Authors: Rosa Prince
It was, in terms of the election result, about the least successful manifesto in history. I’m fully willing to accept that the two I was most involved with, in 1997 and 2001, both led us to landslide defeats.
By then the sad thing was, one worked away but you knew that people weren’t listening and you had this overwhelming sense that they weren’t listening, and it was a very heavy defeat.
When Mr Willetts returned to the Commons after the 1997 general election, he found it a much changed place from when he had first entered:
In terms of the attrition and experience of politics, within five years I’d had two of my closest friends, also elected with me in 1992, die while MPs, I’d resigned at the fag end of the Major government, then I had a lot more friends who just didn’t come back from 1997, so it was quite a tough first few years.
I did spend all the next thirteen years in the shadow Cabinet. I think Liam [Fox, the future Defence Secretary] and I were the two who served in this long march across the wilderness.
I tended to get, which I like by the way, good long stints working in things I was really interested in. I spent basically the first half of the years in opposition on social security and pensions, and then the second half in education.
It’s something else you learn in politics: you have to enjoy what you’re doing and not see it as a stepping stone to something else, and I really enjoyed shadowing benefits and pensions, and then I really enjoyed education, which then became post-eighteen education.
Although he personally enjoyed his portfolios, which provided fodder for his acclaimed book
The Pinch
, about fairness between the generations, but did nothing to dispel his ‘Two Brains’ image, Mr Willetts found the experience of opposition frustrating. In particular, as he saw it, the Conservatives’ failure to adapt to the changed mood of the country left the party out of office for longer than was necessary.
He says:
I saw the difficulties a party has after it’s lost an election accepting that the electorate are telling them something and the painful, slow, frustrating process by which the Conservative Party had to come to terms with the fact that it had lost and learn the lessons from that.
There’s an endless dilemma: you offer the electorate ham and eggs and they turn them down and you say, ‘Alright, how about double ham and double eggs, will that be better?’
We made much more heavy weather of it than we should have done. There was nothing we could have done to have won in ’97, and even 2001 would have been difficult, but I think our poor performance in 2005 was really a kind of rebuke to us as an effective opposition.
In ’97 I was forty-one and by 2010 I was fifty-four. So it was frustrating. You are part of the national conversation but you can’t actually do anything.
When the Conservatives finally went back into the government after the 2010 election, in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, Mr Willetts found himself in Cabinet, but not a Cabinet minister, with responsibility for universities and science within the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) and under Vince Cable as Business Secretary.
Asked if he was upset that the Prime Minister never made him a full Cabinet minister, he says:
I try not to think of politics through that prism. He put me in the Cabinet, not as a secretary of state, but I was effectively in the Cabinet.
I think universities and science and a place at the Cabinet was a really worthwhile thing and I really enjoyed that opportunity and I was very privileged to have had that opportunity, so I shall be standing down thinking that doing that was something that I look back on with great pride.
I got on with Vince. Vince was a serious person and I trusted him. We didn’t agree on everything but we could sort all that out between ourselves. He had so much to do with the rest of the department and because of my position in Cabinet I was given an enormous amount of freedom.
Finally in a spending department, Mr Willetts found ministerial life even more rewarding second time around and his time at the Department for Business proved the most enjoyable of his career as an MP:
It had been a great advantage having been a minister before. And having been a civil servant, including a private secretary.
It’s one thing Vince and I pride ourselves on, although you always have your frustrations and there are some officials you get on with better than others, there was no point getting into a state of war with your own departmental machine.
The Prime Minister, after the first few months of the real controversy on [tuition] fees, wasn’t a Blairite, heavy-handed interventionist where you had No. 10 phoning up every day with a new instruction about what to say [to] the media.
He basically trusted you to get on with things and George [Osborne, the Chancellor] became increasingly sympathetic to science and the investment in science. George was willing to back it in autumn statements and Budgets and it became a real personal thing of George’s.
It’s a peculiar thing in universities and science: there are not a large amount of direct leaders but you have convening power, you can shape decisions.
I think of my father’s background in engineering. You can see how it connects up to the machine in quite an important way, and how this apparently unprepossessing lever can change things quite a lot.
Sometimes ministers are wandering around this Victorian building pulling levers and pushing buttons and switches and [are] not quite clear [on] what works and what doesn’t, and sometimes you’re in a position where there’s a great big lever marked ‘power’ and you pull it and nothing happens, and then there’s something in the corner, an obscure spatchcock that nobody’s touched for years, and you know that that actually really can change things. You’ve got to work out where the real scope is to influence things.
After four years at BIS, Mr Willetts took the somewhat surprising decision to return to the back benches and announce his retirement as an MP.
He was motivated in the main by the desire to try new things, and did hope he would become Mr Cameron’s nomination for the European Commission. It was not to be. Mr Willetts was told that the party didn’t want the distraction of a by-election in Havant if he were to leave the Commons to take up the post, but the pill was sweetened when the Prime Minister threw him a party celebrating science:
The real decision was whether I was going to stand down at the election. Once you have decided you’re going to stand down then lots of things follow from that.
What I hoped was that I might be our candidate for the European Commission, I was very keen to do the European Commission.
Of course I fully realised we didn’t want to have a by-election, and that was a constraint on any of us who were candidates from the Commons.
When it comes to Europe, I’m a believer, and I saw at first hand that you can do things. Britain’s got quite a lot of soft power, coming in from things like our lawyers, our legal system, our media – there is still a lot of respect for the way we do things.
The Prime Minister gave a fantastic party, a celebration of British science, after I stood down, which was also an opportunity for me to kind of say farewell to him and all the scientists.
It was actually the second farewell party I had at No. 10 because she [Margaret Thatcher] gave me a party in 1986.
I wasn’t sure when I left in ’86 whether I’d ever be back in any context whatsoever, so it was marvellous through David’s generosity to be able to do it a second time. I’ve been very lucky.
***
Born and raised in Birmingham; attended Oxford University.
1978: Joins civil service at Treasury
1984: Seconded to work at 10 Downing Street
1986: Leaves civil service; becomes head of Centre for Policy Studies think tank
1987: Takes on role briefing Margaret Thatcher for general election and other major events
1992: Elected MP for Havant
1994: Joins Whips’ Office
1995: Becomes Paymaster General within Cabinet Office
1996: Forced to resign after being caught up in cash-for-questions scandal involving disgraced MP Neil Hamilton
1997: Helps write Conservative manifesto
1998: Becomes shadow Education Secretary
1999: Becomes shadow Work and Pensions Secretary
2001: Helps write Conservative manifesto
2005: Becomes shadow Education Secretary
2007: Becomes shadow Universities Minister
2010: Becomes Universities and Science Minister
2014: Returns to back benches; announces he will stand down at 2015 general election
David Willetts is married to Sarah Butterfield, an artist, and has two children, Imogen and Matthew.
Dame Tessa Jowell,
sixty-seven, was Labour MP for Dulwich (1992–97) and Dulwich & West Norwood (1992–2015).
‘A sense of obligation drove me from Parliament to seek to become Mayor of London.’
***
I was chasing a Tory majority of 192, but it was very clear that my Tory opponent had given up. Actually, when I won I sent him flowers.
On election night, I remember buying a new dress, which I only ever wore once because in the cold light of day it wasn’t a very nice dress. But it was red – obligatory then.
I found people actually incredibly kind and solicitous and wanting to help. I didn’t find people being stand-offish, I didn’t find that I was the butt of sexism or people being arrogant or anything like that, and that was very nice.
The night of the opening ceremony of the Olympics. We all queued up to get on a bus … and then the driver got lost. Boris [Johnson, Mayor of London] was on the bus, Bernard Hogan-Howe, the Armed Forces Chief, all these big leaders, and the bus driver was getting so stressed.
Ed [Miliband, the Labour leader] was on the bus as well and Ed was fabulous because he was just making everyone laugh all the time. He and Boris got a kind of double act riff going on the third time we came round the roundabout. And here we were, we were the people who had to be at the ceremony because it couldn’t start [without us].
It was terrible, it was just terrible [being caught up in an Italian corruption scandal involving her husband David Mills]. My husband was exonerated, nobody understood really what it was all about. It was a maelstrom.
But my husband has a mantra, and it’s: ‘Don’t look back, don’t bear grudges, and remember, everyone has s***.’ I felt terrible about my children, terrible about what they went through.
I decided to stand down because, [I had] done the Olympics, and I didn’t think that I should go back into government, didn’t
want
to go back into government.
I didn’t stand down in order then to stand as Mayor of London. I spent many months thinking about it, wondering if I really wanted to do it, and then what I couldn’t escape was this sense of ‘why wouldn’t you try?’ If you can make a difference to the lives of Londoners, why wouldn’t you try?
Of course I will. Leaving this place is much more traumatic than I expected. I keep imagining that I’ve got to feel myself all over in case I’m already missing a limb. It is physical in that way.
What I’m going to do is work as hard as I can for Labour to win the general election and then … the mayoral process kicks off and I’ve made it very clear that I will be a candidate.
Notice people on the way up because you’ll hear from them on the way down.
It’s very easy to mix only with the people who are in the papers, who are the rising stars, but actually everybody here is a representative – they were selected, they were chosen as a representative of their constituency. And there’s endless wisdom available.
***
Throughout her life, Dame Tessa has been compelled to do her best to help other people, an obligation she says has at times been ‘inconvenient’. Although her parents were not political, their strong values and desire to see the best in people have in her taken the form of a constant niggling drive to help others, from becoming a social worker and mental health campaigner to entering politics as first a councillor and then an MP. It remains to this day, most recently in her decision to stand for Labour’s nomination for London Mayor.
Her first political activism was born of her work with the newly arrived West Indian immigrant community in south London:
I knew how much I could do one to one with people to make them feel more optimistic about their lives, helping with practical things that could make their lives more bearable or even substantially better.
It took me to thinking, ‘I can do a lot one on one but the solutions these people need in their lives are the big solutions that only politics can bring.’ So that’s what focused my mind on standing for Parliament.
[I was] always Labour. I believed that the world was unfair to a lot of people. That’s an absolutely defining sense that you go into politics to deal with what is otherwise the inevitable course of events in the lives of so many people who are born and their life chances are handed out like vouchers. And you can change that.
Dame Tessa’s first election outing, at a by-election in Ilford North in 1978, was an ordeal.
Although the seat had been Labour, the country was on the brink of turning to Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party as a solution to the malaise it had become mired in during the 1970s. Essex in particular was ripe for the shift from left to right, as aspirant, young east Londoners moved out to the suburbs in order to better themselves.
The by-election proved a particularly nasty one; politics was becoming polarised and Dame Tessa was attacked by both the far right National Front and, as a pro-choice believer, the anti-abortion lobby:
It was probably the three worst weeks of my life. It was so cold, so dark – it was awful.
I could just see the Labour vote bleeding away. I knew we were losing, and I knew we were losing not just in this by-election but we were losing generally. We were actually losing the country.
Despite being ‘put off’ politics by the by-election experience, Dame Tessa’s now familiar sense of duty led her to stand again at the 1979 general election largely because she felt ‘a sense of obligation’ to the activists in the Ilford North constituency.
The result was the same, but she learned a lesson that would stay with her throughout her time in politics, and helps to explain her steadfast support for Tony Blair’s project to modernise the Labour Party more than a decade later through the mechanism of New Labour. ‘People were not getting a sense of aspiration, of positive optimism about their future, and that’s why I hope always my politics are the politics of aspiration, ambition, possibility and the future,’ she says.
As the Thatcher government roared on, Dame Tessa sat out much of the opposition years, content raising her family and working at the mental health charity Mind, while Labour took a lurch to the left.
And then, as the 1992 election approached, that niggle began again: ‘If you have this sense of obligation to make the world better and create possibility for people, it can sometimes be quite inconvenient, because it’s always there.’
In 1992 Dame Tessa got her revenge for Ilford North, overturning a tiny Conservative majority to be elected MP for Dulwich.
Although she was thrilled to have won, the news was not so good for Labour elsewhere in the country, as John Major defied the odds to win the Tories’ fourth victory in a row:
The next day we had a bus that went round the constituency to say thank you to people and it was clearly a discordant thing to have done because people’s faces were looking up not quite understanding what this bus-load of people that appeared to be celebrating was about.
If election night was one of mixed emotions, arriving at the Commons on her first day was pure joy:
I remember walking through with someone who was a very dear friend of mine, Bridget Prentice, who was the newly elected MP for Lewisham East, and we walked together through the door into the members’ entrance.
We just stood there before we walked in and we linked arms. She’s Scottish and I grew up in Scotland, and we just said: ‘See us, hen!’ That was a lovely moment.
Glenda [Jackson, the actor and MP for Hampstead & Kilburn] was elected at the same time and Glenda and I shared a room and we had to have some pretty heavy negotiation about her smoking.
I felt in the early few months overwhelmed by it really, overawed by it, by the responsibility to the people I represent. I’ve always had that sense of profound connection to the people I represent.
Despite her early nerves, within six months Dame Tessa began to feel restless and was determined to attract the attention of the party’s leadership.
She made her mark in a debate just before Christmas of 1992. After spending a night touring a number of Accident and Emergency departments in London hospitals, she reported on what she had seen of one of the first NHS ‘winter crises’ to a rapt House of Commons.
An early misstep – supporting the candidacy of Bryan Gould in the 1992 leadership election over the more left-wing John Smith – proved to be an unconsciously canny move when Mr Smith died unexpectedly and the modernising Tony Blair came to power.
Although Dame Tessa denies being ambitious, she did want to get on, and was delighted to be offered a post in the shadow health team: ‘I didn’t come in and think, “Right, I’m going to be leader of the party, I’m going to be in the shadow Cabinet before anybody else.” I wanted to use this extraordinary platform that I had. That was essentially what drove me.’
As the 1997 election approached, and with New Labour on course for a landslide, it was natural that Dame Tessa was hoping to become a minister:
All the indications were that I was going to be a minister. I never quite believed it until it actually did happen.
I remember election day in 1997 so well. The sun was shining, there was the most palpable sense of optimism. I remember going all round my constituency with a loud hailer and people waving and clapping their hands.
It was a day of extraordinary optimism and hope and change and a future.
The call from Mr Blair inviting her to join the government, however, did not come for four long days:
It was my daughter’s birthday, so she had a horrible birthday because I was on the phone all the time. He was never very chatty in these moments, he said: ‘I’d like you to do public health, and Alan [Milburn, the future Health Secretary] is going to do the NHS and I’d like you to work closely together, and remember you’re modernisers.’
The other truly wonderful thing was working with Frank Dobson [the Health Secretary]. Dear Frank. Frank had a team of modernisers and we all absolutely adored him.
In those days we were so passionate about what we were doing. It was an amazing time, actually.
I remember the day I opened my first red [ministerial] box and looked inside. There was this great big submission, I think it was about antibiotic resistance. It was some incredibly technical public health issue. And I just looked at it and thought, ‘I have not the faintest idea what to do with this.’ But then you learn. I loved it.
Dame Tessa spent two happy years at the Department of Health, during which time her proudest achievement was setting up the Sure Start early nurturing programme, before she moved to the Department for Education and Employment:
Then came the 2001 election, another landslide. All the papers said I was going to go into the Cabinet but we got to five o’clock the day after election day and I hadn’t had a phone call.
Did I want to go to the Cabinet? You bet, absolutely. Definitely.
I thought by five o’clock: ‘This is not going to happen.’ But I thought: ‘Never mind, I’m going to go to the constituency and have a lovely evening with all my activists.’
There we were in the garden of the Crown & Greyhound in Dulwich Village, and again it was a lovely sunny evening, and my phone went.
My agent picked it up out of my bag and said, ‘Oh, it’s No. 10 switchboard.’ So with all my activists I answer my phone and … I got this message from one of the wonderful ladies on switch saying, ‘Um, Tessa, the Prime Minister wonders if you could come and see him. Could you be here in half an hour?’
So I got in the car and drove up to No. 10, then I saw Tony, who by then was slightly glazed because he’d done so many appointments. He said: ‘I want you to go to DCMS [the Department for Culture, Media and Sport].’
I said: ‘Lovely, thrilled.’
Despite having little knowledge of her new brief, Dame Tessa threw herself into it, making it, she says, ‘a major economic department’.
Then, just a year later, came the series of events that would change her life and bring joy to millions of her countrymen and women.
She says:
I’m going on holiday, one of my civil servants comes in and says: ‘Secretary of state, before you go on holiday, we just wondered if you could sign off a letter to the Prime Minister advising against a bid to host the Olympic Games.’
I thought: ‘Well, that’s quite pathetic really.’ Especially since the Sydney Olympics had been such a success. It was just after we’d had a very successful Commonwealth Games.
And so I said: ‘Bring me some more balanced advice.’ I came back from holiday and there was a campaign in the department to ‘talk her out of it’. I got the bit between my teeth … and we just went on a campaign of persuasion.
[I] had this conversation with Tony when I’d more or less got it at ten to midnight [and I] went to see him because it was time to sign off and support my recommendation to Cabinet.
We sat on the veranda at No. 10 outside the Cabinet Room. I thought I had thirty minutes but the Scots were coming in so I had seven minutes and he was distracted and said, ‘I think it’s very difficult and there’s so much else going on. I don’t think we can do this.’
I said to him, ‘So what’s the answer to this question: if we are the fourth-largest economy in the world, we are a country that loves our sport, we think London is the greatest city in the world, but we don’t dare to host the games in London in 2012? How are we going to answer that question?’
He looked at me long, hard and lilac [and] said, ‘I get your point. I’ll reflect overnight and I’ll call you in the morning.’
And in the morning I got a call from his principal private secretary saying: ‘The Prime Minister’s reflected on your conversation and he’s prepared to accept your judgement.’