The Tories surprised even themselves at the local elections. Yet if the party is still breathing, a question hangs over its future: will William Hague be the next victim claimed by the nuclear fallout of Peter Lilley’s now infamous speech? And how exactly did that near-disaster come about?
It was the triumph of the focus group that led Hague to the brink. For some time, Andrew Cooper, Hague’s rotund strategy chief, had been concerned by the baleful consistency of swing voters’ comments on the Conservatives and public services. On trip after trip to Windsor, Basildon and other bastions of Middle England, he heard fears that the Tories wanted to privatise schools and hospitals. The party’s reputation on public services was even worse than the inner team had thought. “We knew that people had absorbed the Labour message that we were not to be trusted on health,” says one source. “But the results on education, where we began the drive for higher standards in the state sector, were no better.”
Hague was planning a sustained attack on the government for its ineffectiveness in raising school performance, its failure to bring down waiting lists in the NHS and its inability to tackle welfare dependency. But, the reasoning went, if people were disinclined to hear anything the Tories had to say on these issues, the attacks would go unheeded. Danny Finkelstein, the head of Hague’s policy unit, ventured that there was no way forward for the party until it had established that it did not favour “slash and burn” of the public services in favour of the ideological nirvana of privatisation. Rick Nye, the sharp-witted new head of research, added that the Tories were regarded as out of step with the times. People respected Margaret Thatcher’s achievements, but her Conservatism needed updating.
Cooper persuaded Hague to adopt the lumpen slogan “Kitchen-Table Conservatism” (actually adapted from an American Democrat slogan) to signpost a fresh approach. It was agreed that a whole new basis of conversation was necessary if the party was to reconnect with the voters. Peter Lilley, as head of the party’s policy review, offered to broach the subject of the Tories and public services in a Carlton Club speech on 20 April, with the intention of establishing a new bottom-line: that the Tories were committed to a basically tax-funded health and education system. “There was not the slightest idea of doing anything really hot,” says a source. “But the speech was pressure-cooked and it went off with a bang.”
The main source of pressure was Lilley himself. An early Thatcherite and able minister of robust pro-market and Eurosceptic views under John Major, he has felt the loss of power acutely. Other ousted ministers miss the cars and the party invitations; Lilley misses the hard work of ministerial life. He has always fared best within the infrastructure of government. The isolation of opposition depresses him.
Lilley is also more ambitious than his mousy exterior suggests. He really does want to lead his party – hence those odd attempts to develop a populist side, notably the excruciating party conference ditties about single mums jumping housing lists. He suffered a big setback when his pre-election announcement of the “basic pensions plus” proposals were exploited by Labour as a scare tactic. His leadership bid fizzled out and he failed to shine in the first two years of opposition. Here is a politician who knows that he has ground to make up. The speech offered the chance to combine a strategic aim with a higher profile for himself. “Peter was going for broke on this one,” says a sympathetic shadow cabinet colleague. “The trouble is that none of us realised it in time to stop him.”
On Thursday 15 April draft copies of the speech were released to the three shadow ministers whose briefs were affected by the content – David Willetts (education), Ann Widdecombe (health) and Iain Duncan Smith (social security). Willetts was supportive at the time, though the absence of his defence of Lilley was conspicuous in the ensuing row.
Widdecombe first raised the alarm on 16 April. She told Lilley that the sections dealing with health undermined the work she had begun in a barnstorming conference performance last year, on the need to pull down the “Berlin wall” between the public and private sectors. His speech, she said, would be read as announcing that the Tories intended to put it up again.
Duncan Smith did not read his copy until the weekend. The forthright standard-bearer of Thatcherism was horrified. He phoned Lilley and warned him that the speech would be seen as an attempt to bury Thatcher’s legacy in the week that she was marking her 20th anniversary of coming to power. Lilley agreed to redraft some sections, but not to change the thrust.
The finished draft was passed to Hague’s office. Whether Hague read it, or who cleared it in his absence, is now subject to deliberate obscurity. “We had no reason to give it special attention,” an official said. “Peter is considered to be the safest pair of hands in the shadow cabinet – er, I mean he was considered like that.” So who was really to blame for the omission? “The real problem,” the official admits, “is that nobody was.” Lilley himself usually vets shadow cabinet speeches. Nobody, it seems, was in place to vet the vetter.
At the briefing for Sunday paper lobby correspondents, the speech was heavily spun. By Monday, it was being sold even harder as “the Tories’ Clause Four”. Again, no culprit can be found for authorising such a description. “I don’t know and I don’t want to know who invented that one,” says a source close to Hague, with a shudder. We do know that Lilley was determined that the speech should be pushed hard in the Monday papers. All hell was promptly let loose. Besides the right-wingers, senior party moderates such as Robert Jackson and Nicholas Soames said that “raining on Thatcher’s parade” was a mistake. The atmosphere at the Tuesday evening dinner in her honour was charged. When Hague rose to make a speech – a late insertion into the evening – and attempted to clarify Lilley’s statement, she looked, a fellow guest said, as if she had swallowed a particularly unpleasant insect.
The media handling of the speech opened up a second battle front. When it was revealed that the early draft had been leaked to Tim Hames, a Times writer, the party chairman, Michael Ancram, ordered an audit of outgoing e-mails for the previous week. Michael Simmonds, head of marketing and membership and a staunch Thatcherite, who is also Hames’s brother-in-law, was subsequently fired.
Critics on the right fixed on the idea that a former SDP clique had led the party astray. Finkelstein, Nye and Cooper share not only a youthful SDP background, but a past at the Social Market Foundation. Hague, on the other hand, believes that the different angle they provide is indispensable. To one frontbencher who criticised them, he replied: “They see the Tory party as others see it, not the way we would like to think we’re seen.”
There is some justification in the criticism that the best Tory brains were slow to catch on to the rise of new Labour. For too long they trusted to the belief that the public would soon “see through” Tony Blair. Political Freudians might speculate that the bright young men who forsook the centre left for the Tories in the 1980s feel a particular discomfort when they find, in the prime of their careers, that a popular, moderate left was not such a vain hope after all.
Alan Duncan’s criticisms of his old friend William’s leadership in the New Statesman last week were the final indignity. In the language of Grant Mitchell, Hague duly promised to “sort him out”. But Duncan’s frustration is widely shared in the ranks. This party is far from sorted – that is the main charge against its leader. Allowing a new theme to be introduced in the run-up to elections was a serious miscalculation. A reasonable showing in the local elections is now likely to be offset by turbulent Euro elections next month, with the right wing threatening to exact an even tougher line on the single currency as the price of its continued support.
A reshuffle is intended to relieve the wan faces of the front bench and introduce a fresher team to take the party towards the general election. Lilley is unlikely to emerge with responsibility for policy or overall direction. He may be moved altogether from the deputy leadership to the uncontroversial post of shadow Leader of the House. Francis Maude is a possible beneficiary. If there is any comfort from the tale, it is that the Tories will no longer be viewed as a party secretly united in their privatising zeal. But then, they do not appear united about anything. After two years of trying to rebuild a common Conservative identity, Hague remains unable to bridge the wings of his party.
Any suggestion of a tack in one direction of party opinion goads the other into a destructive response. Hague hasn’t managed to rise above the ideological fray. A similar problem consigned John Major to the electoral graveyard. Unless his successor can show that he is able to lead the whole disputatious army, he will wander inexorably into the same oblivion.
The writer is associate editor of the “Independent”
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