Standing Down (13 page)
Authors: Rosa Prince
Of course I will miss it. Of course I would have liked to have done another five years. I will miss being part of what everyone else would like to be part of. That’s a very terrible way of saying the laws that we make I think are relevant, I think we do have relevant discussions, I think we make some very important decisions here.
I will miss having that input, being the conduit from constituents to the Prime Minister in that sort of way, so I will miss that without a doubt.
Maybe I could have been a minister but I probably rebelled too much for that. I was an odd Conservative because I am anti-fox hunting, I am anti-nuclear power, I voted against the government a few times. I am a liberal Conservative. What I won’t miss is some of the frustrations, some of things you know should be done immediately can take years, and that really frustrates me.
I think I have made a difference; I know I have.
***
CV
Born and raised in Kent; attended South Bank University; became a chartered accountant involved in the music and film industries.
2001: Unsuccessfully fights Barking
2005: Unsuccessfully fights Brighton Pavilion
2010: Elected MP for Hove; tabloid exposé about his ex-wife
2012: Instrumental in introducing anti-squatting measures; diagnosed with cancer and has operation to remove oesophagus
2013: Appointed Prime Minister’s intellectual property adviser
2014: Announces he will be standing down at the 2015 general election
Mike Weatherley has been divorced twice and has three children
.
Greg Barker,
forty-eight, was Conservative MP for Bexhill & Battle (2001–15).
‘Helping David Cameron become Conservative leader was the high point – scandal and scrutiny meant it was downhill from there.’
***
I was a passionate Conservative from my time at university. I drifted away from politics in my twenties but ended up fighting a seat in 1997 in Eccles in Manchester – and Eccles fought back rather successfully. I was then really fortunate to be selected in my home county of Sussex, in Bexhill & Battle.
It was quite overwhelming, very moving. I think I have a romantic view of Parliament, very conscious of the history and the sacrifices that have been made over the years. So I was slightly daunted by it, but not in a bad way.
The biggest difference I would have made in my life, and the thing I’m most proud of, isn’t anything on my climate agenda and green energy, it’s actually at the very beginning: making a difference to the Cameron project. I think David Cameron is unique. Having seen him up close dealing with highly complex and stressful issues, he’s awesome.
That was very difficult [a tabloid exposé of his private life, which reported that he had left his wife for a man]. That was probably the darkest moment for me and my family.
What being a minister reminded me is that I don’t just like being something, I like doing something. If I jump while I’m still in my forties, there are lots of opportunities for me to explore other things, to go back into business, to work abroad potentially and make an impact in a way that is different than if you stay in the House of Commons.
Go on holiday! I will be working partly here, partly abroad. I was in the private equity world before I came into government and I’ll be going back to my roots.
There will probably be a lump in the throat and I’ll probably be sad to wave goodbye to Bexhill & Battle, but the job of an MP these days is so different even to when I came into the House and I really didn’t want to be one of those MPs that just motors along.
People in the outside world don’t appreciate how hard MPs work and also how demanding the role is. The scrutiny you get now, some people get off on it, but it is very draining.
***
the full story
Greg Barker grew up in Sussex, in a non-political family who, he jokes, saw him as the ‘black sheep’ for his ambitions. By 1997, he was living in Tooting, south London, and working in the City when he made his first, unsuccessful attempt to run for office in a safe Labour seat.
He was rewarded at the next election with selection for the plum constituency of Bexhill & Battle, not far from where he was raised:
I was always fascinated by politics and a passionate Conservative from my time at university. I was asked to be on the selection committee in Tooting and after a morning the agent took me aside and said, ‘Look, rather than asking all the smart-a*** questions I think you ought to be answering them.’
So I got selected very late on for a hopeless seat but that really lit the touchpaper. It was a brilliant window for me into politics and a part of the world I didn’t know and confirmed for me that I really did want to go into politics.
And I was then really fortunate to be selected in my home county of Sussex in Bexhill & Battle. It’s a lovely part of the world with even more lovely people. My parents, friends and family all rallied to the colours.
Mr Barker was one of the first Conservatives to get a taste of the threat from the UK Independence Party, when Nigel Farage, the party’s leader, stood against him. To complicate matters, his predecessor, Charles Wardle, had defected and campaigned against him, meaning that despite being in a safe Conservative seat, Mr Barker’s first election was at times ‘horrible’.
He says:
The campaign had an edge to it because we had Nigel Farage, but it was an incredibly exciting experience. Nigel Farage was a very serious opponent. The interesting thing was he could be quite charming on a personal level but when he engaged in debates he became much more ideological and the mask slipped.
The most unpleasant thing about UKIP was the people who arrived in the constituency, skinheads from London, people who were clearly veterans of the far-right fringe, and who scared off a lot of the very decent naturally UKIP sympathisers in Bexhill.
Despite all the nastiness, Mr Barker won comfortably and found himself in Parliament at the age of just thirty-five. While the experience was ‘daunting’, he soon made himself at home, with the help of some new friends by the names of David Cameron and George Osborne:
For me it was very obvious that both David and George were head and shoulders above the rest in terms of raw talent and ability. I was also convinced, leaving personalities aside, that the party just needed to skip a generation and we needed a modern, charismatic, telegenic leader to create a centre-right alternative to [then Prime Minister Tony] Blair that we could sell to the country.
Those were very momentous years. We had the death of the Queen Mother, the Golden Jubilee and then the build up to the war in Iraq, so these were all big parliamentary occasions.
I settled in I think pretty well. It was fun. I was hugely respectful of the institution. I was very conscious of the privilege of being here. It was a very happy time.
After two years on the back benches Mr Barker was invited to join the Whips’ Office by Michael Howard who had become party leader in 2003 with his support.
He still harboured the belief, however, that the Conservatives needed a leader from the younger generation, and while he admired Mr Howard, he felt it was a ‘fence too high’ for him to topple Tony Blair at the 2005 general election.
Instead, his mind turned to the leadership contest he knew would inevitably follow, barely bothering to campaign in his own safe seat, and entirely focused on how best to shape the events that would play out after polling day.
He says:
Michael Howard had resigned on the morning after the election. I remember talking to David Cameron who was still in his constituency. There were a number of us around David encouraging him to stand and I think he was minded to do that but we didn’t know how it was going to pan out.
There was a degree of modesty on his part; becoming modesty. He certainly wasn’t pushing himself. He was quite cautious and took his time to decide whether or not to run but I think it was in hindsight a done deal from the get-go.
Much of the way through it I sort of carried David Cameron’s bags. I would go to events and act as his unofficial PPS and also as one of the campaign managers. We had that sense of underdog excitement. It’s much more exciting to be after the incumbent than to be holding the line. That group of us really believed in our candidate. It wasn’t just a power grab or machine politics. We genuinely believed in David and his modernising mission.
Was it Baldwin or Curzon who said ‘No man is a hero to his valet’? Having acted in some ways as David Cameron’s political valet in the election campaign, I emerged in awe of him and he improved in stature, having seen what he was like behind the scenes.
Mr Barker’s reward was to be given the climate change brief – then a new and exciting issue, and one he had begun to master during his time on the back benches when he served on the Commons Environmental Audit Committee.
He was able to use his post to help ‘detoxify’ the Tory brand, travelling with Mr Cameron to the Arctic Circle in a bid to show off the new leader’s green credentials.
The resulting ‘hug a husky’ images became an indelible part of the Cameron project, displaying the Leader of the Opposition as the coming man – right-on, youthful and modern. When Mr Cameron became Prime Minister, Mr Barker was made Climate Change Minister – to his huge relief.
He denies, however, that the climate change agenda was adopted only out of political expediency, and defends the government’s record on the environment:
Certainly David Cameron has been my most valuable ally during my time in government.
What’s happened is there have been fewer speeches, less sound bites, since the financial crisis but if you look at what we’ve actually done in terms of policy implementation, all of our major policy commitments that were adopted during that time have been implemented. We haven’t shirked away from any of them.
The political narrative has moved on but in terms of have we walked the walk? Absolutely. If you actually audit the big policy deliverables, it’s quite impressive.
The leadership election and those first months as shadow Climate Change Minister were to prove the high point of Mr Barker’s time in office.
In October 2006, the
Daily Mirror
ran an exposé about his separation from his wife of fourteen years, Celeste, under the headline: ‘Tory MP leaves wife and children for a man’.
Finding himself at the centre of such attention, and becoming the Conservatives’ first openly gay MP, was an ordeal, he says, coloured his view of politics.
Like many other MPs at the time, the feeling that he could no longer enjoy his time in Parliament in quite the same way was exacerbated by the 2010 expenses scandal.
He says of the publicity surrounding his private life:
Fortunately by the time that broke in the tabloid press it had all been sorted with my former wife who was extraordinary and very supportive.
After that, when you’ve had that kind of exposure, particularly in the way that you view the press, it’s never quite the same.
Being recognised, being a public figure, it leaves a very bad taste in the mouth.
And then again on expenses. While I wasn’t a primary target of the expenses scandal, every MP had their issue to deal with, real and perceived. The worst thing about that was just the general change in the public’s attitude.
It sounds a bizarre thing to say, [but] I think the Conservatives felt it more. Partly because it was led by the
Daily Telegraph
,
it felt like a more personal betrayal.
How would Labour MPs feel if the
Daily Mirror
had plunged a dagger into the PLP? So that was certainly disconcerting. And the loss of respect for the office of MP, rightly or wrongly, that changed the mood.
In Conservative seats where perhaps there was a lingering degree of deference, which was going anyway, that’s not the century we live in, expenses put paid to that once and for all. I don’t think it makes the job of an MP any easier.
With the 2010 election, Mr Barker was leading a ‘slightly bipolar existence as an MP’, happy that Mr Cameron was Prime Minister but not personally enjoying life in the Commons despite the excitement of becoming a minister.
Surprisingly, unlike many of his colleagues, he was relaxed about the fact that his party had failed to achieve a majority:
It’s easy to bad-mouth the coalition but at that time it was maybe the best result because, post-expenses, showing that in the face of a national economic crisis, which there was, and also in the face of a crisis of confidence in the political class, the fact that two of the major parties could come together and forge a grown-up relationship that wasn’t ‘yah–boo’ politics actually sends a very powerful symbol.
It’s not a coincidence that we were at our most popular after the coalition was formed.
If you look at our opinion poll ratings they actually went up after the election and I think that was responding to a national mood for consensus and an end to the bitterness and divisive politics of the [Gordon] Brown administration and a yearning for politicians to come together and actually work together.
And I think that was a case of ‘comes the hour, comes the man’. David’s big, generous offer to the Lib Dems was inspired and, pay tribute to [Liberal Democrat leader] Nick Clegg, the ability to stick to that together was very important and right for that time.
Since then, the world’s moved on, the financial crisis has abated, we’ve righted the ship. Confidence in MPs and the political class, while I think is never going to go back to where it was before, is certainly better than it was at the time of the expenses scandal, and we face a new kind of political challenge.
But we must never forget the positives of the coalition. I would have preferred to see a majority Conservative government of course, with David Cameron having a real personal mandate and able to implement our policies, but I think there were certainly undeniable advantages.
[Becoming a minister] was very exciting. I was standing [in Portcullis House] when my mobile phone went and I got the call through from No. 10 to talk to the Prime Minister and I won’t forget that.
In opposition it is by definition a fag-packet operation. You have an envelope and a packet of crisps. I had two researchers to take on a whole civil service department. So suddenly to have a properly resourced private office and the professionalism of the civil service was a revelation.
Also, that Narnia creation moment when you go into government, where so many things are possible in the first few weeks, then the administration becomes formed and the civil service get your number, but there is that wonderful moment of policy creationism.
Although that was exciting, it did take a while to become a more effective minister I think. You do benefit from experience and understanding how the machine works. It takes a while if you haven’t served in government before to get your head around it.
Appearing in the Commons to begin with was pretty terrifying but it’s a huge adrenaline kick and a massive satisfaction when you’re able to reply in debates, and hugely rewarding.