Standing Down (9 page)
Authors: Rosa Prince
If he had decided to go down the ministerial route, Mr Swales is not certain his face would have fit in the modern Westminster:
What I have been surprised at is how the place is gradually being taken over by career politicians, most of whom went to just two universities, and they dominate all three main parties. And the people who have got other experience don’t seem to be particularly valued.
I do think that’s sad, because among the 650 people, if we did it right, there is still a great deal of wisdom and experience that I just don’t think is used.
There’s two things you see going on: the cult of youth and also the sort of political correctness.
I think to be honest one of the mistakes all the parties make is that the imbalances are not to do with the usual equality issues, they’re actually more to do with what kind of experiences have people got? What kind of backgrounds do we have here?
For example, only 10 per cent of MPs have any background at all in engineering or science. I think that causes problems. There are very few people who have actually run anything. Those imbalances are far more important than ‘Do we have the right quota of a particular gender?’
It’s not so many years since the chief executive of Asda became a back-bench MP and I just can’t imagine anybody of that level deciding to do that now. Why would you volunteer for the kind of life and scrutiny and the general public opinion that exists around it?
It’s an illustration of how the media and MPs themselves have debased themselves. That’s what makes me sad.
Given the unexpected way in which he ended up in Parliament, it’s perhaps not surprising that Mr Swales hasn’t been bitten by the Westminster bug. He realised early on he would serve only five years and – for the most part – hasn’t wavered in that decision:
Why am I leaving? Well I’m just about to turn sixty-two, my wife’s sixty-three, it’s never been part of our retirement plan to spend years doing a job like this. I can’t half-do a job. I do it full on, which means it’s very time consuming.
It has quite an effect on the family. So I’m retiring really, it’s as simple as that.
I don’t regret one minute of it. I’m pleased we have had a five-year fixed term Parliament because it’s given me a good go at it.
I briefly flirted with standing again, I did. But I think any MP will tell you this – it’s quite a stressful job. I want to come out of this with my health intact as well.
I did it because my area needed a lot of help and I wanted to give myself to it for a few years, and I’ve done that.
I will be making a contribution in various ways in the future. But I won’t miss it in the way that some people seem to do.
Certainly I have always, throughout my life, enjoyed meeting interesting people and you completely overdose on that here. And the chance to do things and make things happen, both nationally and for your community, and I have enjoyed that.
There’s lots I won’t miss. Eight hours a week travelling. Some of the pettiness.
About a year ago, [because of] one of the regular train delays that we have, I tried another route home and I ended up at Doncaster train station at about ten o’clock at night being bothered by a drunk. I remember thinking: ‘How glamorous is this job?’
On a Thursday night I might typically get home at 11 p.m., then I’m on again in the constituency at 9 a.m., not having seen my wife since the Monday morning. There’s that whole relentless nature of it.
I have no regrets. I like to sleep easily every night and look forward to every day, and sleeping easily at nights means I’ve done my best and I honestly think I’ve done that in this job.
It’s been an absolutely fascinating window on life, much broader than I have ever had before.
I’m interested in people and if you’re a student of people this has got to be the best job, because you meet everyone from kings and queens to paupers and everyone in between.
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CV
Born in Leeds; raised in Harrogate; attended Manchester University; became financial and business manager for ICI before setting up his own consultancy firm.
2005: Unsuccessfully fights Redcar
2010: Elected MP for Redcar with largest swing since the Second World War, appointed to Public Accounts Committee
2013: Challenges major companies over their tax payment during PAC session; becomes Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman
2014: Announces he will be standing down at the 2015 general election
2015: Appointed private parliamentary secretary to Vince Cable, Business Secretary
Ian Swales is married to Pat and has three children and five grandchildren.
Tim Yeo,
sixty-nine, was Conservative MP for South Suffolk (1983–2015).
‘Why would you want to leave? Look around, who wouldn’t want to work here? I come to work here even in the recess.’
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For me politics is a bit like a drug. The more you take it, the more you get addicted to it. It gets into your blood.
Mine was a seat that counted on the Friday morning in those days, so I had, therefore, the opportunity to watch the great results in ’83 coming through, a great Conservative landslide, and so I knew everyone else had done very well and I just hoped that was the case [for me]. And of course it was the case, so that was fine.
Obviously it’s an exciting moment for anybody. [For] 99 per cent of the people who come into Parliament, it’s been an ambition they’ve probably cherished for a while, so when it’s actually fulfilled that’s a great moment, of course.
It’s a cross between a club and a school and therefore you get to know people pretty quickly.
I’ve enjoyed the last five years a lot. Parliament is a much more vibrant place than it was. The role of an elected select committee chair [of the Energy and Climate Change Committee] is a very interesting one.
I think if I had been Chancellor of the Exchequer I would have said that was the high point, obviously, but by comparison to what I was doing, to me it was more satisfying.
You’ve slightly more control and you are more independent – ‘I’ve been elected, I can do whatever I like.’
It’s obviously not good [to have resigned from government following an extra-marital affair]. I don’t think there are any redeeming features at all.
There’s no going back from it, there’s no looking back either. I’ve always thought that you can’t change the past no matter how much you’d like to, so don’t lose too much sleep.
I’m leaving partly because my constituents decided they didn’t want me – well, the party decided. And they’re quite entitled to take the decision. If you live by the sword you die by the sword.
It’s past history now. They’ve chosen an excellent candidate who has my full support.
I will certainly be interested on election night because a lot of my friends are standing and I think this is going to be the single most interesting election night of my lifetime – really quite amazing.
I’ll have two TVs, or possibly three, because you need to watch all the channels. We’ll probably have a few people round for drinks, maybe a few ex-colleagues, and we’ll watch what happens.
I’m taking up a post at Sheffield University, which I’m very excited about. They’ve formed an industrial advisory board for what they call Energy 2050, which is a new initiative, so I will chair that advisory board.
One of the great things about Parliament is that it’s a very individual place. There isn’t really a blueprint. Long may that continue. I’m sure there will be changes I’m not even able to anticipate right now.
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the full story
Tim Yeo has always been ambitious, seeing politics as an opportunity to serve at the highest level and influence people’s lives.
At several points in his career he took a calculated look at his options and tried to work out which path would take him closer to power; from backing the Conservatives in the first place – historically they were more likely to be in office and therefore, he reckoned, provided the best chance of making him a minister – to quitting the shadow Cabinet in 2005 to get first dibs on a select committee chairmanship.
It all could have been very different. Had New Labour been in vogue in the early 1970s, when he first became politically active, he believes he could well have joined the other side.
As it was, Ted Heath’s Conservatives proved a more attractive option to a young businessman who had been too busy having fun to get involved in politics at university, but who began to hear the siren call as Britain became bogged down by debt, unemployment and inflation.
Within a short space of time he was fighting to enter Parliament, albeit in the safe Labour seat of Bedwellty, the fiefdom of Neil (later Lord) Kinnock, the future party leader, at the general election of October 1974.
Although he lost, by then he had the bug – a disease he would never recover from:
I got really interested in the 1970s when Britain was in a terrible mess, I mean a really serious mess. I was in business and I got to the point where I almost felt embarrassed when I went abroad sometimes to say where I came from because we were doing so badly.
I thought, ‘Well, instead of just getting cross about this, it might be quite fun to become directly involved in it.’
I then fought an election, because I could see in those days most of the seats went to people who had already fought an election. I fought in south Wales against Neil Kinnock. I thought, ‘This is interesting and I think it could be fun.’
By now smitten with politics, Mr Yeo took one of his tactical decisions, in this case to wait until he could fight a safe seat.
He says:
I would like to have stood [in 1979]. I was applying for seats. It wasn’t that I gave up, I was consciously trying to get a seat, but I didn’t, which was a frustration for me.
I also had some very good advice from Peter Walker [later Lord Walker of Worcester, the former Trade and Industry Secretary]. He said: ‘Don’t ever fight a marginal because you don’t know what the result’s going to be. You can’t make any kind of career plans. Wait until you get a safe seat.’
Which does slightly perhaps make it more difficult, but eventually I got selected for South Suffolk, and that was fine. I must have been lucky on the day, I guess. Then you knew you had a decent run at it.
Having spent so long attempting to get into Parliament, once he was finally elected Mr Yeo’s early years proved somewhat aimless, encapsulated, perhaps, by the events of his first day as an MP.
I had a full-time job in London at the time. So Friday morning I got elected, took the weekend off, went to my office on Monday morning, caught up with a bit of work, and my secretary said after lunch, ‘Tim, aren’t you going to go to Parliament?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t really know what to do.’
I managed to get my car into the car park. When you come out of the members’ car park there’s a sign saying members’ lobby, so I thought, ‘Well, I’ll just follow the sign and see.’ Literally, I was going around going: ‘Oh, look, that’s interesting.’
Some people who’ve worked here, they’re steeped in it, they know their way round, but I didn’t know my way round at all.
The first time I went into the [Commons chamber], I had to pause for a minute to remember which side the government sat on. [I thought]:‘It won’t look very smart if I sit on the wrong side on the first day…’
Mr Yeo found his new home ‘perfectly friendly’, but the fact that he had come in as part of a large intake meant promotion was not immediate.
For the first six months I still had my other job so I was quite focused on that, winding it up, which probably meant that I didn’t focus here quite as quickly as someone else who was not doing anything else at all.
I was perhaps a bit of a slow starter for that reason. Of course I was ambitious. I wanted to move up the ladder, as certainly 95 per cent of the people who come in want to do. As it often does, it took longer than I expected.
Sometimes it’s a matter of chance. I didn’t have any particular patrons that were looking out for me.
Obviously, I wanted to join the government. The vast majority of people do want to do that. Anyhow, eventually it all happened.
Mr Yeo finally climbed the first rung of the ladder in 1988, serving as PPS to Douglas (now Lord) Hurd, the then Home Secretary, and staying with him when he moved to the Foreign Office. ‘PPS jobs depend very much on who they’re for,’ he says. ‘Some of them are frankly pretty much a waste of time. But if you’re working for a very senior Cabinet minister who’s at the thick of all the interesting issues, that’s very interesting indeed.’
In 1992 he became a minister in his own right at the Department of Health, where he was able to put into place perhaps his proudest achievement.
After being approached by a colleague with a constituent who was struggling to bring home a baby girl from China, Mr Yeo overcame Foreign Office reservations in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre to add China to a list of approved countries, meaning adopted children could settle in Britain far more quickly.
He also incurred the wrath of some of his colleagues by paving the way for adoption by gay couples.
Having himself given up a baby girl for adoption as a student, it is perhaps little surprise that the issue was close to his heart. But Mr Yeo said it was the ‘intellectual’ challenge and the capacity to help others that inspired him to act.
Since the first case, around 100 families have taken advantage of the rule change to bring home adopted children from China:
What is lovely is that when this little girl was twenty-one, which would have been about two years ago, I had a letter from her. So I knew that I had made a difference to that family, which nobody else could have done, because of my personal intervention.
Very few decisions you make as a minister have such a direct impact on people’s lives, so it makes me feel really good about that.
A year later he was promoted to minister at the Department of Environment, where he was able to tap into his long-standing interest in ecology.
In his role as Environment and Countryside Minister, Mr Yeo found an outlet for his energy; he felt ‘comfortable’ with life as a minister:
Anyone who does not find it comfortable shouldn’t be doing it, because it’s quite a challenging and demanding role.
For most people the opportunity to have more of an influence than you do as a backbencher is very exciting.
One of the good things about being in government is you have access to anyone you want to talk to. So, long before climate change was a national issue, when very few people knew about it at all, you could go to talk to the scientists, the academics, the think tanks.
I think within about three months of taking on my ministerial job I was one of the half-dozen best informed people in the country, because it was my responsibility and I was really interested in it.
Not a natural Thatcherite, as an MP and then a junior minister Mr Yeo was impressed by the strength of character displayed by Margaret Thatcher and found life under John Major somewhat trickier:
I was very proud of what Margaret Thatcher did to turn the country around from the hideous mess it was in, in 1979. Although I didn’t personally agree with every single decision, I thought that single-handedly she turned the direction of Britain from decline into strength.
That’s a huge achievement and rightly now that’s recognised historically. It’s exciting to be even a small part of that.
The Major years were rather different. It was always going to be difficult to be her successor. He struggled with that, he struggled with an element in the party that disagreed with him very strongly about EU issues. He probably didn’t have the same strength of personality that she had, and that people took advantage of, but I still felt proud to be part of the team, and I think a lot of good things were done.
At the end of 1993, Mr Yeo’s enthusiastic climb up the ministerial ladder came to a juddering halt when a newspaper reported his affair with a Conservative councillor, including the fact that he had fathered a child by her.
The scandal was caught up in the farce that was John Major’s ‘Back to Basics’ campaign, and having once given a speech deploring the prevalence of broken marriages and single mothers in his constituency, Mr Yeo had little choice but to resign.
At the time, both of his children were going through major health crises and the family stuck together.
Did he consider standing down from Parliament?
Fleetingly, I did. But I didn’t think that the setback was terminal, and indeed so it proved.
Everyone said that this was no reflection on your ability as a politician so I thought, ‘Well, it’s worth staying here and fighting’ – that’s always the instinct anyway, and that’s what I did and I’m very glad that I did. It would have been a shame to have left in 1997.
Any crisis of that sort at all is a personal test. I thought, ‘How I react to this will be how a lot of people measure me in the future.’
You have to make a new life for yourself. You still have your constituency, and that work continues. So you’ve got that, and I’ve got a nice home in Suffolk, [as well as] great support from colleagues, who were very sympathetic.
I had a birthday party at my flat not long afterwards and half the Cabinet came along to have a drink. It was an arm round the shoulders.
I had unbelievably good support from my family as well. Without that I think it would have been much, much more difficult to cope with.
Having decided to stick it out in Parliament, Mr Yeo found some redemption following the 1997 election. As his colleagues reeled following the landslide Labour victory, Mr Yeo found satisfaction in helping to rebuild the party, and in getting a fresh opportunity on the front bench:
We lost more than half of our seats in that year, so to be part of the group that remains … there’s a certain excitement about that in a way.
Quite soon I was in the shadow Cabinet so that seemed to me to justify the decision to stay on.