Cast your mind back to what was, even by recent standards, an especially weird and constipated period in British politics when the electorate had voted to leave the European Union but the politicians couldn’t agree on how to do it. For almost four years, from 2016 to 2020, the country was in agonising limbo, stuck somewhere between separation and divorce, as it became clear that Brexit was far more complex and intractable than a simple yes/no vote suggested.
While the nation grew increasingly more divided and embittered, one of the most vocal politicians calling for a second clarifying referendum was Anna Soubry, the former Conservative minister and, at the time, MP for Broxtowe in Nottinghamshire. She was telegenic, opinionated but also aiming to build a cross-party and popular consensus among those who believed they’d been sold a pup by the leave campaign.
“Anna’s great feature,” says one former minister, “is that she’s a fiery politician and the centre right doesn’t produce fiery politicians. She articulated a vision of conservatism that was moderate, but she did so with tremendous forcefulness. The argument against liberals is that they come across as wishy washy, and nobody could ever describe Anna as wishy washy.”
She soon became a hate figure among many Brexit voters, including on her own benches, condemned as a betrayer of the “will of the people”. The more Soubry insisted that Brexit was ill conceived, the less tenable became her position in a party that had bound itself to the Brexit cause. Eventually she jumped ship to Change UK, and in December 2019 she lost her seat to the Conservative candidate.
Nowadays a criminal law barrister, Soubry may have left politics, but politics has never quite left her. On social media she remains a stern critic of the government, and in the past year she has come out as a Labour supporter. It’s a shift that is symptomatic of the dizzyingly chaotic political scene post-Brexit, in which the Tories lurched rightwards, and Labour leftwards, and centrism seemed to be dying in both parties, before making a comeback under Keir Starmer’s Labour. It’s a period that’s seen no fewer than five prime ministers pass through Downing Street, like itinerant squatters. Soubry only has time for one of them.
“I thought David Cameron was courageous,” she says on a video call. “He changed the Conservative party in the way that it had to be changed – largely.”
Yet history will almost certainly remember Cameron as the man who facilitated the UK’s departure from the European Union by holding a referendum that Soubry herself supported. She’s admitted that she only did so because she thought the UK would vote remain.
“We could have won it and should have won it, but I put my hands up,” she says. “I thought the referendum would shut the Eurosceptics up, because I thought we would win it.”
If Brexit has negatively impacted many areas of British life, perhaps none has been harder hit than the Conservative party. In a state of permanent crisis ever since, the various leaders’ attempts to appease the MPs who militated for Brexit has engendered only further despair and dysfunction.
On the day we speak, it emerges that the Conservative party’s director of campaigning had taken leave mid-campaign while his wife is being investigated for placing a bet on the date of the general election. Coming after the D-day debacle, it leaves Rishi Sunak with the air of a condemned man longing for the firing squad to put him out of his misery.
“He’s always been way out of his depth,” says Soubry. “And I don’t think he has any real world experience at all. I hate to use the word privilege, because you don’t choose the family that you’re born into, and his parents were very hard-working, but he’s been in a gilded cage throughout much of his life. I think he’s protected from the realities of life, which are very grim for a lot of people.”
Surely, though, the same could be said of the Old Etonian Cameron?
“No,” she says firmly. “I’ll tell you why. David Cameron’s son Ivan was severely disabled. He talks about being in A&E at two o’clock in the morning, sleeping on the floor, hoping to God that your child survives. That is a very grounding experience.”
When Soubry first entered parliament, her signature combination of forthright convictions and blond bouffant hair had observers reaching, rather predictably, for comparisons to Margaret Thatcher. Dennis Skinner once shouted at her during a Commons debate: “You even look like Thatcher!”
She duly dismissed the jibe as sexist, but it was her own side who really weaponised the supposed resemblance. Arch-Brexiter Edward Leigh disparagingly told her she “ain’t no Margaret Thatcher”. She agreed, but was quick enough to reply that, like Thatcher, she was a supporter of the single market.
Although she entered the government after only two years in parliament, it’s fair to say that Soubry’s career never quite matched the heightened dimensions of her media profile, peaking with her appointment as minister of state for small business, industry and enterprise. Her character always seemed larger than her ambition, which may be another way of saying she enjoyed life more than politics. But colleagues admired her spirit and producers of political and news programmes couldn’t get enough of her.
One such booking, on the Andrew Marr Show, when she was junior defence minister, neatly demonstrated Soubry’s irrepressible sense of mischief. During a conversation about Nigel Farage, she suddenly said: “I always think he looks like somebody has put their finger up his bottom and he really rather likes it.”
It was not the comment of someone looking to avoid controversy and ease her way up the slippery pole of Westminster politics. Even her fellow guests, Rory Bremner and Peter Mandelson, were taken by surprise, with Mandelson complaining it was too early in the morning for such an image.
But what an image! Once envisioned it was hard to banish it from the mind, as though it somehow unpicked the lock to Farage’s peculiar Carry On-style persona. What inspired her to come up with it? She explains that she has always liked to mimic people, and that she’s particularly good with her impressions of men. At dinner parties she used to entertain guests with the scenario of Farage experiencing the novelty of digital insertion.
“Then I would jump up,” she says, adopting Farage’s overexcited voice, “and say: ‘And I really rather enjoyed it!’”
So when she found herself on Marr, in December 2013, she was starstruck by her fellow guest and impressionist Bremner, and decided to roll out her party trick, only without the mimicry.
Afterwards, she apologised to an apparently offended Farage and then received a call from Lynton Crosby, the dark prince of political strategy, who was in charge of the Tories’ election preparations.
“I thought: now I’m in real trouble,” she recalls.
Turning to a broad Australian accent, she mimics Crosby – “Why the hell did you apologise?” – only her impression is decorated with several colourful expletives.
Soubry swears like a docker, or as she would have it, like a barrister. She recently called Farage a “gob shite who preys on prejudice”. But in conversation, her F-bombs serve to establish the cheery informality in which she’s obviously happiest. If her irreverence may have hindered her progress in government, her politics also began to feel out of step with her party’s in the Brexit era. She has always been what she calls a “pink liberal, one-nation Tory”. She even relinquished her party membership, she says, when Thatcher became prime minister.
Nowadays, pink liberal, one-nation Tories are in danger of becoming the panda bears of politics, edging towards extinction.
“There has been a haemorrhage of participation by liberal conservatives since Brexit, although it goes back earlier than that,” says former attorney general Dominic Grieve, who had the whip removed in 2019 for attempting to block a no-deal Brexit. “You sense a demoralisation.”
Although Grieve is reluctant to speculate on what might happen after the election, he is unsure if there will continue to be a space for liberal conservatives within the party. “We are very close to the precipice,” he says.
Soubry says she felt pangs of alienation as soon as she arrived at the House of Commons in 2010.
“I remember going into the Conservative lobby in parliament,” she says. “I looked at a large number of Conservative MPs and wondered what I actually had in common with them.”
She runs through a list, emphasising each name with growing horror, as if no other explanation were required.
“Peter Bone [the hardcore Brexiter who would be suspended after he was found to have bullied and committed an “act of sexual misconduct” with a junior member of staff], Philip Hollobone [who is in favour of capital punishment and privatising the BBC] and,” she adds, pulling a face of exaggerated distaste, “Jacob Rees-Mogg!”
Things finally came to a head in February 2019, when Theresa May, for whom she’d voted as leader, was still prime minister, which prompted Soubry’s second departure from the party.
“May was an absolute disaster,” she says. “She certainly wasn’t what I and a lot of other people thought she would be. She put all her effort into the mad people [by which she means the European Research Group (ERG) of Eurosceptic Conservative MPs]. She pandered to them and ignored the people who had naturally been her allies.”
Appalled by the prevailing anti-immigration rhetoric and the refusal to countenance remaining in the single market or customs union, Soubry defected to, and then briefly led, the Change UK party, a disastrous footnote in independent politics about which she wants to say as little as possible.
“That would take for ever to explain and you would die of boredom,” she says. “But for reasons I still don’t understand, Chuka [Umunna, former Labour MP for Streatham] wouldn’t step up and be our leader.”
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To her detractors, Soubry personified an infuriating brand of Brexit denialism with her insistent calls for a “People’s Vote”, which made it sound as if the original referendum was produced by an entirely different electorate that didn’t qualify as the people. At one stage she even voted against a customs union, so as to preserve the possibility of a second referendum. “It was probably the most difficult decision I had to make,” she says now.
It was all to no avail, of course, with neither a customs union nor a second referendum materialising. Instead we got a hard Brexit that appears only to have added to the country’s economic woes. A recent report from the Centre for Economic Performance found that exports had shrunk by 1% in real terms, and imports by 2%. And despite a resurgence in the service sector, the report concluded that Brexit had had a negative effect on UK trade. Border checks alone are estimated to have added £2bn in costs to businesses bringing in food and plant products.
Last October, Soubry announced that she would be voting Labour, and doubled-down when the election was called last month.
“We need change, we need hope and we need to get back our future,” she wrote on X. “To achieve that we need Keir Starmer as prime minister with a strong majority. Make sure your vote achieves that.”
Given the omnishambles of the current government, Soubry’s support for the opposition is not exactly surprising. But it goes further than an anti-Tory endorsement, because Soubry rates the Labour leader as the most effective politician she’s ever encountered.
“Ken Clarke has always been my hero,” she says, “but the way Starmer has changed the Labour party so that it’s going to command a sizeable majority, that’s an extraordinary achievement.”
Still, she’s not yet ready to join the party, even if she’s unsure why. The best answer she has, she says, laughing, is that she doesn’t “like doing things that are terribly predictable”.
She certainly can’t be accused of following the crowd. She first joined the Conservative party back in the 1970s as a 19-year-old, “when it was profoundly unfashionable”. Taking up student politics at Birmingham University, where she read law, she was the token lone Tory on the NUS executive committee. When Thatcherism came along, she flirted with the SDP, before turning her back on politics to work first in television, and then as a criminal barrister when she was called to the bar in 1995.
Whatever her doubts about the Tories, she rejoined them and stood in the 2005 general election when Michael Howard – hardly a cuddly wet – was leader. She lost, but was then selected for Broxtowe.
The 2010 election was held in the wake of the global financial crisis from which this country’s economy has never quite recovered. It was the era of the coalition government, David Cameron and Nick Clegg’s bromance in the No 10 rose garden, compassionate Conservatism, the “big society” and other sweet-sounding phrases that didn’t long survive the reality of austerity.
Soubry was filled with optimism about the joint government with the Lib Dems.
“I remember feeling very excited about that, because I thought it marked a real change for the Conservative party, and politics in general, that we were going to have a party that was much more of the centre.”
As for the swingeing cuts to public spending, she thought they would be difficult, “but the right thing to do, given the circumstances”.
Politics, like sport, is full of counterfactuals, alternative realities that might have happened if something else had not taken place. For Cameronites, there’s the belief that everything would have been different had they managed to win the referendum. Soubry is not immune to this thinking.
“We could have won it,” she says again, “if we hadn’t had Jeremy Corbyn as the leader of the Labour party. I’m not blaming Labour, but it didn’t bloody help.”
She argues that the remain side never made a strong case for freedom of movement in Europe, too fearful of the question of immigration, which has increased rapidly from outside the EU since Brexit. But the person she most holds responsible for the state of the nation in the post-Brexit years is the man she says is the worst politician she’s personally experienced: Boris Johnson.
“He conned so many people. Remember in 2019, the Conservatives had a majority of 80, and being as generous as you can, what is the legacy after five years? What is one piece of legislation that you can cite? They squandered that majority in such a shameful way. And it’s Johnson’s fault.”
In focusing on Johnson’s disastrous years in office, it would be negligent, however, to ignore the brief but catastrophic premiership of Liz Truss.
“I always thought she was extremely odd,” Soubry says. “She was one of those people who would talk to you very close to your face. Back off!”
She believes that Truss was never a remainer but voted remain out of personal ambition.
“She was far too anti-regulation to be pro-EU; she just said it to advance her career. But what will your children’s children think about this period in history,” she asks rhetorically, “when they learn that a great party like the Conservative party found itself with a membership that elected Liz Truss. Liz Truss!”
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When she’s on this kind of a roll, and it doesn’t take much to get her going, you wonder if Soubry would consider running for parliament again. After all, if Starmer could welcome to his benches Nathalie Elphicke, a Conservative rightwinger who was a member of the ERG, then Soubry should be a shoo-in.
“You’re joking,” she says. “I’m too old and I couldn’t see myself standing as a Labour member of parliament. But I will do whatever it takes to make sure that Keir Starmer is prime minister, and that when he is prime minister, he achieves what he wants to achieve.”
In any case, she says, she’s too busy working as a defence barrister, and her spare time is devoted to gardening and watching sport. Twice divorced with two adult daughters, she now lives with Neil Davidson, a businessman she refers to as her “other half”, in Leicestershire.
As for her old party, she thinks it’s conceivable that it will merge with Reform after the election.
“There isn’t so much as a tissue paper between Mark Francois [chair of the ERG] and Nigel Farage,” she says.
And even if there is no merger, she can only see the Tories moving further right to occupy Reform’s territory.
“It’s difficult for me to say this, because some of these people I consider friends,” she says, without sounding in the least like it’s a struggle, “but a lot of people have not showed the requisite courage in really standing up to the forces of darkness.”
It may be hard for many of us to contemplate, but there could yet come a time when we’ll look back with misty-eyed nostalgia for that less extreme Tory party that quietly disappeared.
