Whatever happened to Cuddly Ken? Kenneth Clarke, the epically long-serving cabinet minister under three PMs, has always been the non-Conservatives’ favourite Conservative. Not least because he would dismissively refer to “right-wing head-bangers” in his own party (his customary term for those hostile to the institutions of the European Union).
Yet last week Lord Clarke, as he now is, shocked such admirers with his brutish performance as a witness at the infected blood inquiry. He had been a health minister in 1982-83, when British haemophiliacs were infected with HIV — then regarded as a death sentence — by contaminated blood purchased from the US by the NHS, and which it carried on purchasing even after it had received extensive warnings about the source of much of it (prisoners, drug addicts, prostitutes).
There were gasps among the relatives present of some of those thousands of victims as Clarke dismissed the questions put to him by the inquiry counsel as “pointless”, “daft” and “wasting time”. The inquiry chairman, Sir Brian Langstaff, told Clarke: “I don’t think anyone who has listened to your evidence will forget it in a hurry.” This was not a compliment.
As The Sunday Times revealed last week, after Clarke returned to the health department as secretary of state, when the extent of the catastrophe had become fully known, he rejected “on cost grounds” the argument of the chief medical officer that this had been “a unique tragedy” and victims deserved special financial support on “humanitarian” grounds. In a witness statement to the inquiry, Clarke declared he had prioritised “my overall responsibility for public funds”.
This is the real Ken Clarke. Despite terming himself in his 2016 memoir Kind of Blue a Tory “wet” — as those opposed to Margaret Thatcher’s harsher economic measures were called — he was always an enthusiastic budget-cutter. He startled an interviewer for a slightly fawning left-of-centre newspaper five years ago when he boasted: “I closed more hospitals than most people had hot dinners.” When my father, Nigel Lawson, was chancellor, he said he found Clarke to have been the quickest among the secretaries of state to agree any cuts in departmental expenditure. As a result, he was put on the so-called “star chamber”, in which disputes between the Treasury and the spending departments were thrashed out. Clarke was brutally effective there too. And when he became justice secretary under David Cameron, he offered up swingeing cuts in the budget for the judicial system, closing more than 150 of the 530 courts in England and Wales. The unconscionable delays in cases coming to trial, which long pre-date Covid-19, are the direct consequence.
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This fitted well with his view that prison itself is a colossal waste of public money. But despite Clarke’s identification as a penal liberal, those with deeper acquaintance with such matters recall that as home secretary in 1992-93 he refused a posthumous free pardon for the teenager Derek Bentley, hanged in 1953 as an accomplice to the murder of a police officer. His decision was implicitly criticised by the Court of Appeal, which in 1998 declared that Bentley had been denied “that fair trial which is the birthright of every British citizen”.
And while from his student days Clarke identified with the “liberal” wing of the Conservative Party, in 1961, as president of the Cambridge University Conservative Association, he took the peculiar decision to invite the founder of the British Union of Fascists, Sir Oswald Mosley, to give the first address of the new term. This was particularly odd as Mosley had addressed them the previous year. As a result, the future cabinet minister Michael Howard, along with other Jewish members with relatives who had been murdered by the Nazis, quit the organisation.
This was an early indicator of what, 60 years later, has caused such consternation at the infected blood inquiry: Clarke’s shattering insensitivity. It is the negative flipside of a characteristic rare in politicians: he really is not bothered about what people think of him, personally. This a great strength, even admirable. It allowed Clarke to concentrate on doing what he regarded as the “right thing” whatever the unpopularity that might accrue.
As he observed in a valedictory interview on leaving the Commons in 2019, discussing his time working in the Thatcher administration: “We didn’t take any notice of opinion polls, we knew we were extremely unpopular, and we didn’t have a popular policy in our portfolio. That wasn’t what we were there for.” He added, in an entirely justified rebuke of Boris Johnson’s modus operandi, and indeed modern politics as a whole: “Nowadays people don’t do that. They have public relations advisers, they look up vast numbers of opinion polls and if the public say they don’t like the sound of that, then they don’t do it.”
Yet the cause of Clarke’s popularity compared with his contemporaries is similar to Johnson’s. Each presents as a Falstaffian figure, a type that has a perennial appeal to the English (if not the Scots). In Clarke’s case it involved lots of drinking and smoking: it was typical of his conventional opinion-defying appeal that it somehow seemed perfectly fine for this ex-health secretary to run for the Tory leadership while simultaneously being deputy chairman of British American Tobacco.
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But the outward similarities — a contagious bonhomie and a colourful way with language that sets them apart from the run of cautious grey men — mask the fact that they are also opposites (and not just in the sense that Clarke’s private life was blamelessly uxorious, or that Johnson will fib rather than confront).
The thing is, unlike the man who holds the job Clarke always wanted, Cuddly Ken has not changed his mind about anything since he became an MP at the age of 29 in 1970, and is therefore deeply unreflective. When reviewing his memoir, I observed how strange it was that it contained just a single paragraph explaining why he remains of the view that the euro was a good thing and the UK should have joined it.
And that paragraph was all about “the unnecessary costs and distortions ... in a free market” caused by “separate national currencies”. Dry as dust and devoid of passion. When, some years ago, after he had given a talk at the Institute of Economic Affairs, I asked Clarke about the suffering in southern European economies as they found themselves trapped in currency union with vastly more efficient Germany, he pretty much gave the “no omelette without breaking eggs” argument.
Clarke is, in certain respects, a great man. But, and in contrast to the outward bonhomie, Hush Puppies and all, he is also a chilly one. As those bereaved relatives at the infected blood inquiry have discovered.