Back from the Brink: The Inside Story of the Tory Resurrection. Peter Snowdon
Cabinet. Social conservatives like Widdecombe and Duncan Smith were pitted against Maude and Portillo, who took a more liberal stance on issues like gay rights. Widdecombe insists that the press, particularly The Times, which she claimed had become ‘a Portillista rag’, exaggerated the tensions. ‘We used to be a relaxed broad Church as a party on these issues, and in my view they didn’t need to be resolved, but we were being portrayed as divided and we went along with it,’ she says.68 Yet the tensions were palpable. The decision to oppose Labour’s repeal of Section 28 of the Local Government Act, which prohibited the promotion of homosexuality in schools, had already driven a wedge through the parliamentary party, and had provoked the defection of Shaun Woodward to Labour in December 1999. More liberal members of the Shadow Cabinet, like David Willetts, believed that the party had become deeply disengaged from social trends in the country since the 1980s and 1990s: ‘We got to a point after 1997 that we knew what to say about privatisation, but when for example we were asked about divorce rates, there was a completely incoherent muddle.’ The backlash over ‘Back to Basics’ in the early 1990s had inhibited Conservative politicians from addressing such issues, Willetts argues. ‘Nobody had thought it through properly. Some people said that married couples should stick together and that there should be tax breaks for marriage, while others said divorce was part of modern life and politicians shouldn’t talk about it.’69
The tensions that consumed the Shadow Cabinet had taken on a poisonous aspect. Hague’s authority was once again under question, and his aides, principally Platell, believed that Portillo, Maude and Norman had a subversive agenda. ‘Amanda’s battle with Michael was very destabilising. She took the view that he was plotting against William, and so set out to spite anybody who might be on his side,’ Daniel Finkelstein recalls.70 By now the relationship between Hague and his Shadow Chancellor and Shadow Foreign Secretary had completely broken down. ‘I did have a difficult time with Michael and Francis in that period,’ says Hague. ‘I didn’t particularly feel that they were team players at the time, and I don’t think they felt I was loyal to them, even though I was.’71 Portillo and Maude felt that they were being regularly briefed against in the press by Platell and Wood, and that Hague refused to do anything about it. When Hague challenged them to prove it, which was impossible, he said that he could not act without proof, which they took to mean that he was, at best, complicit.
Such was the level of mistrust between Hague and his two senior colleagues that resignation threats were issued over the appointment of backroom staff. Hague’s advisers took great exception to some of Portillo’s confidants and advisers. ‘I managed to hold them together, and if they threatened to resign I largely ignored them. I wasn’t going to deal with such stupidities, and refused to speak to them,’ says Hague.72 According to one senior member of staff at Central Office, this led to the appearance of an ‘upstairs downstairs’ mentality, with Maude and Portillo considered highly disingenuous.
Hague also became increasingly frustrated that his Shadow Chancellor failed to suggest ideas to help the party recover. ‘Some of Michael’s thinking tended to change by the week,’ recalls one of Hague’s aides. ‘This was more about Michael’s journey than the rehabilitation of the party.’ Portillo’s friends noticed that he had lost his enthusiasm for the cut and thrust of party politics. ‘Michael almost immediately regretted coming back into Parliament,’ says one. ‘He told me that he had enjoyed each year of his adult life more than the previous one, until that year. He thought there was lots of intellectual nonsense going on. He also didn’t particularly rate William.’
Staring at Defeat
The Conservative Party was heading for another electoral drubbing. Despite the tensions at the top of the party, Central Office was at least ready for the campaign. During the months leading up to the election there were some successful publicity efforts, including posters with the slogan ‘You’ve paid the taxes, so where are the nurses/teachers/police?’ This was one of the few attempts to campaign on the public services, and chimed with the party’s private polling, which revealed the public’s concerns over the lack of progress made by Labour. Andrew Lansley had planned it as the theme for the preelection period, and some in the party felt it was a message that should be pushed right up to polling day, advice that was turned down.
After a delay caused by an outbreak of Foot and Mouth Disease, Tony Blair announced on 8 May 2001 that the election would be held on 7 June. For all Hague’s faults as leader, he had presided over an overhaul of the machine to ensure that the party would survive. The first week and a half of the campaign went relatively well. The party faithful had developed a strong affection for Hague, and there was a degree of bonhomie within his close team as they criss-crossed the country by helicopter. Yet any feelings of optimism were illusory – voters often walked away at the sight of blue rosettes coming towards them. Senior figures were already contemplating what might happen after the defeat. ‘Holding them together in the campaign was hard – for several of them their first instinct when the going got tough was to reach for the lifebelts,’ says Coe.73
Experienced figures in the parliamentary party were not hopeful. ‘The 2001 campaign was the most ridiculous we have ever fought,’ Ken Clarke recalls. ‘People were not interested in saving the pound, and we avoided the major issues. It was like Labour’s doomed campaign in 1983.’74 The ‘Keep the Pound’ roadshow, inspired by the perceived success of the European elections campaign, was designed to arouse interest in the campaign: Hague’s advisers hoped that his appearance on the back of a lorry holding up a pound coin would galvanise party supporters. Yet for many voters, the fact that Labour had already committed to holding a referendum on the single currency made Hague’s rallying cry seem utterly irrelevant. ‘Keeping the pound’ was not the issue on which votes would turn.
On the eve of the campaign, Hague had told the party’s spring forum in Harrogate that Labour’s re-election threatened to turn Britain into a ‘foreign land’. The author of the speech, Daniel Finkelstein, was alarmed that it was briefed to the press that ‘foreign land’ implied concerns over immigration and asylum, as well as the impact of a federal Europe. Labour immediately jumped on the speech as peddling a sinister agenda. ‘It wasn’t William’s fault, and it was not an attempt to say immigrants would turn Britain into a foreign land,’ insists Finkelstein. ‘We were always careful with language. I am the son of two refugee immigrants, and we would never have written something like that. I don’t think I have ever been as depressed about anything in politics as that.’75 But the damage had been done. To the outside world it appeared that the Conservatives were hopelessly trapped in a tawdry sideshow of their own, unconnected with the Britain of 2001.
When Mrs Thatcher addressed a rally of the party faithful in the closing days of the campaign, Hague hoped she would lift morale. She urged them to turn out for the party, warning that another Labour term in office would lead to the ‘progressive extinction of Britain as a nation state’.76 Labour responded with posters of Mrs Thatcher’s trademark perm superimposed on Hague’s bald head. It was the most memorable poster of the entire campaign, making the Tory leader look weak and un-prime ministerial. The Conservative campaign, masterminded by Lansley and Collins, sought to revive the appeal the party had enjoyed in Mrs Thatcher’s heyday. It was nothing more than an ersatz Thatcherism, a bizarre caricature of the campaigns she had fought in the 1980s. The ‘Keep the Pound’ campaign may have resonated with some of the party’s supporters, but talk of ‘bogus’ asylum seekers left a bitter taste in the mouth. ‘We were seen as anti-foreign and anti-everything. It became increasingly difficult to see what we were pro, except perhaps Britain,’ says Archie Norman.77
On the issues