Interview
The Forsyth Saga 28 September 2009 With the prospect of the Tories running the next Westminster Government, former Conservative wunderkind, Lord Michael Forsyth of Drumlean, looks back to the future For those of us who remember with some antipathy the Thatcher years, the extraordinary salivation and hand rubbing that accompanies predictions of the demise of the current Labour Government and the triumphant return of a Tory one at Westminster, is viewed with a weird mixture of denial, relief and fear. Have things really got so bad that a Conservative Government would offer succour? Given what came before: the miners’ strike, the Falklands, the first Iraq war, the wholesale closure of heavy industry, the breaking of the unions, the savage public sector spending cuts, the creeping privatisation of the health service, the concept of the undeserving poor, the emergence of the ‘loads of money’ greed, the unforgivable sleaze, the poll tax and the Iron Lady herself, what can we now expect and should it be welcomed? On May 1 1997, the Tories in Scotland suffered total wipe-out. After 18 years in power, the party was rewarded for its efforts with an historic landslide to the cynically manufactured New Labour with its promise of a new order and a new politics. On the Friday after the election, with his colleagues plunged into a self-imposed exile, it fell to the then Secretary of State for Scotland, Michael Forsyth to call a press conference to ‘face the music’. In the end he was the brave lone soul who stood before the cameras at the old Tory Central Office in Leith. His gleeful reception was not entirely unexpected but by his own admission, he was not the best liked politician in Scotland, seen as he was as the hard-line, Tory enforcer and it was not going to be a comfortable ride. He deliberately turned up late for the event and with a humour that he had all but kept hidden for the ten years while he was in government, he quipped, ‘Sorry, I’m late, traffic was terrible, I’d blame it on this government.’ And so the Tory era in Scotland passed. The little swipe at the transitory nature of power, a moment of light relief for Forsyth at the end of a precociously advanced career which had seen him ultimately reviled, particularly for the introduction of the poll tax – although he still believes it was a fairer method for funding council services, he admits the implementation was a ‘disaster’ – but mainly for just being Mrs T’s lieutenant north of the border.  In a rare interview, he offers Holyrood magazine an incredible window to history, albeit one skewed by his own political vision. He says Thatcher and Keith Joseph were two of the most compassionate people he has ever met in his life. That Margaret Thatcher loved Scotland with a passion and remained puzzled at the way Scots viewed her. He claims New Labour was Thatcher’s greatest legacy. And on his own party’s electoral fortunes, he says he wants the Conservatives to win the next general election but recognises that it will also suffer ‘collateral damage’ for being the party of Government that needs to clear up the economic crises left by Labour. Forsyth presents as a much more mellowed character than the hyperactive one remembered from the 1990s but however reasonable and statesmanlike, there is no denying that he was then abrasive, clipped and did not suffer fools gladly. He says, on reflection, ‘he was a young man in a hurry’, he simply had too much to do and too little time to do it to engage in social niceties. Civil servants remember him particularly for being fantastically demanding and for marking their work out of ten. He was feared within the corridors of power but above all else, he was viewed as Thatcher’s boy in Scotland and with that came and still comes, baggage. “I think when I was appointed Secretary of State for Scotland, the civil servants were standing on the window ledges and I think some people of the Conservative Party were too,” he jokes. Having, he claims, ‘fallen into politics by accident’ he went from being a student activist at St Andrews University where he and Alex Salmond debated from different sides of the political fence, to becoming chairman of the Federation of Conservative Students, then a councillor in Westminster before being elected as an MP for Stirling in 1983 at the age of just 28. He was seen as a favoured son of Thatcher’s and was promoted by her at incredible speed. By his early 30s he had held various positions within government including roles as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Foreign Secretary (1986-87), Minister in the Scottish Office (1987-92) and brief spells in the Department of Employment and the Home Office. He strongly resisted the latter because he says he was simply a ‘lock ‘em up and throw away the key man’ but the then Prime Minister John Major persuaded him that it would be a good learning experience. He now admits Major was right and it was in fact a seminal point in his career because it challenged and changed many of his long-held views on criminal justice. He later served as Secretary of State for Scotland between 1995 and 1997. Unashamedly a Thatcher acolyte, he admits that he was viewed as little better than ‘Freddy Kruger’ by the Scottish electorate and in the general election of 1997, he bore the brunt of that hatred when he and the rest of the Tory Scottish MPs were obliterated from the electoral map. Following the loss of his seat, he entered the world of investment banking and has embraced that with as much enthusiasm as he did political life. He was knighted in 1997 and created a life peer in 1999, taking the name Lord Forsyth of Drumlean, a location to the west of his idyllic loch-side home in Aberfoyle, and clearly loves the intellectual challenge of some of the work he has done within the Lords including a controversial report around the Barnett formula and an enquiry into the banking crisis. He spends approximately 100 days a year in the Lords, often accompanying Lady Thatcher who reminds him that it is their duty to attend. And while he says he has absolutely no desire to return to the fray of front-line politics, it is known that he has undertaken work for the Shadow Chancellor on tax reform and in the last few weeks, raised party eyebrows by publicly calling on Gordon Brown to have a referendum on Scottish independence on the same day as the general election next year. Forsyth can be the occasional thorn in the side of a Conservative Party that might prefer to distance itself from the Thatcher legacy and it is this latest intervention around the constitution that has caused some consternation within party ranks. But as a man who was at the fore of campaigning against devolution and who is viewed by some more radical parts of the party as a reactionary who helped hold the party back, there is method in the madness of a staunch unionist calling the SNP’s bluff – he just doesn’t believe they would win. Forsyth is a Scot to his core. Born in Montrose into fairly ordinary circumstances – his father owned a garage – he went to the local grammar school in Arbroath. Asked about his background, he steals a line from Andrew Neil and says: “I came from a very privileged background because I was brought up with certain values and ideas within a family which didn’t have very much money.” He arrived at St Andrews University, he says, as a socialist who based his political leanings on ‘thinking the world was a bit unequal and that the world was run by an old school tie network’. He left a die-hard Conservative and an evangelist for free markets, wealth creation and enterprise. Cut him in half and it would say ‘Unionist’ but he is also staunchly Scottish – he would not, for instance, accept a seat in England.  Given his recent comments which amounted to ‘bring it on’ in referendum terms, has he moved on his opposition to independence? “No. I believe in the Union and it is absolutely essential to Scotland’s future and Britain’s too. We’ve had Calman and frankly, appeasement is a strong word, but I think we are appeasing the Nationalists. I think we have a Scottish Parliament and ok, let’s make it work, but let’s not actually go further down the slippery slope, because there will be a point when there is no difference between that and independence. “If I were David Cameron, I would be thinking ahead and I’d be looking at this guy, a smart guy, Alex, and I’d be asking, what is he going to do next? He is going to wait for the Tories to get elected, he’s going to say they’ve only got a handful of MPs in Scotland, he will say they’ve got no mandate in Scotland and he is going to take every issue and he is going to argue that if Scotland were independent, things would be better and ultimately, a head of steam will build up and that’s his game plan. I think if he ran a referendum campaign now, he’d get flattened and I think it would take a lot of the political wind out of his sails. So what are we frightened of? “I have always had the greatest respect for Alex and even at St Andrews, where he was a bit of a lone voice, he has always had the courage of his convictions. We used to think he was a bit amusing but he has always believed in an independent Scotland and always believed he could get there and always been a conviction politician. “He has always been a bit of a gambler and that showed when he decided to stand for Gordon which, on the face of it, looked like a disastrous gamble but he said, ‘no, I am going to stand and I am going to win’, and he did. He has always been a conviction politician who is prepared to put his judgement on the line and I think that’s part of the reason he has been very successful and it is part of the reason Margaret Thatcher was very successful. “There are two types of people in politics,” he says. “People that go in to be things and people that go in to do things and I think the balance has swung too far to the former rather than the latter. There are more people whose goal is to be a leader or a minister or whatever without thinking why. I think they are off their heads; there is nothing worse than being a minister – it takes over your life, you don’t see your family, you work 24/7, you are going to fail, you will have the press crawling all over you, people will be beastly to you, people will hate you in the street that you have never met, people will think things about you that are completely untrue, why on earth would you want to do that unless you had an agenda of things that you really wanted to achieve, that you believed in? If you didn’t have that, you would be off your head but there are such people.” There is no doubt that Forsyth saw his experience in politics as a bruising one but worth the pain because he believed in what he was doing. It is a surprise that he is still just 54 – 55 next month – and yet despite his vast government experience, passion for the party and conviction for the cause, remains very much on the fringes of a party on the cusp of power. “I think that the present Government are at the same stage we were at in ‘97. They’ve been in office too long, they have lost their way, they are all over the place, and they don’t know what they are doing. I think the country does need a change but what is completely different is the extent of the crisis which we are facing and the extent to which the political classes seem to be conspiring not to talk about just how serious the problems are. Because if you talk about how serious the problems are, people invite you to put forward solutions and no one wants to do that in the run up to the election because the truth is, the solutions are extremely unattractive and unpalatable. “I got into politics in the aftermath of the 70s, now you have to be over 50 to remember what that was like. We had 25 per cent inflation, we had interest rates at 17 per cent, big problems with public sector unions, strikes and the economy was going down the pan. The Tory Government was elected in ’79 and we’ve never been allowed to forget the ‘81 budget, I mean, it’s part of the mythology. You talk to youngsters now and they say, ‘Oh! Margaret Thatcher, she made these vicious cuts in public expenditure’. But look at the numbers and actually, I was talking to Geoffrey Howe about this the other day, and they cut the deficit, the borrowing, in the ‘81 budget from £13bn to £11bn. The budget deficit today is going up by £11bn every month. “Yes, of course, I want the Tories to win because I think they will be able to tackle these things. If you are asking me if I think the Tory Party will suffer damage as a result of tackling these problems, yes, of course, it will. It is the same point that is made about whether we should have lost the ‘92 election and then Labour would have had to deal with the problems we had with the ERM and everything else and we would have come back in ’97’. I say to that ‘no, no, the importance of us winning the ‘92 election is that we killed off Neil Kinnock and we killed off old Labour and we made New Labour possible. New Labour, for me, is Margaret and Keith Joseph’s legacy. It is what we set out to achieve. “In his book, Ian Lang describes how after the election, and we had just been totally destroyed and it was very, very depressing, he describes driving home at four in the morning and how his heart began to sing. That’s how I felt. I thought, thank God, we no longer have this burden upon us and New Labour and Tony Blair had basically bought most of the stuff we’d said anyway so perhaps they will tackle it.” So if New Labour was the bastard child of the Thatcher years, has New Labour simply spawned a new compassionate Conservative Party which is all spin?  “I think David has set out to deal with the problem, which you’ve described, which is one of image. I think they describe it as damage to the brand and I think he’s done that very successfully. You have to deal with the world as it is and it is no good me saying, listen, the most caring person I’ve met in politics was Keith Joseph, and the next most caring person is Margaret Thatcher because people would just laugh, because that is not what their perception was and they’ll say, ‘Poor old Michael Forsyth. He’s completely lost his marbles’. “What David has done most successfully is to reposition people’s perception of the Conservative Party. And that is undoubtedly a key thing to do if you want to get elected but I’m sorry, getting elected is throwing the double six and you’re then going up the board and we need to know where the ladders are and where the snakes are. But if repositioning means saying stupid things, like we were wrong to oppose devolution for as long as we did, or the poll tax was imposed on the Scots who were used as guinea-pigs, which is just not true then that does irritate me. “I think one of the really damaging things, Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell did between them, was to create this view that politics is about managing the news cycle, running focus groups, finding out what people want and then telling them what they want to hear and focusing on the marginal seats and only talking about the issues that help to swing seats and not about taking a strategic view on what is in the interests of the country. We have lost the way of explaining to people why some things have to be done that are unpopular and that, allied to the kind of Stalinist view that you don’t have debate in your political parties, because that results in division and that results in loss of elections, has meant that debate within the political parties and even between the political parties, has been pretty well shut down. I think that has made people very cynical about the whole political process. So you get people having to completely flip their positions because the party leadership, or some narrow clique around the party leadership, has decided what the policy is going to be. In the old days, I mean, it may not have been perfect, but the old days where you had party conferences and very vigorous debates have disappeared. “I mean, a good example of that, just to show that I’m not just making this a complaint about the Labour Party, is when David Cameron suddenly decided that, apparently, we are no longer in favour of grammar schools. Well, for people like me, I mean, I went through the state system. I went to Arbroath High School, which is the kind of equivalent of the grammar school system. That system gave me my chance in life so this is absolutely fundamental to me and I’m sorry, just because the party leadership has decided that grammar schools are not our policy, it is not going to change my view that I think it is wrong that the chances that I got in education are no longer available to kids from modest or poorer backgrounds and if we’re going to say we’re not going to have grammar schools, well then, we need to have some alternative. But you don’t just do it. “Not to criticise my leader but one of the things he has done, which is part of the repositioning which absolutely drives me mad, is that he goes round saying ‘there is such a thing as society’. Now that is clearly saying, I’m not Margaret Thatcher. And fair enough, if Margaret Thatcher had been this monster that some people have portrayed her as, who didn’t believe in society which is how it is presented by her opponents, then I could understand that. But when Margaret said there is no such thing as society, she meant that you can’t just expect problems to be dealt with by some external force called society but we have a responsibility as individuals to help each other. So, you know, if you have an elderly relative, it is not something just for the health service to deal with, it is something for the family as well as the health service. That’s what she was saying. She was saying, society is not some external body, it is all of us and to portray that differently is just criminally libellous. Of course, that’s what her opponents do but when you get the leader of the Conservative Party appearing to give that credibility, I think that is a huge mistake because Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph cared as much about society, and poverty and healthcare and the rest, as anyone else. And most people in political parties do, because otherwise they wouldn’t be involved. “If you look at what Frank Field is saying today, Keith Joseph was saying this in the 70s. If you said to me, what was Keith Joseph’s motivation in politics, what was his main concern? It was about poverty and the elimination of poverty. Now, that’s not his image but I remember him saying to me that what we had to do in our country was to have a position where it doesn’t matter who wins the election but that the major parties that will be the parties of government share the same understanding of the importance of capitalism and wealth creation and also the values that ensure we have a safety-net below which no one will fall.” So are the Tories just misunderstood? “No, we are not misunderstood, it’s because most people are not really interested in politics until we get to a general election and only then because everything is going very badly. “I’m not pretending that the early ‘80s were easy, you had rising unemployment, caused by the inflation, it was a horrendous time, a horrendous time and you need very special people to deal with that and Margaret said that with ten good men, she could achieve anything but she never had any more than four and I know that sounds arrogant but do you know, in business, great chief executives are people who listen to what people have to say, know where they are going, have a clear strategy and stick to it, and that’s what she did. She never cared what people thought about her but she did care what they thought about her country, and she did care about what was happening to the country and she did care about people. But of course, that was not her image. “A good example of this is after John Major became Prime Minister and I was in his Cabinet and Margaret was being a bit naughty. She was holding drinks parties for Conservative MPs to talk about the Maastricht Treaty and this was making life really difficult for John who was trying to get the Maastricht Treaty through. John asked me to talk to Margaret and try and stop her having all these little soirees with the MPs. So I arranged an appointment to go and see her and I went into the room, and she said, ‘now if you‘ve come to talk about the Maastricht Treaty’ and she produced the treaty and it was all marked up – I think she was probably one of a handful of people in the country who had read it and knew it inside out – ‘Now which part of the treaty would you like to talk about, Michael,’ she said and I told her I didn’t want to talk about the treaty but I want to talk about what is going on because the party machine was getting very, very distressed and I didn’t want her to be done over by the party machine and the press and I was just concerned about her. Now, I should have known better, because at this point, there was a thermonuclear explosion! And she said, ‘How dare you use that argument. How dare you use that argument? Do you think if I’d ever cared about me that we’d have done any of the things that we’ve done?’” The story is a reminder of Forsyth’s experience at the very heart of government. I suggest he would be a great poster boy for the re-branded Tory Party that still can’t shake off the fact that it is dominated at its head by privately educated, posh folk. “I hate this stuff about class and background and that is the other thing about Margaret and that is why the establishment absolutely hated her, she didn’t care where you came from, who your parents were, where you’ve been. What she cared about was what you were able to contribute and that is, of course, why they hated this bossy middle-class woman, with her middle-class ideas, upsetting the club and that’s what I loved about her. I wouldn’t trade on my background but suppose I were to announce I was standing, apart from sending people round to certify me, what would the reaction be? What would they say? You’d get the whole business about the poll tax and all the stuff we’ve been talking about and actually, that is not the distraction we need at the moment. What we need is a government which is going to have to do some very difficult things. Margaret had lots of problems but I think some of the problems facing the next government are much greater in scale and scope.” Has David Cameron or his inner circle approached him about a return? “No, and I don’t think that is very likely either. I am a dyed in the wool, old Thatcherite and we’ve had our go and we’ve got a lot of baggage. You know exactly what would happen and you know what, I do care about the country and if I am honest, do I want to go back? Not particularly.” Holyrood Magazine - issue 219 | Previous article | Next article Related articles: What Labour did next 25 June 2010 A liberal view of life 11 June 2010 The Alexander Technique 28 May 2010 Made from girders 26 April 2010 Keeping order 12 April 2010 See all articles in this category Submit a comment |
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