If Ken Clarke had won ...
A few days ago. in response to an fascinating interview with Ken Clarke on Conservative Home here I posted an quote from that article here and added that
"Ken Clarke would certainly have been leader of the Conservative party and very possibly Prime Minister were it not for the tragedy that his views on Europe were so different from those of most Conservatives."
My attention was drawn today on twitter to a counterfactual post on the Economist website here about what might have happened if Ken Clarke had become Conservative leader in 2005 when he made the third and last of his three bids for the position. The author admits that this post "contains wishful thinking." It certainly does.
However, Ken came much closer to being leader in 1997 and 2001, and was runner up in both those elections. In 1997 Ken was the "favourite" e.g. the candidate expected to win, and the golden rule of Conservative leadership elections is that the early favourite NEVER wins.
In 2001 the early favourite, Michael Portillo also lost, partly because in moving from a previous position of appealing to the traditional right, to advocating radical modernisation including ideas which were a decade ahead of their time, he lost much of his support on the traditional right while moderate MPs remained sceptical and solidly supported Ken Clarke, who topped the ballot of MPs.
If Michael Portillo had reached the final ballot of members I am convinced that the same thing would have happened and Ken would have won, but from the viewpoint of Ken Clarke and arguably everyone in the country except for Tony Blair and New Labour, the Portillo campaign self-destructed a whisker too fast. By a single vote an alternative right-wing candidate who at that time was almost unknown except as a Eurosceptic rebel, Iain Duncan Smith, beat Portillo into the final round.
In one of the worst acts of spectacular self-defeating lunacy in the history of the Conservative party, which normally knows exactly what it needs to do to win power, party members ensured Tony Blair's third election victory by choosing a relatively untried candidate whose views appealed to them rather than the battle-hardened bruiser with appeal to the centre ground and a chance of winning.
Here is an alternative counterfactual which begins with a single MP voting differently and which in my opinion contains much less wishful thinking.
I'm not suggesting that everything here is what would have happened if one MP had voted for Michael Portillo instead of IDS in the third ballot for the Tory leadership in 2001, but I do think that a pattern of events like this is very possible.
Events in bold italics actually did happen.
PRIME MINISTER CLARKE - A COUNTERFACTUAL
* May 2001- William Hague announces immediately after losing the general election that he is resigning as leader
Five candidates stand to succeed him - Michael Ancram, David Davis, Kenneth Clarke, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Portillo.
After two rounds of voting by Conservative MPs three candidates remain: Ken Clarke, Michael Portillo and IDS.
* Ken Clarke tops the final ballot of MPs with 59 votes. A single vote determines who he will face in the final ballot: Michael Portillo received 54 votes and IDS 53.
* Portillo runs on a socially liberal manifesto, calling for Conservatives to reform and reach out to groups not normally associated with the party, calling for greater involvement of women, ethnic minorities and gays: one of his speeches is interpreted in the press as calling for the legalisation of gay marriage more than a dozen years before the Equal Marriage act put that measure into law.
* June to September 2001 - Ken Clarke and Michael Portillo's names go forward to the full party membership in a three-month contest. The closing date for ballots is September 11th, but due to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, the announcement of the result is delayed until September 13th.
Ken Clarke is supported by the majority of the left of the party while the right of the party is split. Many traditionalist right-wingers are unable to support Michael Portillo's modernising agenda. Clarke wins by 55% to 45%.
* September 2001 to May 2002 - Clarke immediately begins to take the fight to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, realising that the most effective way to unify the party is to make sure that all the guns are firing at Labour and not each other. He appoints a broadly-based shadow cabinet and reduces the damage caused by some inevitable splits in the party by allowing some free votes, remarking to one journalist "never give an order which you know won't be obeyed."
* As the former chancellor who had left behind the golden economic legacy which Gordon Brown had inherited, he is one of the most effective Conservatives in debate against Brown.
* June 2002 - Conservative poll ratings overtake Labour's after an opposition debate on the sale of UK Gold reserves between July 1999 and March 2002, when Gordon Brown sold 395 tonnes of gold, about 58% of the government's total reserves, between July 1999 and March 2002, at rock bottom prices costing the UK taxpayer billions of pounds.
* Clarke says of Brown in the Commons "If I had managed the economy like that, he would never have had the money to do any of the things he boasts about."
* 24 September 2002 - Tony Blair says British intelligence services have concluded "that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that Saddam has continued to produce them, that he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes, including against his own Shia population; and that he is actively trying to acquire nuclear weapons capability..."
* 26 February 2003 - Ken Clarke makes a speech in the House of Commons against giving approval at this time to invade Iraq, which you can read at http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200203/cmhansrd/vo030226/debtext/30226-14.htm
* 18 March 2003 - Tony Blair wins vote in support of Iraq invasion by a very narrow margin with both Conservative and Labour parties split. Ken Clarke votes against and leads 95 Conservative MPs into the lobbies against the invasion while nearly seventy tories support the government. This major rebellion is dwarfed by that on the Labour side: 139 Labour MPs rebel against the government, which still carries the day but by just 19 votes.
* IDS and two other shadow cabinet ministers who vote for the war resign from the front bench.
* 19 March 2003 - the war begins the following day with an Airstrike on the Presidential Palace in Iraq
* 19 March to 1 May 2003 - US led coalition including the UK invades and conquers Iraq
* July 2003 - more than three months after the invasion no evidence of WMD has been found and the claims made by the government before the war that they had intelligence of such claims become increasingly controversial. Dr David Kelly is found dead, a death which the Hutton Inquiry found was suicide, after being interviewed by a House of Commons Committee investigating BBC reports casting doubt on the government's pre-war intelligence.
* 28th August 2003 - 50th British soldier killed in action in Iraq
"I also expressed strong reservations about the aftermath of warfare, which I think correctly anticipated that we would win with comparative ease and very little loss to our side. I doubted that it would be easy to put in place a stable new regime in Iraq. I feared that it would not add to the stability of the middle east or make it significantly easier to make much progress on the wider middle eastern problems. In addition, I thought it might set us back in the war against terrorism. "I hope that the forebodings I have always expressed about this matter prove to be wrong; I hope that my forecasts of difficulty are gainsaid by the facts, because I do not wish to see such cheerless conclusions unfold. However, as we are all agreed, the most important thing we should turn to in due course is the question of what happens next, and at the moment things are not going well. I believe that the world is a more dangerous place than it was before the invasion of Iraq and I am not satisfied that we are going in the right direction in Iraq, or in the middle east, or in the war against terrorism, as a result of what we have done. "
* 7 October 2004 - The chief US weapons inspector in Iraq Charles Duelfer concludes that there had been no stockpiles of biological, chemical or nuclear weapons before the invasion.
* December 2004 - a grassroots Conservative member whose son had been killed by an Improvised Explosive Device in Iraq successfully moves a motion for the local party to de-select the sitting Conservative MP for rebelling against the party line by voting for the Iraq war. He is featured on every news bulletin and the front page of every newspaper, saying
"If my MP and just a few of the other Tory rebels had listened to Ken Clarke instead of that war criminal Tony Blair, Britain would not have gone to war and my son would be alive today. My son and all those people died over weapons of mass destruction which never existed. It's time for the people who made that mistake, and especially those who lied to us, to pay the price. I hope everyone remembers that next time they vote."
By the following election four more Conservative MPs who supported the war have been deselected and twenty decide to stand down. All are replaced by opponents of the Iraq war. It becomes a standing joke in the party that almost every aspiring MP supposedly uses the line at selection meetings "Of course, I don't go all the way with Ken on Europe but I'm right behind him on everything else."
* May 2005 - with the opinion polls suggesting a hung parliament Tony Blair does not call a general election. "We were elected for five years and we will govern for five years" he says.
* 29 May -1 June 2005 French and Dutch voters reject EU constitutional treaty in a referendum.
* 4th May 2006 - one of the most acrimonious General Election campaigns in British history, which was dominated by the Iraq War issue, produces a hung parliament. The Conservatives win slightly more votes than any other party: Labour loses 120 seats including just over a hundred to the Conservatives, fifteen to the Lib/Dems and a few to others: Labour remain the largest party in parliament but well short of a majority.
* Tony Blair attempts to remain Prime Minister but his initial feelers to the Lib/Dems are rebuffed, with the clear response given that the Lib Dems could not possibly support him as Prime Minister because of the Iraq war, Attempts to broker a confidence and supply agreement involving an alternative PM are soon deadlocked because none of the options proposed by Labour are acceptable to the Lib/Dems while many prominent Labour MPs and ministers take great exception to being told by Lib/Dem leader Charles Kennedy who they can and cannot have as their leader.
* 7 May 2006 - pound and stock market fall sharply as there is no sign of am agreement which would permit a stable government to be formed
* 3pm on 8 May 2006 After three days of unsuccessful negotiations between the Lib/Dems and Labour, Tony Blair asks Paddy Ashdown to advise the Lib/Dems that unless agreement can be reached within another 48 hours he is minded to advise the palace to see if Gordon Brown can form a government. This incenses large parts of the Lib Dem parliamentary party.
* Ken Clarke calls Charles Kennedy and asks "Are you really going to let Tony and Gordon get away with walking all over you, or should a team of your people and mine sit down to see if we can find enough common ground to put together a programme for government that both of us can support?"
& Evening of 8 May 2006 - Negotiating teams from the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties meet for the first time to see if there is enough common ground to form a government. The talks go better than either side expects, and they agree to meet again over the following two days.
* 1pm on 9 May 2006 - with two hours to go before the expiry of Tony Blair's deadline, the Tory and Lib/Dem negotiating teams come up with a proposed coalition agreement which is acceptable to both Ken Clarke and Charles Kennedy. Both leaders will subsequently have a challenge selling aspects of the agreement to some of their backbenchers: both will succeed.
* 3pm on 9 May 2006 - Bowing to the inevitable, Tony Blair goes to the Palace to offer his resignation and advises the Queen to send for the Leader of the Opposition
* 4pm on 9 May 2006 - Kenneth Clarke becomes Prime Minister in a coalition government, with Charles Kennedy as Deputy Prime Minister.
"Ken Clarke would certainly have been leader of the Conservative party and very possibly Prime Minister were it not for the tragedy that his views on Europe were so different from those of most Conservatives."
My attention was drawn today on twitter to a counterfactual post on the Economist website here about what might have happened if Ken Clarke had become Conservative leader in 2005 when he made the third and last of his three bids for the position. The author admits that this post "contains wishful thinking." It certainly does.
However, Ken came much closer to being leader in 1997 and 2001, and was runner up in both those elections. In 1997 Ken was the "favourite" e.g. the candidate expected to win, and the golden rule of Conservative leadership elections is that the early favourite NEVER wins.
In 2001 the early favourite, Michael Portillo also lost, partly because in moving from a previous position of appealing to the traditional right, to advocating radical modernisation including ideas which were a decade ahead of their time, he lost much of his support on the traditional right while moderate MPs remained sceptical and solidly supported Ken Clarke, who topped the ballot of MPs.
If Michael Portillo had reached the final ballot of members I am convinced that the same thing would have happened and Ken would have won, but from the viewpoint of Ken Clarke and arguably everyone in the country except for Tony Blair and New Labour, the Portillo campaign self-destructed a whisker too fast. By a single vote an alternative right-wing candidate who at that time was almost unknown except as a Eurosceptic rebel, Iain Duncan Smith, beat Portillo into the final round.
In one of the worst acts of spectacular self-defeating lunacy in the history of the Conservative party, which normally knows exactly what it needs to do to win power, party members ensured Tony Blair's third election victory by choosing a relatively untried candidate whose views appealed to them rather than the battle-hardened bruiser with appeal to the centre ground and a chance of winning.
Here is an alternative counterfactual which begins with a single MP voting differently and which in my opinion contains much less wishful thinking.
I'm not suggesting that everything here is what would have happened if one MP had voted for Michael Portillo instead of IDS in the third ballot for the Tory leadership in 2001, but I do think that a pattern of events like this is very possible.
Events in bold italics actually did happen.
PRIME MINISTER CLARKE - A COUNTERFACTUAL
* May 2001- William Hague announces immediately after losing the general election that he is resigning as leader
Five candidates stand to succeed him - Michael Ancram, David Davis, Kenneth Clarke, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Portillo.
After two rounds of voting by Conservative MPs three candidates remain: Ken Clarke, Michael Portillo and IDS.
* Ken Clarke tops the final ballot of MPs with 59 votes. A single vote determines who he will face in the final ballot: Michael Portillo received 54 votes and IDS 53.
* Portillo runs on a socially liberal manifesto, calling for Conservatives to reform and reach out to groups not normally associated with the party, calling for greater involvement of women, ethnic minorities and gays: one of his speeches is interpreted in the press as calling for the legalisation of gay marriage more than a dozen years before the Equal Marriage act put that measure into law.
* June to September 2001 - Ken Clarke and Michael Portillo's names go forward to the full party membership in a three-month contest. The closing date for ballots is September 11th, but due to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, the announcement of the result is delayed until September 13th.
Ken Clarke is supported by the majority of the left of the party while the right of the party is split. Many traditionalist right-wingers are unable to support Michael Portillo's modernising agenda. Clarke wins by 55% to 45%.
* September 2001 to May 2002 - Clarke immediately begins to take the fight to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, realising that the most effective way to unify the party is to make sure that all the guns are firing at Labour and not each other. He appoints a broadly-based shadow cabinet and reduces the damage caused by some inevitable splits in the party by allowing some free votes, remarking to one journalist "never give an order which you know won't be obeyed."
* As the former chancellor who had left behind the golden economic legacy which Gordon Brown had inherited, he is one of the most effective Conservatives in debate against Brown.
* June 2002 - Conservative poll ratings overtake Labour's after an opposition debate on the sale of UK Gold reserves between July 1999 and March 2002, when Gordon Brown sold 395 tonnes of gold, about 58% of the government's total reserves, between July 1999 and March 2002, at rock bottom prices costing the UK taxpayer billions of pounds.
* Clarke says of Brown in the Commons "If I had managed the economy like that, he would never have had the money to do any of the things he boasts about."
* 24 September 2002 - Tony Blair says British intelligence services have concluded "that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that Saddam has continued to produce them, that he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes, including against his own Shia population; and that he is actively trying to acquire nuclear weapons capability..."
* 26 February 2003 - Ken Clarke makes a speech in the House of Commons against giving approval at this time to invade Iraq, which you can read at http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200203/cmhansrd/vo030226/debtext/30226-14.htm
* 18 March 2003 - Tony Blair wins vote in support of Iraq invasion by a very narrow margin with both Conservative and Labour parties split. Ken Clarke votes against and leads 95 Conservative MPs into the lobbies against the invasion while nearly seventy tories support the government. This major rebellion is dwarfed by that on the Labour side: 139 Labour MPs rebel against the government, which still carries the day but by just 19 votes.
* IDS and two other shadow cabinet ministers who vote for the war resign from the front bench.
* 19 March 2003 - the war begins the following day with an Airstrike on the Presidential Palace in Iraq
* 19 March to 1 May 2003 - US led coalition including the UK invades and conquers Iraq
* July 2003 - more than three months after the invasion no evidence of WMD has been found and the claims made by the government before the war that they had intelligence of such claims become increasingly controversial. Dr David Kelly is found dead, a death which the Hutton Inquiry found was suicide, after being interviewed by a House of Commons Committee investigating BBC reports casting doubt on the government's pre-war intelligence.
* 28th August 2003 - 50th British soldier killed in action in Iraq
* 22 October 2003 The Conservative party puts forward a motion in the House of Commons calling for a comprehensive independent judicial inquiry into the Government's handling of the run-up to the war, of the war itself, and of its aftermath, and into the legal advice which it received. (see here):
* During that debate Ken Clarke makes a strong attack on the invasion which includes the following quotes
"I think that the decision to go to war in Iraq was the worst military decision taken by this country since the Suez invasion, and history will judge that it poses several of the same issues: a bogus reason was given to the House of Commons for embarking on the war in the first place; no clear forethought had been given to what would happen in the event of our being militarily successful, which was strongly likely in both cases; and when we are sufficiently far from now and able to look back properly, it will pose quite big questions about what the role of this country is in the modern world."
"I only briefly remind the House of the view that I always took from the first: I opposed the war because I was not persuaded—I had expressed strong doubts—that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, or biological or chemical weapons that posed any current threat to his neighbours or to ourselves.
(You can read the entire speech at
* December 2004 - a grassroots Conservative member whose son had been killed by an Improvised Explosive Device in Iraq successfully moves a motion for the local party to de-select the sitting Conservative MP for rebelling against the party line by voting for the Iraq war. He is featured on every news bulletin and the front page of every newspaper, saying
"If my MP and just a few of the other Tory rebels had listened to Ken Clarke instead of that war criminal Tony Blair, Britain would not have gone to war and my son would be alive today. My son and all those people died over weapons of mass destruction which never existed. It's time for the people who made that mistake, and especially those who lied to us, to pay the price. I hope everyone remembers that next time they vote."
By the following election four more Conservative MPs who supported the war have been deselected and twenty decide to stand down. All are replaced by opponents of the Iraq war. It becomes a standing joke in the party that almost every aspiring MP supposedly uses the line at selection meetings "Of course, I don't go all the way with Ken on Europe but I'm right behind him on everything else."
* May 2005 - with the opinion polls suggesting a hung parliament Tony Blair does not call a general election. "We were elected for five years and we will govern for five years" he says.
* 29 May -1 June 2005 French and Dutch voters reject EU constitutional treaty in a referendum.
* 4th May 2006 - one of the most acrimonious General Election campaigns in British history, which was dominated by the Iraq War issue, produces a hung parliament. The Conservatives win slightly more votes than any other party: Labour loses 120 seats including just over a hundred to the Conservatives, fifteen to the Lib/Dems and a few to others: Labour remain the largest party in parliament but well short of a majority.
* Tony Blair attempts to remain Prime Minister but his initial feelers to the Lib/Dems are rebuffed, with the clear response given that the Lib Dems could not possibly support him as Prime Minister because of the Iraq war, Attempts to broker a confidence and supply agreement involving an alternative PM are soon deadlocked because none of the options proposed by Labour are acceptable to the Lib/Dems while many prominent Labour MPs and ministers take great exception to being told by Lib/Dem leader Charles Kennedy who they can and cannot have as their leader.
* 7 May 2006 - pound and stock market fall sharply as there is no sign of am agreement which would permit a stable government to be formed
* 3pm on 8 May 2006 After three days of unsuccessful negotiations between the Lib/Dems and Labour, Tony Blair asks Paddy Ashdown to advise the Lib/Dems that unless agreement can be reached within another 48 hours he is minded to advise the palace to see if Gordon Brown can form a government. This incenses large parts of the Lib Dem parliamentary party.
* Ken Clarke calls Charles Kennedy and asks "Are you really going to let Tony and Gordon get away with walking all over you, or should a team of your people and mine sit down to see if we can find enough common ground to put together a programme for government that both of us can support?"
& Evening of 8 May 2006 - Negotiating teams from the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties meet for the first time to see if there is enough common ground to form a government. The talks go better than either side expects, and they agree to meet again over the following two days.
* 1pm on 9 May 2006 - with two hours to go before the expiry of Tony Blair's deadline, the Tory and Lib/Dem negotiating teams come up with a proposed coalition agreement which is acceptable to both Ken Clarke and Charles Kennedy. Both leaders will subsequently have a challenge selling aspects of the agreement to some of their backbenchers: both will succeed.
* 3pm on 9 May 2006 - Bowing to the inevitable, Tony Blair goes to the Palace to offer his resignation and advises the Queen to send for the Leader of the Opposition
* 4pm on 9 May 2006 - Kenneth Clarke becomes Prime Minister in a coalition government, with Charles Kennedy as Deputy Prime Minister.
Comments
Anyone who reads the speeches Ken made at the time will realise that these were very powerful critiques of the war, all the more powerful because they obviously came from someone who was in no way anti-American - Clarke specifically said that trying to keep close and constructive dialogue with our American allies was one of the things the government was doing right.
Clarke's speeches were not given the attention they perhaps deserved at the time, but were he Leader of the Opposition they would have been
As leader of the opposition he would have come under huge pressure to support the war, but again, reading those speeches I cannot believe he would have given in to that pressure.
Whichever way the party leadership had jumped there would have been a split, but I am convinced that if Clarke's speeches had been made by the leader of the opposition rather than a backbencher with a distinguished past they would have had even more impact both in the party and in the country. I think Ken Clarke as Leader would have carried the majority of his MPs but that there would have been a huge rebellion from those who felt that on national security grounds they had to support the government.
In the counterfactual above I assumed that Ken Clarke would have carried a little over half his MPs, changing eighty votes compared with what happened in reality.
If there was no change in the Labour votes - which cannot be guaranteed - then the government majority against the rebel amendment would have been 19 instead of 179 and the war would have still happened.
The following election would have become a referendum on the Iraq war to an even greater extent than in actually was, with every Conservative candidate except for those MPs who had voted for war free to go for Labour with both barrels on the subject.
I was a Conservative candidate in 2005 and I would certainly have gone in much, much harder against the Labour party over the Iraq war had not my own leader and most of his colleagues voted for it.
Of course, if the net effect of Ken Clarke being leader and the Tories being whipped against the war instead of for it (extra Tory votes against less any extra Labour MPs who supported the government if it was in more danger of losing) had been ninety votes rather than eighty, the government would have been defeated by one vote, and either there would have been no Iraq war in March 2003, or the US would have gone in without us.
And if that had happened we really are in a whole different timeline.
What would have happened next if Ken Clarke had become Prime Minister - for example, would we have had a referendum by now - is much harder to predict. Ken Clarke is more pro-Europe than any of the people who have been Tory leader instead but although not a huge fan or referenda, he is also more democratic in his instincts than Gordon Brown or Tony Blair. I'm far from certain that any of the parties would have made the 2005 promise of a referendum on the constitutional treaty had Ken been opposition leader; but if they had, I think a Clarke government would have honoured it. Perhaps a subject for another post ...