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