The former cabinet minister Simon Clarke has urged his party not to retreat into blocking housebuilding, saying the party should consider backing Labour’s planning reforms.
Clarke, who was a key backer of Liz Truss and one of the few MPs who called for Sunak to resign before the election defeat, said the party’s landslide defeat had partly been down to exacerbating the housing crisis and a failure to take intergenerational fairness seriously.
He cited “shameful” recent byelection campaigns that had centred on blocking housing and infrastructure and said the party would face oblivion if it went down that path.
The former communities secretary and Treasury minister lost his “red wall” seat in Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland, which he had won in 2017 in his early 30s. He said the next Conservative leader should not be afraid to back Labour’s plans on housebuilding later this autumn and said he was angered to see some new Tory MPs immediately begin campaigns to block energy infrastructure such as pylons and solar farms.
“Some of what Rachel Reeves and Angela Rayner said on this, I could have said. I think we’ve all got to look beyond partisanship here and say, there is a very fundamental issue of supply. It is quite right to say that parts of the green belt are, in fact, gray belt. I don’t think we should embark on some kind of campaign to mischaracterise this as being the death of the countryside.”
Clarke was one of the most vehement critics in parliament of a successful campaign by Tory MPs to end mandatory local housebuilding targets and launched his own push to lift the onshore wind ban in response – backed by Truss and Johnson – though he said he disagreed with Labour’s decision to end oil and gas licences.
However, he said he was dismayed by some of the objections that a number of Tory MPs have leaped on in terms of building green energy infrastructure. “I understand it because I’ve been there and I felt those pressures, but if we don’t fix it, then we are going to see a continued, real-terms decline in living standards, because the UK is just becoming a country where you can’t do things, and that is just woefully unsustainable.”
Clarke said though the scale of the Conservative defeat had been traumatic, he felt vindicated in his decision to call for Sunak to resign early in 2024, saying he was responsible for the scale of the defeat.
“I think the campaign could not have gone worse. I lost by 200 votes. If it hadn’t been for the launch in the rain or the D-day fiasco or the betting shambles, almost any one of those incidents probably cost me votes,” he said.
“It wouldn’t have been the difference between winning and losing, but it would have been the difference between near 200 seats and 120. Our weakness encouraged Farage back, and meant that the whole flank of our support just caved in.
“I do not pretend it was all his fault. Some terrible mistakes were made by Liz [Truss], and sadly, bad mistakes were made under Boris [Johnson] as well. But I just wish that more colleagues had listened to me, because most of them privately knew it.”
Clarke said he had recognised some of Labour’s early issues with briefing wars in government from his time serving as a minister and cabinet minister. “I have lived this movie, and I recognise some of the dysfunctionality that I’m seeing, and it doesn’t tend to end well when you have these very obvious schisms within No 10, this inability to reset a message day after day which we’re seeing over what is a comparatively minor issue about expenses.
“I think it does show that there is a space for the Conservatives to recover – if we can get our own act together. It’s not a given though, it will not be enough just for us to let the pendulum swing back.”
Clarke said he had been torn over whether to support Robert Jenrick or Kemi Badenoch, but said he had decided to back Badenoch because of her commitments to change the system, including key institutions that many more radical Conservatives believe obstructed their time in power, like the Office for Budget Responsibility and the Equality and Human Rights Commission.
“It is going to be very important that we enter government, not just with a set of ideas, but with the system reform in mind to allow us to govern as Conservatives,” he said.
“Kemi goes down well in those red wall seats. And we’re going to need that toughness of approach, if we’re going to frankly convince people that we understand just how furious they are about some of the failures of the state that I’ve seen over recent years.”
Clarke is celebrating his 40th birthday this weekend – and said he did not want his political career to be over, saying he will “almost certainly seek to come back” to keep making the case on housing and intergenerational fairness.
“The thing about 40 is that there’s enough time for several more acts. I look back on the last seven years, and a lot happened when I was still really very young, and there’s a lot more time to contribute,” he said.