But some of those inside Central Office were incredibly angry. They believed that the speech gave the impression that the party would no longer contemplate private-sector involvement in the public services, which even Blair’s government was considering. For the party’s Membership Director, Michael Simmonds, it was a point of political principle. He decided to leak an earlier version of the speech to The Times, and was promptly dismissed after an internal inquest. ‘It showed us at our worst, because we had a serious contribution to the philosophical debate, and we had an opportunity to have a good debate,’ laments Ann Widdecombe. ‘Instead we had the press in full cry saying it was a departure from Thatcherism, which is not what Peter had said, and a situation where the boys in Central Office were playing a game of personality politics. All it did was portray us as unfit for government.’⁴⁵

But there was more to the row than game-playing. Lilley’s speech touched on a raw nerve, which stemmed from the bitterness over Mrs Thatcher’s downfall. ‘It was a sizeable moment,’ recalls Coe. ‘I was with William the morning after the speech, on our way to Liverpool, and although he was always calm under fire, his serenity was at full stretch. The way the media dealt with it, added to the strident voices in the party, meant that this was serious. It was fairly bleak.’⁴⁶ When the Shadow Cabinet met later that week, several senior figures expressed their indignation. Francis Maude, Lilley’s replacement as Shadow Chancellor, was angry that the ground had not been better prepared. ‘I think you should calm down, Francis,’ Hague told him. ‘No, sometimes you shouldn’t be calm,’ Maude retorted. ‘This is a time for panic!’ Michael Howard, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, was even more scathing: ‘This is the most dangerous and damaging speech I have ever read in my entire career.’ Some of those present were struck by the ferocity of Howard’s reaction. ‘It chimed in perfectly with the criticism that Labour had always made of the Thatcher government, which we had always resisted. I didn’t hold back,’ Howard recalls.⁴⁷

Regardless of the fact that it had not been Lilley’s intention to repudiate Mrs Thatcher’s achievement, the row revealed a real reluctance among influential senior figures to accept that the world had moved on since her day. Lilley believes he could have done things differently: ‘I was responsible for it, and there was an unexpected response, so I don’t blame anyone else. I would still have said it, but I would have done some different preparation to calm down the loonies.’⁴⁸ For others, the speech was a turning point. ‘The Lilley episode was a terrible warning,’ says Willetts. ‘It raised the “no entry” sign over various party taboos, and it made it much harder to make changes to policy.’⁴⁹

The row was the last thing the party needed before the local elections. ‘It genuinely did rock Hague’s leadership, because it brought to a head the fact that we were doing badly,’ Finkelstein recalls.⁵⁰ It revealed ineptitude and division at the top of the party, while the Tory press, disillusioned with the state of the opposition, scented blood. More fundamentally, the leadership had reached a fork in the road: either Hague could develop the arguments that Cooper and Lilley had advanced, or he could side with the majority opinion inside his Shadow Cabinet, and not question the party’s Thatcherite inheritance. One way would involve more soul-searching with no demonstrable short-term gain, while the other would mean playing familiar tunes to keep the press and the party faithful onside. Hague and his team chose the latter, and in doing so they lost any chance they had to address the causes of the party’s unpopularity.

To Blair and his aides in Number 10, it was a defining moment. ‘When Peter Lilley attempted to catapult the Tory party forward and was rebuffed, we all thought, “Great – we’ve got quite a long time left in office,”’ recalls one senior Labour adviser. ‘We knew exactly what was being played out from our own experience in opposition; it was that Lilley was saying to his party, “It’s about us, we’ve got to change,” and the rejection of that view told us that the Tories were several years away from being a threat. They obviously just didn’t get it.’

For Hague, survival became the primary motivation. He was comforted by the fact that his robust exchanges with Blair at Prime Minister’s Questions cheered up his backbenches. Many Tory MPs left for their constituencies at the end of the week feeling that Hague had outwitted Blair, but they were painfully aware that his public profile outside the bearpit of Parliament paled in comparison to Blair’s. Images of the youthful leader wearing a ‘Hague’ baseball cap at a theme park, or attending the Notting Hill Carnival, attracted ridicule, as would his claim in August 2000 to have drunk fourteen pints of beer a day in his youth. ‘Once the story became us failing to pick ourselves up off the floor, these incidents came to be seen as the cause of our problems, which they weren’t,’ Hague laments.⁵¹ He had done himself few favours following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in August 1997, when his wooden statement appeared out of touch in comparison with Blair’s emotional reaction. While Blair, once again, articulated the mood of the nation, Hague could only offer the suggestion that Heathrow be renamed ‘Princess Diana International Airport’.

Most seriously for Hague, the party’s focus groups found that voters thought he was a weak leader, and had to be replaced if the party’s ratings were to improve. As criticism of Hague’s leadership grew, he himself began to have serious doubts about his position. There had been modest gains in the local elections in May 1999, but still the party only polled 33 per cent of the vote, lagging well behind Labour. Members of the Shadow Cabinet were either confused or angry about the direction in which Hague was taking the party. ‘I really wondered if we could keep it together at all. I wondered if there would be an open division in the party, or if I would have to stand down as leader,’ Hague recalls.⁵² Between late April and early May, he wobbled. Something would have to be done to lift his spirits and boost his position.

Turning Right

Just as Hague’s confidence reached its lowest ebb, he received encouragement from two new additions to his team. Nick Wood, a hardened lobby correspondent with The Times, and Amanda Platell, a former editor of the Sunday Express, were appointed to bolster the party’s media operation. Hague realised that the coverage of Peter Lilley’s speech had been a disaster. He lacked a ‘heavyweight’ figure to handle the media since assuming the leadership, and his advisers kept pressing him to find ‘our Alastair Campbell’. Campbell’s press operation from Number 10 was vastly superior to anything the Tories could muster. Indeed, Campbell and Mandelson regularly ran rings around Tory announcements or press releases. In the plain-speaking Australian Platell, Hague finally found someone who knew and could speak to newspaper editors on their own terms, and could take on the party’s most hostile critics in the press.

Both Platell and Wood were shocked at what they found when they arrived. ‘It was clear to me from the beginning that William’s agenda was quite fuzzy,’ Wood recalls. ‘It just didn’t translate into an easy message for people to understand.’ They realised that there was very little time to turn things around if Hague was to survive: the next electoral test would be the European Parliament elections in June. ‘If we did badly in the European elections, then that would have been the end of William Hague.’⁵³

By May 1999 Hague had at least managed to defuse some of the tension surrounding the European question, in particular whether Britain should drop Sterling in favour of the Euro. At his first party conference as leader he pledged to oppose doing so for the ‘foreseeable future’. It was a line that was bound to come under pressure, given the strength of feeling on both sides of the divide. The crunch point had come two years earlier, when during a four-hour meeting of the Shadow Cabinet on 24 October 1997 it was agreed that the party would oppose membership of the single currency during the current Parliament and the next. David Curry and Ian Taylor, both prominent Europhiles, promptly resigned from the Shadow Cabinet. They were followed a few months later by the former Cabinet minister Stephen Dorrell. The new policy was solidified by a ballot of party members in 1998. ‘For a number of months Eurosceptics and Europhiles, from Teresa Gorman to Ken Clarke, were regularly coming in to see him to persuade him to move in their direction,’ says Coe. ‘But in the end they all knew that he would not move from the stake he placed in the ground.’ The uncertainty of the Major years had disappeared. ‘The range war just petered out. We had occasional sniper fire, but it ceased to cause anywhere near as much damage as before.’⁵⁴

George Osborne, Hague’s Political Secretary, also sensed that a ‘potentially fatal civil war’ on Europe had been averted. Yet he feared that it might erupt again in October 1999 when Michael Heseltine and Ken Clarke shared a platform with Tony Blair at the launch of ‘Britain In Europe’, the embryonic ‘Yes’ campaign for a referendum on joining the Euro. Indeed, Osborne wondered at the time whether this could have been the moment that the Conservative Party split in two, as Labour did when the SDP formed in 1981. But the departure of leading Europhiles from the Shadow Cabinet, and their dwindling numbers on the backbenches, had given Hague the space to allow the hardened Euro policy to settle.

Now the leadership could use the European elections to present the party’s Eurosceptic credentials. Hague promised radical reform of the EU and a halt to further integration, encapsulated in his own slogan, ‘In Europe, not run by Europe’. His aides, particularly Platell and Wood, believed this would resonate with public opinion and the grassroots. ‘We constructed as hard-hitting and noisy a campaign as we could,’ says Wood. ‘William was totally comfortable with the message.’⁵⁵ The election results on 13 June were widely perceived to be a success for the party, which came first in a nationwide election for the first time since 1992, with 36 per cent of the vote and thirty-six MEPs. Although turnout was a dismally low 24 per cent, the result gave a huge fillip to Hague’s confidence. Enthused by the campaign, supporters had come out to vote. It proved to be a crucial turning point for Hague: ‘I thought that if we lost the European elections I would have outlived my usefulness and maybe it would have been time for me to go. As it turned out we did very well so that thought went away pretty quickly.’⁵⁶

Hague and his aides were convinced that pressing the Eurosceptic button would lead to future success. The campaign had cemented the influence of his new media advisers. ‘Amanda became by far the most influential adviser to William for the rest of the Parliament,’ one aide recalls. Platell and Wood now saw their job as being to protect and promote the leader at all costs. There would be a harder line to policy and presentation, while any argument that challenged the leadership’s position was rapidly dismissed. Platell soon made enemies; in fact she came to be loathed by some in Central Office. Andrew Cooper, who failed to see eye to eye with her after she joined in March, left four months later. Peter Lilley left the Shadow Cabinet in June. ‘William summoned me and said, “The last few months have been extremely destabilising and nearly led to the end of my leader ship, and so if one us has to go it has to be you,” which was fair enough,’ Lilley recalls.⁵⁷ Michael Howard, Gillian Shephard and Norman Fowler also departed from the Shadow Cabinet, further sapping Hague’s frontbench team of experience. Cecil Parkinson had already left in December 1998.

Loyalty to Hague was now paramount. It came at the expense of any attempt to mount a plan for recovery in the long term. Platell in particular ‘waged war against anyone who she suspected was not totally loyal to him’, another aide remarked. She skilfully courted the editors of the tabloids, despite the Sun having already given up on Hague and the party – on the eve of the party conference in 1998 he was portrayed on the paper’s front page as the famous Monty Python dead parrot with the headline: ‘This party is no more … it has ceased to be … this is an ex-party. Cause of death: suicide.’⁵⁸ Hague’s new media advisers sought to project him as a ‘tough guy’ who understood the concerns of ordinary people. Together with Nick Wood, Platell formed an alliance with Seb Coe, Hague’s chief of staff, and from the summer of 1999 Hague trusted their advice much more than that of the Shadow Cabinet. Some were concerned that he had become too reliant on a close-knit team of young advisers. ‘I remember going to an away day,’ says Parkinson. ‘There were only six of us there. I asked halfway through, “Where does the Shadow Cabinet fit into your thinking?” They were convinced that just this little group could do it on their own.’⁵⁹

Platell and Wood encouraged Hague to take a line on issues that would play well with the tabloid press. Support for Tony Martin, a Norfolk farmer who shot dead an intruder breaking into his house, brought favourable coverage in the red-tops and the Daily Mail, but attracted criticism in other quarters. ‘Amanda rehabilitated William Hague, but not the Conservative Party,’ one former party aide observed. It was a press strategy designed to secure ‘core’ supporters, but it did not impress swing voters. ‘It was a shift towards a more robust kind of conservatism that spoke for the silent majority,’ Wood insists.⁶⁰ Policy documents such as the Common Sense Revolution included measures to crack down on ill-discipline in schools and bogus asylum seekers. It was hoped that a tough stance on law and order and a commitment to lower taxes, through a ‘tax guarantee’, would be music to the ears of supporters. Hague memorably said that ‘If the Common Sense Revolution was a person it would be Ann Widdecombe,’ the tough-talking new Shadow Home Secretary. ‘It mattered more to party members that the leader was coming out with things that they agreed with than the fact that the party was not doing so well,’ admits Rick Nye, who joined Central Office as Director of Research in 1999. ‘It was the height of our introspection.’⁶¹

Only once did the Conservatives overtake Labour in the opinion polls – during the fuel crisis in September 2000. This owed more to the government’s unpopularity over high petrol duty than to any faith in the Tory alternative. Three years into government, New Labour had survived its first domestic crisis, when protesters blocked access to oil refineries, leading to a shortage of fuel. Voters were prepared to give Blair the benefit of the doubt after the crisis ended, and the polls soon reversed. Although the Conservative Party made some progress in local and European elections, its performances in parliamentary by-elections continued to be abysmal. A dire warning came at the Romsey by-election in May 2000, when a rock-solid Tory majority fell to the Liberal Democrats. If there was a moment at which to pause and question whether the approach pursued since the European elections was working, it was after the result in Romsey. The leadership pressed on regardless.

Portillo Returns and Disharmony Reigns

Victory at the Kensington and Chelsea by-election in November 1999 provided one glimmer of hope, even though it was the party’s safest seat in the country. The death of the veteran diarist and Tory MP Alan Clark paved the way for Michael Portillo to return to the Commons. Hague hoped that Portillo would strengthen the frontbench team; it was a sign of his continuing vulnerability that he extended the invitation so soon to a man who was widely seen as a rival for the Tory crown. ‘William had suffered a huge amount of undermining, which was compounded by the fact that we had a king across the water in the shape of Michael Portillo,’ says Widdecombe. ‘Everywhere I went, including Tory associations around the country, people asked me, “Have we got the right leader?” and there were a lot of people waiting for Michael to take over.’⁶²

The former Defence Secretary had embarked on a great deal of soul-searching after his dismissal by the voters of Enfield Southgate in 1997. A series of television documentaries, including a journey by train across Spain tracing his family roots, had helped to rehabilitate his public image. He had also embarked on a political journey since his defeat, in an attempt to come to terms with why his party had been so comprehensively rejected. Hague’s team were not entirely convinced that his journey was complete. Soon after Portillo returned to Parliament, Nick Wood had lunch with him. ‘I asked him what he thought we should be doing, and he replied that he didn’t know. I then reeled off what we were planning to do, and he said absolutely nothing,’ recalls Wood. ‘So I went back to William and said that he seemed happy with everything. In reality, he wasn’t happy at all.’⁶³

Within two months, Hague invited Portillo to replace Francis Maude as Shadow Chancellor. Maude had failed to land any blows on Gordon Brown, and had given a huge hostage to fortune when he predicted that Britain was heading for a ‘downturn made in Downing Street’ at a time when, apart from the bursting of the dot.com bubble, the economy showed little sign of slowing. Hague felt that Maude had not given him the support he expected from a Shadow Chancellor, and considered removing him from the Shadow Cabinet in the reshuffle. At Portillo’s insistence, Maude was kept on board, taking over as Shadow Foreign Secretary.⁶⁴ Portillo quickly made an impact as Shadow Chancellor, reversing the party’s opposition to the minimum wage and the independence of the Bank of England, two of Labour’s most popular economic measures since 1997. However, he found a hardened opponent in Brown. ‘This was a Chancellor of the Exchequer who at that stage was at the top of his game, publicly and professionally,’ says Coe. ‘Neither Francis nor Michael could lay a glove on him.’⁶⁵

As the leadership prepared for the final party conference before the general election, which was expected in spring 2001, one last effort was made to broaden the party’s appeal. Hague formed a new strategy group of senior shadow ministers and aides. Two new MPs, Tim Collins and Andrew Lansley, also joined the group. They had been at the heart of the successful 1992 general election campaign, and would become prominent figures in planning for the 2001 election. The strategy group discussed how the party should respond to the public’s continuing concerns over the state of the public services. While the government had been surprisingly cautious since 1997, sticking to Conservative spending plans and avoiding major reform, there was a strong view that the Tories should not even talk about health or education, because the public was far more inclined to trust Labour in those fields, as opinion polls had indicated, and they could not win the argument. Portillo and Maude, who had formed an alliance, disagreed, as did Archie Norman, who had recently been promoted to the Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Environment Secretary. ‘It became clear that we were completely empty on these issues, especially health,’ Norman recalls. ‘On education we did have one or two flagship policies on grammar schools and liberating universities by raising endowments, but that was about it.’⁶⁶

Personality clashes and divisions over social issues soon came to the fore. The tensions focused around Portillo. ‘Once he returned the party was immediately divided,’ recalls one colleague from the Shadow Cabinet. ‘I did not recognise the Michael Portillo I knew from before.’ The stage was set for tensions to boil over at the conference in Bournemouth in October 2000. The mood had been upbeat until the Shadow Home Secretary, Ann Widdecombe, delivered her keynote speech. A combative performance in which she outlined a ‘zero tolerance’ approach to drugs established her as the conference darling. During her speech she announced fixed-penalty fines for people caught with cannabis, a policy that had not been discussed in full Shadow Cabinet. Widdecombe insists that it had gone through the ‘proper processes’, and that Hague had signed the policy off. However, as soon as the press were briefed on the day of Widdecombe’s speech, an argument developed about whether those caught would receive a criminal record. The police questioned how the policy could be enforced, and Widdecombe believes her colleagues used the controversy as an opportunity to attack her.⁶⁷ The row descended into farce when the Mail on Sunday, prompted by a former Central Office official, asked members of the Shadow Cabinet whether they had taken cannabis in their youth. When several replied that they had, the policy collapsed. The Shadow Cabinet could not agree about a supposedly flagship policy at its last conference before the general election. It gave the impression of a party in total disarray and utterly unfit for office.

The newspapers, particularly the traditional Tory-supporting papers, were now filled with stories about splits between ‘mods and rockers’ in the Shadow Cabinet. Social conservatives like Widdecombe and Duncan Smith were pitted against Maude and Portillo, who took a more liberal stance on issues like gay rights. Widdecombe insists that the press, particularly The Times, which she claimed had become ‘a Portillista rag’, exaggerated the tensions. ‘We used to be a relaxed broad Church as a party on these issues, and in my view they didn’t need to be resolved, but we were being portrayed as divided and we went along with it,’ she says.⁶⁸ Yet the tensions were palpable. The decision to oppose Labour’s repeal of Section 28 of the Local Government Act, which prohibited the promotion of homosexuality in schools, had already driven a wedge through the parliamentary party, and had provoked the defection of Shaun Woodward to Labour in December 1999. More liberal members of the Shadow Cabinet, like David Willetts, believed that the party had become deeply disengaged from social trends in the country since the 1980s and 1990s: ‘We got to a point after 1997 that we knew what to say about privatisation, but when for example we were asked about divorce rates, there was a completely incoherent muddle.’ The backlash over ‘Back to Basics’ in the early 1990s had inhibited Conservative politicians from addressing such issues, Willetts argues. ‘Nobody had thought it through properly. Some people said that married couples should stick together and that there should be tax breaks for marriage, while others said divorce was part of modern life and politicians shouldn’t talk about it.’⁶⁹

The tensions that consumed the Shadow Cabinet had taken on a poisonous aspect. Hague’s authority was once again under question, and his aides, principally Platell, believed that Portillo, Maude and Norman had a subversive agenda. ‘Amanda’s battle with Michael was very destabilising. She took the view that he was plotting against William, and so set out to spite anybody who might be on his side,’ Daniel Finkelstein recalls.⁷⁰ By now the relationship between Hague and his Shadow Chancellor and Shadow Foreign Secretary had completely broken down. ‘I did have a difficult time with Michael and Francis in that period,’ says Hague. ‘I didn’t particularly feel that they were team players at the time, and I don’t think they felt I was loyal to them, even though I was.’⁷¹ Portillo and Maude felt that they were being regularly briefed against in the press by Platell and Wood, and that Hague refused to do anything about it. When Hague challenged them to prove it, which was impossible, he said that he could not act without proof, which they took to mean that he was, at best, complicit.

Such was the level of mistrust between Hague and his two senior colleagues that resignation threats were issued over the appointment of backroom staff. Hague’s advisers took great exception to some of Portillo’s confidants and advisers. ‘I managed to hold them together, and if they threatened to resign I largely ignored them. I wasn’t going to deal with such stupidities, and refused to speak to them,’ says Hague.⁷² According to one senior member of staff at Central Office, this led to the appearance of an ‘upstairs downstairs’ mentality, with Maude and Portillo considered highly disingenuous.

Hague also became increasingly frustrated that his Shadow Chancellor failed to suggest ideas to help the party recover. ‘Some of Michael’s thinking tended to change by the week,’ recalls one of Hague’s aides. ‘This was more about Michael’s journey than the rehabilitation of the party.’ Portillo’s friends noticed that he had lost his enthusiasm for the cut and thrust of party politics. ‘Michael almost immediately regretted coming back into Parliament,’ says one. ‘He told me that he had enjoyed each year of his adult life more than the previous one, until that year. He thought there was lots of intellectual nonsense going on. He also didn’t particularly rate William.’

Staring at Defeat

The Conservative Party was heading for another electoral drubbing. Despite the tensions at the top of the party, Central Office was at least ready for the campaign. During the months leading up to the election there were some successful publicity efforts, including posters with the slogan ‘You’ve paid the taxes, so where are the nurses/teachers/police?’ This was one of the few attempts to campaign on the public services, and chimed with the party’s private polling, which revealed the public’s concerns over the lack of progress made by Labour. Andrew Lansley had planned it as the theme for the preelection period, and some in the party felt it was a message that should be pushed right up to polling day, advice that was turned down.

After a delay caused by an outbreak of Foot and Mouth Disease, Tony Blair announced on 8 May 2001 that the election would be held on 7 June. For all Hague’s faults as leader, he had presided over an overhaul of the machine to ensure that the party would survive. The first week and a half of the campaign went relatively well. The party faithful had developed a strong affection for Hague, and there was a degree of bonhomie within his close team as they criss-crossed the country by helicopter. Yet any feelings of optimism were illusory – voters often walked away at the sight of blue rosettes coming towards them. Senior figures were already contemplating what might happen after the defeat. ‘Holding them together in the campaign was hard – for several of them their first instinct when the going got tough was to reach for the lifebelts,’ says Coe.⁷³

Experienced figures in the parliamentary party were not hopeful. ‘The 2001 campaign was the most ridiculous we have ever fought,’ Ken Clarke recalls. ‘People were not interested in saving the pound, and we avoided the major issues. It was like Labour’s doomed campaign in 1983.’⁷⁴ The ‘Keep the Pound’ roadshow, inspired by the perceived success of the European elections campaign, was designed to arouse interest in the campaign: Hague’s advisers hoped that his appearance on the back of a lorry holding up a pound coin would galvanise party supporters. Yet for many voters, the fact that Labour had already committed to holding a referendum on the single currency made Hague’s rallying cry seem utterly irrelevant. ‘Keeping the pound’ was not the issue on which votes would turn.

On the eve of the campaign, Hague had told the party’s spring forum in Harrogate that Labour’s re-election threatened to turn Britain into a ‘foreign land’. The author of the speech, Daniel Finkelstein, was alarmed that it was briefed to the press that ‘foreign land’ implied concerns over immigration and asylum, as well as the impact of a federal Europe. Labour immediately jumped on the speech as peddling a sinister agenda. ‘It wasn’t William’s fault, and it was not an attempt to say immigrants would turn Britain into a foreign land,’ insists Finkelstein. ‘We were always careful with language. I am the son of two refugee immigrants, and we would never have written something like that. I don’t think I have ever been as depressed about anything in politics as that.’⁷⁵ But the damage had been done. To the outside world it appeared that the Conservatives were hopelessly trapped in a tawdry sideshow of their own, unconnected with the Britain of 2001.

When Mrs Thatcher addressed a rally of the party faithful in the closing days of the campaign, Hague hoped she would lift morale. She urged them to turn out for the party, warning that another Labour term in office would lead to the ‘progressive extinction of Britain as a nation state’.⁷⁶ Labour responded with posters of Mrs Thatcher’s trademark perm superimposed on Hague’s bald head. It was the most memorable poster of the entire campaign, making the Tory leader look weak and un-prime ministerial. The Conservative campaign, masterminded by Lansley and Collins, sought to revive the appeal the party had enjoyed in Mrs Thatcher’s heyday. It was nothing more than an ersatz Thatcherism, a bizarre caricature of the campaigns she had fought in the 1980s. The ‘Keep the Pound’ campaign may have resonated with some of the party’s supporters, but talk of ‘bogus’ asylum seekers left a bitter taste in the mouth. ‘We were seen as anti-foreign and anti-everything. It became increasingly difficult to see what we were pro, except perhaps Britain,’ says Archie Norman.⁷⁷

On the issues that most concerned voters, such as the state of the public services, the Tory campaign completely unravelled. After the Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Oliver Letwin, had suggested to the Financial Times that £20 billion of spending cuts could be found, rather than the official party figure of £8 billion,⁷⁸ Gordon Brown raised the spectre of huge Conservative cuts to the public services. Labour’s relentless focus on its investment versus ‘Tory cuts’ struck a chord. Brown’s ‘dividing line’ on spending in 2001 had become the reverse of the Conservative attack on ‘Labour’s tax bombshell’ in 1992. Voters were prepared to give Blair a second term: the economy was prospering and the government had done little to alienate the moderate Conservative voters it had so successfully courted before 1997. In contrast, the opposition looked hopelessly lost, drifting towards another crushing defeat at the hands of New Labour.

Could William Hague have done more to avoid defeat? He admits that the party ‘sacrificed some long-term effort for some short-term victories. But we had to make sure that we survived in 2001: many people thought that the party would not make it through at all.’⁷⁹ The furore surrounding Peter Lilley’s speech and the European elections in spring 1999 were vital turning points for Hague’s leadership and the Conservatives’ journey in opposition. After pursuing a course in which he sought to modernise the party’s decaying organisation and commissioning the ‘Kitchen Table’ research, Hague panicked, and found comfort in a more populist groove advocated by his new media aides. When Lilley confronted his colleagues with some home truths, they took fright and wrapped themselves in a cloak of complacency. Hague’s weakness was that he listened to those whose interests lay purely in propping him up, rather than considering the long-term future of the party. The leadership had steered the party to a relatively more settled position on the single currency, one of the burning issues immediately after the 1997 general election, and one which had plagued the Conservatives ever since the downfall of Mrs Thatcher. Like John Major, Hague had managed to find a way through, but his formula chimed much more with the weight of opinion within the party. Even so, the spectre of a split, which Major so feared, had continued to loom for a time. Although the party had just about survived in one piece, this did little to impress an electorate that had tuned out from what the Conservatives had to offer.

As voters went to the polls on Thursday, 7 June 2001, in fewer numbers than at any general election since 1918, there was a deep sense of foreboding in Central Office. Had they done enough to bring out even their most loyal supporters? Out on the stump, the mood was not promising. ‘Everyone knew it was going to be a bloodbath,’ recalls one of the party’s footsoldiers. ‘It was really a case of holding on to what we had and trying desperately hard to make some inroads.’⁸⁰ Canvass returns on the eve of polling day suggested that the party might be left with just 120 MPs, adding to the losses of the landslide in 1997. Hague was braced for a devastating defeat: the only question was whether it would sound his party’s death knell.