Grant Shapps: ‘Mick Lynch has been taking passengers and workers for a ride for far too long’

Grant Shapps isn’t buying the the idea of Mick Lynch being a modern-day folk hero.

The RMT general secretary may have gained a cult following after a series of punchy TV interviews on the train strikes, but his Transport Secretary nemesis rails against any notion of Lynch’s glorification on social media, where he has become an unlikely online pin-up following run-ins with the likes of Piers Morgan and Kay Burley.

“I don’t agree that he’s some sort of hero,” insists Shapps. “He’s a personality for sure but I don’t think that translates to the public thinking it’s great that our trains aren’t running.

“He’s said himself he’s nostalgic for the 1970s days of union baron power – that is what this is all about for him. But for passengers and his members, the workers – it’s a disaster.”

With train drivers’ union Aslef set to stage a walkout on Saturday, August 13, ahead of another two days of RMT industrial action on August 18 and 20, Shapps is having to weather an unprecedented summer of discontent – not only on the railways but across the UK’s pandemic-plagued airports.

Little wonder, then, that he is pulling no punches. “Mick has been taking passengers and workers for a ride for far too long – and not in a good way,” he says, holding nothing back as we chat in the garden of his detached home in Brookmans Park, smack bang in the middle of the Welwyn Hatfield constituency he has held in Hertfordshire since 2005.

“The union bosses are motivated by some outmoded class war that hankers after days that have gone. Much to their upset, they’re not bringing the country to a standstill because people are able to work from home. The world has changed. It’s moved on. These union bosses are dinosaurs who haven’t realised that’s the case.”

Pointing out that there hasn’t been a day since Boris Johnson appointed him as Transport Secretary in July 2019 without “either an actual strike or a mandate for a strike”, he insists that the dispute isn’t purely about pay.

In July, Network Rail offered the RMT an eight per cent rise across the next two years but the union rejected the deal without putting it to its members, arguing it amounts to “a real terms pay cut” which would involve “cutting a third of all frontline maintenance roles and 50 per cent of all scheduled maintenance work”. Shapps is unapologetic about staff cuts, arguing that it is “nonsense” to have both someone driving the train and another opening and closing the doors.

He adds that the union’s insistence that “blokes physically walk around the tracks and check the rails” rather than relying on a machine that can take 70,000 pictures a minute is “unsafe”.

“It’s Luddite behaviour – not accepting new technology, not accepting new work practices, not welcoming new safety regimes like having machines do things that people are doing at the moment.

“For years and years, successive governments and secretaries of state have just capitulated rather than get the modernisation of the railway done.

“I simply will not capitulate on this. We absolutely have to modernise the railways for the passengers. It is ludicrous that we’re operating under contracts, which go back to precedents set in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s which completely miss out on the Thatcher reforms entirely. And in some cases, rules that go back to 1919, which (under an agreement dating back to 1919, means Sunday working is voluntary) is this business about not being able to run a Sunday service. Sunday isn’t a rest day when no one wants to travel. It’s extremely busy. We now have, in some cases, higher numbers of people travelling on a Sunday than before coronavirus but far fewer travelling during the week.”

Shapps is looking to introduce legislation in the next session of Parliament to crack down on the unions, including stopping co-ordinated industrial action, limiting picketing and having a cooling-off period after strikes. But as he concedes: “It all depends on the next Prime Minister.” It also depends on whether he will still be Transport Secretary after Mr Johnson’s successor is crowned on September 5.

Having launched his own last-minute leadership bid with a 13-second video, only to pull out after failing to secure the backing of the 20 MPs needed to enter the race, he has thrown his weight behind Rishi Sunak – who now appears less likely to win the leadership race than Tory members’ favourite Liz Truss. “Both have their strengths,” he says diplomatically. “Clearly I also had another idea, which was to bet on myself.”

By his own admission Shapps “hadn’t started to build any kind of campaign at all” but decided to put his hat in the ring after years spent up close and personal with David Cameron. As the party’s chairman from 2012 to 2015, he would meet with the former prime minister twice a day at Downing Street. “I think to do that job you’ve got to have a variety of skills and attributes, one of which is you’ve got to be bloody competent at what you’ve done. I’ve tried to take the departments I’ve run including transport out of the news for all the wrong reasons.”

Was it embarrassing when he failed to secure enough backing? “I had 17 people who were prepared to back me from nothing, which was very humbling,” he cheerily replies, joking that Belinda, his wife of almost 25 years, let out a “string of expletives” when he announced he was standing.

As his 18-year-old twins Noa and Tabytha flit about their comfortable but not opulent home alongside the family black Labrador Tequila (eldest son Hadley, 21, who has just graduated from university, rents nearby after his parents gave up his bedroom to house a family of three Ukrainian refugees in April, who are still with them), the family appear reassuringly normal. Tabytha is anxiously awaiting her A-level results, hoping for the three As she needs to go to the University of Leeds to study politics and economics. Noa, meanwhile, “did not cope well with lockdown” and left school after his first year of A-Levels. He is now an apprentice at Microsoft.

For the fourth year running, the family has been forced to forgo a summer holiday abroad, with the 53-year-old forever fearful of jetting off while others might be facing last-minute flight cancellations and lost baggage.

“We’re not going away because I wanted to be here to look after any potential summer travel issues from the rail strikes to aviation. That’s just part of the job. My wife has known for a very long time that there will be weeks when we will have our friends from the media outside the front door.

Yet despite the flack he sometimes cops on social media, Shapps seems to relish being in the firing line. As well as proudly declaring he was “the first MP on Twitter” back in 2000, he tells me that he “quite enjoys” the “mental agility” of being asked to do the broadcast round during particularly difficult weeks for the Government (of which there have been plenty, lately).

“If we’ve had to deal with a very tricky situation, then I don’t try and pretend we haven’t. Being a bit human helps.”

Despite his rather nerdy nickname “Spreadsheet Shapps”, earned by being the government’s resident number cruncher during various whipping operations, the former Watford Grammar School boy is more human than his public image suggests.

Unlike many of his Oxbridge contemporaries, Shapps, who was born and raised in Croxley Green near Rickmansworth, left school after gaining six O-levels to study business and finance at Watford’s Cassio College. Inspired by his parents Tony and Beryl running their own business – a specialist camera shop in Baker Street – he started his working life as a photocopier sales rep before founding his own printing firm in 1990 at the age of 21, which is still going strong 32 years later.

A self-confessed “geek”, who “flunked” biology because he was spending too much time designing computer programmes (one of which he sold to BT aged 16), Shapps admits he had an unconventional childhood. His musician brother Andre, went on to become the keyboardist for Big Audio Dynamite, while their cousin Mick Jones founded punk rock band The Clash. (“I apologise to him for being a Tory. It’s not good for his street cred. He apologises to me for whatever the latest sort of drug scandal is”).

“I’m a bit geeky,” concedes Shapps, whose favourite restaurant is Nandos. “I do love a spreadsheet and I am quite a big to-do list person. Basically I was writing code when I should have been paying more attention in class. I sort of prefer to teach myself stuff in my own time. I only read non-fiction books.”

While Belinda, who has just retrained as a psychotherapist, was “very, very, very unhappy” about Noa leaving school, Shapps was more philosophical. “He was not coping with lockdown from a mental health perspective. We said you can leave but you’ve got to have a job to go to. He did his own research and the next thing we knew, he’d landed the Microsoft apprenticeship.”

At times, Shapps’ somewhat cavalier approach has landed him in trouble. He will forever be haunted by his decision to use a number of pseudonyms, including Michael Green, which led to controversy in 2015 after he first denied having a second job – only to admit that he had been practising business under another name.

Brushing the furore aside, he insists it was “ridiculously overblown” saying: “I published a few things online using a pen name because I knew one day I'd like to go into politics.”

Despite being an outsider (as well as being non-university educated, Shapps is also Jewish), he says: “I've never suffered an inferiority complex. It is true that it’s unusual at the top level of politics to have a pretty normal, comprehensive sort of background, but the Tory party always welcomed me.” Although the family is not religious “we do keep a kosher home because I’m also married to a Jewish girl”. He goes on to describe how he met Belinda, five years his junior, at the Skyrack pub in Headingley when he was up in Leeds visiting a friend in 1995 and how they enjoy nights in watching Stranger Things.

Yet the early days of the couple’s marriage were overshadowed by Shapps being diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma two years after their wedding in 1997. The shock diagnosis came 10 years after a previous brush with death when a car crash in Kansas in the US left him in a coma.

“I was 30 and I had a bit of a cough,” he recalls. “I went to the doctor because it was a bit persistent. They didn’t find anything so I went back a second time, again nothing. After the third time they did an X-ray and they found a mediastinal mass.

“That conversation – you never expect it. We hadn’t started a family because we were fairly newly married. Then we had all the realisation of not just, will you make it, but also thinking about family planning – having to do IVF and storage and all that sort of messy business.”

Two weeks before treatment, the couple had to freeze their eggs and sperm amid the threat of chemotherapy rendering Shapps infertile. After a gruelling year of chemo and radiotherapy, he made a full recovery and they went on to conceive Hadley with their first round of IVF and the twins with their third.

“It makes you realise you should get on with things. You’re not on the planet for long anyway but you realise how quickly that can get cut short.”

It also gave him a newfound appreciation for the NHS. “When I was involved in the car crash in America, I was only just coming round in my hospital bed when the phone rang with someone asking where to send the bill. By comparison, my cancer treatment was completely covered by the NHS.”

Not that Shapps is hankering for the Health Secretary’s job. “It’s not a position I covet,” he says. Shapps still seems to be coming to terms with the ousting of Johnson, who gave him his dream job three years ago after he declared a love of all things transport. The Tesla driver, who also cycles around on his 90-year-old father’s bike, which he recently electrified himself, has a pilot’s licence and has clocked up 800 flying hours in his 37-year-old plane, which he keeps at London Elstree Aerodrome.

Revealing how coronavirus used to keep him awake at night, he says: “Everyone’s got pluses, minuses. We’re all fallible. And Boris Johnson is no exception. But if you look at his so-called misdemeanours, compared with the millions and millions of lives that man has helped save by backing the development of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine...”

He thumps the table as he continues: “I was there! The reason we had the fastest vaccine rollout of any developed nation was not blooming well by chance. If you take the classic three: the fact that no one else would have busted through Brexit; coronavirus and the lives he saved; the fact that we had the fastest growth in the G7 last year and have the joint fastest this year and if you look at what he’s done in Ukraine then say ‘Oh he had a can of Coke in the cabinet room or whatever’.

“People can pile on all those things. But which bit of that did we not know about Boris before he became Prime Minister?”

Did the party make a mistake in forcing him out, then? “Yes I think it did,” he candidly replies.

Although Shapps did not attend Mr and Mrs Johnson’s recent wedding celebration, he has spoken to Boris and describes his mood as “philosophical”. “I’ve not seen him angry at all”, he insists. “I’d say he’s more reflective”. It’s clear Shapps is worried not only about his own future but the future of the Conservatives.

Surely he’s run a spreadsheet on which seats they stand to win and lose at the next election? “No spreadsheet is entirely able to predict the future and nothing is guaranteed but if we get our ducks in a row and if we present a really compelling vision of this country to the voters then I think we can do it.”

Ever the party man, he cannot resist taking aim at Labour, adding: “It’s impossible for them to be honest brokers because they have taken 100 million pounds from the unions in the last 10 years.”

If he remains in post then it isn’t just the unions he needs to grapple with but the “complex, fragmented” railway system – as well as thorny issues like smart motorways of which he admits he is “not a fan”.

He is also in the process of scoping out a new death by dangerous cycling law in a bid to curb “cyclists who don’t think that the red light is for them”. And he’s set a “jet zero” target to make flying more environmentally friendly. “The UK is leading the developed world by requiring 10 per cent of all of our fuel to be sustainable aviation fuel but it needs to be 100 per cent.”

It’s an ambitious target – not least for someone who could be out of a job in less than a month but as Shapps points out: “If life has taught me anything then it’s don’t waste too much time.

“I guess you could say I’m a doer.”