First Confession Read online

  I carried with me from office to office in my political years a photograph of Rab Butler, a man whom I only knew slightly but admired hugely. He always comes high on the list of those who never quite became Prime Minister, but should have got the job. He was a member of the House of Commons for thirty-six years and a minister for over twenty-six of them. His ministerial career rested on the same tripos which he described as the base of his whole life – India, education and Conservatism. Rab held all the great offices of state, was a notably good Chancellor of the Exchequer in the early 1950s, piloted the great Education Act of 1944 which bore his name, and played the pivotal role in the intellectual renaissance of Conservatism after the war through his office at the Conservative Research Department, where I had gone to work at the beginning of 1966. ‘I may never have known much about ferrets or flower arranging,’ he once said, ‘but one thing I did know was how to govern the people of this country.’ No one knew better. As even Enoch Powell acknowledged, he was a master of the art of political administration. He managed to find the right balance between expediency and Conservative principles, a very British mix of practicality and precept. ‘Untouched by morality and idealism,’ he argued, ‘economics is an arid pursuit, just as politics is an unprofitable one.’ He attacked those who called for old-style Montagu Norman austerity economics, reckless of the consequences. For them, public spending was like an enemy regiment, to be gunned down at every opportunity. ‘Those who talked about creating pools of unemployment should be thrown into them and made to swim.’ This moral dimension to politics and economics was closely related to his lack of ideological zealotry. While there was always a philosophical framework to his decision making, he would not push his own philosophy to other peoples’ breaking point, partly because of his intense attachment to the notion of community. No political philosophy should be ‘an incitement to envy, malice or uncharitableness’. A natural task for the politician was to bind people together, not split them apart, recognizing that in any real community justice was insufficient without charity. All this is what helped make him such a consummate man of public affairs.

  I once heard a former French aide of President Mitterand, while apologizing for his allegedly poor English, claiming that his description of his old boss often having contradictory feelings about things did not mean that he was ambiguous. ‘No,’ he protested, ‘not ambiguous, ambivalent.’ I felt the same about Rab Butler, and I mean it as a compliment. Of course, he was sometimes deliberately ambiguous; deliberate ambiguity was at the heart of many of his best jokes. I liked the telegram of apology he sent crying off sick from a Tory grandee’s retirement dinner. ‘There is no one,’ he wrote, ‘whose farewell dinner I would rather have attended.’ I mean something more profound than this sort of barbed joke. While he was cutting flowers for the wife of an assistant in his beautiful garden in Essex one late summer afternoon, the aide asked him what was the most important lesson he had learned in politics. ‘That’s easy,’ he replied. ‘It’s more important to be generous than efficient.’ He knew perfectly well, of course, that you often need to be efficient in order to be generous. But I got the drift. Value comes before price in politics as in life, always.

  Rab was a great patriot; while he loved the Highlands of Scotland, especially the Isle of Mull, you cannot write about him without noting his deep feeling of Englishness: not surprisingly, he loved books, gardens and dogs. His sense of his own identity infused and reflected his philosophy, and set him apart – the same is true of other British conservatives – from much modern American conservativism, with its ideological fervour about small government, low taxes and less regulation, its culture wars against changes in the law on sexual behaviour, and the rigid interpretation of the eighteenth-century US constitution as it would have been understood when it was adopted. These American conservatives favour compulsory school prayer, are frequently against teaching Darwinian evolution, are rock solid in opposing any change in America’s gun laws, and usually believe strongly in American exceptionalism – an attitude which brings with it a hostility to international institutions and laws. Economic issues have been given a greater neo-liberal (as it is now called) tilt among American conservatives in recent years by writers like William Buckley. It is of course possible to be of a conservative disposition in America without signing up to this whole gallimaufry, but even so the differences with the collection of political, moral and economic positions usually espoused by British conservatives is very marked. I have sometimes found myself across the Atlantic expressing the pretty mainstream views of a moderate Conservative politician to the evident surprise of American conservative audiences. I spoke two or three times at an extraordinary mid-summer camp for well-off conservative businessmen, politicians, journalists and academics in northern California. Called Bohemia Grove, it offered comfortable log cabin hospitality to a diverse group who gathered for music, lectures, seminars, a comfortable experience of tamed nature and dry martinis. I lectured there, a slightly exotic European. The audience was told that I was a Conservative, but some of them clearly thought I was a raving socialist because I evidently did not believe that government was the enemy.

  Like other Conservatives, I have always felt that at our best we do not need books to explain our philosophy, although I confess that I once wrote one, The Tory Case. I sought there to argue above all that Conservatism by its very nature defied every description, giving us neither precise and immutable rules of political or social conduct nor revelations about the truth that might explain the world in which we live. ‘As for certain truth,’ Xenophanes wrote, ‘no man has known it … all is but a woven web of guesses.’ So Conservatism is not dogmatic. It suggests a way of looking at the world, not an exact way of running it. But the fact that Conservatism is not an ideology does not mean that it is nothing much at all, resting on little more than a majestic pragmatism. While it is a pretty good starting idea for a political party to try to keep the government of the country afloat, Conservatives in Britain have survived longer than in most other parts of the political world because they have always managed to engage with the real world better than their opponents, at least until recently, and have usually reflected the best (though very occasionally the worst) of our national community – above all practicality, moderation, tolerance and generosity.

  For many American conservatives and for European, including British, socialists the relationship between the state and the individual creates problems. Where exactly should the border be? It creates similar anxieties as well for some British conservatives. Should we worry quite so much about whether the state has got too big for its own boots? The temptation to seek some antithesis between the individual and the state should be resisted. It is wrong, for instance in reaction to socialism, to expound a creed based solely on the individual, on the view that society (which despite Margaret Thatcher’s momentary denial, does exist, as she knew perfectly well – comprising families, churches, voluntary associations, trade unions, firms and so on) only has one role: to provide a legal framework within which individual opportunity can flourish without becoming self-destructive. Carlyle called this ‘anarchy plus the constable’. If that were true, all those other things for which the Conservative Party has stood – patriotism, duty, loyalty – would be meaningless. None of this strikes me as difficult to understand or controversial. If you could pin down what they think about politics, it is, I suspect, what most people who do not regard themselves as political animals would accept as a reflection of their sentiments. Man is not only an individual answerable to himself, ‘the master of his fate’ and ‘the captain of his soul’. He is also a social animal who can attain his full stature only in groups greater than himself, acquiring a broader identity or series of identities in his family, his work, his church, his country or many other groups or organizations of which he may be part. This balance, intuitively perceived rather than articulately expressed by Conservatives during decades, indeed centuries, of changing intellectual fashions, correspond
s to one of the fundamental balances in the whole of life. In all civilizations and in all living things, there must be a balance between the forces of creativity and growth on the one hand, and order on the other. Unbalanced, the one leads to chaos, the other to sterility. Likewise, I do not wish to make a once-and-for-all choice between the state and the individual; sometimes I lean one way and sometimes another. This may be called ‘trimming’, but that is of course what helps to keep a sailing boat from capsizing. Life is not a collection of clear-cut problems to which there are equally clear-cut solutions. The most profound political observation I know is Michael Oakeshott’s view that life ‘is a predicament not a journey’.

  The primary role of the state is to provide order and harmony within which individuals and their social groups can flourish in a stable environment. Without this, civilized behaviour is very difficult. Government itself needs checks on the use of its powers. These should be provided by the diffusion of authority and accountability, the spread of property, and the health of what Burke called ‘the little platoons’, all operating under the rule of law which applies to rulers as well as ruled. I am suspicious of zeal, respect institutions and historical forces, and favour consensus and co-operation where possible.

  These are some of the reasons why I became a Conservative and this is the sort of Conservative I have tried to be. I used to be surprised by the fact that trying to behave according to these precepts in fashioning a response to life’s predicaments was regarded as ‘wet’ by the right wing of my own party. These days nothing much surprises me about them any more, except that time and experience still seem to teach them so little. A thick skin of prejudice, reinforced by reading the tabloids, is proof against the dilemmas of the real world. In addition to being criticized for my political approach, I have often been attacked for the number of things I have done alongside political jobs; apart from their innate interest, I have done them precisely because of the beliefs I have just tried to articulate. What strikes me most forcefully looking back now is how much of my life, maybe too much of my life, was spent with my nose to a political grindstone. For years I really did nothing else.

  When I joined the Conservative Research Department just before the 1966 General Election, the director, Brendon Sewell, an amiable man (who, if the expression had then been in vogue, would certainly have been reckoned to think outside the box), seemed to be rather taken by the idea of recruiting someone hotfoot from an American campaign. My first job was to sneak into Labour Party press conferences and then report back to Edward Heath and his senior advisers on what had happened there. This exposed me to the party’s nabobs and, for that matter, them to me. It should have come as no surprise that they usually seemed to agree with the Leader. After the Conservative election defeat, I worked for a series of backbench committees and policy groups until 1970. Conservative victory then saw me posted as a politically appointed civil servant to work on the co-ordination of social policy in the Cabinet Office. Similar efforts are still being made to co-ordinate the approach to many of the same problems almost fifty years on. Having done that for two years, I was offered the chance to work as the political assistant to the chairman and deputy chairman of the Conservative Party (Lord Carrington and Jim Prior), in which job I was on the inside track of the painful weeks of indecision about whether and if so when to call the 1974 election, when the country was held to ransom by the miners. Defeat then saw me offered two jobs. Christopher Soames, one of Britain’s European Commissioners, asked me to go to Brussels to work for him. Despite a charming interview during which the two of us spent twenty minutes chasing mice around and under the chairs of Claridge’s, I opted instead to go back to the Conservative Research Department as its director. I was just thirty and, though the pay was derisory, thought I had landed in paradise. It was a slightly oddball institution which worked rather well – typically Conservative perhaps.

  The Research Department had in effect been founded by Neville Chamberlain before the war acting virtually as a private office for him. It was re-established after the war under Rab Butler as a think tank for the then Conservative Opposition, which was attempting to come to terms with welfare democracy. It also played the role of a nursery for talented young politicians, many of them entering from military service, who went on to distinguished political careers, like Iain Macleod, Reggie Maudling and Enoch Powell. Partly because its alumni provided several of the leaders and much of the intellectual firepower of Conservative governments from 1950 onwards, it enjoyed quite a privileged position among the party’s institutions. In the 1960s and 1970s it was housed in two pretty but chaotically organized Georgian houses in Westminster. There were about sixty staff, more than half of whom were researchers (mostly men). The supporting staff were young women chosen by successive female ex-army establishment officers from the better sort of secretarial colleges. They were the sort of women (‘my girls’, the ex-colonels would call them) who would today go to university. They were also invariably pretty and usually good at covering up for their bosses, some of whom took a rather Alexandrian view of working hours. There were always one or two people in stockinged feet and several dogs and cats around the place; in my early years a pretty pungent smell of wet hound cut across the atmosphere of pipe and cigarette tobacco.

  When I was director, the team was a nice balance of age, eccentricity and, I am led to believe, sexual preference. (I am not sure what it says about me, probably nothing, that I do not usually notice people’s sexual orientations. I have never anyway regarded what people do in private as any of my business.) Most of the staff were clever and the majority of the young ones ambitious for a political career. We recruited mainly from those who had just left university. Some went on to their own celebrity, like Matthew Parris, Michael Portillo and Michael Dobbs; others made their careers on the touchlines of Westminster politics, like Adam Ridley, Nick True, Dermot Gleeson, Stephen Sherbourne and Patrick Rock. A later vintage, when I was party chairman, included David Cameron, George Osborne and Edward Llewellyn, who worked for me for about ten years in a variety of posts from Hong Kong to Brussels before becoming Cameron’s chief of staff. Edward is very able, very discreet and very nice; he is one of those people who has made my life happier and more successful than it would have been without him. Entirely on merit (of course) he was posted as ambassador to France after David Cameron’s resignation from the prime ministership. He is an excellent example of how a politically appointed chief of staff should behave in government. Good political advisers operate below the radar; when they fail to do so the outcome is invariably a train wreck.

  The Research Department was a unique flowering of amiably and lightly managed talent. A management consultancy would not have allowed it to survive for five minutes, yet it mostly worked rather well. There were some older, worldly-wise sages like James Douglas, a great expert on psephology and the husband of Mary, the social anthropologist, some of whose academic interest would have rubbed off usefully on anyone trying to understand what made the place tick. She had after all tried to answer the question of whether dogs laugh, so nothing was beyond her. There were a few coasting eccentrics and some very knowledgeable people who could not bear the thought of moving on to anywhere more orthodox. One wise old colleague knew every twist and turn in the Conservative Party’s arm wrestling over grammar schools; another acted as a sort of intellectual firewall around Margaret Thatcher and whatever was her current policy preoccupation; another knew everything, indeed more than anyone might want to know, about the brick industry, in which there always seemed to be an actual or incipient crisis. There were a very few driven ideologues and sharp-elbowed political climbers. Private incomes were not unknown, nor was bullshitting. Drink and sex took a small toll of talent. Overall, it was a great little naval destroyer and managed to hold its own – or rather more than that when from 1975 to 1979 Keith Joseph was allowed to establish a more ideological think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies, which searched for the agonized soul of Conservatism and
occasionally came back from the quest with something clenched between its teeth. The CPS, however, suffered from being so weighed down by dogma as to be a bit light on the sort of ideas required to win elections in Britain. Most important, the Research Department contained some people who could write conspicuously well, so that policy documents, speeches and manifestos tended to finish up in our hands. It was a very happy place if, as I say, a little batty. Half a dozen novels by Anthony Powell or Simon Raven could have bloomed there.