Standing Down (18 page)
Authors: Rosa Prince
Sir Tony Baldry
, sixty-four, was Conservative MP for Banbury (1983–2015).
‘Not everyone can be in the Cabinet. The House of Commons evolves – I didn’t want to be a lame duck.’
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Politics is pretty mad but it has to be fun and if it wasn’t fun you couldn’t possibly do it. The general pattern in those days was you went and fought a hopeless seat, you earned your spurs, you got to know what it was like. After you had done that you went off and put in for a safe seat.
It is very much like going to school. You come in with a whole load of boys, men, make friends, colleagues. And I think you have to recognise that at Westminster it’s very, very difficult to do anything meaningfully on one’s own.
I think the whole of life is a great adventure. Looking back there have been very few low points in the House of Commons. I was very fortunate that I was a minister for eight years, which is a pretty good innings. I was a minister at four different departments: Energy, Environment, the Foreign Office, finally MAFF [the Ministry for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food].
The only time I look back on as a real low point was immediately after the 1997 election. Those of us who had been ministers in John Major’s government, I think we felt pretty let down by, quote, the ‘bastards’, unquote, and I think they felt pretty let down by the government of John Major, of which we were a part, [and] had lost the election.
I didn’t want to be a lame-duck MP. And I thought: ‘Well, probably better to go with people generally saying, “We’re sorry you’re going,” than staying on and have people say, “Well, when are you going?”’
Of course there are inevitably parts of the House of Commons one will miss. There’s a group of us called the Breakfast Club and we meet pretty much every morning for breakfast, in my case because I need to get out of the shower before my wife, and I’ll miss the camaraderie and I’ll miss being at the heart of things.
It’s very easy to say, ‘Well, it wasn’t like that when I came in,’ because Parliament will inevitably change. I think my only concern for younger Members of Parliament is they are increasingly being torn to be in two places at once, which is physically impossible.
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the full story
The son of religious parents who went to a Quaker boarding school where he and his classmates engaged in political discussion and debate from a young age, by the 1966 general election Sir Tony was pounding the streets on behalf of the Conservative Party.
When he left school to attend Sussex University – then a hotbed of left-wing activism – he found the perfect environment to hone the skills as a would-be politician.
He joined the Federation of Conservative Students and in 1972 made his first mark on British public life by successfully suing the student union at the High Court over its practice of using compulsory membership fees to fund left-wing causes.
The case caught the eye of an up-and-coming Education Minister in the government of Ted Heath – Margaret Thatcher:
Sussex was still a very new university in 1969 [with] ludicrously left-wing notions and motions. Having been to a Quaker school I wasn’t afraid of public speaking because Quakers speak as part of worship.
Being involved in student politics, at university [I] actually took the student union to the High Court. Student unions were publicly funded, they got quite a lot of money from the taxpayer. Quite a lot of this money was being used to support various left-wing causes. The High Court ruled that student unions were charities and that they could only use their funds in support of educational, charitable pursuits.
Doing that was the first time I really got to know Margaret Thatcher because she was Minister for Education.
After graduating, Sir Tony became a research assistant to Maurice Macmillan, the then chief secretary to the Treasury, a role comparable to a modern-day special adviser.
He helped out during the election of February 1974, rubbing shoulders with Cabinet ministers and grandees such as Harold Macmillan, before Mrs Thatcher asked him to join her team ahead of the election, which was called that October.
He stayed with Mrs Thatcher as she was promoted to the shadow Cabinet:
I really got on very well with Margaret. My approach to Margaret was that she was a bit like one of my aunts. She was very stern but she did have a sense of humour and she was very focused. And very clear in what she wanted to do even then.
Instinctively I’m much more of a Disraeli one-nation Tory and in her instincts Margaret was much more of a Whig. But within the change of post-war politics we were both clearly within the same party.
A year later, Mrs Thatcher challenged Ted Heath for the leadership, giving Sir Tony a ‘ringside seat’ in the contest.
He continued as an adviser, taking on the role of representing her in the Yes Campaign for the 1976 European referendum, and even claims responsibility for persuading her to wear the now infamous multicoloured jumper featuring the flags of various EU states, which became first an iconic and then an ironic image when her views turned Eurosceptic.
By now he was on the Conservative Party’s candidates’ list, and was selected to fight the safe Labour seat of Thurrock ahead of the 1979 general election:
Intellectually I recognised that turning over a majority of 19,000 in one go was going to be pretty difficult. In the end I cut the Labour majority down to 6,000 so I had a 25 per cent swing to the Conservatives. But there was a seismic change in British politics. The small things – for example [the] Queen’s Silver Jubilee occurred in 1977 and I as a Conservative candidate was being invited to do things like judge children’s fancy dress competitions on LCC council estates.
One was very conscious that the tectonic plates of political support were continuing to shift and that politics was about the aspirations of individuals rather than the state imposing its views on communities.
Following the election, it was time to concentrate on finding a winnable seat. He soon found himself at home amid the Oxfordshire hunting and shooting set in the constituency of Banbury, where he was selected as a candidate in 1981:
In those days the executive committee selected the candidate and you were then presented at a public meeting at the town hall for election by acclamation by association members.
So this meeting at the town hall came up and the motion was duly proposed by my predecessor … and the room was packed. It then came to questions and there was only one question – does he support the reintroduction of capital punishment for hunt saboteurs – to which there was great cheering, and when I said that was too modest a punishment, there were no further questions at all.
The very first fundraiser I went to in a small village was a large wine and cheese party. They put all the cash on table, and they divided [it] three ways: a third to the hunt; a third to the church; and a third to the Conservative Party, which struck me as just about right.
Just thirty-one when he was elected at the 1983 general election, Sir Tony’s family was very much a political one, with his first wife, Catherine, who he wed just before the 1979 general election, long aware of his ambitions. He says: ‘I was elected in May 1983 and my son, Ed, was born in June 1983. So I have a son aged thirty and a daughter aged twenty-nine and neither of them have known any existence other than their father being a Member of Parliament.’
Among his many happy memories of his first election campaign is one of being canvassed on behalf of the Labour Party by a teenage Ed Miliband, whose family had rented a house in the constituency. ‘So Ed Miliband’s been trying to get me out of Parliament ever since I’ve been trying to get in,’ he says.
Entering the House of Commons as an MP, he found himself among friends and in a familiar setting:
The Conservative intake in 1983 was a very large intake, some of them I knew very well for a number of years, some were very good friends. It’s slightly like school. You learn from each other. The shape of the House was very different in that there were a lot of men, and in those days it was mostly men who had fought in the Second World War.
During one’s time in the House of Commons if you’re lucky you have a number of different existences. You start as a young government backbencher and then if you’re lucky you get to be a PPS. I think I certainly hoped I would become in due course a minister.
After two years, Sir Tony was invited to become a PPS in the office of the Leader of the House, first under Lynda Chalker and then John Wakeham.
But the rapid promotion he had hoped for did not follow, partly, he believes, because he was seen as a one-nation Tory, who had aligned himself with the likes of Ken Clarke, Michael Heseltine and Douglas Hurd rather than those who were fully behind the Prime Minister.
So he was thrilled and disbelieving when, during a minor reshuffle in January 1990, the call came to attend No. 10:
There was the Prime Minister and the Cabinet Secretary, and Margaret turned to me and said: ‘Tony, I cannot understand why I haven’t made you a minister before.’
And I had to bite my tongue to say, ‘Well, Prime Minister, that thought had crossed my mind.’
I think, looking back … there was this thing of people not being fully signed up to the project. Such is life. I think one has to be true to oneself. And I wasn’t always entirely signed up to the project.
I remember much later on in my career going to a dinner hosted by Michael Heseltine. A very nice dinner. At the end of the dinner Michael said, ‘Well, you may wonder why you’ve all been invited here. I wanted you to know that if ever I had been Prime Minister, you would have been my Cabinet.’ It was a very nice thing of him to say but the fact of the matter is that you never know how life is going to play out.
Finally a minister, Sir Tony spent 1990 engaged in helping to privatise the electricity industry, a task so demanding he failed to notice the rumblings of discontent within the country, and soon his own party too, about Mrs Thatcher’s leadership:
To be honest, at the time I was so totally immersed in the electricity privatisation. That’s a challenge for all ministers – by the time you’ve done your red boxes you’re just about able to come up for air to sort out constituency casework on your own patch. It is quite difficult sometimes getting a feel for the nation as a whole.
I was shocked when Margaret ceased to be Prime Minister but not surprised. There was a kind of feeling for some time that something was changing in the mood of colleagues.
What happened was there were a number of colleagues in marginal seats who took a view that if they didn’t have a change of leader they simply weren’t going to win the election. It was much more practical than ideological. They had taken a pragmatic view that they just weren’t going to win the next general election with Margaret Thatcher.
There was then the other tension articulated in that speech Geoffrey Howe made of ministers and others who had had different kinds of grievances under Margaret. I took the view that anyone who was a minister who didn’t support Margaret should resign. And actually I did support Margaret. Personally I think it was desperately sad – tragic – that she was ousted in the way that she was ousted.
Sir Tony remained a minister under John Major, serving in four departments and tackling such thorny issues as the first Spanish fishing in UK waters ‘since the Armada’ and the BSE crisis.
When the Conservatives lost the 1997 general election he returned to the back benches, where he has remained ever since.
He says he has no regrets about having not achieved higher office and instead found a new set of interests, including his current role of Second Church Estates Commissioner:
The thirteen years in which we were in opposition, one would have hoped, having served a couple of terms as Minister of State, one would have been considered for the Cabinet. But you can’t choose when your party goes into opposition.
Wherever one ends up in politics one can always say, ‘I could have done one rung higher.’ One has to enjoy what one does have the opportunity to do.
Politics is a bit like cricket. You can get on to the team but you never know when you’re going to bat, you never know when you’re going to field. You never know where in the team you’re going to bat, and I think you’ve got to be relatively philosophical about that.
While we were in opposition I had a whole parliament chairing the International Development Committee. I was able to discover a whole secret garden, a new language and I thought I had better give an impression I knew what I was talking about so I went off and did an MA back at Sussex.
I never expected in this Parliament that I’d be asked to be Second Church Estates Commissioner and concerned with things like where Richard III is going to be buried and women bishops.
You have to enjoy Parliament for what it is. Obviously you have got to give it your best and whatever tasks you are asked to do you have got to do to your best. I don’t think you can be disappointed if you’re not put into the Cabinet.
Like a number of retiring MPs, the introduction of five-year terms affected Sir Tony’s decision to stand down:
I became increasingly conscious that people in the constituency were saying to me, ‘Oh, Tony, the next election will be your last election, won’t it?’ They weren’t saying it unkindly, they were stating a matter of fact.
And I thought to myself: ‘Hang on a moment, if I stand again, by 2020 I’ll be nearly seventy and I’ll have done thirty-seven years.’
I didn’t want all that thing about ‘Are you going, are you staying, are you a lame duck?’ So I just thought it was better to go. Whether one does thirty-two years or thirty-seven in the totality of things, Parliament goes on.