Dominic Grieve, the new shadow home secretary, tells James Forsyth that he won’t ‘resort to soundbites’. But is this a sensible approach for a modern-day politician?
Dominic Grieve’s office answerphone is struggling to keep up with events - the caller has reached ‘the office of the shadow attorney general and the Conservative spokesman on community cohesion,’ it says. No mention of his new role as shadow home secretary.
Some Conservatives wish the answerphone was right. Even normally loyal Cameroons struggle to envisage going into the next election with Grieve as shadow home secretary. They’d rather he was a stopgap measure. Certainly, few would have named Grieve as part of the Tory’s strongest bowling attack a fortnight ago. But this is irrelevant now. Cameron cannot afford to change shadow home secretary again: to lose one looks like misfortune, to lose two looks like carelessness.
The logic behind Grieve’s appointment was simple. David Cameron desperately needed to stop David Davis’s resignation turning into a ‘Tory split’ saga. So to shut the story down, he appointed a friend of Davis who is a determined and principled opponent of 42 days. But replacing Davis with Grieve carries with it its own risks. Despite the two men being close, their political personas are about as different as you can get. As one well-connected Tory fretted to me this week, the party has replaced Action Man with Professor Yaffle.
Much of the rap on Grieve is that he isn’t Davis. There are worries about what the change does to the balance of the shadow cabinet; replacing a man brought up by a single mother on a council estate with a Westminster- and Oxbridge-educated QC does little to make the Tory top table look like modern Britain or help the party reach out to those crucial C2 voters. Others worry that he is too much of a lawyer to articulate public concern about crime as effectively as Davis did. But perhaps the most commonly voiced concern about him is that he isn’t ready for prime time, that at the next election it might be him who has to go into hiding, as Oliver Letwin did in 2001.
Grieve has previous. During the great grammar schools row, he popped up to clarify the new Conservative policy. It did not mean that they would stop more grammar schools being built in areas — like his constituency — that already had them and needed more, he said. Debate still rages over whether this was a calculated intervention, made at a time when his leader was too weak to slap him down or whether this was Grieve blithely tying up loose ends that were best left undone. The nervousness with which his press officer, inherited from David Davis, passed him over to me on Tuesday strongly suggests that the latter is more likely.
Talking to Grieve, one can’t help but be struck by his intellect. It is easy to see why he was appointed a QC and is lauded as one of the best debaters on the Conservative benches. But one can also imagine that Labour’s opposition research team (one bit of its operation that hasn’t yet fallen apart) is hanging on his every word. In a political culture where an ill-chosen word can end a career, talking in paragraphs can be a liability.
Grieve and I begin by discussing 42 days. He raised eyebrows on his first day in the job when he announced that the Tory party would repeal the measure, if it passed, once in government. This is Tory policy but it is normally stated with a caveat about ‘notwithstanding new evidence’. The caveat is both designed to prevent a shadow cabinet split on the issue and to give the Tories cover if they decide the problem looks rather different from behind a ministerial desk.
Grieve starts off by stating the policy with the necessary qualifier. I ask him if that means the position has changed since Thursday. He, rather exasperated, replies that it hasn’t. His tone suggests that he thinks we’re playing a silly game. As he puts it, you ‘don’t just ignore new evidence’. Substantively Grieve is right. But if one half of the shadow cabinet are using one line and the other another, then the press are going to exploit the arbitrage opportunity.
The conversation shifts to discussing Grieve’s appearance at a rally organised by the British Muslim Initiative in November 2006. It is hard to keep every group with British and Muslim in the title straight. But the BMI is definitely at the extreme end of the spectrum. It attacked the Muslim Council of Britain for ending its boycott of Holocaust Memorial Day and boasts of its links to Azzam Tamini — a supporter of suicide bombings who Cameron recently denounced as the UK representative of Hamas. The event was also supported by the Cordoba Foundation, which Cameron has described as a front for the Muslim Brotherhood.
A simple admission that he had attended a meeting sponsored by an organisation he should have had nothing to do with would have helped allay mounting fears that Grieve is soft on Islamism. Grieve’s mistake was an easy one to make considering he had not been invited by the BMI but by another of the groups supporting the event. Yet Grieve went into a convoluted defence of his behaviour, saying ‘I don’t think I regret it’ and that he had heard nothing in the meeting that had made him want to walk out.
Your correspondent was beginning to sense a story: shadow home secretary doesn’t regret attending meeting organised by Islamist group his party has denounced. So I pushed him on what the difference was between Hizb ut Tahir, which the Tories are committed to banning, and the BMI. Grieve replied, ‘It would require a theologian’s mind to make such a distinction.’ I was slightly taken aback by the answer, considering that just a moment ago Grieve had been defending attending a BMI organised and promoted meeting. He then told me that knowing what he knew now, he would decline any invitation from the BMI. I was left wondering why he had not said that when I first asked him about BMI, closing down this whole line of questioning.
No one can doubt that Grieve is smart and principled. But doubts about whether he is cut out for frontline politics are growing. Grieve bridles at the idea that he needs to become a more careful speaker. ‘I wouldn’t be doing my job if I just resorted to soundbites,’ he sniffs. But Labour has already made tabloid hay out of an old quote from him about the 7/7 bombings being ‘totally explicable’. Grieve can expect to be on the receiving end of a lot of this kind of Labour fire in the coming months. An attempt to paint the Tories as soft on terror and crime might be Labour’s last and best chance to slow the Cameron bandwagon and with Grieve as shadow home secretary, Labour will feel it has its opportunity.
Grieve is already comfortable talking about the legacy he wants to leave as home secretary; he clearly does not regard himself as a stopgap. But if he wants to succeed in this way he will have to accept that it is sometimes necessary to talk in soundbites.