Playing the heavy

An interview with Eric Pickles, the Cabinet’s surprisingly intellectual bruiser

There are politicians who shy away from confrontation and those who relish it. Eric Pickles, the Communities and Local Government Secretary, is firmly in the latter camp. As we sit around a small table in his room in the House of Commons, he entertains with war stories from his days as the budget-cutting leader of Bradford City Council at the end of the Thatcher era. ‘I arrived at the railway station and there were thousands of people outside chanting “Death to Pickles”. So I pulled my hat down, pulled up my coat, got out of the cab chanting “Death to Pickles” myself and got in.’

Having passed through the fire a quarter of a century ago, being hanged in effigy — as he was recently in Tower Hamlets — seems nothing to this 58-year-old Yorkshire ex-grammar-school boy. Asked what emotional support he offered Nick Clegg after the Lib Dem leader started being targeted in the same way, he replies, without missing a beat, ‘I told him it was a badge of honour.’

Pickles admits that all this talk makes him sound like one of Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen: ‘I have become that ultimate Yorkshireman — “Call this a protest? Luxury, I call it!” ’ But he is in earnest that ministers must not flinch when the cuts begin to bite. ‘The cuts haven’t really started yet, they are about to start and we have just got to get through this year to get some of the benefits.’ His view is that the public have a confused attitude to the coming squeeze. ‘The reaction to it is not sort of Marxism or Thatcherism, it’s Freddie Mercury, which is “I want it all, I want it now”. So everybody is in favour of the cuts but everybody is against every single cut.’

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.’

Manchester City Council, which is laying off 17 per cent of its workforce, comes in for particular criticism. He accuses it of ‘revelling in cuts’ and of going ‘out of its way to target the most vulnerable’.

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’.

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, ‘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.

An extended version of this article is available here.