William Hague: in his own right
Jo-Anne Nadler Politico's, 304pp, £17.99
ISBN 190230165X
It is difficult to criticise someone you like. Few who have met William Hague will have found him disagreeable, and those who wonder about him, wonder more why he isn't thrusting his way in the ranks of new Labour. I have it on good authority that, for anyone who can negotiate that particular defection, there's the microwave plus the toaster to be had.
The problem is that William is a good person, and his authorised biography, William Hague: in his own right, has difficulty hiding that truth, despite its sycophantic efforts to portray him as a statesman. But with all the goodwill of the reader and the writer matched, this book nevertheless succeeds in exposing the flaws in Hague's character.
A year after he delivered the "I want to be free" speech to the Conservative Party conference in 1977, the Guardian asked whether Hague was "the youngest ever has-been in politics". From then on, his inability to lose a reputation for prematureness and precocity - a view informed by academic opinion, rather than personal experience - has followed him everywhere.
Observing Hague, it is clear to me that only a certain part of the man has been allowed to emerge as leader. Listening to the 1977 conference speech, no matter how much it makes you cringe, you are left in no doubt that, before the party machinery engulfed him, Hague was a person of vision. On that day, the 16-year-old challenged his party to enter into war with the "economic and social order", a war that even many old Labour fanatics would admit that they were glad to have lost. The young Hague spoke about the need to create a "capital-owning, home-owning democracy for the young people", a statement that could define new Labour now as easily as it did the Tory party then. More interestingly, he warned against chasing the middle ground in a "futile attempt to beat the left at its own game".
Much has changed since then. Today, Hague is accused of being a career politician, calculating what to do and say in order to win for the sake of winning. And yet, he began his leadership campaign by remaining true to his best instincts, talking about modernising the party, having "no left and no right", and even letting slip his approval of gay marriage. But this flicker of light was extinguished as quickly as it was lit. The man who had hitherto kept a tight lid, for a politician, on his personal politics had discovered the power of the Daily Telegraph. Reading this biography, it seems this was the moment when he allowed his instincts to become sidelined - a short cut to fanatical popularism, yes, but not the mark of a leader.
The deterioration began when the man who had once voted for the equalisation of the age of consent for gay sex chose, under pressure from the likes of the Daily Mail, to abstain in future votes. The man who attended the Notting Hill Carnival after becoming leader finds himself, three years later, railroaded into fighting an election campaign on a platform of near-racist nationalism. The man who surrounds himself with gay advisers chooses to underpin the Conservatives' social and moral agenda for the new century by promoting Section 28.
But for proof of Hague's real instincts in these matters, you need look no further than the people he has around him, and his family. These people are so close that they might as well be wired together on a never-ending conference call, and they are all so nice. Of his five core advisers, not one would look out of place in the Cabinet Office with Tony Blair. Even his wife, a natural Conservative, unlike the old guard who speak for the party, is charming, wild and leaves you with a feeling that you've just met royalty. If I have one regret about Hague failing to become prime minster, it is that Ffion won't be the first lady.
Hague's failure to assert his authority is perhaps best personified in Amanda Platell, his press secretary. A 43-year-old career woman with an eye for what is decent and honest, Platell represents the kind of voter that the Tories must attract if they are ever to win again. But Platell is sidelined professionally at Central Office. Powerless to influence the policy and style of the entire party, she is treated by the skinhead Conservatives who patrol the soundbite as a kind of make-up lady, there to do no more than offer advice on Hague's hairstyle and on his image as a man of action. The real politics is best left to the men.
Even the semi-religious, fundamentalist politicisation of the new Hague agenda, brought back from his frequent visits to a much-loved America, sits awkwardly with him as a person, and with his family background. His father is said to have "never liked organised religion" and, in this biography, his mother is reported to have said that "God is in the garden" - Kiplinesque virtues, from a good, straight-talking family, who are also described by Jo-Anne Nadler as being "natural Conservatives".
So, reading this book, you can't help wondering whether Hague would have become prime minister if he hadn't been so "prompt"; if he had, perhaps, followed most people's advice and run alongside Michael Howard, thus practically guaranteeing himself the leadership in any subsequent contest. With more experience, he might have proved to have had both the courage of his convictions and the strategic wisdom to deliver them.
Instead, Hague's price for selling his soul is to languish in the purgatory of the margins, surrounded by extremists and cruel people. Would that he had found the courage to surround himself in the shadow cabinet with the people he is surrounded by in life.
Ivan Massow is new Labour's most recent recruit from the Tories
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