I wasn’t the master tactician who could best plan the strategic thinking and the tactical moves that would help take the Conservative Party back to power. In those regards, I don’t think George Osborne has an equal.
If a master strategist had sat down in 1997 to draw up the ideal sort of person to lead the Conservatives back to power, they would hardly have come up with a privileged Old Etonian who had worked for Norman Lamont when Britain was ejected from the ERM, and whose only experience outside politics was to work briefly for a London-based media conglomerate.
Good timing and good luck would combine to give me a chance after three heavy defeats. My principal opponent would change from the apparently unbeatable Tony Blair to the eminently beatable Gordon Brown. The long period of economic growth that started in 1992 would come to a juddering halt in 2008.
Added to that, I had Samantha, who humanised and rounded me. I had a constituency in Witney – both safe and close to London – that was an excellent springboard. And I had friends and supporters who were ready and able to back me. I learned a lot at Carlton about business, about management, and about people. And it may have been easier, out of Parliament, to see the big political picture.
Opinions differ about how effective Tony Blair’s team was at driving through change between 1997 and 2001. However, as a political machine it was without equal. And the truth was that Tony Blair was the post-Thatcher leader the British people wanted. He combined pro-enterprise economics with a more compassionate approach to social policy and public services. He understood that in many ways Britain is a small ‘c’ conservative country. In opposition, and in government, he rarely gave his Conservative opponents room to breathe. He talked tough on crime, looked strong on defence, seemed concerned about school discipline, even posed as passionate about business.
At a supposedly ‘off the record’ dinner with journalists in October 2005 I said that just as Tony Blair had understood that he needed to be the ‘heir to Thatcher’, so we needed to understand the need to be ‘heirs to Blair’. By this I didn’t mean that we should imitate all of his political methods or adopt all of his policies and political positions. After all, that wasn’t what Blair had done in relation to being the ‘heir’ to Thatcher. He had tossed aside many of her policies, and introduced some profound changes of his own. Out went subsidised private education for bright children from low-income homes, and tax relief for private healthcare. And in came devolution for Scotland and Wales, independence for the Bank of England, and the minimum wage.
But alongside that, he had carefully analysed and understood what had changed in the country since 1979, and therefore which elements of Thatcherism should be maintained and built on. He kept the trade-union reforms, the privatised industries, the low rates of income tax, the commitment to NATO, a largely pro-American foreign policy and a strong defence. These were natural Conservative policies, and by adopting them, Blair locked us out of Downing Street.
What were the equivalent moves for us? This was the question that Conservative Party ‘modernisers’ kept asking. Getting the answer right was an essential step in returning to power. And returning to power was what we needed to do. Despite his prowess at politics, and those reforms that had benefited Britain, Blair was, overall, taking the country in the wrong direction. It was more than just his policies – the unsustainable welfare system, the dumbing down of education standards, the neglect of some key overseas alliances, the increases in taxes, the overburdening of public finances and the failure to plan for the long-term future of everything from defence to the NHS. It was also about the culture those policies created. Something for nothing. Equality of outcome, not opportunity. Short-termism. I was absolutely not the heir to Blair in any policy or philosophical sense, and I was desperate to clear his government out.
But before I could do that I needed to find a safe parliamentary constituency. By the middle of 2000 I was heading towards the final selection rounds in Epsom, East Devon and Shaun Woodward’s seat of Witney. It was Witney that I really wanted.
I knew Shaun from working with him at Conservative Central Office during the 1992 general election. I was well aware that he was wildly ambitious for high office, but I was just as surprised as everybody else when he chose to jump ship and join the Labour Party in December 1999. Surprise soon gave way to excitement: West Oxfordshire was an area I knew quite well, and the constituency would now need a new Conservative candidate for the next election. The town itself was just thirty miles north of where I was brought up, and West Oxfordshire was very similar to West Berkshire – a combination of market towns, attractive villages, rural enterprises, growing businesses and many talented people who commuted either to the university city of Oxford or to London.
The constituency party had concluded, unsurprisingly, that they’d made a dreadful mistake in selecting Shaun Woodward, who had turned out not to be the genuine article. So in an attempt to avoid making the same sort of mistake again, they employed an interesting ruse for the first round of interviews. The mayor of Carterton – the second town of West Oxfordshire after Witney – was a West Indian called Joe Walcott. He had come over from Jamaica during the war to serve in the RAF at Brize Norton, and had stayed on to become a prominent local figure and a passionate Conservative. As the prospective candidates arrived one by one to be interviewed at a pretty manor house in the village of Bampton, they found Joe standing on his own in the garden. Those who ignored him, or assumed he was a gardener or driver, were immediately struck off the list. Fortunately I gave him a warm handshake, and we would remain good friends until he died in November 2018.
Although I was competing against the former MP and highly effective minister Andrew Mitchell, and a talented young businesswoman called Sharon Buckle, I think my passion for the place shone through, and I was selected.
Within weeks I had new friends, a new home and the makings of a strong political base. Peter Gummer, Lord Chadlington, who I knew a little from when we had both worked for John Major, became something of a mentor, renting me a cottage in Dean, near Chipping Norton, the village where we have lived ever since. Together with Christopher Shale, who also became a firm friend and adviser, Peter helped me to rebuild the local Conservative association and its finances.
And I inherited from Shaun Woodward one of the best constituency agents in the country, Barry Norton, who was also the leader of the local district council. Witney born and bred, Barry is a workaholic with a thick Oxfordshire accent, and seemed to know about absolutely everything that happened anywhere in the 250 square miles of the Witney constituency.
While it is hard to characterise a whole local party, the West Oxfordshire Conservative Association, or WOCA as I came to know it, was, rather like its last two MPs, Shaun Woodward and Douglas Hurd, at the liberal, open-minded end of the party.
The general election, which took place in June 2001, was a fairly gentle affair. I spent the campaign travelling from village to village, having lunch in any number of extremely good West Oxfordshire pubs. It was a fun month, and at the end of it I had a majority of over 7,900. I was in.
In the run-up to the election, and for some time afterwards, when people asked me about my ambitions I would say that I wanted to be a Member of Parliament because I believed it was an incredibly satisfying and worthwhile job. Serving the area, standing up for local people, getting things done, while taking part in debates about some of the big questions facing our country: that was what it was all about. Everything else beyond being a backbench MP – and I always hoped there would be more – would be a bonus.
There was soon the added stimulation and interest of sitting on the Home Affairs Select Committee. I was keen to take risks, and I fully supported the proposal that we look in depth at the issue of illegal drugs. I was later to disavow some of the most contentious conclusions we came to – downgrading ecstasy from class A to class B, for instance. It was, and remains, odd that ecstasy is in the same class as, for example, heroin. But I came to believe that the danger of signalling that certain drugs were more acceptable, or less dangerous, outweighed any benefit from being more scientifically accurate. But there is no doubt this report shifted the dial in terms of moving drugs policy away from criminalisation and towards treatment and education. This was something I would continue to promote as prime minister.