HE FRETS LIKE PIGLET FACING A BREEZY DAY
WHEN Greg Clark was standing for Parliament in 2005, knocking on doors in a rundown part of Tunbridge Wells, Kent, he found himself being followed coincidentally house-to-house by a soberlydressed man. It was the local debt collector.
Tunbridge Wells should be safe Tory territory but Clark became pessimistic about his electoral prospects because it was far from evident ‘whose visit was the more unwelcome’ to residents – his or that of the debt-collector.
Although the 50 year-old Clark now jokes about it, that story says something about the personality of this methodical, oddly zestless Europhile, who has risen to become Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.
You could never mistake him for one of life’s thigh-slappers. He is not a feel- good, can- do, cheer-’em-up salesman like Boris Johnson or Nigel Farage. He approaches life with the fretfulness of Piglet facing a breezy day with much mumbling of ‘oh d- d- d- dear me’ and a conviction everything will go wrong.
Not one of life’s leaders or visionaries, Mr Clark. Here is a faint-hearted camp-follower who for decades has held on to Nurse for fear of finding something worse. ‘Nurse’ was once the BBC, for whom he worked as a policy adviser. He was also employed as a ministerial special adviser.
NOW his security blanket is the multi- national corporate elite: the bigshots of the Confederation of British Industry such as Siemens, Rolls-Royce and Airbus, all of whom were (and arguably still are) committed members of ‘Project Fear’.
Mr Clark is very much Secretary of State for Big Business rather than for small entrepreneurs. He views capitalism not through the small-business lens of risk and agility but as the operation of siege- engine corporations, mighty combines crushing all obstacles in their path.
Though notorious at Westminster for the flatness of his oratory, he has an ostensibly interesting background. This is what is so frustrating: he should be so much more fascinating! He grew up on Teesside, in Middlesbrough, where both his grandfather and father were milkmen and his mother would later work on a Tesco’s checkout. He was educated at a comprehensive school and a sixth-form college, where he was a model pupil. A hard worker, yes, but a conformist, a rule-taker.
You had to be brave to declare yourself a Tory in 1980s Middlesbrough. He did no such thing. Instead, as an undergraduate reading economics at Cambridge, he became a member of the SDP and fell under the spell of David Owen and Shirley Williams, who was the Liberal-SDP Alliance’s unsuccessful candidate in the city at the 1987 general election.
After Cambridge he did a PhD at the London School of Economics, an institution almost synonymous with Centre-Left internationalism.
The title of his 254-page thesis in 1992? ‘The effectiveness of incentive payment systems: an empirical test of individualism as a boundary condition.’ If you think that sounds dull, you should listen to some of his parliamentary speeches. Ribticklers, they ain’t.
The centre-Left SDP may be long defunct but you could argue that Mr Clark has not really changed his views from the days when he worshipped Shirley Williams and Co. He may have joined the Conservative Party in the early 1990s, once that inspirational figure John Major had become leader, but he still adheres to SDP-ish positions on big government (a fan), taxes (ooh yes) and the EU (don’t mind if I do).
Now that his friend Amber Rudd has gone, Mr Clark is probably the biggest Remainer in Theresa May’s Cabinet. But at least Amber had some sparkle. Greg is a grind.
As a member of the inner ‘war cabinet’ on Brexit, Mr Clark has argued long – and sometimes, it is said, almost tearfully – in favour of the softest of all possible Brexits. He was the main voice calling for the now discredited ‘customs partnership’ idea which would have seen British officials collecting duties for Brussels even after we left the EU.
In person he is perfectly affable. He is married with three children and he loves to go cycling in the countryside. A cruel pen would call him bland but a kinder one would hail him for being inoffensive and tolerant of critics (though that is not to say he heeds their criticisms).
Labour MPs find it hard to puncture his balmy consensuality. But that is another way of saying he is not really a party figure. His roots in the Tory family are shallow. His loyalties lie with the nabobs of globalism in their shimmering German limousines. What can we do for you, mein Herr, Monsieur, Signor?
When the great British engineering firm GKN was facing a takeover by short- term City dudes, many a Business Secretary would have muscled into the fight and told the profiteers to get their hands off a strategic national interest. Mr Clark did no such thing and merely wafted the deal through.
What fuels his love of the EU? Is it idealism about federalism – a sort of peace-without-borders Utopia? Hardly. There is no evidence for that romanticism in his bones. I suspect his views flow, instead, from an inate caution. He is a placid, procedural figure with a honeyed, bass voice that exudes inertia.
SCHEDULERS at Tory party conferences hesitate to give him speaking slots after lunch because they fear that his soporific voice will plunge people into post-prandial stupors. So will his lack of ideas. He is remarkably passive. Politically, a dreadful dullard.
He is one of those Remainers who continues to regard the Leave vote as a dratted inconvenience to the Continental bosscat class. It would be no surprise if he has been colluding with the likes of Airbus, whipping up opposition to our departure from the EU’s customs maw.
For big business is more truthfully his constituency than the Tunbridge Wells seat he won comfortably in 2005, despite that debt-collector.