A pride that dares, and heeds not praise: a British political timeline

[Stateless]

"WHERE IS THE SHITTING THING?"

Somewhere in the flat a Nokia 6680 was ringing - for the third time in an hour - and he still couldn't find where it was. It was not down the back of the sofa, it was not in the laundry basket, and it most definitely was not in any of his pockets. For a second, he stopped his madcap dash around the flat, and tried again to listen for the ringtone, while making a mental note to finally change it from that awful bastardisation of Tárrega's Gran Vals.



Was it -? He pulled the fireguard away and found his phone happily lighting up the unlit fireplace. Without pausing to look who was calling, he pressed the answer button.

"Yes?"

A plummy voice with a slight, but still identifiable, Australian twang answered. "I do hope that this isn't an inopportune moment, only I've just finalised the speaking order for Conference, and I thought you might like to know."

He should have known it would be Maude. "Sorry Francis, how are you?"

"Not too bad thanks, busy as ever, but you know how it is. Look, I don't have long so I'll get right down to it. Assuming you are still running for leader come conference season -"

"I have absolutely no ambitions in that dire-"

"Yes, very cute. Look, if you're in the running, we'd like you to speak on the Wednesday afternoon at Conference. I really must get off, I've got some event to get to where I'm speaking - Conservative-Zoroastrian League or something - and I need to change."

With that, Francis Maude rang off.

Now the phone was found he could call someone else. He scrolled through his contact list - nearly calling the member for North West Hampshire by accident - before finding the right number and pressing call.

"Hello David, how are you?"

"Good thanks George, look..."

 

[Ivir Baggins]

Looks interesting. 2005 PoD wrt leadership election?

 

[Stateless]

Looks interesting. 2005 PoD wrt leadership election?

Thanks! I was very politically engaged at the time of the leadership election, so I took a lot of interest in its running, which I thought I might be able to turn into a timeline. Then I actually began researching it and realised that I hadn't paid enough attention and that I didn't know anywhere near enough

This right here is the POD (and, for now, just that). Just to clarify it a little: in 2005 as part of the leadership election, Francis Maude, then chairman of the Conservative Party, decided to have a 'beauty contest' à la 1965, wherein all leadership candidates would have the opportunity to give a speech at the Conservative Party conference in October. In our timeline David Cameron gave his speech on Tuesday, whereas here he's giving it on the Wednesday.

Let's see what difference a day can make...

And, just to boost my credentials in having done my research, the Nokia 6680 is a phone that David Cameron owned in 2005:

 

[Thande]

I mistook the meaning of the OP and for a moment thought you were going to do Prime Minister Francis Maude

Anyway, this is less likely to keep me awake at night so looking forward to it! The 2005 Tory leadership contest seems to be a bit of an underdone topic in UK political AH.

 

[Tovarich]

And, just to boost my credentials in having done my research, the Nokia 6680 is a phone that David Cameron owned in 2005:

He should have kept it, it'd have reminded him which football team he 'supports'

 

[Sideways]

Ah, the same phone as in For Want of a Paragraph no?

Looks good so far. Thankyou for writing a timeline for us

 

[Politibrit]

He should have kept it, it'd have reminded him which football team he 'supports'

To be fair to him that could be either West Ham or Aston Villa, maybe that is why he got them confused in the first place

 

[Stateless]

"Following countless years of tradition, we start with round one, Ian and Tony, who's the one that you want?"

The Producer cued the VT, which began with footage of Ken Clarke speaking at the Conservative Party Conference.

"Ah yes, Ken Clarke doing the only bit of running he believes in," said Ian Hislop, drawing a laugh from the studio audience, "the Big Beast."

The VT changed to show Liam Fox walking along the Blackpool seafront.

"And there's the Big Fox," said Ian, getting a few titters.

"Doctor Who?" chipped in Tony Livesey, which one person in the audience found far funnier than it actually was.

The VT changed to show David Davis speaking with Michael Heseltine.

"Good Lord, Heseltine's not running is he?!" Hislop knew the format of the show well, and knew that would cause the audience to laugh.

"The big...teddy bear?" Despite this being Tony Livesey's third appearance, however, he seemed to be struggling to keep up.

The VT changed to show David Cameron, getting into a cab with his wife.

"And that's...er..." said Hislop. The audience again erupted with laughter.

Livesey, still trying, butted in. "That's David Cameron."

VT cut away to the studio just in time to catch Hislop shooting Livesey a look of exasperation before realising the studio cameras were back on him. "So, this is the lambs rushing to the slaughter in the Tory leadership challenge, presumably so they can be the ones to lose to Gordon at the next election."

"Indeed, and who had a conference speech to forget?" asked Jack Dee from the host's chair. The wording of the question itself provoked a couple of laughs from the audience.

Ian Hislop gave Tony Livesey a nudge to give him a chance to redeem himself. "David Cameron," started the editor of the Daily Sport, "Who I hadn't heard of until this week. And I bet he's wishing I still hadn't."

"That's right," said Dee, "Do we want to see some of the highlight's of Cameron's speech?"

"No," Paul Merton replied, his normal contrary self.

"Well tough," replied Dee.

The footage of the speech began: it had been edited together to get as many laughs as possible. In reality Cameron's speech hadn't been that bad at all, and he'd recovered better than many others might from the early slip-up. But the news reporting had already created the narrative, and now it needed to be milked for laughs. As a result, the VT was just 30 seconds of David Cameron saying "Er..." and "Um...". The studio audience found it hilarious.

 

[Sideways]

That definitely sounds like HIGNFY. It is a difficult truth that for as lot of people this was where the news came from. Until Mock The Week, anyway.

 

[Stateless]

​

Cameron knocked out of Tory race
​

David Cameron has been eliminated in the race for the leadership of the Conservative Party.

The Shadow Education Secretary entered the race seeking to modernise the party, but came fourth in the poll of Conservative MPs, gaining 30 of the 198 available votes.

The poll was topped by David Davis, who secured 89 votes, ahead of Liam Fox on 40 votes and Ken Clarke on 39.

The three remaining candidates go through to another vote of Tory MPs on Thursday. The two candidates topping that will contest a ballot of all party members.

Still work to be done

Mr Davis thanked those that had backed him for their support, but stated that he realised that there was still work to be done to convince party members that his was the right vision for the party and the country.

He said that he would be talking to Mr Cameron and his supporters "and would hope they would provide their backing for the next ballot."

Dr Fox said: "It's a very good result for us - we polled way above what anyone was predicting. We are going into the next round with lots of momentum."

Mr Clarke said that despite finishing third, he was confident that he could still make the final ballot, pointing to the slim margin that existed between himself and Dr Fox.

Commenting on the result, Mr Cameron said: "My team have worked incredibly hard. While the result is not what I might have hoped, I am glad that I have been able to contribute to the debate."

Change to Win

He said that he would give his full support to whoever should become the next leader of the party, but that he hoped that his message of modernisation would be taken on board.

Commenting on his failure in the ballot, he added: "I think people are looking for someone with more experience than I could point to. I don't think it should be relevant, but I clearly failed to demonstrate that I was ready to lead.

BBC Political Editor Nick Robinson said Mr Davis had "undoubtedly won this contest today" and that it seemed he was set to become the next leader of the party.

With his supporters believed to be split largely between supporting Mr Davis and Mr Clarke in the second round, Mr Cameron will sleep on the result before publicly backing any of the remaining candidates.

Before announcing his own candidacy, Mr Cameron had been thought of as a potential ally for Mr Clarke, but declared that divisions over Europe between the two were too great.

A matter of experience?

Mr Cameron was the least experienced in frontbench politics of all the candidates, having been promoted by Michael Howard as head of policy coordination, before being made shadow education secretary in the post-election reshuffle.

It is thought this lack of experience contributed to his defeat in the first ballot.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4's World Tonight, Tory MP Hugh Robertson MP, who voted for Mr Cameron in the poll, said that he would be switching his allegiances to Mr Clarke.

And Nick Herbert MP told the programme he had spoken to a number of Mr Cameron supporters who would now be switching to Mr Davis.

The final result of the party members' ballot is expected on 6 December.

Michael Howard, who has formally resigned as leader, will carry on in a caretaker role until then.​

 

[Sideways]

Oh! This is a Davey D TL. Weird. I was thinking of writing one of those. Goods stuff. Nice mock up of a BBC article.

 

[AgentRudda]

Nice BBC News mockup, and the language in the article is very believable.

I'll be following this one closely. I've always been a fan of 'near-history' British political TLs, and the idea of a David Davis leadership really fascinates me given his stance on the EU and civil liberties being very different to that of David Cameron.

 

[Stateless]

Nice BBC News mockup, and the language in the article is very believable.

I'll be following this one closely. I've always been a fan of 'near-history' British political TLs, and the idea of a David Davis leadership really fascinates me given his stance on the EU and civil liberties being very different to that of David Cameron.

Thanks, the format and some of the language is nearly entirely lifted from an article the BBC published when Clarke was knocked out at the time.

Obviously the POD, which I plan to go into in more detail in a later post, revolves around their speeches at the Conservative Party Conference - in our timeline Cameron gave a good one, Davis gave one that fell flat (though actually people mainly remember the speech he gave at a fringe event, which had lots of nice footage of Michael Heseltine and others falling asleep).

For a different Davis' POD, there's this speech he gave at a 2003 fringe event, just before IDS was forced out, which also bombed (which seems to be a habit of his). It's plausible that this speech was an attempt to feel out the Party for a leadership challenge, and that their failure to respond to his message caused him to unite behind Michael Howard, with the expectation that he'd get his run in 2005.

 

[diestormlie]

I am being Spoilt just now with Modern British Politics Alt-History.

This one and 'Friends stab you in the front'.

Oh my, oh my.
​

 

[Stateless]

-----

After the first round result, we knew that David would make it to the final round, and the second round was just the icing on the cake. But there was no possibility for us to count our chickens. I knew that Nick Kent was an experienced operator, and had been here before, unlike many who I was working with. Moreover, I was concerned that the overwhelming support David received in the MP ballots would result in our voters thinking it was a done deal and stay home, letting Ken in through the back door. So I had a lot of hard work left to do, making sure that members were aware why it was so important that they vote - after all, they were not just picking the next leader of the Conservative Party, but, we hoped, the next Prime Minister.

- Iain Dale: The Insider Who Became an Outsider

The day after the results of the second ballot were announced, Richard [Chalk] called to discuss an offer Ken had received from David Davis. As I understood it, the offer was for Ken to withdraw from the race and unite the party behind David, eliminating the necessity and expense of a members' vote. In return, David would guarantee a place in his Cabinet for Ken. The call was not entirely unexpected: only two years previous Liam Fox had been seeking assurances from Ken that he would not stand against Michael Howard in the contest to replace Iain Duncan Smith. The circumstances, however, were much changed, and Ken did not want to deprive the membership of their voice in the leadership contest. While it was clear that it would be an uphill battle to convince the rank and file that Ken had both the vitality - if elected he would have been the oldest person to become leader of the party since Winston Churchill - and the requisite ideology to lead the party.

- Andrew Tyrie: Loyalty, Religion, Reputation, and Manners: The Memoirs of Andrew Tyrie

David had been keen to run a positive campaign, focusing on his relative strengths, rather than Ken's weaknesses. He was, in all ways, clearly the best leader the Party had available. The campaign has now largely been forgotten, but for the dedicated student of political history it is portrayed as us that attacked Ken. It seems that Ken's whispering campaign, that David would be destroyed at the despatch box by Blair and Brown, that Ken was therefore the only effective opposition the Conservatives could put up, has been expunged from memory. It was a serious misstep on the part of Ken. Our response was simple: attack Ken on Europe, Europe, and Europe.


- Iain Dale: The Insider Who Became an Outsider

What happened next made me quite cross at the time. With the progress of years I have been able to become more prosaic about events, and have become good friends with a number of those with whom I was so annoyed. Nonetheless, it was difficult to feel that the strong vision that Ken was presenting for the Party was being drowned out by malicious misinformation. Europe has been a divisive issue for the Conservative Party since Harold Macmillan first attempted to join the European Economic Community in 1960, and Maastricht has only served to deepen those divides, and so we were well aware that Davis' team would seek to highlight this difference between the two leadership candidates in order to put them off Ken.

We were not, therefore, surprised when Ken was, to all intents and purposes, labelled as a fifth columnist, looking to deliver the country in its entirety to the rule of Brussels. These sort of statements were to be found in the open statements of Davis and his team. The defence to these statements were: that Ken would always seek to lead by consensus; that pragmatism should triumph over idealism; and that to reduce the Conservatives to a single issue party was to hand the next ten years of government to Labour. Mentions were also made of Ken's links to the tobacco industry, but in reality the majority of the membership were neutral to this as a factor against Ken. More pernicious was the fabrication that was put about through unofficial channels, that I will not repeat here, so fantastical were the claims. Needless to say, I know without doubt that Ken is not even capable of what the rumours stated. It seems that someone - and to this day I do not know, nor do I wish to know whom - in the opposite camp had taken tips on fighting a campaign from Lyndon Johnson.

- Andrew Tyrie: Loyalty, Religion, Reputation, and Manners: The Memoirs of Andrew Tyrie

The final act of the campaign was the Question Time debate. We knew from our polling that it would take an aberration for David not to win, but aberrations do happen, and live television is the sort of place where you really don't want them to be happening. And we were wary of going up against Ken, who has always been a strong performer when it came to the cut and thrust of debate. So we had been preparing well in advance, doing our homework watching debates from American elections, working out what David's strengths were in front of a mixed audience, and what would hurt Ken most.

- Iain Dale: The Insider Who Became an Outsider

Given the nastiness that had preceded it, the debate was, if anything, a relief. Davis had avoided making direct attacks himself during the previous weeks, so during a televised debate he would either have to do so in person and risk appearing the embodiment of 'the nasty party', or not and risk being shown up by someone more experienced and more eloquent than himself.

- Andrew Tyrie: Loyalty, Religion, Reputation, and Manners: The Memoirs of Andrew Tyrie​

 

[Sideways]

I quite like Tyrie. Interesting update - did you make those covers?