Andrew Gimson profiles Danny Alexander, the Coalition pillar who might yet succeed Nick Clegg

 

By Andrew Gimson 
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Danny Alexander has the gift of seeming entirely unthreatening. In the summer of 2010, when at the age of 38 he unexpectedly became Chief Secretary to the Treasury, it appeared he might also turn out to be entirely ineffectual.

His predecessor, David Laws, had the air of a brilliant young surgeon who was looking forward to making the deep cuts in public spending which were needed to save us from collapse. Mr Laws knew precisely how he was going to conduct the operation, but no sooner had he made the first stylish incisions with his scalpel than he was forced by a scandal to do with his own expenses to resign.

Mr Alexander was the emergency replacement. It was not clear he had ever held a scalpel, or knew anything about money. For while Mr Laws was a former investment banker, Mr Alexander was a former Head of Communications for the Cairngorms National Park Authority.

It is true that Mr Alexander had also served as Nick Clegg’s chief of staff, and as one of the small team of Liberal Democrat negotiators who formed the coalition with the Conservatives in the five days after the 2010 general election. But to the wider world, these did not look like adequate qualifications for the herculean task of bringing public spending back under control.Mr Alexander looked and sounded amiable, but it also seemed possible that he would find himself out of his depth. In the Commons, to which he had only been elected in 2005, his first  performances as Chief Secretary were unimpressive. His public manner was hard to read. As I wrote of him at the Liberal Democrat conference in September 2010:

“His rhetoric has a soothing, not to say underwhelming quality. ‘We inherited a country in the danger zone. We have taken it to the safe zone. We have to keep it there.’ In another life, one can imagine Mr Alexander as a bomb disposal expert: a man doing something terribly risky who pretends it is utterly routine.”

Three years on, the Tories are no longer in any doubt about Mr Alexander. As one of them put it to me this week, “He doesn’t really sound like a Liberal, he really doesn’t.” It is not that Mr Alexander has sold out: a few days ago he ensured that the coalition will accept the European Arrest Warrant, a decision many Tories find highly distressing. But on the central and immensely tough question of deficit reduction, which could by now have broken the coalition, they find him an intelligent, hard-working, knowledgeable and level-headed person to deal with. It is true that he has defects: he is a convinced pro-European and Liberal Democrat. But these are intellectual rather than moral  defects. It is also true that the deficit remains alarmingly high: much higher than it was supposed to be by now. But a blame game has not broken out between the coalition partners.

When Mr Alexander appeared on Tuesday of this week in front of the Treasury select committee to discuss public spending, the accompanying official, Sharon White, did not have to supply any of the detail required to respond to the very wide range of questions. Andrew Tyrie, the committee’s chairman, suggested that in order to bring the recent public spending round to a successful conclusion, Mr Alexander had been “pretty ruthless”: he settled with some departments “and then showed the instruments of torture to the rest of them”.

Mr Alexander replied: “I’m not sure about instruments of torture. I think that’s over-dramatising it.” He added that he had “tried to be as straightforward as possible with colleagues about the amount of savings that we’re looking for”, and had not employed the stratagem of demanding twice as much as he expected to get.

Plain dealing at the heart of government! How can one write an even faintly interesting profile about a man who is prepared to stoop to that sort of behaviour? In Mr Alexander’s case, a good place to begin is with his maiden speech, delivered in May 2005, soon after winning the seat of Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey. As is conventional, he paid tribute to his predecessor, David Stewart, a Labour man: “He was understated, industrious and gentlemanly”. The word that leaps out here is “gentlemanly”. It is clearly not used in any social or snobbish sense, but as a purely moral term of approval.

Mr Alexander ended his speech by quoting “words that still hold true today” from John Buchan’s autobiography, Memory Hold-the-Door, published in 1940:

“Here our surface ribaldry covers a sincere respect, and in recent years, when parliamentary
government has been overthrown elsewhere, I think we have come to cherish ours more than ever. Public life is regarded as the crown of a career, and to a young man it is the worthiest ambition. Politics is still the greatest and most honourable adventure.”

Buchan was a Unionist, as Conservatives were known north of the border, though towards the end of his life he felt he was “becoming a Gladstonian Liberal”. Nor does this exhaust the elements in the speech to delight those of us of a traditional frame of mind. For as Mr Alexander revealed, it turns out that he is a hereditary Liberal, which to some of us makes that allegiance considerably less objectionable: “My mother tells me that, when I was three months old, my grandfather was seen rocking me in my pram and saying, ‘Repeat after me: “I am a member of the Liberal Party”.'”

Mr Alexander is a first-generation Highlander. He was born in Edinburgh, but when he was two his parents decided they wished to lead a more bohemian life and moved to the island of Colonsay. His father, Di (short for Dion), has recalled that from an early age, Danny had an eye and indeed ear for detail: "Danny could recognise every vehicle on Colonsay by its sound alone. When it went past the house, he'd be able to tell you who it was."

The family in due course returned to the mainland, and Danny was educated at Lochaber High School in Fort William, whose former pupils include Charles Kennedy, leader of the Liberal Democrats from 1999-2006.  

From Lochaber he won a place to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at St Anne’s College, Oxford. PPE has become the favoured degree of our political class, but only a trickle of people arrive at Oxford from Scottish comprehensive schools. Even fewer share Mr Alexander's love of playing cricket.

At Oxford, Mr Alexander became great friends with Mark Littlewood, who went on to become Head of Media for the Liberal Democrats and is now Director General of the Institute of Economic Affairs. Mr Littlewood says of Mr Alexander: “He and I share a political hero, Lyndon Baines Johnson, the greatest politician of the latter half of the 20^th century. We were both in awe of Johnson. In 1996 we travelled round Texas visiting the important places where LBJ had been, using Robert Caro’s first two books about him as guides. We drove to Cotulla, which is at the arse end of nowhere, where LBJ went to teach in 1928.”

Mr Littlewood is not surprised that his friend has turned out to be, as Chief Secretary, a deputy capable of working in harmony with the Chancellor: “Danny Alexander is the best number two human being the human race has ever created. He was a brilliant number two when he worked for the European Movement, he was a brilliant number two to Nick Clegg and now he is a brilliant number two to George Osborne.”

According to Mr Littlewood, Mr Alexander’s political antennae “are really superb”, enabling him “to spot the opportunity two years before anyone else”, after which he puts in the graft. This was why Mr Alexander got his much mocked job at the Cairngorms National Park Authority: far from being a sign of limited ability or ambition, it was part of an astute plan to become MP for the vast constituency, 1,911 square miles in extent, of Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey, a seat with a new name and boundaries but an old and strong Liberal tradition. 

In late 2009, Mr Alexander made the similarly astute suggestion to Mr Clegg that they set up a secret team which would be ready to conduct whatever negotiations might be required to form a
coalition were the Liberal Democrats to hold the balance of power after the 2010 general election.

Mr Alexander, it emerges, is a man who is good at thinking ahead. At the Treasury, he has implemented measures such as a VAT discount for ski lifts, a five pence per litre fuel discount for remote islands, and an eight per cent increase in funding for Gaelic television. The fuel discount applies to the island of Skye, even though this is linked to the mainland by a bridge. Skye might one day form a precedent for cutting fuel duty in other remote rural areas, some of which are to be found in Mr Alexander’s own seat. Measures like this are not for the politically faint-hearted: some necessitate getting the agreement of the other 27 members of the European Union.

So when Mr Alexander claims not to have time to think whether he might one day become leader of the Liberal Democrats, we can be confident that this is utter nonsense. Men and women of much less ability than him have been known to wonder whether they might one day lead their parties. Mr Alexander has already risen within a few years to become one of the pivotal figures in British politics. He was at the heart of the coalition talks in 2010, is now at the heart of government and can be expected to be at the heart of any coalition talks which occur in the immediate aftermath of the next general election. Just as he has worked with the Tories, so he would be quite capable of working with Labour.

It is true that Mr Alexander's only moment of even mild notoriety came when he was called a ginger rodent by Harriet Harman: an insult for which she subsequently felt obliged to apologise, even though it was clearly part of a joke. There is now a beer called Ginger Rodent, brewed in Mr Alexander’s constituency and served in the Strangers’ Bar at the House of Commons.

Mr Alexander has never yet given a speech which reached a wider audience, but that is not the role of a Chief Secretary. As he himself wryly observed earlier this week, Chief Secretaries can have various fates in later life. John Major became Prime Minister, while Jonathan Aitken (a man of greater intellectual vitality with a more adventurous spirit) went to prison. Political parties do not always choose risk-takers to lead them. Sometimes they feel happier being led by a gentleman of acknowledged probity and competence.

 Mr Alexander’s chances of becoming just such a leader are greater than is yet recognised. No wonder Vince Cable was the last minister to settle in the recent spending round. Mr Cable is canny enough to detect in the far younger Mr Alexander a most dangerous rival.

Comments

[robertnow]

Anybody would be an improvement on the awful Nick Clegg.

[adrian clarke]

From what little I have seen from a great distance, I have continuously thought there is something special bout Mr Alexander. He always appears to have a boyish competency, without needing to be arrogant or agressive

[Janet]

Out of the frying pan and into the fire!!!

This man is totally without real experience in the business world. Six months as a pr man with the Cairngorm National Park certainly does not afford him any real background.

Mr Alexander is also a dab hand of using others to achieve his ends, added to the fact he has a very good marketing team. Ask those in the Highlands who watched him turn up for a photograph opportunity then lay claim to having solved their problems! Cant see him winning the seat in the next election as most in his constituancy feel betrayed by him.
He and his party are only self serving.

[Sandy Jamieson]

" Six months as a pr man with the Cairngorm National Park certainly does not afford him any real background" Probably about as challenging as Communications Director for Carlton Communications whatever that means while it looks like the Chancellor's never had a proper job-always a researcher

[HYUFD]

No, after Clegg the LDs will go left, probably Farron

[Dave Bush]

Coalition pillar? Coalition pillock more like. Beaker should join the tories, his natural home.

[clinihyp]

If this bombastic filibustering evasive person who rejoices in pensioner bashing comes to lead what is left of this sad pathetic bunch of hypocrites, he will lead them into the abyss of extinction!

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