Standing Down (6 page)
Authors: Rosa Prince
Sir Menzies felt that his leadership was further undermined by Gordon Brown’s unexpected decision not to call an election soon after becoming Prime Minister in 2007. As matters came to a head of steam, with even senior members of the party openly discussing whether it was right for him to hang on, he decided to stand down:
I was ready for the election. We thought the election would come in the autumn – so did a lot of people.
One Saturday I spent nine hours in the chair taking the manifesto first through the parliamentary party, then through the federal executive. The helicopters were booked and 75 per cent of the programme was ready. I was ready. And then of course it all came to nothing.
And at that stage it was clear to me, I’m sixty-six, I was quite clear in my own mind. Like the Grand Old Duke of York, having marched us up to the top of the hill and marched us down again, there was no way that Brown could march us up once more and he would have to go to 2010, by which stage I would be sixty-nine.
Whereas if I went in 2007, that would give the party the opportunity to choose a new leader who would then have sufficient time to bed himself or herself into the job.
Mr Campbell admits that the sniping over his age and pressure to stand down was ‘bruising’:
Bruising as you know passes off and bruises disappear. It’s fractures that hurt. I was never fractured. One’s nearest and dearest take it worst.
Also, there was a huge amount of pressure. My view now is you can’t lead a major political party now unless you live in London.
Because what was I trying to do? I found myself at Stansted Airport on Saturday nights at seven o’clock, flying home only to leave at four o’clock the following day not even having had the chance to get to Fife. It is remorseless, the pressure. It really is unremitting. And if you’re the leader of a small party you’re expected to be an expert in tax, and welfare and defence and foreign policy and all of that. So it was a real trial of strength and stamina.
Sir Menzies has put his final years in Parliament to good use, serving with distinction on the Intelligence and Security Committee and Foreign Affairs Committee. He now feels the time is right to retire – from the Commons if not from public life altogether, with a seat in the House of Lords almost certainly on the horizon.
He says: ‘I’ll miss this, obviously. I gave up my sporting career, went on to something else. I gave up the law, came to this. I’ve always been very good at moving on. I’ve had three lives, really. Sport, law and politics. So I have no complaints.’
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CV
Raised in Glasgow; attended Glasgow University; became an international athlete and barrister.
1974: Unsuccessfully fights Greenock & Port Glasgow at February and October elections.
1975: Becomes chairman of the Scottish Labour Party
1979: Unsuccessfully fights East Fife
1983: Unsuccessfully fights North East Fife
1987: Elected MP for North East Fife; becomes arts spokesman; appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire
1988: Becomes defence spokesman
1994: Becomes foreign affairs spokesman
2003: Becomes deputy party leader; helps lead opposition to war in Iraq
2006: Becomes Liberal Democrat leader
2007: Stands down as Liberal Democrat leader
2008: Joins Foreign Affairs Committee
2010: Joins Intelligence and Security Committee
2013: Announces he will stand down at the 2015 general election
Sir Menzies Campbell is married to Elspeth and has one stepson, James.
David Willetts,
fifty-nine, was Conservative MP for Havant (1992–2015).
‘I turned up on my first day at the Commons and they thought I was there to fix the heating.’
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It really came from working for Margaret Thatcher. I thought: ‘I don’t want my entire career to be as a backroom boy, as an adviser. This is about winning an argument, helping, changing the way people think about problems facing the country.’
They asked me a peculiar question: ‘Have you come here to fix the central heating?’ Maybe I was there a bit early – I was a bit keen. They weren’t totally convinced I was a new MP. I tried to explain I was and they let me in.
I definitely found being a minister second time around much more rewarding, partly because you were not seduced by the adrenaline rush of that day’s news story. When you come back in your fifties it’s easier to see things in proportion.
So I guess I would have to say having a proper long stint in an area that you love; you can’t ask for much more in politics.
The long years in opposition did get incredibly frustrating. You want to pass on something better to the next generation, it’s a very human emotion, but you also feel an obligation to pass on the Conservatives and Conservatism in some sort of shape, and there were times when you thought: ‘We are so comprehensively messing up.’
I am now fifty-nine. I think that if I leave the Commons now I have a decade where I can do some different things and some new things.
And also to be honest I think that the 2010 intake is a fantastically high quality intake, the calibre of people coming forward as candidates is high, you have to give the next generation their head. I’ve done it for over twenty years and I’m now ready to be released back into the community.
Yes, a bit, I think, not much though. Because I’ve been here for twenty-two years, and also I’ve been standing down since last July, there’s been a sort of a slow farewell tour and people have been very kind. It’s less traumatic than to fight a seat and lose it.
I’ve become the visiting professor at King’s, I’ll stay involved I hope in policy. I’ll be writing – I’m writing a book on universities before I forget it all. There is not a good recent book that explains what they stand for, how they work.
Enjoy what you’re doing, don’t think of everything as a stepping stone to something else, throw yourself heart and soul into the work you’re doing and don’t try to understand the whips. Half the time you can’t quite work out when they ask you to do something if you’re being punished or rewarded. Don’t let that trouble you. We’re all in the same boat.
And keep the constituency properly informed. Maintain a relationship of trust with your association and councillors by taking them into your confidence. And in return … say in public we will absolutely support each other.
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the full story
David Willetts was a bright schoolboy living in Birmingham in the 1970s when he first became aware of politics.
With the country gripped by power cuts and strikes, his response, as would so often be the case in his adult career, was to take a cool look at the problem and attempt to work out the logical solution. To the young Mr Willetts, that solution appeared to be the Conservative Party.
By university he was an economics junkie and an avid free marketeer. After sitting the civil service exams he found himself at the age of twenty-two working at Her Majesty’s Treasury.
Of his early political awakening he says:
This was the ’70s, this was when trade unions were calling strikes all the time. I did some of my work for A levels and my revision for finals to candlelight because there were power cuts.
I worked briefly in the long summer break before I went to university in a factory in Birmingham, and [we were] called out on strike. So this was Britain not working with the conventional solution of an incomes and prices policy, and it was at the University at Oxford that I discovered free-market economics, and ripped with excitement the covers off the Institute of Economic Affairs pamphlets.
I was a free marketeer but I wasn’t necessarily sure I was going to go into parliamentary politics. I was interested in policy, so I did the exam [and] got into the civil service.
I began my career as a civil servant in the Treasury. My wife thought she might be marrying a career Treasury official. I didn’t know.
Mr Willetts served first under Denis Healey, the Labour Chancellor, and then the Conservative Nigel Lawson, widely seen as two of the most distinguished occupants of the post. Then, in 1984, his world changed forever:
I was seconded from the Treasury to work at No. 10 and worked there for Margaret Thatcher.
It was working for her that really gave me the political bug because you could see how political decisions make a difference. What she was so good at was linking the specifics and the general. It was a bit like one of those film shots where you start with a close-up and then the camera zooms out.
Talking to her, however specific an issue, she’d suddenly place it, get to the issue of principle that lay behind a specific question, make you take a step back and see what was clearly the right thing to do.
She was a very good person to work for, incredibly demanding. She didn’t mind a good argument, she actually believed sometimes in truth through argument.
I discovered she would test you on your knowledge of the facts. For the first few meetings she’d fire questions at me: what is the value of the contributory unemployment benefit? And how many years of employment do you need to have before you’re entitled to it? What exactly is the rate of the basic state pension?
She was very wary of people offering grandiose strategic advice when she didn’t think they were up to the nuts and bolts. So you won her confidence by showing you understood all the nuts and bolts, and that was incredibly good training. I learnt a lot in those three years at No. 10.
When the time came for Mr Willetts to return to the Treasury, he decided to quit the civil service and enter politics in his own right.
At the end of 1986 he became head of the Centre for Policy Studies, Baroness Thatcher’s own think tank, returning from time to time to brief the Prime Minister ahead of big events – including the 1987 general election.
He says:
I spent the ’87 election absolutely at the heart of the election campaign, often briefing her for special interviews and doing a bit of speech-writing.
Coming back for the election campaign was very exciting. Although now the record shows we won a landslide victory in ’87, it didn’t feel like that at the time.
People were very edgy; there were all the shenanigans with the famous ‘Wobbly Thursday’.
Mr Willetts was one of the first of his contemporaries to be selected for a parliamentary seat, landing the plum spot of Havant in Hampshire.
From then on, election to parliament seemed more or less assured. The contrast from, as he says, ‘seeing it from the centre in ’87, fighting it in your own constituency in ’92’ was significant:
In your very first election you absolutely have to concentrate on your own constituency. You always work on the basis that it’s a marginal seat but I was optimistic about my chances of getting in.
It was very high pressure because our first child was born in ’88 and our second child was born in February ’92 so we literally had a newborn baby. My daughter was in a pushchair.
They enjoyed it all. In all the inevitable stresses and strains I hope my family thought I was doing something worthwhile. I’ve always felt it was.
My most vivid recollection of election night was [that] they had set up a stage set in the recreation centre … and the mayor, who was quite a short guy, took too many steps back and fell off the back of the stage. When he stood up you could just see his head, and he felt slightly that he had fluffed his big moment.
Arriving at Parliament, Mr Willetts quickly settled in and began to make friends.
He says:
I remember the talking to we had from the Deputy Chief Whip when we arrived. He said when it comes to PMQs, we should remember the wise comment of W. G. Grace [as he faced] a rather ambitious young bowler who was bowling flashy balls.
At the end of an over Grace took him aside and said: ‘Sir, the spectators are here to see me bat, not watch you bowl.’
Within a few months, tragedy struck with the sudden deaths of Judith Chaplin, MP for Newbury and a friend from the Treasury, during a routine operation, and Stephen Milligan, who was found strangled, apparently while taking part in auto-erotic sex. ‘People forget now,’ he says, ‘[but] for me it was a traumatic feature of that first parliament. To have two of your closest friends die during a parliament was very distressing.’
Within two years, Mr Willetts’s abilities had been recognised and he was invited to join first the Whips’ Office, and then, in 1995, the Cabinet Office.
He admits he was ambitious to become a minister:
I certainly wanted to do things. Although you can have an interest from the back benches, and increasingly through select committees, if you want to do things, being a minister and serving in a government is the best way of getting things done, so yeah, I did want to do it.
I was in the Cabinet Office in a kind of classic coordinating role. It was the endless question: how do you link up the decisions that are taken at the centre on an almost hourly basis with the wider machine?
John Major [then Prime Minister] had been frustrated that he couldn’t get the machine to work the way he wanted.
The idea was that there was this almost Cabinet committee that I sat on, sometimes chaired by the PM, more often chaired by Michael Heseltine [then Deputy Prime Minister], with all the No. 10 staff, and it worked out how to handle the issues of the day and how to forward look over the coming days.
There was often some kind of crisis, because this was after we’d left the ERM [the Exchange Rate Mechanism that Britain was forced out of on Black Wednesday in September 1992] and the government was often on the defensive.
My job was to go out after the meeting and transmit our views about how government policy should be communicated.
From his vantage point in the Cabinet Office, Mr Willetts was able to see a politician at the top of his game:
I became a great admirer of Hezza [Lord Heseltine]. The great thing about Hezza and that was something else I’d learned for the future, was that it didn’t matter how big a mess you were in, and how terrible the headlines were, Hezza never wasted time on recriminations. He would start each morning [with]: ‘We are where we are, what do we do now?’ It was very impressive.
Having had the opportunity of being the private secretary to Nigel [Lawson], and seeing him with his fantastic intellect as a Treasury minister, working for Margaret Thatcher, then John Major, and then for Hezza as a senior minister at the Cabinet Office, I was really lucky.
In contrast to Lord Heseltine, Sir John appeared at times to be struggling:
He was a lovely man; incredibly fair-minded, incredibly courteous and considerate.
When you heard John in private, or speaking informally, you got a very genuine personal kind of Conservatism, which was broadly in the one-nation tradition. [He] completely believed in spreading opportunity and genuinely had pride in and loved the institutions that held the country together.
Partly because of powerful gravitational forces, rebels in the Conservative Party [and] pressures from the media, sometimes I didn’t think the real John Major, the real political philosophy, was located in the set-piece stuff.
As the parliament drew to a close, Mr Willetts was beginning to get restless:
To be honest you have the daily adrenaline rush of dealing with that day’s crisis [but] it’s not completely clear at the end of the week whether you’ve done anything.
I’d worked in the Treasury, I’d worked in No. 10, I’d worked in the Whips’ Office, I’d worked in the Cabinet Office, and it left me with, I hope, a reasonable understanding of how the centre worked, but also an intense desire to do something in real departments.
He was also somewhat alarmed at the nickname he had picked up: ‘Two Brains’ – a moniker that he would never shake off and that he feels was both inaccurate and, in the long run, somewhat damaging:
Of course in the Conservative Party it was a complete disaster having a nickname like that. The implication is: dangerous intellectual, out of touch with the world.
I was interested in ideas, partly from the experience of working with Margaret Thatcher, how you get from the big picture to practicality. But it meant I guess a lot of people typecast you as out of touch with reality.
I actually don’t think that. By and large what I say based on the evidence of my beliefs is sort of dangerous and eccentric stuff; I think I’m talking common sense, mainstream, modern Conservatism.
And then it all came crashing down when a note he had written during his time in the Whips’ Office, in which he appeared to be attempting to see off an investigation into Neil Hamilton, a fellow Tory MP, over cash-for-questions allegations, came to light.
He quit the government. Although it proved to be a blip in his career, that was not clear at the time. But within weeks Mr Willetts was back in favour and helping to draw up the manifesto ahead of the 1997 general election, a task that would prove something of a poisoned chalice: