Michael Fry: The East-End millionaire at odds with history

In ANOTHER and more hierarchical age Peter Cruddas, the disgraced treasurer of the Conservative Party, would have grown up into a Cockney barrow-boy. The son of a Smithfield porter, he was born in Hackney, lived in a council flat, left school at 15 and went to work as a telex operator in the City of London.

But in classless modern Britain, he forged a different destiny. Two decades later, he had worked his way up so far that he could establish his own company, Currency Management Consultants (CMC). Within another two decades it earned him a personal fortune of £860 million and reputedly made him the richest man in the City. CMC is, according to one authority, “effectively a bookmaker for the City of London, it allows dealers to place margin calls on foreign currency movements”. In other words Cruddas and CMC are in the business of hedging, the very activity that brought the country to the sorry state it is in today.

With a man like Cruddas in and out of No 10 Downing Street, and taking donations of £250,000 to arrange the same privilege for others, we can better see why David Cameron’s government appears so reluctant to crack down on hedging and hedgers while remaining perfectly happy to stretch the rest of us on a financial rack.

But for me it is more interesting to try to work out why a man at the heart of today’s Tory politics was so unsound on the Union, supposedly one of his party’s great principles.

“We, as a party, have to be seen to be fighting to keep the Union together,” said Cruddas on leaked tapes – and who could be surprised at that – but then went on, “even if we don’t agree with it”.

After his odyssey through the maze of modern Britain, Cruddas might be regarded as representative of two constituencies. One would be the aspirational working class, those who have moved from the East End of London to owner-occupation in the suburbs (or, in his case, in Monaco). On the way they preserved or developed reactionary social views which made them willing recruits to the Conservative party after 1979, where they have, in the long run, stayed despite brief deviations meanwhile to New Labour. These people are happy to holiday in Spain, even in Thailand or the West Indies, but they have never been to Scotland: too cold, too wet, indeed too unwelcoming because there they are regarded as aliens rather than mere tourists.

And the other constituency would be the super-rich, those who in recent times have made pots of money by fair means or foul, almost always in the City. In fact, they have made so much money that they are admitted on equal terms into the innermost sanctums of the old British establishment, where once only blood, or at least an expensive education in the right places, could have opened the doors. For this very reason they probably have been to Scotland, because Scotland is the place to go and slaughter game for amusement with their new friends. But it will be the Scotland of high moors and hunting lodges, empty of Scots except for the beaters.

Cruddas’ verdict was probably speaking for both these constituencies: “At the end of it all, if the Scots say we’re out of here and we want to go independent, we can turn around and say it’s not what we wanted, it’s not what we campaigned for, you can’t have this, you can’t have that, and you can get on with it.”

So stop moaning or get lost. In Scotland, this attitude may not be welcome but it will be in a sense familiar.

After all, it is only repeating from the point of view of the English what Sir Walter Scott said two centuries ago about the Union from the point of view of the Scots. The Union was a matter of the head not the heart, he insisted.

Yet before Scott’s life drew to a close in 1832, Tories found fresh work to do. Though pilloried and despised by their opponents, much in the manner of the media today, they renewed their cause by continuing to defend Scottish interests as they saw them. By this time, the old Scotland had an enemy within, the Whig or Liberal party, which without any particular pressure from London decided the way forward for the junior and poorer partner in the Union was anglicisation.

In time, these Tories were proved right. The Liberal attitude produced so much gratuitous damage to legitimate Scottish interests that the tide of public opinion turned. The Conservative sympathy continued into the 20th century. While an MP, the novelist John Buchan made a famous speech in which he declared that “every Scotsman should be a nationalist”. He went on to argue that his position did not entail the re-establishment of a Scottish Parliament. Odd as this may seem, it only served to highlight his real case, that it was natural for Tories to support and sustain all sorts of local or regional variety, because these helped to give substance and colour to individual lives in an age of advancing centralisation and conformity. Winston Churchill was still in essence setting out the same case against the Labour Party in the 1950s, if only as a political gesture. Presumably that venerable tradition was what also made devolutionaries, of figures such as George Younger and Malcolm Rifkind.

In fact the novelty in this thread of Conservative history is the ferocious and unyielding hostility to Scottish aspirations that took hold under Mrs Margaret Thatcher, brooking no opposition of any kind. Like all policies out of touch with reality it got its due reward in the end, the elimination of the Tory party as a serious force in Scotland.

In the resulting polarisation an interesting point has come to light and Cruddas, among others, reveals it. It is that, for Englishmen too, the Union is a matter of the head rather than the heart, of calculation rather than commitment. Despite 300 years of Union, they do not regard the two nations as being one. In that case, it is hard to see what will make the two nations one. And without that, they will go their own ways.