If Anna Soubry, the pro-EU Conservative MP for Broxtowe in Nottinghamshire, frequently resembles a magnificent galleon under full sail, her Remainer pal and East Midlands colleague Nicky Morgan brings to mind nothing so much as a dogged little tug. Stolid and resilient but distinctly unflamboyant, in the long weeks since “trousergate” – last December, she daringly suggested that Theresa May’s flashy £995 leather flares were not at all the kind of thing she’d be able to justify down the market in Loughborough – she has puttered along with deliberate quietness.
No, she is still not happy about Brexit. Yes, she does feel “bad for the next generation”. As a former education secretary, she is strongly opposed to the government’s plan to roll out grammar schools. Nevertheless, like every other Conservative MP save Ken Clarke, she meekly voted in favour of the bill to trigger article 50. (Her Loughborough constituency voted Leave.) Meanwhile, she and May, who post trousergate excluded her from a meeting at No 10, are once again, it seems, on speaks. So she’s off the prime ministerial blacklist? “I’m not sure she’s got hitlists,” she says, with a somewhat tin-eared straightness I’m going to have to get used to. “The impression I get from the PM is that she’s a head-down, get-on-with-it sort of person.” Morgan’s talk, late last year, of “insurgency” – “I’m revelling in being in the awkward squad,” she said. “I’m not prepared to suck up to anybody” – rings a bit hollow now.
Wasn’t it uncomfortable to rubber-stamp the Brexit bill, for her and her fellow Remain MPs to send it through to the Lords without a single amendment? Leaving aside the arguments – she insisted it was a matter of honouring the referendum result – didn’t her conscience put up even the tiniest fight? “Well, just because you walk through a lobby doesn’t mean there hasn’t been a lot of thought and debate,” she says. “It doesn’t mean you haven’t sought assurances. But yes, it was hard.”
And how will she live with herself should May fail to secure a trade deal with Europe, a situation, as George Osborne noted last week, that could be a death warrant for the British economy? “I said in my speech during the debate that I’ve never in my life felt such uncertainty. People say it’s an exciting time to be involved with politics, but I have to say I’d rather get my excitement another way.” She laughs.
Really, though, what are her limits? What would it take to induce her to be once again in the PM’s bad books by rebelling against the government? She hedges. She can’t tell me this because we don’t yet know what deal will be struck. However, a no-deal situation (for which ministers have indeed been told to prepare) could, she agrees, prove disastrous. “There are some people who would be quite happy for us to leave with no ongoing relationship with the EU,” she says. I have to be honest: she sounds jolly, not furious.
The atmosphere in the Commons just now is peculiar: at once febrile and weirdly monotonous. “I feel really quite sorry for those who were elected in 2015,” she says (Morgan became an MP in 2010, taking her Loughborough seat from Labour). “Nothing has been normal. First the referendum, then the change of prime minister. Usually, you’re not just debating one big topic. Now, though, everything comes back to the EU and Brexit. And because of the hopelessness of the opposition, we can’t rely on adversarial politics any more, either. It is a bit depressing. Triggering article 50 is only the end of the beginning and we haven’t even got the [Brexit] bill back from the Lords yet.” What would she like the Lords to do? “Brexit isn’t just about leaving the EU,” she says, a little bizarrely. “It’s also about rebuilding trust with the electorate. They’ll be conscious of their position as an unelected house. They aren’t the ones who have go out on doorsteps.”
After the referendum last summer, lots of decisions (too many, possibly) were taken very quickly (too quickly, almost certainly). Morgan claims not to have been surprised by the result itself – we’re back to Loughborough market again – but she knew immediately what the consequences would be. David Cameron, who had appointed her first a treasury minister and then secretary of state for education and minister for women, would have to resign.
She supported the leadership bid of Michael Gove, her predecessor at the Department for Education and one of those who ran the Leave campaign, for reasons I cannot fathom, given her position as a Remainer, but which possibly had to do with her desire to hang on to her job (“I supported him because he is a great social reformer,” she says vaguely. “And because I thought we needed someone who really ‘got’ Brexit.”) In the end, though, it was May who came through, the others falling by the wayside for myriad reasons I won’t repeat here, at which point, Justine Greening, the MP for Putney, took over at the Department for Education and Morgan returned to the backbenches.
Was she sad, disappointed? “I was very upset to leave. It’s a wonderful job and I think we were getting somewhere. I had a really strong vision [for the future]. But you have to accept that this is a weird working environment. You can’t put a request in, [ask to be considered] for the next round of promotions. You either get the call or you don’t. I had a quick rise, so not surprisingly I had a really quick fall from grace as well. Still, someone said to me: when you come to write the story of your life, no one’s going to want to see success after success.” But what does she make of those who did get big jobs? In particular, does she trust the likes of David Davies, Liam Fox and Boris Johnson to manage Brexit? Wouldn’t it have been better if May had appointed some sensible women to their posts instead?
First, she emits a kind of sigh. Then she laughs, almost wildly. “Well, yes… I do have confidence in the prime minister’s ability to organise things and therefore you have to have confidence in her ministers. If I have a concern, it’s that people put their own thoughts about Brexit ahead of what they’re actually hearing from interested parties. You can’t say: I don’t want to hear that because it’s negative.” Doesn’t she find it hard to talk to some colleagues now? “Yes, yes, absolutely. There are some friendships that have been put under tremendous strain. It is a very strange situation to be in the same party where on a fundamental issue like this people see things very differently. Europe has always been there as a fault line, but now it’s front and centre.”
(We meet, incidentally, on the day that John Major berates the government for its misleading optimism in the matter of Brexit and the next morning, at my request, she calls me to discuss it. What did she make of the ad hominem attacks on him by Iain Duncan Smith and Jacob Rees-Mogg? “It’s absolutely typical of the arch-Brexiters to attack the messenger,” she says. “They can’t help themselves.”)
Morgan grew up in Surbiton, Surrey, where she was head girl of her private school (though warmer than many politicians, her famed niceness still carries with it a strong whiff of the hockey pitch). She read law at Oxford University, qualified as a solicitor and began work in the City. Was she always a Tory? And wasn’t she, as a student, self-conscious about it? The rest of us, after all, were marching for housing benefit and organising women’s night buses. “I remember the women’s night bus!” she says, as if we were talking about our favourite TV shows. But no, she wasn’t embarrassed.
It was her father who suggested she go along to the young Conservatives; she joined the party in 1989, the year before she went to university. “I didn’t bang on about it, but everyone knew.” Lots of the people she knocked about with then are still her friends, including Daniel Hannan, the arch-Brexiter MEP, who beat her to become president of the Oxford University Conservative Association. Was she a wet or a Thatcherite? “I was a Thatcherite. But to be fair, I probably have changed my outlook. Life isn’t black or white, it’s all sorts of shades of grey.”
What did she make of the Commons when she arrived? Was it – is it – sexist? What was it Nicholas Soames did in the chamber the other day? “He was… woofing,” she says (Soames later apologised for having “woofed” at Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, an SNP MP). Actually, she seems not to have found it sexist. But she still felt like an impostor. “I’d tried for so long to get in [she stood twice for Loughborough, having first fought Islington South & Finsbury, a safe Labour seat] that I couldn’t believe I was there. I was very nervous of putting my bottom on the green benches.”
At the time, her son was two and a half – he and her architect husband live in Loughborough – and she worried about combining her various roles. But these days, she’s in London only two or three nights a week. “It’s easy to feel lonely. But I’m lucky. I’ve got a family and I speak to my husband every evening. One of the best things is the members’ tea room. It’s a mutually supportive society.” Is it? “No, really. You can sit down and say, ‘I’ve had a shocker of a day.’ People do want to help.”
She spends a lot of her time now visiting schools because – wait for it – she is writing a book about “character education”. Wow, I say. This is a far cry from Gove’s obsession with the subjunctive (and with endless tests, a preoccupation she appeared to share, and which made her unpopular with parents and teachers alike). Has the Blob – his term for the educational establishment – absorbed her? Has she, in fact, gone native? “Well, so what? Every child is entitled to an academic education. But resilience, stickability, self-esteem – they need these things, too, and even more than the privately educated.” Will grammar schools happen? “I don’t get a sense from No 10 that their mood has shifted. But I know a lot of the feedback from the consultation [on the education green paper] will not have been supportive.”
By now, my eyes are frantically scanning her Commons office. Where, I wonder, is her famous handbag, the £950 Mulberry number that made her jibe about Mrs May’s leather pants seem hypocritical as well as catty? (Morgan defended herself by explaining that it was 12 years old and a gift; when she then pulled out of an appearance on Have I Got News for You, she was replaced by a bag.) In one corner is a small, rather poignant-seeming, wheeled suitcase – the MP’s most reliable companion – and beside it is… oh. There it is, on a chair: a small, grey shoulder bag that doesn’t (not to be rude or anything) look very much to me like it came straight out of Prada.
Cue more hooting from its owner. Is she worried she will forever be associated with a handbag? Why didn’t she just go on the show and play along? “I thought it would be adding paraffin to a fire that had gone on too long already.” And does she blush slightly when she meets the PM now, those uncommonly luxuriant trousers floating, unbidden, into her mind? She won’t say, though she does look suddenly vaguely pinkish. As for the Private Eye Christmas cover featuring a nativity scene in which she could be seen, dressed as a shepherd, saying: “Leather looks good on a cow”, she seems rather proud of it. In fact, it’s she who brings it up. Is it framed and in her downstairs loo? “Exactly right, it is,” she says, with a wide smile. Make of that, Kremlinologists, what you will.
