Within a few hours of Michael Howard being confirmed as Tory leader, an email was winging its way between Labour MPs and staff at the party’s Old Queen Street HQ. Headed ‘Forty things you did not know or had forgotten about Michael Howard’, it amounted to a trawl through his record, including his spell as home secretary under John Major.
The 40 things were swiftly posted on the web by Labour MP Tom Watson. They ranged from the unforgettable – ‘something of the night’ and ducking the same question fourteen times on Newsnight - to the rather obscure. Apparently Mr Howard called in 1998 for an Anglo-American strike on Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from office, which sounds like cause for praise, not censure, from New Labour.
But the thrust was that Labour should be reminding the public of Mr Howard’s record as a hardline rightwinger. The call was adopted by leading party figures. Take chairman Ian McCartney, in a November press release: ‘Michael Howard will not be able to escape his extremist past. His leadership will serve as a constant reminder to the British people of his responsibility for the poll tax, interest rates at fifteen percent and three million unemployed.’ Or John Prescott, speaking on Radio 4 a few days after Mr Howard emerged as Tory leader: ‘His record is a bad one, his personality is not so great.’
Put that way, it sounds as though a Howard leadership is a gift for Tony Blair and New Labour. Well, yes. But not in the way those comments suggest. Downing Street welcomes Michael Howard not because he is hardline and unpopular, but because he is capable and clever. He can make the Tories a credible threat again. And that threat is essential if Number 10 is to drive through its public service reforms in the teeth of opposition from the unions and the Labour grassroots.
Tony Blair had good cause to be thankful to the Tory leadership in the key vote on foundation hospitals in November, when the government’s Commons majority was cut to just 17. In a meeting with backbenchers 48 hours before the vote, the Prime Minister warned them that a successful rebellion would hand the best possible welcome present to Mr Howard. The threat worked, if only just. Had Iain Duncan Smith still been around, the result might have been different. Why would wavering MPs have bothered to stay loyal if they knew the Opposition was too weak to cash in on Labour disunity?
A crisis moment for New Labour came in September with the Brent East by-election defeat. It propelled the Lib Dems into a three-way tie with the two main parties, on 31 points apiece, according to one poll taken just afterwards. When Charles Kennedy’s party was doing so well opposing Labour from the left over Iraq and tuition fees, Mr Blair’s position was at its weakest since entering Downing Street. But the Tory leadership change a month later stabilised the position of the official Opposition and confirmed it back in second place. It is a honeymoon of sorts, even without any sign of a ‘Howard bounce’ to close the gap with Labour.
In an appearance on Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine show, Mr Blair gave his first response to the Howard leadership: ‘It will make the choice far more real for people and also far more stark, and I think it is a good thing if the country has a very, very clear policy divide.’ Labour strategists planning the next general election campaign face a choice of looking backwards to Mr Howard’s past - the 40 things you may have forgotten - or forward to the policies likely to feature in the next Tory manifesto. Mr Blair’s words suggest that the choice will be to look forward, and for good reason.
In a shrewd move, Mr Howard acknowledged on taking over the leadership that he had been unpopular in the past. He promised to learn from his mistakes and change. To a public less and less interested in the day-to-day business of politics, the six years since the Tories left government seems like a long time, and the distinctions between individuals’ records become blurred.
Logically, Mr Howard, as a leading member of John Major’s government, should be an easier target for Labour than Iain Duncan Smith, who as a Maastricht rebel was effectively in opposition to it. Yet Mr Duncan Smith was never able to take advantage of his clean slate to escape the Tories’ history and give his party a fresh start in the polls. In the same way, labelling Mr Howard as ‘Mr Poll Tax’ - another of the 40 things you may have forgotten, and based on his term as the minister who introduced the hated tax under Margaret Thatcher - might make little difference to a public who blame all Tories for the poll tax in equal measure.
So beyond the jibes about Mr Howard’s past, party strategists see the answer to countering Mr Howard contained in his very first policy pronouncement as leader - namely, that he was sticking with the raft of policies dreamed up under IDS. Maybe Mr Howard was just being polite to the deposed leader. But two of the most controversial proposals - the ‘patient’s passport’, in which taxpayers subsidise private healthcare, and the plan to send asylum seekers ‘far, far away’ while their cases are considered - are associated with Liam Fox and Oliver Letwin, both promoted under the new regime, so they are unlikely to be ditched.
Thus Labour will be able to argue that Mr Howard is still a hardliner, leading his party from its right not its centre, and will be able to base the claim on current policies rather than dusty records of his time in office.
There is little point in Labour strategists waiting for gaffes. Mr Howard is more skilful than IDS and does not share Mr Letwin’s alarming trait for frankness. The Paxman fourteen-questions episode showed him, like many in the current government, as an old school politician who will bluster rather than admit a mistake - unattractive but the safest form of crisis management for politicians in the modern age.
Gone are the days of William Hague and IDS, when the public could be encouraged to laugh at the Tory leader. Today Labour is trying to get the world scared by the Tory leader. Something of the night again.
It means a return to more serious politics, and makes the battle for Labour’s soul more important than ever. Even MPs normally loyal to Tony Blair argue that a stronger Tory party means Number 10 must stop alienating its natural supporters. Helen Jackson, a rebel on Iraq, said: ‘Labour needs to sharpen up the differences that show why a Labour government is distinctly different from eighteen years of Tory rule.’ Paul Farrelly, a rebel on tuition fees, said: ‘A feeling of disconnection shared right across the party must be healed, otherwise we will just be helping Howard on his way.’
Downing Street will nod towards such arguments while using the Howard honeymoon in two ways - to push controversial reforms past a reluctant party, and to persuade voters that the Tories are once more a force worth voting against.