voting on going to war – and I would subsequently help to entrench that convention as prime minister – but I don’t start from the proposition that a prime minister asks for backing for a military conflict ‘lightly or inadvisedly’. Indeed, I believe that if the prime minister comes to Parliament and says effectively, ‘We are standing with our oldest allies, fighting a dictator who has brutalised his people, and we risk humiliation or worse if we falter,’ then I would try to be supportive.
Assuming that other MPs shared this rational patriotism, or naïvety – take your pick – was to let me down several years later, in the vote on bombing Syria when I was prime minister. I regret what happened subsequently, and we will never know how things might have been if matters had been handled differently. But I take the view that if you vote for something, you should take your share of responsibility for the consequences rather than try to find some formulation to show that you were conned or misled. Without Saddam, Iraq at least has a chance of a better future; although even today it is probably still too soon to say whether that chance will be taken.
It wouldn’t be fair to write off Iain’s entire period leading the party. He understood that the Conservative Party needed fundamental change. But he wasn’t capable of some of the basic requirements of leadership in British politics – building an effective team, performing at Prime Minister’s Questions, and delivering big speeches and media interviews.
For PMQs, George Osborne and I were drafted in, together with a bright young staffer, James Cartlidge (now the MP for South Suffolk). From time to time we were joined by Boris Johnson, whose appearances grew less frequent the more obvious it became that we were marooned in the polls and heading for defeat.
They were pretty desperate sessions. Blair was at the height of his powers, and Iain was leaden and dull. Boris asked me after one particularly depressing prep session, ‘Hey Dave, what’s the plan?’ He then grabbed me by the shoulders and said, ‘Presumably it’s like carrying an injured hooker in the scrum – we know he can’t play but we just’ – at this point he grunted and heaved me off the ground – ‘pick him up and carry him over the line.’
George and Boris saw the writing on the wall much more clearly than I did. I didn’t attend either of the IDS party conferences, as on both occasions I had to be at Ivan’s bedside at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington. Despite this, I did catch his second conference speech – the one where he declared that ‘the quiet man’ was ‘turning up the volume’. I watched it on an ancient hospital television, but even I could see that the multiple standing ovations were staged and looked ridiculous.
In the end, this right-winger with the potential to unite the party was overthrown by a combination of left and right after losing a fight he didn’t need to pick. A government Bill on adoption and children was amended to enable unmarried couples to adopt children, opening the door for gay couples to adopt. It had already passed the House of Commons, but the Lords had rejected the amendment and reinstated the original ‘married-only’ rule.
Iain tried to whip the party against supporting unmarried couples’ right to adopt. A small number of MPs rebelled completely and voted with the government. A larger number ignored the three-line whip – so-called because the whips underline the vote three times on the official notice, meaning that you must support the party line – and abstained. There were only three of us from the 2001 intake who did so: me, George and Boris.
Instead of ignoring the rebellion – as I frequently chose to do as party leader – Iain’s lieutenants called an emergency press conference, telling the party to ‘Unite or die.’ IDS’s personal authority was left mortally wounded, with more or less open discussion of plots to oust him. Only the Iraq War, which soon dominated the political discourse, diverted press and political attention from the travails of the Tory leadership.
But by October 2003 the party had had enough. A major donor announced on the radio that he and others were considering abandoning ship if IDS’s leadership continued. Given the party’s precarious financial situation, this new crisis stampeded the parliamentary party into action. Shortly afterwards a vote of confidence in Iain’s leadership was triggered as the chairman of the 1922 Committee received the sufficient number of letters from Conservative MPs.
The day of the vote was also the day of PMQs. For once Boris turned up at our weekly prep meeting, and there was lots of gallows humour, including from Iain, about potential leadership bids. Afterwards, I asked to stay behind for a private word. I pleaded with Iain to resign, and not face the indignity of losing a vote of confidence. George was probably right, though, when he said the deed simply needed to be done.
The arrival of Michael Howard as leader provided yet more lessons in leading, and in losing. Michael handled the technical aspects of the job well. After two years of IDS, there was a sense that the grown-ups and the professionals were back in charge. PMQs was a fight once again. Conferences were well organised. There was a newly effective media operation.
Overall the Michael Howard leadership gave us a fighting chance. The critique of Blair was sharpened: over-regulation was holding back the economy, and over-centralisation was holding back public services. And the government was ignoring vital issues such as crime and immigration, on which Michael Howard could demonstrate both passion and expertise. And yet. Once again it didn’t work.
Did I ever believe that we could win in 2005? While I thought we could take away Labour’s majority, I was never confident that we could win outright. We simply hadn’t won the right to be heard. Nor had we developed a clear enough description of what we needed to do.
Perhaps the biggest lesson of this whole period is something that is both hard to measure, and unfair. People make up their minds about the major party leaders pretty quickly. Iain couldn’t escape his image of being old-fashioned, a hanger and flogger, and not quite up to the job. And Michael never shook off the ‘something of the night about him’ attack by Ann Widdecombe.
My view increasingly came to be blunt: a large share of the voting public had simply written off the Tories after 1997. They weren’t going to listen to what they had come to believe was an arrogant bunch of politicians who they believed were more interested in looking after their own interests than anybody else’s. And even when people did listen to something we said, they would mark it down, irrespective of whether they agreed with it or not, simply because it was ‘the effing Tories’ that were saying it.
What followed from this was that government failure, even if on an epic scale, wouldn’t see us return to power. Simply put, as bad as Labour were, the electorate thought they were better than the alternative. We needed to prove that we had listened, learned and changed.
I am saying a lot about this period because it forms the backdrop to my later decision to stand for the leadership. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had, respectively, eleven and twenty-four years in Parliament before leading their party. I had just four.
I had, however, joined the front bench, though the jobs I held before 2005 were not particularly significant. The first rung on the ladder was becoming one of several deputy chairmen of the Conservative Party. Being appointed deputy shadow leader of the House of Commons was only marginally less meaningless. After all, in opposition you have virtually no control of the parliamentary timetable, so there is little enough for the shadow leader to do, let alone their deputy.
But the non-job did give me an opportunity. My boss Eric Forth decided to take a week off one Thursday, and handed the task of Business Questions over to me. I made a reasonable fist of it, with a few funny jokes and a half-decent attack on the government. The parliamentary sketchwriters gave me the thumbs up. These things get noticed.
But the most important lessons from this period came from spending time with a very bright group of relatively young Conservative colleagues, commentators and former staffers who wanted to understand why we kept losing, and what needed to change.
Andrew Cooper, who had become the founder of the market research company Populus, and Daniel Finkelstein, now a Times columnist, had joined the CRD shortly before the 1997 debacle. After the 2001 election they had teamed up with George to begin pressing the party to change.