Andrew Gimson talks to Alistair Cooke, the godfather of the Cameroons, about Dave’s temperament and Hilton’s penchant for ponchos
As David Cameron solicits approval for deep spending cuts, he has assured the public: ‘We’re not doing this because we want to, we’re not driven by some theory or ideology.’ Cameron remains very anxious not to be taken for a closet Thatcherite, who beneath the cloak of necessity is pursuing ideological politics. If the Prime Minister wished to make a properly Tory case for cutting himself free from an outdated programme, he could do worse than turn to Alistair Cooke, who played a part in the political education of most of the Tory authors of the coalition government. When I visited Cooke at the end of last week, I found him in his library, which apart from a profusion of books about the politics of the last two centuries, is also adorned by about 50 likenesses of Disraeli, and between 20 and 30 of Lord Salisbury. Cooke at once quoted Lord Salisbury, perhaps the greatest of Tory prime ministers, explaining what Cameron has done: ‘Principles should last as long as the circumstances that gave rise to them.’
Although by training an academic historian, Cooke spent the greater part of his career in the Conservative Research Department, where as deputy director he was one of the people responsible for hiring Cameron straight from Oxford. The essential task of the research department is not in the slightest bit intellectual. It is to draft, often under pressure of time and from unpromising raw materials, a stream of clear and accurate pamphlets, briefing papers and campaign guides, which make as powerfully as possible, without tipping into mendacity, the case for whatever policies the Conservative party happens at that point to be pursuing. Cooke, who on reaching his 65th birthday has just retired after editing millions of words of this stuff, has probably done more than anyone now alive to save the Tory party from sounding illiterate.
Few journalists bothered to report that by the barbarous standards of modern times, the programme agreed by the Tories and Liberal Democrats in the fortnight after the general election was a model of clarity. The fact that such a lucid document had been produced at such speed was taken for granted. Of the four Tory negotiators, three — Oliver Letwin, Ed Llewellyn and George Osborne — had, like Cameron himself, received their early training in flexible, pragmatic draftsmanship in the Conservative Research Department.
Cooke makes no claim to have improved Cameron’s written work: ‘He wrote the stuff very well from the beginning.’ Soon after joining the CRD, Cameron was in demand to brief ministers such as Kenneth Baker and Norman Lamont before they went on television, ‘applying good Tory common sense’ to their ‘twittering’. Cameron’s temperament also impressed Cooke, especially by comparison with other politicians. ‘The day’s difficulties die with the day. That’s very, very rare. They all fuss and fret endlessly, and he doesn’t.’
When Cameron arrived in September 1988, the director of the research department was Robin Harris, of whom Cooke says: ‘Robin insisted on the highest standards in that place. He made it a Thatcherite institution, but I don’t think at that time the CRD could thrive in any other way.’
But in Cooke’s opinion, unbounded faith in Thatcher soon became disastrous. ‘It’s been the great curse of the Tory party, the assumption that Margaret Thatcher had the answers to all the problems.’ This sort of thinking was ‘quite new in the Conservative party, and thoroughly undesirable’. It put the Tories out of power for 13 years: by historical standards an exceptionally long period. After the crushing defeats of 1906 and 1945, the party recovered much more quickly than it did after 1997.
Cooke does not seek to disparage Thatcher. ‘She was a product of her time. She was right for that time. To blame Mrs Thatcher personally is absurd, I think. But to have got the Conservative party so identified with selfish individualism was a disaster.’
Cooke admits that the idea of the Big Society has not inspired people. ‘Its time may yet come. But if it doesn’t, Cameron will find something else.’
It would be absurd to attribute very much of Cameron’s political development to Cooke, but the research department certainly introduced him to a style of politics, and a group of close friends, which became indispensable to him. Those friends included Steve Hilton, who became Cameron’s director of strategy. Cooke very much liked Hilton, but disapproved of his custom of coming to work in a poncho: ‘Now Mr Hilton, why are you wearing that blanket? You must stop it.’
But Cooke also recalled going through a draft Hilton had written, pointing out to him how it could be improved. ‘He said that is one of the most helpful things anyone has ever done.’ Conservatives, Cooke says, are ‘always in danger of being pale and passionless’, but with Hilton there were always ‘masses and masses of ideas’.
Cooke identifies Llewellyn as a key figure in the Cameron team: ‘Very important in there is Ed Llewellyn, who is a brilliant staff officer.’
In Alastair Campbell’s diaries we find Tony Blair surrounded by gifted men who were constantly on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and often indulged in hysterical outbursts of temper: Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson, Campbell himself. The self-regarding suggestion of the diarist is that this driven, brutal style is the only way to be serious about winning elections. Blair himself did not behave like that, but did for most of the time reject any idea that a modern leader might learn from the past.
The research department has long been characterised by a happy mixture of frivolity and seriousness. Cooke summed up his own approach: ‘People shouldn’t take themselves too seriously. They should take their work seriously.’
Continuities that stretched back long before Thatcher could not be forgotten while Cooke was closely involved. For coalition government to work, he says, ‘there always needs to be one clear overriding aim and objective’. After 1886, this was provided by the determination to resist an elected law-making parliament in Dublin. Today it is provided by the need to restore the public finances.
When the recent list of Tory life peers was published, it contained, needless to say, some of Cooke’s pupils, but some of us could not repress a sense of mild surprise that the name of their master was nowhere to be found.
This is emphatically not Cooke’s opinion: he rejoices in his title as the Conservative party’s official historian, an honour also conferred on him by the Carlton Club. A slim volume on the Primrose League is about to appear, after which he will devote himself to his study of Neville Chamberlain’s ally Sir Joseph Ball, a fixer who makes Lord Mandelson look pure as the driven snow.
Andrew Gimson is the Daily Telegraph’s parliamentary sketchwriter.