Authors: Rosa Prince
Standing Down (19 page)
For the next stage of his life, Sir Tony plans to continue in public service while also keeping up his other interests as a company director and barrister.
He was asked by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York to serve as the head of the Church Buildings Council, and the Bishop of London invited him to chair the trustees of St Ethelburga’s, the peace and reconciliation centre.
He says:
I’ll continue to live at home in the constituency. I’ll have time to work as a volunteer with the RVS visiting people. One of the greater challenges we have as a community of people living longer is loneliness and dementia. And I’ll do a few things pro bono. So I’m going to have plenty to do.
***
CV
Raised in Reading, Berks; attended Sussex University; became adviser to Margaret Thatcher and other senior Conservative politicians; qualified as a barrister.
1979: Unsuccessfully fights seat of Thurrock
1983: Elected MP for Banbury
1985: Becomes PPS in office of Leader of the House
1990: Becomes Environment Minister
1994: Becomes International Development Minister
1995: Becomes Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food Minister
1997: Returns to back benches; apologises to House of Commons after being found by the standards commissioner to have failed to declare he was the beneficiary of a loan when writing a letter to the Conservative chairman in support of the awarding of an honour to a solicitor friend
2010: Becomes Second Church Estates Commissioner
2012: Receives a knighthood for public and political service
2014: Announces he will be retiring at the 2015 election
Sir Tony Baldry is now married to his second wife Pippa, and has two children, Edward and Honor, from his first marriage
.
Stephen Dorrell,
sixty-two, was Conservative MP for Loughborough (1979–97) and Charnwood (1997–2005).
‘You can’t get to the House of Commons at the age of twenty-seven and think that you weren’t ambitious.’
***
It’s what I’ve always wanted to do. I’ve always been interested in public affairs, thought the political world was where you had the opportunity to make a difference, and so from a very young age I wanted to be involved in politics. No family background, not at all, I simply was interested.
I ran for Parliament in 1974 when I was the grand old age of twenty-two. I fought John Prescott. It was a 22,000 Labour majority when I went and it was a 22,000 majority when I left.
It’s daunting. It was like a first day at school, both for the feeling and of course for the building. You’re shown your peg, you’re given a locker.
I think the high point, I have to say, and would want to say anyway, [is] the two years I spent as Health Secretary.
And I enjoyed the four years I spent chairing the Health Select Committee. I like to think that it demonstrated that you can be actively engaged in policy without being a minister in Whitehall.
It’s not a great moment when after eighteen years in office you find yourself voted out by such a huge landslide majority, which the Blair government won in ’97.
The period after ’97 was pretty dispiriting because I’d spent time throughout eighteen years in different roles engaged in the government of the country, forming ideas, and we were clearly unable to do that from the opposition benches.
A number of people came to me and said, ‘Well, given where you are, why don’t you consider engaging more fully in business life?’ The particular one that crystallised in the autumn was KPMG, but other interests as well.
So the combination of KPMG, there was quite a big international angle to it, with other business interests, well, actually the time’s come to focus on these public affairs and to step back from elected politics.
Of course. You don’t spend thirty-six years as I will have done [without feeling a pang on standing down].
I shall miss it, of course I shall, but you have to make choices and I’m more interested in what comes next. I have an aversion to the word ‘retirement’.
To get the most out of it you have to be your own person. I’ve seen many people here eaten by the system. You have to be clear that you’re here on your terms and if you can’t be here on your terms you should go find something else to do.
There are plenty of easier, more comfortable ways of earning a living, so if you’re here to achieve something, there’s only any point in holding any office if it’s to do something.
If your objective is to hold the office for the sake of holding office you won’t get much of a personal reward from it.
***
the full story
Stephen Dorrell made a precocious start in politics, becoming interested in current affairs while at boarding school in the febrile atmosphere of the late 1960s.
He joined the Conservatives at university, and grew close to his local MP, the Cabinet Minister Peter (later Lord) Walker of Worcester.
By the second of the two 1974 elections he found himself running for Parliament in Hull East at the age of just twenty-two – a daunting task not least because his opponent was a young John (also now Lord) Prescott.
He says:
I grew up in a very politicised era, it was the time of the Vietnam War … and all the student unrest of the late 1960s. It was difficult to avoid politics – but I was interested anyway.
I’ve always been somebody who distrusts conventional wisdom and values personal independence and personal initiative. I suppose it was the emphasis that the Conservative Party placed on individual responsibility, initiative, the role of the individual in society, that was [the] original thing that I started out with and [it] is still important to me now.
As with a lot of people it was a combination of instincts and analysis, with the analysis coming rather later than the instincts.
The ball bounced my way from a personal point of view when I left Oxford … in the summer of ’73.
I already knew Peter Walker who was my local MP in Worcestershire, I’d been engaged with him, his political instincts were very similar to mine, so he asked me to work with him in the ’74 election [as a] kind of student bag-carrier, driver, which must have tested his nerve somewhat.
Having done the bag-carrier bit in February ’74 he encouraged me to look for a seat without a candidate for what was obviously going to be another election coming very quickly.
Fighting a parliamentary seat at the age of twenty-two taught me a lot. I already knew that’s what I wanted to do.
After the election, Mr Dorrell returned to work in the family’s industrial clothing business in Worcester, making trips to London to work for Lord Walker.
It was an era where MPs, even frontbenchers, did not yet employ the bright young advisers now known as SPADs, and his role was very much a part-time one, to the extent that when Mr Dorrell was eventually elected, he had not spent a great deal of time at the Palace of Westminster.
General election night in May 1979 saw him elected MP for Loughborough and simultaneously becoming, at the age of twenty-seven, the ‘baby of the House’ – the youngest MP in the Commons:
It was a very long night because they counted the council elections on the same night as the general election and they counted the council seats first.
They didn’t actually get to counting the parliamentary seat until about 2.30 in the morning and it was finally declared at 5.30, by which time after an election campaign I was elated but I think I was chiefly tired.
Unlike today’s generation, I hadn’t spent a huge amount of time here [in Parliament], so I was very much a stranger in the building when I first arrived.
I quickly got to know the 1979 intake. I had met some of them at Tory events of one sort or another before the election but the friendships formed after I got here.
I was the youngest member of that House of Commons but I never was made to feel like the baby. I quickly got used to it. I became acclimated.
My friends were on ‘the liberal wing’ – is the phrase I like to call it – of the party. I was engaged in quite a lot of political debate around the early years of the Thatcher government.
Mr Dorrell did well in the Commons’ chamber and, following the 1983 election, climbed the first rung of the ministerial ladder as Lord Walker’s PPS, replicating the ‘bag-carrier’ role he had played as a young man nearly a decade earlier.
He was ambitious to do more, and immersed himself in dialogue with colleagues, particularly around economic policy.
Despite being on that ‘liberal’ – i.e. left-leaning or ‘wet’ wing of the party – Mr Dorrell wasn’t inhibited by the party’s shift to the right under Margaret Thatcher, enjoying the cut and thrust of the debate:
Personally I never felt uncomfortable. I have always enjoyed political discourse, quite often seek out people who disagree with me, and I’ve always thought that it’s an unattractive trait in a politician to end up talking only to the people you agree with.
Reinforcing mutual prejudices is not the most interesting. Exploring areas of disagreement and reasons for them is more interesting.
You can’t get to the House of Commons at the age of twenty-seven and think that you weren’t ambitious; that doesn’t really stack up. On the other hand I’ve always had a split personality around this.
Yes, I wanted to make a difference, but I’ve never been very comfortable with what Disraeli called the greasy pole. I always like to think of myself as someone who had a point of view and advanced it. There’s only any point in holding office if it’s to do something. To hold office if it’s to draw the salary or ride in the car, well I’m not interested.
Throughout the ’80s the area I spent the vast majority of my time on was economic policy. I was always on side for economic reform; I wasn’t always on side every step of the way for how it got there.
The argument clearly in the early ’80s was the extent to which tight money, the monetary policy that the government pursued, was designed to squeeze out inflation – which was necessary, but the argument at the time was whether there were steps that could be taken to get there quicker and less painfully.
After a spell in the Whips’ Office, Mr Dorrell was despatched to the Department of Health. It was where he would later make his political name, but at that stage he had no experience of the field whatsoever.
He found ministerial life to his taste, joking:
I suppose I got used to it more quickly than I suppose I should have done.
Margaret Thatcher sent me to health. I had no previous exposure really to health. She said what was needed in the Department of Health was a businessman. I’m not sure anyone would have agreed with her.
I’m sure she could have produced another argument for another candidate, but anyway that was the argument she used.
Ken Clarke was secretary of state. He’s almost a perfect person to work for in that he has a very quick mind, despite his reputation he does read the papers, he has the lawyers’ ability to grasp issues extremely quickly but he wasn’t a control freak and he was happy for his junior ministers to develop an agenda provided he knew what it was and he was comfortable with the direction of travel.
Mr Dorrell would go on to support Mr Clarke on the three occasions he stood for the party leadership, and still thinks his colleagues’ failure to elect him was a major mistake:
I do think it was a loss for the party. In a sense the key thing is the voters, in particular the people who might vote Tory but at the same time might not, found it inexplicable that the most obviously big beast of the Tory jungle was thought by the Tory Party to be unelectable.
He feels similarly about Michael Portillo, who he backed in 2005, before switching to Mr Clarke when the former Defence Secretary dropped out of the race.
He says:
The reason why I supported Michael was .. we had both moved on to a space that was very similar, not the same, but very similar, to the space that David Cameron occupied in 2005.
My own view is if we had occupied that ground in 2005 we [would have] had a very good chance of winning that election.
At different levels I always had good personal relationships and still have with William [Hague] and with Iain [Duncan Smith] and with Michael [Howard], and particularly with David [Cameron].
I never felt personally hostile to any of the leaders. I’m not going to go further than that.
Back in 1990 at the Department of Health, Mr Dorrell was finally beginning to become frustrated with Thatcherism.
He says:
In a sense, opinions by people like me about Margaret Thatcher are secondary. She has a very clear position both in the Tory Party and the country’s history.
It was under her government that the requirement for economic reform was addressed and successfully carried out. She is one of the major figures of our political history.
But it was my view that by 1990, if we were going to win the following election we needed to present a different face to the electorate.
It would have been far better for the Conservative Party if the events of 1990 hadn’t happened in the way that they did [with Mrs Thatcher being forced out] but I did think that the Tory Party had improved its chances of winning the ’92 election as a result of making a change.
Mrs Thatcher’s successor, John Major, appointed Mr Dorrell to the Cabinet. He says: ‘It’s obviously a great privilege to serve in Cabinet. I did two roles in Cabinet; I was more successful in the second rather than the first.’
That first was at the Department for National Heritage, which had become something of a joke under one his predecessors, David Mellor, who dubbed himself the ‘Minister for Fun’. Fun never being something particularly associated with Mr Dorrell, even those close to him were surprised at the appointment:
I enjoyed it more than I was given credit for, and I was more interested in it than I was given credit for at the time.
I was thought of as the Treasury minister who was landed for some inexplicable reason with looking after the arts. I hope I’m reasonably well educated and interested in the arts; had I been engaged in the arts world? No, I hadn’t.
Even more inexplicable to anyone was the fact that I was Minister of Sport. I always say it was last time I saw my father laugh, because he died very soon after I was appointed.
He had a terrible condition that meant he couldn’t really communicate with the world at all. And I told him that I’d been made Minister of Sport and he must have laughed I should think virtually continuously for a week.
He was a passionate sportsman and he did say to me, with very great difficulty, ‘It proves John Major has a sense of humour.’
Next was his appointment as Health Secretary, one of the highlights of his career and the issue on which he would focus for the rest of his time in Parliament.
He still has strong views on the place of the NHS, believing that the Conservatives should be unafraid to challenge Labour on the perennial taunt that the Tories want to ‘privatise the NHS’.
Another favourite topic is social care, which, like most experts, he believes should be part of the health care system but, unlike most experts, he suggests could be transformed into a successful service industry on the lines of the pub and restaurant trade.