Don't be Vague,
Count
on Hague

How did William Jefferson Hague, hardly out of short trousers, end up asour Leader of the Opposition and potential Prime Minister?
Roy Stone goes back to his roots.

_____________________

I hope you've all got a lump in your throats. Thirty years after Harold Wilson, eighty five years after Herbert Asquith and two hundred and twenty after the Marquis of Rockingham, Britain is close to having another Yorkshireman at the helm. Repeat after me. The Right Honourable William Hague, Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Stop giggling at the back, I'm serious! All it takes is a cross on that ballot paper and the lad from Wentworth, near Rotherham will be leading the entire country. Brings a tear to the eye, doesn't it.

I mentioned the Marquis of Rockingham because the man was not only the first Yorkshireman to run the country, but he also happens to loom large in the childhood of both William Hague and myself. Both of us grew up within a stroll of the Rockingham's immense estate north of Rotherham, his Wentworth Woodhouse stately pile, his palladian follies, his model village, and what was left of all his aristocratic enterprise. The old Marquis and his son had a passion for industry. Around his estate he cut canals, sank coal mines, set up foundries and railway lines. Sponsored the installation of the Newcomen Steam Engine. Until very recently the industry was still there and still worked. The old Tory's vision more or less intact.

William was born in Wentworth village, to a family who ran a thriving business over the eastern side of the vast estate. He grew up alongside coal miners and steelworkers and labourers, but the family firm was unconnected with the old Earl's affairs. Hague's Soft Drinks was a local institution and young William grew up knowing industry secrets that any child would have treasured. Lime and Lemon, Cherry. Orange. Dandelion and Burdock. Much more magical than Anthracite, Bitumen, Coke and Ironstone.

Wentworth Village was an oasis in the dust and tundra of the vast South Yorkshire coalfields. It was a legacy of benign capitalism where a Tory patriarch would provide cheap housing, schools and healthcare for his workforce. The big house was now a PE college but the whole village was still exclusive, still owned by the Fitzwilliam Estate. To those of us just the other side of the moonscape of waste matter north of the place, where pit buzzers cut through filthy air, and coal trains thundered past at all hours, Wentworth was a world away.

TORY BOY WONDER

"...They do not want to go to Callaghan's promised land, which must surely rank as the most miserable and abhorrent land that has ever been promised to the people of a nation. Most of all they want to be free from the Government, the government they think should get out of the way, not interfere with their lives, and I trust that Mrs Thatcher's government will indeed get out of the way..." WILLIAM HAGUE aged 15 Conservative Party Conference 1976 _____________________

The only thing we prole kids had to hold onto was the prospect of a mining job at Cortonwood, Elsecar, or Wombwell Main. If we got lucky with the 11 plus there was Wath Grammar School . Wath Grammar, the best school in the area became a Comprehensive in '72. Eleven plus abandoned, and catchments invented. I got Wombwell High. William got Wath Grammar, which went comprehensive the same year, adding to his working class cred.

The '74 pit strike came and went. Family savings were spent on necessities. Powercuts plunged the landscape into darkness. There was Ted Heath, the Three Day Week, and the Winter of Discontent. Sunny Jim Callaghan came along to get Labour back to work. But, as Saatchi and Saatchis famous posters pointed out, he failed miserably.

Meanwhile, over the far side of the slagheaps, Young Will was turning his back on the cricket his Dad loved so much and was developing a fascination for the political game. Not for him the minutiae of Leeds United's league positions or Geoff Boycott's test centuries. Will had eyes on higher things. He studied Churchill speeches, memorised cabinet teams and charted election results. In True Blue Wentworth tradition he became a Conservative and the 200 year old ghost of the Earl of Rockingham smiled down and laid plans.

In the summer of Punk Rock, when the rest of us were basking in the uncommonly hot weather and getting our water from standpipes in the street, William prepared a speech for that years Conservative Party Conference. It was the cheek of this little kid, barely able to see over the lectern, that enchanted the party's new leader Margaret Thatcher, not yet Prime Minister, and set young William on the road to legend. His northern accent just added to the novelty.

Over the other side of the slag-heaps it felt like a sell-out and an act of treason. The area was still smarting from the 1974 miners' strike and the mood was still sombre. The sight of a local kid at the heart of a blue-rinsed ruling class jamboree was galling then, and is galling now. It showed the working people of South Yorkshire that you couldn't take the next generation's loyalty to Labour for granted. Here was proof that a good education bred nowt but tiny class traitors.

William went up to Oxford in the days when the dons there still looked down on northern prodigies. He proved to be quite brilliant. A First in Politics, Economics and Philosophy. President of the Union. Within seconds he was political advisor to the likes of Geoffrey Howe and Leon Brittain at the heart of the new Thatcher government. By '87 he'd taken his first step into the hustings back home in Wentworth, and took a sound beating in a strong Labour mining constituency.

At the age of 27 he was elected MP for Richmond and soon he became the Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Rt Hon Norman Lamont, then Chancellor of the Exchequer. Under Major's government he became the Secretary of State for Wales (the youngest Cabinet Minister since Harold Wilson) and won a local reputation for his hard work and fair nature. A Yorkshireman after all.

Then came the Labour Landslide of May 1997. John Major resigned as party leader. The man widely expected to replace him, Michael Portillo, had been famously beaten in that election and made the party nervous of a right wing candidate. As one of the last centre-right men standing, William Hague stepped forward on a Euro-skeptic platform and got the job. Leader of the Conservative Party. At his age.

BYE BYE ELECTION

"The voters of Romsey were not beguiled by William Hague's personal brand of politics - those based on fear and division. His is the Britain of the twitching curtain and the locked door, where every refugee is an economic migrant, every gay man a pervert waiting to prey on your children and every creak in the floorboards an intruder in your home. By concentrating on the negative, and pandering to the small-minded, he insulted the electorate." CHARLES KENNEDY Leader of the Liberal Democrat Party writing in The Independent 4/5/00 _____________________

2000: William Hague was smarting from the recent Romsey By-election result, and once again was wondering about his public image. Romsey was supposed to be a huge step back into the limelight for Hague and his Conservatives as they attempt to claw back the grass roots Tories who defected to labour in the last two elections. Romsey was a safe safe seat and Hague personally led the baby-kissing. But the Liberal Democrats demolished an 8,585 majority in the Hampshire constituency and achieved a massive 12.5per cent swing from the Tories. In short a massive disaster.

Hague led a party where position on Europe can make or break careers. And where he owed his own position to a guarded anti-Europe stance. Elders and betters with a more pragmatic and modern approach to the subject (Kenneth Clarke take a last bow) had fallen by the wayside. But the electorate was still under the Blair spell, and education and health remained the big issues. Not Europe. So he played hardball, latching onto Little England prejudices and failed badly.

Young William, try as he might, came across as nerdy and naive. His 'hip to be square' geniality drew no votes in the aftermath of Blair's 'Cool Britannia'. He seems as out of touch with his contemporaries now as he did back in '76 when his Tory Conference grandstanding clashed with punk expletives, and left him damned as an anachronism.

All that seemed left was to take a leaf out of Thatcher's book and counter the Tony Blair nice guy stuff with a bit of punk style nastiness. His public image, even after wife Ffion's 'Project Hague' re-brand, and his baseball-hatted visit to the Notting Hill Carnival, remained awkward and the hard man act didn't ring true. As a leader he looked like the first man up on karaoke night, trying gamely to rabble rouse a bored audience whilst trying to keep his dignity. Then came the 2001 election...

June 2001:
Hague Resigns as Conservative Leader after Tony Blair landslide.

Back at Wentworth Woodhouse the ghost of the Marquis of Rockingham still hopes for another Prime Minister to return in triumph to the old Yorkshire pile. Horace Walpole saw Rockingham as a "weak, childish and ignorant man, not fit as the head of an administration". He only took the position because of his connections with Whig giants like Edmund Burke, Charles Fox, the Duke of Cumberland (who he fought alongside at Culloden against the Jacobites ) and Lord John Cavendish. In the event he "dissolved in his own weakness" as King George III had William Pitt replace him. History did the rest.

In 1765 the young Marquis from Wentworth had to wait sixteen years to get back into No.10 Downing Street and would die within days of the shock. In 2001 a young Wentworth folly was again on the verge of greatness, but was ultimately thwarted on the ultimate political prize by Tony Blair's second landslide election win. Young William resigned before breakfast and lived to fight another day. Time will tell how closely history repeats.