James Forsyth
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Sitting in his office, one can tell that Pickles loves the game of politics. In pride of place is a picture of Margaret Thatcher in full Elizabethan mode and below in a glass case are Toby Jugs of every postwar prime minister. Alongside the former PMs is a clutter of model rhinos. Pickles adopted the beast after it was remarked that he had ‘the charm of a charging rhinoceros’.
It is as well that David Cameron has someone at the department who is used to fighting over cuts because, from this week, local councils must live with government grants that are on average 7 per cent lower. Pickles is unapologetic about this. He thinks councils, and particularly the salaries of their executives, have grown too fat.
Warming to his theme, he declares that ‘in some parts of the country these are the new establishment. You go to a cocktail party, you are not going to bump into captains of industry, it’s hello, I’m the chief executive of the local health service, hello I’m the chief executive of the local council, hello I’m the chief executive of the local authority — these are the ruling elite. I mean damn it, all we need to do is give them a dacha and the revolution is complete. And those folks are on £230,000. Take a pay cut!’
To Pickles’s mind, those councils claiming that they are having to weaken vital services because of the cuts are talking nonsense. Councils slashing frontline services are doing so for political reasons, he says. ‘There are a number of Labour leaders who started out to make their way when they first joined in the 1980s and are trying to relive their youth when they were obviously younger and more attractive to women and they sort of try to fight the non-existent Thatcher. ’
Manchester City Council, which is laying off 17 per cent of its workforce, comes in for particular criticism. “Manchester seem to have gone out of their way to target the most vulnerable. Given their level of balances, given their appalling record of collecting council tax, given that their chief executive is on an enormous salary, why couldn’t they have followed the example of Sheffield – a similar kind of sized council – or Trafford, geographically quite close, which have sought to engage with the voluntary sector and have sought to protect the most vulnerable.” In Pickles’ opinion, Manchester Council is “revelling in the cuts, rather enjoying the process .”
Pickles believes that he has one particularly important weapon in this battle: transparency. He argues that the councils that are claiming there is no alternative to cuts to the frontline have ‘underestimated the public’. Now that councils must publish lists of all expenditure over £500, it is ‘much more clear’ where their money goes. With great delight, he points to several blogs that have used the new disclosure rules to expose inaccurate council claims about how much is having to be cut.
There is, though, one council that is holding out against this transparency drive: Nottingham City Council. Pickles is predictably dismissive. ‘Nottingham just looks silly, they just look ridiculous. I think there was agreement among a number of Labour leaders not to co-operate and everybody else folded except Nottingham, but they forgot to tell Nottingham that everyone else had surrendered. They were just left out there, a rather run-of-the-mill council with a no-hopers leadership, the same people have run it for years and they find themselves having to defend the indefensible.’
It would be wrong, though, to see Pickles as just a bruiser — a northern tough brought in to add grit to a soft, southern Cabinet — even if he does play up to this stereotype. He is
more of a political strategist than many of his colleagues. He’s keen to stress that ‘there isn’t that much difference between the cuts that we’re imposing and the cuts the
Labour party would have imposed, a couple of billion quid, if that’. He remarks, with typical dry humour, that ‘it was a lot easier working out the cuts because they had left
plans’.
Labour MPs who complain about the cuts receive short shrift. With a smile spreading across his face, Pickles tells us about one recent exchange across the floor of the House: ‘I had one
Labour MP, someone from the north-west, I’m not quite sure which constituency it is, jumping up and down saying I should be ashamed of myself [because of the cuts to area based grants]. I
said he was a class traitor, a class traitor because he had gone along with these cuts with Darling and was quite happy to sell the people out then. Now we were doing it, and we were at least
putting in a transitional arrangement which they weren’t, they should be supporting us.’
But Pickles’ opposite number, Caroline Flint, is someone he likes. He calls her ‘lovely’ and pays her half a compliment. ‘When she is concentrating she is a formidable
woman.’
In dealing with his department, Pickles has been a canny operator. When he decided, in one of the most controversial decisions of his tenure so far, to abolish the Audit Commission, he resolved
that the news would not leak. So Pickles and his special advisers talked in code to ensure that no one else knew what was coming.
In all documents the Audit Commission was replaced by ‘Victoria Sponge’ and auditing by baking. Pickles’ explains the rather odd choice of words by saying that if you were simply
going to use search and replace in a document, you can’t have something that might make sense.’
The ruse, as Pickles proudly tells us, worked. News of the Audit Commission’s abolition came completely out of the blue to the Commission and the press.
When the interview turns to Pickles’s hinterland, he becomes slightly uncomfortable, shifting his weight around in his chair. Asked if he believes in miracles, he tries to brush the question
away by saying, ‘Well you’re here’, before adding, in typical Pickles’ style, a quick quip: ‘I believe that the lamb can lay down with the lion, providing you’ve
got a lot of spare lambs.’
But when the conversation turns to poetry, and Pickles’s fondness for Seamus Heaney, he opens up. ‘This is very bad for my image but I really liked his translation of Beowulf, I thought it brought it to life and it wasn’t clever, it was expressive without showing off. I just thought it was lovely but I’m not happy that anybody thinks I’ve read Beowulf.’
This answer rather sums up Pickles. He is a deeper, more thoughtful politician than he lets on. This is just as well, for it will take subtlety as well as brute force to defeat the Grendels of local government.
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