Alan Duncan - In the Thick of It

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2021

Copyright Alan Duncan 2021

Cover photograph Alan Duncan

Alan Duncan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

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Source ISBN: 9780008422264

Ebook Edition April 2021 ISBN: 9780008422271

Version: 2021-03-19

For James

Sir Alan Duncan, as a Conservative MP and government minister, was at the centre of British politics for nearly thirty years. Born in 1957, Alan is the second of three brothers, and was educated at Beechwood Park School and then Merchant Taylors School, becoming head boy at both.

His mother Anne was a teacher, and his father was an RAF officer whose job took the family around the world to postings including Gibraltar, Italy and Norway. The familys politics were Liberal, and Alans first foray into elected politics was at the age of thirteen in a school mock election in 1970 in which he stood unsuccessfully as a Liberal. Two years later he joined the Young Conservatives, and went up to Oxford where he read PPE at St Johns College. As a fresher he struck up a friendship with Benazir Bhutto, the future prime minister of Pakistan, and helped to run her successful campaign for the presidency of the Oxford Union.

Other contemporaries included future Cabinet ministers Dominic Grieve and Damian Green, as well as Theresa May (then Theresa Brasier) and her soon-to-be husband Philip May, who was then the more political of the pair. Alan ran successfully for the presidency of the Union himself in 1979, defeating Philip, who later followed him in the role.

After Oxford, Alan began a career in the oil industry, working first for Shell, and then (after a year at Harvard as a Kennedy Scholar) for the legendary and colourful trader Marc Rich, whose company later became Glencore. These years during the 1980s were a period of pioneering change in the industry, which saw the creation of the free market in oil after the price shocks of the 1970s. Duncan helped open up new oil-trading markets in Asia, and was based for a time in Singapore. His business experience during this period afforded him a deep personal understanding of international relations and of the Middle East, which developed into an abiding political interest in the region. He also gained friends and contacts who would remain significant throughout his later life.

Towards the end of the decade he formed his own consultancy to advise foreign governments on oil supplies, establishing his reputation in the industry and giving himself the financial security to embark on a political career. He fought his first unsuccessful parliamentary election in 1987 in the Labour stronghold of Barnsley West and Penistone, and bought a house in Westminster, which was used as the HQ for John Majors leadership campaign in 1990.

Duncan was selected as the Conservative candidate for Rutland and Melton ahead of the 1992 general election, and once in the Commons developed a reputation as a Thatcherite Eurosceptic, carefully navigating a path between these political instincts and personal ambition as a new MP during the turmoil of the governments increasingly bitter civil war over Europe. In 1995 he was appointed as parliamentary private secretary to the Conservative Party chairman, Brian Mawhinney, before the 1997 general election consigned the Conservatives to opposition.

Following the landslide defeat, Duncan championed the leadership campaign of his young friend and former flatmate, William Hague. After this success, he became Hagues parliamentary political secretary and vice-chairman of the Conservative Party. He was then made a junior shadow minister, firstly for health, and then trade and industry.

As part of the generation that held the Conservative Party together during these long years in opposition from 19972010, Alan Duncan was a fixture of the Opposition front bench throughout. He served under each of Hagues three successors: Iain Duncan Smith (20013), Michael Howard (20035) and David Cameron (200510), holding six shadow Cabinet posts.

When the Conservatives entered government again after the 2010 election, Alan was appointed as a Minister of State at the Department for International Development, where he served for four years, covering the period of the Arab Spring uprisings, during which he was closely involved in the political transitions in Yemen and Libya.

In 2014 he chose to step down and return to the backbenches, with the award of a knighthood seeming to mark the conclusion of his front-bench career after seventeen years. He was then nominated by the prime minister to join the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), and remained in that position as this volume of the diaries begins.

As an MP and since, his domestic life alternates between his London home near Parliament and his constituency home in a small rural village in Rutland, where he lives with his husband James and their cockapoo, Noodle. Having become the first openly gay Conservative MP when he came out in 2002, Alan entered a civil partnership with James Dunseath in 2008. Four years earlier, he had taken a leading role in supporting the passage of the Civil Partnership Act from the Conservative front bench.

Since stepping down from government and leaving Parliament in 2019, he has returned to the private sector and his roots in the oil industry, taking up a position as an executive with a top commodity trader.

Brexit: the withdrawal by the United Kingdom from its membership of the European Union. The portmanteau word from Britains/British and exit arose in common parlance in advance of the 2016 referendum on UK membership of the EU, and soon became the accepted term for the process, widely used across the world.

As soon as I became a minister in 2010, I knew that more would happen in my daily life than I would ever be able to remember. I wanted total recall, and the only way of achieving it was to write it down. Every day I kept my appointments diary in my pocket, and would scribble notes and prompts on it as the day unfolded. Then every night or the next morning Id tap it all into my laptop. I was never far from the all-important memory stick. So one of the motivations was recollection protection against the brain-fade of age.

But the greater driver was catharsis. Political life can be suffocating. The pettiness of poor decision-making and the strutting of tiresome egos are a constant frustration. I could see that the only way to keep calm and carry on was to write it all down. Use the pen and the page to emote, to download and to vent my feelings. These were often as warm as they were venomous. So much that happened was worth recording but could not be said. Temper was invariably better kept than expressed. It was better to put gossip and fury into a diary than tell a journalist. So instead of briefing the press, I wrote it down. Some might see it as a form of therapy.