By the mid-1990s the Tory government was in considerable disarray. Things were so bad within the Conservative Party that prime minister John Major stood down as party leader and then won the contest to be the new leader. His party was losing seats, through defections and by-elections. The Labour Party, under Tony Blair, was in the ascendancy and looked like it might win the next general election.
This was the context in which Andersen Consulting began looking into the political future, wooing Labour. It provided its services free to Labour’s Commission on Social Justice, and in 1994 it employed Patricia Hewitt, the deputy chair of that Commission, as its own director of research. In the summer of 1996, it laid on a vast event at Green Templeton College, Oxford University, for the entire team of prospective Labour ministers – more than a hundred Labour MPs – to discuss their future as government ministers. The investigative journalist Paul Foot, who passed away 20 years ago this week, wondered what on earth they thought they were going to learn from a bunch of consultants.
The following year, Labour won the election and Foot began tracking Hewitt’s rise. She was now Labour MP for Leicester West, and within a year she would become economic secretary to the Treasury, within two years a Minister, and by 2001 was in the cabinet as secretary of state for trade and industry. Foot had always thought she was on the left but noted in his Guardian column that Bill Morris, the general secretary of the transport union, described the Department of Trade and Industry under Hewitt’s leadership as “the provisional wing of the CBI [the Confederation of British Industry, a trade group representing businesses]”.
