For the Record. David Cameron
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kept asking. Getting the answer right was an essential step in returning to power. And returning to power was what we needed to do. Despite his prowess at politics, and those reforms that had benefited Britain, Blair was, overall, taking the country in the wrong direction. It was more than just his policies – the unsustainable welfare system, the dumbing down of education standards, the neglect of some key overseas alliances, the increases in taxes, the overburdening of public finances and the failure to plan for the long-term future of everything from defence to the NHS. It was also about the culture those policies created. Something for nothing. Equality of outcome, not opportunity. Short-termism. I was absolutely not the heir to Blair in any policy or philosophical sense, and I was desperate to clear his government out.
But before I could do that I needed to find a safe parliamentary constituency. By the middle of 2000 I was heading towards the final selection rounds in Epsom, East Devon and Shaun Woodward’s seat of Witney. It was Witney that I really wanted.
I knew Shaun from working with him at Conservative Central Office during the 1992 general election. I was well aware that he was wildly ambitious for high office, but I was just as surprised as everybody else when he chose to jump ship and join the Labour Party in December 1999. Surprise soon gave way to excitement: West Oxfordshire was an area I knew quite well, and the constituency would now need a new Conservative candidate for the next election. The town itself was just thirty miles north of where I was brought up, and West Oxfordshire was very similar to West Berkshire – a combination of market towns, attractive villages, rural enterprises, growing businesses and many talented people who commuted either to the university city of Oxford or to London.
The constituency party had concluded, unsurprisingly, that they’d made a dreadful mistake in selecting Shaun Woodward, who had turned out not to be the genuine article. So in an attempt to avoid making the same sort of mistake again, they employed an interesting ruse for the first round of interviews. The mayor of Carterton – the second town of West Oxfordshire after Witney – was a West Indian called Joe Walcott. He had come over from Jamaica during the war to serve in the RAF at Brize Norton, and had stayed on to become a prominent local figure and a passionate Conservative. As the prospective candidates arrived one by one to be interviewed at a pretty manor house in the village of Bampton, they found Joe standing on his own in the garden. Those who ignored him, or assumed he was a gardener or driver, were immediately struck off the list. Fortunately I gave him a warm handshake, and we would remain good friends until he died in November 2018.
Although I was competing against the former MP and highly effective minister Andrew Mitchell, and a talented young businesswoman called Sharon Buckle, I think my passion for the place shone through, and I was selected.
Within weeks I had new friends, a new home and the makings of a strong political base. Peter Gummer, Lord Chadlington, who I knew a little from when we had both worked for John Major, became something of a mentor, renting me a cottage in Dean, near Chipping Norton, the village where we have lived ever since. Together with Christopher Shale, who also became a firm friend and adviser, Peter helped me to rebuild the local Conservative association and its finances.
And I inherited from Shaun Woodward one of the best constituency agents in the country, Barry Norton, who was also the leader of the local district council. Witney born and bred, Barry is a workaholic with a thick Oxfordshire accent, and seemed to know about absolutely everything that happened anywhere in the 250 square miles of the Witney constituency.
While it is hard to characterise a whole local party, the West Oxfordshire Conservative Association, or WOCA as I came to know it, was, rather like its last two MPs, Shaun Woodward and Douglas Hurd, at the liberal, open-minded end of the party.
The general election, which took place in June 2001, was a fairly gentle affair. I spent the campaign travelling from village to village, having lunch in any number of extremely good West Oxfordshire pubs. It was a fun month, and at the end of it I had a majority of over 7,900. I was in.
In the run-up to the election, and for some time afterwards, when people asked me about my ambitions I would say that I wanted to be a Member of Parliament because I believed it was an incredibly satisfying and worthwhile job. Serving the area, standing up for local people, getting things done, while taking part in debates about some of the big questions facing our country: that was what it was all about. Everything else beyond being a backbench MP – and I always hoped there would be more – would be a bonus.
There was soon the added stimulation and interest of sitting on the Home Affairs Select Committee. I was keen to take risks, and I fully supported the proposal that we look in depth at the issue of illegal drugs. I was later to disavow some of the most contentious conclusions we came to – downgrading ecstasy from class A to class B, for instance. It was, and remains, odd that ecstasy is in the same class as, for example, heroin. But I came to believe that the danger of signalling that certain drugs were more acceptable, or less dangerous, outweighed any benefit from being more scientifically accurate. But there is no doubt this report shifted the dial in terms of moving drugs policy away from criminalisation and towards treatment and education. This was something I would continue to promote as prime minister.
But while I loved the job, my joy at being a Member of Parliament was tempered by the hopelessness of our situation as a party. 1997 was the year of the Tory wipeout, and in 2001 we added precisely one to our historic low of 165 MPs. The Conservative parliamentary party looked very white, very rural, very male, and frankly rather irrelevant. Of the thirty-four new Tory MPs who had made it to Westminster, only one was a woman.
And during that Parliament a whole series of things happened that brought home to me just how wretched our situation was, and how simply waiting for something to happen was a useless strategy.
William Hague’s resignation as leader after the 2001 election was sad, but not surprising. He had done his best in almost impossible circumstances. Throughout his leadership the Conservative Party had been divided and fractious, and was still trying, though often failing, to come to terms with defeat. Blair was always likely to be given a second chance by the electorate. But through the force of his performances, both inside and outside Parliament, William had kept the party together and the show on the road.
Because he changed tack partway through the Parliament, backing off from modernisation and returning to more traditional Tory themes such as law and order and Europe, it is easy to represent his leadership as a false start for the modernisation of the party and its policies. I don’t think that’s fair.
Timing is everything in politics. William did not have the support in the party for modernisation, and given that Blair was then at his peak, even a changed Conservative Party couldn’t expect much reward from the electorate. Pressing on might have sacrificed core support without attracting new voters.
In any event, I can’t claim any particular foresight: I backed him strongly in both phases. And the pressure on him was spectacular. William said to me some years later, when I was trying – successfully – to tempt him back into front-line politics, that the experience of leading the party after 1997 had nearly broken him.
In the leadership election of 2001 I was a committed supporter of Michael Portillo. I had seen how good he was in office, and the unexpected loss of his seat in 1997 had clearly made him think deeply about what needed to change. Re-elected to Parliament in a by-election in 1999, it seemed that he had a clear plan for change, and for a more liberal party with greater urban support. However, he had so fallen out of love with his own party that he couldn’t really contemplate the hard work and compromises needed to reform it. Also, with his hard-man-of-the-right past, he struggled to convince all those who supported the modernising agenda.
And so we were left with Ken Clarke versus Iain Duncan Smith. It was a hopeless situation. One couldn’t unite the party; the other couldn’t win over the country.
I made what I thought was a rational choice, which was to support ‘IDS’, because I thought that if Ken won, the subsequent inevitable party split over Europe would be so bad as to make us both a laughing stock and wide open to a revolt from our right. Samantha said I was mad, and voted for Ken. Frankly, I was pretty happy that we cancelled each other out.