Teresa Gorman

In memory of Teresa Gorman, who died yesterday, I thought I would post an extract from my book A Classless Society about the Maastricht rebellion, in which she was such a prominent feature. Apart from anything else, it's good to remember that both major parties have had long-standing dissidents, who party managers feel probably shouldn't be allowed out in public too much.

The attempt to get Maastricht ratified in the Commons dominated politics in the first half of 1993. In a series of votes a stubborn group of Conservative backbenchers fought every line of the Bill, often siding with the Labour Party in what John Major called ‘a mad-hatter coalition’. The ensuing bitterness soured the party for years to come. ‘In the voting lobbies it was not unknown for one Conservative MP to spit at another,’ remembered Michael Spicer. ‘Physical violence occurred during the course of one or two crucial votes.’ He also recalled a senior MP being dragged by his hair into the government’s lobby. 

Spicer was a key figure in the rebellion, but one who insisted on maintaining good relations with the whips and the leadership. He was also reluctant to attract attention to himself at a time when the open voicing of dissent guaranteed publicity. Indeed, Maastricht made media stars of several backbenchers who would otherwise have languished in obscurity.

Chief amongst them was Bill Cash, whose slight frame, unflattering pinstripe suits, greying hair and glasses made him look like Major’s Eurosceptic doppelganger. He was ‘the biggest bore in the House of Commons’, according to his colleague Julian Critchley, though another Tory MP, Teddy Taylor, disagreed: ‘I am the biggest Euro-bore there ever was.’ Cash managed to vote against his government forty-seven times during the Maastricht debates, with a further thirteen abstentions, and did what he was told just twice. 

He was rivalled in coverage only by Teresa Gorman, the MP for Billericay whose vocal enthusiasm for hormone replacement therapy, never knowingly understated dress sense and tattooed eyebrows (to conceal the fact that her real ones hadn’t grown back after being shaved) were matched only by her splendid quotability. ‘The Conservative establishment,’ she once announced, ‘has always treated women as nannies, grannies and fannies.’ 

There was an equally oddball supporting cast, with notable contributions from the married couple Ann and Nicholas Winterton, dismissed scornfully by Michael Heseltine as having a knack for stumbling upon ‘a populist cause waiting for a voice’. Their fellow MP Nicholas Soames was less restrained: ‘You’re cunts,’ he told them after one Commons rebellion, ‘and ugly ones to boot.’

This group of mavericks and misfits – a hard core of around twenty-five, with a similar number on the fringes – were undoubtedly motivated by high principle, albeit in some cases only recently discovered. This, however, was neither the first nor the lasting impression they made on a television audience. Every time they conducted yet another round of interviews on College Green, they came across as slightly strange, obsessed with an issue that simply didn’t feel like a priority to most of the electorate. They were not, for many viewers, very endearing...

Will no one rid us of this tedious pundit?

'The Tories who witnessed the Major years still bear some scar tissue,' writes Simon Heffer in the New Statesman, as he commences his analysis of the new government's position.

Well, yes, and much of it was inflicted by him and others in the supposedly loyal Tory press, still worshipping at the shrine of the fallen idol, having never got over the emotional shock of witnessing her departure from Downing Street. When John Major was told during the 1992 election campaign that the Conservative Party was six points behind Labour in the opinion polls, he replied: 'Of those six points, three are the fault of Simon Heffer and the other three are Frank Johnson's fault.'

Heffer was then the deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph and the relentless sniping from that newspaper and from the Daily Mail did a huge amount of damage to Major's government. It'll be interesting to see how much they've learned from the experience.

Meanwhile, though, I do wonder why any publication continues to pay Heffer money for his views, given how ludicrously inept his assessments are. I know most commentators, having spent far too long reading opinion polls, called the recent election wrong, but Heffer is way beyond that. He is willfully blind to reality, his perception distorted by dogma in a way that would have caused embarrassment to a member of the Workers' Revolutionary Party in the days of Gerry Healy.

In May last year, following the European elections, Heffer wrote about the urgent need for the Tories to form an electoral pact with Ukip. In constituencies such as Nigel Farage's promised land of Thanet South, he said, 'there is nothing to be gained by putting up a novice candidate against him'. Foolishly, the Conservative party ignored his wise advice, fielded their own candidate and, er, won the seat.

Heffer's article concluded: 'If the Tories have any sense, they will start talking about such an arrangement now. For if, next week, Ukip wins the Newark by-election and the Tories descend into panic, David Cameron might find himself with no other option.' Needless to say, the Conservative Party won the Newark by-election, with a handsome 7,400 majority. In the general election, they increased that to 18,500, with Ukip beaten into third place by Labour.

But the great sage was undeterred. He still knew better, and mere facts weren't going to get in his way. This is him in August last year. 'Although they [the Tories] have doggedly refused to entertain the idea, they will have to consider an electoral pact with Ukip, or face at least five years out of government.' Consequently, 'the party's grandees will, I am convinced, make a humiliating U-turn.'

If David Cameron would only reach out to Ukip, 'he wouldn't just keep himself in Downing Street, but would reunite a conservative coalition - which, I am sure, is really what the country wants.'

All that certainty, all that absolute self-confidence, all that nonsense.

But then this is the man who backed John Redwood's bid for the Conservative leadership in 1995. He has been consistently wrong for over twenty years now. Why is he still considered employable?

The challenge for the next Labour leader (in 1992)

The general election last week is widely said to be reminiscent of 1992. So what were the papers saying at the same stage back then, eight days after John Major's shock result, when the Labour Party was looking for a new leader?

This is how The Times started its editorial on 17 April 1992:

Can Labour Win? and Must Labour Lose? were the titles of two bleak books published in 1960, after Labour had lost three elections in a row. Now the same questions are being asked after a run of four defeats.

In language that might well sound familiar, the editorial continued:

Labour has failed to respond to the changing aspirations of the British. In the 1980s the Conservative achievement was to make those born working class feel comfortable about wanting to move up in society. Britain may not yet be as socially fluid as America, but the class system is no longer frozen in ice.

And it concludes:

Whoever wins the Labour leadership election must prepare his party for the next general election by recognising that the world has changed. The politics of envy have lost their potency. Labour need not lose, but it has to find new friends all over the country, and across all social classes and income groups, before it can win.

What actually happened, of course, is that Labour chose John Smith. At the time he was considered to be on the right of Labour, though his enthusiasm for higher taxes was partially blamed for losing the 1992 election.

In today's world, that belief in public spending would have him condemned as a left-wing extremist. So too would the trade union support he enjoyed; asked why he hadn't joined the SDP during the Great Schism of the 1980s, he replied: 'I am comfortable with the unions.' And his Scottishness would be regarded with some suspicion.

I'm not sure that any of this represented a response to 'the changing aspirations of the British'. Nonetheless, Black Wednesday came along a few months later, and by the time Smith died in 1994, he had a 20 per cent lead in the polls over the Tories.

David Cameron: chillaxing to victory

In 2005, following a third successive election defeat, the Conservative Party staged a beauty contest for those who wished to succeed Michael Howard as leader. Up until that morning, the front-runner had been David Davis, but by the time all five candidates had made their 20-minute speeches, he'd been overtaken by David Cameron.

Amongst those who had their minds changed was me. I rated Davis highly at this stage, largely on the strength of a gig he did with Tony Benn at the Royal Albert Hall in 2002. Benn was then at the peak of his popularity as a lovable elder statesman, and for a Conservative to have the nerve to go head-to-head with him in front of an audience that was guaranteed to be 99 per cent anti-Tory showed, I thought, considerable bottle and self-confidence. He was also very good on the night.

Unfortunately he wasn't very good at that 2005 conference, while Cameron was brilliant. Maybe - I've often had cause to think in the last ten years - I was dazzled by a smoke-and-mirrors act, but my immediate response was to predict to the person with whom I was watching on TV that Cameron would win the leadership and would go on to win the next two general elections.

As I say, maybe I was caught up in the heat of the moment. In the final poll, the party members voted for Cameron over Davis in a ratio of two to one, but come 2010 the country did not. He failed to win the election, despite facing only a badly wounded Gordon Brown, a man whose most noteworthy contribution to the campaign was to insult a supporter for her alleged bigotry.

Now, however, Cameron has actually won an election, and I feel my original judgement was sort of vindicated.

This has been a spectacular victory, though not quite as wondrous as some are claiming. The Conservatives' share of the vote went up, but turnout was still poor and Cameron persuaded just 24.4 per cent of the registered electorate to vote for him. This was, however, better than the 23.5 per cent he achieved last time round (itself an improvement on Labour's 21.6 per cent in 2005).

So I wanted to make a couple of points about Cameron.

The first is something that I explored at greater length in an article on the twenty-first anniversary of Black Wednesday. This is a photograph of Norman Lamont, then chancellor of the exchequer, announcing Britain's humiliating withdrawal from the exchange rate mechanism in September 1992:

And there, off to one side, is his 25-year-old adviser and speech writer, David Cameron.

Cameron, I wrote, 'witnessed at close quarters the spectacular implosion of a party that once believed it was predestined to power'. I suggested that this is perhaps why he always seems so relaxed in a crisis. Similarly George Osborne, who was at Douglas Hogg's side in the BSE disaster of 1996. These people had experienced such dreadful political depths in their early years that very little was going to faze them.

Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, on the other hand were New Labour advisers in the 1990s, at a time when the party was already coasting into government. They had no such baptism of fire.

When Cameron became leader in 2005, it was clear that his job was, in the cliché of the time, to 'decontaminate the Tory brand'. The early efforts were clumsy and gimmicky: hugging hoodies and huskies, demonstrating his green credentials by installing a windmill on his roof and cycling to work (followed by a car, carrying his papers).

Then he got blown off course by the bankers' recession. No longer, it appeared, was sunshine going to win the day. The concept of the Big Society withered on the vine (though it's actually very good and the Labour Party should take it back).

Instead, the attempt to modernise the party seemed to consist of little more than the sudden, unpromised introduction of same-sex marriages. It didn't seem like very much - essentially a new name for civil partnerships - but actually it turned out to do the job really rather well.

Because the success of same-sex marriages lay not in the legislation itself, but in the way that it provoked a mass exodus from the party. Some constituency organisations claimed to have lost up to half their members as a result of the policy.

This was, most commentators agreed, disastrous for Cameron. But it wasn't. In one fell blow he'd cleared out large numbers of the 'fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists', as he'd described Ukip back in 2006. Many of them, of course, went straight over to Ukip, giving that party a huge boost in membership and popularity.

Less noticed was the effect on the Conservative Party itself, now smaller but - from Cameron's perspective - much better looking. It has become difficult to denounce the Tories as racist, sexist, homophobic and still retain any credibility as a political observer. The party that embraced economic liberalism in the 1980s has accepted the social liberalism that spread across Britain in the 1990s.

The election results this week saw Cameron increase the Conservative share of the vote, largely at the expense of the Liberal Democrats. All those right-wing commentators like Simon Heffer and Charles Moore who had insisted that the Cameron project was misguided, that he shouldn't be trying to appeal to the liberal vote (sometimes even suggesting he form an electoral pact with Ukip) - they turned out to be completely wrong.

There are many other commentators for whom the Tory brand cannot ever be sufficiently decontaminated, but it turns out that he's done enough. Not enough for those in the long-derided 'metropolitan elite' of course, those who follow in the pioneering footsteps of the delegate to the 1982 SDP conference, excitedly proclaiming: 'There may be minorities we have not yet discovered.' But enough for the rest of the country.

The achievement of Tony Blair in the mid-1990s was to make the Labour Party a safe home for ex-Tory voters. If Cameron hasn't quite reciprocated that achievement, he has gone some way towards it. There were many disillusioned Liberal Democrats, and even some lifelong Labour supporters, who simply couldn't countenance Ed Miliband and who felt just about safe enough to turn to vote Conservative for the first time ever, despite grave reservations over Tory policy.

As all the polls showed, Cameron's ratings outstripped his party's; Miliband's trailed his.

The Left need to get used to the idea that Cameron and Osborne have changed the Conservative Party for good. A new line of attack is needed.

One final thought. There is much talk of this election resembling 1992 when John Major won a slender majority and then ran into trouble with his own party over Europe. And look what's coming next, say the columnists: it's a European referendum and history could repeat itself.

I think this unlikely. If Ukip had got, say, five MPs they might have formed a rival pole of attraction for Eurosceptic Tory members, and there might have been defections over the referendum arrangements. Then Cameron would have had trouble. That might still happen if there are a few by-elections that allow Ukip to boost their numbers, but I doubt it. And Douglas Carswell does not in himself constitute a rival pole of attraction.

In any event, Cameron is much more in tune with the mood of his party than Major was. He remembers all too well the damage that Europe did to the Tories in the 1990s. Most importantly, he doesn't face the same problem that afflicted his predecessor.

Because Major's real grief over Europe was not to be found amongst the 'bastards' on his own backbenches; it lay in the House of Lords. There lurked the malign influence of Margaret Thatcher, the deposed but still powerful ex-leader, constitutionally unable to keep herself from interfering, from stirring up trouble, from seeking to undermine her successor as he tried to get the Maastricht Treaty through Parliament.

As I wrote in my book A Classless Society:

Thatcher's behaviour during Major's premiership was even worse than that of Edward Heath during her own time in office. Heath had been unstinting in his disapproval as he remained stubbornly on the backbenches ('like a sulk made flesh,' in the words of journalist Edward Pearce), but he hadn't actively engaged in plotting against her. But then, as a minister told the BBC's John Cole: 'She was always criticising the government when she led it, so why expect her to change now?'

The EU referendum won't all be smooth sailing, but it'll be less choppy than Major's trip back from Maastricht. And easier than Cameron's rite of passage on Black Wednesday.

Top Ten: Most influential post-war British politicians

Are today's politicians really as poor as they sometimes appear? In an entirely non-objective, unscientific spirit of enquiry, I've drawn up a list of the people I consider to be the ten most influential post-war British politicians. The criteria are simple: they must have been elected to the Westminster Parliament, and only their impact on Britain counts - this isn't about foreign affairs.

1. Edward Heath - Useless in so many ways, but he was the man who took Britain into the European Community, which is surely the biggest political development since the war.

2. Roy Jenkins - The best home secretary in living memory, the man who made parliamentary time available for backbencher bills that ushered in the civilised society (as he called it) or the permissive society (as everyone else called it).

3. Aneurin Bevan - He gave us the NHS, the great sacred cow of modern politics. (Unless you believe Leanne Wood of Plaid Cymru, in which case the NHS was a gift to the UK by the Welsh people.)

4. Ken Livingstone - A bit of a cheat, since his contribution was made before he was elected as an MP, but the identity politics he pioneered at the GLC in the early-1980s have transformed the country: the loony left became the mainstream.

5. Margaret Thatcher - She may not have achieved many of her goals, but she did persuade the British people that they didn't like socialism. And none of her trade union reforms or privatisations have been reversed, or show any sign of being reversed.

6. Enoch Powell - Nearly fifty years after he was sacked from the Conservative front bench, his obsessions with free-markets, British sovereignty, Europe, immigration - all deeply unfashionable at the time - continue to dominate the political agenda.

7. Clement Attlee - Since William Beveridge was never elected, he doesn't get on this list, so Attlee's here in his stead as the man who presided over the implementation of the Beveridge reforms. And because Attlee's government also gave us National Parks and a decent Town and Country Planning Act.

8. Harold Macmillan - The break-up of the empire was inevitable, but Macmillan's 'wind of change' attitude helped ensure it happened with relatively little violence.

9. John Major - The much maligned Citizens' Charter emphasised users rather than providers in public services, which will be a great idea when it kicks in. He also takes the credit for initiating the Northern Ireland peace process.

10. Tony Blair - The massive, unprecedented increase in immigration during Blair's government is still in the process of transforming Britain.

Others who made this list at one time or another during my long cogitations included Gerry Adams, Alex Salmond and a brace of Tory chancellors - Anthony Barber and Nigel Lawson - who screwed up the economy.

And then there's Tony Benn, the man who gave us colour television, post codes and commemorative postage stamps; he also introduced the concept of the referendum and, by changing the Labour Party constitution, inadvertently and ironically strengthened the leadership. But since he's best known for his socialist message, which is now conspicuous by its complete absence from the political agenda, he doesn't make the cut.

Of the present crop, the only one I think might make it onto this list in the future is Iain Duncan Smith, if his benefit reforms last. (Of course this should have been Frank Field, but Tony Blair and Gordon Brown chickened out.)