The Rt Hon Ken Clarke

I recently found copies of various magazines I edited from 1990-2002. It's a bit self indulgent I know but each Sunday for the next few weeks I'm posting some of the many interviews I did during that period. Subjects include Gyles Brandreth, Michael Winner and Felix Dennis. See Something for the weekend.

Last week I posted an interview with Tony Benn that took place in the summer of 2002 and was published in The Politico. In the spring of 2000 I interviewed Conservative MP and former Chancellor of the Exchequer Ken Clarke. In a long career – he was first elected as an MP in 1970 - he held another four Cabinet posts including Health Secretary under Margaret Thatcher. When I interviewed him 20 years ago it was for the Forest magazine Free Choice and Clarke was getting stick for being on the board of British American Tobacco. We met in his office overlooking Parliament Square and the first thing he did was light a cigar.

BAT’S LIFE

Rare among modern politicians, former Chancellor Ken Clarke not only smokes, he is happy to be photographed lighting up and even happier to talk about it. The fact that he is paid a substantial sum by British American Tobacco (BAT) may have something to do with it but, let’s be fair, Clarke has never hidden his lighter under a bushel.

Indeed, like many people, the Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke QC MP began smoking cigarettes when he was a teenager. He gave up when he became a pupil barrister and is now a steady cigar smoker, as I could tell from all the ashtrays in his splendid new office in Portcullis House where he enjoys a clear view of Parliament Square and the Palace of Westminster.

He is characteristically upbeat about his habit. ‘I enjoy smoking cigars. I smoke an ordinary brand by day and the odd Havana in the evening. That’s one of my pleasures.’

He knows there are health risks. ‘I always have. If I was told the health risk was much more dramatic than I believe it to be, although I don’t dismiss it, I’d give up, but I’ve done a bit of motor racing in my time and I think that’s probably more of a health risk. I do it because I enjoy it. I enjoy food, I enjoy drink in moderate quantities, and I think if I didn’t do those things I’d be a much more stressed individual in a very stressful job.’

The traditional smoke-filled room may be a thing of the past, but it wasn’t long ago that the-then Chancellor of the Exchequer was engaged in a battle far more serious than monetary policy. He eventually resolved his confrontation with fellow smoker Eddie George, Governor of the Bank of England, by having two ashtrays. Their meetings, he laughs, took place ‘in a very smoke-filled atmosphere’.

Today Clarke is increasingly worried about the smuggling of cigarettes because ‘I don’t think taxation should encourage criminality. If the Treasury was losing billions of pounds because people were cutting smoking for their health, that’s one thing, but they’re losing billions because black market cigarettes are taking more and more of the market.’

If he was in [Chancellor] Gordon Brown’s shoes, Clarke would reduce tobacco taxation. ‘But I understand the political difficulties. If you are in government you can’t upset the health lobby entirely and government has a legitimate role to play in informing people of the health risks and making them think about them. Somehow, we’ve got to persuade the health lobby that the policy is not fulfilling their intended purpose.’

If this sounds a bit rich coming from a man whose government initiated the tobacco tax escalator, you’re not alone. He bristles, however, when I suggest he’s being hypocritical. ‘Our government had plainly decided that our policy was to raise the price in order to get people to think more seriously about the health hazards. It means that we were really contemplating that one day our revenue might fall if the policy actually succeeded and we were quite braced for that.

‘The reason I am now critical is that we have started to lose revenue on a vast scale for the wrong reasons. It was never the policy that we should help smugglers, but with hindsight all those Budgets did more good to smugglers than they did to anybody else, and that’s why I think the [Blair] Government should revisit it because the policy is not achieving its declared objective. There’s no hypocrisy. It was just a failure to have the policy produce the desired results.’

Health and taxation aside, Clarke insists he is and always has been a libertarian. ‘I believe in the title of your magazine, Free Choice. I think the Government has a duty to tell the public honestly and genuinely what the health risks are, so long as they’re based sound scientific evidence, and thereafter adults are free to make their own minds up.

‘I think a democratic society is a tolerant society and people are free to make their own choice about their lifestyle, and I probably take more risks when I drive my car than I do when I’m smoking a cigar inside a car.’

This, says Clarke, is the reason he’s a right of centre rather than a left of centre politician. ‘I disapprove of all these attempts to interfere in people’s lifestyles. I’m not an interventionist and I do think that there are areas of people’s lives which lie outside politics.’

Surprisingly for a committed Europhile who some Conservatives believe has been deeply treacherous for sharing a pro-euro platform with the likes of Tony Blair, Clarke opposes tax harmonisation. ‘I used to argue there was a case for approximating taxes on tobacco, alcohol and diesel. I thought that tax competition would make us move closer together towards the lower levels of tax as governments found they were losing out by having higher levels of tax than their neighbours. But it just hasn’t worked with tobacco because our policy is so dramatically different from that of our neighbours that moved even further apart.’

The euro isn’t the only issue on which he and the present Tory leadership disagree. Although he seems relaxed about the prospect, Clarke is opposed to the proposed ban on tobacco advertising and sponsorship. ‘I’ve never believed that tobacco advertising causes people to take up smoking. Teenagers take up smoking for a variety of reasons but it isn’t because they’re seen the slogan on the motor car and our government resisted all pressure for tobacco advertising to be banned throughout our entire [18-year] period in office.’

He is even less enthusiastic about the Tories’ extraordinary plan to target young adults who smoke. ‘In an age where we’re more liberal in our attitude towards the behaviour of young people than we’ve ever been, and in a society which positively encourages young people to do all kinds of crazy things, it seems utterly bizarre to single out tobacco as something which you don’t allow them to make their own responsible choice about. I personally would stick to the division between people who are under 18 and those who are 18 and over and when people are adult they are as ready to make an informed choice about smoking as anybody else.’

Defending his decision to work for British American Tobacco he juts out his chin and says he was pleased to be approached and that ‘It would have been rather hypocritical of me to suddenly decide there was some reason why I shouldn’t join BAT when I’d been quite open in my views on tobacco and smoking over the years. If I felt any doubts about working in the industry I wouldn’t work in it.’

He is dismayed however that [Labour] Government shows little sign of wanting to speak to the industry. As for the Health Select Committee, it was described by BAT’s Martin Broughton as a ‘kangaroo court’, which is probably unfair to kangaroos. Nevertheless, as one who was also questioned by this bizarre bunch of backbenchers, I knew what he meant.

‘If you are trying to tackle these problems in a responsible and balanced way it’s an advantage to work with the people who know the tobacco market best, and that is the tobacco companies, and if the Government were to refuse to have any dealings with us and to rely solely on the views of extremist campaigners they will get a very peculiar view of what goes on. I do prefer common sense to the zealotry of single issue campaigners.’

Talking of which, even this most laidback of politicians is puzzled by the persistence of the more extreme anti-smokers. An incident in the Rocky Mountains sticks in his memory. ‘There were probably more bears than people when a middle-aged American woman, who I could see in the distance some three or four hundred yards away, scrambled over rocks, through brambles, and said would I warn her if I was going to smoke again because it gave her migraine. She must have been using binoculars to see that I was smoking so I think her migraine had more to do with her state of mind than it had to do with my cigar.’

He may be pig-headed on some issues but we need more politicians like Kenneth Clarke – people who smoke, drink, enjoy their food and are not ashamed to admit it. Better still, a politician who admits his policy was wrong. Now, if only he had done that when he was still in office.

Ken Clarke stood for the Conservative party leadership three times, in 1997, 2001 and 2005, losing each time. From 2017 to 2019 he was Father of the House of Commons, a title bestowed on the longest serving continuous member of the House. He stood down as an MP before the December 2019 election and has since been nominated for a peerage by Boris Johnson.