Grant Shapps: “I’m not waiting by the phone, but I genuinely wish Theresa May well”
6 min read
After last autumn’s abortive coup, Grant Shapps admits he is not ‘waiting by the phone’ for a call from the Prime Minister. Instead the trained pilot and chair of the APPG on aviation is now ‘ploughing his own furrow’ on the backbenches. He talks to Kevin Schofield about his three passions – planes, blockchain and infrastructure
Not so long ago, Grant Shapps used to walk through the security gates at the bottom of Downing Street twice a day, en route to advising David Cameron on how to run the country.
The memories of the 8.30am and 4pm get-togethers are still vivid, and there is an air of wistfulness when he mentions them, unprompted, during our conversation.
But unsurprisingly for a man renowned for his energy and thirst for new ideas, the former Conservative chairman has not decided to put his feet up now that his services are no longer required by the Prime Minister.
Instead, he now chairs two all-party parliamentary groups – on aviation and blockchain – as well as the British Infrastructure Group (BIG), an ad hoc body exploring what needs to be built to help the UK thrive in the future.
“Ultimately, if you come to parliament you want to be able to change things,” he tells The House from his PCH office. “You can quite obviously do that as a minister, but if you are a backbencher you want to plough your own furrow and achieve something, and these are three areas I’m passionate about.”
As a trained pilot, it is unsurprising that the MP for Welwyn Hatfield thinks the reduction in the number of British airfields – from thousands at the time of the last war to just 120 today – is “a bloody emergency”.
He says: “They’re closing down at such an alarming rate that we’re getting to the point where we won’t be able to train pilots, air traffic controllers and engineers; we won’t be able to sustain our great British aviation and aerospace sectors.
“The problem the sector has is that people think, ‘isn’t it just people buzzing around at the weekends in their planes?’. The government’s got a policy of making this country the best in the world for civil aviation, however, we are a long way short of that. What is wrong with this country when we think we can close these airfields?
“Boeing reckons that, globally, we’ll need 600,000 pilots by 2032. Britain is the best country in the world to train to be a pilot because they all need to speak English, but it’s the only profession in this country on which VAT is charged for learning. No one has cared about this stuff, so the jobs are being exported.
“This is a major transport issue, as well as a major jobs and skills issue, and the APPG thinks that as a society we need to wake up to the fact that if we let this go, then we are literally shipping jobs abroad.”
Blockchain is a technology which has been described as “pixie dust” by its critics, but for Shapps it has the potential to revolutionise the world. He may have some way to go in convincing his parliamentary colleagues, however. According to Hansard, it has only ever been mentioned five times.
“Two were people using the word ‘blockchain’ in the wrong context and another couple were in relation to bitcoin,” he says. “But this is a lot bigger than the price of a cryptocurrency; this could be about how you run public administration.”
Asked to explain what blockchain is, he says: “If I owe you a tenner and say I’ll make a bank transfer to you, I go to my bank and send it and you look at your bank and see the money come into your account. To make that transaction, you and I need two trusted third parties to make sure it’s happened. What the blockchain does is remove the need to have banks involved, because I make the payment to you, that gets confirmed by millions of computers in the blockchain, you can check and the proof is there.
“You then start to think of the implications of that and it is mindblowing.”
Shapps’ APPG is exploring how it could be used to help deliver public services more efficiently for a fraction of the current cost. He says: “In order to get to the bottom of what it is, we’ve set up the blockchain APPG with an enormous programme of inquiry. It’s a two-year programme with the best experts in the world. What will it mean for the NHS? What would it look like to blockchain our patient records, for example? What could it mean for the Land Registry or welfare? It’s a proper, serious bit of work.”
If all that wasn’t enough, the British Infrastructure Group is grappling with the huge challenges the UK faces in adapting to the demands of a fast-changing world.
BIG’s next report is on smart energy meters, while previous ones have looked at the rollout of broadband, mobile connections and bridges. “My interest came out of sitting in No 10 twice a day – at 8.30am and 4pm – and it didn’t matter what we were discussing, whether it was the third runway or HS2 or Crossrail,” says Shapps. “Whatever the subject was, there was no one arguing for the infrastructure. There are a thousand reasons not to do something when it comes to infrastructure, rather than get the job done. So I decided that when I had time, that’s what I would do.”
There is no doubt that Shapps – who was a minister throughout Cameron’s time in office – is keeping busy, which is just as well as his chances of a return to government are vanishingly small.
That is due in no small part to his infamous attempt to unseat Theresa May in the days immediately after the Tories’ disastrous conference last year. But he has no regrets.
“There’s a time at which people have to be honest about what they see around them. You have to put on a strange kind of glasses to not recognise that things were not exactly going tickety-boo. We’d just had a terrible election, lost our majority, had a terrible conference that looked like we were lacking in ideas and where the cabinet were not being disciplined going into it. You need to call these things out.
“The problem was the Prime Minister was being very poorly advised up to the election by people who didn’t have her best interests at heart, and were terrorising members of the cabinet. You cannot operate government like that, and they went.
“People learn on the job and the Prime Minister has been able to do that when people who were misleading her were no longer there.
“I’m not waiting by the phone, but I genuinely wish her well.”
Shapps even thinks his abortive coup may even have helped the PM.
“If part of the product of that has been those around her saying ‘we can do better than this’, then great,” he says. “The last thing I want to see is Corbyn inflicted on this country. We just need to make sure we do better.
“Come this year’s conference, it needs to be a barnstormer, and I think and hope that we can.”
And if Team May are short of an idea or two before this year’s jamboree in Birmingham, there’s a former party chairman who would be more than happy to take their call.
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