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