‘I am quite happy to acknowledge that I am the underdog’
POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT Mark Harper has become the twelfth Tory MP to enter the leadership race, saying he is the only candidate not tainted by serving in Theresa May’s government.
The former chief whip admits he is an underdog in the race but says he has an edge against ministers who have “shared the responsibility” for Mrs May’s failure to deliver Brexit.
In an interview with The Daily
Telegraph, Mr Harper said watching the other candidates over the past week convinced him to run.
“We’ve seen basically the same faces saying the same things that they’ve been saying for the last three years,” he says. “A number of them have tried to position themselves as fresh faces but I’m afraid they’ve sat around the Cabinet table sharing the responsibility with the Prime Minister.”
“I’ve not heard any fresh thinking,” he continues – adding that this is what he has to offer. On Brexit, this means building a better relationship with the Irish government and including the Cabinet and wider party in the conversation before agreeing a deal with Brussels.
Mr Harper, who campaigned for Remain in 2016, criticises his rival candidates for promising to leave the EU on Oct 31. A short-term extension is more likely if a new prime minister genuinely wants to try for changes to the Withdrawal Agreement, he says. While he doesn’t want to tie himself into a timeline, he does not rule out a delay to 2020.
While his candidacy is not unexpected – most leadership “runners and riders” have included him for months – few outside Westminster would recognise Mr Harper in the street. This week a woman on Twitter joked that he looks like a “stock image of a Tory MP”.
But his background sets him apart from many of his party colleagues. Mr Harper, 49, was the first in his family to go to university, having grown up in a “working class family in Swindon”.
He won a place at Oxford, studying philosophy, politics and economics at Brasenose – the same degree and college as David Cameron, although they did not overlap. He went on to be an ally to Mr Cameron and they still exchange texts “occasionally”.
Mr Harper became a card-carrying Conservative aged 17 and wanted to go into politics from a young age but followed advice to pursue another career first – so he became an accountant and then spent seven years working for Intel, the technology company.
Government posts included in the Cabinet office, Department for Work and Pensions and the Home Office – in 2014 he quit as immigration minister after learning his private cleaner did not have permission to work in the UK. His most senior government job, chief whip, gave him valuable experience of how to navigate Parliament but didn’t raise his profile.
“It was the sort of job where if you were doing it properly no one would know who you were. They would only find out who you were if you cocked it up,” he says.
He adds: “I am quite happy to acknowledge that in this contest I am the underdog.”
He certainly has a record of speaking out against Mrs May’s Brexit plan. In December, Mr Harper broke 13 years of loyalty to the Government by declaring his opposition to Theresa May’s plan, saying it compromised the “integrity of our country”.
His leadership bid has backing from MPS including Jackie Doyle-price, Steve Double, and Scott Mann.
About 140 MPS have still not decided who they will back, he said. Asked if he has his spreadsheet of MPS ready as a hangover from his chief whip days, he said: “I am an accountant after all”.
In his spare time he likes to walk with his two rescue labradors, Chase and Sophie, in his constituency. Asked what is his biggest vice, Mr Harper said: “My vices are quite boring. I like drinking nice glasses of wine.”
Mr Harper, who co-chairs “Women to win”, a campaign to elect more Conservative women to Parliament, also wants to encourage more people from diverse backgrounds to become MPS: “93 per cent of people go to state schools and I think it’s quite good if a good range of politicians do,” he said.
He also wants the party to start working on other priorities than Brexit, and said he is embarrassed that the Government has repeatedly delayed publishing its long-awaited green paper on social care.
But he won’t be drawn on specific policy pledges nor “eye catching spending and tax promises” without balancing the books first – and warns others against doing the same.
“If we throw around promises in this leadership election I don’t think we’re going to put ourselves in a very credible place,” he said.
“I’m doing this to win – and we’ll see what happens.”