Standing Down (23 page)
Authors: Rosa Prince
Sir Andrew was unimpressed with what Labour had to say, and frustrated by the failure of the team, made up of Ed Miliband, Ed Balls, Harriet Harman, Lord Mandelson and Lord Adonis, to deliver on the Liberal Democrats’ primary demand of a referendum on electoral reform.
By contrast, he says, the Conservatives were falling over themselves to give the Liberal Democrats what they wanted:
I was expecting us to come up against some really feisty negotiators. If you think about it, the Tory Party has got a history of business and deals and all that sort of stuff, the Labour Party’s got trade unions and bargaining and all that sort of stuff, [so] the point I was making to my team was, we’re going to be up against some really hard nuts here.
When we met Labour we were ready for it and they just didn’t have anything. They weren’t there at all.
I was really, really surprised that the Conservatives were prepared to come as far as they did in the negotiations.
They actually delivered on, if you like, the poison pill in that negotiation, which was the AV [alternative vote] referendum bill.
It would have been a pretty odd situation to have then turned away and said, ‘That’s not good enough.’
With the negotiations concluded, Sir Andrew retired home for some much needed sleep, only to be surprised by a phone call inviting him to become a minister in the new government:
I got back to my flat very, very tired. I worked out that in the six days from election eve to the conclusion of the negotiations I’d had seventeen hours’ sleep. I can tell you that’s not enough.
I got a telephone call saying would I take a call from the Deputy Prime Minister? I did a double take and said, ‘Ah yes, that’s Nick Clegg.’ Because the mindset was it’s [until then the Labour Deputy Prime Minister] John Prescott – why does John Prescott want to talk to me?
Obviously I said yes because it would have been a bit odd not to. It’s a logical consequence but I admit to not having thought about it at all beforehand.
The following morning I got a call from the head of, as I now know, my private office, who said she was my PS. My PS? Can somebody talk English round here?
Having never considered the possibility, Sir Andrew admits that being a minister did not come naturally, although the post, in the Department for Communities, played to his strengths:
It is a new world and quite a remote existence from being a backbencher in opposition. I went in to the department, I turned up in the foyer, and literally had no idea at all about the civil service system, or the hierarchy, or the delivery routes or any of those things.
The Tories had clearly done a lot more preparatory work than we had for office. It’s their divine right to be in office so obviously they make sure they’re all ready for office, whereas we didn’t have that perception.
Sir Andrew says he formed a good relationship with Eric Pickles, the Conservative Communities Secretary:
We had very different approaches but a shared agenda about devolution and taking power out of Westminster, and a whole load of areas where we were on the same page.
Part of the conversations I had with Eric Pickles was, ‘Have you decided what you’re going to do about building regulations?’
And he said, ‘What are building regulations?’
So I said, ‘Well, I’ll do it then.’
As he settled in, Sir Andrew found his work on the Private Members’ Bill came in handy in his new job and he began to get on top of his brief.
He says:
The civil service is set up to serve ministers regardless of the quality of the minister. They take as their baseline that most ministers don’t know very much about anything and they supply ministers with an unceasing stream of high quality stuff, and if you’re not very careful you just become a glove puppet.
You’re fighting. If you want to have a more engaged ministerial team delivering, the civil people are not the people to provide it, that’s for sure.
Sir Andrew had two high points during his two years as a minister. The first was ‘signing the instrument that raised the energy performance standards needed for new homes by 25 per cent’, and the second what became the 2011 Localism Act, which devolved powers from central to local government.
In 2012, Mr Clegg brought Sir Andrew’s time as a minister to an end. He says:
I returned to the back benches because Nick told me my time was up. I would have been very willing to carry on so it was a disappointment in that sense.
I’d like to think it was the reason he gave, which was to ensure that other deserving people had their time in the sun before the end of this parliament, rather than [because] I’d cocked up in some way.
Most delivery projects take a long time. So there’s always unfinished business. There’s no good time to stand down, I guess.
While he may have had ‘unfinished business’ as a minister, Sir Andrew is content with his decision to stand down as an MP.
On 7 May he will be cheering on his successor without the knot in his stomach that accompanied his own election battles. ‘I’m fighting this election with as much intensity as the previous eight that I fought,’ he says. ‘Election counts are fine, it’s a great spectator sport, but if it’s your life and career on the line it’s a pretty tough thing.’
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CV
Born Sutton, Surrey; attended Manchester University; became an architect and head of the Association of Liberal Councillors.
1979: Unsuccessfully fights Chester
1983: Unsuccessfully fights Chester
1987: Unsuccessfully fights Chester
1992: Unsuccessfully fights Hazel Grove
1997: Elected MP for Hazel Grove; becomes energy spokesman
2001: Becomes Chief Whip
2006: Becomes communities spokesman
2010: Becomes member of the negotiating team that forms the coalition; becomes Communities Minister
2012: Asked to return to back benches
2013: Knighted for public and political service; announces he will stand down at the 2015 general election
Sir Andrew Stunell is married to Gillian and has five grown-up children
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Andrew Miller
, sixty-five, was Labour MP for Ellesmere Port & Neston (1992–2015).
‘The whole political process is overly dependent on patronage and I just feel uncomfortable in that kind of world.’
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It was sort of by accident. I had no intention of becoming a Member of Parliament. A few people from the Ellesmere Port party said, ‘We’re looking for a candidate, would you put your hat in the ring?’
I had genuinely never contemplated that before. As they say – the rest is history.
I had this bizarre conversation with my bank manager, saying: ‘I’m pleased to say I’m back in employment, the only trouble is I don’t know when I’m going to get paid from. Will you tide me over?’
It gradually fell into place. We turned up, there were about twelve of us housed in the Cloisters off Westminster Hall. We were all shoved in effectively a corridor and we had no way of getting office accommodation.
The parliament I have enjoyed most has been this one, as chair of the Science and Technology Committee. I have had fantastic fun doing that and it’s given me enormous reach beyond this place.
Right at the beginning of the ’97 parliament I had a very long, difficult case dealing with a constituent who had been imprisoned in the United States. It was a girl called Louise Woodward [a nineteen-year-old au pair who served nine months in jail in America after being convicted of the involuntary manslaughter of a baby in her care].
It was extraordinary hard work, keeping all the balls in the air, the scale of it was enormous. There were real tragedies right at the heart of it both for Louise and the family.
I’ll be sixty-six on 23 March and I took the view that with the fixed-term parliaments, leaving at sixty-six I can go off and do other things. Leaving at seventy-one, five years later, it would not be feasible to go off and do all those things.
I guess so but I’ve always taken decisions in a fairly objective way and I think it is the right decision.
So I’m picking up a couple of responsibilities in the university sector … helping with new research centres …. [and] I’m going to join the advisory board of the United Kingdom Research Integrity Office. It deals with the ethics of research programmes.
One: take on a responsibility where you are out of your comfort zone, something you’ve never done before, so you get a better handle on dealing with the breadth of this job and how you cope with that.
Two: make sure you take your time and hire the best possible staff, because without a supportive loyal team you will collapse into a heap.
Three: never forget you’ve got a family at home because this place puts enormous stress on relationships, especially small kids.
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the full story
Andrew Miller’s involvement with the Labour Party came about almost by accident, at a time when he was living in Portsmouth and working as a laboratory technician at the then polytechnic.
During council elections in 1968, he was canvassed by an activist whose affiliation he no longer remembers.
He launched into a diatribe against a landlord neighbour he felt was taking advantage of a compulsory purchase order and found himself challenged to step up to the plate himself:
Somebody came knocking at my door because there happened to be a local government election. I remember very distinctly this old guy, when I ranted at him about this unfairness, said: ‘Well, you really ought to do something about this yourself. Politics needs people to do something. If I were you, I’d join a political party.’
When I researched who was going to tackle this unfairness, Labour was up for it, locally.
I spoke to all of the parties that were contesting that election and I said: ‘Right, who’s going to take this seriously?’ And Labour said they would.
The outcome of that was I joined the Labour Party and have been active ever since.
I was actually in a sense quite naive about politics. My late father was a civil servant and kept his politics to himself, although ironically in his later life he joined the Conservative Party, rebelling against his son.
Finding himself ‘getting more interested in people’, Mr Miller took time out to pursue a course in industrial relations at the London School of Economics, before joining the Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs trade union, where he would remain for fifteen years. After a while he was transferred by the union to the north-west region. ‘I continued being active as a lay member of the party, I also did one or two things for the union that were overtly political, representing the union on one or two political bodies,’ he says. ‘And so I got to be reasonably well known.’
In 1991, he was approached by members in the Conservative-held seat of Ellesmere Port & Neston. He didn’t live in the constituency but was only half a mile away.
Mr Miller was surprised and flattered, but cautious, and decided to talk it over with his wife, Fran:
We had a long chat, because our children were still at school. We didn’t go into it entirely blind because this job, especially representing a seat outside London, is a big disadvantage to people with families.
Family friendly this place still isn’t. Not because of the hours but because your family are by definition elsewhere.
It was a family agreement we would try to achieve the goal, and almost twenty-three years ago now I got elected.
Although victory wasn’t assured, Mr Miller was reasonably confident he could overturn the Tories’ majority of less than 2,000. He was also optimistic about Labour’s prospects nationally, more or less assuming his party would be going into government. It was not to be:
I came to the conclusion if we threw everything at it we could take the seat. Election night was surreal, for two reasons. We started to realise early on that the expectation of Labour winning was melting away very rapidly. The euphoria of that was melting away, somewhat counterbalanced by the fact we’d sneaked home in Ellesmere Port & Neston.
Mr Miller was baffled when, amid all the excitement, he was bundled off to do a radio interview in the ladies lavatory and emerged to find the room where the count had taken place deserted.
He was struck by how little help he was given to cope with the transition to becoming an MP:
Came out of the interview and there’s nobody there. I was expecting the chief executive [of the local council, who had run the count] telling you, ‘Here’s your orders for what you do next.’
The only person I could find was the caretaker rattling his keys saying, ‘Come on, I want to go home.’ I was somewhat miffed. So I went to the [local Labour Party] celebration, great evening, but with the big downside that we hadn’t formed a government. But great party nevertheless. [I] woke up the following morning, or rather what was left of it, and, still do it, you follow the old traditions of going round with the speaker car saying thank you to people in a state of total exhaustion. And then you start thinking: ‘What happens next?’
The 1992 election was immediately followed by the ‘hiatus’ of the Easter break. Thus Mr Miller remained without instructions – and pay – for some time.
When he finally did get to Westminster, the new MP unexpectedly found himself spending his first day giving a tour to a primary school class his somewhat hubristic predecessor had invited to visit.
Settling in wasn’t easy, particularly given the seeming reluctance of the Labour whip in charge of divvying out accommodation to give him an office.
A year later, and having ruptured his Achilles tendon, he was so desperate that, finding a cubby hole buried away in a little-used part of the building, which officially belonged to the Conservatives, he successfully lobbied the Tory accommodation whip to be assigned it.
While many of his fellow MPs were well known to him from the Labour circuit, he found the jockeying for position that followed Neil Kinnock’s departure from the leadership following the 1992 election loss unedifying, although he admired his successor, John Smith.
When Mr Smith died two years later, Mr Miller was unwilling to court the new regime of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and was largely content to let others advance ahead of him.
Describing his first months in Parliament, he says:
It was difficult inside the party.
We were right at the beginning of what was inevitably going to be a [leadership] election campaign, and of course people were inevitably (as they do in all systems, it’s not just in political systems) positioning themselves either to be a candidate or to be the right hand of God to their favoured son or daughter.
I had an enormous amount of respect for John Smith and I had no doubt that he was the right person. I still take the view that had he lived Labour would have won the ’97 election. Maybe it wouldn’t have been the same massive election but we certainly would have won. The transitions that Kinnock had started to make inside the Labour Party made us electable again. John as a personality was more suited to shifting that last bit of the ground.
Of course he sadly died relatively young. It was really, really a difficult time. You had lost a genuine friend who lived life to the full but was a great brain and, politics being politics, again people were positioning themselves extremely quickly. I was still very much feeling my way then.
It was moving very quickly and it was fairly obvious that some of the people I’d come in with were going to climb the slippery pole very quickly.
It’s never excited me. If somebody said, ‘Would you like to be a minister?’ the answer is ‘yes’ – of course you would. [But] selling your soul in a system has never really excited me. The whole of the political process is overly dependent on patronage and I just feel uncomfortable in that kind of world. Yes, I had good friends who were in strong positions, but I never enjoyed exploiting that patronage relationship.
On a personal level I got on well with both of them [Mr Brown and Mr Blair]. It was clear to me at an early stage who had the edge in terms of the personality you need to be Prime Minister. That’s not at all being critical of Gordon because he’s got some great strengths.
I got stuck into constituency work and doing stuff here [at Westminster] around science policy issues. I was still following a general passion for how science and society meet.
When the 1997 election came around, Mr Miller was as thrilled as anyone else at the prospect of a Labour victory, and astonished when his own majority went from ‘less than 2,000 to 16,000; a massive swing’:
It was extraordinary. It was just unbelievable. The beginning of that Parliament was full of euphoria on our side and bitterness on the Tory side.
Personally [I] carried on pottering around. I spent a year running a campaigning team for John Prescott, under his leadership.
I got on well with Blair [but] I don’t play camp games. I won’t join these silly cliquish groups; maybe that’s a disadvantage but I prefer it that way, personally.
Despite his reluctance to court the leadership, Mr Miller was invited to use his science background to write a paper on intellectual property rights for the then Prime Minister and, in 2001, to take on a ‘roving role’ at the Department for Trade and Industry, advising its ministers on science policy.
He is philosophical about the fact he didn’t become a minister himself, saying simply: ‘It didn’t happen.’
And to some extent it was perhaps a good thing that he was free to concentrate on his constituency. A few months before the 1997 general election, a nineteen-year-old constituent, Louise Woodward, was arrested in Massachusetts, where she had been working as an au pair and convicted of the second-degree murder of a nine-month-old baby boy she had been caring for.
The case would occupy much of Mr Miller’s time before Miss Woodward successfully appealed and had her conviction reduced to involuntary manslaughter. She returned to the UK in June 1998.
He says:
The scale of the Louise Woodward [case] was mad. We had a campaign running globally and we were getting emails of support, technical information about child deaths, money – and abuse.
It was enormously hard work and [I was] being battered by people, some of whom said, ‘You’re interfering in the judiciary of another country, you shouldn’t be doing this, what right have you got to be judge and jury?’
[I said] ‘Hang on a minute, she’s a constituent who deserves representing like any constituent.’
I had done a huge amount of research, including talking to her doctors, talking to her teachers, to satisfy myself that if she had been involved it was out of character, but much, much more likely was that she didn’t commit the crime. I still take that view that she didn’t.
That was an unusual case; really, really hard, but fantastic to be involved with her return.
In 2003, Mr Miller voted in favour of the Iraq invasion. It was a decision he agonised over perhaps less than many of his colleagues:
I voted definitely to go into Iraq. I’m not a warmonger by instinct but I took the view that many of the problems facing the Middle East countries we are historically responsible for creating. Frankly some of the mess that we’re facing reflects that [and] I think we have a responsibility to sort it.
For the remainder of his time in Parliament, Mr Miller concentrated on the areas of policy that interested him, culminating with his election by his peers, in 2010, to the chairmanship of the Commons Science and Technology Committee. It would be the high point of his time as an MP.