Rights and Wrongs

Eric Pickles: The Tory heavyweight

A consummate political organiser,

he rose fast through the Tory ranks,

but can 'the beast of Bradford' be the life and soul of Cameron's party?

By Paul Vallely

Saturday, 24 January 2009

His working diary for the start of Pickles' tenure as Chairman of the Conservative Party – the role he acquired this week in David Cameron's Shadow Cabinet reshuffle – tells us two things.

Eric Pickles intends to work very hard to secure his party's victory at the next general election whenever it is called over the next two years.

And he intends, in doing so, to deploy the strategic sense he has developed in overseeing the successful Tory tactics at local council and parliamentary by-elections in recent years.

Those two qualities, of course, were not the only reason he was appointed to the flagship electioneering role.

For all their success to date, the Conservatives still have not really broken through in the North of England.

 If anything can counter the impression that the modern Tory party is dominated by an effete crowd of silver-spooned Notting Hill public schoolboys, it is the straight-talking bluff jocularity of this son of the North.

The appointment cuts both ways, of course, for if there was ever a larger-than-life antidote to David Cameron's claim that the Conservatives are now the progressive party it is personified in Eric Pickles, who does not have a progressive bone in his substantial blunt-speaking body.

Which is presumably why, in a pre-reshuffle poll of the grass-roots Tory readership of the ConservativeHome website, 75 per cent said that the jovial man of the people was their favoured candidate for the job he has now been given.

"He's William Hague without the intellect," said one of those readers.

"I don't mean that to sound badly.

 Pickles is no fool but he's a great reader of the instincts of ordinary people."

It is not hard to see why.

Pickles wasn't born into the Tory party.

 He chose it.

 His parents were working-class Labour voters in Keighley in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and his grandfather was one of the founders of the Independent Labour Party which was set up in Bradford in 1893.

But Pickles switched his political allegiance at the age of 16 and joined the Conservative Party in outraged response to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

By the time he left Greenhead Grammar School for Leeds Polytechnic, he was a fully fledged Young Conservative, swiftly becoming chairman of the local association.

By his late twenties, he was elected to Bradford Council.

A year later he became leader of its Conservative group.

It was here that he first showed his political ruthlessness.

Foreseeing that local elections might produce a hung council, he rifled through the constitution to discover that the Lord Mayor could cast a substantive vote plus a casting vote on every matter before the council.

Using that he seized power from the Labour Party which had held sway in Bradford for as long as anyone could remember.

The Labour and Liberal factions were outraged.

But they were even more angered when, at the end of the Lord Mayor's term, Pickles overturned tradition by refusing another party its turn to nominate a new mayor and implanting another Tory.

A journalist who wrote a book about the affair blurbed it as owing "more to a soap opera than a council chamber; intrigue and double-dealing, ambition and power, sex and money, conspiracy and corruption, betrayal and blackmail".

But there was more to it than political manoeuvring. Pickles, having gained control of the Conservatives' only inner-city council, set about an unprecedented round of cuts, sell-offs, price rises and job losses.

At the first meeting, £5.8m was cut from the budget, chiefly in education. Council rents went up.

So did charges for leisure centres, car parks, school meals, home helps, meals on wheels, OAP luncheon clubs and cemeteries.

Teachers, caretakers, maintenance workers, crèche and nursery staff, social workers and council officers all lost their jobs.

Old people's homes were sold off and Benefit Advice Centres closed.

Pickles announced that his five-year plan was to slash £50m from the budget, cut the council workforce by a third, privatise services and restructure the authority.

The council would simply became a "holding" company which would meet two or three times a year in order to sign contracts with private companies that would provide whatever services remained.

It was Thatcherism at its most red-blooded. Eric Pickles – now dubbed "The Beast of Bradford" – became a villain and a hero in equal proportion.

Today, being a Cameroony kind of Conservative – who insists that he's now moved more to the "moderate centre-right" – he looks back at his Bradford days with a revisionist eye his leader would surely approve.

"If you look at the initiatives we undertook, it now looks remarkably New Labour – best value, quality assurance, mixture of private and public," he chuckled to one interviewer recently.

"It was cutting-edge stuff then."

It's not how others still in the area remember things. "He was arrogant and ruthless, pugnacious, utterly charmless and incredibly reactionary," one Bradford Council insider said yesterday.

"And for all his constant reference to being co-chair of Joint Committee Against Racism between 1982 and 1987, he is not remembered with affection by the Asian community."

It did not matter. He had won the affection of Margaret Thatcher, who shoehorned her golden boy of the north into one of the Conservative party's safest seats in as MP for Brentwood and Ongar.

The locals on the selection committee were wary of him until one asked him his faults and he replied that he was fat and loved westerns. "They laughed until the tiles were coming off the ceiling," he recalled.

His rise through the Tory ranks has been smooth and barely perceptible.

He voted against ID cards, gay rights, a ban on hunting and stronger anti-terrorism laws and in favour of the Iraq war, a replacement for Trident and action to curb climate change.

There was a small ripple in his progress when 119 members of a controversial Christian sect all joined his local Tory party on one day and the sleaze-busting independent Martin Bell stood against him in the 2001 general election, slashing his majority to below 3,000.

But by the next election it was back to 50 per cent of the vote and Pickles moved through the gears as shadow spokesman on social security, then transport, then local government.

Parliament mellowed him, says one Labour MP who knew him in his Bradford days.

"He's changed quite markedly since he went south. He's less hard right and doesn't talk anywhere near as tough. He's impatient to get things done but he's pragmatic and he does his homework.

He has retained a passion for local government which is genuine and to be respected," the Labour man said yesterday."He looks a nice old duffer – he's built for comfort, not for speed," said a Tory colleague.

"But he's no fool. He's tenacious and a rather tough cookie. He's an earthy counterweight to the Notting Hill set.

His bulk gives him bottom and gravitas; bald people don't do well in politics but big people do."

His biggest asset is that he sees politics as voters do rather than as a politician.

His website gives prominence to his expense claims, showing they are lower than those of many MPs.

And it reveals he has just two side interests – as director of a property firm and adviser to the Royal British Legion Industries – which makes him practically a full-time politician by comparison with many of his shadow cabinet colleagues.

He has a good eye for Middle England. He has spoken about how the Tories will "purge town hall 'fat cats'".

 And he lambastes government moves to bully local councils into axing weekly rubbish collections.

But he knows how to marry that to political tactics.

He recently told the Conservative Councillors' Association that now was the time for the party's councillors to start saying "no" to Whitehall – because the consequences of their lack of co-operation will bring political benefits without any practical repercussions until after the next election when he hopes he will be in power.

It was the combination of these populist instincts with his shrewd tactical eye which, many commentators suggest, won the Tories the Crewe and Nantwich by-election in May 2008 in which his earthy Yorkshire style undermined the efforts of Labour to suggest that the Tories were still the party of Old Etonian toffs.

"I don't feel like I'm a ballast," Pickles said when asked about David Cameron's reshuffle.

"When he's putting a shadow cabinet together, he doesn't say, 'Two posh people equals one fat Yorkshireman.' I don't think I'd make it round the table if I was there to serve the drinks or make the odd witty quip. I've been at the top of it for a very long time.

Folk know me.

I've been around."

 His Labour counterparts know that in Eric Pickles they will have an effective opponent.

A life in brief

Born: 20 April 1952 in Keighley, West Riding of Yorkshire, to working-class Labour-voting parents.

Education: Greenhead Grammar School, north Keighley. Then Leeds Polytechnic.

Career: Leader of Bradford Council, 1988-90. Elected MP for Brentwood and Ongar, 1992.

Frontbench spokesman on social security, 1998. shadow minister for transport and minister for London, 2001. Shadow minister for local government and the regions, 2002.

Shadow Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, 2007. Chairman of the Conservative Party, 2009.

He says: "It's not that two posh people equal one fat Yorkshireman.

I don't think I'd make it round the table if I was there to serve the drinks or make the odd quip."

They say: "A consummate party organiser, with huge election experience, he ran rings round Labour when he master-minded last year's Tory victory in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election." Michael Brown, former Tory MP