my joy at being a Member of Parliament was tempered by the hopelessness of our situation as a party. 1997 was the year of the Tory wipeout, and in 2001 we added precisely one to our historic low of 165 MPs. The Conservative parliamentary party looked very white, very rural, very male, and frankly rather irrelevant. Of the thirty-four new Tory MPs who had made it to Westminster, only one was a woman.
And during that Parliament a whole series of things happened that brought home to me just how wretched our situation was, and how simply waiting for something to happen was a useless strategy.
William Hague’s resignation as leader after the 2001 election was sad, but not surprising. He had done his best in almost impossible circumstances. Throughout his leadership the Conservative Party had been divided and fractious, and was still trying, though often failing, to come to terms with defeat. Blair was always likely to be given a second chance by the electorate. But through the force of his performances, both inside and outside Parliament, William had kept the party together and the show on the road.
Because he changed tack partway through the Parliament, backing off from modernisation and returning to more traditional Tory themes such as law and order and Europe, it is easy to represent his leadership as a false start for the modernisation of the party and its policies. I don’t think that’s fair.
Timing is everything in politics. William did not have the support in the party for modernisation, and given that Blair was then at his peak, even a changed Conservative Party couldn’t expect much reward from the electorate. Pressing on might have sacrificed core support without attracting new voters.
In any event, I can’t claim any particular foresight: I backed him strongly in both phases. And the pressure on him was spectacular. William said to me some years later, when I was trying – successfully – to tempt him back into front-line politics, that the experience of leading the party after 1997 had nearly broken him.
In the leadership election of 2001 I was a committed supporter of Michael Portillo. I had seen how good he was in office, and the unexpected loss of his seat in 1997 had clearly made him think deeply about what needed to change. Re-elected to Parliament in a by-election in 1999, it seemed that he had a clear plan for change, and for a more liberal party with greater urban support. However, he had so fallen out of love with his own party that he couldn’t really contemplate the hard work and compromises needed to reform it. Also, with his hard-man-of-the-right past, he struggled to convince all those who supported the modernising agenda.
And so we were left with Ken Clarke versus Iain Duncan Smith. It was a hopeless situation. One couldn’t unite the party; the other couldn’t win over the country.
I made what I thought was a rational choice, which was to support ‘IDS’, because I thought that if Ken won, the subsequent inevitable party split over Europe would be so bad as to make us both a laughing stock and wide open to a revolt from our right. Samantha said I was mad, and voted for Ken. Frankly, I was pretty happy that we cancelled each other out.
My only memory of the entire leadership campaign was of an event I organised in Witney for party supporters to hear John Bercow speaking for IDS and George Young speaking for Ken. Samantha asked Bercow whether he supported his candidate’s views that abortion should be restricted and the death penalty restored. It was one of the many moments in our married life when I realised that she had seen the big picture rather quicker and clearer than I had. IDS was always going to be seen as an outdated old clunker.
But two days before he won the leadership contest on 13 September 2001, the world changed.
When the first plane struck the World Trade Center I was at home in Dean doing constituency work. Samantha was in New York starting the process of setting up a new Smythson store in Manhattan. For about four hours I was unable to get in touch with her because the telephone lines were down. I sat with the TV remote control in one hand and my mobile phone in the other, watching in shock and pressing redial over and over again. By the time I got through to her that evening I was staring out of the window on the train to London. Relief.
People now tend to jump straight from 9/11 to the war in Iraq, but that is unfair. Tony Blair’s initial response to what had happened that day in New York was masterful. He moved fast, and set the agenda both at home and abroad. He correctly identified the problem of Islamist extremism, the inadequacy of our response both domestically and internationally, and supported – quite rightly in my view – the action to remove the Taliban regime from Afghanistan. Once it was clear that they would not stop al-Qaeda using the country as a safe haven, there was no realistic alternative.
Along with other relevant select committee members, I went to No. 10 for a briefing in late 2001. It was the first time I had been through the famous black door in years, and Blair impressed me then and in the many debates and statements that followed. Even as a relatively tribal Conservative, I felt strongly that at this moment Britain had the right prime minister. I even stopped Blair behind the speaker’s chair after one statement in the Commons to say that in his clarity about the threat we faced, he was speaking for the whole country.
But what of Iraq? While anyone with an ounce of reason could see that the regime in Afghanistan was a legitimate target, it was impossible to be quite as certain when it came to Iraq. As I showed in the anguished Guardian columns I wrote at the time – I had a regular spot in the paper’s online comment pages – I was a sceptic about the move to war.
Saddam Hussein’s regime was brutal. He was in breach of countless resolutions passed by the UN, an organisation for which he showed only contempt. His people would unquestionably be better off without him. There was a risk that, left in place, he might start to work more closely with the extremist groups that threatened us. And, after all, he had employed ‘weapons of mass destruction’ against his own people when he used poison gas on the Kurds.
I bought all of these arguments, and still do, but as I put it at the time: ‘We are being asked to swap deterrence with something new called pre-emptive war. I cannot be certain but I suspect that many of us will not support pre-emptive war unless Blair can produce either compelling evidence of the direct threat to the UK or a UN resolution giving it specific backing.’
As the evidence to satisfy the first condition was pretty unconvincing even at the time, and as Blair clearly failed on the second condition, why did a sceptic like me vote for military action?
The convenient answer would be to say I was ‘duped’ by the various dossiers and the claims about Britain being ‘forty-five minutes from doom’. But that’s not really the case. They only formed a small part of the reasons I gave publicly and to my many highly sceptical constituents.
I wrote at the time about the consequences of backing away. It would undermine the UK–US alliance. Saddam would win an invaluable propaganda victory. We would jeopardise any chance of a proper, multilateral approach. And, of course, while there was no ‘second resolution’ specifically mandating force, there were over a dozen resolutions dealing with Iraq, and the UN would look powerless if they weren’t enforced.
Sitting in the Commons, it was also clear that a vote against military action wouldn’t stop the war, it would just make it less of an international coalition. The Bush administration was going to have this war, the question was whether we would be involved.
And I listened to my closest colleagues and friends. Some, like George Osborne, who was a fairly enthusiastic ‘neo-con’, had no doubts. Others, like Oliver Letwin, who were wavering sceptics like me, decided on the balance of evidence to vote with Blair.
Samantha was totally opposed, and told me to stick with my initial scepticism. But this was a time in our marriage when we talked about politics very little.
Our first-born son Ivan was a year old, desperately ill and in hospital almost as much as he was at home. I would often leave his bedside in the morning after a night sleeping beside him, handing over to Samantha before heading off to the Commons for the next Iraq debate or statement. Less parenting by relay, and more time together, and she might have persuaded me.
But to be truthful, there was something else.