1 min read
ByStephen Pollard, Stephen Pollard
This isn't quite as good as the 'if Lord Halifax had better teeth we'd have lost the war' counter-factual (and if you want the full version, buy my book!), but the FT's story of Mike Hancock and the email to Matt Hancock is pretty great:
Now here is a heart-warming tale of goodwill and political
selflessness to start this cold winter day, a story of how a Lib Dem
turned away an extraordinary piece of Tory intelligence and helped
scupper Gordon Brown’s election plans.Who is the man of honour in this a place of skulduggery and low
politics? Arise Mike Hancock, the maverick Lib Dem MP for Portsmouth
South.Over the years, a lot of Tory documents have gone astray in
Hancock’s email account because his address is perilously similar to
that of Matt Hancock, George Osborne’s ubiquitous chief of staff. Most
of the misdirected mail never amounted to much and Hancock passed it on
to to its rightful recipient.
But then, in the autumn of 2007, against the drumbeat of a calls for
a snap election, a CCHQ staffer sent Mike Hancock one of the Tory
policy crown jewels: the plan to lift the bar on inheritance tax. It
was days before the Tory party conference. Leaking it would have stolen
Osborne’s thunder and tilted the scales in favour of an early election
the Tories were desperate to avoid.
What did he do with the Tory state secret? He sent it back. The
email said “I think this is yours”, or some such. The Osborne policy
was unveiled without a blip.
The Tories always presumed Mike Hancock never realised he had
political gold in his inbox. But when I called Hancock to ask about
this stunning tale, he was happy to admit he knew the value of the
email — he just didn’t want to use it.
“I did only what I expect others to do to me,” he told me, as the
sweet strings of a harp struck up in the background. “It was private. I
didn’t keep it. Mistakes are easily made.” He insisted I report that I
heard about this through some Tory sources, just in case people thought
he was “crowing about it”.
Did he let his leader know? “I never told anyone. My office knew.
But everyone was rather surprised that I returned it.” They are not the
only ones.
I think it is plausible that had Mike
leaked this information, we could already be 2 years into a Gordon
Brown led elected administration. Cameron could easily have been ousted
as yet another failed Tory leader and the map of British politics could
now look very, very different.