Standing Down (16 page)
Authors: Rosa Prince
Sir Richard Ottaway
, sixty-nine, was Conservative MP for Nottingham North (1983–87) and Croydon South (1992–2015).
‘My bad luck is when I might have hoped for ministerial experience we went into thirteen years of opposition.’
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I was a partner of a firm of lawyers in the City and at the 1983 election I thought I’d like to be a candidate somewhere, so I just started ticking boxes. I was lucky enough to get selected in Nottingham North, which was a fairly safe Labour seat.
Of course it was Margaret Thatcher’s great landslide victory, it was the high-water mark of modern Conservatism even to this day.
We had two re-counts. It was a long night. And to my absolute astonishment and I think to my opponent’s astonishment and the public’s astonishment I found myself elected the MP for Nottingham North.
I looked around and I saw Maurice Macmillan, who was the son of [former Prime Minister] Harold Macmillan, I saw [former Prime Minister] Ted Heath sitting there, and these were names who I’d looked at with awe in the past and to find that I was sitting there in the same benches as them was frankly rather nerve-wracking.
A few weeks later I stumbled through my maiden speech, which still reads quite well to this day, and got into it. It took me a couple of years to get fully settled here.
For the last decade I’ve been on the Intelligence and Security Committee, looking at the security services, getting an understanding most people don’t have of how they work and what they’re doing. Immediately after it was formed we had the 7/7 bombings here in London.
And then that led me into the chairmanship of the Foreign Affairs Committee, which has been the most rewarding thing I’ve done in my parliamentary life.
I imagine everyone says the expenses saga. There was nothing improper about my expenses but the whole attack on the political system was wearing.
Fortunately the strength of the demands of Parliament kept us all going. You knew you had to get up and ask questions, answer constituency questions, lobby on this and that, no matter [if] your heart was in your socks at the time you were doing it.
I’m older than I behave. I’m going to be seventy in a couple of months’ time. And I just don’t want to go from Parliament to an armchair.
I will miss the politics and the buzz and not being a part of it. I’ve got a holiday home on the Isle of Wight and a yacht and I hope to spend a lot of my summer down there.
Perfect world is a couple of charities, couple of consultancies, and a four-day weekend. And I think one has got it lined up.
One of the charities is helping Ben Ainslie with his bid for 2017 Americas’ Cup, [the others are involved with] development issues and family planning in developing countries.
Perseverance pays. You need to have enormously thick skin. Never ask a question unless you know the answer. Very dangerous to start asking questions if you don’t know what the outcome is going to be.
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Sir Richard Ottaway:
the full story
Sir Richard had just got out of the Royal Navy and was training to become a solicitor when his interest in politics was piqued during a chance encounter on a boat off the coast of the Isle of Wight.
Throughout his life his ‘passion’ has been yachting. ‘I found myself once, back in the early ’70s, sitting on the windward rail of a yacht in the Solent next to a couple of MPs,’ he says.
Both MPs, Winston Churchill, grandson of the wartime Prime Minister, and Sir John Hannam, the Conservative MP for Exeter, became close friends, and he volunteered to help Sir John out at the 1974 general election. ‘That was really my first introduction into the life,’ he says. ‘And the moment I got into it, the bug got me.’
There was never much of a question that he would be a Conservative:
I came out of the Royal Navy in the 1970s and in the 1960s the Labour Party looked pretty left-wing to me. They still had quite strong contacts to the Communist world. And I just felt they weren’t my environment. I just didn’t relate to them.
The more I looked at the Conservative Party and their support for enterprise and the creation of wealth, I realised that’s where my heart lay
.
By 1983, Sir Richard was involved enough to consider running for Parliament himself, and joined the candidates list. He anticipated he would take the usual path of fighting a no-hoper for his initial electoral outing, saying: ‘I would have been quite happy to have fought Michael Foot [the then Labour Party leader] in Wales if it came to it.’ But he instead found himself selected for Nottingham North.
He engrossed himself in an election battle, which proved far tighter than anyone could have realised – and along the way had experiences that shaped his political consciousness for the rest of his career:
I actually loved Nottingham. They were a lovely people. And it’s where my compassionate Conservatism was born. Because if you’re working on the housing estates of the Midlands, helping people in quite deprived areas, you get a real understanding of how millions of people live in this country – which is where I really became a one-nation Tory.
I knew that I was in with a shout. I was ready to take the credit for a good result but a narrow loss [but] I had the biggest swing in the country. I had a 10.5 per cent swing. I found myself elected with a majority of 362 votes.
Both Sir Richard and his wife were delighted at the prospect of him becoming an MP, but the tiny margin of victory was a brake on any temptation to become overexcited:
My wife was with me the whole way through. We had only been married a year. She loved it. She was a very successful executive in her own right, running a successful advertising agency, so we were absolutely flat out; classic Thatcher’s children.
I knew it was a marginal seat and I was never going to build a long-term political career there. So I wanted to keep my outside interests alive.
In those days there were never any votes before about five in the afternoon, so I was working in the City in the morning, coming up here at lunchtime and dealing with the constituency stuff and parliamentary life.
Sir Richard was able to take his first step on the ministerial ladder early, thanks to social connections – he had got to know Tim Renton, a Foreign Office Minister, through friends of friends and became his PPS. ‘It was great,’ he says. ‘Geoffrey Howe was the Foreign Secretary. Britain, as it is now, was a world leader and I was on the first rung of the ladder in keeping the ship of state afloat.’
As the 1987 election approached, Sir Richard was conscious that his time in Parliament might be brief, but decided to stick with Nottingham North rather than seek a safer seat: ‘Having won the seat I thought I ought to defend it, tempting though it was, especially since the neighbouring seat became free. I thought [switching] would be rather poor form. I gave it my best shot.’ The loss, when it came, was no surprise. Although he had a safe cushion at his legal firm, there was no question that Sir Richard saw his future in politics rather than the law. He immediately began looking around for another seat:
I had no hesitation whatsoever. I had the bug. I missed it. Actually, my career was going pretty well in the legal profession, but I knew I wanted to come back. But I knew it had to be a safe seat.
And the party didn’t let me down. After I did lose in ’87 I let it be known quite early that I’d like to come back in ’92 and the party in all honesty was very supportive, kept me involved, encouraged me to go for seats.
To get selected for Croydon South was beyond my wildest dream. Very different from Nottingham, but that legacy of helping deprived people in the Midlands has stayed with me throughout, actually.
Fighting a safe Conservative seat was far less exciting than Nottingham North had been. Instead, the thrill was watching John Major defy the odds to be re-elected as Prime Minister:
It was a new seat, new people, new campaign, but there was a feeling of inevitability about it. I had a majority of over 20,000 in that election, I sort of always knew I was going to win so there was less drama about the night.
After my vote was declared, instead of going to bed I got into my car with my wife and went up to Smith Square to join in the celebrations there.
As someone who had been around the block before, Sir Richard was welcomed back into the fold with open arms:
Immediately, the weekend after the election, Michael [now Lord] Heseltine asked me to be his PPS. I’d got to know him during the ’83–’87 parliament when he was Defence Secretary and we had established quite a dialogue.
In ’92 he went to the DTI [Department for Trade and Industry] and that’s when I joined him. He became Deputy Prime Minister in 1995 and I was with him all the way through.
Working with him was a tremendous experience because I threw a lot into it, I got quite close to him, I wasn’t a detached PPS. I learnt an awful lot from him in all honesty.
One [of his highs in Parliament] is the learning curve I had with Michael, an absolutely top-flight politician at the peak of his powers. Working with him was an invigorating experience.
Having served under Lord Heseltine for some years, Sir Richard might have hoped to become a minister in his own right. It was not to be, as the party was dumped out of power at the 1997 election. Although he went to serve on the shadow front bench and even the shadow Cabinet, ministerial office always evaded him:
My bad luck is when I might have hoped for ministerial experience we went into thirteen years of opposition. Just life. Politics is a rough old game and you hope to take it on the chin. I threw myself in as an opposition spokesman.
The first job I had I was party spokesman for London when we were setting up the Greater London Authority.
In a way, standing at the despatch box as an opposition spokesman is even more exciting because you don’t have a dozen civil servants behind you. You’ve got a couple of researchers and you’re on your own.
For much of the time in opposition, Sir Richard was somewhat out of step with the leadership, backing the more moderate (but losing) candidates of Ken Clarke, the former Chancellor, and Michael Portillo, former Defence Secretary.
In 2001, with the election of the right-winger Iain Duncan Smith, Sir Richard opted to return to the back benches. He was persuaded to return to front-line politics two years later by his successor Michael Howard, becoming shadow environment secretary, a role he describes as ‘fun’.
The election of David Cameron in 2005 did meet with his approval, however:
Eventually I found a leader I could vote for. I’ve worked with six party leaders, three of whom became Prime Ministers.
The outstanding one of course was Margaret. But David Cameron is very close behind. I think without David Cameron’s drive and energy the Tory Party wouldn’t be where it is today.
Sir Richard says that, given his age, he did not expect to receive a job by Mr Cameron, but he was upset when, in 2010, he failed to be elected chairman of the 1922 Committee of back-bench Conservative MPs.
He puts his failure down to his place on the left of the party. Luckily, happier times were just around the corner with his election as chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee:
I stood for election to be chairman of the 1922 Committee. Still to this day disappointed that I lost. I had been the vice chairman for five years before that, but I had to accept that the one-nation Tory as a grouping inside the Tory Party is a large minority and it’s not a majority and so I just didn’t have the across-the-board support that I needed.
But then I went from the low to the high literally three or four weeks later of being the first elected chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, and you’re elected by the whole of Parliament – very meaningful and quite an honour, particularly to be the first one. And it gives you tremendous strength, knowing that you’ve won the support of your parliamentary peers right across the board.
Obviously chairing the Foreign Affairs Committee I travelled around the world more than most people. We underestimate how the rest of the world sees us.
There’s huge respect in the rest of the world for this country, this building, and for the democracy and respect for human rights and values. And to be part of that and to maintain that reputation is something I’ve really enjoyed.
And, boy, never has there been more major foreign affairs issues going around than there are now.
Sir Richard’s final parliament brought another high when, spurred on by an incident in his constituency when metal was stripped from a church roof, he steered through a Private Members’ Bill, which resulted in an enormous drop in thefts of scrap metal:
I introduced in 2013/14 the Scrap Metal Dealers’ Act. There were thousands of people whose lives were being affected by plaques being ripped off their loved one’s graves, roofs being ripped off, communications cables alongside railway lines being pulled up.
And now I’m pleased to say that scrap metal theft has fallen by more than a half. Perhaps not the sexiest of subjects, but a really serious thing that has made a difference.
Sir Richard has taken a particular interest in reproductive rights in the developing world, an issue he will remain involved with once he leaves Parliament:
It’s my slightly quirky fringe interest. I just woke up one day saying, ‘If every couple on this planet had two children, we wouldn’t have to keep building more houses and roads and things, we would have enough for everybody.’
I started making speeches about it in the ’80s and if we had stabilised the population growth in the ’90s and ’00s at sustainable levels we wouldn’t be seeing the conflict in north and west Africa, we wouldn’t being seeing the migratory pressures that are starting to build up coming into Europe, where hundreds of millions of people [have] no prospects whatsoever, so they either take up crime or terrorism or they migrate.