Back from the Brink: The Inside Story of the Tory Resurrection. Peter Snowdon
Within minutes of losing the vote in the Commons, he sent a text message to Andrew Cooper: it read, ‘The slave is free’ in Latin. ‘I seemed to unite people against me in antagonism,’ was his verdict as he announced his intention to leave frontline politics for good.26
Michael Portillo’s personal and political journey had proved far too much for many backbench Tory MPs. His prescription for a modernised party, forcing it to accept social change, was simply too bitter a pill for them to swallow. ‘He had a clear sense of what was wrong with the party, but not the country,’ says Willetts. ‘He campaigned against the obscurantism and atavism of the Conservative Party, but it became a preoccupation to liberate the party from a caricature of itself. Issues like attitudes to gay people were more important to the party than the country, which had largely accepted that things had moved on. The leadership campaign became a battle for the soul of the party disconnected from where the country stood in 2001.’27 Many in the Shadow Cabinet understood that these issues had to be confronted, but the rest of the party did not. It was a battle that would continue to rumble in the party, while the rest of the country looked on bemused.
Another issue that continued to preoccupy the party but not the country was Europe. Hague had settled the dispute over the parliamentary party’s position on the Euro, but for the Eurosceptic press and the grassroots, European integration still stirred the loins. Portillo’s exit ensured a choice between the avuncular Clarke, whose pro-European views they largely disliked, and the relatively unknown Duncan Smith, whose Eurosceptic credentials were comfortably reassuring. Many of Portillo’s supporters at Westminster had little option but to back Clarke, but MPs had little influence in a contest that would be decided by ordinary party members. ‘We all retreated back into our comfort zones,’ recalls Oliver Letwin. ‘One lot of people went for Ken and were arguing that we just needed to revert to the golden days, and the others went to IDS to avoid falling into the Europe trap.’28 Once again, a large number of MPs believed that Clarke would lead them into a distinctly uncomfortable pro-European position.
Drawn out over the long summer recess, the contest became drained of energy. As Clarke and Duncan Smith attended membership hustings across the country, there was little to excite the media, apart from the visible awkwardness between the two candidates. Their personal styles could not have been more different: Duncan Smith was serious but wooden, whereas Clarke was jovial but complacent. ‘We didn’t do many televised debates because there was so little public interest. We did one on Newsnight, and nobody ever asked us to do it again, because it was a pretty turgid affair,’ recalls Duncan Smith.29
Duncan Smith’s campaign won the support of party donors and, crucially, of the Daily Telegraph, which under the editorship of Charles Moore represented the most vocal of Tory activists. Duncan Smith’s commitment to ruling out membership of the single currency for good played well with a paper that flew the standard for Euroscepticism. ‘We were probably rather boring on the subject, and made ourselves the noticeboard,’ Moore concedes. ‘We could have said that Ken Clarke was the best candidate even though we didn’t agree with him, but it would have been a regression if he had won. I do regret the factional negativity that crept in over Europe – it isn’t good for papers to bash all the time.’30 Although he had topped the poll of MPs in July, Clarke did not fancy his chances. ‘The problem was that the change of leadership rules made it difficult for me. In 1997 the membership was more supportive, but did not have a vote, and in 2001 the MPs were more supportive, but they did not have the final say.’31
As the contest drew to a close in late August, Duncan Smith was in confident mood. Polling of Tory members showed that he had a commanding lead over Clarke. In July the Duncan Smith campaign commissioned focus-group research which showed that activists believed that Clarke ‘had not uttered a single word to help during the [2001 election] campaign’. Other comments were very revealing of the mood of the party membership after the 2001 defeat: ‘I’m very disappointed with the electorate’; ‘People were brainwashed to vote Labour by the papers and the BBC’; and in order to win, the party had to ‘just sit it out for the next four years, educate the voters and they’ll see we’re right in the end’.32 For a constituency with views like those, it would not take much for a candidate from the right of the party, like Duncan Smith, to attract support. In fairness to his campaign, he tried to talk about the state of the public services and the need for reform, but these were not issues that excited the average Tory member as much as Europe.
Like William Hague in 1997, Iain Duncan Smith received the crucial endorsement of Lady Thatcher. In a letter to the Daily Telegraph on 21 August she wrote that he would restore the party’s ‘faith and fortunes’, and warned that Clarke’s pro-European views would lead to confusion and contradiction within the ranks: ‘I simply do not understand how Ken would lead today’s Conservative Party to anything other than disaster.’33 John Major and Michael Heseltine came out in favour of Clarke, but Thatcher’s influence with the party faithful remained strong. Eleven years after leaving office, her interventions, although fewer and farther between because of her declining health, continued to resonate with a large swathe of the party.
Once again, Europe would swing opinion within the party, although it mattered little to how most people voted at general elections. Clarke did not help his own cause. ‘Ken’s campaign managers got frustrated with him because every time they tried to steer him away from Europe he would just go back to it and make some comment about it,’ says Duncan Smith.34 ‘Europe was his undoing,’ admits Ann Widdecombe, a rare Clarke supporter from the right. ‘People mistrusted his views on the subject, because he was seen as a troublemaker and had shared a platform with Blair in support of the Euro. But people couldn’t get their heads round the fact that you could have a view contrary to most in the party and still serve because that view was not going to prevail.’35 Like Portillo, Clarke was not prepared to change or even tone down his message. ‘I wasn’t going to compromise my views by saying things that I didn’t believe in,’ he insists.36
Long memories about Clarke’s role in Mrs Thatcher’s downfall also harmed his prospects. He had been one of the Cabinet ministers who told her in November 1990 that she had little chance of remaining as leader after the first ballot, and ardent Thatcherites would never forgive such ‘treachery’. ‘I believe this did him far more harm than the European issue,’ says Don Porter, a respected figure as Chairman and President of the National Convention, the body which represents the voluntary wing of the party. ‘Unlike some others who were less sincere, Ken was at least honourable and told her exactly what he felt, but that did him long-term damage.’37
In September 2001, the grassroots finally delivered their verdict. When the postal ballots were counted, 155,933 had voted for Iain Duncan Smith and 100,864 for Ken Clarke. Duncan Smith had won by a margin of three to two. It was an emphatic victory that appeared to give him the authority to lead the party through to the next general election.
A Leader in the Shadows
A day before the new leader of the Conservative Party was due to be announced, the world changed. As Iain Duncan Smith sat in his Commons office on 11 September 2001, news broke of a plane flying into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York. When a second plane hit the South Tower seventeen minutes later, he rang William Hague to ask if the announcement of the result could be postponed. Normal politics was put on hold. Tony Blair had been addressing the Trades Union Congress in Brighton. ‘This mass terrorism is the new evil in our world today,’ he declared in a short statement before retuning