First Confession Read online

  With fewer MPs should also come the further empowerment of Select Committees, not least giving them greater responsibility in the drafting of legislation. The establishment of the Select Committee structure was begun by my first parliamentary boss, Norman St John Stevas, for whom I acted as a parliamentary dogsbody, the lowest rung on the ladder of Westminster. Some Select Committees have done very well, for example the one on Treasury affairs intelligently chaired recently by Andrew Tyrie, a fiercely independent Conservative MP. You have naturally to make allowances for the opportunities for some MPs to show off their poopery in Select Committees in front of the cameras. When I was Chairman of the BBC Trust I had to deal with one MP who managed to embrace an astonishingly varied collection of primitive views with no evident embarrassment at how ridiculous he was. Naturally, the more he behaved like a right-wing buffoon, the more press attention he got. You also find that some MPs have difficulty, when they have an important witness in front of them, distinguishing between forceful questioning and being simply rude.

  I was fortunate in my parliamentary friends and in spending as much time as I did as a minister. My closest colleagues were all members of an informal dining group which in a rather random way somehow came together soon after the 1979 election; we tried to look after one another as we scrambled onto the political escalator. The Whips dubbed us ‘the Blue Chips’, which gave a slight impression of a group of weak-chinned and self-satisfied chaps who thought themselves born to rule. There were indeed four proper toffs – two sons of marquesses, and two of earls (one of them Irish, so perhaps he counts as four-fifths toff) – but the rest of us were a pretty mixed bunch: middle-class scholarship boys on the whole. Nor were we all on the left of the party. We represented most of the available Conservative points of view, except the nasty right wing. Robert Cranborne spoke for centuries of deep-blue Cecils. Jocelyn Cadbury, who tragically shot himself while in a deep depression, was the best sort of social worker MP. John Watson was a Yorkshire businessman with a radical streak. The friend I had known the longest was my namesake, John Patten, known in the family as ‘no relation’. He had been an Oxford don when I was running the Research Department, and convened like-minded academics to help us with policy work. The cleverest among us were John Major and William Waldegrave. William would always be one of the cleverest in any gathering, a widely read classicist who taught himself enough about science policy and industry to hold his own and more on both subjects. He and his family have been very close friends. William is cursed by a strain of modesty, verging on melancholy, which has prevented him from recognizing for much of the time just how good he is. I will talk about John Major later. The other two very close friends were Richard Needham and Tristan Garel-Jones. Richard became a terrific minister, under-promoted because one of the reasons that he got so much done was precisely because he was not safe. He has made me laugh more than anyone else in my life. Tristan (who hosted our dinners at his home) has caused me much more pain and grief than almost anyone since he has spent his whole lifetime smoking himself to death. If he dies before me I shall be devastated, since there has not been a day when I have imagined coping without him at the other end of the phone. He has a reputation for scheming, mostly because he has allowed others sedulously to spread this largely fictitious description. He is usually all too happy broadcasting exactly what he is doing, which is not always predictable but invariably smart.

  There were other MPs, from a slightly older generation, whom I greatly admired, like George Young and John Cope. Young and Cope were examples of the sort of MPs who help to make our whole political system work, as they continued to do later in the House of Lords. They did conscientiously and competently whatever jobs they were asked to undertake, without any indication of great personal ambition. They were the best sort of amiable, selfless, decent public servants, and always excellent company.

  My own first ministerial job was in Northern Ireland, about which I have written in a separate chapter because that experience bears very directly on my views of politics and identity. After two years in Belfast as a Parliamentary Secretary, I was promoted in 1985 to be a Minister of State in the Department of Education and Science. I was deputy there to Keith Joseph for a miserable year, not because of him but because of the near impossibility of getting anything to change in the dour world of education policy. Education should involve a partnership between parents representing the interests of their children, the government on behalf of the national interest, the teachers’ unions with a professional commitment to delivering as good an education to pupils as possible, and the local education authorities organizing the various parts of the system in their communities. But by the 1970s and 1980s, two of the partners had been pretty well eliminated as serious players. The government’s ability to do anything at all was so constrained that the quality of officials to administer a policy void had badly declined, despite the presence of a very good Permanent Secretary (head of the department) who was there because Margaret Thatcher wanted him out of the Treasury (she didn’t like his middle-of-the-road economic views). Parents were naturally regarded as far too personally involved in the outcome of education of their children to be, well, personally involved: their role, it was thought, should be confined to whatever happened outside school. That left the teachers’ unions and local government. The teachers’ unions had allowed their commitment to professionalism to be eroded by the worst sorts of public sector defence of special interests. When Keith Joseph went to address one of the union’s conferences he was greeted by its senior officers wearing rubber gloves and surgical masks and aprons as though he was an AIDS patient. The local authorities employed much expertise but were too inclined to reduce everything to a fight over cash, and they were usually locked in a duopolistic embrace with the unions. Breaking this hold on education has taken years, and it was not something Keith Joseph – an intellectual rather than a toughie – could do in a short time despite his passionate commitment to raising educational quality.

  Our department was housed in a scruffy building next to Waterloo Station. It was rather like two other offices in which I had to spend many years – the Conservative Central Office, in Smith Square, and the Department of the Environment, in nearby Marsham Street. When you went in – even when you approached the entrance to these buildings – you could feel your spirits retreating for cover. One of the few advantages of working in the Environment Office was that from the inside you were one of the lucky few in London who could not see its full brutalist horror. My own office in the Waterloo building was, rather curiously, separated from Keith’s by a sliding door. I had not seen one of these since our home in Hillside Road, Greenford. With my back to the door, I would suddenly be aware of Keith (if I had missed his ever so discreet knock) looming over me, clearing his throat. He was a good and kind man, but not, to put it mildly, a political natural, and too easily influenced by mad or bad ideologues. Few people can have been so disappointed at their inability to change the nation’s soul. At Education, we would spend days arguing with him backwards and forwards before, invariably and contrary to his philosophy, he plumped for the most centralizing option. He was pleased with me when I once made a speech which caused a stir at a headteachers’ conference suggesting that if we were to avoid presiding over the creation of a yob society, we should put in place some elements of a national curriculum.

  I lasted at Education for a year before being transferred sideways – actually it felt like a huge promotion– to the Overseas Development Administration. I was the only minister there, typically the feudal subject of the Foreign Secretary, who was too busy to bother much at all about us. Britain had one of the best overseas-development programmes in the world, smaller than it had been and much smaller than today. But it was a classy operation, much admired globally, and with a team of first-class officials whose hearts were in their jobs. Travelling the world (sorry, again, Lavender) dealing with the various problems of impoverishment, principally in Asia and Africa, was an extraord
inary education in geopolitics and, frankly, geography. I was happy non-stop, with two great private secretaries, first, Martin Dinham, who later came to Hong Kong with me (in a very competitive field, the best person who ever worked for me), and then Myles Wickstead, who went on to be ambassador to Ethiopia and head of the secretariat of Tony Blair’s Africa Commission.

  While my friends at home wrestled with intractable economic issues, tortured themselves trying to comprehend and reform social security, invented the poll tax and so on, I flew around running some pretty effective aid programmes and in the course of that work achieving some of development’s basic aims, like preventing babies dying prematurely. I hardly ever had to engage in domestic political arguments, rarely went to meetings with the Treasury or with Cabinet committees, and got most of my flavour of British politics from my constituency and my surgeries, three Fridays out of four.

  When I came down to earth it was with a mighty bang. Following a larger than expected Green Party vote in the 1989 European Parliament elections, it was thought sensible to replace the clever but not very user-friendly Environment Secretary, Nicholas Ridley, with someone who would stand a good chance of not scaring the horses, or more to the point the voters. The fickle finger of fate pointed at me. So I got promoted to a seat in the Cabinet to run the biggest government department, with seven junior ministers, to draft and promote the first ever Environment White Paper by a government, but also to implement the poll tax, of which news had reached me literally on the bush telephone. The day after my promotion to the Cabinet, there was an Opposition debate in the Commons about it. I had first to learn the rudiments of local-government financing, before – up all night – getting my head around the scheme invented by several of my cleverer colleagues. I gave the worst speech I ever made in the Commons, including the shaming line (drafted by my otherwise astute political adviser, Patrick Rock) ‘the community charge’ (Tory for the poll tax) ‘puts the community in charge’. But I do not grumble about Patrick, a hugely gifted political operator; it is only because of him that I have ever made it into books of quotations, with real humdingers like ‘gobsmacked’ and ‘double whammy’. The story of the poll tax has been written about so much already, and since I intend to write a little more about it in relation to Margaret Thatcher’s leadership, I will at this point lock it away for a while. It was the worst thing about running a huge department, whose Permanent Secretary was a great cockney auto-didact, Terry Heiser, as good at the task as anyone I saw doing that or any similar job. Terry had left school in his mid-teens and joined the civil service, where he worked his way to the top. He helped me, in the margins of poll tax damage control, to produce a pretty good White Paper on the environment, This Common Inheritance, which was naturally a disappointment to environmentalists, who wanted to see every green target hit first-time round. Our main environmental achievement was to install in the department a serious economist, David Pearce, who made sustainability a central feature of subsequent government policy. David died horribly young, but was a key figure in making environmental economics respectable in Whitehall.

  I was at the Environment Department from 1989 to the fall of Margaret Thatcher in 1990. The new Prime Minister, John Major, invited me to become the chairman of the Conservative Party to plan and run the next election campaign. I was made Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, which gave me a few largely ceremonial duties relating to the Royal Family, but otherwise I worked mainly out of the Conservative HQ in Smith Square. In a sense my Westminster career had come full circle. The rest of my political life was spent away from London, in Hong Kong, Northern Ireland and Brussels.

  My years spent between the Commons and a variety of government departments from Stormont in Belfast to Waterloo to Victoria Street and Pimlico had left me with some strong views about how well we are governed in Britain. The answer is, not as well as we think. Over the whole post-war period we have been better governed than some other countries, for example Italy. We have avoided calamity, sometimes narrowly. We dissolved our empire, no small thing. We have become more prosperous, though we are a diminished country in terms of our relative economic and political clout. I hope I am right that we are fairer than we were, and also much more tolerant of diversity. But the EU referendum campaign and its aftermath produced some worrying signs of intolerance. Some problems seem beyond our government’s ability to resolve them – low productivity, welfare reform, a health service weighed down by the requirements of longevity and social care, an over-centralized system of government, a penal system that imprisons too many and has turned into a revolving door for crime, growing inter-generational unfairness. It should not be impossible to make more headway in unpicking these problems. But the question of how good our government really is is raised above all by some egregious policy failures in the last few years, for example the poll tax, the second Iraq War and the Brexit referendum. These were not indications of a well-led country, and in the case of the Iraq War the Chilcot Inquiry showed how widely the blame for lamentable failures should be apportioned: the political, diplomatic, civil service, intelligence and military establishments all helped to write this horror story. Any fundamental change in our system of government is overwhelmed by an implacable complacency about how good we are at managing our country. There are three main causes of our troubles.

  First, policy and the favoured options for resolving our problems emerge from a very narrow funnel. The political parties and those they select dominate policy making, and the choices they propose take little account of the need to build consensus and to take a long-term view. Too much attention is paid to the tabloid press, which becomes more shrill as it becomes less commercially viable. What makes this party dominance even more absurd is that the membership of the parties (with one recent exception) has been in free fall. This is particularly true of the Conservative Party. When I first got involved in politics there were about 1.5 million party members; when I was chairman there were about 450,000; today there are fewer than 150,000. Before long you will be able to fit them all into Wembley Stadium. There are far fewer members of political parties in Britain than in most other European countries. As a proportion of the national electorate, party membership in the UK in the first decade of the century was lower than in any European country other than Poland and Latvia. The Democratic Party in Italy had more members (about 500,000) than all UK parties combined, until the recent rise in Labour members. While political party membership falls, membership of other voluntary organizations rises. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has over one million members; The National Trust has more than 4 million; there are over 40,000 members of the Royal National Lifeboat Institute, who support those who risk their lives for those in trouble at sea. The recent increase in Labour Party membership was largely the result of attempts by the left (including the extra-parliamentary left) to keep Jeremy Corbyn in office as leader; a leader widely regarded, not least by many of his parliamentary colleagues, as a literally incredible candidate for residence at 10 Downing Street.

  With this recent exception, party membership has got smaller and, in the Conservative Party, older. The party is fortunate in its opponents in England. Yet this largely unrepresentative section of the community is the principal sounding board for policy discussions; it selects MPs; and it plays a large role in choosing the party leader. Paradoxically, the Conservative Party in particular has introduced more democracy into its processes while becoming less representative of our wider electorate. No wonder it chose to be led not long ago by the alas unelectable Michael Howard and Iain Duncan-Smith rather than Kenneth Clarke, one of the best Chancellors of the Exchequer since the war. No wonder too that it led the charge for the EU exit, choosing to dwell in an imagined past rather than make the most of a challenging future. Conservatives are in danger of becoming a narrow party of English nationalists; they seem to have hoovered up many UKIP voters for the time being, which is bound to drag the party to the right. For its part, a main consequence of Labour’s r
ecent up-tick in membership is to make its approach to policy even further removed from what most voters regard as an acceptable mix of welfare and the market. These new members are alienated not only from the views (left and right) of the political establishment, but also from the traditional core Labour vote.

  I have already mentioned our second problem, over-government at the centre. While this tendency developed, we also foolishly undermined the quality of what had always been one of the best, most effective and creative bureaucracies in the world. Successive governments have run down the policy-making, problem-solving elite of the civil service while contracting out much of the most interesting and important public-service tasks to consultancies. They are more expensive and need to have the details of the problems they are bought in to tackle explained to them by existing civil servants. This undermines civil service morale and recruitment. If you are a clever graduate, why join a government department rather than go to a consultancy at a far higher salary? Civil service mistakes are caricatured and publicized. Repeats of the Yes, Minister television programmes feed the idea that civil servants are there to stop ministers doing what they want to do. In my experience good civil servants like decisive ministers who know what they want to do. They implement these decisions enthusiastically, occasionally too enthusiastically. No one ever logs the failure of consultants. I am, however, pleased that recent comedy programmes have shown us some of the worst aspects of the awful growth of ministers’ special advisers, or ‘spads’ as they are charmingly called. Quite why ministers need two, three or four ‘spads’ to help them act as ministers has always puzzled me. This is one part of our apparatus of governance which needs a Herod-like cull.