Back from the Brink: The Inside Story of the Tory Resurrection. Peter Snowdon

share of the vote. Hague was happy to allow the grassroots to vent their fury at the parliamentary party. Many were unhappy at being let down by the sleazy behaviour and divisions among MPs that had preceded the landslide defeat. The first party conference after the election would see fireworks. ‘I deliberately let them rebel and gave them half a day at conference to do that, and boy, did they rebel,’ recalls Hague. ‘They demanded a bigger share of votes in the leadership election and they told off the MPs in no uncertain terms.’²⁵ When Sir Archie Hamilton, the Chairman of the 1922 Committee, the body that represents backbench Conservative Members of Parliament, rose to speak in defence of MPs he was booed and heckled. The mood suddenly changed. MPs finally relented on the issue, agreeing to a two-stage process whereby they would vote in a series of ballots to select the final two candidates, who would go forward to a ballot of all party members.

      Democracy had come to the Conservative Party, but it came at a time when members were leaving the party in droves. Membership had fallen from one million in 1987 to 400,000 in 1997, while the average age of party members, which had been sixty-three in the early 1990s, continued to rise.²⁶ A shrinking party in the country could now exert real influence, but this presented new problems. ‘Entrenching your changes in a democratic party is the right thing to do, but democratising an unreconstructed party and then trying to change it is incredibly difficult,’ argues David Willetts. ‘The leadership tried too hard to attempt to please the Tory press, which had an agenda that was resistant to change.’²⁷ It was a criticism that rang true: Hague’s reforms looked good on paper, but they overlooked the fact that the real work that needed to be done was in changing the party’s policies and broadening its appeal.

      In his first year as leader, Hague succeeded in performing one of the largest overhauls of the party organisation in over a century. In February 1998 a ballot of the membership almost unanimously approved his ‘Fresh Future’ reforms. But few in the outside world would even notice, let alone give him credit. ‘I had some confidence that we would soon get going again. Our first party conference was very successful. The first few months did seem to go to plan, but then it became apparent that none of that was making any difference in the country. Whatever we did, it just wasn’t cutting through to the voters at all,’ Hague recalls. In fact Hague had wanted to go much further in changing the public face of the party, which was predominately male, white and middle-class. There were only thirteen female Conservative MPs after the 1997 election. ‘We wanted a woman on every candidate shortlist, and there was a lot of resistance amongst MPs and activists, and so we dropped that to win acceptance of the constitution,’ Hague says regretfully. ‘We should have had a bigger row and forced it through, but at that time things like that were regarded as very un-Conservative.’²⁸ Had he been bolder, the public might have taken more notice. It was a mistake that he would make a habit of repeating.

      The first tests of public opinion after the election did not bode well. Basking in its honeymoon, Labour recorded average opinion poll ratings of 55–60 per cent for the rest of 1997, while the Conservatives languished at 23–26 per cent.²⁹ Blair’s satisfaction ratings as Prime Minister broke all records. ‘I don’t know if there was anything we could have done about this,’ recalls one of Hague’s senior aides. ‘We were bit-players in the drama in which Tony Blair was the main character.’

      Although the Conservatives retained the safe seat of Uxbridge in a by-election in July 1997, the next time voters went to the polls the party would get the shock of its life. Having lost Winchester, a traditionally safe Tory seat, to the Liberal Democrats in the general election by only two votes, the defeated Conservative MP, Gerald Malone, forced a by-election in November 1997 after contesting the result in the courts. The party’s director of campaigning in Central Office, Tony Garrett, told senior staff on the morning of the by-election that the result would be ‘too close to call’, and agents on the ground in the cathedral city believed that there would be only two thousand votes in it either way. When the votes were counted, the Liberal Democrat MP, Mark Oaten, was returned with a majority of over twenty thousand. ‘It was a huge eye-opener. There was a tendency for us to think that the electorate would wake up after the general election and feel that they had overshot the mark,’ recalls Francis Maude, who was then Shadow Culture Secretary. ‘Here we were giving them the chance to say, “Sorry guys, we didn’t mean to do it,” and put right what was meant to be a Tory seat. A lot of colleagues just didn’t get it. There was something deeply wrong; we were totally in denial.’³⁰ Maude, who had been out of Parliament between 1992 and 1997, was one of a small number of MPs around the Shadow Cabinet who began to recognise how unpalatable the Conservative Party had become, and how powerful the mood for change in the country really was.

       Getting Round the Kitchen Table

      For all the changes to its organisation, the Conservative Party had not come to terms with defeat. Inside Central Office there were a few figures who understood the depth of the problem, and realised that the party’s relationship with the electorate had completely broken down. In an organisation sapped of intellectual energy and drive, they cut lonely figures. Among them was Andrew Cooper, who had overseen the party’s private polling since early 1996. Having previously worked for the former Labour Foreign Secretary David Owen, who helped to form the breakaway SDP in 1981, he became a supporter of John Major at the 1992 general election before joining the centrist think tank the Social Market Foundation (SMF) as head of research. Daniel Finkelstein was another former member of the SDP and director of the SMF, who joined Central Office in 1995 to develop policy. Finkelstein and Cooper were two of the brightest officials in Central Office: they had as sophisticated an understanding of public opinion as anybody in the party. Hague appointed Finkelstein to direct policy, while Cooper was given the unenviable task of devising a strategy for recovery.

      Cooper had been influenced by Michael Portillo’s speech at a fringe event at the 1997 party conference. Portillo’s lecture, ‘The Ghost of Conservatism Past, the Spirit of Conservatism Future’, was a blunt assessment of how the party had come to be regarded in the 1990s. His shock at how he himself seemed to embody the party’s unpopularity had caused him to consider what had gone wrong. Cooper shared Portillo’s analysis: ‘Although there were clearly parts of the Conservative government’s record that led to its defeat, the reaction on the doorstep during the 1997 campaign was more about the party’s character, not about its beliefs. They disliked our motives and us as people,’ Cooper says.³¹ The party had become completely estranged from ordinary people’s lives and concerns. His research showed that the majority of people had accepted that a dose of Thatcherite medicine had been necessary to cure the economy of its industrial relations ills and the scourge of inflation. In fact, the party was credited with the economic recovery in the mid-1990s, despite the calamity of Black Wednesday, and some polls during the 1997 general election showed that Major and Clarke were more trusted to manage the economy than Blair and Brown. But the state of the public services, principally health and education, had emerged as a key public concern during the 1990s. Instead of responding to this, the party became obsessed with Europe, holding a conversation with itself rather than with the voters.

      An aficionado of American politics, Cooper seized on a phrase used by the senior Democrat Congressman, Dick Gephardt, to explain why the Republican Party had done so badly in recent mid-term elections. The Republicans had become obsessed with impeaching President Clinton for various misdemeanours in office, rather than tackling the ‘kitchen table issues’ that mattered to people. ‘We needed to think about what ordinary hard-working people talked about around the kitchen table, and show that we shared their values,’ says Cooper. His strategy paper ‘Kitchen Table Conservatives’ starkly laid out the deep-seated perceptions of the party. It suggested ‘ten-thousand-volt shocks’, bold, dramatic gestures ‘to make people sit up and go, “Wow, that’s surprising, we wouldn’t have expected them to do that.”’³²