Serving under four prime minsters, Ken Clarke has been a unique face on both sides of British politics. A grammar-school Conservative, devotedly pro-Europe, Nottingham lad, he is “economically orthodox” but wants Britain to join the euro, jokes about facing down Thatcher, and is hugely supportive of gender quotas in politics. In a passionate and candid Guardian Live interview, Clarke revealed:
1. He doesn’t like his name.
Kenneth Clarke, named after his father, also has a son named Kenneth Clarke. “I had to put up with it, so I had to do the same thing to my son,” he said. He has always preferred Ken: “I still sign myself as Kenneth, as habit. When you start in politics you try to make yourself sound important and Kenneth sounds better,” he said, “but nobody ever called me Kenneth in my life.”
2. He grew up ‘in DH Lawrence country’ but doesn’t read fiction.
Clarke grew up in Langley Mill, on the border of Nottinghamshire – “DH Lawrence grew up on the hill next door”. Clarke’s father had friends who knew Lawrence, but regarded him as a prickle on their town’s history. Clarke called Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers “a marvellous book”, but doesn’t read novels: “It’s all history and biography.”
3. He decided which party to join after choosing a career in politics.
After Ken finished grammar school, he told everyone he would become an MP, “to startle them”, and joined “all the political parties” at Cambridge. After 18 months, he had become “quite conservative”, settling among a generation of soon-to-be MPs dubbed the “Cambridge mafia”. “We were in the privileged 10% of people, probably less, that would go to university,” he said. “We knew that we were going to get some of the glittering prizes of life, so we were all very professional.”
4. He passed the bar exam after two weeks’ study.
Talking about the hoops that young professionals face today, Clarke shared how he passed the bar exam to become a lawyer: “I borrowed a postal course that Michael Howard had used, spent a fortnight reading it, and went off and read the bar final,” he said. “That would deeply shock people now who safeguard standards in these areas, but a lot of the standards in these kind of professions are set by overly status-conscious trade unions.”
5. He believes in gender quotas.
“If all else fails, I think we will have to do it,” he said, on gender quotas in British politics. “The Conservative party is taking a painfully long time to get the balance right. The argument that the women who got in on a shortlist are somehow second-class is simply not true. Unless we really speed up the women coming in, I would personally advocate all-women shortlists.”
6. He still supports Britain joining the euro.
Clarke has consistently been pro-Europe – and still supports adopting the euro, despite the ongoing financial crisis in the eurozone.
“The problem is not the euro ... the British are obsessed with the damn euro. We wouldn’t be in this crisis if we had stuck to the Maastricht criteria,” he said. “But they broke every rule! I knew the [EU] finance minister and I said: ‘Why the hell have you let the Italians in?’ I got a whole lot of stuff about: ‘Oh, Imperial Rome, the birthplace of European civilisation ...’ That was the start of the rot.”
Letting countries such as Greece and Portugal enter “was a disaster”, he said, “but none of them went for it on quite the scale the British did – we made the Greeks look abstinent”.
7. He expected to retire in 1997.
“I was the oldest politician by a street,” he said, referring to when he first failed to win the Conservative party leadership in 1997. “I didn’t expect I would ever be a minister again.” He’s happy now. “Frankly I think I can cope better with one job, being a member of parliament. I do find that not having red boxes at night is a pleasure. Normality was to pour a large brandy, light a big cigar and settle down with a red box at 11 o’clock at night. These days I pour a large brandy and light a big cigar, but I settle down with the Guardian or the Financial Times.”
8. He hopes UKIP won’t win more seats in the 2015 election.
“The triumph of Farage is to conflate the immigration issue, which is a serious issue, with Europe,” he said. “To attribute all the problems caused by economic catastrophy, the failure to build enough houses, the failure to deal with an aging population – to suddenly attribute that to foreigners and immigration, has led to a worsening in the political debate. This is not a dull time, but a very alarming time in politics.”
9. He doesn’t agree with compulsory voting or voting at 16.
“Politicians should inspire you to vote, they should appeal to people. Having everybody voting to avoid a £25 fine is no way to solve public apathy,” Clarke said about compulsory voting. He’s also against votes for 16-year-olds, despite being a “highly political teenager. “I went veering from right to left; I didn’t have formed, settled views,” he said. “You must concede that all of us go through some period of adolescence and maturing before acquiring some world-weary wisdom.”
10. Despite their differences, he regards Thatcher as ‘the best politician’.
“Thatcher was the best politician I have ever witnessed,” he said, speaking fondly of their “terribly robust arguments”, despite her becoming “embittered” about Europe later on. “She never read a newspaper, she took no notice of political polls. She loved a damn good political row. She did not want my health reforms to come in and when they got in, she wanted to get rid of them. It was a hell of a government to be in, if you could stand the hassle,” he said, to laughter.
Ken Clarke was talking to Michael White. Find out about more upcoming Guardian Live events and how to sign up as a member.
