The gaffe-prone ‘fixer’ once again at the heart of political turmoil
AS Sir Oliver Letwin scurries around the halls of Westminster, ahead of his newly granted parliamentary time, it won’t be the first occasion he has been at the heart of a national crisis.
Sir Oliver first made his mark as an adviser to Margaret Thatcher. In 1985, as a precocious young talent, he managed to overcome the objections of Nigel Lawson, then chancellor, and Douglas Hurd, then home secretary, to keep the poll tax alive. It was Sir Oliver, a memorandum to Mrs Thatcher disclosed in 2014 showed, who recommended she “use the Scots as a trailblazer for the real thing”, rather than let the policy die.
A policy that would eventually lead to the fall of the last great reforming Tory prime minister, Sir Oliver was key in the rise of the next pretender to that title, David Cameron. He was the first shadow cabinet member to back Mr Cameron publicly. His reward was to lead the party’s five-year policy transformation and stitch together the 2010 manifesto. The result was the much-maligned “Big Society”.
Still, the failure of that manifesto to win a first Conservative majority in 18 years wasn’t held against Sir Oliver; he was part of a team of four sent to negotiate the coalition agreement with the Liberal Democrats.
Sir Oliver became known as Mr Cameron’s “fixer”, but was unable to save his career. In early 2016, Sir Oliver phoned Michael Gove and Boris Johnson, who were having dinner with Evgeny Lebedev, the Russian owner of the Evening Standard. Via speakerphone, he tried to convince them to back Remain – to no avail.
Sir Oliver has been unable to shake a reputation of being intelligent but plagued by blunders. His record of mistakes includes racially insensitive comments about the 1985 Tottenham and Handsworth riots, for which he apologised in 2015; allowing a stranger into his house at 5am to use the lavatory, only to find his wallet had been stolen; saying he would rather “beg” than send his children to his local comprehensive school and dumping letters relating to his constituents in bins in a park. Most embarrassing, perhaps, was the 2001 election, when he went into hiding after suggesting his party could slash taxes by £20billion a year by 2006, more than twice the £8 billion pledged by Mr Hague, the then leader.
Sir Oliver is anything but in hiding this week, and finds himself once again in the thick of Britain’s political turmoil.