An era of upheaval in City Hall corridors

Some of the Conservative politician’s critics thought he was a dictator. That spring, nobody in Bradford thought he was a comedian.

He was the man who, in October the previous year, had presided over one of the stormiest meetings of full Council that anybody could remember. Irate people in the public galleries heckled, booed and one even threatened to cut Eric Pickles’s throat.

His Bradford Revolution, so called, was the subject of television programmes and heavyweight national newspaper articles and intense public debate. It could have been turned into a television drama by Michael Dobbs or Kay Mellor.

Politically, the idea was to take on the Labour Party in its inner-city heartland and win. Mr Pickles outlined the strategy at a Conservative Party conference at Brighton.

“It should be the test of our party to remove Labour from the last vestiges of power in the North. If we can do it in Bradford, the birthplace of the Independent Labour Party, we can do it anywhere.”

Mr Pickles became Tory group leader in February 1987 when Labour was in power. Over the next 15 months, the Conservatives won seats at Eccleshill, Idle, Baildon, Clayton, Undercliffe and Keighley North. All three Odsal seats held by Labour were lost to the Tories, due principally to public anger at Labour’s indecisive response to the city’s problem with gipsies.

In May 1988, Mr Pickles became leader of Bradford Council. His Conservatives ruled but only by the narrowest of margins – the second and casting vote of the Lord Mayor, who happened to be a Conservative, in his capacity as chairman of full council meetings.

This in itself was unprecedented. Traditionally, Lord Mayors were supposed to be non-political. That was the first cause of controversy.

Maintaining this slender advantage in City Hall over the 18-months to two years Pickles calculated he needed in power, meant retaining the Lord Mayoralty for a second consecutive year by voting in another Conservative. Not afraid to court controversy, Mr Pickles prepared his plans in advance.

The Bradford Revolution was the name given to a package of ideas worked out by Pickles and a core group of Conservative Group colleagues – Phyllis Petit, David Heseltine, Kathryn Metcalfe, Mike Gaunt, Richard Wightman and Margaret Eaton.

These ideas concerning the purpose, policy and finance of City Hall were inspired by one of Margaret Thatcher’s favourite Cabinet members, Environment Secretary Nicholas Ridley – the man who quietly ensured national coal supplies before the 1984 miners’ strike.

The aim was to drive down budget costs and thereby lower the community charge or poll tax levied by central government, particularly in politically volatile inner-city areas that Conservatives needed to prevent Labour from winning back.

A top Council officer told the T&A at the time that the drive to cut the size and cost of council services and to improve them by means of streamlined management and competition stemmed Mr Ridley’s phrase about councils – “enabling not providing”.

He said: “There’s no point in gaining power only to continue a fairly ropey form of municipal socialism. In the past, officers have managed to take the Tories and turn them around, so that they ended up appointing even more staff. That’s why Eric Pickles wants to cut the number of committees and staff.”

On April 20, 1989, Mr Pickles was halfway through his Bradford Revolution. By May 1990 he was voted out of power. Six months later, on November 22, 1990, Margaret Thatcher was deposed from power by Tory MPs.