‘Not a public-school boy’: A press portrait of David Davis

My Conservatism doesn’t come out of books or figures or demographics, all of which are important. It comes out of my experience of life.
David Davis (2003) [1]

The test of a future Tory policy is what it does for the least well-off in our society. Not the richest, but ordinary people.
David Davis (2005) [2]

‘Yeah, I grew up eating beans on toast,’ said David Davis in 2003, ‘but I don’t want to bang on about it.’ [3] The truth was, though, that the media found his upbringing by far the most fascinating thing about him, and he was seldom reluctant to run through the story one more time. And rightly so, for his early years were unusual in a two-time candidate for the leadership of the Conservative Party.

David Michael Davis was born in York in 1948 to an unmarried mother, his father (who was married elsewhere) having disappeared on learning of her pregnancy. She subsequently married Ronald Davis – who adopted the boy when he was eleven – and moved to London, where the family lived on a council estate in Tooting.

The background was firmly left-wing. David’s maternal grandfather, Walter Harrison, had been a communist who’d led a hunger march in the 1930s, and – according to some accounts – had spent six months in jail for his part in a riot. Similarly, his stepfather was a shop steward at Battersea power station. Davis remembered the latter as ‘a good, but rather tough-minded man. Like many working class Labour voters, he was pretty unsentimental and not at all politically correct – his comments on a local man who spent his life on the dole would have made Norman Tebbit blush.’ [4]

Educated at Tooting Bec grammar school, Davis had a reputation, according to one of his contemporaries, as something of a hard case: ‘He was a tough kid who knew how to look after himself. He had a reputation for getting into scraps.’ [5] His somewhat battered face comes from having broken his nose five times, the first three playing rugby at school – he was a prop forward – the last in a fight on Clapham Common. The scar over his lip was inflicted by a crowbar during a scrap in Brixton.

The highlight of his school career, though, came in 1966 when he won an essay-writing competition and, as a prize, got to meet the chancellor of the exchequer in Downing Street, though James Callaghan was a little distracted, being in the midst of a sterling crisis at the time.

‘I was dead lucky,’ Davis later reflected. ‘In a way I am a member of the privileged generation. My generation had huge social mobility – all those opportunities came for us. Those opportunities are shrinking now. Social mobility is going down. There are new glass ceilings in effect for people from the bottom of society.’ [6]

At home, he had a fractious relationship with his stepfather, though the conflict was not over politics. ‘I was left-wing at school,’ [7] he says, ‘your typical young radical-left kid, full of ideals and no sense.’ [8] The domestic battles were, in his view, more primeval in nature: ‘We clashed, as adult and adolescent males do.’ [9] Are you an Alpha male? he was once asked; ‘Broadly speaking, yes,’ he replied. [10]

Davis failed his zoology A-level, after yet another stormy argument drove him from home, but, still determined to go to university, he worked as an insurance clerk and a barman to raise funds for his further studies.

He also joined the Territorial Army, serving in the SAS. There was an annual payment, but ‘I topped that up by signing on for extra courses like unarmed combat and the demolition course – blowing things up was great fun.’ [11] He could, he once bragged, kill a man with his bare hands, though he admitted he was ‘slightly out of practice’. [12]

The SAS connection has always stood him in good stead in his political career, giving him the kind of image that other Tories – Michael Portillo, for example – could only fantasize about. The butch look was enhanced by his fondness for rock-climbing, by the fact that he had a pilot’s licence in three countries, and by his tendency each summer to complete a 170-mile coast-to-coast walk across Cumbria and Yorkshire.

Some, however, have questioned just how effective he was in his SAS role. Marina Hyde once wrote in the Guardian of ‘an occasion where David was asked to coordinate an exercise where his troops would ambush a convoy, and opted to position his men on either side of the road so that, in the event of the exercise being real, the soldiers would have opened fire on each other in the process.’ [13]

Whether that were true or not, he continued in the TA when, having passed his A-levels, he went to university to study molecular science and computer science.

He arrived, slightly older than his contemporaries, at Warwick University in 1968, a time when the recently opened institution was acquiring a reputation for dissent. (Germaine Greer took up her position as an assistant lecturer the same year.)

‘Warwick was a centre of radical chic at the time, complete with its own crisis and sit-ins,’ Davis remembered. ‘Many of my friends were socialists, but I quickly came to the view that their radical theories had little purchase on reality.’ [14] He read the work of Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh, but ‘I looked at the movement against the Vietnam War and thought it rather puerile. Also there’s a romantic streak – the importance of freedom.’ [15]

And so he joined the Conservative Party. It was an unusual decision, but not entirely surprising at a time when the Tories were seen to be in the process of changing, led now by Edward Heath, the grammar-school exemplar of modern meritocracy.

Warwick was influential on Davis in other respects. As with Margaret Thatcher, the scientific method – he believes – has shaped his politics: ‘I am very much an evidence-driven character because of my scientific background.’ [16] He also acquired an interest in the media, helping to set up the university’s radio station, which was later to give an early taste of broadcasting to Simon Mayo and Timmy Mallet. ‘We were very pop oriented,’ he explained. ‘And we were also a bit controversial. We broadcast Portnoy’s Complaint and that got us into difficulty.’ [17]

Most significantly, he met his future wife, Doreen Cook, another molecular science student: ‘I won her over with persistence, tenacity and doggedness.’ [18] An early date found the pair strolling along the Thames and him pointing to the Houses of Parliament; ‘That’s where I’m going,’ he told her. [19]

She has never been a typical politician’s spouse, and has seldom spoken in public, though she did give an interview to the Daily Mail during his 2005 leadership bid. It wasn’t a very helpful contribution. ‘He can be quite selfish and inconsiderate sometimes,’ [20] she reflected, adding: ‘I suppose I come last in the priority of things to be done, really.’ [21]

Leaving Warwick in 1971, Davis went on to the London Business School to do a Masters. Whilst there, he ran for the chairmanship of the Federation of Conservative Students, against the Heathite favourite Tony ‘Baldrick’ Baldry (who went on to be the long-serving, if underachieving, MP for Banbury) and also Neil ‘Brown Envelope’ Hamilton, who went on to join UKIP. Davis was the non-dogmatic, open-minded candidate who attracted support from both wings of the party and won.

It was here that his distinctive brand of Conservatism first emerged. The FCS was not then the ludicrously extreme organization that it became in the 1980s (when it was closed down by Norman Tebbit for bringing the party into disrepute), but even so Davis was a notably liberal leader, who surprised some by sponsoring Amnesty International. His first mention in the national press saw him at the 1973 Tory conference arguing for bold measures on welfare:

Mr David Davis, of the Federation of Conservative Students, said twenty-five years of a welfare state based on a socialist model had failed to eliminate poverty in Britain. There were more than one million people below the poverty line. One reason was that money was spent on those who did not need it. A negative income tax would give the sick and the unemployed a positive incentive to return to work. ^{^[22]}

By the time he left university, the Heath government was in its death-throes and his political position was confirmed as he began looking for work during the three-day week. ‘Interviews by candlelight were an interesting way to start a business career,’ he reflected, ‘and a sharp reminder of the risks inherent in having governments run whole industries.’ [23]

He worked for sugar giant Tate & Lyle from 1974, who sent him on a training course at Harvard Business School, and who eventually made him a director of the company. In 1988 he published a book, How to Turn Around a Company, based on his experiences, which made clear the thinking that underpinned his political position: his interest was in managerial pragmatism rather than doctrine.

Deciding that he was now ready to go into politics full-time, he walked into the safe seat of Boothferry in the county of his birth, Yorkshire, inheriting a 17,000 majority, which he marginally increased in the 1987 general election. He has remained there ever since, though when boundaries were redrawn in 1997, Boothferry was absorbed into the new constituency of Haltemprice and Howden. (Coincidentally, Alan B’Stard, the ultra-Thatcherite politician played by Rik Mayall in the sitcom The New Statesman, was MP for Haltemprice, though the character was based on Michael Portillo, not Davis.)

When he entered Parliament he was seen as a hardened Thatcherite, and was, for the most part, a loyal backbencher. The major exception came in 1988 when he rebelled against the government over charging for eye tests. ‘It was a very emotional issue for me,’ he was to insist. ‘We got a change in the Bill which led to people with glaucoma in the family being given a free eyesight test.’ [24]

When Michael Heseltine challenged Margaret Thatcher for the leadership in 1990, Davis remained loyal to the prime minister, switching his allegiance to the approved candidate, John Major, when she dropped out of the race. An indication of how highly Thatcher regarded him came in the 1992 general election, when his was one of only six constituencies in which she campaigned.

Major appointed him to the whips’ office in 1990, where he was kept busy during the protracted misery that was the ratification of Maastricht, trying to persuade Eurosceptic backbenchers to vote for the wretched Treaty, or, at the very least, not to bring the entire government and Conservative Party crashing down in ruins.

Davis himself was a Eurosceptic, but did his job with sufficient enthusiasm that he was nicknamed ‘the hammer of Maastricht’. He later claimed that the more extreme stories of bullying and violence were exaggerated.

He moved on in 1993 to become minister for public services, with responsibility for John Major’s big idea, the Citizen’s Charter, and then, in 1995, he was made minister for Europe. In this latter role he served under Douglas Hurd at the Foreign Office, and it was said that Hurd resented his presence, though it’s hard to tell for certain since he doesn’t warrant a single mention in Hurd’s memoirs.

In 1996 Davis was widely rumoured to have threatened that if he wasn’t given a cabinet position, he would resign from the government. He wasn’t and he didn’t, but he did get to be a Privy Counsellor later that year.

The perception by now was that, in Donald MacIntyre’s words, he had ‘carefully cultivated a reputation as the Government’s bovver boy, the party’s unflinching bone cruncher.’ [25]

He also seemed to seek out mavericks and misfits as his political friends: Tony Benn and Peter Kilfoyle on the Labour side, Alan Clark and Eric Forth on his own. Keeping such company, of course, enhanced his own status as an individualist.

After the Tories’ crushing defeat in the 1997 general election, Davis backed Michael Howard for the leadership and, when Howard was knocked out in the first round, he was assumed to have switched to Kenneth Clarke, though he didn’t publicly declare himself. Certainly he didn’t seem overwhelmed by the idea of William Hague becoming leader, and opted not to serve in Hague’s shadow cabinet.

Instead he pursued his ambitions via the less travelled, but more scenic, route of the parliamentary committee, serving four years as chair of the Public Accounts Committee. In this capacity, he was named Inquisitor of the Year in the Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year awards in 2000, and Opposition Politician of the Year by Channel 4.

It was a shrewd move on his part. It kept him suitably distanced from the civil war raging at the heart of the parliamentary party, while playing to his strengths. It was a time that he looked back on with some affection, feeling that he had actually achieved something:

I’m interested in taxes, competitiveness, the public services and poverty eradication and if you are a frontbencher you are constrained to a single thing whereas as a backbencher – the most useful things I have done in politics have been as a backbencher. [26]

By 2000, with Hague clearly destined to lose the next election, Davis was being talked of as a potential leader, the candidate for the Right. And indeed, following the second, equally crushing defeat in 2001, he put his name forward for consideration.

There was now a new system for electing the leader, in which MPs voted in a series of ballots, eliminating the least successful candidate on each turn, until only two remained, with the final decision given to the party members. This was the first opportunity to test the system, and it was immediately found wanting. Two candidates – Michael Ancram and Davis himself – shared the bottom place, with 21 votes each, and there was no rule to govern that eventuality. It was the ‘Fight of the Living Dead,’ mocked the Daily Mirror: ‘They can’t even agree who comes last.’ [27]

So the first ballot was run again, and this time there was sufficient movement to find a loser. Davis slipped to 18 votes, but Ancram did worse still and went down to 17, thereby being automatically eliminated. Even so, it was a hopeless cause, and Davis withdrew voluntarily, backing Iain Duncan Smith in the final ballot of MPs.

In fact, it had been a pretty hopeless cause from the off, but there was a value, Davis clearly felt, in establishing himself as a serious player for the next time round. What was noticeable was the lack of heavyweight supporters on his side. No big-name MPs came out for him, though Frederick Forsyth did declare his support. ‘I like the cut of his jib,’ enthused the Referendum Party-supporting novelist. [28] (The treasurer for his later leadership campaign was Baron Kalms of Edgware, the UKIP-supporting businessman who made Dixons such a commercial success.)

The leadership contest that had started with farce ended up eclipsed by tragedy: the final winner of the election was scheduled to be announced on the morning of 12 September 2001, but the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America led to a 24-hour postponement; even the Conservatives were aware that in such circumstances no one was going to pay the blindest bit of attention to who their new leader was.

As it happened, the Tory faithful voted for Iain Duncan Smith, and no one paid the blindest bit of attention anyway.

Davis did now take up a front-line post as party chairman, though he didn’t last long. In 2002 he was sacked and instead made shadow deputy prime minister, which was less impressive than it sounded: he wasn’t deputy leader, he just shadowed John Prescott, mostly speaking on local government – never one of his strengths. He was replaced as party chairman by Theresa May, giving her the chance to make her name by claiming the ‘nasty party’ cliché as her own.

His removal from the post had been prompted by suspicions that he was plotting against his leader, though if he was he was hardly the only one. More significant was the lack of support for him at the top of the party, where he was seen as a divisive and disruptive figure.

A shadow cabinet minister complained: ‘He doesn’t put himself around Central Office or rally the troops in the constituencies. He’s obstructive and sulky, he’s not engaged.’ Even his supporters, while denying a charge of laziness, still ended up apologizing: ‘He works bloody hard. Admittedly he is a chippy person who has come from humble beginnings, but his bluntness is often misinterpreted as enmity.’ [29]

Even so, as the vultures circled around Smith, Davis was being talked of as a viable alternative to the doomed leader. But when the palace coup finally came in 2003, Davis was the one who made it possible by stepping aside, to allow Michael Howard to inherit the title without challenge.

It was perhaps a calculated decision, assuming that Howard was bound to lose the next election and that the job would become vacant again soon enough. So it proved and in 2005 Davis – who had since been promoted to shadow home secretary – entered the next leadership race as the ‘runaway favourite’. [30]

Indeed, such was the apparent momentum behind his campaign that David Cameron was said to be the ‘Stop Davis’ candidate, backed by four successive Tory leaders – John Major, William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard – who thought Davis was ‘devious’ and ‘untrustworthy’. [31] Even if those reports were exaggerated, there was no doubt that he had managed to alienate many on his own side. Some of his colleagues complained that he was ‘lazy, divisive and arrogant’. [32] One said he was ‘a tough guy who hasn’t achieved anything and doesn’t even read books’; [33] another that he was ‘a thug, a bully and a careerist’, while yet another explained that he was disliked ‘because he’s such a rude fucker’. [34] Meanwhile, it was said of Liam Fox that he ‘can’t stand Davis’. [35]

It was widely assumed that the protracted timetable for the contest had been devised by Howard to stack the odds against him. Nonetheless, Davis was still the front-runner going into the 2005 Conservative conference, when each of the five candidates was given fifteen minutes to address the hall.

He took the opportunity not to make much of his upbringing, again: ‘I know what it’s like to live in a tough neighbourhood. I grew up on a council estate. It’s sixty-nine years ago this morning that my communist grandfather joined the Jarrow march against unemployment. So I wasn’t born a Conservative.’ He also talked about cutting taxes, building more prisons and Europe: ‘The drive to deeper integration never rests. So ask yourself this: if the Conservative Party doesn’t speak up for Britain’s interests, who will? We must – and I will.’ And he was unapologetic about the Tory record: ‘I’m proud to be a Conservative, proud of our history, proud of what we have achieved for our country. Yes, we need to debate our future. Yes we need to agree on change. But we don’t need a collective nervous breakdown. So let’s stop apologising – and get on with the job.’ [36]

None of it worked. His delivery was weak and unconvincing and his ‘lacklustre performance’ [37] was widely seen as having damaged his cause, particularly when compared to the eager enthusiasm of the young pretender, David Cameron, and the weighty self-assurance of the elder statesman, Kenneth Clarke. But, Davis protested, he wasn’t unhappy that he’d lost his lead: ‘I like fights. I don’t like cruises.’ [38]

And he joked: ‘I got my points across and I didn’t forget my words. That is good enough, isn’t it?’ [39] It wasn’t. Cameron was now the favourite, and Davis never really managed to recapture the initiative.

He topped the first ballot of MPs, because the modernizing vote split between Cameron and Clarke, but saw his numbers fall in the second ballot (from 62 to 57). That was still enough to see off the rival challenge from the Right from Liam Fox and leave him in the final two, but when the membership were consulted, he was overwhelmingly rejected, beaten by Cameron with a margin of two-to-one.

Under the new leadership, Davis remained as shadow home secretary, insisting that he was totally in tune with Cameron on the key issues: ‘The only difference between David and me is that I would hug hoodies a little harder and a little longer, I suspect.’ [40] More usefully, he began to carve out a distinctive niche for the party as the defender of civil liberties.

He was not the only Tory concerned at the Labour government’s relentless erosion of freedom in the name of the war against terror. In 2008 Gordon Brown’s government brought back its attempt to increase detention without charge. Under Tony Blair, a 90-day law – borrowed from apartheid South Africa – had been rejected; now the aim was 42 days. And it provoked John Major to make one of his occasional interventions in politics, arguing:

The government has been saying, in a catchy, misleading piece of spin: ‘If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.’ This is a demagogue’s trick. We do have something to fear – the total loss of privacy to an intrusive State with authoritarian tendencies. This is not a United Kingdom that I recognise and Parliament should not accept it. [41]

Despite this and other such contributions, the measure was passed in the Commons, and Davis responded in what was (briefly) one of the most dramatic political moves of the time: he resigned as shadow home secretary (to be replaced by Dominic Grieve) and as an MP, saying he would stand again in a by-election, fighting on the issue of civil liberties.

The 42-day vote was ‘only the latest in the steady, insidious and relentless erosion of our freedoms over the past decade,’ Davis wrote:

We already had the longest period of detention without charge in the free world. We will soon have the most intrusive ID card system in the world. There is a CCTV camera for every 14 citizens…
We have the largest DNA database in the world, larger than any dictatorship…
The Government has attacked the jury system, that historic bulwark against unfair law and the arbitrary abuse of state power…
There are now 266 state powers allowing officials to force their way into the home. Six hundred public bodies have the authority to bug phones and emails and intercept the post. Forget the security services: councils and quangos conduct a thousand surveillance operations every month. [42]

There was no doubting the force of his argument, but it was interpreted in terms of personal politics. The Daily Mirror saw his resignation as ‘a cynically disguised leadership challenge to David Cameron’, [43] while the Daily Telegraph said it was ‘a challenge to Mr Cameron’s authority’. [44]

In response, the Labour Party – which had come a distant third in the constituency in 2005 – announced that it would not field a candidate, and were shamefully joined in that decision by the Liberal Democrats.

In the subsequent by-election, a low turnout saw Davis returned with an increased majority, but there was no great victory to be celebrated. In the absence of the other major parties, it had turned into a circus – there were 25 other candidates, setting a record for a by-election. Indeed there were so many candidates that they weren’t allowed on the platform to hear the result, for fear of breaking the stage.

The only encouraging note came from the fact that Mad Cow Girl, of the Monster Raving Loony Party, registered nearly four times as many votes as did David Icke. Sadly, though, Ronnie Carroll – who had represented the UK in the 1961 and 1962 Eurovision Song Contests – got only 29 votes, standing on a Make Politicians History ticket.

Davis returned to the Commons a chastened man, knowing that he might well have thrown away his career on a gesture that hadn’t worked. ‘If I was given my job back, I think I’d take it,’ he said; ‘but I don’t think I’ll be offered it.’ [45]

There was a suggestion that, following the 2010 general election, he was offered – but refused – a place in the coalition cabinet. Either way, with a new generation in the ascendant, the sun appeared to have set on Davis’s frontbench ambitions.

Except that the referendum result last year transformed the face of British politics, and – at the age of 67 – David Davis finally made it into the cabinet, in the newly created role of Brexit secretary.

He had impeccable credentials for his new post: a background in business, frontline experience of the Maastricht debate, a period as Europe minister, and an early advocacy of the referendum: in the 2005 leadership election, he had called for a referendum on ‘a return of power from Brussels to the UK.’ [46]

Unlike some in the party – the John Redwood tendency – his Euroscepticism seems directed more by irritation with the EU’s incompetence than by ideology, though there is also a cultural dimension. He learnt of his sacking as party chairman in 2002, for example, while he was on a rare foreign holiday, and significantly he was in Florida not Florence: culturally his attachment is to the English-speaking peoples.

Whether all of this is sufficient for him to make a success of his job remains to be seen. But he’s currently Britain’s best hope for a stable future.

‘You may become leader of the Tory party,’ Tony Benn once told Davis, ‘but you’d never be allowed in New Labour, you’re too left wing.’ [47]

That was nonsense. Davis is firmly on the Right of Tory politics. But even beyond questions of civil liberties, there are subtleties and nuances that make him one of the more interesting figures in the modern Conservative Party.

He’s opposed to inheritance tax, but also to university tuition fees. He voted for the restoration of capital punishment and the lowering of the term limit on abortions, but also to outlaw hunting with dogs. He tried to stop the lowering of the age of consent for male homosexuals from twenty-one, but as party chairman he approved the adoption of more out gay candidates than ever before and was subsequently supported in his leadership bid by Nick Herbert and Iain Dale.

His longstanding and passionate interest in the reform of public services derives from his belief that they are failing people with the same kind of background as himself. ‘The Conservatives’ top priority must be to improve the everyday lives of ordinary people,’ he has argued. ‘Victims of the state are a whole series of people – people who end up with MRSA, people who have poor local policing and yobs on street corners, people who end up with their kids not getting a decent education at school, people whose life chances are poor, unable to get on.’ [48]

Many of these are issues to which he has given a lot of thought and time, though he has struggled sometimes to find soundbites that went any further than Blairite vacuity. ‘Opportunity for the many, not just the privileged few,’ he would say. Or: ‘By standing for the shared British values of decency and tolerance which bind us all, we can build one nation.’ [49]

And, like so many politicians, he can’t always resist the dumbed-down cultural references. At a South London school in 2005, he explained to a class of 11-year-olds who Admiral Nelson was: ‘He was very, very famous. I guess you could say that he’s the David Beckham of his day and, like David Beckham, he found his Posh Spice.’ [50]

Or perhaps that’s being unfair. Because he does know something about popular culture. His favourite film is Cool Hand Luke (maybe identifying with Paul Newman’s tough-guy messiah figure), and on Desert Island Discs in 2008, although he went for predictable choices from the playlist of Classic FM and some AOR (Phil Collins, Dire Straits), he also threw in the wildcards of P!nk’s ‘Get the Party Started’, and the political folk of Mundy-Turner’s ‘Stealing My Democracy’.

In any event, there’s no doubting his political courage. It’s not just the choice of the committee route to influence or the 2008 resignation. It’s also to be seen in the fact that he shared a stage with Tony Benn at the Royal Festival Hall in 2002 in front of a 1,500-strong audience, the vast majority of whom were always going to be anti-Tory. The debate was later broadcast on Radio 4 and showed him winning most of the arguments, even if he didn’t convince many of those present.

Nor, in his backbench years, did he show any reluctance to rock the boat. During David Cameron’s premiership, he called for more grammar schools, insisted that European migrants came to Britain for jobs not benefits, and argued against Theresa May over the European Arrest Warrant. The latter was not the only clash between the two; he had been shadow home secretary, she became the real thing, and there was no apparent doubt in his mind as to who was better suited to the role. Now they are cabinet colleagues, embarked on the most difficult project of any post-war government.

Their relationship is really rather important to the nation, and one must hope that, in his older, more mature incarnation, the prickliness that held him back in the past might have faded a little. ‘I probably have got quite a bad temper,’ [51] he once admitted. ‘I’m quite fierce.’ [52]

What’s unlikely to have changed is his fondness for reminding people of his upbringing. When Michael Portillo attempted to live on benefits for a week for a television documentary about poverty, Davis was unimpressed: ‘He’d have a better idea if he’d lived for years like that, not for one week.’ [53]

And in 2008 an unfortunate incident saw him locked in the toilet of a London restaurant with Andrew Neil, from which Davis emerged to comment: ‘Don’t worry, nothing went on; I’m not a public-school boy.’ [54]

As with all the portraits in this series, this piece is drawn almost entirely from contemporary newspaper accounts. It is liable, therefore, to be wildly inaccurate

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