Press Office

Aired: Sunday, 2 November, 2003 10:00
Sky News' Sunday with Adam Boulton

Boulton:

It all happened in less than an hour. One moment Ian Duncan Smith was accepting that he lost the leadership of the Conservative Party and the public applause of his colleagues, moments later the pretenders to the throne choreographed  dropping out of the contest declaring their support for one other.

Barring the emergence from the darkness of a dark horse the Shadow Chancellor Michael Howard will take up the reigns on Thursday. But will he fair any better than William Hague or Iain Duncan Smith?

Well, joining me now from Dorset is the Shadow Home Secretary Oliver Letwin, one of those who pledged undying loyalty to the new leader Michael Howard, and also here in the studio is the former Conservative chairman Cecil Parkinson, who witnessed a previous toppling of a Tory leader, in fact more than one I should think.

Cecil Parkinson  first of all, your reaction to the events of the past week, momentous by any measure of party history?.

Parkinson:

Well I think it was very brave of Iain to precipitate the solution, if you like…….

Boulton: For what ?

Parkinson:

Well I think he knew we couldn’t carry on as we were and of course he was able, under the new rules, not to ask people to take soundings of anything, but to demand a vote of confidence and the rest flowed from there.

Boulton:

And the emergence of Michael Howard?  And you yourself, who’s someone who has long dealt with the party and the country and Conservative Central Office… it was a bit of a coup by the parliamentarians wasn’t it?

Parkinson:

Well Michael has very sensibly said that he is going to ask the membership of the party to endorse him, because he realised that it is very important for him to lead a united party. So the party workers and the party subscribers and the hundreds of thousands of members will have a chance to express a view.

Boulton:

Oliver Letwin. What are your constituents and indeed party activists down there in Dorset saying to you this weekend about the goings on up here in Westminster ?

Letwin:

Well I think earlier last week there was a great mood of despondency and at the tail end of the week there was a huge collective sigh of relief. I’m sure that other Conservative members of Parliament and other candidates around the country would reflect this.

I found when I came back to the constituency on Friday morning and saw many of my activists and party members that they were just overjoyed that for the first time in a decade there’s a palpable sense in the Conservative Parliamentary Party that we actually want to get together and try the sort of novel experiment of working together. And I think they feel, as I feel, indeed many of them said to me that they feel, that this could be an experiment that has an enormous power to it. If I were the Government I would be pretty unhappy just at the moment.

Boulton:

Would you like to see the parliamentary end of this business speeded up, so that de facto Michael Howard could be in the position of leading the party by question time on Wednesday. There are suggestions, perhaps, that there could be an extraordinary meeting on Tuesday at the 1922 Committee to challenge anyone to say whether they are going to come forward or not. Would that be a good idea do you think?

Parkinson: I think the sooner we have the situation clear the better. But I think one of the things the party now has, is a constitution. We never had one before. As you know, legally, we didn’t exist as a party. Now we have one and we have to follow the procedures. But Michael Spicer, whom I saw the other night, is determined to follow the rules and to give everybody a chance to have a say

Boulton:

But would you like to see Michael Howard do Question Time this week?

Parkinson:

Oh I think that’s pushing it a bit myself. I think he is going to have quite a lot of opportunities to do that and I don’t think they need rush that particular phase.

Boulton:

Oliver Letwin….. what’s your feeling about that? Because of course it could be rather awkward for Iain Duncan Smith, having effectively been sacked by his MP’s,  to stand up at the Dispatch Box this week.

Letwin:

Well, Cecil is obviously right, we are a party that believes in shoring up the British constitution so we can hardly discard our own. We have to follow it’s procedures, which incidentally Sir Michael Spicer has done with impeccable impartiality and accuracy and discretion. And we need to go on in that fashion. We need to establish that is the way we do business. Actually I don’t think that Iain will find it, I suppose personally he will find it slightly odd, but I don’t think he will find it uncomfortable at all on Wednesday.

I think ,on the contrary, there will be a tremendous sense of sympathy and admiration for the dignity and courage with which he conducted himself in the closing stages of his leadership. I think it became him very well. I think his stock is going to rise, actually, interestingly over the next couple of years, just as William Hague’s has.

Boulton:

What about yourself? You are one of the king makers in all of this. Does that mean you are looking for promotion or would you like to stay on shadowing the Home Secretary?

Letwin: Well I think this is a second experiment we’re going to try. At least I hope we are going to try, as well as getting together as a parliamentary party, which is to quit worrying about whether we are in this or that grand and meaningless position in the shadow cabinet, and work out, instead, how collectively we can actually do what we need to do for the sake of the country and the Conservative Party…. which is to become the next government .

Bouton:

The point one would have to make to you, is that you’ve been seen very much as a modernising Shadow Home Secretary, a progressive. When he was the real Home Secretary Michael Howard was seen as a real right winger. So you must be worried a bit that if you’re moved perhaps your hard work over the last two years would go out of the window?.

Letwin: I’m not in the least worried about that. During the last two years Michael and I have sat next to one another other at meeting after meeting of our strategy group and our policy board on which we both sat. We spent many  hundreds of hours discussing the tactics and the strategy and the policies and I don’t think it should surprise you that everything I have done over the past couple of years has been a set of things that I have discussed with him.

Boulton:

There is a suggestion already being put out… sort of on line one of the Labour Party briefings, that is this is the return of the ‘nasty party’?

Letwin:

I’ve no doubt the Labour Party will try various strategies over the next few days. They’ve

gone noticeably quiet over the past two or three days because, of course, their main idea was that they could have fun at our expense over a six week or three month period while we tore ourselves to bits. There’s no doubt it’s a great disappointment to them that they can’t do that and now they will try various other tactics.

They won’t be plausible.  Michael has made it absolutely clear that he’s leading this party from the centre. We’re going to have a rainbow of talent in the shadow cabinet. We’re going to approach things with moderation - effective opposition but not overstated opposition. And we’re going to try to work together and not worry ,as I say,  about particular positions and vanities, but instead worry about how we can form an effective opposition that can become a serious alternative government and, in due course, become the Government.

Boulton:

Cecil Parkinson…. given that there has been a move, if you like, towards euro-scepticism… towards the right…. in the years of opposition for the Conservatives, how inclusive should Michael Howard be in assembling his team? Does he need people like Kenneth Clarke in there?

Parkinson:

I think you should look back on Margaret Thatcher’s experience when she became the leader. She inherited a shadow cabinet of which very few had actually voted for her.

But she took the view that in opposition you need a shadow cabinet representative of the party as a whole. And she brought in a lot of people who fundamentally didn’t share her views but who agreed that collectively it was in all their interests to work for a Conservative government. And the phrase that’s kept recurring for me over and over again in the last few years is - now is the time for all good men and women to come to the aid of the Party. This is the time when we have got to stop internal bickering and start to focus on winning the next election.

Boulton:

So someone like Michael Portillo, you would hope, would come back into the Shadow Cabinet?

Parkinson:

I would hope that if, and this is Michael’s choice, - but I would hope that any Conservative member of Parliament who is asked by Michael Howard to join the Shadow Cabinet, would think very seriously about it. Because we need all our best people pulling in the same direction and working together to defeat this rather sad, mistaken and befuddled Government.

Boulton:

Oliver Letwin -  would you like to see Kenneth Clarke and Michael Portillo returning to the Shadow Cabinet ?

Letwin:

Well it’s absolutely right what Cecil says. And of course the particular individuals and Michael Howard will need to discuss these things. But the general proposition has to be that we need to draw, one way and another, on all the talents we’ve got. We need to work together. We need to do exactly what Cecil was describing – and find a way for all the highly talented people on our benches to come together in aid of the party.

Boulton:

Yes, but you can’t have an infinitely expanding Shadow Cabinet It’s not like European Commission, for example.

Cecil Parkinson - that will mean that some of the faces now doing front bench jobs will get the chop won’t it?

Parkinson:

That’s inevitable. Politics is a rather swift business you know, you’re in and then you’re out.

Boulton:

Can you give any names? Tim Collins?  Theresa May ?

Parkinson:

No. That’s a matter for Michael. I can think of a lot of very able people who were sitting on the back benches when they should have been on the front bench under Iain because they are very able people and I would hope that Michael can draw on all those people.

That may mean some people may go. But that’s a matter for Michael.

Boulton:

What about Central Office itself and the unhappiness which there clearly has been there in the Duncan Smith years - and perhaps dating back before that. Are the politicians treating the party and the country with the respect they are entitled to?

Parkinson :

I think that one of the aims of the William Hague reforms - and I read so much stuff this week which is so miss-informed about -  the idea that under the reforms it would take three months to get a new leader, the whole thing could be done and dusted in four or five weeks even if there was a contest. And I earnestly hope there won’t be. I am very much in favour of Michael so there’s been a lot of misunderstanding. But at the heart of William’s reforms was the determination to bring together a united party - the voluntary party; Central Office and the Parliamentary Party - because before there had been three warring factions who blamed each other and that simply wasn’t good enough.

We now have a Board. They want to work with whoever’s leader. On the Board are all those three elements - Central Office, the Parliamentary Party and the voluntary party.

The voluntary party’s an important part of it. It must be taken along and it mustn’t feel that they are just passengers or observers. It’s their party just as much as it’s the Parliamentary’s party.

Boulton:

Oliver Letwin, finally, if you look at the prospect ahead, it has to be said that the mountain that you’ve got to climb to win the next election is a lot steeper than that hillock we can see behind you, isn’t it?

Letwin:

Michael has been absolutely clear and we mean to be honest about this, as some of us have tried to be over the past couple of years. Yes, we are at the bottom, as you put it,

of a steep and long ascent. We recognise that. On the other hand it’s a remarkably better position than we might have expected.

Both William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith began their hold of the office of Leader of the Opposition about 20- 25 points behind Labour. We begin now with the last poll putting us two points behind Labour;  a much-reduced faith in the Government; a set of policies which I think are pretty universally (by the media, by our own party and by others) acknowledged to be serious and radical reforms of the public services. So we’ve got the policy programme. We’ve got a united party. We’ve got a highly unchallengeably

competent leader. We’ve got a real sense of unity of purpose with the voluntary party about which I thoroughly agree with Cecil, and we are only two points behind.

Now that’s a position from which it is genuinely possible, if, and only if, we work ceaselessly with huge energy and great unity of purpose over the next couple of years,  that we really can win a general election. And I think the Conservative Party in the last 72 hours has not only had the benefit of a collective shock therapy of a result of the past five weeks, but has also scented for the first time in a very very long time, the possibility of actually becoming a proper government of this country.