Much ink was spilled during the Cameron years about CCHQ’s A-list efforts to get more top talent from a range of diverse backgrounds into the Tory parliamentary party. But now it belatedly transpires one man foresaw the future and was nursing his own crop of rising stars before it was fashionable – onetime MP turned novelist Jeffrey Archer. The octogenarian author popped up on Times Radio on Sunday to offer his thoughts on the issues of the day.
Mr S was interested to hear Archer telling host Gloria De Piero that no less than six of the members of the organising committee of his 2000 London mayoral bid – which ended somewhat ignominiously after he was accused and then convicted of perjury – are now leading Tory MPs. The six of the best include Nadhim Zahawi, now minister for vaccines, ex chancellor Sajid Javid, home secretary Priti Patel and business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng who are both in the cabinet plus select committee chairmen Tobias Ellwood and Robert Halfon. Big names but which of them has achieved the most? For Archer there was an obvious choice: ‘The one who has done best of all is Stefan Shakespeare, who opened a company called YouGov and in my opinion probably beat the lot of them.’ Ooft. He continued:
I didn’t see a prime minister among them, I could see that they would make the cabinet and I wasn’t at all shocked when Nadhim Zahawi was given the jobs of injecting us all because he’s a go getter, he’s a businessman, he’s a man who likes to make things happen so that didn’t surprise me at all and of course I was delighted when Kwasi made it to the top and Sajid because it’s all very well to talk about divergence but I was clearly doing it in London without thinking about it and people would say to me ‘Gosh have you planned that Jeffrey?’ and I said ‘No I happened to choose the best people available’ which is what you should do: ‘You should pick the best people available and it just wasn’t a coincidence that in my London team, seven fulfilled all the sort of rules that are now being demanded.
Archer’s long time nemesis Michael Crick noted back in 2010 that Zahawi was the fourth of Archer’s personal assistants to become a Conservative MP following David Faber, who quit politics to become a professional writer, and David Mellor and Richard Ryder, who both made it to John Major’s cabinet table. Clearly Archer has an eye for talent and enjoys dispensing the wisdom earned from five years in the Commons and two years in prison, saying:
I remember Sajid Javid coming to me when he was only 32, 33 and saying ‘I want to be a member of parliament Jeffrey’ and I said ‘Don’t make the mistake I made of going in too young. Do something else, get yourself financially secure with your family and with a proper job and then consider politics’ which he did, he took 10 years off and work for Deutsche Bank and he went into the House much later and became Chancellor in four or five years so I didn’t take my own advice – he did.
Steerpike looks forward to those currently in the Commons continuing to follow the advice, if not always the example, of Jeffrey Archer in the future.
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