Was it a great moment or was I, even at the time, deceiving myself? On 14 October 1999, Tony Blair led five other senior figures from the three main parties on to the stage of London’s Imax cinema to proclaim their affinity for the European Union. One of them, Ken Clarke, said he was enjoying the opportunity to have an “intelligent debate about the national interest”.
What bathos; Britain’s political class refused to embrace Europe. Blair tried a bit, but not very hard. Gordon Brown did what he could to stop him. For Clarke, proud leader of the Conservatives’ awkward squad for four decades, that dream is in ruins. His party now calls for foreign workers to be named and shamed, for Britain to go its own way, the little dinghy floating off into the mid-Atlantic, a little union flag bobbing about in tow.
Despite this extraordinary act of self-harm, Clarke maintains his jolly air throughout this memoir. I keep on wondering: where is the fire in the belly? His is a pleasant meander through life in government and opposition, from Thatcher to Cameron. The book – anticipated as one of the blockbusters of the autumn season – does provide many amusing anecdotes. But for a man with a ringside seat and a maverick’s instinct, it is curiously light on revelation. Perhaps he saw that as a grubby pact with a media devil he claims to disdain.
The author makes light of a difficult upbringing; he romps through life’s many travails. He finds himself, in turn, on a school trip to the House of Commons, sitting two rows behind Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin. He networks with ease while at Cambridge, where he meets many of his political peers. Everything was so effortless for the student. The local bank manager bends over backwards to lend him money. By the end of his undergraduate life in 1963, he has an overdraft of nearly £60,000 in today’s money.
Clarke is a consummate raconteur. He relays his stories into a Dictaphone. This would make for a captivating audio book (one can, through the pages, almost hear him speaking out loud). In one chapter he muses on the awkwardness of Edward Heath , and gives advice to female friends who have to sit next to him at dinner to get through the evening by confining their comments to classical music and sailing. On Clarke’s first day in Margaret Thatcher’s new administration, he is appointed a junior minister in the Department for Transport. He has no idea what government policy is; nobody in Downing Street has the faintest idea where his department is.
Occasionally, Clarke displays raw emotion. During his two spells at the Department of Health (as minister of state and then as the boss), he fights bitter battles with the BMA, an organisation he regards as hell bent on protecting jobsworth doctors rather than serving the public. “Those were the days when the general public were rather deferential and unwilling to complain about great institutions like the NHS,” he notes.
He confronts consultants in London teaching hospitals who, he says, “scarcely came into the hospital that supposedly employed them – preferring private practice and lecture tours”. When he tries to close down Victorian-era hospitals and wards that have been mistreating elderly patients, he becomes “immersed in a constant round of demonstrations and petitions fighting to ‘save’ clapped-out institutions all over the country”.
For a man seen as on the left of the Tory party, or “wet” to use the parlance of the time, Clarke is staunch in his praise of Margaret Thatcher. She was, according to his interpretation, more of a consensus politician than is commonly believed; she tried to bring her cabinet along with her, and she did not buckle to the vagaries of the media. “Blair introduced, and Cameron enthusiastically adopted, the mass-media campaigning tactics that she had always despised,” he writes.
Clarke wears his libertarian and anti-modernist badges with pride. He reminisces about smoking with Harold Wilson; he abhors the idea of spin doctors telling elected politicians what to say or do. He refuses to use a computer; for one of his (many unsuccessful) leadership campaigns, he agrees to have a website, but has “no idea what was on it”. He jealously guards his privacy. “On the odd occasions when we holidayed somewhere that I could not credibly claim had no telephone, I would deliberately leave my private office with a plausibly inaccurate number on which to contact me.”
Clarke is moderately complimentary about Cameron. He is surprised to be put in charge of justice; he is pleasantly surprised to be kept on at all. He does what he can to swat away the authoritarian agenda promoted by much of the media. Then it is all thrown away, in a “chancer-like gamble, taken for tactical internal party-management reasons, [which] turned out to be the worst political mistake made by any British prime minister in my lifetime”.
The referendum defeat he blames on “modern mass media and constant superficial PR-dominated political campaigning”. That may be part of the story, but only a small part of it. Herein lies the frustration with this tale – a disarmingly normal man with so many decent instincts is as flummoxed as the rest of us about what has happened to his country.
Kind of Blue is published by Pan Macmillan (£25). Click here to buy it for £20.50
