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. In a series of papers, articles and polls they argued that the Tory Party would not win again unless it understood why people had turned away from it. I joined in with this group, and together with others like Michael Gove, Ed Vaizey and Nicholas Boles we began to meet, usually at Policy Exchange, the new modernising Conservative think-tank, and talk over pizzas and beer.
As a genuine, moderate and liberally minded One Nation Conservative, I was an enthusiast for change. At the time I wrote that there were three essential components for a successful modern conservatism: ‘First, we need to reclaim the full set of values that makes conservatism whole. I joined up because the Conservative Party combined a message about aspiration – that everyone should be free to do what they could and be what they could – with compassion for the weak, the vulnerable and those left behind. Second, we must look outwards and forwards, not inwards and backwards. Parties should exist to identify and address the modern challenges that our country faces. Finally … conservatism is nothing if it is not practical. We need a relentless focus on the things that people care about in their daily lives: the public services they use, the taxes they pay and their hopes and fears about the future.’
In other words, pretty much everything needed to change. Instead of tax cuts, crime and Europe, we needed to shift our focus onto the issues the Conservative Party had ignored: health, education, and tackling entrenched poverty. It simply wasn’t acceptable to have so few women MPs, so little representation from ethnic minorities, and such a poor geographical spread of Conservative seats. As I came to believe passionately, words alone do not work; you need positive action. It’s no good simply telling talented British Asians or young businesswomen just how meritocratic you are when the first meeting they attend is a sea of white male faces.
And the Conservative Party had to stop putting people off with curtain-twitching moralising. Yes, there were genuine arguments about family breakdown and behaviour that needed to be made, but we were in no position to make them. We had to earn the right to be heard on these and other subjects.
Added to this, we all agreed that it was time for the Conservative Party to make a decisive step in favour of equal treatment for gay people. In 2003, Labour had repealed the law that banned councils from ‘intentionally promoting homosexuality’. It was known as ‘Section 28’, after the clause in which it appeared in the Local Government Act 1988, passed by the Conservatives.
For me at the time, the reason this legislation had been passed was that councils were overstepping their role. What business had a local council promoting sexuality in any form? But by arguing this I was ignoring an even bigger question: what were we doing backing what looked like, and what was for many, an attack on homosexuality? As Nick Boles later put it to me, ‘It’s not about what councils should and shouldn’t do. That’s not the point. It makes gay people feel like they’re worth less.’
In all of this, there was something we agreed shouldn’t change: we were all convinced that the Conservative Party had become, and should remain, a Eurosceptic party.
While we were all at that time