Kenneth Clarke: Without doubt the ‘best prime minister we never had’

He could have made it to 10 Downing Street several times in the past quarter-century, but his resolute adherence to the European ideal meant he was always out of time. John Rentoul salutes a Tory grandee

Clarke: the bad boy of One Nation Toryism (Peter Macdiarmid/Rex)

Now that Ken Clarke has left the House of Commons after 49 years, his chance of becoming prime minister depends on an unlikely sequence of events, including taking a peerage and stepping into No 10 in a crisis. “I wrote a biography of Ken Clarke in 1993 in the expectation that he might soon be prime minister,” wrote Andy McSmith, my former colleague, when MPs voted at the end of last month for an early election. “I’m starting to get a bad feeling it won’t ever happen.”

McSmith’s was one of two biographies of the chancellor published in 1994, a year when politics changed. By then, Clarke’s chances were already receding. Had he been a more cynical politician, that could have been the year he trimmed his sails to the prevailing Eurosceptic mood in the Conservative Party, but he refused to do so. He insisted on keeping the option open for the UK to join the planned single European currency – it didn’t even have a name then – and thus annoyed party members.

By the time McSmith’s book came out, with an image on the cover just of a man’s feet, in suede shoes (not Hush Puppies, Clarke said, but Crockett & Jones), John Major was in deep trouble, and it seemed likely he would be turfed out within months. But Clarke was no longer the shoo-in to succeed him. People have forgotten now how unpopular Major was. More unpopular even than Theresa May at her lowest ebb. Much more unpopular than Boris Johnson is today. His net satisfaction was at minus 54 per cent, at that point the worst ever recorded by a prime minister – a record only ever beaten by Gordon Brown.