Standing Down (5 page)
Authors: Rosa Prince
I was ready to go. It was a fantastic job, being in the Home Office, but it was a very big job. I thought that I was going to take [John] Prescott’s job, to do planning, local government, transport and so on. And then when I got in to see Tony finally on election day in 2001 he said … ‘I’m making you Foreign Secretary.’ I said: ‘Oh f***.’
Ironically, given what was to come on 11 September, Mr Straw found his first few months in office ‘terribly quiet’. When 9/11 happened he was in his office chatting to Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, about a deployment of troops to Macedonia. Within two years he had approved the despatch of troops to Afghanistan and, in a controversy that continues to this day, Iraq:
By that stage I’d been in the shadow Cabinet for ten years, I’d been in Cabinet for over four. You’d been tested. Not obviously on the same scale, but in the Home Office there had been crises, there had always been crises, and so you get on with it.
The troop deployment to Afghanistan at that stage was a limited one. Strangely the environment appeared fairly benign, initially.
The major deployment, where we suffered really serious loss of life, came in ’05, ’06, in the south in Helmand, but at that stage it was limited. And it was a pretty straightforward decision to make to send the troops into Afghanistan.
There was no issue of legality. It was a war of necessity. Iraq was infinitely more difficult because it was a war of choice.
As Foreign Secretary, it was Mr Straw’s role to present legislation approving the decision to go to war to a reluctant House of Commons. He fought hard to get United Nations approval, and even in early 2003 hoped that war could be avoided. When the time came to decide whether Britain should join America in a unilateral invasion, he was fully aware of the weight of the responsibility that rested on his shoulders. ‘It was by far and away the most important decision I have ever taken,’ he says, made even more agonising by the fact that his wife and children opposed the war.
Although he failed to win over much of the country, he was at the time genuinely convinced that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, a belief he now concedes was incorrect.
As he awaits the verdict of the Chilcot Inquiry into his role in the drama that was the decision to go to war in Iraq, he is philosophical about the likelihood that he will be blamed, and knows he is still a hate figure to some:
I made the decision I made, which was to support the war, and I have to take the responsibilities that flow from that. I think it’s pathetic to see people wringing their hands and pretending they weren’t there. Either you’re there or you’re not. If you make a decision of that magnitude and the consequences were as adverse as they have been, you have to accept your responsibility; nothing else to do.
The question I sometimes face is: If you knew then what you know now, would you have made the same decision? Well, no, of course I wouldn’t, but that’s true of a myriad of decisions. You don’t have that luxury when you’re a decision-maker. You make decisions looking forward not back.
What I sought to do in my evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry was to try to explain why I came to the decisions I came to in what were circumstances of very great uncertainty about the future.
The deceiver was Saddam Hussein. Obviously the whole prism through which Iraq is seen would have been completely different had a great onslaught of WMD been found, but, anyway, it wasn’t to be.
I knew that, had I taken a contrary view, I could have stopped the UK’s involvement. There’s no doubt about it. I [could have] said in early March to Tony: ‘Look here, Tony, I’m not going to support this’ – and, after all, I’d seen everything – ‘I’m not going to support this, you’ve got to decide; if you go ahead with this I’ll resign.’
If I’d resigned, the government wouldn’t have got a majority and it may have brought the government down. I’m not being precious about that, it’s just a reality. So I was aware of that responsibility.
With the benefit of hindsight I wish we had known what we subsequently discovered, but that’s hypothetical. I knew what I was doing. I made a decision, I’m accountable for it.
People will shout at me on the Tube sometimes, with less frequency these days, and say I’m a war criminal. It’s much less pleasant for my family, particularly given the fact that my wife and both children opposed the war.
They were amazingly loyal actually. But it was a very difficult period.
It has been five years since Mr Straw gave evidence to Chilcot, and, like everyone else, he is baffled by the delay. ‘It’s just very unfortunate it’s been going on as long as it has been. It’s not fair on the bereaved relatives of people who were killed there for it to have dragged on this long.’
In 2006, Mr Straw was taken out of the Foreign Office and despatched to be Leader of the House. He was not unhappy with the move, but was annoyed at the circumstances: Mr Blair had promised he would give him notice if he planned to move him, but failed to live up to the pledge.
At the time there were rumours that he was shifted at the behest of US President George Bush. He thinks it was more likely an off-the-record briefing he gave to a newspaper suggesting it was time to negotiate with Hamas, which appeared ‘with his fingerprints on it’, that had irritated Downing Street:
Tony, in fairness to him … said to me two weeks afterwards he had made a mistake.
We had got across each other in 2006, actually not over Iraq, interestingly, but over Middle East politics, over Iran and Israel and Palestine.
I’ve no evidence whatsoever it was to do with George Bush. Tony and I were simply ending up at a different place. At the time maybe each of us could have avoided that. I didn’t like being forced out in those circumstances, and I was doing the job fine.
If I had stayed on I think that I could have stayed him going right out on a limb over the war in south Lebanon, which is the reason the party said: ‘It’s time for you to go.’
[But] I enjoyed being Leader of the House, it’s a very different job. If you like this place it’s a good job.
In a symbolic move, having done the same job for Blair, Mr Straw ran Gordon Brown’s campaign for leadership in 2007 and served as his Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor.
The Brown Cabinet was ‘different’, he says. ‘It was OK, but Gordon’s problem was a lack of grip of decision-making.’
In the run-up to the 2010 election he told Mr Brown he wanted to return to the back benches, although he was ‘never’ tempted to stand down.
In fact, his determination to remain an MP continued for another few years. In 2013, when his constituency party staff calculated that ‘that week I’d been the longest-standing MP for Blackburn ever in the history of the world’, he firmly told his local paper that he would be a candidate at the 2015 election.
However, by the end of the year, the formal deadline for announcing his candidacy under Labour Party rules (which he points out few follow), he had a change of heart.
Around the time of his decision, his son and daughter both had children, grandsons born within two days of each other, and with whom he is looking forward to spending more time.
He hopes, however, that there will be a Straw in the Commons after the election. His son is standing for Parliament in Rossendale & Darwen, a Conservative-held seat that was in Labour hands until 2010. He says he is ‘of course’ happy that Will is following in his footsteps:
It’s great [but] there are no advantages in this respect in British politics in being the son of the father, there are many disadvantages – all this rubbish about red princes.
What I want for my children is that they should be personally fulfilled and fulfilled in their careers if that’s what they want.
***
CV
Born in Essex; attended Leeds University; became president of the National Union of Students, then a barrister who served on Islington Council and then adviser to minister Barbara Castle.
1974: Unsuccessfully fights Tonbridge & Malling
1979: Elected MP for Blackburn
1987: Becomes education spokesman
1992: Becomes shadow Environment Secretary
1994: Runs Tony Blair’s leadership campaign and becomes shadow Home Secretary
1997: Becomes Home Secretary
2001: Becomes Foreign Secretary
2003: Leads government on vote taking Britain into war in Iraq
2006: Becomes Leader of the House
2007: Runs Gordon Brown’s leadership campaign; becomes Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor
2010: Gives evidence at Chilcot Inquiry; returns to back benches
2013: Announces he will stand down at 2015 general election
Sir Menzies Campbell,
seventy-three, was Liberal Democrat MP for North East Fife (1987–2015).
‘PMQs should be abolished. It’s a bear pit; my worst time in Parliament.’
***
I have a nasty competitive streak. You wouldn’t lose your race, you wouldn’t lose your [legal] case, and you wouldn’t lose your seat. All the things I’ve ever done have had a competitive edge, a competitive element.
I had no sense of the place at all. I was overawed. I was quite nervous about it. There was no induction in the way that there is now.
If I’m asked to look back, I think the way in which we led the opposition to the Iraq War.
I formed the view very early on that it was illegal because it was clear whatever they said in public, regime change was the objective, which is contrary to international law. And that was the mood of the country of course: nearly a million people marched through London, millions around the country.
We looked serious. We took a risk. All it took was a patrol of American marines to turn a corner somewhere and find two trailers full of anthrax and it would have been all over, game, set and match.
I didn’t enjoy PMQs. There’s no secret. It was a real bear garden.
They smell blood in the House of Commons so if you make a mistake or two they’re trying to get you, especially if you make five or six, they’re trying to get you.
One of the reasons I decided to step down now is [that] I’ve had a full Parliament and I would certainly not like to be someone hanging on in his anecdotage.
I’ve done twenty-eight years. MPs always know when it’s time to stand down. They don’t always admit it to themselves.
[I will feel] relieved because I always got very, very nervous. My wife was very good at saying: ‘Come on, relax.’
I’m going to do a bit of legal work. I’ve been doing a little advisory work. Nothing very much.
***
the full story
As Sir Menzies ‘Ming’ Campbell says, he has had three careers: the first as an international athlete – he competed for the United Kingdom at the 1968 Olympics Games – the second as a successful barrister and only from his forties as a politician.
His interest in Liberal politics came as ‘a rebellion’ against his Labour-supporting parents, after reading John Stuart Mill’s
On Liberty
. It was furthered at the highly political Glasgow University, where he was president of the Liberal Club and Union, and by a timely visit from Joe (later Lord) Grimmond, the great leader of the Liberal Party.
But politics largely played a back seat to the law until 1970, when he was approached by David (now Lord) Steel, the future party leader, over their shared interest in the anti-apartheid movement.
Within months Lord Steel was telling Sir Menzies’s wife-to-be Elspeth:
‘We must get Ming to stand for Parliament.’
To which she said: ‘Well, I’m not so sure about that.’
There was an election in 1970, in fact we got married in the course of the election. One constituency, I don’t quite know why, popped up during the engagement and pre-marriage time saying would I be interested in standing, and I said ‘No, no, I am engaged and I’m getting married quite soon.’
In 1974 the same constituency, called Greenock & Port Glasgow in the west of Scotland, came back and said, ‘Would you stand?’
I looked at my wife and she said, ‘Why not?’ So we went off to Greenock. We fought it twice in ’74.
It was Labour, Labour, Labour; really tough. We used to do these lunchtime meetings at the shipyard gates and we would have a car and a loudspeaker and we would put my wife in the car and not let her out because the language was ferocious.
But it was a great way to cut my teeth. We weren’t expected to win but we did reasonably well.
There’s no family money in my family. I had to earn to live and I really was concentrating on my practice at the Bar [so it was a] toe in the water and helping the party.
I went off to speak at what was then the East Fife Liberals, and they came back to me about three months later and said: ‘Would you ever be our candidate?’
I said no, because I’m concentrating on my [legal] practice. Enter David Steele; David’s sister-in-law was a prominent member of the party in Fife.
He said to me: ‘Why don’t you do it? Try it.’ So I tried it. In ’74 we came fourth, [in 1979] I moved us up from fourth to second. The Conservative majority was 10,000, it was a dyed-in-the-wool Tory seat, quite feudal actually.
When he first set out, Sir Menzies did not expect to become an MP, and was fully content with that. But then his competitive instinct set in. Not for nothing had he once been known as ‘the fastest white man alive’.
In 1983 he reduced the Conservative majority to 2,000, after which he seriously considered dropping out of politics altogether, before 1987 proved third time lucky. ‘Having committed myself, I really did think I wanted to see it through,’ he says. ‘It was my last throw. If it hadn’t been third time lucky that would have been it and I would have just concentrated on the Bar. We won by 1,447. Hard-fought. Very hard-fought.’
Sir Menzies describes himself as an ‘amateur’ with little experience of Parliament. As a member of one of the smaller parties, there were few colleagues to help him settle in and, in an age before the televising of Parliament, he had little idea of what went on:
There were people on both sides who had fought in the war. There were successful Conservative businessmen who had made their pile and come in. There were the Knights of the Shire who were not meant to be very intellectual but nonetheless there was a great deal of common sense, and on the Labour side there were a lot of trade unionists who’d come up the hard way. They had been down the pit or in the iron or steel works, heavy industry, motorcars.
So the atmosphere was much more collegiate in a way. Whereas now, the prize, even for Liberal Democrats, is to be a minister.
The party itself was ‘dysfunctional’, the eighteen Liberal MPs were still in a loose alliance with the SDP but the relationship had become strained.
Sir Menzies decided to keep a low profile, maintaining his legal practice and spending much of his time in Scotland. It was a decision he acknowledges might be frowned on today. ‘Recent events show us what people think about second jobs,’ he says. ‘I went on doing practice until fairly recently. When I was the leader I gave up, obviously that was pretty difficult, but I went back to practice once I stopped being leader.’
In the days when the Liberals could only dream of a coalition, Sir Menzies knew a ministerial life was unlikely to be his – something he concedes was a ‘frustration’.
Instead, he concentrated on becoming well known within his party, specifically in the role as a spokesman on arts issues.
He admits he wanted to rise:
It’s a competitive place. The theory was: the more you were noticed, the more the party was noticed.
At the risk of sounding portentous, I was ambitious for liberalism, for Liberal ideas. We [then] had the car crash of the amalgamation [between the Liberals and the SDP], which went very, very badly adrift. I was very angry. We got to the point where we could have done it and I was really very angry with those who I believed to be responsible for the thing coming to pieces. And it was very damaging, no doubt.
The fractious amalgamation of the two parties led to the downfall of Lord Steel and the arrival as leader of Paddy (now Lord) Ashdown.
After a slightly shaky start to their relationship – ‘I remember we had a set-to one night about MPs’ salaries, whether they should be increased or not increased. He was rather hair shirt about it and I was less so’ – Sir Ming became close to the new leader and his public profile began to rise as he climbed to a more senior position in the party:
I supported him in the leadership campaign. To begin with he wanted me to do the Treasury brief – I was a bit nervous about that.
There was a bit of a struggle for places and Ashdown came to me and said, ‘Look, there’s someone that really wants to do this, and I’d quite like to get everyone involved and engaged.’
And he said, ‘What else would you like to do?’
And I said, ‘Defence.’
The defence brief was considered a ‘hot potato’ but Sir Menzies managed to win over the party conference – which sets Liberal Democrat policy – to support an independent nuclear deterrent.
His profile rose still further as the party made the running in opposing the First Gulf War of 1990–91, often performing better than the official opposition in the form of Labour.
The two parties joined forces however a few years later as, along with Edinburgh neighbour Robin Cook, then the shadow Foreign Secretary, Sir Menzies helped to put John Major’s government on the rack over the 1996 Scott Inquiry into sales of arms to Iraq.
Yet in the run-up to the 1997 election, with no prospect of becoming a minister, or, he believed, leader of his party, Sir Menzies began to think seriously about returning to the law:
I thought Ashdown was going to be indestructible. He thinks he’s indestructible as well.
I was able to go on running my [legal] practice. The truth is I expected to do a couple of parliaments, maybe ten years, twelve years, and then just go back full time to the Bar, because my ambition was to be a Court of Session judge.
In 1996, a year before the election, I was offered the High Court bench in Scotland. I was minded to take it.
Sir Menzies took his dilemma to Lord Jenkins, the former leader of the SDP and Labour Cabinet minister, who advised him that should Tony Blair, the Labour leader, need the support of the Liberal Democrats to form a government, there was ‘a reasonable chance’ he might be made a Cabinet minister:
So there’s this fly dangling in front of me – I decided to turn down the bench. It was quite a big decision because it [would have] meant going back to my legal roots and a different kind of life; more secluded, more private – cloistered to some extent.
Everyone thought Blair might win by twenty-five [votes], in the end he won by 160, so that was Roy Jenkins’s prediction and my ambition out of the window.
What happened along the way was it just got in the blood. Politics got in the blood.
My pension as a retired judge would be quite a lot more than my salary as an MP. [But] as my wife constantly says as she eyes up the shop windows of Harvey Nichols, ‘Money’s not everything.’
She’s right because I really have had the most extraordinary time. Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, I’ve seen five Prime Ministers come and go in different ways.
Two years later, much to Sir Menzies’s surprise, the ‘indestructible’ Lord Ashdown did stand down. He has joked that he regretted not challenging for the leadership ‘for about ten minutes of every day’, but at the time he was not convinced he could beat Charles Kennedy, the eventual winner:
I thought Kennedy would win outright. I was still undecided if I really was going to go on in the House of Commons. I’d seen at close quarters the impact it had on the lives of Paddy Ashdown and David Steel, and that really was considerable.
[I] did get on very well [with Mr Kennedy]. I was a really great admirer of his; wonderful political touch.
In 2003 came what Sir Menzies considers his finest hour in the Commons, when he and Mr Kennedy led the opposition to the war in Iraq:
We had a lot of sleepless nights. The principal stand I took, because of my legal interest and because of my interest in international law, was: this is illegal. It can’t and shouldn’t be done.
We were all influenced by forty-five minutes to Armageddon and things of that kind. There just seemed to me to be so many doubts about it.
Although Mr Kennedy was a popular leader, his heavy drinking took a toll and in 2007 he was forced out. This time Sir Menzies would not miss his chance.
A point came at which it became clear that it was in the best interest of Charles and in the party’s interest that he should stand down:
There were people who were saying to me: ‘Look, if he goes’ – some of them were saying ‘when he goes’ – ‘will you do it?’
I was a bit nervous because of [my] age. I knew it was going to be an issue. I was sixty-five. But it seemed to me that I was capable of doing it in a rather different way.
I was leading the party that Asquith had led. So one couldn’t avoid feeling a certain sense of satisfaction about that.
There were three things. One was to restore stability. Second was to make the party professional because it was pretty slack. The third was to prepare for a general election. Because it was clear that at some stage Blair was going to step down. He’d won three elections in succession, he was going to step down and we were going to have to prepare for an election.
Sir Menzies was right to be concerned that his age would be a factor in how he was perceived as party leader.
In contrast to the youthful Tony Blair and David Cameron, the bespectacled Sir Menzies appeared somewhat elderly, particularly in their set-piece encounters at PMQs.
From the start, the weekly bouts were an ordeal, quickly becoming the worst experience of his twenty-eight years in the Commons. He now believes it should be abandoned – a view that is increasingly shared by those who deplore its ‘yah–boo’,
Punch & Judy
nature:
Not being able, in the beginning, to carry off PMQs, I disliked that. I was disappointed that I wasn’t able to master that immediately.
What people forget is that if you’re Leader of the Opposition at PMQs, at least half the House is behind you. If you are the leader of the third party, then five-sixths of the House is against you.
We worked on it. There’s a public affairs company that has a mock studio in its basement and we went off and we practised. And I practised and practised and practised.
This may seem totally unimportant but if you look very closely at [Ed] Miliband, there are the papers on the despatch box and he often looks at them, down and up, down and up, down and up. The Liberal Democrat leader, you stand up with your papers in your hand. You’ve nothing to hold on [to], you’ve no prop.
And my problem was that I need glasses, so I could only look down with my glasses on. If you look down with your glasses on, the camera shot is … impossible.
You take the spectacles off and you use them as a prop to make the point. But you have of course to have learned your lines. And there’s a problem [in that] if you’ve learned your lines too much then you become too concentrated on the lines and less on what you’ve got to say.
In the end I think we got it right, but it took a little while.