Читать книгу Back from the Brink: The Inside Story of the Tory Resurrection - Peter Snowdon - Страница 8

As the first results came in, it became clear that the Conservative Party was heading for another calamity. William Hague had hoped to make a few dozen gains and a modest increase in the party’s share of the vote, the measure of progress that would persuade him to continue as leader.¹ In fact the party had gained just one seat, leaving it with 166 MPs, and increased its share of the vote by one point to 31.7 per cent. After 1997, it was the Conservatives’ second-worst result since 1832. Yet the nightmare of losing twenty or thirty more seats had not materialised. As Hague flew down to London from his count in Yorkshire, he began to write his resignation speech, despite pleas for him to stay in the name of stability. As after the landslide defeat in May 1997, the party struggled to compose itself following a crushing defeat. If ever there was a time for an inspired leader to lift the Tories out of the gloom, it was now.

Hague Falls

Standing outside Central Office in bright sunshine on Friday, 8 June, William Hague admitted defeat. ‘I believe strongly, passionately, in everything I’ve fought for. But it’s also vital for leaders to listen and parties to change. I believe it is vital the party be given the chance to choose a leader who can build on my work, but also take new initiatives and hopefully command a larger personal following in the country.’ He was painfully aware that he had become just the second Tory leader in over a century not to serve as Prime Minister. Many had believed after the Labour landslide in 1997 that victory four or five years later would be a near-impossibility, but past performance showed that the Conservatives were capable of staging impressive recoveries. In the general elections that followed the great landslide defeats of 1906 and 1945 the party made up enough ground to challenge for power next time round. In January 1910 the Conservatives gained 116 seats, while in 1950 they recovered eighty-eight. The gain of a solitary seat was a dismal performance by comparison.

Tony Blair had achieved what no other Labour leader had done: a large enough majority to ensure a second full term in office. Despite a sharp fall in turnout to only 59 per cent, a post-war low, he had received another huge overall majority of 167 seats. With increased majorities in almost all of the constituencies gained from the Conservatives in 1997, New Labour crushed the Tories in large swathes of the country – particularly in their heartland of the south-east. Although they won one seat back in Scotland, the Conservatives failed to recover in Wales, and had slipped into third place in Manchester, Liverpool and many other northern cities. The Liberal Democrats not only won seven more seats from the Conservatives, but came a close second in many of the Tory strongholds in the south and west of England.² The Conservative Party’s woes were compounded by an electoral system that worked to Labour’s advantage. But the harsh reality was that almost one and a half million fewer people voted for the party than in 1997. Beneath the headline figures, the Conservatives were falling back even further.

The one consolation from the 2001 general election was the emergence of a handful of Tory MPs from a new generation. Elected in safe rural seats, they would be the future of the party, set apart from a parliamentary rump comprised of former ministers and backbenchers in the autumn of their political careers. Among them were David Cameron and George Osborne. After three years trying unsuccessfully to secure a winnable seat, Cameron finally persuaded the Witney Conservative Association to adopt him as their candidate in April 2000. Shaun Woodward, who had worked alongside Cameron at Central Office in the 1992 general election campaign, had represented the Cotswolds constituency since 1997. Woodward defected to Labour in December 1999 in protest at Hague’s stance on Section 28 and other social issues. ‘It’s not me who left my party. My party left me,’ he regretted at the time.³ While Woodward was parachuted into a safe Labour seat, Cameron found a new political home in true blue Oxfordshire. Victory in Witney was cold comfort for David Cameron: his party lay in tatters. The new MP had some sympathy with his outgoing leader. If Hague had continued with the ‘fresh start’ theme of 1997, the result in 2001 might have been even worse, Cameron contends, but at least he would have set out on the right path.

Hague had told only three people that he would resign if he failed to reach his desired target of seats for the election: his wife Ffion, Seb Coe, his chief of staff, and the Chief Whip, James Arbuthnot. When news of his intention to resign began to circulate among senior figures in the early hours of the morning of 8 June, colleagues were in a state of shock. Despite the infighting that had blighted his Shadow Cabinet, many hoped that Hague would remain in post for a while to ensure stability after the expected defeat. ‘Michael Portillo was very cross with me when I told him; that was the final straw for him,’ says Hague.⁴ Portillo was already on the way to the airport to fly to Morocco to consider his own future. After eighteen months of mistrust between them, their relationship had completely broken down; they would not even speak to each other for another seven years.

As Portillo headed for Morocco, several other colleagues in the Shadow Cabinet appealed to Hague to reconsider. ‘I wanted him to have another shot at it,’ recalls Iain Duncan Smith. ‘I tried to persuade him before he went out to the cameras. I stopped trying once I realised he was tired and adamant that he was going.’⁵ Nick Wood and Amanda Platell, Hague’s loyal media advisers, also urged him to stay, arguing that he was held in great affection by the grassroots. Yet taking on the leadership of his vanquished party was a burden that was perhaps too great for the William Hague of 1997. As one former Cabinet minister commented, ‘The sadness for the Conservative Party is that William Hague was put in [too soon]. It was rather like opening a very good wine several years before it should be drunk, and you don’t get the best out of it.’⁶

Shocked, Frightened and Hollowed Out

William Hague’s sudden departure left a vacuum at the top of the party, just as John Major’s had done four years earlier. Instead of the complacent attitude that arose after 1997, senior figures inside the party had little to console themselves with. ‘2001 was by far the worst result,’ says Lord Strathclyde, who became Tory leader in the Lords in 1998. ‘I was one of those in 1997 who thought that the pendulum would swing back. After 2001, it seemed to be completely stuck.’⁷ ‘There was a state of panic; the party didn’t know where to go,’ recalls Liam Fox, then Shadow Health Secretary.⁸ Hague’s Shadow Social Security Secretary, David Willetts, laments the fact that there was ‘no grown-up discussion of why we lost so badly for a second time. We were getting straight into another leadership election, and because of the fear of appearing divided there was no collective understanding of what had gone wrong. I think we were too frightened of it all.’⁹

The mood in Central Office was despondent. Among those to leave was Daniel Finkelstein, who had been head of policy before standing in Harrow West, a leafy seat in north London that the Conservatives lost in 1997. He would have become an MP had the party made even the smallest of inroads into Labour’s majority, but out on the stump, Finkelstein soon realised that the party’s campaign was doomed. Like Norman Tebbit, Mrs Thatcher’s Party Chairman in the 1987 general election campaign, he compared the party’s predicament after 1997 to that of Marks & Spencer. Tebbit’s point had been that by dropping traditional lines in favour of more trendy, fashion-conscious items, M&S had alienated its core customers but failed to attract new ones. In 2001, Finkelstein drew a different conclusion: ‘M&S was frequented by suburban women whose fashion sense and lifestyle had completely changed. Its sales began to fall because it did not change with its customers, and was committed to the same way of doing things.’ It was precisely the same for the Conservative Party, he argued. ‘The party decided after 1997 that it needed to sack the voters and get a new set who were more willing to go along with what it wanted to say to them.’ Indeed, M&S only restored its fortunes by broadening its range to accommodate old and new styles.

Instead of pursuing what many commentators labelled a ‘core vote’ strategy, the party failed to understand what its ‘core’ supporters – suburban, professional and middle-class (the so-called ‘ABC1s’) – wanted. ‘When a Conservative Party starts attacking the “liberal elite” then you know you’re in trouble, because they had actually been a traditional source of support. Ironically, the party had contributed a lot to the fact that these people had changed,’ says Finkelstein.¹⁰ New Labour appeared to be listening to voters’ concerns about the state of the public services, while the Conservatives had left them unanswered. As a result, the middle classes deserted the party. In 1983 the Conservatives led Labour among ABC1s by 40 per cent. By 1992 that lead had fallen to a still healthy 30 per cent, but by 1997 it had collapsed to 5 per cent, and it was a mere 3 per cent four years later.¹¹ Only among working-class voters, the DEs, was there a small increase in Tory support, which produced the minuscule rise in the party’s overall share of the vote. Such was the solidity of Labour’s support and the lowness of the Conservatives’ base among these voters that it hardly made a difference.

The party had become trapped in a warped version of its past. ‘We had become a neo-Thatcherite party, not a Conservative party,’ argues Archie Norman, the outgoing Shadow Environment Secretary. ‘We were following an ideology that her disciples developed after she fell, but it wasn’t what she believed in the 1980s.’¹² By pushing an agenda which stressed concerns about asylum and immigration, keeping the pound and raising the spectre of Labour’s ‘foreign land’, the party’s 2001 election campaign was fought on a narrow platform, and seemed to be aimed purely at ‘striving’ working-class voters. Mrs Thatcher had succeeded in picking up many of their votes in the 1980s, but she knew that their support was not enough by itself to win an election, and her initial success lay in appealing to both the middle and the working classes. William Hague’s election campaign in 2001 was a parody of hers in 1979 or 1983. It was not only out of step with an earlier generation of Thatcherites, but was lost on an electorate that had moved on.

Despite Hague’s ambition to revive Conservatism as a grassroots movement, the campaign exposed how thin and aged the party had become on the ground. ‘There was a crisis of DNA in the party – it was left with the old, who were too infirm to be the footsoldiers of campaigns, but who actually kept the party ticking over in various places,’ one party official observed. Elderly activists were loyal and hard-working, but they were too few in number to sustain a healthy presence in many constituencies. Many local associations, particularly in constituencies which for years had not returned a Conservative MP, had ceased to function as organisations capable of fighting an election campaign. Elderly members were accompanied by a younger generation of activists enthused by Mrs Thatcher’s view of the world. ‘The young ones socialised only with each other, and were obsessive about politics as well as being socially and culturally tone deaf,’ another insider remarked. ‘Association meetings were dominated by the old, who weren’t necessarily prejudiced or bigoted, but out of step with public opinion on social issues, and a younger set who were atypical of their generation.’

The messages of the 2001 campaign resonated with a hard core of Tory activists, but those who helped to keep the party in touch with the world of work, through the professions, private industry and the public sector, simply drifted away. Disillusioned with or uninterested in a party so far removed from power, fewer and fewer were drawn into Conservative circles. ‘There was a lost generation of bright young types who came into political maturity at a time when the party was in decline,’ says a party official. ‘If you combine this with the disengagement of the broader public from politics you have a perfect storm for the Tory Party struggling to survive in the country.’ Along with injections of cash from a small group of donors, the hollowed-out grassroots had helped to keep the party alive after 1997. Now it would be left to the emaciated and estranged ranks of the Tory Party in the country to make the decision about William Hague’s successor. For the 166 Tory MPs returning to Westminster the contest had already begun.

The Peasants’ Revolt

The ensuing leadership election, the fifth in twelve years, would not provide the constructive debate that the party so desperately required. As in 1997, five candidates stood: Michael Ancram (Party Chairman after Parkinson retired); Iain Duncan Smith (Shadow Defence Secretary); David Davis (a former minister who had been on the backbenches since 1997); Ken Clarke, who threw his hat into the ring for a second time; and Michael Portillo. With the exception of Clarke and Portillo, all of them appealed to the right of the parliamentary party. Both Duncan Smith and Davis were devotedly Thatcherite and Eurosceptic, while Ancram had a small following among social conservatives. Clarke drew his support from the centre of the party, as well as the dwindling number of pro-Europeans.

Portillo’s return to the frontline had been a jarring experience, not least because of his bruising encounters with some of Hague’s aides. Even before then he had had doubts about re-entering the political fray. Shortly before returning to Parliament in November 1999, he revealed that he had experienced gay relationships as a young man, an admission he came to regret.¹³ Confiding with friends in February 2001, four months before the general election, he gave ten reasons for not wanting to be party leader, including his declining appetite for politics, the pursuit of other interests and a feeling that the party would not be willing to be led in the direction he would wish to take it. Shrugging, he concluded, ‘Well, there isn’t anybody else.’¹⁴ When he set off for Morocco just after the election defeat, he told friends that he would not stand, but while he was there Francis Maude rang several times to tell him there was a strong tide of support building in his favour. When Stephen Dorrell, a former Cabinet minister from the centre of the party who had backed Ken Clarke in 1997, called to say that he would support him, his mind began to change. On his return to Westminster he resolved to go for it.

Portillo met with Maude and Archie Norman on the Monday after the election, and told them, ‘We are going to win this, and win it on our terms. We are going to be uncompromising.’ The party had to come to terms with modern Britain, he insisted. Its position on social issues, such as Section 28 and support for marriage through the tax system, had to be reconsidered. Portillo soon gained the support of a number of frontbenchers, including David Willetts and Oliver Letwin, and his campaign manager, Maude, collected further declarations of support from most of the Shadow Cabinet. Portillo also had the support of some of the brightest of the 2001 intake, including David Cameron. Despite being caught up in the Hague–Portillo rivalry, Hague’s former Political Secretary George Osborne saw the need for change, and supported Portillo as the right candidate for the time.

Within days Portillo had become the front-runner. But in a series of meetings with undecided backbench MPs he did not make it easy for himself. When a potential supporter, Graham Brady, asked him about all-woman shortlists for selecting parliamentary candidates he refused to rule them out, even though those close to him knew he did not favour them. ‘I wasn’t happy with his response that “The end justified the means,”’ Brady recalls. ‘He just wanted a completely free rein to do whatever he saw fit. I then joined the David Davis campaign.’¹⁵ Portillo’s tactics would soon backfire. ‘He wasn’t going to campaign in the conventional fashion or dilute his views in any way,’ recalls Michael Gove, a columnist at The Times who had written a biography of Portillo in 1995. ‘He was essentially saying that the party needed to change profoundly, and unless they could accept his message and understand fully what they were getting into, he would not stoop to conquer.’¹⁶

Nevertheless, most of Portillo’s campaign team were brimming with confidence, insisting that he had nearly a hundred MPs on board. But some were not so complacent. ‘I raised my eyebrows when I heard some of the names being mentioned by senior MPs running the campaign,’ says Mark MacGregor, a former parliamentary candidate who joined the campaign to organise events. ‘For example, I saw William Hague on a list of possible supporters, but Hague had seriously fallen out with Portillo during his time as leader. There was a presumption that MPs would vote for Michael simply because he was the candidate backed by virtually the entire Shadow Cabinet, and that Clarke could not win support because of his views on Europe. Ironically, Duncan Smith was barely even given a moment’s consideration.’¹⁷ Doubts were also emerging elsewhere in the camp. ‘He didn’t produce a forward-looking agenda that people could galvanise around,’ recalls Archie Norman. ‘When we met in my house before the first round, we said we had to have a policy narrative to make it clear what he stood for. Michael was pretty reluctant, but by then he realised it was too late anyway.’¹⁸

When the results of the first ballot were announced, Portillo emerged in the lead with forty-nine votes. To everyone’s surprise, Duncan Smith came second with thirty-nine, and Clarke third with thirty-six. Davis and Ancram, who were tied on twenty-one, both withdrew from the contest. Portillo’s lead was nowhere near as large as his campaign team had expected. ‘They assumed there would be a wave of support, and when it didn’t happen they didn’t have a plan B,’ Mark MacGregor recalls.¹⁹ For Portillo, it was a defining moment. ‘He didn’t want to win, because it proved his point about the party not wanting to go where he wanted to lead it,’ says his friend the former Tory aide Andrew Cooper.²⁰ He consulted his team about whether to pull out, but was persuaded to remain in the contest.

While Ken Clarke’s campaign had had a faltering start, Iain Duncan Smith had made a surprisingly strong showing. The tactical flaws of Portillo’s campaign had provided an opportunity for Duncan Smith to court the right. The Thatcherite and Eurosceptic wing of the party, who would have once flocked to Portillo, were now unconvinced about his candidacy. ‘The out-and-out-moderniser package was too much for those who in earlier years had been ardent supporters,’ Maude admits. ‘He lost his old constituency without gaining enough new people.’²¹ Paul Goodman, a newly elected MP, observed that ‘There was a massive campaign to sign up the great and the good – the aristocracy of the parliamentary party, one might say – but it overlooked the peasants. Perhaps inevitably, a revolt followed, led by Iain Duncan Smith and managed by Owen Paterson, John Hayes and Bernard Jenkin.’²² They believed that Duncan Smith would speak up for them and the backbenchers.

Iain Duncan Smith had made his name as one of the Maastricht rebels in the Major years. Before he succeeded Norman Tebbit as MP for Chingford in 1992, he had a career in the army and in business. He became a thorn in the side of the Whips’ Office as a serial rebel during the passage of the Maastricht Bill.²³ Pinstriped and balding, Duncan Smith was not one of the most colourful characters on the Tory benches. Yet he was a competent and at times impassioned speaker, leading to a number of approaches to join the government, all of which he turned down. After the landslide defeat in 1997 he won promotion as Shadow Social Security and then Shadow Defence Secretary, and remained loyal to Hague. Many MPs were astonished when he put himself forward as a candidate to lead the party. Despite his loyalty in opposition, his reputation as a rebel remained, and very few considered him leadership material. ‘I left Central Office with Iain after William Hague announced his resignation,’ recalls Andrew MacKay, who was Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary at the time. ‘As we were walking through Westminster, he said: “This is an awful dilemma, Andrew, because I’ve got to stand for leader to stop Portillo.” I was exhausted, but thought, “This cannot be serious.” Of all the people I sat around the Shadow Cabinet table with, this decent man was least equipped to do it.’²⁴ MacKay tried to dissuade him, but Duncan Smith had made up his mind.

Duncan Smith’s campaign organisation soon eclipsed that of his rivals. ‘We made a tremendous effort working on the new intake. We got a lot onside because the Portillo camp threatened them, and that wasn’t a successful tactic,’ says Owen Paterson.²⁵ The ‘IDS’ camp thought Portillo’s campaign was overbearing in its approaches to new MPs, while its pitch was superficial and fixated with politically correct issues of little importance to traditional Tory supporters. Duncan Smith believed that the party had to stop arguing about Europe and broaden its approach: it had to engage with the state of the public services and concentrate on social problems. He also genuinely believed that only someone with impeccable Eurosceptic credentials could lead the party in this way.

When Tory MPs voted in the second round, Clarke came first with fifty-nine votes, ahead of Duncan Smith on fifty-four and Portillo on fifty-three. Portillo was knocked out of the contest by one vote, leaving Clarke and Duncan Smith to go to the final round, which would be decided by party members. It was an astonishing result: Duncan Smith had successfully led a peasants’ revolt against the establishment. Many Tory MPs could not bring themselves to vote for Portillo, and a sizeable number of them had voted for Clarke, who picked up twenty more votes than in the first round, as a way of preventing Portillo entering the nationwide run-off. Any lingering interest Portillo might have had in leading the Tories evaporated. Within minutes of losing the vote in the Commons, he sent a text message to Andrew Cooper: it read, ‘The slave is free’ in Latin. ‘I seemed to unite people against me in antagonism,’ was his verdict as he announced his intention to leave frontline politics for good.²⁶

Michael Portillo’s personal and political journey had proved far too much for many backbench Tory MPs. His prescription for a modernised party, forcing it to accept social change, was simply too bitter a pill for them to swallow. ‘He had a clear sense of what was wrong with the party, but not the country,’ says Willetts. ‘He campaigned against the obscurantism and atavism of the Conservative Party, but it became a preoccupation to liberate the party from a caricature of itself. Issues like attitudes to gay people were more important to the party than the country, which had largely accepted that things had moved on. The leadership campaign became a battle for the soul of the party disconnected from where the country stood in 2001.’²⁷ Many in the Shadow Cabinet understood that these issues had to be confronted, but the rest of the party did not. It was a battle that would continue to rumble in the party, while the rest of the country looked on bemused.

Another issue that continued to preoccupy the party but not the country was Europe. Hague had settled the dispute over the parliamentary party’s position on the Euro, but for the Eurosceptic press and the grassroots, European integration still stirred the loins. Portillo’s exit ensured a choice between the avuncular Clarke, whose pro-European views they largely disliked, and the relatively unknown Duncan Smith, whose Eurosceptic credentials were comfortably reassuring. Many of Portillo’s supporters at Westminster had little option but to back Clarke, but MPs had little influence in a contest that would be decided by ordinary party members. ‘We all retreated back into our comfort zones,’ recalls Oliver Letwin. ‘One lot of people went for Ken and were arguing that we just needed to revert to the golden days, and the others went to IDS to avoid falling into the Europe trap.’²⁸ Once again, a large number of MPs believed that Clarke would lead them into a distinctly uncomfortable pro-European position.

Drawn out over the long summer recess, the contest became drained of energy. As Clarke and Duncan Smith attended membership hustings across the country, there was little to excite the media, apart from the visible awkwardness between the two candidates. Their personal styles could not have been more different: Duncan Smith was serious but wooden, whereas Clarke was jovial but complacent. ‘We didn’t do many televised debates because there was so little public interest. We did one on Newsnight, and nobody ever asked us to do it again, because it was a pretty turgid affair,’ recalls Duncan Smith.²⁹

Duncan Smith’s campaign won the support of party donors and, crucially, of the Daily Telegraph, which under the editorship of Charles Moore represented the most vocal of Tory activists. Duncan Smith’s commitment to ruling out membership of the single currency for good played well with a paper that flew the standard for Euroscepticism. ‘We were probably rather boring on the subject, and made ourselves the noticeboard,’ Moore concedes. ‘We could have said that Ken Clarke was the best candidate even though we didn’t agree with him, but it would have been a regression if he had won. I do regret the factional negativity that crept in over Europe – it isn’t good for papers to bash all the time.’³⁰ Although he had topped the poll of MPs in July, Clarke did not fancy his chances. ‘The problem was that the change of leadership rules made it difficult for me. In 1997 the membership was more supportive, but did not have a vote, and in 2001 the MPs were more supportive, but they did not have the final say.’³¹

As the contest drew to a close in late August, Duncan Smith was in confident mood. Polling of Tory members showed that he had a commanding lead over Clarke. In July the Duncan Smith campaign commissioned focus-group research which showed that activists believed that Clarke ‘had not uttered a single word to help during the [2001 election] campaign’. Other comments were very revealing of the mood of the party membership after the 2001 defeat: ‘I’m very disappointed with the electorate’; ‘People were brainwashed to vote Labour by the papers and the BBC’; and in order to win, the party had to ‘just sit it out for the next four years, educate the voters and they’ll see we’re right in the end’.³² For a constituency with views like those, it would not take much for a candidate from the right of the party, like Duncan Smith, to attract support. In fairness to his campaign, he tried to talk about the state of the public services and the need for reform, but these were not issues that excited the average Tory member as much as Europe.

Like William Hague in 1997, Iain Duncan Smith received the crucial endorsement of Lady Thatcher. In a letter to the Daily Telegraph on 21 August she wrote that he would restore the party’s ‘faith and fortunes’, and warned that Clarke’s pro-European views would lead to confusion and contradiction within the ranks: ‘I simply do not understand how Ken would lead today’s Conservative Party to anything other than disaster.’³³ John Major and Michael Heseltine came out in favour of Clarke, but Thatcher’s influence with the party faithful remained strong. Eleven years after leaving office, her interventions, although fewer and farther between because of her declining health, continued to resonate with a large swathe of the party.

Once again, Europe would swing opinion within the party, although it mattered little to how most people voted at general elections. Clarke did not help his own cause. ‘Ken’s campaign managers got frustrated with him because every time they tried to steer him away from Europe he would just go back to it and make some comment about it,’ says Duncan Smith.³⁴ ‘Europe was his undoing,’ admits Ann Widdecombe, a rare Clarke supporter from the right. ‘People mistrusted his views on the subject, because he was seen as a troublemaker and had shared a platform with Blair in support of the Euro. But people couldn’t get their heads round the fact that you could have a view contrary to most in the party and still serve because that view was not going to prevail.’³⁵ Like Portillo, Clarke was not prepared to change or even tone down his message. ‘I wasn’t going to compromise my views by saying things that I didn’t believe in,’ he insists.³⁶

Long memories about Clarke’s role in Mrs Thatcher’s downfall also harmed his prospects. He had been one of the Cabinet ministers who told her in November 1990 that she had little chance of remaining as leader after the first ballot, and ardent Thatcherites would never forgive such ‘treachery’. ‘I believe this did him far more harm than the European issue,’ says Don Porter, a respected figure as Chairman and President of the National Convention, the body which represents the voluntary wing of the party. ‘Unlike some others who were less sincere, Ken was at least honourable and told her exactly what he felt, but that did him long-term damage.’³⁷

In September 2001, the grassroots finally delivered their verdict. When the postal ballots were counted, 155,933 had voted for Iain Duncan Smith and 100,864 for Ken Clarke. Duncan Smith had won by a margin of three to two. It was an emphatic victory that appeared to give him the authority to lead the party through to the next general election.

A Leader in the Shadows

A day before the new leader of the Conservative Party was due to be announced, the world changed. As Iain Duncan Smith sat in his Commons office on 11 September 2001, news broke of a plane flying into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York. When a second plane hit the South Tower seventeen minutes later, he rang William Hague to ask if the announcement of the result could be postponed. Normal politics was put on hold. Tony Blair had been addressing the Trades Union Congress in Brighton. ‘This mass terrorism is the new evil in our world today,’ he declared in a short statement before retuning to Number 10.

While the events of 11 September would cast a long shadow over the election of the new Tory leader, Tony Blair would find his stride as an international statesman. ‘Nobody was interested in us: it was the biggest crisis to hit the Western world, and nobody cared about an opposition party that had a new leader,’ Duncan Smith recalls.³⁸ When the leadership ballot result was announced in a low-key event in Central Office on 13 September, the media’s gaze was fixed on events thousands of miles away.

Nick Wood, who continued in his role as press secretary to the party leader, becoming a close confidant of Duncan Smith, thought that the crisis would play to the strengths of a leader who had been Shadow Defence Secretary and had close contacts in Washington. Duncan Smith had planned that his first speeches would be about domestic policy, signalling a change of emphasis, but now he would have little opportunity to make them.’The whole landscape changed,’ remembers Wood. ‘It looked good for him to go to Number 10 for meetings with the Prime Minister, but it was frustrating for us as we couldn’t get into domestic affairs. Politically it was not good for us at all.’³⁹ An impotent leader of the opposition could only watch as the Prime Minister received plaudits for his shuttle diplomacy after 9/11. ‘Oppositions die on foreign affairs. It was very difficult to make headway because the public weren’t interested,’ recalls Duncan Smith. ‘I found it incredibly difficult to make a mark, when the news was wall-to-wall Tony Blair every night. I didn’t get a look-in.’⁴⁰

Failing to make an impression in the first weeks and months of his leadership was only one of the problems to beset Duncan Smith. Despite his convincing victory in the ballot of party members, he had won the support of only a third of the parliamentary party in the final round of MPs. It was hardly a solid foundation on which to build authority. ‘We had Iain Duncan Smith because he wasn’t anybody else – he wasn’t me, or Portillo or Clarke,’ says Widdecombe.⁴¹ Long-serving Tory MPs also resented his rebellious behaviour during the Major years, while his lack of ministerial experience (he was the first party leader not to have served in the Cabinet) was a concern for many. Former whips and ministers questioned why they should demonstrate loyalty to a man whose disloyal behaviour had caused them so much consternation in the past.

Duncan Smith’s first Shadow Cabinet leaned heavily towards the right of the party. A number of heavyweights returned to the fold, including Michael Howard as Shadow Chancellor and David Davis as Party Chairman. Michael Ancram and Oliver Letwin were promoted to Shadow Foreign and Home Secretaries respectively. There were very few counterbalancing voices from the centre or pro-European wing of the party. Portillo, Maude and Clarke all refused to serve, and Hague returned to the backbenches, although unlike Portillo he did not rule out a future in frontline politics. Bernard Jenkin, the only former member of Hague’s Shadow Cabinet to support Duncan Smith in the early stages of the leadership election, took the defence brief, while the arch-Maastricht rebel Bill Cash became Shadow Attorney General. ‘The appointment of Bill Cash is the final proof that the lunatics have taken over the asylum … grief will follow,’ was the verdict of one disillusioned MP.⁴² Like Hague, Duncan Smith lacked a close ally in the Shadow Cabinet to act as a troubleshooter and command respect across the party. While Thatcher had Whitelaw and Major had Heseltine, both Hague and Duncan Smith lacked a serious heavyweight figure to protect them.

What undermined Duncan Smith even further was the weakness of his private office. He relied heavily on supportive MPs such as Owen Paterson, his Parliamentary Private Secretary, and John Hayes, both of whom had very little experience in advising party leaders. He also lacked a chief of staff or a permanent Political Secretary. Jenny Ungless, his first appointment, departed after a few months as chief of staff, despairing at his way of working. ‘It was bit of a ragtag army that came in with him, and a lot of them left very quickly,’ Rick Nye recalls. ‘His working methods were chaotic and he couldn’t keep time: meetings would often overrun.’⁴³ As Director of the CRD, Nye was one of the few figures in Central Office Duncan Smith trusted, along with Greg Clark, who headed a new policy unit. In an attempt to stretch a hand out to his rivals for the leadership, he appointed Mark MacGregor, from the Portillo campaign, as Chief Executive.

Vulnerabilities on Display

There were some parts of the party machine that showed signs of life under Iain Duncan Smith. A more considered approach to domestic policy took root. Clark’s policy unit was modelled on Mrs Thatcher’s Number 10 Policy Unit. He developed a three-stage process to policy-making: identifying problem areas; dispatching shadow ministers and aides to European countries to learn from their experience; producing consultation documents in advance of preparing the next manifesto. Health was an area which received much more attention than before: The Wrong Prescription, Alternative Prescriptions and Setting the NHS Free were the most significant pieces of work in the field that the party had produced in years. Clark and Nye were conscious of the party’s weakness in this area. ‘It was a very collaborative process. We agreed that we shouldn’t rush into making detailed policies, otherwise people would think that we hadn’t learned from our mistakes,’ Clark recalls.⁴⁴

To the surprise of many in the party and the press, Duncan Smith did not concentrate on European issues. ‘We wanted to broaden things out – our strategy was to talk about the public services,’ he says.⁴⁵ At Prime Minister’s Questions he invariably probed Tony Blair about health, education and transport, as well as foreign policy, which often dominated proceedings. But backbenchers were unimpressed by his performances: Duncan Smith struggled to rival Blair, who was in confident form at the dispatch box following his second election victory.

One of the more striking new arrivals at Central Office was Dominic Cummings, who had led the embryonic campaign against joining the single currency, as Director of Strategy. Young and enthusiastic, he had firm views about what had to change. ‘I knew from my research at the “No” campaign that people thought the Conservatives were immoral, incompetent and weird, and didn’t care about the things that mattered to them,’ he says. ‘My first memo to IDS said that we need to explain the failure of public services. To his credit, he said he agreed with it.’ ⁴⁶ In March 2002 Cummings produced another memo for Duncan Smith and senior members of the Shadow Cabinet in which he urged ‘a single campaign for the period until at least July – “why public services are failing the most vulnerable in society”’.⁴⁷ ‘Helping the Vulnerable’ became the theme for the party’s spring forum at Harrogate in March 2002.

This struck a chord with Duncan Smith, touching on his beliefs as a devout Catholic. ‘Initially it was a personal thing for him, but by complete chance he was also about to make these visits to Glasgow in the spring,’ recalls Cummings.⁴⁸ Rick Nye had recently suggested the idea of a visit to the Easterhouse and Gallowgate areas of Glasgow, which had some of the most deprived estates in the country. Deep in Labour’s Scottish heartlands, this was not natural territory for a Tory leader. Organised in conjunction with ‘Renewing One Nation’, a party group with close links to faith-based organisations, Duncan Smith’s visit to the city took place on 1 February. He was struck by what he saw – the run-down housing, visible signs of drug abuse and general lack of hope. ‘It was a real eye-opener for IDS,’ recalls Greg Clark.⁴⁹

Nye and Cummings found an ally in Tim Montgomerie, a Conservative activist who was running the Conservative Christian Fellowship, another group which had access to faith-based charities. ‘One day I went for a walk around Central Office, and I wandered downstairs into the basement where I could hear voices,’ Cummings recalls. ‘I found Tim Montgomerie and two other people sitting among the pipes and central heating boilers. Their office was literally in a bunker underneath Central Office. I sat down and started talking with them, and Tim said, “I really agreed with the helping the vulnerable stuff and I really hope you persuade Iain to do it.”’⁵⁰ Cummings suggested that Montgomerie help write some of Duncan Smith’s speeches, and from that point onwards he became an increasingly important source of advice and encouragement for the leader.

Many in the party, including some of Duncan Smith’s inner circle, were sceptical about ‘Helping the Vulnerable’. There had been a tradition of Tory evangelicals ever since William Wilberforce and the Earl of Shaftesbury, who were primarily concerned with the condition of the poor. But it was a tradition that had become lost during the Thatcher years. ‘I didn’t really get it all. It was very vague and woolly and largely consisted of IDS walking around housing estates,’ recalls one close aide. ‘The press were baffled, because we hadn’t found a way of giving it any coherence.’ Many members of the Shadow Cabinet were also perplexed, although Oliver Letwin’s speeches about the ‘conveyor belt to crime’ and the decline of the ‘neighbourly society’ were consistent with the approach. Liam Fox, the Shadow Health Secretary, thought the strategy was not given a context, such as stressing the role of the family, in lifting people out of poverty.⁵¹ The Party Chairman, David Davis, insisted that the ‘helping the vulnerable’ phrase was actually his invention. ‘There were some people who didn’t want to get it, and there were others like Howard who said that the vulnerable people in his constituency in Folkestone were more worried about illegal immigrants coming in from the Channel Tunnel,’ says another senior party official.

It was clear that the new message failed to excite the majority of Tory MPs. ‘It really threw my party; they really didn’t get it,’ Duncan Smith regrets. ‘We hadn’t quite figured out all of the detail because we were trying to feel our way forward, but the concept was very alien to the Conservative Party. They wanted me to talk about tax and Europe, but I just felt that we needed to spend time on these subjects to let the public know that we were broader than this narrow party that they perceived. Now I realise it was a radical step to far.’⁵² With the eye of the media firmly focused on the ‘war on terror’, Duncan Smith struggled to get his message across to the public. He was aware that the weekly theatre of Prime Minister’s Questions was not the right forum in which to convey the strategy, particularly as Tory MPs had become used to Hague’s virtuoso performances from the dispatch box. However, the communicator was as much to blame as his target audience. Duncan Smith failed to get his message across because he failed to present it imaginatively and convincingly. Many in the party may not have ‘got it’, but forging such a different agenda would require deft communication skills, which he lacked.

Like Andrew Cooper after his attempts at persuading the Shadow Cabinet to adopt his ‘Kitchen Table’ strategy in 1998, Dominic Cummings began to lose faith in his masters. ‘The left of the party never had a strategy for anything, and complained that the Eurosceptics were idiots and didn’t understand what we were on about in helping the vulnerable,’ he says. ‘The right said that if we bang on louder about tax, Europe and immigration we’ll punch through, and they thought the Tory Party could never be about the public services. And then there were the Portillistas.’⁵³ The latter believed that Duncan Smith’s prescription was along the right lines, but that he lacked the political skills to drive it through. Shifting opinion within the party towards an agenda that talked about the vulnerable would be far from easy for such a divided party. There was simply no appetite for it. Despite Duncan Smith’s commitment, his lack of authority was a considerable handicap to advancing his cause.

Uninspired by the ‘helping the vulnerable’ mantra, the Shadow Cabinet sought clarity on other issues. They decided to oppose the government’s plan to introduce top-up fees in higher education, and to pledge to restore the link between the state pension and earnings. ‘There was a sense that we were becoming far too populist in adopting these positions,’ one frontbencher recalls. Taxation became a particular source of tension between Duncan Smith and Michael Howard, the Shadow Chancellor. Howard wanted to reassure voters that the party would prioritise spending on public services above tax cuts. Opinion polls showed that the public were concerned about public services, and were sceptical about any party that promised to cut taxes. But Duncan Smith, under pressure from Thatcherites in the parliamentary party and from the Tory-supporting papers, the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail, pressed for tax cuts. The right questioned whether Howard’s position provided enough ‘clear blue water’ between the Conservatives and the government, which had recently announced massive increases in public spending, particularly in health and education. ‘The pressure from outside to mount a traditionally Tory approach was quite forceful, and there were pressures on Howard to make concessions, but he was adamant,’ a close aide recalls. The issue was never really resolved by Duncan Smith, leaving an unhealed wound at the heart of the party. Relations with his Shadow Chancellor had deteriorated, with Duncan Smith privately considering Howard to be a ‘panicker’. The ‘peasants’ who had catapulted Duncan Smith into the leadership were seriously worried that their man was unable to establish a clear position. The dispute also confirmed that for many Tory MPs, upfront tax cuts, like Euroscepticism, had become an article of faith.

By July 2002, when Duncan Smith undertook his first reshuffle, the Shadow Cabinet was not a happy team. The principal casualty was David Davis, the Party Chairman. According to one of Duncan Smith’s close aides, who encouraged him to appoint Davis to the chairmanship, ‘They just didn’t hit it off.’ ‘Iain wasn’t that bad at managing the overall Shadow Cabinet, but when it came to managing the big beasts, like Davis, who has an ego the size of a planet, it didn’t work,’ the aide regrets. ‘They needed to be blood brothers, and they weren’t, and we were in a weak position. Iain felt that Davis’s heart wasn’t in it and he wasn’t pulling his weight.’ Davis insists that he played a full role in managing the party organisation after the heavy defeat of 2001. ‘There was no tension to speak of between Iain and me for much of the year, but it wasn’t an easy time politically,’ he recalls. ‘It was permanent struggle in terms of the media and the public perception of Iain. There were tensions in Central Office caused by some of the people he brought in who wanted to modernise and change the party. So quite a lot of my job in those days was trying to manage all of this as best we could.’⁵⁴ Davis had taken some bold decisions, such as severing formal ties with the right-wing Monday Club, and made efforts to attract more women and ethnic minority parliamentary candidates.

However, by the summer of 2002 some in Duncan Smith’s team and the Whips’ Office suggested that Davis be moved from Central Office. They used the fact that he had gone on an early-summer holiday to Florida in July as a reason to suggest that he wasn’t fully committed to the job, even though Davis had agreed to hold the fort at Central Office during August and September (an arrangement he had also made during his previous role as Chairman of the Commons Public Accounts Committee). Davis was furious when he learned in Florida that he was being demoted to shadow Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott’s Department of Local Government and the Regions. When he returned from holiday, he discovered that a briefing campaign against him was well under way. ‘It was being pushed by a mixture of the ultra-modernisers and some of Iain’s people,’ he recalls.⁵⁵ After agreeing to take up the new post, he issued a strong statement outside his constituency home in which he lambasted a ‘cowardly campaign of character assassination’ against him, based on a ‘tissue of lies’. ‘Vendettas, character assassination have crippled three previous Tory leaders. We cannot allow this to happen again,’ he declared.⁵⁶