Profile Michael Howard: With just 12 days left to the British election, Michael Howard is hoping the professionalism he has restored to his party may yet lead to a revival, writes Frank Millar, London Editor
Put aside your preconceptions. There is, it would seem, "something of the tender rather than the night" about Michael Howard. And there has plainly been a recent attempt to improve his public bedside manner - once likened to that of a doctor informing a terminally ill patient that he was behind with his health-insurance payments.
But where once there was only the certainty of his own beliefs, there is some humility now - at least to the point of allowing that not everyone will share them.
Howard's old friend from Cambridge days, Leon Brittan, has suggested that lawyer Howard's greatest weakness may be "that he can persuade himself so firmly of the strength of his argument, he forgets to persuade other people". Yet along with his new humility (well, sort of) we must also consider the man who would replace Tony Blair as British prime minister through the eyes of those who actually know, love and admire him.
Michael "Prison Works" Howard of the devilish and Count Dracula depiction beloved of satirists and cartoonists is, it transpires, a bit of a softie, a sentimental romantic, possessed of oodles of "oomph", who (unlike Blair) can always say it with flowers.
The man who came bottom of the poll in the Conservative leadership election in 1997 had apparently, in his bachelor days at Cambridge, "the reputation of being a very fine lover". We know this from his friend of almost 20 years, the "unaligned radical" broadcaster and journalist Anne Robinson. Robinson confided Howard's "oomph" factor to readers of her always entertaining Saturday Daily Telegraph column after the bloodless coup which saw Howard anointed unopposed to succeed the hapless Iain Duncan Smith ("IDS") in November 2003.
ROBINSON'S TAKE ON Howard was all the more fascinating because until his political resurrection, the former home secretary, environment secretary and (as Labour never tires of reminding people) "Minister for the Poll Tax" had been largely defined in the public mind by another woman, fellow Tory MP Ann Widdecombe. She it was who famously scuppered his 1997 leadership bid by suggesting there was "something of the night", and thus something sinister or dangerous, about her former boss.
To many outside observers, including some who thoroughly detested Howard and his ultra-Thatcherite persona, there always seemed something unjust about this damning (and despite, presumably, her best public efforts since) enduring indictment, even as it amused and entertained. For it was as prisons minister under Howard that Widdecombe acquired the nickname Doris Karloff, after the notorious incident in which a woman prisoner was shackled to a hospital bed as she gave birth. To this day, certainly, there are many Tories who would insist that Widdecombe's own "populist" brand contributed at least as much to the subsequent perception of the Conservatives as "the nasty party." And on the subject of his appeal, Conservative Campaign Headquarters will hope floating voters may be inclined to pay rather more attention to Robinson's depiction of Howard as "charming and unspoilt", a man not lacking in sophistication but simply not interested in being "hip", who is at ease in the company of women.
Another pal from Cambridge days, Norman (now Lord) Lamont, said as much when asked if friends had been surprised by Howard's marriage in 1975 to former Vogue cover model Sandra Paul.
If, as Lamont says, Howard was always interested in great beauty, he certainly married one. And, of course, what is referred to as Sandra Howard's "purple past" (Michael is her fourth husband) lends further to the exotic air about the tale of the front-ranking Tory whose Jewish immigrant parents fled Europe at the start of the second World War. The suspicion endures that his "Transylvanian roots" and almost certainly latent anti-Semitism may have hindered his search for a safe Tory seat and delayed his entry into parliament until 1983. The upbringing in the draper's shop in Llanelli and his grammar school education bequeathed a lasting passion for Wales and, oddly, for football rather than rugby which may have marked him out initially as a bit of a loner. Indeed, to this day Howard retains a slight appearance of the outsider, even as he campaigns for the right to form a government pledged to incorporate the values of the British people and to protect Britain's borders from illegal immigrants (all but an annually set quota of asylum seekers) and, of course, the European federalists who would enslave the now-independent Bank of England and destroy this nation state.
Howard claims both he and the Conservative party have changed and now offer an "inclusive" home for all Britons. Nowhere perhaps was this personal change more eloquently revealed than in his recent interview with the gay magazine Attitude. Changed times and the potential power of the pink vote obliged all three main party leaders to subject themselves to a grilling about homophobia and hate crimes, civil partnerships and the ongoing quest for full equality.
HOWEVER, TO APPRECIATE the scale of the Tory change it is necessary only to recall the dark murmurings, suspicions and hostility which attended the rejection of "modernising" Michael Portillo's leadership bid by Conservative MPs in 2001. And there will have been deep distaste on the Thatcherite right on finding Howard conceding that he was wrong - when pioneering the notorious and now repealed Section 28, banning the "promotion" of homosexuality in schools - to say it was "not acceptable to teach that homosexuality is a normal pretended family relationship".
Pressed that a lot of gay people might think this electorally expedient rather than the result of a genuine conversion to gay rights, Howard offered the assurance: "I do not think they need to have that worry. That is absolutely not the case. I cannot imagine the kind of things that I've been saying being reversed or contradicted by any future leader of the Tory party."
Yet for all this change and modernisation (as shown by the fact that some of Howard's most senior advisers are openly gay), his determination that "it isn't racist to talk about immigration" - and to go on talking about it - appears to be consolidating his "core" vote at the expense of reminding many others, including Labour doubters, what they still do not like or trust about what they perceive as the base Conservative instinct. Concern that he had taken the issue as far as he could prompted the Daily Telegraph this week to urge him to stop banging on about it, and concentrate instead on the big issues which divide Britain's two main parties.
He has precious little time in which to convince the country that his figures really do stack up, and that it is possible to spend more and tax and borrow less.
He will also be hoping there is no real basis for the first reports of internal policy dissent within the shadow cabinet, as the media gleefully awaits a potentially "wobbly weekend" if the polls continue to show Labour headed for another big majority. With just 12 days to go, the voters (of both genders) are still resisting his charms and refusing to go Howard's Way.
Yet admirers say that he is even considered to be in this fight is evidence of his success already in restoring professionalism and discipline to the Conservative party - coupled with a renewed appetite for power never really apparent under William Hague or "IDS" - elements which are the essential bases for revival.
Howard, of course, has an innate belief in his ability to defy the odds and deliver a political sensation. His aides also recall opinion polls wildly overestimating Labour's lead (and by much greater margins) at this point in the 2001 campaign. In truth, however, most of his colleagues would count it a victory to dent Blair's majority enough to bring forward Labour's promised day of reckoning, and the arrival of a prime minister Brown who might well make the Labour Party feel better about itself but who will surely struggle to maintain Blair's appeal to Middle England. And who knows? Howard, the passionate Welshman who champions "English votes on English issues" in a post-devolution Westminster might even get a second chance, where previously few would have given him even one.