Back from the Brink: The Inside Story of the Tory Resurrection. Peter Snowdon
election of the new Tory leader, Tony Blair would find his stride as an international statesman. ‘Nobody was interested in us: it was the biggest crisis to hit the Western world, and nobody cared about an opposition party that had a new leader,’ Duncan Smith recalls.38 When the leadership ballot result was announced in a low-key event in Central Office on 13 September, the media’s gaze was fixed on events thousands of miles away.
Nick Wood, who continued in his role as press secretary to the party leader, becoming a close confidant of Duncan Smith, thought that the crisis would play to the strengths of a leader who had been Shadow Defence Secretary and had close contacts in Washington. Duncan Smith had planned that his first speeches would be about domestic policy, signalling a change of emphasis, but now he would have little opportunity to make them.’The whole landscape changed,’ remembers Wood. ‘It looked good for him to go to Number 10 for meetings with the Prime Minister, but it was frustrating for us as we couldn’t get into domestic affairs. Politically it was not good for us at all.’39 An impotent leader of the opposition could only watch as the Prime Minister received plaudits for his shuttle diplomacy after 9/11. ‘Oppositions die on foreign affairs. It was very difficult to make headway because the public weren’t interested,’ recalls Duncan Smith. ‘I found it incredibly difficult to make a mark, when the news was wall-to-wall Tony Blair every night. I didn’t get a look-in.’40
Failing to make an impression in the first weeks and months of his leadership was only one of the problems to beset Duncan Smith. Despite his convincing victory in the ballot of party members, he had won the support of only a third of the parliamentary party in the final round of MPs. It was hardly a solid foundation on which to build authority. ‘We had Iain Duncan Smith because he wasn’t anybody else – he wasn’t me, or Portillo or Clarke,’ says Widdecombe.41 Long-serving Tory MPs also resented his rebellious behaviour during the Major years, while his lack of ministerial experience (he was the first party leader not to have served in the Cabinet) was a concern for many. Former whips and ministers questioned why they should demonstrate loyalty to a man whose disloyal behaviour had caused them so much consternation in the past.
Duncan Smith’s first Shadow Cabinet leaned heavily towards the right of the party. A number of heavyweights returned to the fold, including Michael Howard as Shadow Chancellor and David Davis as Party Chairman. Michael Ancram and Oliver Letwin were promoted to Shadow Foreign and Home Secretaries respectively. There were very few counterbalancing voices from the centre or pro-European wing of the party. Portillo, Maude and Clarke all refused to serve, and Hague returned to the backbenches, although unlike Portillo he did not rule out a future in frontline politics. Bernard Jenkin, the only former member of Hague’s Shadow Cabinet to support Duncan Smith in the early stages of the leadership election, took the defence brief, while the arch-Maastricht rebel Bill Cash became Shadow Attorney General. ‘The appointment of Bill Cash is the final proof that the lunatics have taken over the asylum … grief will follow,’ was the verdict of one disillusioned MP.42 Like Hague, Duncan Smith lacked a close ally in the Shadow Cabinet to act as a troubleshooter and command respect across the party. While Thatcher had Whitelaw and Major had Heseltine, both Hague and Duncan Smith lacked a serious heavyweight figure to protect them.
What undermined Duncan Smith even further was the weakness of his private office. He relied heavily on supportive MPs such as Owen Paterson, his Parliamentary Private Secretary, and John Hayes, both of whom had very little experience in advising party leaders. He also lacked a chief of staff or a permanent Political Secretary. Jenny Ungless, his first appointment, departed after a few months as chief of staff, despairing at his way of working. ‘It was bit of a ragtag army that came in with him, and a lot of them left very quickly,’ Rick Nye recalls. ‘His working methods were chaotic and he couldn’t keep time: meetings would often overrun.’43 As Director of the CRD, Nye was one of the few figures in Central Office Duncan Smith trusted, along with Greg Clark, who headed a new policy unit. In an attempt to stretch a hand out to his rivals for the leadership, he appointed Mark MacGregor, from the Portillo campaign, as Chief Executive.
Vulnerabilities on Display
There were some parts of the party machine that showed signs of life under Iain Duncan Smith. A more considered approach to domestic policy took root. Clark’s policy unit was modelled on Mrs Thatcher’s Number 10 Policy Unit. He developed a three-stage process to policy-making: identifying problem areas; dispatching shadow ministers and aides to European countries to learn from their experience; producing consultation documents in advance of preparing the next manifesto. Health was an area which received much more attention than before: The Wrong Prescription, Alternative Prescriptions and Setting the NHS Free were the most significant pieces of work in the field that the party had produced in years. Clark and Nye were conscious of the party’s weakness in this area. ‘It was a very collaborative process. We agreed that we shouldn’t rush into making detailed policies, otherwise people would think that we hadn’t learned from our mistakes,’ Clark recalls.44
To the surprise of many in the party and the press, Duncan Smith did not concentrate on European issues. ‘We wanted to broaden things out – our strategy was to talk about the public services,’ he says.45 At Prime Minister’s Questions he invariably probed Tony Blair about health, education and transport, as well as foreign policy, which often dominated proceedings. But backbenchers were unimpressed by his performances: Duncan Smith struggled to rival Blair, who was in confident form at the dispatch box following his second election victory.
One of the more striking new arrivals at Central Office was Dominic Cummings, who had led the embryonic campaign against joining the single currency, as Director of Strategy. Young and enthusiastic, he had firm views about what had to change. ‘I knew from my research at the “No” campaign that people thought the Conservatives were immoral, incompetent and weird, and didn’t care about the things that mattered to them,’ he says. ‘My first memo to IDS said that we need to explain the failure of public services. To his credit, he said he agreed with it.’ 46 In March 2002 Cummings produced another memo for Duncan Smith and senior members of the Shadow Cabinet in which he urged ‘a single campaign for the period until at least July – “why public services are failing the most vulnerable in society”’.47 ‘Helping the Vulnerable’ became the theme for the party’s spring forum at Harrogate in March 2002.
This struck a chord with Duncan Smith, touching on his beliefs as a devout Catholic. ‘Initially it was a personal thing for him, but by complete chance he was also about to make these visits to Glasgow in the spring,’ recalls Cummings.48 Rick Nye had recently suggested the idea of a visit to the Easterhouse and Gallowgate areas of Glasgow, which had some of the most deprived estates in the country. Deep in Labour’s Scottish heartlands, this was not natural territory for a Tory leader. Organised in conjunction with ‘Renewing One Nation’, a party group with close links to faith-based organisations, Duncan Smith’s visit to the city took place on 1 February. He was struck by what he saw – the run-down housing, visible signs of drug abuse and general lack of hope. ‘It was a real eye-opener for IDS,’ recalls Greg Clark.49
Nye and Cummings found an ally in Tim Montgomerie, a Conservative activist who was running the Conservative Christian Fellowship, another group which had access to faith-based charities. ‘One day I went for a walk around Central Office, and I wandered downstairs into the basement where I could hear voices,’ Cummings recalls. ‘I found Tim Montgomerie and two other people sitting among the pipes and central heating boilers. Their office was literally in a bunker underneath Central