By Andrew Gimson
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Three weeks ago today, an obscure Conservative backbencher learned that by pure chance, he had become a figure of national interest. James Wharton, MP for Stockton South and at the age of 29 the youngest Tory in the House of Commons, described how he heard the news: “It was a one-line whip, Thursday, I was just leaving my flat in London to go to my constituency and I was wearing casual clothes to travel and looking forward to getting back up north, and the phone rang and someone from the BBC just said: “Congratulations, Mr Wharton.”
Of the 440 MPs who had entered the private members’ ballot, Mr Wharton (pictured here in front of the Infinity Bridge in Stockton) had come first. He had won the right to introduce a piece of legislation, and had to decide very quickly what it was going to be. The widespread assumption was that he would seize the chance to introduce a Bill providing for the holding by 2017 of a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. This Bill is meant to persuade restive Tory Eurosceptics that they can believe David Cameron’s promise of a referendum.
Mr Wharton quickly changed into a suit and returned to the Palace of Westminster: “I went over to the Whips’ Office and told them I was happy to do the Europe Bill. My phone was by now ringing off the hook: everybody was ringing me. I just stopped answering it. The only person I contacted was Chris who worked in my office here and took on the role of organising media for the day, just going from camera to camera. I did about 12 camera interviews answering almost exactly the same questions. It was manic, and didn’t stop until about 2.00pm, when David Beckham announced he was retiring. The only interview I did after that was for Look North [a regional television programme].”
The fact that Beckham drove him off the news channels illustrates something Mr Wharton already knew, namely that for most people the European issue is not of consuming interest. As Mr Wharton observed during this interview: “I make no secret of the fact that I think the party needs to stop talking about things that matter to politicians, but not so much to the electorate. Yes, we need to resolve the issue of Europe, it matters, is important, it matters to a significant proportion of people but there are also people out there to whom it does not matter and we need to be talking about things that engage them as well. I think we need to focus relentlessly on the things that matter to the broadest base of my constituents – cost of living, jobs, the economy, and actually we’ve got a good message on a lot of those things. In the north-east, where salaries are lower than the national average, the lifting of the personal allowance and taking people out of income tax disproportionately benefits people in constituencies like mine.”
I suggested to Mr Wharton that since what we are trying to defend is parliamentary democracy, and since the whole European issue is highly complicated, there is a lot to be said for letting it be decided by Parliament rather than by referendum.
He replied: “I think that normally that’s the case, for most things I agree, but the starting point is that our relationship with Europe was ratified by referendum in 1975, and the thing that people were then asked to vote on was very different from the European Union that we have today. I think the British people have to be given the opportunity to renew their consent or not to renew their consent. I think it’s an opportunity for Conservative MPs to get behind a very clear position on Europe and a unified position, and this vexed issue can one way or the other be put to bed.”
If an in-out referendum were held today, how would he vote?
Mr Wharton: “I would vote to leave today, but I don’t want a referendum today. It would be unfair on the British people to offer them a choice between the status quo and leaving when we have the opportunity to offer them something better. Now I don’t know what that something better will look like, but I think we should do everything we can to secure a better deal from Europe and then whatever that deal is put it to the people.”
On Friday 5 July, Mr Wharton will get the chance to introduce his Bill. He does not intend to speak at great length: “I don’t think you benefit from saying in a thousand words something that can be said in ten.” He hopes that by preserving a scrupulously moderate tone, he will make it easy for a number of Labour members to support his Bill: “Yes, some Labour MPs have indicated they want to support what we’re trying to do, I’m not going to divulge who at this time because obviously we’re in the very early stages.” He also hopes a few Liberal Democrats will support him, and observes that until quite recently they had pledged themselves to hold a referendum.
For a man of only 29 years of age, Mr Wharton is rather good at refusing to let himself be pushed around, and at declining to answer questions which he does not wish to answer. A caricature of the Duke of Wellington hangs above his desk in his Commons office, so I asked: “Is Wellington one of your heroes?”
Mr Wharton replied: “No, well I wouldn’t particularly say that. It was a gift.”
“OK, who are your heroes?”
“I don’t know the answer to that question. I knew you were going to ask that and I don’t particularly think that I have heroes. I admire what people do, not necessarily who they are.”
“So in that sense who do you admire in recent or indeed in distant history?”
“I hate this sort of question. I don’t have a really good answer to it.”
Just as I was preparing to abandon an unprofitable line of inquiry, Mr Wharton added: “If I could pick two people who are very different Conservative politicians, one was Harold Macmillan, who was one of my predecessors [as a Stockton MP]. He never forgot Stockton, hence taking the title [Macmillan became Earl of Stockton]. He used to continue to visit, he made a great Europe speech in Stockton which I think Michael Crick picked up on, a rather different view to the prevalent Eurosceptic view in the party today."
"And, um, Margaret Thatcher, because coming from the north-east, and being a Conservative in the north-east, there’s an accepted myth that Margaret Thatcher was bad for the region, that the Conservatives didn’t do anything for us. If you actually come to my constituency and visit it, nearly all the successful developments and areas of development came through the Teesside Development Corporation which was set up by Margaret Thatcher. Yet when you come to the north-east there’s an erroneous perception that Margaret Thatcher wasn’t popular there. But she won more seats in 1987, her last election year, than David Cameron won in 2010, she got five and he got two and she won ten per cent more of the vote than he got. Yes, there were some very difficult things the Conservatives had to do to transition us from being dependent on a small number of very large employers and old industries. They put in huge amounts of investment to allow that transition to take place. You look at the current trends, they’re actually quite positive, and the areas where they’re happening are the areas she invested in.”
Mr Wharton does not think Lady Thatcher’s reputation has improved in recent years: “I think in some parts of the north-east it’s got more widely negative, because the received wisdom’s become she was bad for the north-east. One of the things about being a Conservative MP in the north-east, the only Tory in the village up there, surrounded by Labour MPs, it means whenever they want a Conservative voice, I do quite a lot of regional TV, so I was doing all of the regional TV stations about Baroness Thatcher’s death, and I did what I thought was an appropriate tribute to someone who I thought made a great contribution to national life, and then the next day, I was on again doing the reaction to a number of the miners’ associations who say we’re going to have a party on the day of the funeral and this kind of thing. So there is a danger in the north-east that if we don’t make the Conservative case people will be allowed to believe the case our opponents make.”
The only other Tory MP in the north-east is Guy Opperman, who holds Hexham, an agricultural constituency “right at the other end of the region”, with a majority of 5,766. Mr Wharton enjoys describing his own seat of Stockton South as the second safest Tory seat in the region: at the age of only 26, he won it by 322 votes, overturning a Labour majority in 2005 of 6,139. He described how this happened: “I joined the party when William Hague was leader, I liked William, he said the sort of things that made sense to me.” Hague’s seat of Richmond lies south of Stockton, just over the border into Yorkshire.
Mr Wharton was born in his constituency and went to school there, at the independent Yarm School, before reading law at Durham and qualifying as a solicitor. “I’d have been 16 when I joined the Conservative Party. I got more involved in my local association in Stockton, became chairman of it and was heavily involved in the 2005 general election campaign. I liked the on-the-ground local campaigning because I understand the area: because it’s my home, I like to think I understand the people. I was fortunate enough to be selected as the prospective parliamentary candidate in 2007 and was then able to run a campaign as I wanted. In 2007 you would not necessarily have expected to win seats like Stockton South. In 2010 the national polls weren’t quite good enough to give us it, but we were on the right side of a number of important local issues and had fought a much stronger campaign than we had for many years, so we were confident that whatever the result would be we would do a little bit better than the national polls indicated.”
And what was it like arriving at Westminster as the youngest Conservative MP?
“It makes no difference whether you’re young or old. It’s a strange experience arriving here for anybody if you haven’t lived in the Westminster world, and you don’t get treated differently depending on your age Everybody here is elected to represent a constituency and has a sort of equal standing. The strange thing about arriving here was that although we were given a pass, a laptop, a BlackBerry and a 20 minute tour we were then basically left to our own devices, and you very quickly make friends, but you’ve got to find your own way around and make what you want of being an MP, and everybody does it differently, and I think that’s a brilliant thing about our system, because for all you get all politicians are the same these days, they’re actually not, there are different approaches.”
Stuck to the lofty ceiling of Mr Wharton’s office is a playing card, the six of clubs. It got there thanks to a trick performed by a magician called Archie Manners who worked last year as his researcher. But Mr Wharton struck me as a man who does not play tricks. It would be hard to think of a more reasonable Tory to try to steer the Referendum Bill onto the statute book.
