For the Record

After the 1997 election I was outside Parliament. Eight years later I was leading my party. And five more years after that we were back in power. It was a slow and painful ascent for the party, but an incredibly rapid rise for me.

I wasn’t by any means the fastest to understand either the scale of our defeat or the profound nature of the change that was needed to our party. Michael Portillo and the group around him seemed to have thought more deeply than many others about this.

Nor was I the best parliamentary performer, speech-maker or even motivator of potential Conservative voters. William Hague was by far the most talented politician of my generation, and was superb at all of these vital tasks.

I wasn’t the master tactician who could best plan the strategic thinking and the tactical moves that would help take the Conservative Party back to power. In those regards, I don’t think George Osborne has an equal.

If a master strategist had sat down in 1997 to draw up the ideal sort of person to lead the Conservatives back to power, they would hardly have come up with a privileged Old Etonian who had worked for Norman Lamont when Britain was ejected from the ERM, and whose only ex­perience outside politics was to work briefly for a London-based media conglomerate.

Good timing and good luck would combine to give me a chance after three heavy defeats. My principal opponent would change from the apparently unbeatable Tony Blair to the eminently beatable Gordon Brown. The long period of economic growth that started in 1992 would come to a juddering halt in 2008.

Added to that, I had Samantha, who humanised and rounded me. I had a constituency in Witney – both safe and close to London – that was an excellent springboard. And I had friends and supporters who were ready and able to back me. I learned a lot at Carlton about business, about management, and about people. And it may have been easier, out of Parliament, to see the big political picture.

Opinions differ about how effective Tony Blair’s team was at driving through change between 1997 and 2001. However, as a political machine it was without equal. And the truth was that Tony Blair was the post-Thatcher leader the British people wanted. He combined pro-enterprise economics with a more compassionate approach to social policy and public services. He understood that in many ways Britain is a small ‘c’ conservative country. In opposition, and in government, he rarely gave his Conservative opponents room to breathe. He talked tough on crime, looked strong on defence, seemed concerned about school discipline, even posed as passionate about business.

At a supposedly ‘off the record’ dinner with journalists in October 2005 I said that just as Tony Blair had understood that he needed to be the ‘heir to Thatcher’, so we needed to understand the need to be ‘heirs to Blair’. By this I didn’t mean that we should imitate all of his political methods or adopt all of his policies and political positions. After all, that wasn’t what Blair had done in relation to being the ‘heir’ to Thatcher. He had tossed aside many of her policies, and introduced some profound changes of his own. Out went subsidised private education for bright children from low-income homes, and tax relief for private healthcare. And in came devolution for Scotland and Wales, independence for the Bank of England, and the minimum wage.

But alongside that, he had carefully analysed and understood what had changed in the country since 1979, and therefore which elements of Thatcherism should be maintained and built on. He kept the trade-union reforms, the privatised industries, the low rates of income tax, the commitment to NATO, a largely pro-American foreign policy and a strong defence. These were natural Conservative policies, and by adopting them, Blair locked us out of Downing Street.

What were the equivalent moves for us? This was the question that Conservative Party ‘modernisers’ 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.

My only memory of the entire leadership campaign was of an event I organised in Witney for party supporters to hear John Bercow speaking for IDS and George Young speaking for Ken. Samantha asked Bercow whether he supported his candidate’s views that abortion should be restricted and the death penalty restored. It was one of the many moments in our married life when I realised that she had seen the big picture rather quicker and clearer than I had. IDS was always going to be seen as an outdated old clunker.

But two days before he won the leadership contest on 13 September 2001, the world changed.

When the first plane struck the World Trade Center I was at home in Dean doing constituency work. Samantha was in New York starting the process of setting up a new Smythson store in Manhattan. For about four hours I was unable to get in touch with her because the telephone lines were down. I sat with the TV remote control in one hand and my mobile phone in the other, watching in shock and pressing redial over and over again. By the time I got through to her that evening I was staring out of the window on the train to London. Relief.

People now tend to jump straight from 9/11 to the war in Iraq, but that is unfair. Tony Blair’s initial response to what had happened that day in New York was masterful. He moved fast, and set the agenda both at home and abroad. He correctly identified the problem of Islamist extremism, the inadequacy of our response both domestically and internationally, and supported – quite rightly in my view – the action to remove the Taliban regime from Afghanistan. Once it was clear that they would not stop al-Qaeda using the country as a safe haven, there was no realistic alternative.

Along with other relevant select committee members, I went to No. 10 for a briefing in late 2001. It was the first time I had been through the famous black door in years, and Blair impressed me then and in the many debates and statements that followed. Even as a relatively tribal Conservative, I felt strongly that at this moment Britain had the right prime minister. I even stopped Blair behind the speaker’s chair after one statement in the Commons to say that in his clarity about the threat we faced, he was speaking for the whole country.

But what of Iraq? While anyone with an ounce of reason could see that the regime in Afghanistan was a legitimate target, it was impossible to be quite as certain when it came to Iraq. As I showed in the anguished Guardian columns I wrote at the time – I had a regular spot in the paper’s online comment pages – I was a sceptic about the move to war.

Saddam Hussein’s regime was brutal. He was in breach of countless resolutions passed by the UN, an organisation for which he showed only contempt. His people would unquestionably be better off without him. There was a risk that, left in place, he might start to work more closely with the extremist groups that threatened us. And, after all, he had employed ‘weapons of mass destruction’ against his own people when he used poison gas on the Kurds.

I bought all of these arguments, and still do, but as I put it at the time: ‘We are being asked to swap deterrence with something new called pre-emptive war. I cannot be certain but I suspect that many of us will not support pre-emptive war unless Blair can produce either compelling evidence of the direct threat to the UK or a UN resolution giving it specific backing.’

As the evidence to satisfy the first condition was pretty unconvincing even at the time, and as Blair clearly failed on the second condition, why did a sceptic like me vote for military action?

The convenient answer would be to say I was ‘duped’ by the various dossiers and the claims about Britain being ‘forty-five minutes from doom’. But that’s not really the case. They only formed a small part of the reasons I gave publicly and to my many highly sceptical constituents.

I wrote at the time about the consequences of backing away. It would undermine the UK–US alliance. Saddam would win an invaluable propaganda victory. We would jeopardise any chance of a proper, multilateral approach. And, of course, while there was no ‘second resolution’ specifically mandating force, there were over a dozen resolutions dealing with Iraq, and the UN would look powerless if they weren’t enforced.

Sitting in the Commons, it was also clear that a vote against military action wouldn’t stop the war, it would just make it less of an international coalition. The Bush administration was going to have this war, the question was whether we would be involved.

And I listened to my closest colleagues and friends. Some, like George Osborne, who was a fairly enthusiastic ‘neo-con’, had no doubts. Others, like Oliver Letwin, who were wavering sceptics like me, decided on the balance of evidence to vote with Blair.

Samantha was totally opposed, and told me to stick with my initial scepticism. But this was a time in our marriage when we talked about politics very little.

Our first-born son Ivan was a year old, desperately ill and in hospital almost as much as he was at home. I would often leave his bedside in the morning after a night sleeping beside him, handing over to Samantha before heading off to the Commons for the next Iraq debate or statement. Less parenting by relay, and more time together, and she might have persuaded me.

But to be truthful, there was something else. I believed that the prime minister was entitled to something approaching the benefit of the doubt. I was all for Parliament voting on going to war – and I would subsequently help to entrench that convention as prime minister – but I don’t start from the proposition that a prime minister asks for backing for a military conflict ‘lightly or inadvisedly’. Indeed, I believe that if the prime minister comes to Parliament and says effectively, ‘We are standing with our oldest allies, fighting a dictator who has brutalised his people, and we risk humiliation or worse if we falter,’ then I would try to be supportive.

Assuming that other MPs shared this rational patriotism, or naïvety – take your pick – was to let me down several years later, in the vote on bombing Syria when I was prime minister. I regret what happened subsequently, and we will never know how things might have been if matters had been handled differently. But I take the view that if you vote for something, you should take your share of responsibility for the consequences rather than try to find some formulation to show that you were conned or misled. Without Saddam, Iraq at least has a chance of a better future; although even today it is probably still too soon to say whether that chance will be taken.

It wouldn’t be fair to write off Iain’s entire period leading the party. He understood that the Conservative Party needed fundamental change. But he wasn’t capable of some of the basic requirements of leadership in British politics – building an effective team, performing at Prime Minister’s Questions, and delivering big speeches and media interviews.

For PMQs, George Osborne and I were drafted in, together with a bright young staffer, James Cartlidge (now the MP for South Suffolk). From time to time we were joined by Boris Johnson, whose appearances grew less frequent the more obvious it became that we were marooned in the polls and heading for defeat.

They were pretty desperate sessions. Blair was at the height of his powers, and Iain was leaden and dull. Boris asked me after one particularly depressing prep session, ‘Hey Dave, what’s the plan?’ He then grabbed me by the shoulders and said, ‘Presumably it’s like carrying an injured hooker in the scrum – we know he can’t play but we just’ – at this point he grunted and heaved me off the ground – ‘pick him up and carry him over the line.’

George and Boris saw the writing on the wall much more clearly than I did. I didn’t attend either of the IDS party conferences, as on both occasions I had to be at Ivan’s bedside at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington. Despite this, I did catch his second conference speech – the one where he declared that ‘the quiet man’ was ‘turning up the volume’. I watched it on an ancient hospital television, but even I could see that the multiple standing ovations were staged and looked ridiculous.

In the end, this right-winger with the potential to unite the party was overthrown by a combination of left and right after losing a fight he didn’t need to pick. A government Bill on adoption and children was amended to enable unmarried couples to adopt children, opening the door for gay couples to adopt. It had already passed the House of Commons, but the Lords had rejected the amendment and reinstated the original ‘married-only’ rule.

Iain tried to whip the party against supporting unmarried couples’ right to adopt. A small number of MPs rebelled completely and voted with the government. A larger number ignored the three-line whip – so-called because the whips underline the vote three times on the official notice, meaning that you must support the party line – and abstained. There were only three of us from the 2001 intake who did so: me, George and Boris.

Instead of ignoring the rebellion – as I frequently chose to do as party leader – Iain’s lieutenants called an emergency press conference, telling the party to ‘Unite or die.’ IDS’s personal authority was left mortally wounded, with more or less open discussion of plots to oust him. Only the Iraq War, which soon dominated the political discourse, diverted press and political attention from the travails of the Tory leadership.

But by October 2003 the party had had enough. A major donor announced on the radio that he and others were considering abandoning ship if IDS’s leadership continued. Given the party’s precarious financial situation, this new crisis stampeded the parliamentary party into action. Shortly afterwards a vote of confidence in Iain’s leadership was triggered as the chairman of the 1922 Committee received the sufficient number of letters from Conservative MPs.

The day of the vote was also the day of PMQs. For once Boris turned up at our weekly prep meeting, and there was lots of gallows humour, including from Iain, about potential leadership bids. Afterwards, I asked to stay behind for a private word. I pleaded with Iain to resign, and not face the indignity of losing a vote of confidence. George was probably right, though, when he said the deed simply needed to be done.

The arrival of Michael Howard as leader provided yet more lessons in leading, and in losing. Michael handled the technical aspects of the job well. After two years of IDS, there was a sense that the grown-ups and the professionals were back in charge. PMQs was a fight once again. Conferences were well organised. There was a newly effective media operation.

Overall the Michael Howard leadership gave us a fighting chance. The critique of Blair was sharpened: over-regulation was holding back the economy, and over-centralisation was holding back public services. And the government was ignoring vital issues such as crime and immigration, on which Michael Howard could demonstrate both passion and expertise. And yet. Once again it didn’t work.

Did I ever believe that we could win in 2005? While I thought we could take away Labour’s majority, I was never confident that we could win outright. We simply hadn’t won the right to be heard. Nor had we developed a clear enough description of what we needed to do.