By Paul Goodman
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In today's Mail on Sunday James Forsyth wonders if Eric Pickles could be the next Chief Whip. For last Wednesday's ConHome Party Conference newspaper Paul Goodman argued that Mr Pickles was under-rated and under-valued. This essay is republished below.
Who is the most successful Cabinet Minister? Polls of party members by ConservativeHome give a twin answer: Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Gove. But this is unfair to a Tory colleague who comes in a little below them and gets a lot less publicity – outside his own brief, at least. Let us consider the case for their colleague, the Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles.
Mr Gove is delivering academies and raising standards, but his reforms will take years to work their way through successive generations of school pupils (and that's assuming that some future government doesn't uproot them). Mr Duncan Smith's aims are noble, but the universal credit is yet to happen, and getting the long-term unemployed into work and keeping them there is a daunting challenge.
Mr Pickles's programme has his own limitations – a future Labour Government could unpick his work, no less than it could unwind Mr Gove's – but it's worth thinking about where he comes from, what he has already achieved – two and a half years into his job – what he has still to do in his department, and what he could do afterwards.
Remember, remember: while David Cameron and George Osborne have a top-down Tory background as former special advisers, the Communities Secretary has a bottom-up one as a former Young Conservatives' Chairman and local council leader. He is one of the very few Cabinet members who can claim to be an activist himself. I think he can notch up three biggish achievements on his wall chart to date:
There is a debit as well as a credit side. Supporters of City Mayors claim that Mr Pickles never lined behind the project, and that this is one of the reasons why it collapsed in the referendums held earlier this year. And it remains to be seen whether the Communities Secretary will line up behind big-scale reform to planning: to work, this would need to take powers from council planners and give them to local people.
But Mr Pickles's record compares well with his Tory Cabinet colleagues, which gives rise to a question. Mr Duncan Smith is a hero of the grassroots. So is Mr Gove, whose praises are also widely sung within the Westminster Village. The Communities Secretary is a master of publicity in his own sphere. None the less, he doesn't make the wider splash that some other Cabinet members do. Why?
I suspect the answer is that Mr Pickles has never been part of a gang. The Work and Pensions Secretary has a network of supporters, just as the Education Secretary has one of admirers. But their colleague has always been his own man, keeping much of his counsel to himself. And while other Cabinet members do so too – Philip Hammond, for example – Mr Pickles is hard to place in the party's own left/right axis.
The Defence Secretary is a member of David Cameron's seven-member "inner Cabinet". Mr Pickles is not. It's understandable that the former is ever-tipped for promotion. It's baffling that the latter seldom is. In the wake of Gate-gate, the question has to be asked: is class prejudice somehow at work here? Why shouldn't this Minister who Delivers be seen as (say) a future down-to-earth Home Secretary?