Back from the Brink: The Inside Story of the Tory Resurrection. Peter Snowdon
us, we’ve got to change,” and the rejection of that view told us that the Tories were several years away from being a threat. They obviously just didn’t get it.’
For Hague, survival became the primary motivation. He was comforted by the fact that his robust exchanges with Blair at Prime Minister’s Questions cheered up his backbenches. Many Tory MPs left for their constituencies at the end of the week feeling that Hague had outwitted Blair, but they were painfully aware that his public profile outside the bearpit of Parliament paled in comparison to Blair’s. Images of the youthful leader wearing a ‘Hague’ baseball cap at a theme park, or attending the Notting Hill Carnival, attracted ridicule, as would his claim in August 2000 to have drunk fourteen pints of beer a day in his youth. ‘Once the story became us failing to pick ourselves up off the floor, these incidents came to be seen as the cause of our problems, which they weren’t,’ Hague laments.51 He had done himself few favours following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in August 1997, when his wooden statement appeared out of touch in comparison with Blair’s emotional reaction. While Blair, once again, articulated the mood of the nation, Hague could only offer the suggestion that Heathrow be renamed ‘Princess Diana International Airport’.
Most seriously for Hague, the party’s focus groups found that voters thought he was a weak leader, and had to be replaced if the party’s ratings were to improve. As criticism of Hague’s leadership grew, he himself began to have serious doubts about his position. There had been modest gains in the local elections in May 1999, but still the party only polled 33 per cent of the vote, lagging well behind Labour. Members of the Shadow Cabinet were either confused or angry about the direction in which Hague was taking the party. ‘I really wondered if we could keep it together at all. I wondered if there would be an open division in the party, or if I would have to stand down as leader,’ Hague recalls.52 Between late April and early May, he wobbled. Something would have to be done to lift his spirits and boost his position.
Turning Right
Just as Hague’s confidence reached its lowest ebb, he received encouragement from two new additions to his team. Nick Wood, a hardened lobby correspondent with The Times, and Amanda Platell, a former editor of the Sunday Express, were appointed to bolster the party’s media operation. Hague realised that the coverage of Peter Lilley’s speech had been a disaster. He lacked a ‘heavyweight’ figure to handle the media since assuming the leadership, and his advisers kept pressing him to find ‘our Alastair Campbell’. Campbell’s press operation from Number 10 was vastly superior to anything the Tories could muster. Indeed, Campbell and Mandelson regularly ran rings around Tory announcements or press releases. In the plain-speaking Australian Platell, Hague finally found someone who knew and could speak to newspaper editors on their own terms, and could take on the party’s most hostile critics in the press.
Both Platell and Wood were shocked at what they found when they arrived. ‘It was clear to me from the beginning that William’s agenda was quite fuzzy,’ Wood recalls. ‘It just didn’t translate into an easy message for people to understand.’ They realised that there was very little time to turn things around if Hague was to survive: the next electoral test would be the European Parliament elections in June. ‘If we did badly in the European elections, then that would have been the end of William Hague.’53
By May 1999 Hague had at least managed to defuse some of the tension surrounding the European question, in particular whether Britain should drop Sterling in favour of the Euro. At his first party conference as leader he pledged to oppose doing so for the ‘foreseeable future’. It was a line that was bound to come under pressure, given the strength of feeling on both sides of the divide. The crunch point had come two years earlier, when during a four-hour meeting of the Shadow Cabinet on 24 October 1997 it was agreed that the party would oppose membership of the single currency during the current Parliament and the next. David Curry and Ian Taylor, both prominent Europhiles, promptly resigned from the Shadow Cabinet. They were followed a few months later by the former Cabinet minister Stephen Dorrell. The new policy was solidified by a ballot of party members in 1998. ‘For a number of months Eurosceptics and Europhiles, from Teresa Gorman to Ken Clarke, were regularly coming in to see him to persuade him to move in their direction,’ says Coe. ‘But in the end they all knew that he would not move from the stake he placed in the ground.’ The uncertainty of the Major years had disappeared. ‘The range war just petered out. We had occasional sniper fire, but it ceased to cause anywhere near as much damage as before.’54
George Osborne, Hague’s Political Secretary, also sensed that a ‘potentially fatal civil war’ on Europe had been averted. Yet he feared that it might erupt again in October 1999 when Michael Heseltine and Ken Clarke shared a platform with Tony Blair at the launch of ‘Britain In Europe’, the embryonic ‘Yes’ campaign for a referendum on joining the Euro. Indeed, Osborne wondered at the time whether this could have been the moment that the Conservative Party split in two, as Labour did when the SDP formed in 1981. But the departure of leading Europhiles from the Shadow Cabinet, and their dwindling numbers on the backbenches, had given Hague the space to allow the hardened Euro policy to settle.
Now the leadership could use the European elections to present the party’s Eurosceptic credentials. Hague promised radical reform of the EU and a halt to further integration, encapsulated in his own slogan, ‘In Europe, not run by Europe’. His aides, particularly Platell and Wood, believed this would resonate with public opinion and the grassroots. ‘We constructed as hard-hitting and noisy a campaign as we could,’ says Wood. ‘William was totally comfortable with the message.’55 The election results on 13 June were widely perceived to be a success for the party, which came first in a nationwide election for the first time since 1992, with 36 per cent of the vote and thirty-six MEPs. Although turnout was a dismally low 24 per cent, the result gave a huge fillip to Hague’s confidence. Enthused by the campaign, supporters had come out to vote. It proved to be a crucial turning point for Hague: ‘I thought that if we lost the European elections I would have outlived my usefulness and maybe it would have been time for me to go. As it turned out we did very well so that thought went away pretty quickly.’56
Hague and his aides were convinced that pressing the Eurosceptic button would lead to future success. The campaign had cemented the influence of his new media advisers. ‘Amanda became by far the most influential adviser to William for the rest of the Parliament,’ one aide recalls. Platell and Wood now saw their job as being to protect and promote the leader at all costs. There would be a harder line to policy and presentation, while any argument that challenged the leadership’s position was rapidly dismissed. Platell soon made enemies; in fact she came to be loathed by some in Central Office. Andrew Cooper, who failed to see eye to eye with her after she joined in March, left four months later. Peter Lilley left the Shadow Cabinet in June. ‘William summoned me and said, “The last few months have been extremely destabilising and nearly led to the end of my leader ship, and so if one us has to go it has to be you,” which was fair enough,’ Lilley recalls.57 Michael Howard, Gillian Shephard and Norman Fowler also departed from the Shadow Cabinet, further sapping Hague’s frontbench team of experience. Cecil Parkinson had already left in December 1998.
Loyalty to Hague was now paramount. It came at the expense of any attempt to mount a plan for recovery in the long term. Platell in particular ‘waged war against anyone who she suspected was not totally loyal to him’, another aide remarked. She skilfully courted the editors of the tabloids, despite the Sun having already given up on Hague and the party – on the eve of the party conference in 1998 he was portrayed on the paper’s front page as the famous Monty Python dead parrot with the headline: ‘This party is no more … it has ceased to be … this is an ex-party. Cause of death: suicide.’58 Hague’s new media advisers sought