Michael Portillo
Michael Denzil Xavier Portillo is a British journalist, broadcaster, and retired politician. His broadcast series include railway documentaries such as Great British Railway Journeys and Great Continental Railway Journeys. A former member of the Conservative Party, he was Member of Parliament for Enfield Southgate from 1984 to 1997 and Kensington and Chelsea from 1999 to 2005, holding a number of ministerial and Cabinet positions.
Portillo obtained a first-class degree in history from the University of Cambridge, having been a student at Peterhouse. He began his working life as a graduate trainee with the transport company Ocean Group plc, before joining the Conservative Research Department in 1976. First elected to the House of Commons in a 1984 by-election, Portillo served as a junior minister under both Margaret Thatcher and John Major, before entering the Cabinet in 1992 as Chief Secretary to the Treasury. He was promoted to Secretary of State for Employment in 1994. A Thatcherite and a Eurosceptic, he was seen as a likely challenger to Major during the 1995 Conservative leadership election, but did not stand, and was subsequently promoted to Secretary of State for Defence. As Defence Secretary, he pressed for a course of "clear blue water": purist policies separating the Conservatives from the Labour Party.
Portillo unexpectedly lost the theretofore safe Conservative Enfield Southgate seat at the 1997 general election. This led to the coining of the expression "Portillo moment". Returning to the Commons in the 1999 by-election in Kensington and Chelsea, Portillo rejoined the frontbench as Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer. Standing for the leadership of the party in 2001, he came in third place behind Iain Duncan Smith and Kenneth Clarke. He retired from the House of Commons and from active politics at the 2005 general election.
Since leaving politics, Portillo has pursued his media interests by presenting and participating in a wide range of television and radio programmes. Portillo's passion for steam trains led him to make the BBC documentary series Great British Railway Journeys, beginning in 2010, in which he travels the British railway networks, referring to various editions of Bradshaw's Guide. The success of the show led Portillo to present series about railway systems in other countries. In 2022 he began to present a political show Portillo for the British news channel GB News.
Early life
Portillo was born in Bushey, Hertfordshire, on 26 May 1953 to an exiled Spanish republican father, Luis Gabriel Portillo and a Scottish mother, Cora Waldegrave de Portillo. Portillo's father, a devout Catholic, was a member of left-wing movements in the 1930s and fled Madrid when it fell to General Franco in 1939, settling in England. He became head of the London Diplomatic Office of the Government in Exile in 1972. Portillo's maternal grandfather, John Waldegrave Blyth, was a prosperous linen manufacturer from Kirkcaldy, who left an art collection worth millions to the Kirkcaldy Galleries.Portillo was registered as a Spanish citizen at the age of four, and in accordance with Spanish naming customs his Spanish passport names him as Miguel Portillo Blyth. Portillo's now well-known "love affair with trains" started when he was a youth. He owned a clockwork train set, and envied friends who had electric ones. Additionally, his mother took him on 13-hour trips from London to Kirkcaldy aboard a steam-hauled night train, the Starlight Special, to visit his British grandparents, and he had summer holidays on the Isle of Wight, where he "loved" the steam railway between Ryde and Ventnor.
In 1961, aged 8, Portillo appeared in a television advertisement for Ribena, a blackcurrant cordial drink. He was educated at Stanburn Primary School in Stanmore, Greater London, and Harrow County School for Boys and was awarded a scholarship to Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he studied history. While at school Portillo had supported the cause of the Labour Party; he attributed his embrace of conservatism at Cambridge to the influence of the right-wing Peterhouse historian Maurice Cowling.
Marriage
In 1982, Portillo married Carolyn Claire Eadie.Political career (1984–2005)
Portillo graduated in 1975 with a first-class degree in history, and, after a brief stint with Ocean Transport and Trading Ltd., a shipping and transport company, he joined the Conservative Research Department in 1976. Following the Conservative victory in 1979, he became a government adviser to David Howell at the Department of Energy. He left to work for Kerr-McGee Oil between 1981 and 1983. In the 1983 general election, he fought his first electoral contest, in the Labour-held seat of Birmingham Perry Barr, losing to the incumbent Jeff Rooker.Election
Portillo returned to advisory work for the government, and, in December 1984, he stood for and won the Enfield Southgate by-election, following the death of the incumbent, Sir Anthony Berry, in the bombing of the Grand Hotel, Brighton by the IRA. Initially, he was a Parliamentary Private Secretary to John Moore, and then an assistant whip.In government
In 1987, Portillo was given his first ministerial post, as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Social Security; the following year, he was promoted to Minister of State for Transport. Portillo has stated that he considers "saving the Settle to Carlisle railway" to be his greatest achievement. He was a strong supporter of Margaret Thatcher.In 1990, Portillo was appointed Minister of State for Local Government, in which post he argued in favour of the ultimately highly unpopular Community Charge system. He demonstrated a consistently right-of-centre line and was favoured by Norman Tebbit and Margaret Thatcher, who said of him "e expect great things of you, do not disappoint us". His rise continued under John Major; he was made a Cabinet Minister in 1992 as Chief Secretary to the Treasury and was admitted to the Privy Council the same year. He subsequently became Secretary of State for Employment, and then Secretary of State for Defence.
File:Peter Abbot, Michael Portillo and William J. Perry.jpg|thumb|right|Portillo with Admiral Sir Peter Abbott and US Defence Secretary William J. Perry aboard HMS Illustrious in 1996
As Defence Secretary, Portillo became the object of criticism when he invoked the motto of the SAS, "Who Dares, Wins", at a speech at the 1995 Conservative Party annual conference. In 1996 his ministry undertook the sale of the entire stock of Ministry of Defence housing for military personnel to Annington Homes. His high profile led to constant attention from the media, including Private Eye, which mockingly referred to him as "Portaloo". He was accused of vanity when Alexandra Palace was hired to celebrate his ten years in politics.
Some saw the Defence Secretary post as a reward for Portillo's cautious loyalty to Major during the 1995 leadership challenge of John Redwood, following Major's "back me or sack me" resignation as party leader. Many urged Portillo, the "darling of the right", to run against Major. He declined to enter the first round, but planned to challenge Major if the contest went to a second round. To this end, he set up a potential campaign headquarters, with banks of telephone lines. He later admitted that this had been an error: "I did not want to oppose , but neither did I want to close the possibility of entering a second ballot if it came to that." Portillo acknowledged that "ambiguity is unattractive" and his opponents within the party later used Portillo's apparent equivocation as an example of his indecisiveness; "I appeared happy to wound but afraid to strike: a dishonourable position."
1997 election defeat
Portillo's loss of the Enfield Southgate seat, in the 1997 general election to Labour's Stephen Twigg, came as a shock to many politicians and commentators, and came to symbolise the extent of the Labour landslide victory. Halfway through the campaign, Portillo invited aides Andrew Cooper and Michael Simmonds to his house and presented them with some ideas for a leadership campaign following the expected Conservative defeat and asked them to finish it off. However, when a poll in The Observer on the weekend before the election showed that Portillo held only a three-point lead in his hitherto-safe seat, Portillo asked Cooper, who oversaw the party's internal polling, to reassure him that it was wrong; Cooper was unable to and Portillo began to think that he might lose.He was interviewed by Jeremy Paxman on election night, prior to the result being called in his own seat. Paxman opened the interview with the question "so Michael, are you going to miss the limo?"—a reference to the expectation that the Conservatives were headed for defeat and thus he would no longer be a Minister. Portillo was then asked "are we seeing the end of the Conservative Party as a credible force in British politics?". He has since revealed that, prior to the interview, he had already come to believe he had lost his seat:
Portillo's defeat represented a 17.4% swing to Labour. Symbolising the loss of the election by the Conservative Party, it has been referred to as "the Portillo moment", and in the cliché "Were you up for Portillo?" In 2010, Portillo wrote: "I had hoped for something better than Were You Still Up for Portillo? Now I feel lucky to have been ejected. I discovered that there is life and livelihood outside Westminster."
Return to Parliament
Following the election, Portillo renewed his attachment to Kerr-McGee, but also undertook substantial media work, including programmes for the BBC and Channel 4. In an interview with The Times given in 1999, Portillo said that "I had some homosexual experiences as a young person." A few weeks after he had given that interview, the death of Alan Clark gave Portillo the opportunity to return to Parliament, despite Lord Tebbit accusing Portillo of lying about the extent of his sexual "deviance", and similar comments from an associate included in a profile of Portillo in The Guardian newspaper. He comfortably won the by-election in late November 1999 to represent Kensington and Chelsea, traditionally one of the safest Conservative seats.On 1 February 2000, William Hague promoted Portillo to the Shadow cabinet as Deputy Leader and Shadow Chancellor. On 3 February, Portillo stood opposite the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, in the House of Commons for the first time in his new role. During this session, Portillo declared that a future Conservative government would enhance the independence of the Bank of England and increase its accountability to Parliament, and that it would not repeal the national minimum wage.