Back from the Brink: The Inside Story of the Tory Resurrection. Peter Snowdon
and from that point onwards he became an increasingly important source of advice and encouragement for the leader.
Many in the party, including some of Duncan Smith’s inner circle, were sceptical about ‘Helping the Vulnerable’. There had been a tradition of Tory evangelicals ever since William Wilberforce and the Earl of Shaftesbury, who were primarily concerned with the condition of the poor. But it was a tradition that had become lost during the Thatcher years. ‘I didn’t really get it all. It was very vague and woolly and largely consisted of IDS walking around housing estates,’ recalls one close aide. ‘The press were baffled, because we hadn’t found a way of giving it any coherence.’ Many members of the Shadow Cabinet were also perplexed, although Oliver Letwin’s speeches about the ‘conveyor belt to crime’ and the decline of the ‘neighbourly society’ were consistent with the approach. Liam Fox, the Shadow Health Secretary, thought the strategy was not given a context, such as stressing the role of the family, in lifting people out of poverty.51 The Party Chairman, David Davis, insisted that the ‘helping the vulnerable’ phrase was actually his invention. ‘There were some people who didn’t want to get it, and there were others like Howard who said that the vulnerable people in his constituency in Folkestone were more worried about illegal immigrants coming in from the Channel Tunnel,’ says another senior party official.
It was clear that the new message failed to excite the majority of Tory MPs. ‘It really threw my party; they really didn’t get it,’ Duncan Smith regrets. ‘We hadn’t quite figured out all of the detail because we were trying to feel our way forward, but the concept was very alien to the Conservative Party. They wanted me to talk about tax and Europe, but I just felt that we needed to spend time on these subjects to let the public know that we were broader than this narrow party that they perceived. Now I realise it was a radical step to far.’52 With the eye of the media firmly focused on the ‘war on terror’, Duncan Smith struggled to get his message across to the public. He was aware that the weekly theatre of Prime Minister’s Questions was not the right forum in which to convey the strategy, particularly as Tory MPs had become used to Hague’s virtuoso performances from the dispatch box. However, the communicator was as much to blame as his target audience. Duncan Smith failed to get his message across because he failed to present it imaginatively and convincingly. Many in the party may not have ‘got it’, but forging such a different agenda would require deft communication skills, which he lacked.
Like Andrew Cooper after his attempts at persuading the Shadow Cabinet to adopt his ‘Kitchen Table’ strategy in 1998, Dominic Cummings began to lose faith in his masters. ‘The left of the party never had a strategy for anything, and complained that the Eurosceptics were idiots and didn’t understand what we were on about in helping the vulnerable,’ he says. ‘The right said that if we bang on louder about tax, Europe and immigration we’ll punch through, and they thought the Tory Party could never be about the public services. And then there were the Portillistas.’53 The latter believed that Duncan Smith’s prescription was along the right lines, but that he lacked the political skills to drive it through. Shifting opinion within the party towards an agenda that talked about the vulnerable would be far from easy for such a divided party. There was simply no appetite for it. Despite Duncan Smith’s commitment, his lack of authority was a considerable handicap to advancing his cause.
Uninspired by the ‘helping the vulnerable’ mantra, the Shadow Cabinet sought clarity on other issues. They decided to oppose the government’s plan to introduce top-up fees in higher education, and to pledge to restore the link between the state pension and earnings. ‘There was a sense that we were becoming far too populist in adopting these positions,’ one frontbencher recalls. Taxation became a particular source of tension between Duncan Smith and Michael Howard, the Shadow Chancellor. Howard wanted to reassure voters that the party would prioritise spending on public services above tax cuts. Opinion polls showed that the public were concerned about public services, and were sceptical about any party that promised to cut taxes. But Duncan Smith, under pressure from Thatcherites in the parliamentary party and from the Tory-supporting papers, the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail, pressed for tax cuts. The right questioned whether Howard’s position provided enough ‘clear blue water’ between the Conservatives and the government, which had recently announced massive increases in public spending, particularly in health and education. ‘The pressure from outside to mount a traditionally Tory approach was quite forceful, and there were pressures on Howard to make concessions, but he was adamant,’ a close aide recalls. The issue was never really resolved by Duncan Smith, leaving an unhealed wound at the heart of the party. Relations with his Shadow Chancellor had deteriorated, with Duncan Smith privately considering Howard to be a ‘panicker’. The ‘peasants’ who had catapulted Duncan Smith into the leadership were seriously worried that their man was unable to establish a clear position. The dispute also confirmed that for many Tory MPs, upfront tax cuts, like Euroscepticism, had become an article of faith.
By July 2002, when Duncan Smith undertook his first reshuffle, the Shadow Cabinet was not a happy team. The principal casualty was David Davis, the Party Chairman. According to one of Duncan Smith’s close aides, who encouraged him to appoint Davis to the chairmanship, ‘They just didn’t hit it off.’ ‘Iain wasn’t that bad at managing the overall Shadow Cabinet, but when it came to managing the big beasts, like Davis, who has an ego the size of a planet, it didn’t work,’ the aide regrets. ‘They needed to be blood brothers, and they weren’t, and we were in a weak position. Iain felt that Davis’s heart wasn’t in it and he wasn’t pulling his weight.’ Davis insists that he played a full role in managing the party organisation after the heavy defeat of 2001. ‘There was no tension to speak of between Iain and me for much of the year, but it wasn’t an easy time politically,’ he recalls. ‘It was permanent struggle in terms of the media and the public perception of Iain. There were tensions in Central Office caused by some of the people he brought in who wanted to modernise and change the party. So quite a lot of my job in those days was trying to manage all of this as best we could.’54 Davis had taken some bold decisions, such as severing formal ties with the right-wing Monday Club, and made efforts to attract more women and ethnic minority parliamentary candidates.
However, by the summer of 2002 some in Duncan Smith’s team and the Whips’ Office suggested that Davis be moved from Central Office. They used the fact that he had gone on an early-summer holiday to Florida in July as a reason to suggest that he wasn’t fully committed to the job, even though Davis had agreed to hold the fort at Central Office during August and September (an arrangement he had also made during his previous role as Chairman of the Commons Public Accounts Committee). Davis was furious when he learned in Florida that he was being demoted to shadow Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott’s Department of Local Government and the Regions. When he returned from holiday, he discovered that a briefing campaign against him was well under way. ‘It was being pushed by a mixture of the ultra-modernisers and some of Iain’s people,’ he recalls.55 After agreeing to take up the new post, he issued a strong statement outside his constituency home in which he lambasted a ‘cowardly campaign of character assassination’ against him, based on a ‘tissue of lies’. ‘Vendettas, character assassination have crippled three previous Tory leaders. We cannot allow this to happen again,’ he declared.56
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