EXTENDED VERSION: Playing the heavy

A longer version of James Forsyth’s 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.’
 
He accepts that the coming months are going to be particularly hard for new MPs who presented themselves as local champions at the last election. ‘A number of my colleagues got here by being very good constituency campaigners and then suddenly they are now on the defensive having to take the argument out.