Ninety days is a long time in politics. Too long, it turns out, for the 49 Labour MPs who defeated the government on its plans for 90-day detention. And too long, perhaps, for Charles Clarke, the minister responsible for guiding the ill-fated proposal through parliament. The gossip in Westminster is that Downing Street forced the home secretary to go-for-broke on the 90-day figure, when he had been willing to compromise.
Clarke, however, is quick to deny any rumours of a split with No 10. He swats aside the suggestion that either himself or the government had been unwilling to compromise with backbenchers on the legislation: ‘We had compromises about the judicial over-review. Compromises about the procedure. Compromises about the sunset clause on the back of the 90 days.’
And he remains adamant that the 90-day amendment was a measure he thought Labour backbenchers would be willing to support: ‘The message I got was that there was very strong movement of opinion towards the 90 days that was taking place on the Labour side of the House. I had three meetings that [Monday] afternoon with Labour MPs, including the PLP meeting itself, where there was a very strong feeling for 90.’
However, the Tories’ refusal to move beyond 28 days, Clarke suggests, played a large part in the government’s failure to reach a compromise figure. ‘I wasn’t in a position to make a deal with the opposition parties beyond 28 days,’ he says. ‘I would have been prepared to consider it but they weren’t prepared to in anyway whatsoever.’ This, he claims, ‘was contrary to what was then said by the Tories, which was specifically that they were not prepared to move beyond the 28 under any circumstances, and I had always been clear I thought 28 was too short.’
The home secretary also admits that he had not counted on Tory opposition to the 90-day amendment being as united as it subsequently proved to be: ‘I thought candidly there might be some collapse in the Tories position, as a number of Conservative MPs had said to me that they didn’t think their position was rational and they thought it was wrong.’
Despite the personal blow of the 90-day defeat, however, Clarke appears unconcerned as to the threat posed by the Labour rebels on the remainder of the bill. ‘The legislative defeat on the 90 days was not a defeat of the counter-terrorism legislation,’ he says.
The home secretary is also keen to play down the implications of the defeat for the government’s proposed reforms on education and incapacity benefit. ‘I don’t think you should simply see it as there being a range of issues on which MPs decide they are going to punch the government on the nose,’ he insists. ‘You have to look at the substance [of each proposal].’ But he concedes that, with a much-reduced majority and a persistent rump of rebellious MPs, further legislative defeats for the government are possible: ‘You are down to relatively small number of people so there is always a risk of losing a particular measure. But a particular loss shouldn’t be confused with a lack of confidence in the government.’
Clarke is scathing, however, of those Labour MPs, or ‘no-hopers’ as he calls them, who repeatedly vote against the government. ‘What you have got is a relatively small group of MPs who are against absolutely everything,’ he says. ‘But that is not enough to turn over the government. The question, on each given issue, is how big is the penumbra around the no-hopers.’
The home secretary is also less than complimentary about the behaviour of the Tory leadership candidates on the 90-day amendment: ‘The shocking thing was the leadership candidates weren’t prepared to play a leadership role in this at all, and that was not what I expected, quite frankly.’
As to Clarke’s views on his predecessor at the Home Office, the outgoing Tory leader, Michael Howard, he is even less forgiving: ‘He was a poor home secretary. He is the most opportunist leader of the opposition in my political lifetime. His approach to politics in the 2005 general election campaign was an absolutely shoddy disgrace. And I regard him as someone of no principle and no substance.’
Indeed, the home secretary has become something of a connoisseur of the un-artful putdown. After the 7/7 bombings, and in the run-up to the vote on the 90 days, in an angry outburst to the Daily Telegraph (and in a familiar echo of his more recent predecessor, David Blunkett) he described the views of ‘liberal London’ as ‘pathetic’. Clarke, however, is unrepentant. ‘There is a real issue that the liberal intelligensia has to face up to,’ he says. ‘Which is: how do we deal with the national security of the country. And to simply deal with it by saying we have got to protect certain liberal values is not a sufficient answer.’
‘The [liberals] don’t really believe that there is a terrorist threat with which we have to deal,’ he continues. ‘And that was their position before 7/7, and after 7/7. They don’t face up to the question. And I think the obligation of a commentator, a politician or an intellectual in this is to face up to the actuality of the issue.’
Given the government’s defeat on its security legislation by its own backbenchers, however, can the home secretary afford to be complacent about the ability of his own party to face up to the terrorist threat? ‘The overall view has been very strong,’ Clarke counters. ‘You have got legitimate questions about the definition of terrorism, and how you use glorification and that is a legitimate discussion to have. But in general I think the Labour party is pretty solid on it.’
Unsurprisingly, he is less sure of the ability of the opposition parties to confront the security needs of the country. ‘The Lib Dems are simply not part of the debate,’ he says. ‘They don’t think our security is an important issue and that is reflected not only on national security but also more widely on anti-social behaviour and drugs. They simply say freedom is the only thing that matters. Everybody is free to do whatever they want, irrespective of the damage to society as a whole.’
The Conservatives, he feels, represent a ‘more interesting case’ but are fundamentally divided on the security issue: ‘They have got quite a deep division in the Tories. There is a group of Tories, mainly the old right, who are really liberals from this point of view, and simply say there should be nothing. And then you have got the traditional Tories who take security very seriously.’
While Clarke can no longer count on the backing of the majority of MPs for his security measures, he has no doubt that the views of the country are behind him on the issue. In particular, he refutes the idea that Britain’s ethnic communities do not recognise the necessity of taking sensible steps to defend, as he sees it, the ‘country and its values’.
‘They are the strongest possible supporters of the kind of values in the society that we have,’ he says. ‘People I meet say: “make sure you defend the values of this society: respect for the faiths, respect for women, respect for a free media, and respect for [democracy]”.’
And, unlike his liberal critics, the home secretary has no doubt as to what is at stake in his effort to get 90 days and other security measures on to the statute books: ‘al-Qaida and their related organisations are about destroying democracy. Some ride a particular issue on the back of it, such as Iraq, but that is not actually what it is about. It is about a fundamental attack on the values of our society.’