Jesse Norman is almost certainly the first Minister of State in the Department for Transport to have written a novel. The Winding Stair (praised on ConHome by Daniel Hannan) was launched last week at Gray’s Inn Hall, where the author gave a short speech in which he repeated one of the three brilliant quotations from Francis Bacon’s Essays which adorn the first page of the book:
“For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.”
Norman has a capacity, not always found in Englishmen, for expressing emotion. He plays the trumpet and often declares his unbounded admiration for Louis Armstrong:
“Armstrong has a JOY [much emphasis on ‘joy’]. It’s about joy. Life is about joy. And I think that’s why I love the trumpet and that’s why I love Armstrong. He’s a total hero.”
But joy is combined, again rather unusually, with high seriousness. Norman has a remarkable ability to expound with clarity and fair-mindedness the ideas of distinguished thinkers.
He has written admirable accounts of Edmund Burke and Adam Smith, reviewed here and here on ConHome, and early in his career published a volume of essays about Michael Oakeshott, to whose insights he again and again returns.
In 2013, Bruce Anderson, than whom no one has a better record in modern times at picking future Tory leaders, declared in The Spectator that Norman, elected in 2010, “is at least as good as anyone else” in that “outstanding vintage”, and went on:
“His abilities are bound to earn a place in government, and rapid advancement thereafter. By 2020, he will have at least as much Cabinet experience as William Hague did in 1997. It is not certain that he will succeed David Cameron, but Jesse Norman is a Member to watch.”
Instead of which, Norman has yet to enter the Cabinet. Since 2016 he has served as a Parliamentary Under-Secretary at two different Departments, Business and Transport, as Minister of State at Transport, then for two years (2019-21) as Financial Secretary to the Treasury, followed by a fleeting spell during Liz Truss’s administration as Minister of State at the Foreign Office, and a return to Transport for a second stint as Minister of State.
Here is an odd journey for a man who clearly has the gifts needed to run a department. What is the explanation?
During his speech at Gray’s Inn Norman gestured fondly at the portrait of his father-in-law, Tom Bingham, which adorns that hall.
Bingham was widely regarded as the outstanding judge of his generation, and Norman has often expressed unbounded admiration and affection for him.
It seems more than likely that Norman has a judicial rather than political cast of mind. He sums up any case which is presented to him with marvellous fairness, erudition and good-humour.
But then comes the judgement, which is delivered with independence and impartiality. No considerations of friendship or advancement are allowed to sway the judge.
And on two notable occasions, Norman decided, as we shall see, that it was his duty to reach verdicts which enraged and distressed his party leader, the Prime Minister of the day.
He demonstrated an independence which may have been in the national interest, but was not welcome to David Cameron or Boris Johnson.
Norman admitted, when interviewed in 2015 by ConHome, that politics is “a compromised activity”, but added that he looked to voters to behave like impartial judges rather than recipients of electoral bribes:
“I don’t really believe in making political promises. James Madison had this idea, and it was widely believed in the 18th century, that manifestos were attempts to bribe the voters. On this view you shouldn’t be promising things, you should simply be showing people what you had done and explaining the reasoning by which you did it, so that they could make a judgment on the facts about what you were about.”
Born in 1962, Norman is one of the five children of Sir Torquil Norman, famous as the saviour of The Roundhouse in Camden, and his wife Anne, an artist and the daughter of the tenth Earl of Sandwich.
Every so often I meet people in north London who remember the noisy, affectionate, high-spirited Norman family driving round in their bus. According to Torquil, who made his fortune designing, manufacturing and selling children’s toys including Polly Pocket,
“As our children grew up they were extremely unruly and, of course, did an enormous amount of crayoning, drawing and painting. In fact it was almost impossible to stay at a hotel with them on holiday because their first instinct would be to crayon all over the bedroom walls…
“I came up with a solution. I bought a 30-foot Bedford chassis and delivered it to Plaxtons the coach builders in Scarborough. They kindly built a body on it to my design which, when equipped, meant that we could sleep nine people in it, with a motor scooter in the boot and a small sailing dingy on a vast roof rack. I think we had the first, the best and undoubtedly the biggest campervan in the business.”
One detects hereditary ebullience as well as height. Jesse is six foot five inches tall, two inches shorter than his father, and told Jane Merrick of The Independent he was sent to Eton following
“an educational argument between my mother, who despised any form of privilege, and my father, who took the view that he had set up his own business, so he was entitled to spend money on his kids’ education.”
Jesse read classics at Merton College, Oxford, worked on Wall Street, ran an educational charity which distributed medical textbooks in eastern Europe, in London became a Director of Barclays, and then switched to the study and teaching of philosophy at University College, London.
In 2006 he won an open primary to be the Conservative candidate in Hereford and South Herefordshire, which in 2010 he took from the Liberal Democrats.
He is married to Kate Bingham, profiled on ConHome after springing to fame as head of the Vaccine Taskforce, and they have three children. Rachel Johnson, who knows them well, remarks on their exceptional energy:
“The Norman-Binghams are to me a bionic superbreed of some sort – it makes me tired just to think about them.”
Another friend spoke of Norman’s modesty: how he never used his intellect to put others down.
In his maiden speech, delivered on 14th June 2010, Norman showed he wanted seriousness and jokes to co-exist:
“I know that every Member of this House will join me in saying that it is the greatest honour of all to be chosen to sit in this august Chamber; to have a share, however small, in the supreme sovereign authority in this country; and to walk in these hallowed halls and corridors, as so many extraordinary men and women have done before us.
“First impressions are not always so favourable; one thinks of Mark Twain, who said—I hope that the House will forgive my accent—’When I first came to Memphis, I found men drinking and gambling, and open prostitution in the streets. It was no place for a Presbyterian—and I did not long remain one.’ As for me, I enter this House as I hope I will remain—filled with a sense of due reverence and due responsibility.”
Norman was already known as an eloquent advocate of the Big Society, and of compassionate conservatism – causes championed by David Cameron, Conservative leader from 2005 and Prime Minister from 2010-16 – and proceeded to lead a cross-party campaign against the grotesquely wasteful Private Finance Initiative, while issuing thoughtful critiques of crony capitalism, and of neo-liberal economics.
He is deeply committed to the New Model Institute for Technology & Engineering, NMITE, which he helped to found in Hereford, and is also a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
But in 2012, Norman led a rebellion by 91 Conservative MPs against the Coalition Government’s plan for an elected House of Lords. As he later related,
“David Cameron was clearly very angry about the scale of the defeat, his temper not helped by an email I had sent in good faith to wavering colleagues a few minutes before the vote, which argued that the largest possible rebellion would actually help the PM by killing the legislation outright.
“Directly after voting, he strode up and tore a strip off me, jabbing me in the chest with his finger, while I stood there gaping at this unexpected development.”
One sees here Norman’s naivety – he was taken aback by Cameron’s anger – but also his resourcefulness in organising the rebellion, and his loyalty to existing institutions. He feared an elected Lords would soon lose interest in its work as a revising chamber, and become a rival to the Commons:
“The British Constitution is not perfect. But…it possesses a deep inherited wisdom which — and this is not a fashionable thought — outstrips individual human comprehension. It has evolved over hundreds of years as a means not merely to constrain democratic power but to defend it; from monarch and people alike. You meddle with it at your peril.”
There was now little prospect of advancement while Cameron was Prime Minister. In 2013 Norman was sacked from the Downing Street Policy Board after abstaining in a vote on the bombing of Syria: he said he had not realised he was expected to toe the party line, which was pro-bombing.
In the EU Referendum of 2016, Norman took the unusual course of declining to say how he himself would vote. He explained that he wished to encourage the spread of reliable information and the holding in his constituency of public debate, so people could decide for themselves how to vote.
Once again, he had taken an independent position and wanted people to behave as sober judges, not intoxicated partisans.
After losing the referendum Cameron stood down as Prime Minister, whereupon Theresa May made Norman a Parliamentary Under-Secretary.
Three years later, there was once more a vacancy at No 10, and Norman, instead of getting an ally to float his name, wrote a leadership pitch for himself, published on ConHome:
“Society is a trust, it gives us freedom, and it is our duty to preserve, enhance and pass it on to our children and grandchildren. This is the true meaning of ‘One Nation’ conservatism, long before Disraeli and Baldwin gave it voice; it runs far wider than they ever imagined. The paradox of conservatism is thus that—against the caricatures—it is intrinsically modest. It is an antidote to generational or individual arrogance, materialism and selfishness. It is hostile to injustice, since injustice can never be of social value. Nor is true conservatism naïve about markets. It understands that open markets are the greatest route to prosperity and social advance ever created; but that effective competition rests on trust and law and pro-competitive policies for which the state is essential.
“We should be ambitious not for ourselves, but for our country: for the future of this extraordinary, warm, funny, tolerant, open, traditional, kind, inclusive, mad, conflicted, joyous United Kingdom of ours, from Lands End to John O’Groats, Enniskillen to the Wash.
“If you believe in this idea of conservatism; if you want new faces at the table; if you share these ambitions; if you agree about the central importance, now more than ever, of history and philosophy and substantive debate in politics; then please say so.”
Not enough people said so, for he did not stand. In both 2016 and 2019 he supported Boris Johnson for the leadership.
They were old friends: Norman was almost the only MP in Johnson’s inner social circle. On Sunday evenings, Norman and Bingham would occasionally have an informal supper with Johnson and his wife of 25 years, Marina Wheeler.
These suppers were discontinued after Johnson and Wheeler split up in 2018. Johnson is said to have asked on one occasion if he could bring Carrie Symonds, and to have been told not.
In the summer of 2019, Johnson became Prime Minister, and kept Norman as Financial Secretary to the Treasury, a post he had been asked to fill two months earlier as May’s administration disintegrated.
And there Norman remained until 16th September 2021, when he was asked, on the second day of the reshuffle, to meet Johnson in the Cabinet Room.
The Prime Minister was embarrassed. He said he needed to create a more diverse Government. Norman realised he was being asked to make way for someone else, and agreed to go. Johnson replaced him with Lucy Frazer.
While Cameron was Conservative Leader, the last thing he wanted was Johnson, a loose-cannon Old Etonian, stealing his thunder and striking the wrong note. In 2007, when he reshuffled the Shadow Cabinet, he refused to bring in Johnson, who instead went off to run for Mayor of London.
In 2021 Johnson left an independent-minded Old Etonian, who might strike the wrong note, out of his Cabinet, but suggested Norman might come back into the Government at some point in the future.
Norman seemed to take the whole thing with his usual grace, though one friend said he “looked a bit like a pterodactyl with a secret sorrow”, a phrase borrowed from P.G. Wodehouse.
From about this time everything went wrong for Johnson. His beloved mother, Charlotte Johnson Wahl, died on 13th September 2021, from the start of December he struggled in vain to cope with the partygate allegations, and in January 2022 David Davis told him, in the Commons, it was time to go.
It wasn’t, actually, quite time yet, but at 7.30 a.m. on 6th June 2022 Norman published a letter to Johnson in which he said he had always supported him, but could now “see no circumstances in which I could serve in a government led by you”.
The Sue Gray Report, he went on, showed Johnson had “presided over a culture of casual law-breaking at 10 Downing Street”, the “Rwanda policy is ugly”, and the PM was “trying to import elements of a presidential system of government that is entirely foreign to our constitution and law”.
Norman said he was withdrawing his support from Johnson and had notified the Chairman of the 1922 Committee, Sir Graham Brady.
This devastating letter was overtaken half an hour later by Sir Graham’s announcement that 54 Conservative MPs had now called for a confidence vote, which would be held that evening.
Only 211 MPs backed the PM, with 148 voting against, and a month later, as minister after minister resigned, Johnson was forced to concede defeat.
Norman has since denied that his letter proceeded out of any kind of ill-feeling towards Johnson:
“People think that my letter about Boris was revenge… It wasn’t at all. I’ve always liked Boris. I consider ourselves friends now. I’m not sure he would, but I certainly would.”