Such a thing as society

Both a disciple of Thatcher and an enthusiastic advocate of the Big Society, Robert Halfon is the 21st century incarnation of a one-nation Tory, eager to recast perceptions of the party.

Every MP knows the apocryphal tale of the student Michael Heseltine mapping his parliamentary career on the back of an envelope. Many quote it as the antithesis of their own ‘accidental’ career path, seeing parliamentary aspirations as a cause for embarrassment.

So Robert Halfon is something of a rarity, freely admitting that becoming an MP, which he did in 2010, is “the fulfilment of a childhood dream”.

He made up his mind as a ten year-old in 1979, after seeing a picture of Margaret Thatcher on a newspaper front page. “The caption was ‘Super Maggie’, and for some reason I started to follow and, I am not ashamed to admit, admire her,” he announces with pride. “I used to read newspapers and cut out political stories, and I would sit in Central Lobby, and would watch debates. I then joined my Young Conservatives at the age of 14 or 15, and I was 16 when my father took me to an event where Mrs Thatcher was the guest speaker. I still have the ticket.”

While forming his early political dreams at home in North London, Halfon was joined by a schoolmate and fellow future MP, David Burrowes. The pair went to Exeter University together, where Halfon became chairman of the university Conservatives – during which time he took the student union to the European Court of Human Rights over compulsory NUS membership – and fell in with a useful network, becoming “great friends” with future MP Sajid Javid and Tim Montgomerie, who would later found and edit the Conservativehome website.

It then took Halfon 14 years and three attempts, via a stint as a double glazer, to finally make it to Westminster. He describes the experience, which included losing Harlow twice, and by just 97 votes in 2005, as “an exhausting struggle, but the test of an individual is how they recover from failure when they are losing”.

“I recovered pretty quickly, but when I have flashes of what I have been through I genuinely shudder. I bear the scars.” Now “thrilled to be here”, he is clearly at home in his office in Speaker’s Yard, which is situated near a lift to allow Halfon, who has a walking disability after being born with short Achilles tendons, quick access to the Commons chamber. Despite his electoral failures, Halfon still spent much of the last two decades working in Parliament, starting as a researcher to his “colourful” good friend Michael Fabricant and ending up as chief of staff – “it is such a naff title, it sounded like I was commanding an army” – to Oliver Letwin.

In between, he reunited with Tim Montgomerie at the latter’s Renewing One Nation project, a forerunner to Iain Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice. Their work focused on “trying to move the Conservative Party away from the harsh image that we didn’t care about the poor”. This lofty aim, Halfon believes, sowed the seeds for what became the Big Society.

“There was a compassionate Conservative manifesto published separately to the main manifesto in 2001,” Halfon recalls. “It was a groundbreaking document, and a building block for what has happened in the last few years. It was a tragedy that it wasn’t used.” Letwin, then shadow home secretary, pushed the agenda on as the “neighbourly society”, but to Halfon’s frustration, the vision was misunderstood.

“People thought this was about moving over to the left and more state spending, but it was totally the opposite. This was about putting people in charge of what is now known as the Big Society, and that is the future of Conservatism. It’s about putting people in charge, making communities stronger, and building social capital – and social capital is as important as economic capital.”

And with the Big Society now sitting at the heart of prime minister David Cameron’s vision for Britain, Halfon is fully signed up to the leadership’s agenda. “Because of what happened in the 1990s, the country is taking a long, long time to trust us again,” Halfon argues, in language straight from the Cameron textbook.

“What will change the way people think about the Tory Party is if we can get the Big Society to work.” Despite this ringing endorsement of the leadership’s ‘big idea’, Halfon shares the grassroots scepticism of its modernising push, stating: “You will never agree with everything a leader does, and I’m not interested in A lists and that side of things.” Perhaps this attitude, coupled with links through the party, explains his early election to the influential 1922 committee of Tory backbenchers.

Halfon fits the 1922 bill when he describes himself as an “independent loyalist”. He has once rebelled against a three-line whip, on the European budget. “I think very hard about voting against the government because it always gives ammunition to the enemy,” Halfon insists. However, he has voted – on a non-whipped vote – against the smoking ban in private clubs, while he also worries that Britain is “sleep-walking into a privatised surveillance society”.

But given Halfon’s belief in the Big Society and his connections in the higher echelons of the party, he seems a likely candidate for promotion. For now, however, he insists that he is “content” just to be in Parliament. “I do not want to spend so long getting here and then be constrained, partly because of my constituency and partly because I want to campaign on things I believe in. As a minister, even a PPS, you are constrained. I am in no hurry.”

His focus is the constituency – where he lives with his girlfriend – which he fought so long to represent. His other passions include apprenticeships – Halfon’s researcher, Andy, is Parliament’s first apprentice – and special constables: “What better example of the Big Society can there be?” Having worked for the Conservative Friends of Israel, he is also a committed pro-Israel MP, recently raising the issue of Islamic extremism with the prime minister.

At 41, he can hardly be described as an up-and coming youngster, but this avid collector of watches – “It’s a mad hobby, I have hundreds of them” – has time on his side. Over a decade of fighting for his childhood dream has given Robert Halfon a healthy sense of perspective and an intriguing streak of independence, but that youthful ambition still remains.

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