In the second of a series of interviews - Jeremy Hunt was first - Paul Goodman interviews the Shadow Secretary of State for Transport. Nick Herbert MP is next in the series.
I’m biased in favour of Theresa Villiers. Since MPs are meant to declare their interests, this should be made clear up front. She headed up our committee team for two successive finance bills when I was a Shadow Treasury Minister. These bills are hard pounding: detailed, technical and laborious.
Theresa, almost brand new in the Commons (“seven months in”, she reminds me later) was extremely considerate, led the team adeptly, and seemed to have an inexhaustible appetite for the arcane details of capital gains, real estate investment trusts and profit share agencies. She was a sympathetic mixture of steel and hesitancy. What on earth, I used to wonder, does she do in her spare time - if she has any? What makes her tick? Now I’m about to try to find out.
She sweeps into Portcullis House wearing a grey trouser suit and large-beaded purple necklace (the finer fashion details escape your correspondent), and clutching a can of red bull caffeine – “breakfast”, she explains. The commentators seem to be a bit divided about Theresa. Some would take the red bull accessory as a potential trademark, viewing her as a tough lady – a second Thatcher in the making. She certainly came to Commons with a terrific reputation as a Euro-sceptic. Others would quarrel with this assessment, seeing her as a bit too unpushy to sharp-elbow her way to the top of the table.
I find evidence for both views. What about the criticism that the high speed rail network is a gimmick, I ask, a bit of green window-dressing for the consumption of Liberal Democrat voters?
Theresa champs at the bit, and comes back at me: “It’s not green window-dressing. We passionately believe that high speed rail yields huge economic benefits. You just have to look at Lille. For years, it was a dead-end place. For years, it had considerably higher unemployment than the French average. It fought hard to get on the TVG network and has been totally transformed by the regeneration benefits.”
Transport, like those finance bills, is a hard grind: a real wonks’ brief with no shortage of vested interests and noisy lobbies. If Theresa becomes Secretary of State, I put it to her, she’ll be the unluckiest one in history, because transport needs infrastructure, infrastructure needs spending – and there’ll be a drastic tightening of budgets during the next Parliament.
“We are going to have to learn to do more for less, there’s no doubt about that,” she says. “There’s no doubt that there will be difficult decisions to be made. But we’re working hard on solutions which will make a difference to people’s everyday lives which won’t break the bank.”
As she spells them out, these solutions sometimes seem to be reliant on the goodwill of others. Sure, there are some populist policies: giving the rail regulator the power to confiscate the bonuses of senior managers, stopping funding for fixed speed cameras (though only for new ones). But ensuring, for example, that buses are able to move more people – “it’s more important than ever that we use the road space we have much better” – is to some degree out of the hands of the Department of Transport, because it’s partly in the hands of local authorities.
“For many people, the bus is the only available public transport. I’d like to build on successful partnerships between local authorities and bus companies which have dramatically improved services, making them more reliable.” I find myself thinking not only that some of Theresa’s plans are dependent on others right from the start, but that she’s very unlikely to be in office by the time they finish. For example, we want high speed rail eventually to run all the way to Leeds. The deadline for completion could be as far away as 2027 – or further. Transport works in long time-spans.
Theresa turns out to be a mixture of easy fluency on her brief and extreme caution off it. At one point she self-deprecatingly notes “my anorak tendencies…which you may recall from our days together on the finance bill”. Perhaps it’s inevitable, with only a few weeks to go until the election, that Shadow Secretaries of State display what could be called – apologies for the transport metaphor – tunnel vision. When I go off-piste to ask her what she thinks about liberal internationalism, she says, rather vaguely: “Oh, the neo-con stuff…I’m afraid that I’m a bit focused on trains.” (But she has become “more reluctant to become involved in these sorts of overseas adventures”.)
How did she get involved in politics in the first place? “I wanted to make a difference,” she says, carefully, referring back to her original University involvement with the Party at Bristol. (She bagged a first in law.) Then she branches out, citing “belief in individual freedom, belief in the market…I grew up during the 1970s watching the country going to the dogs, and then grew older during the 1980s watching Margaret Thatcher putting it back together again.”
I’m working my way round to finding out what she does when not toiling over paperwork. “You know I don’t have spare time,” she comes back, but is smiling this time. I float a vague memory of having read about her going to Glastonbury. “Yes, that’s right, I do go to the odd music festival. I’ve never been to Glastonbury when it hasn’t been muddy.” So what’s she listening to at the moment? “Kings of Leon.” As so often, I’m out of touch. To me, Leon is a former EU Trade Commissioner. I search them out later on You Tube and discover something called “Sex on fire”.
What’s she reading? Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel’s novel, five years in the making, about the rise of Thomas Cromwell. “I started, gave it up, and then went back to it. After a while you get into the mindset of the author. It’s an interesting book for a politician.” I gather that the title is an allusion to an old Latin saying: “Man is wolf to man.” That’s an interesting saying for a politician, too – though not one that this possible future Transport Secretary, arguably on the verge of office, certainly faced with hard decisions and little money, seems to want to live by.