Back from the Brink: The Inside Story of the Tory Resurrection. Peter Snowdon
href="#litres_trial_promo">13 Confiding with friends in February 2001, four months before the general election, he gave ten reasons for not wanting to be party leader, including his declining appetite for politics, the pursuit of other interests and a feeling that the party would not be willing to be led in the direction he would wish to take it. Shrugging, he concluded, ‘Well, there isn’t anybody else.’14 When he set off for Morocco just after the election defeat, he told friends that he would not stand, but while he was there Francis Maude rang several times to tell him there was a strong tide of support building in his favour. When Stephen Dorrell, a former Cabinet minister from the centre of the party who had backed Ken Clarke in 1997, called to say that he would support him, his mind began to change. On his return to Westminster he resolved to go for it.
Portillo met with Maude and Archie Norman on the Monday after the election, and told them, ‘We are going to win this, and win it on our terms. We are going to be uncompromising.’ The party had to come to terms with modern Britain, he insisted. Its position on social issues, such as Section 28 and support for marriage through the tax system, had to be reconsidered. Portillo soon gained the support of a number of frontbenchers, including David Willetts and Oliver Letwin, and his campaign manager, Maude, collected further declarations of support from most of the Shadow Cabinet. Portillo also had the support of some of the brightest of the 2001 intake, including David Cameron. Despite being caught up in the Hague–Portillo rivalry, Hague’s former Political Secretary George Osborne saw the need for change, and supported Portillo as the right candidate for the time.
Within days Portillo had become the front-runner. But in a series of meetings with undecided backbench MPs he did not make it easy for himself. When a potential supporter, Graham Brady, asked him about all-woman shortlists for selecting parliamentary candidates he refused to rule them out, even though those close to him knew he did not favour them. ‘I wasn’t happy with his response that “The end justified the means,”’ Brady recalls. ‘He just wanted a completely free rein to do whatever he saw fit. I then joined the David Davis campaign.’15 Portillo’s tactics would soon backfire. ‘He wasn’t going to campaign in the conventional fashion or dilute his views in any way,’ recalls Michael Gove, a columnist at The Times who had written a biography of Portillo in 1995. ‘He was essentially saying that the party needed to change profoundly, and unless they could accept his message and understand fully what they were getting into, he would not stoop to conquer.’16
Nevertheless, most of Portillo’s campaign team were brimming with confidence, insisting that he had nearly a hundred MPs on board. But some were not so complacent. ‘I raised my eyebrows when I heard some of the names being mentioned by senior MPs running the campaign,’ says Mark MacGregor, a former parliamentary candidate who joined the campaign to organise events. ‘For example, I saw William Hague on a list of possible supporters, but Hague had seriously fallen out with Portillo during his time as leader. There was a presumption that MPs would vote for Michael simply because he was the candidate backed by virtually the entire Shadow Cabinet, and that Clarke could not win support because of his views on Europe. Ironically, Duncan Smith was barely even given a moment’s consideration.’17 Doubts were also emerging elsewhere in the camp. ‘He didn’t produce a forward-looking agenda that people could galvanise around,’ recalls Archie Norman. ‘When we met in my house before the first round, we said we had to have a policy narrative to make it clear what he stood for. Michael was pretty reluctant, but by then he realised it was too late anyway.’18
When the results of the first ballot were announced, Portillo emerged in the lead with forty-nine votes. To everyone’s surprise, Duncan Smith came second with thirty-nine, and Clarke third with thirty-six. Davis and Ancram, who were tied on twenty-one, both withdrew from the contest. Portillo’s lead was nowhere near as large as his campaign team had expected. ‘They assumed there would be a wave of support, and when it didn’t happen they didn’t have a plan B,’ Mark MacGregor recalls.19 For Portillo, it was a defining moment. ‘He didn’t want to win, because it proved his point about the party not wanting to go where he wanted to lead it,’ says his friend the former Tory aide Andrew Cooper.20 He consulted his team about whether to pull out, but was persuaded to remain in the contest.
While Ken Clarke’s campaign had had a faltering start, Iain Duncan Smith had made a surprisingly strong showing. The tactical flaws of Portillo’s campaign had provided an opportunity for Duncan Smith to court the right. The Thatcherite and Eurosceptic wing of the party, who would have once flocked to Portillo, were now unconvinced about his candidacy. ‘The out-and-out-moderniser package was too much for those who in earlier years had been ardent supporters,’ Maude admits. ‘He lost his old constituency without gaining enough new people.’21 Paul Goodman, a newly elected MP, observed that ‘There was a massive campaign to sign up the great and the good – the aristocracy of the parliamentary party, one might say – but it overlooked the peasants. Perhaps inevitably, a revolt followed, led by Iain Duncan Smith and managed by Owen Paterson, John Hayes and Bernard Jenkin.’22 They believed that Duncan Smith would speak up for them and the backbenchers.
Iain Duncan Smith had made his name as one of the Maastricht rebels in the Major years. Before he succeeded Norman Tebbit as MP for Chingford in 1992, he had a career in the army and in business. He became a thorn in the side of the Whips’ Office as a serial rebel during the passage of the Maastricht Bill.23 Pinstriped and balding, Duncan Smith was not one of the most colourful characters on the Tory benches. Yet he was a competent and at times impassioned speaker, leading to a number of approaches to join the government, all of which he turned down. After the landslide defeat in 1997 he won promotion as Shadow Social Security and then Shadow Defence Secretary, and remained loyal to Hague. Many MPs were astonished when he put himself forward as a candidate to lead the party. Despite his loyalty in opposition, his reputation as a rebel remained, and very few considered him leadership material. ‘I left Central Office with Iain after William Hague announced his resignation,’ recalls Andrew MacKay, who was Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary at the time. ‘As we were walking through Westminster, he said: “This is an awful dilemma, Andrew, because I’ve got to stand for leader to stop Portillo.” I was exhausted, but thought, “This cannot be serious.” Of all the people I sat around the Shadow Cabinet table with, this decent man was least equipped to do it.’24 MacKay tried to dissuade him, but Duncan Smith had made up his mind.
Duncan Smith’s campaign organisation soon eclipsed that of his rivals. ‘We made a tremendous effort working on the new intake. We got a lot onside because the Portillo camp threatened them, and that wasn’t a successful tactic,’ says Owen Paterson.25 The ‘IDS’ camp thought Portillo’s campaign was overbearing in its approaches to new MPs, while its pitch was superficial and fixated with politically correct issues of little importance to traditional Tory supporters. Duncan Smith believed that the party had to stop arguing about Europe and broaden its approach: it had to engage with the state of the public services and concentrate on social problems. He also genuinely believed that only someone with impeccable Eurosceptic credentials could lead the party in this way.
When Tory MPs voted in the second round, Clarke came first with fifty-nine votes, ahead of Duncan Smith on fifty-four and Portillo on fifty-three. Portillo was knocked out of the contest by one vote, leaving Clarke and Duncan Smith to go to the final round, which would be decided by party members. It was an astonishing result: Duncan Smith had successfully led a peasants’ revolt against the establishment. Many Tory MPs could not bring themselves to vote for Portillo, and a sizeable number of them had voted for Clarke, who picked up twenty more votes than in the first