It’s no secret that the parliamentary Conservative Party is riven with splits over Europe, but when Tory MPs start laughing uncontrollably about government decisions and taking little notice of government whips, you know it is a government in trouble.
Yesterday Downing Street announced that Tory MP John Hayes had been awarded a Knighthood. Nothing unusual in that, you might think. After all, he’s been an MP for close on 20 years, served as an adviser to David Cameron in Downing Street and was a minister for eight years. However, political honours are normally announced in the Queen’s birthday honours list or the New Year’s honours list. To announce a knighthood out of the blue is unusual to say the least. And when it happens people naturally look for the motive.
Mark Francois, one of the leading lights of the European Research Group, thinks he knows the answer and has written a rather wonderfully amusing letter to the future Sir John, giving vent not only to his thoughts but to his spleen. This letter was sent to me at 1am this morning - not, I emphasise by Mark himself. I’m assuming it’s genuine! [UPDATE: Mark Francois confirms it is genuine].
Quite extraordinary. But then again, John Hayes’s various appointments have invariably attracted comment and surprise from his colleagues. This is what I wrote back on 29 March 2013, when he was appointed as a senior advisor to David Cameron…
‘Not since Caligula appointed his horse as his chief adviser has such an inappropriate appointment been made’. Those were the words of not one, but two Tory MPs, speaking to me about John Hayes being made the Prime Minister’s chief parliamentary adviser. I wouldn’t quite go that far myself, but I can understand the sentiment. One minister when told the news seriously believed it was an early April Fool. Only when he logged onto the BBC News website did he finally believe it.
I’ve always got on rather well with John Hayes, and I have a sneaking admiration for his utter shamelessness. He really does have the ability to argue that black is white. And he did it today on PM. ‘My kind of Conservatism is the Prime Minister’s kind of Conservatism’ was one of his more memorable quotes from the interview. It may be that he believes it, but if he does he couldn’t be more wrong. His is a kind of Christian fundamentalist conservatism which is about as far removed from David Cameron as you can possibly get. He’s a sort of ‘Kinder, Kueche, Kirche’ Conservative who is viscerally opposed to any form of liberalism. He’s a climate change sceptic, ambivalent about women’s rights and a vocal opponent of gay marriage. Does he sound like a typical Cameroon to you?
Now in itself, holding views like that shouldn’t rule him out from advising David Cameron. It’s good for any Prime Minister to hear different views. But the thought that John Hayes is representative of the Right of the Conservative Party is slightly fanciful. The tensions between him, Edward Leigh and Christopher Chope, the other two leading lights of the Cornerstone Group are palpable. When Cameron made him a Minister there were gasps from various corners of the Tory Right. Why him? That was the question most were asking. The simple explanation is that he enjoys the patronage of Iain Duncan Smith. IDS was quite open that if Cameron didn’t promote several of his proteges, he wouldn’t be joining Cameron’s government.
Hayes was a rather good Minister in charge of vocational education and apprenticeships. He did the Prime Minister’s bidding and his policy area was seen as one of the Coalition’s successes. But most pundits were left open mouthed when he was promoted to the Department of Energy & Climate Change. Everyone knew his non PC views on global warming, so a clash with the LibDem Secretary of State Ed Davey wasn’t difficult to predict. On a personal basis they rubbed along OK, but Davey was furious at his junior minister’s public utterances on wind farms.
There is only one reason for this mini reshuffle, which sees the excellent Michael Fallon take over John Hayes’ responsibilities at DECC. It has to have been because the LibDems insisted on it. I can think of no other reason. So Hayes moved across to Number 10 and is elevated to the Privy Council. That’s how Coalition politics works at the moment. Nick Clegg says jump, and the Prime Minister obeys.
Margaret Thatcher once said that ‘every Prime Minister needs a Willie’. She was right. But is John Hayes a ‘Willie’? The key point of any ‘Willie’ is that they don’t want to be a player. They retain the trust of their master because they have no agenda, no ambition and don’t gossip. Can John Hayes truly be said to have no agenda, no ambition and to lack the desire to gossip?
The parallels today are clear. Needs must. But I do wonder if Theresa May has fallen for one of John Hayes’s oldest tricks in the book. And I have reason to know what this might be. It’s entirely possible that Hayes has told Number Ten that he can deliver a whole tranche of maybe 20 votes for her, if only they follow his advice. Let me explain why this might be a real possibility.
Back in May 2005 I was appointed Chief of Staff to David Davis. On my first day working in Parliament John Hayes showed up in my office. I hadn’t met him before. He greeted me like a long lost friend and was very keen that we should meet regularly as he could be very helpful to DD in his leadership ambitions. Indeed, he told me that if David took the “right” course John could deliver 35 votes from the Cornerstone Group of MPs. It was something he was to repeat several times to me over the ensuing few weeks. Later that day I was in Portcullis House when I spied John on an upstairs landing, going into the office of another putative leadership candidate, David Willetts. A couple of hours later I met up with Mark Fox, one of Willett’s advisors and asked what John Hayes was doing with his man. “Oh, he was telling David how he could deliver 35 votes for him,” said Mark. We both had a good laugh.
John Hayes is an operator. He likes to be at the centre of political intrigue and gossip. But sometimes he’s not quite as clever at these kind of machinations as he thinks he is.
We all know the government is desperate to win the vote on the Brexit deal, currently slated for December 11th. If they really have to dole out baubles like this to persuade MPs to get in line then they are in even more trouble than many of us thought. But it plays to a wider narrative than just one about this vote. Up to now Tory MPs may have disagreed about the way forward but they have avoided too much personal rancour. I sense this is about to change, and although this letter is written in a humorous way I detect that the gloves are about to come off. Words like ‘betrayal’, ‘traitor’ and ‘quisling’ are about to enter common parlance.
The government has clearly decided that it will just have to battle through and cope with any short term embarrassment that announcements like this knighthood will bring. It brings back echoes of Maastricht, doesn’t it? The difference between now and then is Maastricht was eventually ratified by Parliament. I can’t conceive of circumstances in which this Brexit deal will be.
Let’s finish with a quote from George Orwell’s Animal Farm…
Can you not understand that liberty is worth more than just ribbons?
Actually, there’s another quote from George R R Martin, which might become aposite. Just imagine if John Hayes now didn’t vote with the government…
They’ll kill for that knighthood, but don’t ever think they’ll die for it.
UPDATE 10:45am: A Tory MP texts…
The Cornerstone group used to meet at 6pm on a Wednesday evening. At 7.10 John Hayes could be seen slipping into the Chief Whips’ office.
