in opposition and its recovery. Cooper recommended that Hague do the following: ‘a high profile expulsion by the [party’s] ethics and integrity committee ([which says] we will not tolerate sleaze); an impatient confrontation with the Carlton Club (we are inclusive); a speech saying that we deserved to lose the general election (we are not arrogant and we are listening); a clear position on reform of the House of Lords (we have changed)’.
When Cooper presented the paper to Hague, Chief Whip James Arbuthnot and a number of other close aides in November 1998, the leader lapped it up: ‘I agree with almost every word of it.’ ‘I wish I had asked him which words he disagreed with,’ Cooper now says. He was surprised at how little discussion there was. ‘Unless anyone objects, this will be our strategy,’ Hague instructed. A few days later, Cooper made another presentation to Hague and the full Shadow Cabinet. ‘From now on I want you all to be clear that I shall promote and reward exclusively on how closely you stick to this strategy,’ Hague declared. After this, no one was willing to express outright opposition to the paper, and in the discussion that followed everyone tried to find something in the paper that they could be positive about. But it was clear to Cooper that they were unconvinced. Sure enough, many of Hague’s colleagues ignored the new strategy in speeches, parliamentary questions and media appearances. Hague instructed Cooper to have one-to-one meetings with the Shadow Cabinet to find out what their reservations were. Only one, Gary Streeter, the Shadow International Development Secretary, appeared to understand what was expected: ‘So what you’re saying is that we need to do everything differently?’ ‘Yes, exactly,’ Cooper replied.33
Hague encouraged groups of backbench MPs to go to Cooper’s presentations at Central Office. They left unimpressed. Many blamed the election defeat on John Major for being ‘weak and useless’ or ‘not right-wing enough’, or felt that Tony Blair had ‘pulled the wool over people’s eyes, nicked our policies and millions had stayed at home rather than vote for us’. Disappointed with the complacency of Conservative MPs, in January 1998 Cooper wrote a follow-up paper entitled ‘Conceding and Moving On’, a phrase taken straight out of The Unfinished Revolution. New Labour had understood that the Conservatives had won the argument on some issues, particularly the Thatcherite settlement of the economy and the demise of trade union power, and so had to ‘concede and move on’. Only by ‘letting go’ could Labour really change. This argument touched a very raw nerve. While many backbenchers dismissed Major’s leadership, frontbenchers who had served in his government were not prepared to have its record traduced. ‘We should have taken a strong line: we had left with a golden economic legacy and said that nobody can manage the economy better than we can. That should have been our robust approach,’ argues Ann Widdecombe, one of the most colourful former ministers from the Major years. ‘We disowned the past, and it was the single biggest mistake we made – we began making it with William Hague and have been making it ever since. We went crawling around saying, “Oh no, we’re terribly sorry, we really are going to change,” and the question was, to what and from what, and nobody really had an answer.’34
It was a view that resonated with the rank and file, who detested the thought of ‘doing a Blair’ to their party. In 1997 Hague had begun to make amends with the electorate by apologising on behalf of the Conservatives for taking the country into the ERM, leading to the débâcle of Black Wednesday. However, the party’s own research showed that most voters did not think the Tories had apologised at all. The irony was that the most vociferous defenders of the Major government happened to be those who had been most critical of the Prime Minister at the time. ‘No matter how often you replay the video of the last election, we always get wiped out,’ was Finkelstein’s riposte to an argument that showed that many senior Tories simply refused to have an honest debate about how their party had lost, and what its purpose was in the modern world. This was no longer a world torn by the divisions of the Cold War: the bogeymen of the left were now few and far between, but many on the right had failed to notice.
By the spring of 1999, the ‘Kitchen Table’ strategy had been reduced to Shadow Cabinet discussions about appearance. ‘We had great debates about whether we should wear suits and ties or open collar shirts on TV,’ recalls one shadow minister. ‘There was not really any profound discussion about the real issue which was the character and perception of the party,’ says Oliver Letwin, who had been elected as a new MP in 1997. ‘I remember feeling utterly alone. It wasn’t a discussion that anybody was having. Colleagues weren’t talking about it, nor were the think tanks. We talked about other things, like Europe and tax, but not that.’35 Emotionally, many MPs had been so stunned by the 1997 defeat that they were unable to ‘let go’ and understand what the country really thought of them.
Responsibility for the demise of the ‘Kitchen Table’ strategy lay with Hague himself. As leader, he failed to convince his senior team of its merits, despite his enthusiastic endorsement. Neither did he lead by example. ‘It still puzzles me that he never followed it,’ says Cooper. ‘I frequently found myself challenging him on things he did and said, pointing out that they did not accord to the strategy. He had been elected leader on a reforming ticket, but he is not by nature and temperamentally a modernising person; he’s traditional in most of his instincts and attitudes – he loves the rough and tumble of politics. It was almost like he wanted someone to give him an off-the-shelf way of doing it.’36 Hague himself confessed to not being fully convinced by Cooper’s strategy: ‘It was thoughtful and correct, but it was an incomplete analysis. It was more a public relations strategy, as it didn’t really tell us what to do – it was more of a diagnosis than a prognosis. I didn’t find anything in the “Kitchen Table” stuff that was going to give us success then – maybe it would ten years later, but there was no guarantee we would be around in ten years’ time.’37
In fact, Cooper’s strategy was more operational than Hague suggests, and included a set of guidelines for Hague and his shadow team to follow. He advised them to start ‘talking about the future, not the past’, ‘using the language of people, not politicians’ and ‘being for things and people, not just against them’. These suggestions may not necessarily have been a panacea, but at least they offered an avenue that Hague could have pursued.
Ultimately, Hague was not confident enough to lead a thorough rethink of the party’s position. Almost two years into the job, his leadership was not secure. In December 1998 he had suffered the humiliation of the Tory leader in the House of Lords, Lord Cranborne, brokering a deal with Tony Blair to save ninety-two hereditary peers whose seats in the House of Lords were threatened by proposed constitutional reforms. Hague was opposed to the government’s plans to remove the right of all of the 750 hereditary peers to sit in the Lords until the party formed its policy towards reforming the Upper House. Cranborne’s secret deal with the government left Hague no choice but to sack him, but the episode gave the impression that he was not in control of his party.
Hague was also painfully aware that the party’s average poll ratings showed no sign of improvement, stubbornly hovering below 30 per cent. The traditional Conservative-supporting newspapers cried out for vigorous opposition to the Labour government, but Blair was enjoying a prolonged honeymoon as the economy continued to grow. Feeling the pressure, Hague urged the Shadow Cabinet to be more combative. ‘We were providing a running commentary, saying no to everything, so that people could remember how negative and rude we’d been about Labour at the end of each week, but had no better idea about how a Conservative government would make the world a better place,’ laments Willetts.38 ‘William’s big problem was that he was not strategic – he was flying by the seat of his pants all the time,’ says another frontbencher. The central question about how the party tackled its past would soon erupt into a full-blown row that threatened Hague’s increasingly precarious position.
Lilley’s Taboo and Hague’s Wobble
With Hague and his Shadow Cabinet unconvinced