The Times
Why Ken Clarke is Blair's Trojan Horse
By: Michael Gove
2001.07.17

The judgment of Paris led to ten years of conflict. When the Trojan prince gave the golden apple for the fairest of goddesses to Aphrodite, passing over the claims of Hera and Athene, he secured a brief period of bliss before losing everything in an all-out war. 

If Tory MPs today defer to the judgment of Parris then they are in for a further decade of conflict. When my distinguished Times colleague awarded his golden apple for the best Tory leader to Ken Clarke, passing over the claims of Portillo and Duncan Smith, he struck a chord. Since then, Conservative MPs whose judgment has often proved sound, from Andrew Tyrie through Boris Johnson to Greg Knight, have sought happiness in Ken’s arms. And should Mr Clarke prevail then there will, undeniably, be a Tory honeymoon in the polls. But it will not be long before war breaks out, and the Tory party, like the Trojan kingdom, will be reduced to a melancholy remnant of ancient history. 

None of the candidates for the Conservative leadership is perfect. Each has faults on an Homeric scale. Michael Portillo has, at times, seemed to be too much the Odysseus. Iain Duncan Smith has all the courage, honour and bearing of an Ajax but not a little of his obstinacy. It is Ken Clarke, however, who combines at once the arrogance of an Achilles with the self-indulgence of a Paris and poses, for the Tories, all the dangers of the Sirens. 

If the Tories vote for Clarke today they will have proved that the gods do wish to destroy them, for they will have gone mad. They will have voted for a man who holds the view of most of their party on the future of the country in not-so-genial contempt. They will have voted for a man determined to strike an attitude on Europe so flagrantly in defiance of his party’s that it cannot help but renew its fight on this issue. And that way lies perdition. 
Don’t just take it from me, recall the words of the Tories’ wise old Nestor, Douglas Hurd, in 1992. Twice the Tories broke themselves, he warned, over the Corn Laws in the 1840s and Protection in the 1900s. Don’t, he urged, therefore let it happen again over Europe, give that madness a miss. Yet now many, perhaps even a plurality, of Tory MPs want to embrace that madness and call it bliss. 

For, despite the claims of his wilfully blind supporters, there can now be no doubt that a Clarke candidacy taken to the grass roots will reignite Tory passions over Europe. Any Clarke leadership that might follow would see the Conservative Party consumed by warfare on the issue. 

It was the hope of some who sought his candidature that Clarke would, at the very least, avoid discussion of Europe or, at best, agree to cool his ardour for integration. But that frail hope was butchered at his campaign launch. The Tory party, Clarke demanded, would have to abandon its opposition to every aspect of European integration it had previously shown any scepticism towards and accept his right to use the majesty of his office to argue for entry into the single currency when it pleased him. The dream that Ken could give the Tories’ European row a decent burial has been replaced by the nightmare prospect of his wanting to drag the bodies of the party’s sceptics round the Palace of Westminster behind his chariot. 
If Clarke won the Tory leadership then the Government would ensure that the Commons had to divide, regularly and with all fanfare, on a series of European issues. Debates, and votes, on the Euro-army, Euro-justice, the Nice treaty and the single currency would become regular fixtures in the Westminster calendar. On each occasion the motion would be so contrived as to rally the whipped ranks of Labour MPs into one lobby while Clarke and his party split, split and split again. 

The Tory leader would dismiss his party’s sceptics as cranks; in turn they would protest at his arrogance and failure to reflect the wish of the conservative majority. Democracy would be doubly betrayed. 

First, the country would be deprived of a cohesive political force to express its natural scepticism towards the onward march of European integration. The majority in Britain want to have a party saying “hang on, just a minute, are we sure this further surrender of self-government is justified?”. That desire would be denied. And because it had been denied, the chances of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown trying to take us in to the single currency would move from slim to probable. 

But even if one does not share the majority’s concerns on Europe, then a Clarke leadership would still damage our democracy. For the inevitable internal wrangling it must bring on Europe would sap Tory energies, confirm their irrelevance and let the Government off the hook. 
That prolonged, damaging, probably fatal internal conflict would not, however, take place if either of the other leadership candidates won. Neither Portillo nor Duncan Smith wants to re-open the European row. They thought it was settled by the referendum William Hague held which confirmed that 85 per cent of the party wanted to hold the sceptical line. Instead, they want to move discussion on to those many other areas of policy where the Conservatives have failed to communicate sufficient passion and authority. They offer to that small number of Conservative MPs, such as Clarke, who cannot get over their infatuation with integration, a chance to make their peace with the majority and still go their own way if a referendum should ever arise. 

But while they want to move on, Clarke wants to refight internal battles he has already, overwhelmingly, lost. Who, then, is the real Euro-obsessive in this contest? Instead of spending most of their time still talking about Europe, as Clarke did when he launched his leadership campaign, the Tories should be listening more closely to the electorate’s verdict last month. The collapse in the numbers voting Conservative, from the high point of 14 million in 1992 to just eight million in 2001, requires a searching debate about the future of the party which the petty squabbling of this leadership election has almost entirely displaced. 

The issues which have dominated the contest so far — cannabis legalisation, the survival of Section 28, which candidate has been the most disloyal and which enjoys the secret favour of Margaret Thatcher — reflect the preoccupations of those who, having been consigned to irrelevance, seek to wallow in it. 

The most important drugs question we face is the spiralling cost of NHS treatments; the great scandal in our classrooms is not the peddling of gay propaganda booklets but the fact that a fifth of our children leave school functionally illiterate; the misplaced loyalties Tories should worry about are those of the missing six million voters; and the real Thatcher question is not whom does she back, but why can’t the Tories show the courage she did to ask themselves honestly why they have failed. 

The Conservatives need to recognise that the preening display of the past weeks, the whispered asides urging journalists to rake over the past, the bufferish prattle about “big beasts”, “bottom” and “baggage”, the coquettish announcements that they have switched their affections but they won’t say to whom, or why, all confirm that they appear to have learnt nothing from defeat. Why can’t these people realise that their Francis Urquhartish games just make the voters cry “FU!” The Conservatives best hope tomorrow is that Michael Portillo and Iain Duncan Smith emerge cleanly and clearly as the two candidates to go before the membership and that with their emergence we see the subsidence of the old Westminster obsessions with internal Euro-wrangles and personality trivia. Then, perhaps, we can have the debate the Tories need about the range, scope and extent of modernisation across the board of domestic policy. We can judge if Michael Portillo, though he has the vision and the intelligence, has the anchor. We can discern if Iain Duncan Smith, though he has the character and the honesty, has the daring and the adaptability. A vote for either is a vote for a future, a vote for Clarke is a dash to the rocks. 

michael.gove@thetimes.co.uk

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