Losing Faith in the Tories; Euro-Scepticism; Blair
Peter Stothard was four days into his editorship when sterling was forced out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism. Having been in the United States for almost all of Major’s administration up until that point, he had returned at the very moment the Government’s credibility collapsed. The result, Stothard later maintained, was that ‘I never saw a good day of the Major government.’1
Sterling exited the ERM on Black Wednesday, 16 September 1992. It was a humiliation for Norman Lamont, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, yet it was understandable that John Major believed sterling’s exit from the ERM was not a resigning matter. Joining the system had, after all, been Major’s principal act while Lamont’s predecessor at the Treasury. Despite advice to the contrary, he had even insisted on the high sterling to Deutschmark parity. If it was a resigning matter, then there would be fingers pointing at the Prime Minister.
As a discipline that drove out inflation, ERM membership had already succeeded in its task, yet the Government had remained committed to it nonetheless partly because it had no alternative economic strategy and also because a free-floating currency was incompatible with the Maastricht criteria for joining the euro. By March 1992, 1200 businesses a week were folding. There were 40 million square feet of unwanted commercial property in London alone. As Britain prepared for autumn, unemployment reached 2.8 million. The Conservatives’ reputation for economic competence was in tatters. Regardless, the Government persevered with a policy that necessitated raising interest rates to defend sterling’s overvalued parity at a time when British business, deep in recession, needed a reduction in the cost of borrowing and a cheaper currency with which to trade. Repeatedly, the leading columns of The Times advised Major to renegotiate the terms while there was still a chance.2 The Prime Minister, however, was nothing if not a man of his word. In the last days, despite all the signs that sterling’s rate within the ERM was unsustainable, the Government wasted £3.3 billion and the Bank of England parted with £25 billion of its reserves in a forlorn attempt to stop the currency falling through the floor of its fixed trading bands.
‘With one bound we are free,’ whooped Anatole Kaletsky, whose financial analysis had been promoted to the front page during the crisis. While others, engulfed by the sense of national defeat, prophesied further bad economic news, he argued that letting sterling float and cutting interest rates would ensure an economic recovery. He did not disguise his disdain for the incompetence of ‘the political and business establishment, the prime minister, the captains of industry, the City bankers and above all, the Treasury knights’ whose abrogation of financial sovereignty to the Bundesbank had ensured ‘a million people have lost their jobs. Hundreds of thousands have been made homeless and bankrupt.’ Kaletsky, indeed, was one of a select few who had warned of the dangers from the moment Major had – to the acclaim of informed opinion – first taken Britain into the ERM nearly two years earlier.
Major had an opportunity, if he wished to take it, to set a new course that put a positive spin on a floating currency and low interest rates and turned its back on immediate aspirations to join a single European currency. His failure to do so crushed any lingering Euro-sceptics’ hope that he was secretly on their side but had merely been playing a long game for tactical reasons. In consequence, he had to contend with the virulent enmity of daily denouncements from Euro-sceptics, either, if they were his own backbenchers, to the television cameras on College Green, or, if they were writers, in the pages of papers like The Times.
The official HMSO version of the Maastricht Treaty was not published until May 1992, more than six months after it was signed. Constitutional lawyers pored over its implications. At the time of its signing, The Times, like all other British media organizations, had no means of knowing its exact content and had to rely on the interpretation Major and his press office put on it. Once fuller details became available, The Times’s ardour cooled substantially. Simon Jenkins, who had applauded Major’s efforts in December 1991 from the editor’s chair, was among those who felt duped. In his new role as a Times columnist, he denounced Maastricht as ‘the worst treaty since Versailles’.3 Be that as it may, it was now clear to both Jenkins and Peter Stothard that the Prime Minister so believed his own propaganda about winning ‘game, set and match’ at Maastricht that no argument or event would disabuse him of the notion. Even before Black Wednesday, the Danes, on 2 June, had stunned all Europe by daring to reject the Treaty in a national referendum. Their veto invalidated it. Twenty-four hours after the verdict of Copenhagen, nearly one hundred Tory MPs had signed an early-day motion calling for a ‘fresh start’ and a change in Europe’s direction. They were dumfounded when their Prime Minister reacted to the news by suggesting that it was the Danes – rather than the EU – who needed to think again.
Over a very short period of time, Euro-scepticism had gone from being perceived as a modern variant on flat earth-ism to a respectable analysis of the disengagement between politicians and public. Four days after sterling fell through the ERM trapdoor, the French referendum called by President Mitterrand to demonstrate the strength of his country’s pro-Europeanism recorded a ‘yes’ majority to Maastricht of just over 1 per cent. If support for the European project had waned so much in the country that had led it for the past thirty-five years, it was hardly surprising that the Danes had – by an equally narrow margin – voted against it. Nor were they the only ones. Despite the adherence of the German political elite and the constitutional bar on referenda, opinion polls suggested most Germans were opposed to scraping the Deutschmark. In Britain, there could have been no more personalized example of how the intellectual mood had changed among Tory-minded journalists than in the case of William Rees-Mogg. During his editorship of The Times between 1967 and 1981, he had been a strong advocate of Europeanism and regarded his paper’s support for British membership of the EEC (as it then was) as among the greatest legacies of his years in the chair. Although he remained a supporter of that decision, his enthusiasm for integration had waned considerably. Not content to assault Maastricht repeatedly from his perch on the Op-Ed page, he mounted a High Court challenge to its becoming law.
Major was adamant that there would be no referendum in Britain. Spades were handed out for what promised to be a lengthy bout of parliamentary trench warfare. The Tory Party conference in October descended into a shouting match and a Commons revolt in November reduced the Government’s majority to three. When, in the new year, the bill to approve the Maastricht Treaty entered its committee stage, five hundred amendments and one hundred new clauses were proposed by Euro-sceptics content to wear the Government down in this war of attrition. The old contemptibles who had opposed Heath’s original entry made up the core of the Tory rebellion in the Commons but they had been joined by a younger generation of dogged sceptics that included Bill Cash and Michael Spicer. It was these two MPs who led what became effectively a party within a party, complete with London HQs, separate financing and a back room full of eager young men down from Oxbridge whose youthful idealism to liberate Britain from Brussels echoed a previous generation’s zeal to free Spain from Fascism. Although Stothard had always resisted getting too close to any one politician or interest, he had enjoyed gatherings of the Conservative Philosophy Group and other Thatcherite think tanks during the 1980s and found himself similarly drawn to the cabals and coteries that formed around the Euro-sceptic banner. Brushing aside those who thought Bill Cash was too driven on the subject, Stothard enjoyed Cash’s company, noting, ‘at least he had some strong arguments’.4
Rees-Mogg’s legal challenge failed on 30 July 1993 and three days later Maastricht was formally ratified. The Danes, too, had been persuaded to reconsider their objection while Austria, Finland and Sweden were poised to join an EU increased from twelve to fifteen member states. Yet, at Westminster and Wapping, the Euro-sceptics appeared unwilling to concede defeat and their hounding of the Prime Minister continued. On 28 November 1994 (the night Norway rejected joining the EU in a referendum), Major only won a Commons division on increasing Britain’s contribution to the EU budget by threatening to resign if the vote was lost. Given the unpopularity of his party this was leadership through suicide pact. Even still, eight Tory MPs rebelled. When the whip was withdrawn from them another MP opted to join them. The Government no longer had a Commons majority. In December, the vote on imposing VAT on domestic fuel was lost. In the words of Norman Lamont (who Major had finally got round to replacing with the pro-European Ken Clarke), the Government appeared to be in office but not in power.
Unlike Margaret Thatcher, John Major was an assiduous reader of the press. Given his thin-skinned reaction to criticism, this was perhaps a mistake. Across Fleet Street he could count on very few allies. Stewart Steven at the Evening Standard and Bruce Anderson, the Spectator’s political editor, argued his corner but elsewhere the collapse in support for the Tory Government from once-friendly newspapers was astonishing. Among the senior journalists at The Times, Stothard, Daniel Johnson and Martin Ivens all took great exception, in particular, to Major’s failure to steer a more Euro-sceptic course. Anatole Kaletsky shared their contempt and Mary Ann Sieghart represented for him the worst of both worlds – a Euro-sceptic and New Labour supporter. The Times, though, was not governed by a party line. In their columns, Woodrow Wyatt and Matthew Parris bravely gave the Prime Minister the benefit of the doubt while Peter Riddell, the political editor, was a committed supporter of his attempts to keep Britain positively engaged in the process of European integration. Riddell, indeed, took a completely different line from that emanating from the editorial conferences and argued that Maastricht would ‘in time, be seen as the start of a new, more diverse EC’.5 Thus, Major retained the support of some of the most widely read columnists in the paper. He had one other advocate. The deputy editor, John Bryant, shared his love of sport and believed The Times was not giving him a fair chance. Indeed, he suspected that many of those who despised him so vehemently were motivated by a deep-seated social and educational condescension towards the Prime Minister whose degree came from the university of life. ‘They had pretty much decided that they didn’t like him because he was too downmarket’ was Bryant’s assessment of his colleagues’ attitude.6
Neither Major nor his private office made much attempt to court The Times. Stothard thought Major’s reticence was perhaps to his credit. Major did occasionally provide Stothard with warm gin and tonic around the Cabinet table, but he received far less attention from the Prime Minister than he had from his predecessor, even though he had then held far more junior rank at the paper. Even Sarah Hogg, head of the Downing Street Policy Unit, did not attempt to call in old favours despite having worked with Stothard at The Times prior to the move to Wapping. She did, however, express surprise that Major and Stothard did not get on given that, as far as she could see, they came from similar backgrounds – an observation that caused the Oxford Classicist’s eyebrow to rise.7
It was Simon Jenkins who launched the articles in The Times that caused particular upset in Downing Street. He was the first journalist to refer (in an otherwise supportive article) to an alleged Prime Ministerial breakdown. ‘Certainly he wobbled inside Admiralty House on Black Wednesday, by some accounts wobbled alarmingly,’ Jenkins wrote. This fired the starting gun for others to repeat rumours that were circulating throughout Westminster. On 21 October 1992, Graham Paterson and Andrew Pierce wrote a lengthy article entitled ‘Can Major Take the Strain?’ Using unnamed ‘friends’ of the Prime Minister as its sources, it stated that Major was not eating properly and was lonely in the evenings because his wife preferred to live in Huntingdon. A professor of organizational psychology was quoted stating that such unstable eating patterns ‘indicate a man in the second phase of a stress disorder’. There was certainly more supposition in the article than was consistent with being the journal of record. The worst slur, however, concerned the events of Black Wednesday. ‘There is a deep reluctance from Mr Major’s close colleagues and civil servants to divulge anything about the prime minister’s bearing during that day,’ Paterson and Pierce winked. ‘But for five weeks one question has been asked again and again in Westminster and Fleet Street: did he crack up?’ One man who had spent time with Major during that day was Norman Fowler, the party chairman (and a former Times journalist). He immediately took the unusual step of denouncing the article as ‘nasty and malicious’. A wellbriefed Daily Mail was particularly vociferous in attacking The Times’s efforts, providing its readers with a point-by-point refutation of the claims made by Paterson and Pierce.8 Stothard remained convinced that his source was ‘impeccable’.9 In his autobiography, Major described the rumours as a ‘malicious invention’.10
The attacks intensified. At the Daily Telegraph, Max Hastings had spiked a commissioned article by Paul Johnson that argued in fine polemical style that Major was not fit to be Prime Minister.11 Stothard published it in The Times instead. Rees-Mogg soon came to share Johnson’s contempt for Major, writing:
He seems to be the most over-promoted of the seven [post-war Tory Prime Ministers]. He is not a natural leader; he cannot speak; he has a weak Cabinet which he has chosen; he lacks self confidence; he has no sense of strategy or direction. Even on Europe he does not stand for any great issue … His ideal level of political competence would be deputy chief whip, or something of that standing.12
The dislike for Major, for his European policy and for his failure to come to grips with the sleaze allegations that were engulfing so many of his colleagues tended to diminish his Tory critics’ appreciation for those parts of his agenda that took Thatcherism forward. Yet plans to privatize British Rail, deregulate London buses, reduce the Post Office’s monopoly and produce Audit Commission league tables on councils’ performance were drawn up nonetheless. John Major had launched his Citizen’s Charter back in July 1991. It aimed to apply the language of rights and expectations to consumers’ use of public sector services. The intention was to increase choice, quality, value for money and accountability. Patients and parents would be permitted to see league tables of how their local health and education authorities were performing. NHS patients who had waited over two years for an operation would be entitled to treatment within the next three months or have the health authority pay for them to be treated privately. For the first time, there would be a legal requirement for schools to be independently inspected regularly. Public utilities would be forced to give compensation for poor service. Passengers would receive refunds if their trains were cancelled or subject to unreasonable delays and the emergency services would be subject to new 999 response target times.
There was, however, a downside. The granting of contractual rights to users of public services and the separation of powers between providers and scrutinizers necessitated the creation of a new army of inspectors and regulators to monitor and enforce standards. Some of these, like the ‘Cones Hotline’ (a service that allowed drivers to report delayed road works) quickly became the butt of jokes and condescension. More importantly, a new level of bureaucracy was created that proved expensive and a time-consuming distraction to the public sector employees it was trying to hold to account but was sometimes frustrating their professional judgment. This regulatory burden continued to impose itself when some of the utilities, like the railways, were privatized. For those that remained within the public sector, it was all part of a wider Tory strategy to create internal markets in areas of the economy that could not be privatized and, in doing so, to make them more responsive to consumer rather than producer interests. The policy had started in the 1980s, when local authorities were forced to offer out some of their services to ‘competitive tender’. During the summer of 1991, the programme was rolled out in what became a central feature of the Government’s domestic legislation. School and hospital league tables became popular measures by which the public could gain information on the provision of services in their area. Slowly, the number of patients waiting very long periods for NHS treatment was reduced. Before the new standards and inspections were enforced, some schools did not even trouble themselves to provide parents with annual reports on their child’s progress. Chris Woodhead, appointed the Chief Inspector of Schools, became a familiar scourge of the so-called ‘trendy teacher’. When his Office of Standards in Education (Ofsted) compiled evidence that illuminated low standards in many schools, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers union responded by calling for Ofsted to be abolished. The Times, though, saluted Woodhead’s efforts and the drive to make the performance of schools as well as hospitals more transparent.13 In November 1992, The Times was able to publish an official table of national school GSCE and A-level performances for the first time.
Accompanying the new world of Charter Marks and regulatory bodies, the Tories turned their attention once again to higher education. Having expressed his determination to make Britain a classless society, Major declared that ‘at the heart of our reforms is the determination to break down the artificial barrier which has for too long divided an academic education from a vocational one’.14 Polytechnics would be allowed to call themselves universities. Indeed, the Government, with Ken Clarke as its Education Secretary bringing the changes onto the statute book, wanted to see a third of young people receiving higher education degrees by the end of the decade. Although The Times later became a great critic of expanding entrance to higher education beyond what it regarded as the limitations of its applicants and the grade inflation that accompanied it, the paper did not rush to criticize the move. Taking a free-market approach to the issue, it hoped that the transformation from polytechnics into universities would enhance competition for students and resources – a process that need not mean a dilution in standards.15 Certainly, the polytechnics leapt at the opportunity to upgrade their status. Within a very short space of time, a higher education system with almost one hundred universities was created. For The Times, one consequence was the decision taken following the 1992 graduation ceremonies to end the practice of printing degree results. In one sense, this abandonment marked yet another retreat from the paper’s pretensions to be the journal of record (albeit that until 1986 it had only bothered to print non-Oxbridge degrees if they were first-class honours). However, the increasing number of degree-awarding institutions meant either causing offence by only persisting with publishing the results from the traditional universities or giving the paper during the summer months the appearance of a metropolitan telephone directory.
The greater consequence of the expanding number of universities concerned how potential students could differentiate between what they offered. In a phrase that doubtless made degree holders from the likes of Imperial, UCL, Bristol and Edinburgh wince, The Times declared that ‘until now, Britain has been different: outside Oxford and Cambridge, a university degree has carried much the same weight, whatever its source’.16 This was a gross exaggeration and a glib insult, but the expansion of degree-awarding bodies certainly made the claim that all universities were equal far less tenable. To differentiate, in 1992 The Times Good Universities Guide led the way with the first ranking of them according to various criteria that ranged from the qualifications of the staff, the amount of library spending per head and the quality of student accommodation. It was a major undertaking, beset with problems of comparing potentially non-compatible statistics and deciding what weighting should be attributed to which measurements. The task was entrusted to Tom Cannon, a former director of the Manchester Business School. His efforts were made yet more difficult by the deliberate obstruction of some of the institutions concerned. Indeed, many vice-chancellors (and not just those of the worst-performing universities) vehemently denounced the attempt to create a ranking system even though something similar had existed in the United States for more than a decade. The chairman of the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals and his equivalent on the Committee of Directors of Polytechnics responded with an open letter that stated, ‘We believe the tables are wrong in principle, flawed in execution and constructed upon data which are not uniform, are ill-defined, and in places demonstrably false.’17 They had a point: raw statistics were a most imprecise science and no guarantee of the ‘value added’ strengths of what was on offer. Nonetheless, they were more useful to the consumer who, able for the first time to compare so much information in one place, no longer had to rely on the only real alternative guide – hearsay and snobbery, real or inverted. The first Times ranking placed Cambridge ahead of Oxford by only a fraction of a point and the two ancient institutions continued this closely contested pre-eminence, followed by the science-only Imperial College London, throughout the ensuing decade. At the other end of the scale, the universities propping up the ranking, all former polytechnics, continued to protest that the points system took insufficient account of the problems they laboured with and, indeed, by branding them failures, only added to the divisiveness of higher education. In response to this, The Times stood firm: having opted to join the league of universities, ‘they must expect to be judged against the best’.18
Everything that the ERM’s supporters claimed would happen if sterling was allowed to float failed to happen. Instead, 1993 began with interest rates falling to 6 per cent (their lowest level since 1977) and inflation to 1.7 per cent (the lowest for a quarter of a century). The ‘feel good’ factor took longer to return. With the housing market remaining stagnant, heavily mortgaged families that had bought during the 1980s boom were locked into negative equity. It was a gloomy portfolio for The Times’s new property correspondent, Rachel Kelly. Dissatisfaction with the Government’s health policies continued. In August 1993, the number on NHS waiting lists passed one million. The Scott Report into arms sales to Iraq and the Nolan Report into standards in public life did little to lift the reputation of senior Tories. Sleaze allegations chipped further at their integrity. The Defence Minister, Michael Mates, had to resign over his links with the fugitive businessman Asil Nadir, while several MPs, most prominently Neil Hamilton, were linked to payments from Mohammed Fayed, Harrods’ owner. The sex scandals caused the greatest titillation, in particular David Mellor’s dalliances with a resting actress and the death while engaged in a sex act of a rising star, Stephen Milligan. Collectively, they reduced to ruins Major’s ‘Back to Basics’ campaign which The Times described as his ‘last despairing stab at a big idea’.19
The public’s response, towards which no popular newspaper could be indifferent, had become remarkably hostile to the Conservative Party. In the local elections of May 1993, the party was left in control of only one county council. Supposedly safe seats were transformed in by-elections to huge majorities for the Liberal Democrats, further frustrating Major’s ability to retain a Commons majority. A MORI opinion poll in September 1993 suggested that only a third of Times readers supported the Tories. Forty-three per cent of them backed Labour and 20 per cent the Liberal Democrats. The share was not much different in the FT and the Conservatives did not even quite scrape a majority among Telegraph readers. Most alarmingly for Major, his party was down to 22 per cent of Sun readers.20 The constituency that Margaret Thatcher had put together had been lost.
It was an atmosphere conducive to satire. The television show Spitting Image depicted Major from early on as a grey figure pushing his peas around the plate. It was the Guardian’s Simon Hoggart and its cartoonist, Steve Bell, who established the memorable image of Major with his shirt tucked into a visible pair of Y-fronts. The Times’s cartoonist, Peter Brookes, preferred to depict the Prime Minister as a slightly goofy looking man dominated by a large pair of spectacles. The non-transparent nature of the glasses suggested there was not much of a personality behind them. One who resisted the temptation to kick a man when he was down was the parliamentary sketchwriter, Matthew Parris. Like many ex-Tory MPs, Parris had no love for the Tory Party, although he remained a Conservative by instinct. His sketches were never partisan in the party sense and he got on well with many Labour MPs. Nonetheless, originally a member of the ‘blue chip’ generation of Tory MPs himself, he found it difficult to caricature them with the same ease with which he had got to work with the larger than life figures of the Thatcher years. ‘There I was,’ he later wrote, ‘my gang in power, chronicling their noontide, their late afternoon, their internal mutinies and finally their sunset and night.’ Indeed, Parris was sufficiently close to the Prime Minister to draft a section of his 1994 conference speech, a conflict of journalistic interests that a past editor of The Times, Geoffrey Dawson, had once more controversially performed on behalf of Stanley Baldwin.21 This was, perhaps, one of the benefits of his decision to remain on a freelance contract. Like John Bryant, Parris regarded Major’s treatment by the press as ‘downright nasty … And I think his dignity and politeness in the face of adversity and mockery were heroic.’22 If partisanship made him pull the occasional punch in his sketch, then this was perhaps a necessary relief from the unending attack to which the Major Government was prey from almost every other corner of the newspaper. During 1994, opinion polls suggested it was the most unpopular government since polling began.
The Times’s disillusionment with John Major had not been accompanied by any great enthusiasm for John Smith. The leader of the Labour Party and the editor of The Times had little in common. Smith once asked Stothard to join him for a drink in the House of Commons. It was not a success: Stothard was underwhelmed by the Leader of the Opposition ‘pouring half a glass of red wine down his shirt’ at six in the evening.23 On 12 May 1994, Smith died of a heart attack. It was Tony Blair’s ascendancy that made a difference to the relationship between Labour and The Times. Peter and Sally Stothard had got to know Tony and Cherie Blair in the 1980s when the Blairs bought their Islington house. Happily, the relationship survived this transaction.
Matthew Parris had reacted very differently on his first acquaintance with Blair. Introductions had been arranged in the late 1980s by the Blairs’ new friend, Mary Ann Sieghart, who invited them and Parris for dinner. Parris was less than impressed, finding the MP for Sedgefield strangely hollow, unlike his wife who was the far more substantial personality.24 This assumption had not changed much by the time Tony Blair emerged to run for the leadership. Watching him make his bid during a speech in Bloomsbury, Parris observed:
Seating in the hall was divided into the three sections eligible to choose the Labour leader: one third BBC, one third print journalists and one third Labour Party … Blair delighted most journalists. His skills would serve in those amusement arcade ‘Grand Prix’ screen games. His own screen, the Autocue screen, and his gaze rigid with concentration, Mr Blair drove at gathering velocity round a track littered with the death-traps of policy commitments, swerving to avoid every one, fuelled by a tank full of abstract nouns.25
It was nonetheless a strategy that impressed Stothard. In 1995, Labour delegates were persuaded to remove Clause Four, their party’s historic commitment to state ownership of the means of production. Blair assured them, ‘Today a new Labour Party is being born. Our task now is nothing less than the rebirth of our nation.’ A new start was certainly made with News International. That year, Blair travelled to Australia to speak to the News Corp. seminar on Hayman Island. Considering the Labour Party’s boycott campaign during the Wapping dispute, the occasion was seen as a defining moment in which the symbolism of past disagreements was buried. Blair, indeed, had travelled an awfully long way to prove the point.
Believing in John Major’s depth and Tony Blair’s shallowness, Parris’s view continued to be far more distrustful than the open minded attitude of his editor. His sketch for Blair’s second party conference speech as leader in 1995, noted:
Blair offered the New Testament. Within moments he was quoting Christ. Near the end he declared (twice): ‘Be strong and of good courage.’ The tone was positively messianic. Mr Blair has yet to declare: ‘As God said and rightly …’ but he will.26
In May, Parris was called to take tea with Major, who floated the idea of his ‘put up or shut up’ resignation strategy. Parris advised against such an unorthodox move. Unsure whether Major had shared with him the idea in confidence, he chose not to break it in the paper.27 However, Major duly resigned the party leadership and dared any rival to challenge him. Michael Portillo thought about doing so, but drew back. It was John Redwood, the Welsh Secretary, who left the Cabinet to do so.
Five years earlier, Parris had christened Redwood and Portillo ‘vulcans’ although it was with Redwood that the title stuck, greatly to his personal distress. It was a theme Parris revisited when he turned up for Redwood’s opening press conference only to find himself debarred from entering by organizers who claimed the hall was full. Watching it on television, he reported the scene in his sketch:
Television viewers yesterday watched the first Tory leadership campaign in history to be launched from the bosom of Teresa Gorman. Viewers were startled by the strange green-clad torso behind John Redwood as he spoke at his press conference yesterday. No head was visible in the frame.
I can reveal that it belonged to Mrs Gorman. We would recognise that bust anywhere. Once, as Redwood parried, a hand could be seen tugging at her lapels, drawing them together like green curtains across the cleavage. We trust the hand belonged to Mrs Gorman.
As for the candidate, Parris successfully ridiculed him:
How did he view Wales? ‘It-is-a-beautiful-country,’ said the Vulcan, because that is what Earthlings say about Wales. Instructed by his minders to display humour, Redwood told us he was a ‘jobseeker.’ He followed this with the smile he has now learnt to do very nicely: a triumph of muscular control … What, we wondered, would be his final word?
‘No extra charge!’ he declared. Mr Redwood must have seen this in a supermarket, recorded it as a useful idiomatic phrase, and inputted it onto the wrong disk-drive in his logic system.28
When his colleagues voted on 4 July 1995, Major defeated his challenger by a sufficient although, in the circumstances, hardly crushing manner. Redwood received eighty-nine votes and there were twenty abstentions.
Meanwhile, Conrad Black replaced Max Hastings with the more firmly anti-Major Charles Moore as editor of the Daily Telegraph. This was followed by a raid on The Times for some of its best staff. Anne McElvoy was inveigled away to the Spectator and Matthew D’Ancona was poached by the Sunday Telegraph. D’Ancona’s departure did not alter The Times’s hostility to the Government, but it did raise the possibility that it would mix a right wing attack on its European policies with a Blairite attack on domestic issues. Mary Ann Sieghart was proving to be an articulate and forceful advocate of Blair’s ‘third way’. As the only senior Times leader writer who knew Tony Blair well, she was able to speak authoritatively on his agenda without risk of contradiction. The chief leader writer, Rosemary Righter, disagreed with her, but because her own speciality was foreign policy she was keen to find a strong intellectual who could shoreup the paper’s defences against falling for Blair’s charms. The answer came in the guise of D’Ancona’s friend and Oxford contemporary, Michael Gove. An Aberdonian, Gove had attended Robert Gordon’s College, a regular feature in the surprisingly intense world of Scottish schools debating contests. Proceeding up to Lady Margaret Hall, he had been elected president of the Oxford Union. To Gove, journalism was the natural means of keeping his formidable debating skills in fine fettle. Like Stothard, another minor independent schoolboy and Oxford graduate, he had worked at the BBC (on the Today and On The Record programmes) and was looking to escape into print journalism. Believing that he had identified the next leader of the Conservative Party, he had also begun writing a biography called Michael Portillo: The Future of the Right. When The Times considered serialization, Gove met and made a favourable impression on Martin Ivens. In January 1996, he was duly appointed a leader writer, at the age of twenty-eight. A few months later, the leader team was strengthened further with the arrival of Tim Hames, an Oxford don of light blue hue who would also come to play a prime role in the paper’s political positioning. Daniel Johnson was moved from the literary editorship over to become comment editor. These changes stalled, at least for the moment, the prospect of The Times falling for the charms of Tony Blair.
In fact, the dynamics of Stothard’s inner circle were complicated. Michael Gove and Mary Ann Sieghart were both Euro-sceptics and, for the most part, social liberals. Yet the former was a trenchant Tory, committed to maintaining the Act of Union with Scotland and Ulster and man of evangelical convictions, while the latter was an equally strong advocate of New Labour who had a personal rapport with the Blairs. Daniel Johnson provided a more traditional voice of social and religious Conservatism. Like Bernard Levin before him, Anatole Kaletsky had a sparkling mind and prevented leader conferences from proceeding along conventional lines by the elasticity of his thinking. On foreign policy, Rosemary Righter combined an uncompromising neo-conservative world view with a strong belief in the principles of the United Nations (thus ensuring she was often highly critical of the UN in practice). Michael Binyon, on the other hand, was relied upon to represent the unflappable perspective of the Foreign Office and was, alone among the group, noticeably less hostile to the causes of Brussels and the Palestinians. During previous editorships, Stothard had watched ‘a lot of aggression take place in and around the leader department’ yet among his own college of cardinals he recognized that ‘the general spirit was exceptionally good. They were very fine representatives of their causes, all good humoured, good hearted people’ despite the daily ding-dongs that took place between them.29
The political commentator least amenable to the attractions offered by either of the main parties was, perhaps, the cartoonist, Peter Brookes. Having studied at London’s Central School of Art and Design, Brookes was an expert draughtsman whose rare achievement was an ability to parody his subject matter while still drawing them with great accuracy and attention to detail. He began at The Times in 1981 as an illustrator to the main columnists on the Op-Ed page. After a while, he concluded it would be more satisfying to conjure up his own commentaries rather than, for example, reproduce Bernard Levin’s views in visual form. From 1993, he became the paper’s political cartoonist. His method was to arrive at the office in good time for the morning conference when the main news stories were discussed. He would then spend the rest of the morning and early afternoon toying with ideas in pencil. Once he had decided on his cartoon, usually by about 4.30 p.m., he had a couple of hours to translate it onto paper in pen and ink before the page was ready to go to press. For the Saturday edition, he added his box of watercolours in order to produce ‘Nature Notes’. This was a weekly bestiary that depicted public figures as animals, annotated with informative behavioural notes. Eventually, colour came to the Op-Ed page as well, specifically so that the daily Brookes cartoon could be unveiled in the best of lights. Neither Tory, nor Euro-sceptic, nor taken in by the blandishments of New Labour, his political prejudices were often far removed from those emanating from the editor’s office and this helped create an important ideological counterpoise in the heart of the paper. His real achievement, though, was the piquant wit he brought to contemporary events. While the quality of his artistry was without equal, it was always the idea he was conveying that was the central component of his success.
As colleagues reassembled at Times House in the New Year – an election year – Stothard was musing about the implications of change. Did this mean he would take The Times where it had never gone before by endorsing the Labour Party? He gathered the leader writers and senior political staff for a private meeting in the Reform Club where the options were laid before them. It was Stothard’s technique in leader conferences to set up opposing views and watch the two antipathetic sides battle it out to a conclusion. The same format was deployed at the Reform Club. Michael Gove made the case for endorsing the Tories and Mary Ann Sieghart did likewise for Labour. Gove maintained that what was at the core of Blair’s programme was constitutional reform and this, unlike issues of funding and provision, was so revolutionary that it could not be undone five years later if The Times did not like the consequences. As a Scottish Unionist, Gove was deeply uneasy about Labour’s plans for devolution within the British Isles but he was especially concerned about the likelihood of being taken into the euro and a far deeper form of integration than even Major was prepared to stomach. Blair’s plans were irreversible and bad. Furthermore, Gove questioned whether the modernizers were really in control? He doubted that a Cabinet containing Frank Dobson and Margaret Beckett in key portfolios was likely to think the unthinkable in reforming the welfare state. Sieghart took a different line. She too was averse to taking Britain into a European single currency, but Blair would hold a referendum on that issue so it was not a defining issue for how people should vote at the general election. The Times, she argued, had set Blair a number of hurdles that he – and more importantly his party – would have to cross on issues like the unions and education before they could be endorsed. These hurdles had been very impressively cleared. Given how far Labour had come and the distance the Tories had slipped, she maintained that the question of whether the paper endorsed Labour was ‘if not now, then when?’. The meeting broke up with no final decision taken. Unusually for an ambitious and sharp-witted young Tory, Gove was a man of generous spirit and unfailing old-fashioned courtesy. He thought that Sieghart had possibly ‘won on points.’30
The decision lay with the editor and with him alone. He recognized that the Conservatives had run out of steam. Yet, given the limited practical programme set out by Tony Blair – albeit accompanied by much evangelical rhetoric – the Tories certainly seemed to have as much to offer a new parliamentary term as New Labour in terms of proposals for domestic reform. Instead, it was the issue of Europe that remained at the forefront of Stothard’s mind. He might have been more inclined to overlook Blair’s enthusiasm for Brussels if he had known that once Gordon Brown became Chancellor he would kick the euro issue into touch for the next two parliaments. This, however, was far from clear in the first months of 1997. A Labour victory, it seemed, was the surest way of bringing about a referendum to join the euro within the lifetime of the next parliament. It would be a campaign in which the Government, the most well-known and popular Tory politicians and the Liberal Democrats would all be campaigning for a ‘yes’ vote. The prospect filled him with as much woe as it did Michael Gove. On the other hand, the other principal issue vexing the editor was not one of policy but of personality. With Michael Howard and Peter Lilley he was on good terms, but he had a shortage of respect that bordered on contempt for John Major. Bumping into the Prime Minister in Australia House shortly before Christmas in 1996, Stothard had told him that The Times was about to bring him some good news with an opinion poll that suggested he had gained some ground against Labour. ‘For me personally or for the party?’ was Major’s instant reply.31 Such comments made Stothard despair. He was also staggered when Lady Thatcher assured him that ‘Tony Blair is a man who won’t let Britain down’.32 In any case, having very effectively given the impression he thought the Prime Minister lacked the intellectual rigour to hold the office, he could hardly clear his throat and endorse him for a further five years of political purgatory.
On 17 March, Major announced there would be a general election on 1 May. He had put off the date until the last moment, hoping that the improving economic climate would demonstrate the Tories were not economically incompetent after all. Stothard had still given no indication as to which way his mind was made up between Labour and Conservative, yet there was an alternative that gave him a way out of his dilemma. The businessman and millionaire Sir James Goldsmith had founded the Referendum Party. Its specific aim was expressed in its title, but it was unapologetically a party campaigning against Britain being swept up into the integrationist impulses of the European Union. Around Goldsmith, a group of youthful, right-wing enthusiasts had constellated, as had a few more glamorous figures, drawn in part by the leader’s charisma and wealth. For its part, most of the mainstream media regarded Goldsmith with a mixture of fear and loathing. Stothard did not share this aversion and Goldsmith paid a couple of visits to Times House in the run up to polling day. The editor even got Gove to write a profile of Goldsmith, specifically requesting that it should not be the hatchet job that others had done when entrusted with the task. Gove opted to suggest that ‘it would be more dignified for Sir James to claim an intellectual victory now than to endure an electoral massacre this spring’. Gove particularly resented Goldsmith’s intention to field candidates even against MPs with strong Euro-sceptic track records.33 Nobody who knew Stothard imagined that he would do anything as eccentric as committing The Times to the maverick pronouncements of the Anglo-French multimillionaire but it was a sign that he was open to unorthodox thinking as election day drew near. It was Hywell Williams, John Redwood’s adviser, who suggested that since the editor clearly thought Britain’s relations with the EU was the most important issue facing the country, The Times should fight it as a ‘coupon election’ – endorsing those candidates of whatever party had a history of opposing further integration in general and the euro in particular. Meanwhile, Stothard asked the archives to send up all the paper’s twentieth-century general election endorsements. He read them and passed them onto Tim Hames, asking for his historical insight, adding implausibly by way of explanation, ‘the twentieth century is not really my period’.34
Accompanied by the acclaimed watercolourist Matthew Cook to record the scene, Stothard, Riddell and Kaletsky arrived at 10 Downing Street for their pre-polling day interview with the Prime Minister. In the full-page write-up for the paper by Stothard, Europe appeared to have been the only issue that intruded upon the discussion, save for an almost throwaway sentence, ‘he sees the achievement of low inflation as essentially his own, the top item in the ledger of his achievements’.35 Despite repeated interrogation from Kaletsky, Major nonetheless refused to say what his gut feeling was towards joining the euro, explaining ‘what I will do is what I happen to think is in the best interests of the country. It may not actually be what my innate instincts might be. I don’t know what judgment I am going to reach.’ Major was in a difficult position. If he ruled out joining the euro in the lifetime of the next parliamentary term he would retain – or perhaps regain – the loyalty of two-thirds of his party. Yet, if he pursued this course, he risked losing the support of those Cabinet ministers he actually liked and, in particular, the two most senior members of his government, Michael Heseltine and Kenneth Clarke. It was an unenviable choice, but adopting a wait and see policy gave the impression that the Prime Minister did not have the strength of character to tell his own party whether he actually had an opinion on one of the biggest issues in the economic and political life of the nation – scrapping the national currency and surrendering ultimate budgetary control via the stability pact to the European Union. His equivocation only sharpened the contempt in which his critics at The Times – and elsewhere – held him. It was certainly not a display of leadership and, given the discord it was fuelling, some frankly had come to wonder if it was even an effective course of party management.
This last point was thrown into focus when Tory MPs started disavowing their leader’s wait and see (it had been rechristened ‘negotiate and decide’) policy. Major responded to demands for clarity with the desperate appeal, ‘don’t bind my hands’. Stothard made up his mind, deciding, in the words of a subsequent leading article drafted by Michael Gove, that, ‘The party machines do not wish to be bound, but the voters should not have to choose blind.’36 With only six days to go before polling day, Stothard told Gove what was afoot, entrusting him with leading a small team to draw up within forty-eight hours a comprehensive list of who the Euro-sceptic candidates were. This was a tall order that involved much delving into reference sources and checking on pressure group affiliations. Among the inducements for pro-Europeans to use vaguely Euro-sceptical language in their campaign literature was the prospect of money from the businessman Paul Sykes to help Euro-sceptic candidates’ campaign expenses. Gove’s team were not prepared to endorse anyone who deployed weasel words like being unable to ‘foresee’ adopting the euro. Discovering Labour candidates’ views on the matter was even more difficult because few cared to deviate from the line of obfuscation being encouraged from their party’s headquarters at Millbank. Nonetheless, on Monday 28 April – four days before election day – The Times published its list of the candidates it endorsed. The two-page spread was framed by a Richard Willson cartoon depicting a Bayeaux tapestry-style montage with the heads of the leading politicians superimposed on the figures. So that the Euro-enthusiasts could be depicted as being under attack and Major subjected to an arrow in his eye, it was the Euro-sceptics who, oddly, were the Norman cavalry.
The Times decided to list not only those candidates it considered Euro-sceptic but also those with firmly Europhile records, ‘whom sceptical voters should not support’. Where a Europhile Tory was being challenged by a candidate from the pro-euro Liberal Democrats, The Times advocated voting for the latter on the grounds that ‘the Commons will be just as Europhile whether the Tory or Liberal Democrat candidate wins, but if the Tory loses the Tory party as a whole will become more sceptical’.37 There were also some exceptions. The Times refused to endorse Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams or the Tory Neil Hamilton, who was at the centre of the much-publicized fight over allegations that he took cash for questions. The Europhile Tam Dalyell was endorsed on the grounds that he was opposed to devolution for Scotland. Inevitably there was a flurry of telephone calls from anxious Tory candidates keen to protest their Euro-sceptic credentials in order to be added to the list. ‘If I lose, you’ll have a hand in it,’ warned the candidate for Hampstead and Highgate while another, soon to be former, MP, hollered down the telephone, ‘This is a scandal: you could cost me the election.’38 Some injustices were done, although in other cases it appeared that it was only the prospect of being hanged that concentrated a candidate’s mind.
Endorsing candidates according to their view on the great issue of the day rather than the party they represented was a complete break from past custom. It did, however, solve Stothard’s problem over feeling unable to endorse the Conservatives but reticent to declare for the untested and euro-friendly Blair. Some thought The Times had made a serious misjudgment. They questioned whether Europe was an issue that trumped all others. The opinion polls certainly suggested it was bread and butter issues that would determine the result. The Times had embarked upon a policy where it found itself endorsing far left Labour candidates like Jeremy Corbyn and Tony Benn with whom it had nothing else in common but an aversion to Brussels. Indeed many of the left-wingers the paper endorsed opposed joining the single currency on the sort of anti-capitalist economic arguments that were anathema to the paper’s general outlook. Furthermore, the leading column was also highlighting the cause of specific candidates – usually in marginal seats – who it felt deserved to be elected on account of their contribution to public life. These included politicians like the Liberal Democrat Simon Hughes who supported the euro. Critics were not shy in pointing out these glaring inconsistencies. It came to overshadow the considerable work the paper had made to highlight the other aspects of the general election campaign. The Times was the only newspaper to publish the major parties’ manifestos in full. Indeed, Stothard later suggested, ‘Endorsement is not the main point.’ What Labour had been far more interested in was having their policies given ‘a fair crack of the whip’ in the news pages and across the paper generally. This The Times provided.39
Nonetheless, the decision of The Times to endorse a platform rather than a party took the paper’s journalists by surprise. It was the editor’s decision alone and was not debated at any leader conference. Mary Ann Sieghart was particularly bewildered, having believed Labour was about to be endorsed. She promptly did some moonlighting for the News of the World, helping to write its leader column endorsing Blair.40 On Tuesday 29 April, The Times’s decision ran across the top of the front page and was elaborated upon in a full-page leading article written by the editor. It contained a note of historical self-justification that sought to minimize accusations that the paper was breaking with tradition. In the early years of the twentieth century, the paper had put aside its Liberal instincts in order to defend the causes of the Empire and opposition to Irish Home Rule. It had not taken a hard line in the 1945 election and had been neutral in 1955. Thereafter its Tory endorsements had been accompanied by a plea to shore up the Liberal Party. ‘Our strong support of Lady Thatcher in the 1980s was, in this regard, counter to our traditions, not central to them,’ it assured readers. While the paper had admired strong leaders, ‘John Major, by contrast, has been a true man of his parliamentary machine. His skills are those of the whip. His proudest boasts have been for his powers of negotiation.’ In contrast, there was much to commend Blair who had acted quickly to re-educate his party, ‘but we do not put our name to what is still a tower of dreams’.41
Murdoch was as much taken by surprise as everybody else. Indeed, the division of opinion within his newspaper empire hardly gave credence to the common orthodoxy that News International’s owner pulled the political strings. The Sunday Times reluctantly endorsed the Conservatives while the Sun, rather more confidently, proclaimed the case for Labour. The line adopted by The Times appeared eccentric or unashamedly individualist, according to taste. Yet, even though Murdoch privately thought the Euro-sceptic endorsement was a mistake,42 he did not attempt to dissuade Stothard nor did he use the broadly unfavourable backlash following the paper’s pronouncement to undermine him. Indeed, it would have been hard to find a more politically ‘hands-off’ proprietor in all Fleet Street. Conrad Black’s Daily Telegraph was the only daily broadsheet to declare for the Tories. The Times’s columnists went their separate ways. Accusing Major of ‘pathetically ineffectual leadership’, Kaletsky described his government as ‘the least electable in 50 years’.43 Rees-Mogg cast around for reasons to vote Conservative, arguing that having been promised a free vote on the euro, a Tory majority would ensure a euro-sceptic parliament.44 Woodrow Wyatt argued that the polls could be wrong, that many old socialists would abstain rather than vote for Blair and that ‘against all the pollsters, and chumps like the pornographic bestseller and disloyal Edwina Currie … I believe that John Major, who has fought brilliantly, is on course for a majority of around 30–40’.45 Eschewing the rancour that so many felt for the collapsing regime, Simon Jenkins wrote a notably fair-minded piece on election eve, noting ‘there is no greater compliment to the Thatcher – Major era than the thinness of today’s Labour manifesto’.46
On election morning, The Times’s MORI poll suggested Labour would get 48 per cent and the Tories 28 per cent with the Liberal Democrats on 16, suggesting a Labour majority of between 180 and 200. In the event, the respective percentages were 44, 31 and 17 and the majority was 177. ‘Landslide victory for Labour’ ran The Times’s headline once most of the results were in, below an architrave of Tory portraits – Portillo, Lang, Forsyth, Rumbold, Hamilton, Mellor, Waldegrave, Rifkind, Lamont – each looking dejected, each with the caption ‘OUT’ splashed across the top. Five Cabinet ministers and eighteen other ministers lost their seats. The Conservative Party, which had gone into the election committed to preserving the United Kingdom against Blair’s plans for devolution, was left with no MPs outside England.
What was particularly embarrassing for The Times was that the landslide predominantly swept away Tory Euro-sceptics, leaving Euro-friendly chieftains like Kenneth Clarke and Michael Heseltine untouched. There was little evidence that voters had actively endorsed Europhile candidates, merely that they had treated it as a traditional general election fought on party lines and domestic issues, and not as a surrogate referendum on deeper European integration. In this mood, the vast majority of Times readers simply ignored their paper’s appeal. If the Euro-sceptic voters’ guide had any effect then, perhaps, it assisted some in identifying a like-minded candidate from one of the main parties in their constituency, thereby redirecting some protest votes away from Goldsmith’s Referendum Party or the UK Independence Party (both of which performed below expectations in the ballot). How many – if any – MPs owed success to this assault on the fringe vote may be contested. At any rate, it had no bearing on the overall result. This was a humiliating rebuff to The Times’s editorial stance – not that this consequence was dwelt upon in the leading column whose attention seamlessly switched to the prospects for the new administration. It was a demonstration of how impotent the press could be once the public had already made its mind up on a subject. ‘If I could rewrite the traditions of the paper, I would not endorse’ at general elections was Stothard’s subsequent reflection.47
The end of eighteen years of Tory rule and the prospects for a new style of government under a young, fresh faced Prime Minister who talked the language of hope and rebirth would now become the focus for The Times. Yet not to be overlooked was the relative success of the third party. With forty-six MPs, the Liberal Democrats had produced their best result since Lloyd George’s Liberal Party went to the polls promising a Keynesian-style New Deal in 1929. The other, more pressing matter concerned how the Conservatives – whose share of the vote had not been so low since they were led by the Duke of Wellington in 1832 – would regroup. Major immediately announced his intention to stand down, sensibly opting to spend his first day of freedom watching cricket at The Oval. It was the cue for a bloody leadership fight to commence. Matthew Parris was perturbed that ‘the party I used to respect’ had been gripped by ‘some sort of fever’ that was turning it away from being led by ‘grown ups’ who challenged Labour for the middle ground, preferring to become a sort of ‘Tory Likud’ that instead aimed at predominance on the fringe. The notion that they might find salvation under John Redwood’s leadership was, Parris wrote, ‘laughable’ although it was clear he saw nothing amusing about the prospect.48 The leading column, however, leapt to pour cold water on Clarke or Heseltine’s claims to the succession, positing that they were ‘deeply associated with the election debacle’.49 Having argued that the issue of Europe was the determining factor in the general election, the paper could hardly demand a Europhile victory in the ensuing leadership contest. Portillo, who Michael Gove had tipped as the next leader, had been removed from the contest by his own electors in Enfield Southgate. On 3 May, Heseltine’s aspirations were felled by a heart scare that dispatched him to hospital. Within days, John Redwood had entered the leadership race with an article in The Times entitled ‘I can’t defend the past; I can unite the party’ in which he maintained that having resigned from the Major Cabinet he was the only candidate who would not have to spend the next few years apologizing for it.50 In fact, it was Redwood’s decision to resign from the Cabinet in 1995 that created an opportunity for a young man of promise, William Hague, to fill Redwood’s shoes at the Welsh Office and, in doing so, enter the 1997 election as a candidate with Cabinet experience. Even on the morning after the general election disaster, Andrew Pierce had written up Hague as the leader the Tories might turn to in order to ‘skip a generation’. This initially improbable prospect suddenly took hold. Having originally made a verbal agreement to back Michael Howard by standing as his deputy (and, in effect, heir apparent) Hague soon began to believe he could win under his own steam. Howard’s hopes were dealt a further blow by the outspoken maverick Ann Widdecombe, who attacked him over his sacking of the prison chief, Derek Lewis, and announced to a stunned Commons chamber that there was ‘something of the night’ about the former Home Secretary.
The scale of the election landslide naturally encouraged some to think the Tories needed a complete reinvention. Coming from a younger generation, Hague’s profile appeared perfect for this role. Yet, in urging the party to elect Ken Clarke as their leader, Simon Jenkins pointed out that there was no need to assume that the Tories would be out of office for a generation. On the contrary, although exaggerated in seats secured by the vagaries of the electoral system, Blair had actually won only 1 per cent more of the popular vote than had Major in 1992. The gap was thus by no means unbridgeable within the space of one parliamentary term of office. Jenkins was baffled by the defeatism of Tory MPs who were ‘behaving as if they lost the argument as well as the election. They did not. They won the argument, which is why they lost the election … New Labour is one of the Tory party’s great achievements.’51 After Howard and Lilley trailed in the first ballot of MPs, Redwood and Clarke agreed to work together to dish Hague. The decision astounded Westminster and its lobby correspondents. References to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact abounded. ‘We can say a sad farewell to John Redwood as a valid figure in Conservative policies,’ wrote Rees-Mogg. ‘He was the Robespierre of the Right, the dark-blue Incorruptible … In the twinkling of an eye he has destroyed himself.’52 ‘Absurd is how the axis between Mr Clarke and Mr Redwood will look to the country and absurd is what it is,’ huffed the leading article.53 Lady Thatcher felt likewise, and endorsed William Hague. The following day, he romped to victory by 92 votes to 70. Aged thirty-six, he was the youngest Tory leader since William Pitt the Younger (of whom he later became a biographer) two hundred years before.
Few, including The Times which backed him, knew where Hague intended to take the party. All that was known for sure was that he was young, fresh, virtually untainted by the infighting of the Major years and, unlike Clarke, was no enthusiast for joining the euro. In the circumstances, this appeared to be a promising start. If he lacked stature then he had time, it seemed, to acquire it and develop some new policies along the way. Yet, escaping the shadows of the past five years of infighting and ‘Tory sleaze’ remained a daunting prospect. The day after Hague was elected leader, Jonathan Aitken’s libel case against the Guardian collapsed. Having been prepared to let his daughter Victoria provide him with a false alibi under oath, the former Chief Secretary to the Treasury faced charges of perjury and perverting the course of justice for which he would serve seven months in jail and be declared bankrupt. There were heavy clouds hanging over the bright Tory dawn. The Times was ready to look out towards a different horizon.