CLOWNS TO THE RIGHT OF ME, JOKERS EVEN FURTHER RIGHT
A tell-all tale of life inside Will Croft's Conservatives
Will Croft is exasperated - and who can blame him after the latest shambolic show of Tory disunity?
The Conservative Party is no stranger to infighting. From the Maastricht rebels all the way up to the replacement of William "Baseball Cap" Hague with William "Cowboy Hat" Croft, and beyond, the boys (and girls) in blue love a gentlemanly discussion on the finer nuances of political debate. Occasionally, such discussions spill into open conflict, leaving the public wondering what is going on. The embarrassing euroshambles earlier this year and now the resignation and failed vote of no confidence called by John Baker are such episodes.
Well, dear reader, wonder no longer. For we at
The Sun have procured exclusive access to a revealing tell-all tale of life inside Will Croft's Conservatives, with major players from the disgraced Mr. Baker himself to Mrs. Cosette Beauvais-Becker and the man in the middle of the storm, Will Croft himself, butting heads on the record in the pages of this newspaper.
Of course, it started inauspiciously when the remarkably radical Mrs. Cosette Beauvais-Becker (Cosima Bordelaix-Bigger to friends) almost beat Cowboy Willy to the leadership. With 47% of his party thinking what Mrs. Becker was thinking, one could say that right out of the starting gate his rodeo horse had broken a leg (or two). Surprise concessions, such as the appointment of eurosceptic Monday Club 'intellectual' Sir Tristan St. John as Shadow Chancellor, shocked Westminster, prompting pundits to ask the perennial question: whither the Tories.
Clowns to the left of him, jokers to the right, into the valley of Conservative bickering rode Mr. Croft. Rather than graciously accept defeat, his opponent thought she'd ramp up the pressure and continue her campaign to put pressure on him, calling him out for his intention to put the euro to a referendum even if Labour had no intention of sacrificing our currency. Despite immediate reassurances from Sir Tristan St. John, who still claims that Mr. Croft could only have agreed with him all along ("read my book", he added), Will Croft went ahead with a motion that stated very much the contrary.
The result was an embarrassing kerfuffle we can only refer to as a
euroshambles. In our conversations with Mr. Baker, he was kind enough to shed light on exactly how Mr. Croft went from staunch supporter of the pound to europhile-by-referendum and back again, all the while claiming alongside his fellow party members that his position had never changed. As a staunch supporter of sterling, this newspaper was quite disappointed that it took him so long to end up supporting something as evidently sensible as a referendum lock.
It's no less baffling if you know what went on inside the Conservative Party. Mr. Baker, then an ally of his leader, had cooked up the 'once and for all' referendum policy with Mr. Croft and, allegedly, Dylan Macmillan, the crypto-europhile whose name was briefly and sadly floated for the Treasury portfolio by colleague Patricia Carmichael. Instead, it went to someone "unqualified for the job", dixit Mr. Baker, who added that he had "cautioned" Croft to ensure Sir Tristan was on board with the euro plan. Apparently, either Mr. Baker is being liberal with the truth or Mr. Croft forgot that the said Sir Tristan, in his maiden speech, had revealed himself a staunch sterling supporter. It should not come as a surprise that the whole euroshambles started with Sir Tristan reaffirming this position and presuming (perhaps naively) that his leader was on board. According to Baker, the resulting embarrassment caused Croft to subtly change his position to a referendum lock. While we applaud the position itself, it does quite create the impression of a leader who can be easily pressured into changing his position, all the while cultivating a bold and principled image.
This pattern seems to have cropped up in more places than one. Though Mr. Croft ran for the leadership on the promise of party reform and word around Westminster was that his now-fallen party chairman was close to announcing a package of reforms.
The Sun has seen the document, which was confirmed by Mr. Croft to have been authentic and which contains reforms to diversify the slate of candidates and to give a Conservative Party Convention policy setting powers. Sources around the leader have previously said that these proposals were underwhelming and informed by fear of the membership. Mr. Croft confirmed these sources, saying that "Mr. Baker took a number of creative licenses to what I asked him to, and it was not the direction I was looking for," despite refusing to make his criticisms of the proposals any more concrete prior to their announcement. Among these creative licenses was apparently a "fail safe" of 35% of MPs on Convention resolutions.
There is another story going around Westminster, which Mr. Baker recounted to us, which if true casts a different perspective on the whole affair. According to Baker, following the euroshambles, the leader allegedly decided to shelve his party reforms at the insistence of none other than Sir Tristan St. John. The reason, he tells us, was "concerns that the Monday club would see it as Croft trying to consolidate power." Mr. Croft, on the other hand, claims that no drafts were presented to Shadow Cabinet and that there would therefore have been no opportunity for Sir Tristan to voice such concerns. When confronted : "To be honest, these accusations are starting to become unhinged. The former Shadow Chancellor never registered these concerns to me, and if he did in meetings with others, I never heard about them. Moreover, these reforms strengthen party democracy, empowering individual members to exert more control over the direction we take. I cannot see how any Conservative who cares about our grassroots would oppose that." At the same time, Dame Evelyn Redgrave recalls that there
were such discussions: "I recall Sir Tristan raising his own thoughts and views about the reforms certainly and offering the view of the Monday Club faction, of which he's a member. The party reforms were being developed at the time and it was simply a case of Sir Tristan weighing in." However, despite this discrepancy between their stories, she added that "to say that Will Croft shelved party reforms at Sir Tristan's insistence isn't credible, for the reasons I stated just a moment ago."
Then the bomb that had been going around the Conservative Party ever since the 53-47 split became apparent burst. The pressure had been building beforehand, not just due to the euroshambles, but in renewed infighting between the newly-founded Campaign for Patriottic Unionism and the leadership's more wet supporters. Mr. Baker said that "the leadership cannot help but react like everything is a personal slight." But it is not just him that decries this heavy-handed style of leadership. A source on the right of the party, when asked about this, reminded us that a member of his Shadow Cabinet has gone unpunished for calling CBB and her supporters members of National Front, in shadow cabinet has referred to CBB as National Front's Parliamentary Caucus in an unchallenged. Yet rumours of withdrawing the whip from CBB has been surrounding his leadership ever since his leadership campaign started. In an interview with Newsnight's Jeremy Vine he said as much: "if I have the honor of being elected leader, I will lead a party that rejects this idea utterly and makes no space for MPs that attempt to advocate for it." Mr. Baker confirmed that removing the whip from CBB was mentioned a few times and revealed that Mr. Croft asked nobody to run against him so that they could "crush the Monday Club and cut ties with them." He continued: "That didn't really go his way, did it?". Quite so.
The shift to the right, for Mr. Baker, led him to tender his resignation over something so small that it seems a trifle to us: a signature by Croft for an EDM that was never published that way. Days before his resignation, Cosette Beauvais-Becker had presented the draft of EDM-2 to party colleagues. An anonymous source, assumed by many to be Mr. Baker himself, leaked troubling quotes from this dicussion apparently showing party bigwhigs flirting with the idea of deportation for speaking insufficient English. It appears that Mr. Baker may have overreacted. Transcripts and accounts of that meeting from multiple sources suggest that only a single MP ever raised the question. Clarice Ashbridge, who was said by Mr. Baker to have supported the EDM with minor reservations, in fact raised concerns over the short term of the English requirement. Even Mrs Beauvais-Becker, not a moderate by any definition of the term, confirms this: "As for the deporting immigrants part, that was asked by an MP to which I said that is something we can discuss, and that the EDM was about starting the discussion. Another backbench MP then expressed support for such a provision which I said was open to discussion." Mr. Baker may have overreacted to this, because he was not able to give us a better explanation for his resignation. Dame Evelyn Redgrave made a very salient point in this regard: "On this, I would make the point that the views of one backbencher do not define a party. If that were so, then Labour would be refusing to condemn FARC on the basis that Harry Laski refused to recently."
In the end, only Thatcherite and Shadow Chancellor Mr. Mountstuart signed the EDM, and it therefore seems that Mr. Baker resigned over nothing. Or did he? Mr. Croft revealed to us that he had let Baker know that he was "being let go". In fact, what happened afterwards is telling of the way interpersonal relationships within the Conservative Party have rapidly deteriorated to the point of sniping. The moment after Mr. Baker resigned, a leadership source leaked that he was sacked. Mr. Baker told us that the VONC was called "in retaliation" for this personal slight, publicly humiliating both himself and his former boss in the process. Whether it was high-minded principle and the "last straw", even if a very thin one, as Mr. Baker also suggested, or mere personal pettiness, neither account reflects very favourably on the Conservative Party.
In fact, one would question after all this whether, despite his overwhelming victory in the vote of no confidence, Mr. Croft can repair his leadership and his party from the damage wrought by all this chaos. He himself seems to think so: "I know I have a tendency to apply brute force from time to time, and yes, the sentiment has been expressed to me. It's the soldier in me; I see a problem and I want to address it immediately and to do so head on. If you look at how I'm trying to reform our party, however, my approach is quite the opposite. (...) I accept that I have a tendency to be a little too aggressive, and I'm working on it. I'm a passionate person who is eager to fight for what he believes, but I'm the first to admit that all of us could do with a little less fighting right about now." He must certainly be lauded for his self-reflection.
However, will he get the time and space to grow? Credible sources actually raised the point that the Monday Club must have come to Will Croft's rescue in the confidence vote, which means that he owes them: “Baker is a quisling to the cause. He has caused what would have been irreparable damages to Croft but worst part of it was that it was CBB who came in like a knight and saved the day. Everyone knows Croft owes her big time. With this move Baker turned CBB from pariah to a saviour and I bet she will cash that in when the time comes.”
The Sun says: If we look at the Conservative Party, we see clowns to the right of us, and jokers even further to the right. None of them look particularly good. If the party's attempts to become a credible alternative lead to this, perhaps it is a good thing Labour is under new leadership that
does seem to have temporarily bridged its differences, even if it holds an unacceptably muddled view of the euro. Did things have to get worse before they got better? We leave that up to the judgment of our readers.