Back from the Brink: The Inside Story of the Tory Resurrection. Peter Snowdon

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

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

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

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

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

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

In their own peculiar ways, each of the three leaders between 1997 and 2005 – William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard – attempted to broaden the party’s appeal in opposition. Why and how they failed forms the story of the first half of this book. While Howard was unable

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Back from the Brink: The Inside Story of the Tory Resurrection. Peter Snowdon

Back from the Brink: The Inside Story of the Tory Resurrection

CONTENTS

Introduction