Thursday 13 March 2014 | UK News feed

How we imploded: senior Tories finally speak out

Graham Turner has talked to Conservative peers, ex-ministers and shadow cabinet members about the fall of the party. In the first part of his investigation, they speak with startling candour about the disasters of the Major years

Oh dear, oh dear: what is one to say about the Tories on the first full day of Iain Duncan Smith's second party conference as leader? The glory days of Margaret Thatcher seem but a distant memory. The opinion polls yield little, if any, comfort. The new leader might as well not exist for all the impact he has made on Parliament and public life. All this and Edwina, too.

Nor is any of that the worst of it. For those with ears to hear, there is the slow drumbeat of impending extinction as a major political force. Those who have heard it prefer not to speak their names, because the auguries of death seem all too real, but hear it they do.

"There is a real danger," said a leading Conservative peer and former Cabinet minister, "that the Tories will become like the Liberals in the 1920s and disappear as a major political force. The party may prove to be more fragile than the monarchy, no longer part of the fabric of the nation. It has become a sect talking to itself."

A prominent Tory MP who has served in several Cabinets takes a similar view. "We are," he declared, "in serious danger of becoming a small minority party incapable of commanding a majority in the country again. If we have made no progress halfway through this parliament, Iain Duncan Smith will be seen as just another caretaker. If there were no substantial recovery in the 2005-6 election, it could be fatal."

"I ask myself," said a second Tory peer and former Cabinet minister, "whether we are now going to have a social democratic government of the kind that lasted for decades in some Scandinavian countries. The Conservatives are going to find it very hard to articulate an alternative to New Labour."

Former Cabinet ministers look back at the disasters of the past decade, many of them self-inflicted, shake their heads and wonder. Sir Malcolm Rifkind, Foreign Secretary in John Major's government, recalled Churchill's mordant remark that, in politics, one should never commit suicide as one might live to regret it. "We did," he added sadly. "And we certainly do regret it."

Are things, though, really as bad as all that? Are the Tories in any worse plight than the suicidally stupid Labour Party of the early 1980s? Is there not a vast well of former Conservative voters that is simply waiting to be tapped? The Tories, after all, have been out of office for only five years, compared with Labour's seemingly unending 18 years in the wilderness.

Even so, the question has to be asked: how did the Conservative Party sink into its present predicament, the nadir of its modern political history? And why is it showing so little sign of emerging from it?

The first act in the Conservative tragedy was the amazingly rapid collapse of Mrs Thatcher's near-regal domination of the political scene. "When I came into parliament in February 1989," recalled William Hague, "she had been leader for 14 years and Prime Minister for 10.

Nigel Lawson had been Chancellor for six years, Geoffrey Howe Foreign Secretary for six. It seemed an extremely stable government - yet, within 18 months, they had all gone."

By the end of 1990, moreover, the seeds of long-term disaster had been sown. John Major, then Chancellor, had somehow persuaded Mrs Thatcher that the time had come for Britain to join the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, although it went against everything she believed in.

"It was profoundly against her instinct that you cannot buck the markets," said Lord Tebbit, "but maybe she felt she couldn't oppose Major because she'd already lost one chancellor, Nigel Lawson, and couldn't afford to lose another one. By then, she was also in a much weaker position. Ian Gow had been murdered by the IRA and Nick Ridley had resigned, so the queen was more exposed. I think she was cornered."

Within a month of Britain's entry came the tragedy's second act: Mrs Thatcher was turfed out of Number 10, the victim of a Europhile-driven putsch. That left festering sores of bitterness among her supporters that infected the entire party in the years that followed.

"The way she went," said Lord Hurd, "was quite wrong and stored up a lot of trouble for the future. That manifested itself in the debate about Europe after we had signed the Maastricht Treaty. The poison in that debate derived from the fall of Margaret. It was then that people started being bloody to - and about - each other."

Her departure left a gaping hole in Downing Street. John Major, one of the candidates to fill it, had latterly done nothing to please Mrs Thatcher. As well as hating the whole idea of the ERM, she distrusted his approach to the Maastricht negotiations: endorsing the idea of a single currency, but giving Britain an opt-out.

Nevertheless, to the astonishment of the other candidates for Number 10, Michael Heseltine and Douglas Hurd, she gave him her enthusiastic support. "I felt she got Major completely wrong," said Hurd. "She told me afterwards that she had only realised later that he was not 'one of us'. What John wanted was 'a country at ease with itself', and that was certainly not what Margaret was aiming for.

"I'd had long talks with John and I was amazed that she put such weight behind him, because I don't think he was at all Thatcherite in his attitude to society, Europe or the welfare state. I thought she'd at least sit on the fence, instead of which she really muscled in for him."

Nor was Hurd the only one to be surprised. "The problem," said Sir Malcolm Rifkind, who was then Scottish Secretary, "was that she had never taken the trouble to find out where John really stood. He was really quite damp on social policy. I remember sitting with them both in a Cabinet committee when she was going on about single mothers getting themselves pregnant just so they could climb higher up the council housing list. We looked at each other and he said: 'She's barking', or something like that."

Both Major's allies and his opponents thought she had been fooled by his performance at the Treasury. "She felt he was a person after her own heart," said Lord Parkinson, "but he appeared decisive as Chief Secretary only because the job is always to say 'No'. When he had jobs which involved more than just saying 'No', he found being decisive a lot more difficult."

At first, it seemed to her colleagues that she might have backed the right horse. For one thing, the new incumbent at Number 10 was altogether more congenial. "There was a huge sense of lightening of the spirit and touch when she left," recalled Lord Mayhew, then Attorney-General. "Everybody breathed a sigh of relief. What added to the sense of relief was great surprise that we were still in government after the 1992 election."

In April of that year, Major swept back into office with the largest popular vote in British electoral history. His majority was only 21, but more than 14 million people voted Conservative. Mayhew was not the only senior Tory who could not imagine why so many of the public had supported them.

There were, in fact, a number of fairly obvious reasons. For one thing, the voters had believed what one Central Office spokesman admitted was "our huge lie - vote Tory today and the economic recovery will begin tomorrow". It was, as a future member of Major's Cabinet said, "a cruel deception" - but it worked.

Within six months, Major had become the least popular prime minister since polling began: in November 1992, only 21 per cent of the electorate thought he was doing a good job. The first and decisive hammer blow to public confidence came with Black Wednesday in September, when Britain was forced to withdraw from the ERM.

Major may have been "absolutely fixated on staying in at any price", as he had made clear to Tim Yeo - then a junior minister, now a member of the shadow cabinet - only two months earlier but, in the event, it was simply not possible.

It was a massive humiliation. Ten years on, the Tories are still enduring the consequences. Interest rates shot up to 15 per cent. People could no longer afford their mortgages. Small businesses collapsed in their thousands. John Redwood, the MP for Wokingham, met a man who flourished a bunch of keys in his face and said he was going down to the bank to tell the manager: "Here, you run it, because I can't at these rates!"

Tim Yeo was horrified that nobody resigned as a result. "A strong leader," he said, "would have said to the Chancellor, Norman Lamont: 'Someone has to carry the can, so out you go for the moment'. In fact, Lamont dragged on in office for another seven months and, by that time, the damage had been done." To Dr Liam Fox, now the shadow health secretary, "it set the mood music which culminated in sleaze."

The second shattering blow that turned Major's government into little more than a collection of warring factions was the debate on the Maastricht Treaty. When he had come back flourishing his opt-out deal, first reactions had been favourable. Then, doubts began to set in.

As they looked more closely at the treaty's implications, the party's Euro-sceptics were left with the uncomfortable feeling that Britain's shirt-tails were irretrievably caught in the Euro-wringer, that we were being inexorably dragged into a federal state.

Discussion of the treaty went on for month after month. By the time it became law, in 1993, it had consumed 61 days of parliamentary debate and required no fewer than 70 parliamentary votes. "We spent endless time on Maastricht," recalled Liam Fox. "It was utterly energy-sapping and maximised the time when the government and the party were clearly at each other's throats. All Labour had to do was watch while we tore ourselves apart."

Maastricht was the issue that set the Tory Right on the warpath, and convinced them that they had been utterly wrong about John Major. "I'd been one of the group which backed him and helped to run his campaign against Heseltine," said Lord Tebbit, "but we soon found out how wrong we'd been. For a time, I saw him regularly. Then, we had a discussion about the approach to Maastricht and the single currency, and I said he should rule it out as an act of principle. I also said it would enormously strengthen his hand if he put the treaty to a referendum.

"He replied that it was a pragmatic matter. I told my wife: 'I'll never see that man again', and I haven't. He is genuinely courteous and polite, but he's not anything in particular. He has no basic principle, so he was always going to be at the mercy of events, and I don't think he had a European view. He could easily fit into Blair's Cabinet, though his egotism has never reached Blair's standard."

Lady Thatcher, too, feeling similarly betrayed, weighed into the debate in no uncertain terms. "I'm afraid she helped to create the poison which developed," said Lord Hurd. "She constantly criticised Major, and in a way that got around. You could say that the same thing happened after Ted Heath went, but he didn't try to organise a Jacobite movement - and Margaret was far more successful than him in her subversive activities."

Maastricht did, indeed, bring the government to the brink of defeat. Major and his Chief Whip, Richard Ryder, even went to the length of appointing Euro-sceptic whips to drive their colleagues into the approved lobbies, often against their better instincts. David Davis, the former Tory party chairman, was one of those whips and, irony of ironies, had the job of urging Iain Duncan Smith, then a recently elected MP, to vote for the treaty.

Davis professes to have no clear recollection of what happened - "I have a very convenient memory," he said with a smile - but Duncan Smith remembers it only too well. "Yes," he said, "David was the whip who dealt with me. He was very decent and straight. He told me that, if I chose to abstain or vote against the treaty, it would be a career-bending move. 'It'll affect your future,' he said. I replied: 'There's no point in a future if I don't have a country.' "

The strong-arm tactics that it had taken to produce a majority for Maastricht left deep resentments among a substantial group of Tory MPs. "It caused ill-feeling far beyond the rebels," said Liam Fox, "because there was a large Euro-sceptic element in the House that felt that it was being railroaded.

"In the Maastricht debate, they were torn between their scepticism and their sense of loyalty to the government. There were a lot of us who instinctively felt more than private support for the rebels, but reluctantly backed John Major. I was certainly one of them."

The result of all these conflicts was that the Major government became a shambles. According to members of his Cabinet, internal discipline disappeared, Cabinet meetings leaked within minutes, the Prime Minister lost all authority. "It ceased to be a government," said Patrick Mayhew, "and became a collection of people at war with each other."

Faction-fighting became a way of life. "The years from 1992 to 1997," said Lord Cranborne, then Leader of the Lords, "were like the dying days of the Venetian republic." By the end, the stench of decay was all-pervasive.

"During the Major years," recalled Damian Green, now shadow education spokesman, "I was in the Policy Unit in Number 10. The policy was to get through the week ahead. You could hardly frame long-term policies when you didn't know whether the government would still be there by the end of the month.

"The party simply forgot that the public were not merely watching but also thinking to themselves: 'If these guys hate each other, as they obviously do, why shouldn't we as well?' Observing the Conservative government and party from 1992 to 1997 was like seeing someone you love getting involved in a car crash that you can do nothing about. And it was a five-year crash."

By any measure, it was a disgraceful performance that brought its just reward in the 1997 election.

How far was the debacle due to Major's failings? His apologists argue that he was dealt a very bad hand. "In many ways," said Sir Brian Mawhinney, who became party chairman in 1995, "John was a very good prime minister. He had a sense of office and of history, but he came in on the back of the greatest trauma that the party had suffered for two generations - the forced removal of Thatcher, for which half the party did not forgive the other half."

Even Major's friends, however, concede that he had also dealt himself a bad hand by espousing, and then being forced to leave the ERM, a choice that - by itself - wrecked both his premiership and his party's long-term future. He then compounded the error by forcing through the Maastricht Treaty against the basic instincts of many in his party.

"His trouble," said William Hague, "was trying to push through Maastricht on that slim majority. No amount of being strong was going to remove that difficulty. The alternative would have been not to ratify it, but that was almost impossible because it was he who had negotiated it." In any case, a decision not to ratify Maastricht would also have split a party that was deeply - and honourably - divided on the great issue of Europe.

That said, the consensus among Major's former colleagues is that he was a weak and indecisive man. "If he had been firmer and clearer," said Tim Yeo, "he'd have greatly reduced the amount of trouble there was. Margaret knew what she was doing. He was not so sure what he wanted. He didn't have a clear strategy, concisely argued, consistently upheld. He was very nervous about what to do. He'd duck one way and then the other.

"His style positively encouraged intrigue. There was no vicious instinct in him, but decency alone is not a sufficient guarantor of success. On balance, a lot of our difficulties can be traced back to his premiership."

"He had the makings of a superb chancellor or foreign secretary," said Malcolm Rifkind, "but for reasons of personality, not ability, he was not best cut out to be Prime Minister. He was far too reasonable, civilised and pragmatic. You have to be a bit of a shit to do that job, and John wasn't enough of one.

"He was not so much indecisive as willing to listen to argument before a decision was reached. Margaret had started every discussion by saying what she thought and challenging everyone to disagree. John invited a discussion and then wouldn't say a word or express a view until everyone else had spoken. I think he took that too far. On a lot of issues, ministers don't necessarily have a strong view and it's useful to know what the PM wants."

"There were times," said Brian Mawhinney, "when John needed to say: 'I'm the Prime Minister and this is what is going to happen.' He was always trying to conciliate opposites, of which there were all too many. You can only conciliate up to a point. Beyond that, people will say you're weak. 'Should I do this or that?' he'd ask me. 'Do what you're more comfortable with,' I used to reply, 'you're the Prime Minister.' "

"People ought to be slightly frightened of the prime minister," agreed Rifkind, "to feel that it's rather like going to see the headmaster. He should be clearly primus inter pares, and John was not primus enough - a bit too much one of the lads, but that was his nature."

"I once went into the Cabinet room to see him with Virginia Bottomley," recalled Tim Yeo, "and he said: 'I woke up this morning and thought: I've got this terrible list of things to do before the summer recess' - and he'd written them all down. He seemed to me more like an old widow making up her shopping list than the Prime Minister."

Stories such as that reverberated through the government, said Mawhinney, and were the genesis of a perception that the Prime Minister was not quite up to the job.

Many of Major's colleagues also felt that he lacked any real confidence in himself - politically, socially and intellectually. "I'm very fond of John," said one of the men who organised Major's re-election campaign in 1995, "and he was, in fact, cleverer than most of his Cabinet, but that was obscured by this lack of self-confidence. I think that, if he'd been less of an inverted snob, he could have picked up the party in a way that he simply didn't do. He was liked but not really respected."

Some of Major's colleagues, indeed, had the sense that he was rather surprised to be in the job at all. "Do you remember the Peter Sellers film Being There?" said Tim Yeo. "In it, he played this character called Chauncey, who was a gardener but then gained a quite spurious reputation as an economic sage after being taken in by a very rich American couple. Eventually, to his own astonishment, he became the President's right-hand man. There was something of the same quality in John Major."

Often, at crucial moments, he displayed a characteristic mixture of consideration and indecision. "At the time when he put himself up for re-election in 1995," recalled Malcolm Rifkind, "it was obvious that there would be a reshuffle if he won. Two days before the ballot, I got a call to come and see him in his room in the House of Commons.

"At that time, I was Defence Secretary and knew that we'd need a new foreign secretary because Douglas Hurd was to retire. We chatted and John said: 'Assuming I win, I know what job you'd like to do, but I'd prefer you to become chairman of the party.' I said I didn't want that job and gave my reasons. I thought I'd persuaded him.

"Well, he was duly re-elected and asked me to go to Number 10 at 9.30 the following morning. Andrew Turnbull, his private secretary, was with him. He began by saying that he'd thought about our discussion and, notwithstanding what I felt, would still like me to be party chairman.

"My jaw dropped and I said I simply didn't think I was the right person. He said: 'I need a political fighter. Heseltine won't do it and I don't want to ask Michael Portillo.' He added that a foreign secretary wasn't going to win an election. 'No,' I replied, 'but he might lose one.' Then he said: 'Would you leave us for five minutes?'

"I went out, feeling a bit of a heel. The five minutes became 20 and I had no idea what was going on. Eventually, he called me back in, said he'd thought about it and concluded that I should be the new foreign secretary after all. He then spent five minutes apologising to me, when I should have been apologising to him for messing up his reshuffle. He was willing to keep an open mind in the middle of something like that. It was extremely civilised, but I wonder if I could have had that discussion with Mrs Thatcher."

Major, for reasons which are now obvious, showed the same hesitancy in deciding how to handle the issue of sleaze. "He understood the damage it was causing," said one of his colleagues, "and became more and more anxious about it. I told him he should sack the people involved. He was not willing to do that, but said that we must have a public inquiry.

" I told him we must at least get the right judge to chair it, and proposed someone who was a member of MCC, like John. 'No,' he replied, 'everybody would just say he's my friend' - which was typical Major. So Lord Nolan was appointed, of whom a friend of mine once said: 'He's never had a floozie in his life.' "

When Major put himself up for re-election in 1995, even some of the ministers who managed his campaign felt that, as one said, "it was a bloody silly thing to do, because it showed how weak he was". Major apparently did not expect anyone to put up against him, to the extent that he had not even appointed a campaign manager.

When one of his closer colleagues, Lord Cranborne, suddenly realised that the Prime Minister might not have thought of it, he rushed into Downing Street early in the morning, had Major woken, discovered that he was right - and was immediately offered the job himself.

The curious thing is that, as the patently divided government staggered on, a number of ministers remained ridiculously sanguine about the Tories' future prospects, as Brian Mawhinney discovered when he became chairman in 1995. "I was told by John to get the organisation into fighting form," he recalled, "but it was hard to persuade some of my colleagues to think politically rather than just enjoying themselves being secretaries of state. I met a mixture of divine right to rule and downright complacency."

Tim Yeo had concrete evidence of the fact that some of his colleagues were still far from realistic, even in the months before the 1997 election. "Before the campaign began," he recalled, "quite a few still fell into the complacent category. They perhaps thought it would be tough to win, but a number were far more optimistic than the facts justified.

"I know that, because I belong to a dining club called Third Term, which had been formed in 1984 and met on the third Monday of each month. The last time we met before the election, in March 1997, we all put into a sealed envelope the number of seats we thought we would win, together with a £10 note.

"The winner would be the one who got closest. I guessed 240 seats, and I'm ashamed to say I won. Several of the 14 members, including two Cabinet ministers and one junior minister, had put 345, and quite a lot were clustered around 300. In fact, of course, we only won 166."

By the week before the election, however, optimism had evaporated. "It was apparent to everyone that we were in for a devil of a hiding," said Patrick Mayhew. "Some of my colleagues were so tired that they looked upon it as a relief."

Very few, though, guessed just how great the hiding was going to be. William Hague, who had moved all his belongings out of the Welsh Office when the campaign began, thought the Tories might lose by between 80 and 90. He undershot the scale of the disaster by another 80 seats.

So John Major, like Margaret Thatcher before him, left Downing Street bitterly disappointed. "His great fear," said Brian Mawhinney, "had always been that he would go down in history as the man who split his party. He always told me that his first responsibility was to hold it together."

The plain fact is that Major had set himself a well-nigh impossible task, given that the Tory party was irreconcilably divided on Europe. Moreover, those who held passionate and differing views on that issue were not, as is sometimes suggested, behaving like fractious schoolchildren who ought to have known better; and they were certainly not bastards.

They were taking sides on the greatest issue in British post-war political history, because it involved the very independence of their nation and, in conscience, they could do no other.

John Major may have left Downing Street, as his friends say, "deeply wounded and feeling utterly betrayed by his party and the media", but he can console himself with the thought that - given the decisions he himself had taken - no politician alive could have squared that particular circle. The Currie affair, on the other hand, does pose the question of just who betrayed whom.

  • Part two tomorrow - can Iain Duncan Smith succeed where William Hague failed?

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