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

Smith. ‘I tried to persuade him before he went out to the cameras. I stopped trying once I realised he was tired and adamant that he was going.’⁵ Nick Wood and Amanda Platell, Hague’s loyal media advisers, also urged him to stay, arguing that he was held in great affection by the grassroots. Yet taking on the leadership of his vanquished party was a burden that was perhaps too great for the William Hague of 1997. As one former Cabinet minister commented, ‘The sadness for the Conservative Party is that William Hague was put in [too soon]. It was rather like opening a very good wine several years before it should be drunk, and you don’t get the best out of it.’⁶

       Shocked, Frightened and Hollowed Out

      William Hague’s sudden departure left a vacuum at the top of the party, just as John Major’s had done four years earlier. Instead of the complacent attitude that arose after 1997, senior figures inside the party had little to console themselves with. ‘2001 was by far the worst result,’ says Lord Strathclyde, who became Tory leader in the Lords in 1998. ‘I was one of those in 1997 who thought that the pendulum would swing back. After 2001, it seemed to be completely stuck.’⁷ ‘There was a state of panic; the party didn’t know where to go,’ recalls Liam Fox, then Shadow Health Secretary.⁸ Hague’s Shadow Social Security Secretary, David Willetts, laments the fact that there was ‘no grown-up discussion of why we lost so badly for a second time. We were getting straight into another leadership election, and because of the fear of appearing divided there was no collective understanding of what had gone wrong. I think we were too frightened of it all.’⁹

      The mood in Central Office was despondent. Among those to leave was Daniel Finkelstein, who had been head of policy before standing in Harrow West, a leafy seat in north London that the Conservatives lost in 1997. He would have become an MP had the party made even the smallest of inroads into Labour’s majority, but out on the stump, Finkelstein soon realised that the party’s campaign was doomed. Like Norman Tebbit, Mrs Thatcher’s Party Chairman in the 1987 general election campaign, he compared the party’s predicament after 1997 to that of Marks & Spencer. Tebbit’s point had been that by dropping traditional lines in favour of more trendy, fashion-conscious items, M&S had alienated its core customers but failed to attract new ones. In 2001, Finkelstein drew a different conclusion: ‘M&S was frequented by suburban women whose fashion sense and lifestyle had completely changed. Its sales began to fall because it did not change with its customers, and was committed to the same way of doing things.’ It was precisely the same for the Conservative Party, he argued. ‘The party decided after 1997 that it needed to sack the voters and get a new set who were more willing to go along with what it wanted to say to them.’ Indeed, M&S only restored its fortunes by broadening its range to accommodate old and new styles.

      Instead of pursuing what many commentators labelled a ‘core vote’ strategy, the party failed to understand what its ‘core’ supporters – suburban, professional and middle-class (the so-called ‘ABC1s’) – wanted. ‘When a Conservative Party starts attacking the “liberal elite” then you know you’re in trouble, because they had actually been a traditional source of support. Ironically, the party had contributed a lot to the fact that these people had changed,’ says Finkelstein.¹⁰ New Labour appeared to be listening to voters’ concerns about the state of the public services, while the Conservatives had left them unanswered. As a result, the middle classes deserted the party. In 1983 the Conservatives led Labour among ABC1s by 40 per cent. By 1992 that lead had fallen to a still healthy 30 per cent, but by 1997 it had collapsed to 5 per cent, and it was a mere 3 per cent four years later.¹¹ Only among working-class voters, the DEs, was there a small increase in Tory support, which produced the minuscule rise in the party’s overall share of the vote. Such was the solidity of Labour’s support and the lowness of the Conservatives’ base among these voters that it hardly made a difference.

      The party had become trapped in a warped version of its past. ‘We had become a neo-Thatcherite party, not a Conservative party,’ argues Archie Norman, the outgoing Shadow Environment Secretary. ‘We were following an ideology that her disciples developed after she fell, but it wasn’t what she believed in the 1980s.’¹² By pushing an agenda which stressed concerns about asylum and immigration, keeping the pound and raising the spectre of Labour’s ‘foreign land’, the party’s 2001 election campaign was fought on a narrow platform, and seemed to be aimed purely at ‘striving’ working-class voters. Mrs Thatcher had succeeded in picking up many of their votes in the 1980s, but she knew that their support was not enough by itself to win an election, and her initial success lay in appealing to both the middle and the working classes. William Hague’s election campaign in 2001 was a parody of hers in 1979 or 1983. It was not only out of step with an earlier generation of Thatcherites, but was lost on an electorate that had moved on.

      Despite Hague’s ambition to revive Conservatism as a grassroots movement, the campaign exposed how thin and aged the party had become on the ground. ‘There was a crisis of DNA in the party – it was left with the old, who were too infirm to be the footsoldiers of campaigns, but who actually kept the party ticking over in various places,’ one party official observed. Elderly activists were loyal and hard-working, but they were too few in number to sustain a healthy presence in many constituencies. Many local associations, particularly in constituencies which for years had not returned a Conservative MP, had ceased to function as organisations capable of fighting an election campaign. Elderly members were accompanied by a younger generation of activists enthused by Mrs Thatcher’s view of the world. ‘The young ones socialised only with each other, and were obsessive about politics as well as being socially and culturally tone deaf,’ another insider remarked. ‘Association meetings were dominated by the old, who weren’t necessarily prejudiced or bigoted, but out of step with public opinion on social issues, and a younger set who were atypical of their generation.’

      The messages of the 2001 campaign resonated with a hard core of Tory activists, but those who helped to keep the party in touch with the world of work, through the professions, private industry and the public sector, simply drifted away. Disillusioned with or uninterested in a party so far removed from power, fewer and fewer were drawn into Conservative circles. ‘There was a lost generation of bright young types who came into political maturity at a time when the party was in decline,’ says a party official. ‘If you combine this with the disengagement of the broader public from politics you have a perfect storm for the Tory Party struggling to survive in the country.’ Along with injections of cash from a small group of donors, the hollowed-out grassroots had helped to keep the party alive after 1997. Now it would be left to the emaciated and estranged ranks of the Tory Party in the country to make the decision about William Hague’s successor. For the 166 Tory MPs returning to Westminster the contest had already begun.

       The Peasants’ Revolt

      The ensuing leadership election, the fifth in twelve years, would not provide the constructive debate that the party so desperately required. As in 1997, five candidates stood: Michael Ancram (Party Chairman after Parkinson retired); Iain Duncan Smith (Shadow Defence Secretary); David Davis (a former minister who had been on the backbenches since 1997); Ken Clarke, who threw his hat into the ring for a second time; and Michael Portillo. With the exception of Clarke and Portillo, all of them appealed to the right of the parliamentary party. Both Duncan Smith and Davis were devotedly Thatcherite and Eurosceptic, while Ancram had a small following among social conservatives. Clarke drew his support from the centre of the party, as well as the dwindling number of pro-Europeans.

      Portillo’s return to the frontline had been a jarring experience, not least because of his bruising encounters with some of Hague’s aides. Even before then he had had doubts about re-entering the political fray. Shortly before returning to Parliament in November