Saved by a smooth coronation
Leadership elections are by definition divisive, and parties prefer seamless transfers of power, as the Conservative Party achieved in 2003
As I wrote in a recent essay on the 1922 Committee, the Conservative Party only began systematically electing its leaders in 1965, and it wasn’t till 2001 that the contest was opened to the ordinary members of the party rather than just its MPs; by contrast, the Labour Party had first balloted its parliamentarians in 1922, and for the 1983 leadership election when Neil Kinnock replaced Michael Foot, the task fell to a newly created electoral college representing affiliated trades unions, constituency Labour parties and the parliamentary party.
However leaders are chosen, pitting two or more politicians from the same party against each other, striving for an office which may be the lifelong ambition of all the contenders, is always a divisive affair, as it is almost impossible to burnish one’s own credentials with out at least by implication highlighting the shortcomings of one’s opponents. Most contests begin with declarations of generosity and goodwill, promises of positive campaigning and an abjuration of dirty tricks, but politics is a rough game, and even if the candidates themselves remain dignified and fair-minded, there are always acolytes who are willing to go low.
In terms of party unity and harmony, the ideal solution to these dangers is to have an election in which there is only one candidate. By this method the party can spend a modest amount of time praising the qualities of its leader-to-be, but can then proceed to a stately and orderly coronation, without any of the messiness and rancour of a gloves-off grapple. This requires, of course, the party to be more or less agreed on a single figure who is overwhelmingly equipped to lead the party, or else in such dire political straits that there is general feeling that a result much be achieved quickly and tidily so that the party can move on.
In the Conservative Party, this elusive unity of spirit has only seized Members of Parliament twice. In 2016, after David Cameron resigned in the wake of losing the referendum on Brexit, there was a partial competition. Five candidates put themselves forward in an initial ballot of MPs: Theresa May, the home secretary; Dr Liam Fox, a former defence secretary who had been on the backbenches; work and pensions secretary Stephen Crabb; lord chancellor and justice secretary Michael Gove; and, somewhat surprisingly, the junior energy and climate change minister Andrea Leadsom.
Many had expected the former mayor of London, Boris Johnson, to seek the leadership, and he had initially been supported by Gove. But a bare three hours before nominations closed, Gove announced that he could not support Johnson after all, judging that the irrepressible Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip could not “provide the leadership or build the team for the task ahead”, and that he was instead offering himself as a candidate. Johnson saw the damage Gove’s decision had done, and withdrew from the contest.
The first ballot, on 5 July, saw May, the obvious if uninspiring frontrunner, poll 165 votes, comfortably ahead of the unexpectedly strong Andrea Leadsom, who won 66 votes. Gove, to the disappointment of many, was third with 48, Stephen Crabb trailed on 34 and, again surprisingly, Fox, despite his long experience and service in cabinet, came last with only 16 votes; he was therefore eliminated. Crabb’s candidacy was suddenly threatened by allegations that he had sent sexually suggestive text messages to a 19-year-old female parliamentary candidate, and he withdrew, though in truth his chance of becoming prime minister had never been strong.
A second ballot was held two days later, on 7 July. May’s vote swelled to 199, while Leadsom moved up to 84. Gove in fact lost the support of two colleagues, falling to 46 votes, and was eliminated. This was the end of the involvement of Conservative MPs. having narrowed the field to two candidates, it was now for the party membership at large to choose between Theresa May and Andrea Leadsom. It seemed an uneven contest, but the ordinary members were generally thought to sit to the right of the MPs, and some felt the Eurosceptic Leadsom might pull off an upset against the Remainer May. But some Members were fiercely opposed to the idea of a Leadsom leadership, and the candidate had made some questionable decisions when promoting herself against May. On 11 July, she announced that she would not pursue the leadership any further, leaving May as the only candidate to be anointed leader of the Conservative Party. Two days later, May went to Buckingham Palace and kissed hands as prime minister.
The contest had not been without its sparks. Gove’s decision to withdraw support from Johnson had been seen by some as a betrayal, cementing in many minds (unfairly in my view, for what it’s worth) an image of the clever Aberdonian intellectual as an inveterate and untrustworthy plotter, always consumed by ambition. There was no question that Johnson wanted the premiership; the success of his Eton and Oxford contemporary David Cameron ate away at Boris, whose earliest recorded ambition was to be “world king” and whose upper second-class degree from Balliol nagged at him, given that Cameron, at Brasenose, had been awarded a first. And Leadsom’s attempt, clumsy if perhaps not malicious, to display her family life in contrast to May’s childlessness had left a sour taste in many mouths. It was, some colleagues felt, just not a subject for self-promotion. It was therefore a desire to put out these choking fires that led to the curtailing of the process and May’s unopposed success.
The leadership crisis of 2003 was a very different business. In September 2001, with the party membership involved for the first time, the parliamentary party had presented a choice between Kenneth Clarke, only 61 years old but massively experienced and well liked by the public, and the relatively anonymous Iain Duncan Smith, who had only been an MP since 1992 and had never held ministerial office, although by 2001 he was shadow defence secretary. Clarke had led the last ballot of MPs, with 59 votes, while Duncan Smith had won 54 votes and had pipped Michael Portillo, the shadow chancellor, by only one vote.
The elimination of Portillo was a surprise. Once the Thatcherite dauphin of the 1990s, he had lost his seat in the Labour landslide of 1997 amid gleeful public rejoicing, the catchphrase of that contest becoming “Were you still up for Portillo?” He had disappeared from view and searched his soul, before returning to the House in November 1999 for Kensington and Chelsea, a more centrist, modernising, socially liberal figure. The greater surprise, however, was that the result of the ballot of members returned, Duncan Smith beating Clarke by 61% to 39%.
2001 was the greatest demonstration until that point that the party at large was considerably more Eurosceptic, and more eager for ideological purity, that the parliamentary party. Clarke was a hugely attractive candidate in electoral terms. He had an easy, bluff, confident manner both in the Commons and in the media, had spent 12 years in cabinet under Margaret Thatcher and John Major, and was widely regarded to have nursed the economy back to health during his four years as chancellor of the exchequer from 1993 to 1997. But he was unfashionably enthusiastic towards the European Union, and suffered fools neither gladly nor even at all, utterly secure in his own intellectual positions.
Duncan Smith, by contrast, was a deeply mediocre candidate. He had spent his first parliament (1992-97) as a troublesome backbencher, opposed to the Maastricht Treaty and sometimes making the Major government’s parliamentary arithmetic stressful and embarrassing. He was a former soldier, having been a junior officer in the Scots Guards, but had left the Army without much distinction and had continued in a similar vein for most of the 1980s. Quietly spoken but stubborn, he would have been a serviceable backbencher if he had been in sympathy with the government, but he would certainly never have found himself anywhere near the party’s senior counsels had not the Conservatives lost 178 seats when Tony Blair had swept to victory in 1997.
It should have been obvious to anyone who was even vaguely familiar with politics by the turn of the millennium that Duncan Smith was a disastrous choice for the Conservatives to field against Tony Blair in his pomp. During the leadership contest, a Daily Telegraph journalist had mused that Duncan Smith seemed all right, “but isn’t he a bit 1950s?” It was a measure of how out-of-touch the Tory right was becoming that the Telegraph editor, Charles Moore, had responded “What’s wrong with the 1950s?” With so blinkered and hopeless an insight into the electorate, Moore deserved to pick the wrong man, and Duncan Smith proved to be wrong in all sorts of ways.
The story of Iain Duncan Smith’s dismal two years as leader of the opposition are for another day. Sir Iain (as he now is) still awaits a serious biographer, but it will surely be a labour of duty rather than love. He performed about as well against Blair as might have been expected, which is to say very poorly. Unlike William Hague, his predecessor, Duncan Smith had no presence in the Commons nor any spark of wit or lightness of touch at the despatch box. Nor could he rely on personal charm or warmth which might transmit itself in the media. He was not a particularly clever man nor did he have any “big ideas” to scatter stardust on his leadership.
The shadow cabinet had a seasoning of solid, reliable performers alongside their hapless chief: Michael Howard, Michael Ancram, David Davis, Oliver Letwin and Theresa May were all understandable choices for a first XI, David Willetts was known (feared?) to be exceptionally clever and Eric Forth was a flashy and pugnacious attack dog. But there were no stars. Clarke and Portillo had returned to the backbenches, joining Hague, who was probably the party’s best debater, and even four years on the losses of 1997 were tangible: Rifkind, Lang, Newton, even Waldegrave would have enlivened the front bench. And the party gained council seats at the local elections of 2002 and 2003, but this was the bounce of a cat which had been dead for some time. After the deep trench of the mid-1990s, it would have been a truly existential crisis if the fortunes of the party had not risen at all.
Duncan Smith’s leadership was essentially an extended exercise in survival. Few could see as far ahead as the next general election, due by 2006, let alone conceive the idea of the Conservative leader winning over the electorate and becoming prime minister. By the autumn of 2003, matters were as grim as ever and voices raised well above a whisper in favour of a change, when the journalist Michael Crick revealed he had collected evidence that Duncan Smith had paid his wife, Betsy, a salary from the public purse for duties which were unclear and seemed less than arduous. In fact it was a minor imbroglio at best: when it came to judgement, the parliamentary commissioner for standards found no wrongdoing on Duncan Smith’s part but suggested that he might perhaps have paid her from one fund rather than another.
If the fleeting scandal, dubbed “Betsygate”, was not serious, it was crystallising. Doubts about his leadership were now rampant, and, the chair of the 1922 Committee, Sir Michael Spicer received more and more letters of no confidence in the leader. He needed 25 such letters to trigger a contest, and, with rumours that the threshold was about to be reached, Duncan Smith called for his critics to do their worst by 29 October 2003. The day before the deadline, Spicer announced that he had received at least 25 letters, and a vote of confidence was arranged for the following day. I do not know if he expected to win the vote, or if he was simply exhausted by two years of siege, but the result was clear: 90 MPs voted against the leader while 75 supported him.
There had clearly been discussions behind closed doors among senior members of the party as to what might happen if Duncan Smith was defeated. It soon became clear that there was limited enthusiasm for a full-blown contest, which would have been divisive and time-consuming. Oliver Letwin, the shadow home secretary, and David Davis, who marked John Prescott as deputy prime minister, announced that they would support the shadow chancellor, Michael Howard, as the new party leader. Kenneth Clarke ruled himself out of what would have been a third tilt at the crown in six years, and, perhaps unnecessarily, the jovial Tim Yeo, shadow trade and industry secretary, said that he would not put his name forward.
This left as the only even vaguely plausible senior figure Michael Ancram, deputy leader and shadow foreign secretary. Perhaps unwilling to rule himself out with the heaviest of inks, he conceded that he would not stand against Howard if no other candidate emerged. By the time nominations closed on 6 November, there were no other hopefuls, and so Michael Howard was the only candidate. But how was this to be managed? The rules were not helpful, since they had not been drawn up anticipating such a situation (perhaps understandably, the ambition of most MPs being what it is). But the party’s grandees worried. Would a coronation for Howard rob him of some legitimacy or authority? Ought the party membership to be offered a confirmatory vote?
The board of the Conservative Party thought not. These worthies, headed by the party chairman Theresa May, must have seen only pitfalls and delay in keeping the process going, and so Howard was declared leader of the party nemine contradicente. It was an undramatic and short end to a long and protracted nightmare, and cleared the party’s decks to look towards the next election, which was eventually held in May 2005; the Conservative Party rallied somewhat, winning 198 seats, but were still firmly in opposition. Some kind of toxic cloud seemed to have lifted, however, allowing the party to go from ghostly, broken shadow to a merely defeated opposition.
Michael Howard was probably the best candidate available to the party in 2003. Although Ann Widdecombe’s savage observation in 1997 that the former home secretary had “something of the night” about him still had currency, and the folk memory among progressives was of a brutal and hardline law-and-order enthusiast, Howard had the confidence of his MPs as a short-term appointment. He was 62 years old, hardly looking at a long period in office, and if he was still a slightly strange figure with his peculiarly pronounced vowels which bore traces of his Welsh upbringing, he had the confident air and quick responses of a successful barrister (he had taken silk in 1982 and practised planning and employment law).
He also did not have Duncan Smith’s almost other-worldly lack of political grip. In February 2004, the Member for Congleton, Ann Winterton, told a deeply tasteless joke at a private dinner about the recent deaths of 21 Chinese cockle-pickers in Morecambe Bay. It was not her first offence: she had been sacked as shadow agriculture minister in 2002 after telling a racist joke at a rugby club dinner. She shared a “robust” sense of humour with her husband and constituency neighbour, the veteran MP for Macclesfield Sir Nicholas Winterton. Howard did not dither or obfuscate, but immediately withdrew the Conservative whip from Lady Winterton.
The coronation of 2003 stands as a singular event in the Conservative Party’s history. It was the result of several factors coming together at once: a deeply unpopular and indeed hopeless party leader was clearly doomed, there was an available candidate who would evidently be a step-change in quality, fluency and credibility; and the senior figures of the party came more or less to an agreement to rally round that one available candidate. Howard was not perfect, but he was obviously more able and convincing than the rest of the shadow cabinet and could at least be seen in the same league as Tony Blair. Moreover he was clearly a serious politician. He had held one of the great offices of state and had spent 12 years in ministerial office, seven of them in cabinet. He knew how Whitehall worked and, even if the prospect was a distant one, voters could imagine him holding the office of the Queen’s chief minister without resorting to ribaldry or laughter.
The most important factor, though, was the personal sacrifice and self-effacement of the other leading shadow ministers. Ancram, Davis, Letwin and May did not seem (at that point) to be absolutely front-rank politicians, though all had ambition, and one would eventually become prime minister, but they were able, at that particular moment in time, to understand that the condition of the Conservative Party was so parlous that the swift appointment of a new and plausible leader was more important than their own career prospects. It was a rare show of unity, but, looking back nearly 20 years, it seems that they made absolutely the correct decision. Howard did not win the following election, or even run Blair close, but he stopped the rot which would soon have become fatal, and he began to improve the party’s standing in parliament.
Whether this episode has any contemporary relevance is for the reader to decide. All I will say in conclusion is that the grandees of 2003 (all of whom are still with us) should rest assured that they did not only the right but the noble thing. And that is not an epitaph which one can append to many political tales.