thousands of successful new businesses.
While a CRD desk officer learns a great deal about specialised areas of policy, one of the advantages, and challenges, of working there is that before long you have to be an expert on everything the government is doing. And in the process you become professional. Indeed, the things I learned in those years are, I think, part of the answer to the charge that we have too many ‘professional politicians’ in British politics.
Yes, we need people in Parliament from all walks of life, and with many different life experiences. And the Conservative parliamentary party is far broader in its make-up today than it was ten or twenty years ago. And yes, I gained hugely from the seven years I spent in business, outside the political world. But while politics is a vocation, it is also a profession. There are tools and skills that you need to master. Not just the speech-making, press handling or campaigning, but how you get things done in a political system, how you make change happen.
In my case, it wasn’t long before I was briefing ministers for vital media appearances. It staggers me today to think of the access to senior cabinet ministers that I had when I was still in my twenties.
Most of the ‘big beasts’ lived up to their public images. Ken Clarke would spend most of the meeting telling you why the specific government policy you were pleading with him to defend was ‘absolutely bonkers’. He would challenge the entire concept of a government ‘line to take’, and say pretty much what he liked. Twenty years later, when I asked him to join the shadow cabinet, not much had changed.
Michael Portillo – something of a hero to many of us in the CRD, as an alumnus with an apparently glittering future ahead of him – was both ferociously bright and warmly encouraging, as he had done the same briefing job himself. He once told me his key to success on BBC radio’s Any Questions. Instead of being polite to your fellow guests at the dinner beforehand, and then fighting with them on the airwaves, do it the other way round. Be argumentative and objectionable in private, and then as soon as the microphones are switched on, be the voice of reason and consensus. Meanwhile, your fellow panellists are so steamed up and angry they come across on air as partisan and divisive.
I arrived at the CRD at the high-water mark of Thatcherism. The Conservative Party had won its third consecutive general election victory under her leadership, and she seemed to be at the height of her powers.
We viewed her with a mixture of admiration and terror. The first time I met her was at the CRD Christmas party, when she fixed me with a laser-like stare and asked what I did. After I had answered, she asked about the trade-deficit figures, which had come out that day. I hadn’t seen them. At that moment, instant death – or even a lingering painful one – would have been a merciful release.
At around this time Robin Harris, CRD’s staunchly Thatcherite director, told us that as there was so little effective opposition from Labour, we would have to provide it ourselves. He meant critique our own work, but it was a moment of supreme hubris. The party did provide opposition to itself, but not in quite the way Robin had envisaged. Within two years Margaret Thatcher was gone.
The history of this period has been written about extensively. An apparently cloudless sky in 1988 soon turned dark. It was the result of an overheated economy and the return of inflation, courtesy of shadowing the deutschmark, keeping interest rates too low for too long, and the encouragement of an unsustainable boom in house prices, partly through Nigel Lawson’s 1988 Budget.
Then followed rows over Europe, with Thatcher’s Bruges speech – which we in the CRD all applauded – the resignation of Lawson and the fateful decision to join the Exchange Rate Mechanism.
Then the dénouement. The resignation of Geoffrey Howe and the fall of Thatcher. In the middle of all this, there was the Poll Tax. And believe me, I was right in the middle of it all. Europe was the occasion of the Lady’s fall, but the Poll Tax was the reason she couldn’t get up again.
So many of the team that worked together at the CRD all those years ago ended up, twenty years later, in prominent positions in my government, including Ed Llewellyn, Kate Fall, Steve Hilton, Ed Vaizey and Jonathan Caine. All of us worked for Thatcher and then John Major. The late 1980s and early 1990s shaped us and our thinking. First we were labelled ‘the brat pack’, because of our age. Later ‘the Notting Hill set’, even though most of us didn’t live there. Inasmuch as there was a clique – and I would argue that every successful politician needs a team – it was a CRD clique.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 confirmed us in the view that, with our beliefs in democratic politics and market economics, we were on the right side of history. The fall of Thatcher showed us that even the most successful authors of that history were mortal. It was an early experience of profound political trauma. She was the reason most of us were there in the first place.
My own view of her and the situation was nuanced. I was a supporter, but I did feel that ‘late Thatcher’ began to believe her own propaganda and somewhat lost touch with reality. I was a tremendous admirer of Nigel Lawson, and wanted those two titans to get over their differences.
Most supporters of Thatcher couldn’t abide Michael Heseltine. Again, I took a different view. I didn’t agree with his views on Europe, but I admired the muscular action he took to back British industry and to transform Liverpool and the inner cities. I liked the One Nation approach on poverty. And frankly, it looked as if he was being proved right on local government and the hated Poll Tax. If we were going to lose the Great One, wouldn’t it be better if her replacement was someone with a plan, with passion and with election-winning charisma?
When I became prime minister twenty years later, few people were more helpful to me than Michael Heseltine. He backed the coalition. He gave strength to our regional policy, particularly through his unstinting support for elected mayors and the real devolution to our cities of both money and powers. He rolled up his sleeves, occupied an office in the Business Department, and, in his inimitable way, he got things done.
But back then, when Mrs Thatcher was on the brink, I felt that one of the reasons he didn’t make it was a peculiar lack of charm. Not that he doesn’t have any – he certainly does – but that he didn’t always take the trouble to show it.
When the leadership challenge began, we at party headquarters were all supposed to be neutral. This order was not taken very seriously: most were passionate supporters of Mrs T. But by the end, while I was still loyal, I was unenthusiastic. I could see that her position was becoming untenable. When the new leadership campaign began after her fall, I was content to stay out of it altogether. What mattered, I thought a little piously, was continuing to implement Conservative ideas.
Despite my view that the end would come, when it did, the fall of Mrs Thatcher was still a political tragedy, one that affected all of us. More profound than personal feelings was the political impact: the leader of our country had been treated in a shabby and disloyal way by the very people she had helped to get elected in the first place. The resentments and divisions that this act of regicide created would affect Conservative politics for the next two decades. In fact, they still resonate.
Some of the lessons we learned from her fall were obvious: the importance of loyalty and teamwork; that leaders – particularly in our party – can never take their positions for granted. But there was something more subtle. We revered the reality of Thatcher, not the mythology.
The reality was a brilliantly effective prime minister who changed her country for the better, but who lost touch towards the end and was, in part, the author of her own downfall.
The mythology that grew and grew, particularly after her fall, was that she alone was ideologically pure; that she was always right and everyone else wrong; that she never compromised or backed down; and that she only ever did what was right, and never calculated what was politically deliverable.
This, of course, was nonsense. She backed down over many issues, like university tuition fees. She knew when to back off, as when giving in to the miners’ demands in the early 1980s. She was a master of political calculation.
The