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