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 IDS was always going to be seen as an outdated old clunker.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. I believed that the prime minister was entitled to something approaching the benefit of the doubt. I was all for Parliament 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.