Kenneth Clarke
Kenneth Harry Clarke, Baron Clarke of Nottingham is a British politician who served as Home Secretary from 1992 to 1993 and Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1993 to 1997. A member of the Conservative Party, he was Member of Parliament for Rushcliffe from 1970 to 2019, serving as Father of the House of Commons between 2017 and 2019. Clarke served in the Cabinets of Margaret Thatcher and John Major as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster from 1987 to 1988, Health Secretary from 1988 to 1990, and Education Secretary from 1990 to 1992. He held two of the Great Offices of State as Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer.
President of the Tory Reform Group since 1997, Clarke is a one-nation conservative who identifies with economically and socially liberal views. He contested the Conservative Party leadership three times—in 1997, 2001 and 2005—being defeated each time. Opinion polls indicated he was more popular with the general public than with his party, whose generally Eurosceptic stance did not chime with his pro-European views. Under the coalition government of David Cameron, Clarke returned to the Cabinet as Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor from 2010 to 2012 and Minister without Portfolio from 2012 to 2014. He was also the United Kingdom Anti-Corruption Champion from 2010 to 2014.
The Conservative Whip was withdrawn from him in September 2019 because he and 20 other MPs voted with the Opposition on a motion; for the remainder of his time in Parliament he sat as an independent, though still on the government benches. He stood down as an MP at the 2019 general election and was thereafter made a Conservative life peer in the House of Lords in 2020.
Clarke is president of the Conservative Europe Group, co-president of the pro-EU body British Influence, and vice-president of the European Movement UK. Described by the press as a 'Big Beast' of British politics, his total time as a minister is the fifth-longest in the modern era. He has spent over 20 years serving under Prime Ministers Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher, John Major and David Cameron. He was one of only five ministers to serve throughout the whole 18 years of the Thatcher-Major governments, which represents the longest uninterrupted ministerial service in Britain since Lord Palmerston in the early 19th century.
Early life and education
Kenneth Harry Clarke was born in Nottingham and was christened with the same name as his father, Kenneth Clarke, a mining electrician. The younger Clarke spent his early years in Langley Mill, Derbyshire. He won a scholarship to the independent Nottingham High School before going up to read law at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he graduated with an upper second honours degree. Clarke initially held Labour sympathies, and his grandfather was a Communist, but while at Cambridge he joined the Conservative Party.As Chairman of the Cambridge University Conservative Association, Clarke invited former British Fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley to speak for two years in succession, prompting some Jewish students to resign from CUCA in protest. Howard then defeated Clarke in one election for the presidency of the Cambridge Union, but Clarke became President of the Cambridge Union a year later, being elected on 6 March 1963 by a majority of 56 votes. Clarke opposed the admission of women to the Union, and is quoted as saying upon his election, "The fact that Oxford has admitted them does not impress me at all. Cambridge should wait a year to see what happens before any decision is taken on admitting them."
In an early-1990s documentary, journalist Michael Cockerell played to Clarke some tape recordings of him speaking at the Cambridge Union as an undergraduate, and he displayed amusement at hearing his then-stereotypical upper class accent. Clarke is deemed one of the Cambridge Mafia, a group of prominent Conservative politicians who were educated at Cambridge in the 1960s. After graduation, Clarke was called to the Bar in 1963 at Gray's Inn, being appointed Queen's Counsel in 1980.
Parliamentary career
Clarke sought election to the House of Commons almost immediately after Cambridge. His political career began by contesting the Labour stronghold of Mansfield at the 1964 and 1966 elections. In June 1970, just before his 30th birthday, he won the East Midlands constituency of Rushcliffe in Nottinghamshire, south of Nottingham, from Labour MP Tony Gardner.Clarke was soon appointed a Government Whip, and served as such from 1972 to 1974; he, with the assistance of Labour rebels, helped ensure Edward Heath's government won key votes on British entry into the European Communities. Even though Clarke opposed the election of Margaret Thatcher as Conservative Party Leader in 1975, he was appointed as her Industry Spokesman from 1976 to 1979, and then occupied a range of ministerial positions during her premiership.
From 2017 to 2019 he served as Father of the House. Following his expulsion from the Conservative Party in September 2019, he became the first Independent MP to hold the position of Father of the House since Clement Tudway, who died in office as MP for Wells in 1815.
Lord Clarke is the subject of a portrait in oil commissioned by Parliament.
Early ministerial positions
Clarke first served in the government of Margaret Thatcher as Parliamentary secretary for Transport and Parliamentary under-secretary of state for Transport, and then Minister of State for Health.Clarke joined the Cabinet as Paymaster General and Employment Minister , and served as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Minister of the DTI with responsibility for Inner Cities. While in that position, Clarke announced the sale to British Aerospace of the Rover Group, a new name for British Leyland, which had been nationalised in 1975 by the government of Harold Wilson.
Health Secretary (and aftermath)
Clarke was appointed the first Secretary of State for Health when the department was created out of the former Department of Health and Social Security in July 1988. Clarke, with backing from John Major, persuaded Thatcher to accept the controversial "internal market" concept to the NHS. Clarke claimed that he had persuaded Thatcher to introduce internal competition in the NHS as an alternative to her preference for introducing a system of compulsory health insurance, which he opposed.He told his biographer Malcolm Balen: "John Moore was pursuing a line which Margaret was very keen on, which made everything compulsory medical insurance. I was bitterly opposed to that...The American system is...the world's worst health service – expensive, inadequate and with a lot of rich doctors". In her memoirs, Thatcher claimed that Clarke, although "a firm believer in state provision", was "an extremely effective Health minister – tough in dealing with vested interests and trade unions, direct and persuasive in his exposition of government policy".
In January 1989, Clarke's White Paper Working for Patients appeared; this advocated giving hospitals the right to become self-governing NHS Trusts, taxpayer-funded but with control over their budgets and independent of the regional health authorities. It also proposed that doctors be given the option to become "GP fundholders". This would grant doctors control of their own budgets in the belief that they would purchase the most effective services for their patients. Instead of doctors automatically sending patients to the nearest hospital, they would be able to choose where they were treated. In this way, money would follow the patient and the most efficient hospitals would receive the greatest funding.
This was not well received by doctors and their trade union, the British Medical Association, launched a poster campaign against Clarke's reforms, claiming that the NHS was "underfunded, undermined and under threat". They also called the new GP contracts "Stalinist". A March 1990 opinion poll commissioned by the BMA showed that 73% believed that the NHS was not safe in Conservative hands. Clarke later claimed that the BMA was "the most unscrupulous trade union I have ever dealt with and I've dealt with every trade union across the board". Although Thatcher tried to halt the reforms just before they were introduced, Clarke successfully argued that they were necessary to demonstrate the government's commitment to the NHS. Thatcher told Clarke: "It is you I'm holding responsible if my NHS reforms don't work".
By 1994 almost all hospitals had opted to become trusts but GP fundholding was much less popular. There were allegations that fundholders received more funding than non-fundholders, creating a two-tier system. GP fundholding was abolished by Labour in 1997 and replaced by Primary Care Groups. According to John Campbell, by "the mid-1990s the NHS was treating more patients, more efficiently than in the 1980s...the system was arguably better managed and more accountable than before". Studies suggest that while the competition introduced in the "internal market" system resulted in shorter waiting times it also caused a reduction in the quality of care for patients.
Clarke has been the subject of criticism over the decades for his responsibility for the contaminated blood scandal. It was the largest loss-of-life disaster in Britain since the 1950s and claimed the lives of thousands of haemophiliacs. Theresa May ordered a public inquiry into the contaminated blood scandal in July 2017. In July 2021, Clarke gave oral evidence to the inquiry with his demeanour being widely branded "arrogant, pompous and contemptuous" by the press. It was reported that he argued with inquiry counsel, refused to apologise and at one point even walked out while the chairman, Sir Brian Langstaff, was speaking.
The MSF trade union claimed that Clarke's exclusion of NHS medical laboratory staff from the pay review body in 1984 led to massive staff shortages and a crisis in medical laboratory testing by 1999.