Standing Down

by Rosa Prince

  ***

  Tim Yeo: the full story

  Tim Yeo has always been ambitious, seeing politics as an opportunity to serve at the highest level and influence people’s lives.

  At several points in his career he took a calculated look at his options and tried to work out which path would take him closer to power; from backing the Conservatives in the first place – historically they were more likely to be in office and therefore, he reckoned, provided the best chance of making him a minister – to quitting the shadow Cabinet in 2005 to get first dibs on a select committee chairmanship.

  It all could have been very different. Had New Labour been in vogue in the early 1970s, when he first became politically active, he believes he could well have joined the other side.

  As it was, Ted Heath’s Conservatives proved a more attractive option to a young businessman who had been too busy having fun to get involved in politics at university, but who began to hear the siren call as Britain became bogged down by debt, unemployment and inflation.

  Within a short space of time he was fighting to enter Parliament, albeit in the safe Labour seat of Bedwellty, the fiefdom of Neil (later Lord) Kinnock, the future party leader, at the general election of October 1974.

  Although he lost, by then he had the bug – a disease he would never recover from:

  I got really interested in the 1970s when Britain was in a terrible mess, I mean a really serious mess. I was in business and I got to the point where I almost felt embarrassed when I went abroad sometimes to say where I came from because we were doing so badly.

  I thought, ‘Well, instead of just getting cross about this, it might be quite fun to become directly involved in it.’

  I then fought an election, because I could see in those days most of the seats went to people who had already fought an election. I fought in south Wales against Neil Kinnock. I thought, ‘This is interesting and I think it could be fun.’

  By now smitten with politics, Mr Yeo took one of his tactical decisions, in this case to wait until he could fight a safe seat.

  He says:

  I would like to have stood [in 1979]. I was applying for seats. It wasn’t that I gave up, I was consciously trying to get a seat, but I didn’t, which was a frustration for me.

  I also had some very good advice from Peter Walker [later Lord Walker of Worcester, the former Trade and Industry Secretary]. He said: ‘Don’t ever fight a marginal because you don’t know what the result’s going to be. You can’t make any kind of career plans. Wait until you get a safe seat.’

  Which does slightly perhaps make it more difficult, but eventually I got selected for South Suffolk, and that was fine. I must have been lucky on the day, I guess. Then you knew you had a decent run at it.

  Having spent so long attempting to get into Parliament, once he was finally elected Mr Yeo’s early years proved somewhat aimless, encapsulated, perhaps, by the events of his first day as an MP.

  I had a full-time job in London at the time. So Friday morning I got elected, took the weekend off, went to my office on Monday morning, caught up with a bit of work, and my secretary said after lunch, ‘Tim, aren’t you going to go to Parliament?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t really know what to do.’

  I managed to get my car into the car park. When you come out of the members’ car park there’s a sign saying members’ lobby, so I thought, ‘Well, I’ll just follow the sign and see.’ Literally, I was going around going: ‘Oh, look, that’s interesting.’

  Some people who’ve worked here, they’re steeped in it, they know their way round, but I didn’t know my way round at all.

  The first time I went into the [Commons chamber], I had to pause for a minute to remember which side the government sat on. [I thought]:‘It won’t look very smart if I sit on the wrong side on the first day…’

  Mr Yeo found his new home ‘perfectly friendly’, but the fact that he had come in as part of a large intake meant promotion was not immediate.

  For the first six months I still had my other job so I was quite focused on that, winding it up, which probably meant that I didn’t focus here quite as quickly as someone else who was not doing anything else at all.

  I was perhaps a bit of a slow starter for that reason. Of course I was ambitious. I wanted to move up the ladder, as certainly 95 per cent of the people who come in want to do. As it often does, it took longer than I expected.

  Sometimes it’s a matter of chance. I didn’t have any particular patrons that were looking out for me.

  Obviously, I wanted to join the government. The vast majority of people do want to do that. Anyhow, eventually it all happened.

  Mr Yeo finally climbed the first rung of the ladder in 1988, serving as PPS to Douglas (now Lord) Hurd, the then Home Secretary, and staying with him when he moved to the Foreign Office. ‘PPS jobs depend very much on who they’re for,’ he says. ‘Some of them are frankly pretty much a waste of time. But if you’re working for a very senior Cabinet minister who’s at the thick of all the interesting issues, that’s very interesting indeed.’

  In 1992 he became a minister in his own right at the Department of Health, where he was able to put into place perhaps his proudest achievement.

  After being approached by a colleague with a constituent who was struggling to bring home a baby girl from China, Mr Yeo overcame Foreign Office reservations in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre to add China to a list of approved countries, meaning adopted children could settle in Britain far more quickly.

  He also incurred the wrath of some of his colleagues by paving the way for adoption by gay couples.

  Having himself given up a baby girl for adoption as a student, it is perhaps little surprise that the issue was close to his heart. But Mr Yeo said it was the ‘intellectual’ challenge and the capacity to help others that inspired him to act.

  Since the first case, around 100 families have taken advantage of the rule change to bring home adopted children from China:

  What is lovely is that when this little girl was twenty-one, which would have been about two years ago, I had a letter from her. So I knew that I had made a difference to that family, which nobody else could have done, because of my personal intervention.

  Very few decisions you make as a minister have such a direct impact on people’s lives, so it makes me feel really good about that.

  A year later he was promoted to minister at the Department of Environment, where he was able to tap into his long-standing interest in ecology.

  In his role as Environment and Countryside Minister, Mr Yeo found an outlet for his energy; he felt ‘comfortable’ with life as a minister:

  Anyone who does not find it comfortable shouldn’t be doing it, because it’s quite a challenging and demanding role.

  For most people the opportunity to have more of an influence than you do as a backbencher is very exciting.

  One of the good things about being in government is you have access to anyone you want to talk to. So, long before climate change was a national issue, when very few people knew about it at all, you could go to talk to the scientists, the academics, the think tanks.

  I think within about three months of taking on my ministerial job I was one of the half-dozen best informed people in the country, because it was my responsibility and I was really interested in it.

  Not a natural Thatcherite, as an MP and then a junior minister Mr Yeo was impressed by the strength of character displayed by Margaret Thatcher and found life under John Major somewhat trickier:

  I was very proud of what Margaret Thatcher did to turn the country around from the hideous mess it was in, in 1979. Although I didn’t personally agree with every single decision, I thought that single-handedly she turned the direction of Britain from decline into strength.

  That’s a huge achievement and rightly now that’s recognised historically. It’s exciting to be even a small part of that.

  The Major years were rather different. It was always going to be difficult to
be her successor. He struggled with that, he struggled with an element in the party that disagreed with him very strongly about EU issues. He probably didn’t have the same strength of personality that she had, and that people took advantage of, but I still felt proud to be part of the team, and I think a lot of good things were done.

  At the end of 1993, Mr Yeo’s enthusiastic climb up the ministerial ladder came to a juddering halt when a newspaper reported his affair with a Conservative councillor, including the fact that he had fathered a child by her.

  The scandal was caught up in the farce that was John Major’s ‘Back to Basics’ campaign, and having once given a speech deploring the prevalence of broken marriages and single mothers in his constituency, Mr Yeo had little choice but to resign.

  At the time, both of his children were going through major health crises and the family stuck together.

  Did he consider standing down from Parliament?

  Fleetingly, I did. But I didn’t think that the setback was terminal, and indeed so it proved.

  Everyone said that this was no reflection on your ability as a politician so I thought, ‘Well, it’s worth staying here and fighting’ – that’s always the instinct anyway, and that’s what I did and I’m very glad that I did. It would have been a shame to have left in 1997.

  Any crisis of that sort at all is a personal test. I thought, ‘How I react to this will be how a lot of people measure me in the future.’

  You have to make a new life for yourself. You still have your constituency, and that work continues. So you’ve got that, and I’ve got a nice home in Suffolk, [as well as] great support from colleagues, who were very sympathetic.

  I had a birthday party at my flat not long afterwards and half the Cabinet came along to have a drink. It was an arm round the shoulders.

  I had unbelievably good support from my family as well. Without that I think it would have been much, much more difficult to cope with.

  Having decided to stick it out in Parliament, Mr Yeo found some redemption following the 1997 election. As his colleagues reeled following the landslide Labour victory, Mr Yeo found satisfaction in helping to rebuild the party, and in getting a fresh opportunity on the front bench:

  We lost more than half of our seats in that year, so to be part of the group that remains … there’s a certain excitement about that in a way.

  Quite soon I was in the shadow Cabinet so that seemed to me to justify the decision to stay on.

  Life in the shadow Cabinet was nowhere near as scintillating as being in government had been, however:

  It’s pretty dull. Looking back on the shadow Cabinet, it is inherently a frustrating process. You may win the argument in Parliament, you may win the argument in the media, you may win the argument on TV, but the other guy makes the decisions, and that’s frustrating.

  There were highs, however, during his time in the shadow Cabinet, where he served in a succession of roles including Health and Education, Agriculture and Culture.

  Two particular high points were responding to the foot-and-mouth crisis of 2001 and bringing Tony Blair to the brink of defeat over student tuition fees.

  I was a shadow minister for agriculture at the time of the foot-and-mouth epidemic in 2001 and even at the time it was recognised that we were on the front foot.

  That was quite a frantic period in my life. I gave up my weekends in Suffolk, I stayed in London. Obviously I would have loved to have been the minister rather than the shadow minister. For two months it took over my life.

  On tuition fees in January 2004, in my capacity as education spokesman, we had one of the most remarkable debates of that parliament, perhaps of the whole Blair years. We came closer to defeating Tony Blair on a major policy issue than at any other time in his entire ten years as Prime Minister. It was down to about six votes.

  To lead for the opposition in a vital debate in a completely packed House is in itself quite an event. As it happens I didn’t agree with the policy.

  As the Conservatives stumbled through the Blair years with a succession of leaders, Mr Yeo found himself generally backing the more moderate, but losing candidate.

  There were ‘heady moments’ where he was talked of as a candidate in 2001, before Michael Howard’s near unanimous election.

  When David Cameron became leader in 2005, Mr Yeo decided to retire to the back benches. Once again, the move was ‘partly a calculation’ based on his age and prospects of advancement:

  I thought, ‘Whoever is leader of the party, however much they may like me and support me and however much I may then work for them, the probability is they’re going to want a younger team around them. So ministerial jobs in 2010 are going to be focused on younger people.’

  I thought, ‘Where can I make a contribution? Well, I can make a bigger contribution as a select committee chairman.’ I didn’t know quite how much fun it would be but I thought it would be fun.

  I have no idea if David Cameron would have offered me a job. I was a supporter of his and still am, and I think he has done a good job.

  I doubt [he was going to say] to me, ‘Tim, why don’t you become Secretary of State for Health?’ … so I think I made the right decision.

  Mr Yeo served first on the Environmental Audit Committee and then, in 2010, was one of the first elected committee chairman of the Energy and Climate Change Committee, entering into perhaps his happiest time in Parliament. ‘That was a natural place for me to go,’ he said. ‘You can have real freedom, which as a minister you don’t have. I think I’ve been able to have a greater influence from a select committee chair than I would have had in the Cabinet.’

  Is it a regret that he never served in the Cabinet?

  Of course it is. [But] there’s no entitlement. I would have liked to have been in Cabinet, of course, and that was my hope when I came in, but I don’t waste too much time looking back on that.

  I didn’t seem to have a very strong ideology before I came in [to Parliament]. I knew I was a Conservative but I think if I’d known then where Labour were going to get to under Tony Blair, I think I would think, ‘Well, I’d not be uncomfortable with that.’ It would have been a much more marginal decision.

  Apart from the instincts towards free markets and all of that kind of stuff, I also observed that the Conservatives tended to be in power for longer periods.

  Then, slightly unluckily for me, there came a thirteen-year period in opposition, just at the time when I might have expected to do some quite senior jobs. So I made a miscalculation.

  Mr Yeo may also have made a miscalculation with regard to his safe seat. Last year he was deselected after losing a vote of local party members.

  He had hoped to have served at least another five years, perhaps more, but is philosophical about the way events turned out, saying he never gave way to anger or disappointment. ‘Life’s far too short to have those kinds of emotions,’ he says. ‘No, I’m looking forward to the next stage. I can change the future, I can’t change the past.’

  Although he denies he’ll miss the place, he has fond memories of his time in the Commons:

  It’s a great privilege to be a Member of Parliament. You are at worst a very upfront spectator at some very great events and at times you have an opportunity to take part and influence them.

  So why would you not want to do that? I’m genuinely surprised at the number of my colleagues who are giving up mid-career.

  Why would you want to leave? Look around, who wouldn’t want to work here? I come to work here even in the recess.

  I’ve had an exceptionally interesting time. I’ve had one or two high points, not perhaps as many as one would have liked, but I’ve had my share.

  And the last two jobs I’ve had, on these two select committees, have been really worthwhile.

  I don’t really have what I would call regrets or disappointments. There may have been missed opportunities and there have certainly been mistakes.

  Everyone makes mistakes; some have bigger consequences
that others. I’m certainly not looking back with any sense of complaint or regret or entitlement. Far from it, it’s been very positive, the whole thing.

  ***

  Tim Yeo: CV

  Born in London; attended Cambridge University; became a businessman and charity worker and was director of the Spastics Society (now Scope).

  1974: Unsuccessfully fights Bedwellty

  1983: Elected MP for South Suffolk

  1988: Becomes PPS to Home Secretary Douglas Hurd

  1989: Follows Douglas Hurd to Foreign Office

  1992: Becomes Health Minister

  1993: Becomes Minister for the Environment and Countryside

  1994: Resigns over revelations of an affair and child by his mistress

  1997: Becomes shadow Agriculture Minister

  2001: Becomes shadow Culture Minister

  2002: Becomes shadow Trade and Industry Secretary

  2003: Becomes shadow Health and Education Secretary

  2004: Becomes shadow Environment and Transport Secretary

  2005: Becomes chairman of the Environmental Audit Committee

  2010: Becomes chairman of the Energy and Climate Change Committee

  2013: Deselected by executive committee of Conservative Association in South Suffolk

  2014: Deselection confirmed by secret ballot of party members in South Suffolk

  Tim Yeo has one son and one daughter with wife Diane, as well as two daughters by other relationships, including one adopted as a baby.

  FRANK DOBSON

  Frank Dobson, seventy-five, was Labour MP for Holborn & St Pancras South (1979–83) and Holborn & St Pancras (2003–15).

  ‘I foolishly resigned – I was promised I could return to the government, then Tony Blair broke his word.’