Authors: Rosa Prince
Standing Down (14 page)
During his time as Climate Change Minister, Mr Barker oversaw the creation of the Green Investment Bank, helped make solar energy a viable industry and pushed his agenda of tackling climate change through the private sector on the international stage.
He ‘loved’ the travel and enjoyed negotiations, particularly his ability to persuade the Americans that ‘climate change is not a Trojan horse for paid-up lefties’.
But by the fourth year of the Parliament, he knew he had had enough. He thought about it for six months then asked to see the Prime Minister – who to begin with assumed he was asking for a new job:
Maybe I’ve had my share. I love the theatre of politics as much as the next person, I’m not a critic of the style of the House of Commons, but I think maybe my political mojo is not quite as rampant as it was ten years ago, and I think you need that.
To leave wanting more is a good thing. Before I told the Prime Minister I fretted for six months, very stressed out about it.
I was really worried that the moment I told him I’d instantly regret it and I’d just hear the slamming of doors, [I’d think,] ‘What have I done? I’d worked so hard to get here and now I’d locked myself out.’
And in actual fact from the moment I told him I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Of course I’ll miss it terribly when there’s a big parliamentary occasion, and I’ll miss colleagues, but I think I’m going to enjoy them in different ways in the next section of my career.
I will be sad but I think I definitely made the right decision. I got to work with my heroes and in a small way made a difference. I thought I would be here ’til I dropped when I came in. Turns out I won’t be.
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CV
Born and raised in Sussex; attended Royal Holloway, University of London; went into the City.
1997: Unsuccessfully fights Eccles
2001: Elected MP for Bexhill & Battle
2003: Becomes a member of the Conservative Whips’ Office
2005: Helps run David Cameron’s leadership campaign; becomes shadow Environment Minister
2006: Accompanies David Cameron on trip to the Arctic Circle;
Daily Mirror
reports he has separated from his wife to begin a relationship with a man
2010: Becomes Minister for Climate Change
2014: Announces he will not stand for re-election; stands down from government
Greg Barker is divorced and has three children.
John Denham
, sixty-one, was Labour MP for Southampton Itchen (1992–2015).
‘I’m quite independent. I’ve never been in the social circle of any of the people who were leaders.’
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I have been extraordinary lucky. Through all this, at every stage, doors have opened for me. And this was one door that opened.
As much as anything I remember it for having young children. I knew I was in with a very good chance of winning.
I’d always been a campaigner for change. I think my real feeling when I got elected was: now I’ve got a job I can get my teeth into.
I’m quite insensitive to that kind of stuff. I didn’t go, ‘Oh wow’, or anything of that sort, just set about getting myself bed in, just got on with it really. I’ve never felt particularly uncomfortable here at all.
The most enjoyable thing was chairing the Home Affairs Committee. I’m not sure if there’s influence or impact but it was a really interesting period of time, because you control your own agenda.
I didn’t decide to resign until the morning of the [Iraq War] debate itself. Once it was done I felt so much better. The two weeks leading up to it were awful.
Resigning at the end made no effect. You’ve got to look at that: fine you made a decision you thought was right in principle; [but] you didn’t change anything.
There’s no one big single reason but everything comes together. Part of it is when you’re approaching sixty-two you are very aware that the decision to do one thing is a decision not to do other things. When you are young, life is long enough to do lots of things, and that’s less and less true the older you get.
I honestly don’t think I will. I’ve always been quite good at moving on from one job to another. I’ve left under my own volition, not everybody is able to do that in politics, so I’m not expecting any pangs.
I’m going to be at Winchester University two days a week where I’ll be concentrating on … a centre looking at English politics and identity.
I’m going to be with the London School of Economics for part of the week – they … want to improve the interface between academic work and public policy.
We’ve got a new think tank, Centre for Southern Policy … and I’ve also been asked to chair something called Culture Southampton. So I’ve ended up with quite a reasonable diary.
People are here for five minutes now and they’re being talked about as the next leadership candidate. I would actually advise a new MP not to be in a hurry and not to think that being on the front bench is a mark of achievement. Try to get some real achievements under your belt, because the skills you learn from that will land you in really good stead later on.
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the full story
Despite staging a ‘one man sit-in’ of his headmaster’s study at the age of eleven in protest at the lack of school cricket facilities, John Denham grew up largely unaware of politics. His father was a trade union activist and Labour voter, his mother’s family were Conservatives, yet, he says: ‘It wasn’t a politically active household and it wasn’t one [in which] I remember politics was discussed a great deal.’
The family were ‘joiners’, however, and it was at Southampton University, where he was active in the student union by virtue of becoming president of the athletic club, that he came into contact with student politicians who were to shape his future, including his wife-to-be, Ruth.
As he became increasingly politically active, he was drawn to Labour, believing he shared the party’s values:
The first politicising thing that happened to me was the eleven-plus. I went to a village primary school and half the class were sent to secondary modern.
One way was the carpet factory and the other way was possibly going on to university. It just seemed, even then at the age of eleven, to be wrong
.
Although he had trained as a chemist, by the time he left university he knew he wanted to work with people, and took on a series of jobs in the voluntary sector including Friends of the Earth, War on Want and Christian Aid.
Then, in 1981, a peculiar set of circumstances led to him standing for Parliament in his adopted home town of Southampton.
He says:
In 1981 Bob Mitchell, who was the sitting MP, announced he wasn’t going to stand for Labour again. We all knew he was defecting to the SDP [the newly formed Social Democratic Party].
The funny story is that everybody agreed that Bryan Gould [former shadow environment secretary], who had been the MP for [the neighbouring seat of Southampton] Test, should be the candidate, including me, but in those heady days of Campaign for Labour Democracy there was a general feeling there ought to be an election. I was literally a third choice, token candidate to give Bryan a run out. And I won by one vote.
I had no particular parliamentary ambitions. And I don’t think I would have gone on to fight a seat anywhere else. It just happened.
And then I enjoyed it. At the end of the campaign, not just friends but other people said, ‘I think you should do it again.’ And I had got into the groove by then.
Mr Denham came in third at the 1983 general election, with 2,000 fewer votes than his SDP rival. Together they polled 10,000 more than the Conservatives, but by running against each other they ‘split the centre-left vote, undoubtedly’. It was a valuable lesson: ‘Everything I’ve done since has been about not shifting what I believe in, but finding a way to make the argument for a progressive case.’
Mr Denham came closer in 1987, but with the SDP still a force, he and Mr Mitchell again split the vote.
By 1992 the heyday of the SDP was over. Mr Denham won by just over 500 votes. His success was not repeated nationally as, to the surprise of many, John Major’s Conservatives hung on to power:
Once you’ve lost you never assume you’re going to win. I hoped I’d win in ’87 although I think by polling day we knew we weren’t going to do it.
The truth is in ’92, that was the one we went into with supposedly a 6 per cent lead, and I think all of us who were on the ground campaigning where we were didn’t think we were that far ahead.
So the 1992 election, the night itself, there was a sort of satisfaction from it, but it wasn’t that exhilarating because it was so disappointing nationally and locally.
Bar the odd Labour Party meeting organised by the late Robin Cook, Mr Denham had not spent much time in Westminster, and he arrived knowing few people.
But once the usual hiccups of not being given an office or any kind of induction were sorted out, he settled in well:
Most of it you’re learning the skills of the trade, how to use the House. I don’t think most of us in our intake missed a second reading debate on legislation in the first year we were in. You always went to question times. Look at the House these days – the culture has changed.
I didn’t have any ambitions when I started out to be on the front bench or whatever. I just wanted to be a good constituency MP.
So I put a lot of effort into doing back-bench things. I had Private Members’ Bills, ten-minute rule bills about airport planning [and] houses with multiple occupation. These were constituency issues, so I was finding out about raising constituency issues.
Mr Denham was soon getting his teeth into two issues that ended up having national and long-term repercussions: the mis-selling of personal pensions and a scandal involving the purchase of a computer system in his local health area, which led in part to the Nolan Report on standards in public life.
His success also led him to consider the prospect of advancement:
In my first term I was lucky enough to hit on two issues that turned out to be of national importance. I suppose I began to assess my qualities alongside colleagues, and I thought I could do a front-bench job. No more than that. If I’d been here and never been on the front bench I don’t think I’d have been distraught by it.
Despite his growing reputation, Mr Denham remained outside the orbit of the rising stars of his party, as people like Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Lord Mandelson began to formulate their vision for what would become New Labour:
I don’t think I ever got to know those people particularly well. I’ve never been in the social circle or immediate political entourage of any of the people who were leaders at that time.
I’m quite independent-minded. I can support people passionately but I’ve never been one of those people who can hitch themselves to someone uncritically. And in that sense I think it makes you not necessarily the person they want to bring into their inner circle when they’re looking for people.
He is content with having not had a patron or mentor, saying: ‘It’s a choice, isn’t it?’ And advancement came, despite his lack of connections, in 1996, as Mr Blair got his troops into position ahead of the 1997 general election.
Mr Denham says:
It wasn’t Tony. Alastair Campbell [Mr Blair’s head of communications] rang me one Friday evening and said did I want to come on the front bench, the pensions team, so I was delighted by that.
The election result in ’97 was incredible. Huge celebrations locally. I remember being in a television studio on the Friday morning … as Tony was doing the walk up Downing Street.
We had pretty much been told that the teams that had been formed before the election would go into office. So I don’t think there was a great deal of sitting nervously by the phone.
As he had expected, the call came summoning Mr Denham to the Department of Social Security as a junior minister. After just a year he was promoted to state ministerial level.
Having served in local government for some time, running big budgets and major projects, Mr Denham immediately felt comfortable as a minister:
It sounds an odd thing to say; I had actually run things. So I didn’t feel terribly daunted about coming in and I’d had a chance to think about the agenda. We got in and got some good stuff done.
Ninety per cent of what you do as a minister, any sane, rational person would do the same thing. The next eight per cent, any person of your party would do the same thing. The interesting thing is to find the two per cent where if you hadn’t done it, it might not have happened or it might not have happened for some time.
If I say myself … I was a really good engine-room Minister of State. What ministers of state have to do is to make sure the machine works and it delivers. And I reckon I can say that about all the roles I had as a Minister of State.
I won’t say nothing ever went wrong but by and large secretaries of state could get on with the bits that they do knowing all the bits that were being run down there worked well.
After two years Mr Denham moved to the Department of Health followed by, after the 2001 election, the Home Office, as Police Minister.
By then, he was considered a rising star. He says it would have been ‘nice’ to have been made a Cabinet minister at that stage:
But I didn’t have expectations. I don’t think I’ve ever thought I should be rising up. I thought I could do a Minister of State job, and I got promoted to that within a year, [but] I have never had a sense of entitlement. I still don’t have. I don’t know – maybe you get further if you have a sense of entitlement.
I think the feeling was that I should move about. Tony, I had been told, had been thinking he might put me in the Cabinet so I guess this was part of career development. I had never been involved in Home Affairs, it had never been one of my campaigning issues.
After a year at the Home Office, Mr Denham began to wonder if Mr Blair was ready to put him into the Cabinet.
He says:
I had long planned to walk from Southampton to my [childhood] home, near Lyme Regis. It was the weekend Stephen Byers [the then Transport Secretary] resigned.
In those days mobile phones were much too heavy to carry on a walking holiday so I had a pager … and the pager went off about nine o’clock in the morning: ‘Byers has resigned.’ Then about eleven o’clock in the morning it went off: ‘Ring Downing Street.’
I was up in the hills in the Blackmore Vale and it was about a 10-mile trip to the nearest village. I went to the village, phone box isn’t working, so I went to the pub, which was shutting.
It had been very wet, I was in this pub with this grumpy landlord and I was trying to persuade him that this mud-spattered figure was a privy councillor who had to speak to the Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland very quickly.
I get through and I speak to Tony and he says: ‘John, as you know I’m having a reshuffle. I just wanted to tell you I think you’re doing a great job where you are and I’m leaving you where you are.’
I then had to walk 5 miles back up the hill to resume the journey. I thought: ‘Well, that’s that then.’
A year later, Mr Denham’s independent spirit led him to the most difficult choice of his career – and his toughest time in Parliament – as he and the rest of his party were asked to back Mr Blair’s decision to go to war in Iraq. Failing to do so would mean quitting the government.
He says:
I was never convinced by the case for war. We used at the time to have a small group where most of the ministers of state would get together and have a glass of wine and chat about things, and I was the only one I think who had the depths of reservation I did.
I was quite conflicted because most of my friends and colleagues didn’t sense the same problems with it that I did.
Not being a tribal loyalist, there was no part of me that thought that I should be supporting it if I didn’t think it was right, which some people would say was a weakness. I felt at the time that I was probably letting people down.
There was no anger or bitterness about it towards colleagues. People were hugely generous. I didn’t try to milk it as an issue; I did it and then quietly moved on.
If you look back over it … it is very difficult to spot the moment when a concerted effort to say no could have happened.
It will be interesting when [the] Chilcot [Inquiry] comes out; I would be very surprised if he doesn’t focus on that lack of clearly identified decision points in the decision-making process.
The lesson you have to learn is about the process and where the opportunity was, particularly at Cabinet level, to actually force people to say where they stood.
It’s all turned out to be much worse than I thought. I knew enough from the Home Office that it would increase the risk of terrorist attacks. That was one of the things I talked about in my resignation speech, about making things worse not better.
These huge ideological shifts that are taking place around Islamic extremism would have been taking place in some ways anyway, so we didn’t cause those things to happen, we didn’t create al-Qaeda. But by creating instability we created the conditions in which they spread more quickly than they otherwise would have done and we weakened our ability to counter that type of extremism.