No one expressed greater enthusiasm at the return of David Cameron to high office than William Hague. He recalled with feeling in his Times column how wonderfully things worked when Cameron was Prime Minister and he was Foreign Secretary:
“Government was conducted in a rational, methodical way, with the top members of it arguing things out privately but then trusting and supporting each other, and never having to contradict each other in public. Mistakes could certainly be made — eventually the Brexit referendum would sweep away that administration — but for six years government was run as it should be.”
Such sentiments were frequently uttered in Yes Minister by Sir Humphrey. The outcome might be unsatisfactory, but look how good the process was.
Hague’s admiration for Cameron is fully reciprocated. In his memoirs, Cameron says next to nothing about various Tories he can’t stand, but records that at his first meeting with Hague in 1992, “William immediately struck me as one of the brightest and most talented Members of Parliament I’d ever come across”.
“We formed a friendship that has lasted ever since”, he goes on, and from 2005, when Cameron became party leader, Hague was “an indispensable sage in my inner team”.
During the 2010 general election campaign, when Cleggmania broke out and it looked as if the Conservatives might have to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats in order to enter government, Cameron asked Hague, George Osborne and Oliver Letwin to prepare in secret for the deal with the Lib Dems which after the election was formed in only five days of negotiation, and lasted for five years.
As Conservative Party leader from 1997-2001 Hague had challenged conventional wisdom, especially on the European Union, but now he was a key Establishment figure. There was speculation last month that he had actually arranged Cameron’s appointment as Foreign Secretary, but when asked on Times Radio if this was the case, he replied:
“No…I do like the idea of David Cameron coming back into government and was very enthusiastic about it. I knew about it a few days before and spoke to David Cameron to brief him about my views on foreign affairs and the Foreign Office.
“But it wasn’t my idea. You read these things, I set it up in some way, it was my idea – that’s not the case. I know Rishi Sunak and David Cameron very well, but sometimes in politics, things are simpler than they look.
“Sometimes somebody just asked somebody else around for a chat and says, ‘Why don’t you do this?’ And they said, ‘Well, OK, fine.’ And you know, it doesn’t need any intermediary or they just sort it out themselves. So that’s what happened in this case.”
Here is a perfect illustration of how the Establishment works. Its stock in trade is knowing, without giving reasons, which of its members would be most suitable for each job.
Forget those laborious recruitment processes which are supposed, rather implausibly, to ensure fair competition. Personal recommendation is what counts. It saves time, and a member of the Establishment becomes responsible to other members of the Establishment for whether the recommended candidate turns out to be any good.
What a contrast with the young Hague who sprang to fame with his speech to the 1977 Conservative Party Conference, held in Blackpool. In an eerily calm voice, his Yorkshire accent in marked contrast to the plummy tones of the chairman who called him to speak, he emphasised his status as an outsider, an oddity:
“As a 16-year-old I represent what may well seem to be the last generation for the Conservative Party. By all accounts some ten per cent of first-time voters voted Conservative in the last general election.”
The trouble, he asserted, was that the party was seen “as standing for the maintenance of the existing political and economic order”, but young people want to be free, they want the Government to get out of the way,
“and I trust that Mrs Thatcher’s Government will indeed get out of the way.”
Hague turned with a grin to Mrs Thatcher, sitting on the platform, to see how she took this impertinence. She smiled and clapped enthusiastically, as did Sir Geoffrey Howe, beside her, a moment later. The schoolboy continued:
“It’s all right for some of you. Half of you won’t be here in 30 or 40 years’ time. But I will be, and I want to be free.”
He told Conservatives they must become “the party of radicalism and change”. Behind him one sees Lord Carrington, also on the platform and in 1979 to become Foreign Secretary in the first Thatcher Government, give a charming but sceptical smile.
Peter Carrington told the diarist Kenneth Rose that
“he and several other frontbench Tories were nauseated by the much-heralded speech of a 16-year-old schoolboy called William Hague. Peter said to Norman St John-Stevas: ‘If he is as priggish and self-assured as that at 16, what will be be like in 30 years’ time?’ Norman replied: ‘Like Michael Heseltine.'”
Hague was born in Rotherham in 1961 and educated at Ripon Grammar School, where he boarded, and at Wath-upon-Dearne Comprehensive School. His parents, Nigel and Stella Hague, ran a soft drinks business for which he worked during the holidays.
As Michael Crick has related, Hague developed as a boy an unusually detailed interest in politics:
“Soon, alongside the Margaret Thatcher poster on William’s wall, were lists of MPs and their constituencies. He learnt the details off by heart, along with MPs’ majorities in many cases, and boys would sometimes test him on school trips. And on his 15th birthday Stella Hague invested 50p on a special treat – membership of the local Wentworth Conservatives.”
Crick had invented, while Editor of Cherwell, the Pushy Fresher award, conferred on whichever first-year Oxford undergraduate displayed the most nauseatingly shameless ambition to clamber to the top of every student institution, and was confident that Hague, whose reputation as a party conference orator preceded him when he arrived in 1979 as a Demy, or Scholar, of Magdalen College, would carry off the prize.
Hague confounded expectations by easing himself tactfully into debates at the Oxford Union, and by turning out to be someone with whom it was a pleasure to have a drink. He nevertheless became President both of the Union and of the Oxford University Conservative Association, where he was convicted of electoral malpractice while attempting to ensure that another Magdalen undergraduate succeeded him.
He also, without visible effort, took a First in PPE, after which he did a business degree at INSEAD and joined McKinsey as a management consultant.
During the general election of 1983 he worked as a researcher for Howe, in the general election of 1987 he stood in the safe Labour seat of Wentworth, and in 1989 he won the by-election in the North Yorkshire seat of Richmond caused by the departure of the sitting Tory MP, Sir Leon Brittan, to become a European Commissioner.
Richmond Conservatives like to select a candidate of Cabinet calibre, and Hague was soon on the upward path: PPS to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Norman Lamont, from 1990-93; Under-Secretary and then Minister of State for Social Security 1993-95.
In the latter post he conceived and with difficulty put through the Commons the Disability Discrimination Act, which he has described as his proudest political achievement. In an interview with ConHome on the 20th anniversary of the measure, he described how it was unexpectedly backed by the Right of the Conservative Party and opposed by the Left, and how he prepared a 24-hour speech in order to defeat a rival Labour plan, but after delivering an hour of it had disheartened his opponents sufficiently for them to give up.
In 1995 he entered the Cabinet as Welsh Secretary, and in order not to suffer the embarrassment of one of his predecessors, John Redwood, who had been filmed pretending to sing the Welsh National Anthem, he asked a Welsh-speaking civil servant, Ffion Jenkins, to teach him the language.
They were married in 1997, hoped to start a family, but to their sorrow, avowed by Hague in 2010 after wounding speculation in the press, instead suffered multiple miscarriages.
At the general election of 1997, the Labour Party under Tony Blair won a landslide victory, John Major at once resigned as Conservative leader, and in the contest to succeed him, Hague, who was still only 36 years old, at first said he would be Michael Howard’s running mate, but then decided to stand himself.
This was the last leadership election to be decided exclusively by Conservative MPs. The front-runner was Ken Clarke, who in the second ballot led Hague by 64 votes to 62, with Redwood in third place on 38.
Clarke then did a deal with Redwood which made arithmetical sense, but was compared by satirists to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, Clarke and Redwood being on opposite sides of the European issue.
Thatcher described the deal as “incredible” and appeared with Hague in front of the cameras outside St Stephen’s entrance to the Palace of Westminster:
“I am supporting William Hague. Have you got the name? Vote for William Hague to follow the same kind of government I led. Vote for William Hague on Thursday. Have you got the message?”
Enough of the depleted band of Conservative MPs got the message for Hague to win the final ballot by 90 votes to Clarke’s 72.
Charles Moore argues, in the third volume of his life of Thatcher, that this victory had profound long-term consequences:
“Clarke, probably the most determined of all the party’s senior pro-Europeans, thus missed the chance to crush Euroscepticism in the 20th century and assist Blair’s aim of getting Britain into the single currency in the 21st…
“If Clarke had become leader, the European position Lady Thatcher represented would have been pushed to the margin. At the time, the Tories looked merely laughable. In the longer term, however, the episode was a milestone in the gradual move away from the Europhilia which, despite her efforts in her later period of office, still dominated the Tory elites.”
In the short term, Hague made himself a laughing stock by going down a waterslide in a baseball cap bearing the word “HAGUE”, and newspaper columnists competed to see who could be rudest about this bald yet baby-faced leader. In The Daily Mail, Simon Heffer wrote that the Conservative leader “looked like a child-molester on a day release scheme”.
Further ridicule was heaped on Hague when he said he used to drink 14 pints a day when delivering soft drinks for the family firm. The trouble was that he looked too trim, and also too inhibited, ever to have drunk anything like that amount.
Hague was by general consent a brilliant parliamentarian, marvellously witty at Prime Minister’s Questions, but Blair in time got the measure of him, and damned him as better at jokes than judgment.
The new Prime Minister enjoyed a protracted honeymoon by conveying the impression that he was in harmony with modern Britain, and had a coherent programme for carrying the country forward.
Hague led an exhausted and divided party, and seemed to look to a better past. The British, he implied, had been dispossessed: “come with me and I will give you back your country,” as he urged in October 1999.
During the 2001 general election campaign he told voters “we have two weeks to save the pound”. When the results came in, the Conservatives had gained one seat.
“I’ve always thought he had the stuffing knocked out of him by losing in 2001,” one Conservative campaigner told ConHome. “Every single voter you asked gave ‘William Hague’ as their reason for not voting Conservative. That was their excuse for giving Blair a second term.”
Hague stepped down and went off to write well-received biographies of Pitt and Wilberforce.
The gap between what he set out to achieve as leader, and what he did achieve, was vast. In 2018 he wrote a column for The Daily Telegraph defending the new rules for the election of the Conservative leader which he had introduced in 1998, with members now choosing between two finalists selected by the party’s MPs.
Hague explained that he had engaged in this exercise in self-justification
“not because I am protective of my earlier decisions and think I was always right. Oddly enough, it is partly because in a very important respect I turned out to be spectacularly wrong. I believed at the time that giving a vote to members would help to enlarge the membership and make it more representative of the country, and aimed for a million members of a revived grassroots organisation.”
The vanity of human wishes! Who now supposes the Conservative Party could have a million members?
By the end of 2005, when Cameron brought him back to serve as Shadow Foreign Secretary and deputy leader, Hague had become an Establishment man, an insider ready to work with other insiders.
He was less ambitious, or more realistic, or perhaps he had grown up, which could also mean he had abandoned his youthful ideals. From 2010-14 he served as Foreign Secretary, and was best known for campaigning with Angelina Jolie for the prevention of sexual violence in conflict.
In Sasha Swire’s Diary of an MP’s Wife we find Hague in June 2011 giving a “side-splittingly funny” speech at Osborne’s 40th birthday party. He said Osborne’s first law of political success was to “work out, ahead of anyone else, who will be the next leader, stick to them like glue and become indispensable”, and described how Osborne had insinuated himself into his own leadership team.
Swire also records Cameron saying in September 2010, a few months after becoming Prime Minister, that he would like to do the job for seven years (he managed six), then wanted time for “some outside interests”, but “would quite like to be Foreign Secretary one day”.
Hague had decided to step down as MP for Richmond in 2015, and in 2014 went to be Leader of the House, where he mounted an underhand and unsuccessful attempt to eject John Bercow from the Speaker’s chair.
The passionate Euroscepticism of Hague’s years as party leader had by now given way to temperate Remainer convictions. While the country moved one way, Hague moved the other: he, Cameron and Osborne took the Establishment view that staying in the EU was the only sensible thing to do.
On leaving the Commons, Hague became a member of the House of Lords, but spent little time there, and in due course took leave of absence. For his public pronouncements he uses his column in The Times, and it was here, after Boris Johnson had managed to hang on in a confidence vote, that on 7th June last year Hague told him it was time to go:
“While Johnson has survived the night, the damage done to his premiership is severe. Words have been said that cannot be retracted, reports published that cannot be erased, and votes have been cast that show a greater level of rejection than any Tory leader has ever endured and survived. Deep inside, he should recognise that, and turn his mind to getting out in a way that spares party and country such agonies and uncertainties.”
The Establishment had decided Johnson, the party’s most successful campaigner since Thatcher, simply would not do, and out he went, soon to be replaced by Sunak, praised by Hague as “a very calm, rational, friendly guy”.
Blair and Hague earlier this year put their names to a report entitled A New National Purpose. In his youth, Hague was derided by the great and the good. Now he is one of the great and the good.
No one laughs at him any more for being weird. His weakness, if that is the right word, is a certain detachment from normal life. Like his friends Cameron and Sunak, he does not connect with the wider public.
Cameron attempted, in the manner of a bridge player, to finesse the European problem by holding a referendum, but then found he could not win it. Sunak too is striving, with nerve and skill, to finesse various problems, but looks unlikely to carry voters with him.
And Hague, become a pillar of the Establishment, offers helpful advice from the sidelines. The paradox of his career is that although in 2001 he too lost a general election, fought on a Eurosceptic platform, that cause has since triumphed, despite being deserted by Hague.