Profile: Michael Ancram - The next leader of the Tories?

There is a press photograph of a bizarrely cheerful Michael Ancram arriving at Conservative Central Office on Tuesday night. A firestorm is raging. He has just called in Scotland Yard to investigate the alleged penetration of Tory bank accounts after the revelation that Michael Ashcroft's Belize Bank Trust has transferred pounds 666,5000 to them since the summer. The aftershocks of Lord Archer's resignation last weekend continue unabated. It is easily the Conservative Party's worst week since William Hague became leader. And yet, turning from the front door, overcoatless and in a double- breasted suit, to face the camera, the Tory chairman is grinning broadly, rather as if his party had unexpectedly won a by-election in a safe Labour seat.

To all appearances, Mr Ancram was pushing his well-deserved reputation for good humour under fire beyond acceptable limits. In fact, he had little alternative. He had arrived in Smith Square at the peak of the crisis from his nearby flat only to find the door firmly locked and the night security man deaf to the doorbell, off on his errands deep in the interior of Central Office. The standard shot of the focused man of action, brow furrowed, striding purposefully through the front door to take control, was simply not a possibility. Knowing he was beaten, Ancram genially agreed to pose for the solitary photographer as he waited patiently for the door to open. And yet the incident - which Ancram described with some hilarity to several colleagues this week - was more revealing than it seems. For Ancram is unflappable, fabled for not losing his temper or raising his voice, for courtesy towards his staff when things go wrong and for cracking jokes at moments of greatest pressure. Prepared to defend his party on television even in the most unfavourable circumstances, he is a calm and adept performer who almost invariably lowers the temperature of political debate.

Which is why it was uncharacteristic of him to raise it quite deliberately this week by announcing that the party had turned to Scotland Yard after The Independent and The Times received detailed information about the Ashcroft payments to the party. On the one hand the two middle-market newspapers, The Express and the Daily Mail, saw the alleged burglary as a bigger issue than the Ashcroft payments. On the other, Ancram's decision elevated a good story into a sensational one which radio and television could not, as they otherwise might have done, ignore.

Part of the explanation, however, lies in the wider political implications of the Ashcroft affair. Ancram, the clubbable Ampleforth- and Christ Church, Oxford-educated son of the 12th Marquess of Lothian, and Michael Ashcroft, the abrasive self-made global multi-millionaire, are not natural soul- mates drawn to each other by mutual chemistry. But as long as Ashcroft remains both Conservative Party Treasurer and the plaintiff in a libel action against The Times - over allegations that one of his companies was under suspicion of laundering drug money - the party is fully embroiled in his battle. If Ashcroft were to lose, the damage to the party would be incalculable; if The Times were to lose, the damages could be all too calculable - some claim more than pounds 100m if Ashcroft can prove the value of his stocks were reduced by the paper's allegations. The stakes are therefore high not only for the paper and for Michael Ashcroft, but also for the party, its leader - and its chairman.

Ancram was born 54 years ago into the heart of the Scottish aristocracy, but politics was also in the blood. His father, who has family seats on both sides of the border (Melbourne Hall in Derbyshire and a stately home with 20,000 acres at Jedburgh), was a whip in Sir Alec Douglas-Home's government in the early Sixties and subsequently a Foreign Office minister in Ted Heath's administration. But his political instincts were, if anything, more nurtured by two formidable women.

One was Lady Elliot of Harwood, a close family friend, who was related by marriage to Herbert Asquith and had known Downing Street from the inside as a child. But she was, nevertheless, a highly active Conservative. The other woman was Ancram's devoutly Roman Catholic mother Antonella, "a real Tory matriarch, with class and style oozing from every pore".

Brought up a Roman Catholic - he still is - Ancram went to Ampleforth rather than Eton, then on to Christ Church, Oxford, where he read history. He canvassed for the Tories in the 1964 and 1966 elections. Grown-up politics already seems to have had more appeal than the student posturing of the Oxford Union, whose debates he never attended. He may be a real "toff among garagistes", as one MP describes him (one colleague who shared a hotel room with him on a foreign trip claimed he even wore monogrammed underpants), but, unlike several of his equally blue-blooded contemporaries, he was not untouched by the Sixties and developed his life-long and still eclectic interest in folk music from Jacobite ballads to the songs of Tom Paxton and Joan Baez. There can be few members of the present Tory front bench who own, as he does, a 12-string Martin acoustic guitar, can do a first-rate impression of Buddy Holly, or have schmoozed with Paul Simon in Fulham's Troubadour Club - a famous folk hangout which Ancram frequented in the mid Sixties.

He is one of the select group of top-flight politicians who took silk at the Scottish bar. It includes the late John Smith, with whom the highly sociable Ancram became firm friends. As with Smith, the politics went hand-in-hand with the bar.

Ancram's first experience as a parliamentary candidate was in 1970 in Tam Dalyell's rock-solid Labour seat of West Lothian - a seat made even more hopeless for him by the fact that the local Orange Lodge refused to back him because he was a Catholic. It is one of the few times his religion has had an adverse effect on his career; apart from a few disparaging remarks by Ian Paisley at the end of Ancram's time in Belfast, no Unionist ever mentioned it when he was the political minister in Northern Ireland, his most important job to date. He was seen as a straight dealer. Even after he became the first minister to meet Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness since Willie Whitelaw in the early Seventies, he was respected by the Unionists and the nationalists alike.)

Dalyell, who has a vivid recollection of Ancram and his mother touring the mining villages of Blackburn, Fauldhouse and Blackridge (hitherto a no-go area for the Tories), remembers that the electors "who had not the slightest intention of voting Tory, were pleased and flattered to be called on by Michael Ancram and, in particular, by his mother the Marchioness of Lothian". According to Dalyell, he was "without doubt" the ablest candidate of all those he has fought against in 12 elections.

Dalyell, who has followed Ancram's career as closely as any opponent, says (as do many of the man's colleagues in private), that he is "intensely ambitious". That judgement is vindicated by the fact that Ancram has, highly unusually, sat for three different constituencies. He defeated the legendary Labour MP John Mackintosh in Berwick and East Lothian in February 1974, but he was out again in October and he won Edinburgh South in 1979, only to lose it again in 1987. A less determined man, having twice lost his seat, might have given up at this point. Instead Ancram went south, as the best of the Scottish "carpetbaggers", searching for a safe English seat. He eventually alighted at Devizes, the pleasant Wiltshire constituency which should be his for as long as he wants it.

Despite a congenial, relaxed manner he needs little sleep and will cope with ministerial and constituency paperwork until the early hours. Once a 40-a-day cigarette smoker, he put on weight in Northern Ireland and now works out regularly in the Westminster gym. He has a happy family life, having married another Catholic aristocrat, Jane Fitzalan-Howard, the daughter of the Duke of Norfolk, in 1975. They have two daughters.

Ancram's ambition may have also played a part in a certain adaptability which has helped him rise, albeit at a steady rather than a meteoric pace, through the Thatcher, Major and Hague years. He was a founder member of the "Blue Chip" club of centre-left Tories which included John Major and met regularly at the home of Tristan Garel-Jones. And, like his oldest Scottish political friend Malcolm Rifkind, Ancram was a serious Tory devolutionist, in favour of proportional representation and, at least until 1982, modernising the Lords. But, unlike Rifkind who resigned from Thatcher's front bench over the issue and joined the "Yes" campaign in the 1978 referendum, Ancram changed his mind on the respectable grounds that devolution in Scotland would lead to a destabilising imbalance in the British constitution.

In 1980, and out of Parliament, he was rewarded with the appointment to the chairmanship of the Scottish Tories by Margaret Thatcher. And, as a junior minister in the Scottish Office from 1983-87, he was responsible for first introducing the poll tax.

The friendship with Rifkind did not collapse over devolution any more than his friendship with his fellow Christ Church-educated (and more right wing) aristocrat Lord Cranborne did when Cranborne astounded Hague and Ancram by doing the behind-the-scenes deal with Tony Blair to preserve 92 hereditary peers. Cranborne was sacked for this, even though the leadership later accepted it.

This raises the interesting question of what a man whose early career displayed the classic pattern of a leftish One Nation Tory patrician is doing as a key lieutenant to the distinctly right-wing Mr Hague. It is tempting to see him as a scaled-down version of Whitelaw, whose presence at Thatcher's side helped to reassure the old-fashioned shire Tories who had little ideological sympathy with her. Ancram even caught himself the other day saying "good, good, good," in the manner of Whitelaw. He has contacts in every Tory faction. He is, he said in 1994, "on some issues on the centre-left and on others on the centre-right".

On Europe, he has a record, at least since the Major period, of being robustly anti-federalist. He adheres strongly to the now orthodox Hagueite position of being in favour of EU membership but wholly against the single currency. And his temporary espousal of devolution was Unionist in flavour. It is impossible to see him having any truck with the nascent English nationalist tendency in the Tory party.

The other question is: whither Ancram now? He was extremely happy at the Northern Ireland Office. He was good at it; he revelled in the craic of Belfast politics. He thought, rightly, he was doing something worthwhile. As a student, he wrote a folk song lamenting the conflict. He wanted to be Northern Ireland Secretary - and probably would have been had Major won the 1997 election. As Opposition constitutional affairs spokesman, he handled devolution well and helped cheer Scottish Tories flabbergasted by the scale of their defeat.

Many MPs thought he wanted to be Shadow Foreign Secretary but also that he failed to push Hague to give him the job. And yet, the party chairmanship may just be the ideal post for him. Tory chairmen used to sink and swim with their leader. But the seismic change wrought by the party's new rules, now mean that if MPs vote to sack their leader, then the leader cannot be a candidate in the subsequent contest. The result is that a party chairman can therefore stand without worrying about being disloyal. For the moment, Ancram's chairmanship is, for Hague, something of a bulwark against a post-election assasination bid by the Portillistas. They might see off Hague, only to deliver the leadership into the hands of Ancram standing as the unity candidate with unrivalled access to the party members who decide the issue. Ancram must consider, deep down, that he could yet be a candidate. He may have been a slow developer but then what is the Lothian family motto? "Sero sed serio" - "Late but in earnest".

Life Story

Born: Michael Andrew Foster Jude Kerr (Earl of Ancram) on 7 July 1945, heir to the 12th Marquess of Lothian

Family: Father, Peter Francis Walter Kerr, KCVO, the 12th Marquess of Lothian (b1922). Mother, Antonella (nee Newland). Younger brother, Lord Ralph William Francis Joseph (b1957). Sisters: Lady Mary Marianella Anne (b1944); Lady Cecil Nennella Therese (b1948); Lady Clare Margaret (b1951); Lady Elizabeth Marian Frances, Countess of Dalkeith (b1954)

Marriage: To Lady (Theresa) Jane Fitzalan-Howard, daughter of the 16th Duke of Norfolk. Two daughters: Clare Therese (b1979), Mary Cecil (b1981)

Education: Small French-speaking Swiss school; Ampleforth; Christ Church, Oxford; Edinburgh University. Became an advocate in Edinburgh, 1970; QC, 1996

Political career: MP for Berwick and East Lothian, Feb to Oct 1974; for Edinburgh South 1979-87 and for Devizes since 1992. Chairman of the Scottish Conservatives 1980-83; Minister in the Scottish Office, 1983-87; Minister in Northern Ireland 1994-97; Chairman of the Conservative Party since October 1998

Hobbies: Folk singing; skiing (second fastest in the Anglo-Swiss ski race, Davos, 1988); photography

Suffers from: Gout

He says: "The Conservative Party has a long tradition of Christian involvement. Other faiths have a role to play, too. The Catholic encyclicals are one source of knowledge"