Politics
They're set on keeping Blair at No 10
Published 03 May 1999
Simon Heffer finds the Tories plunging into yet another quite unnecessary argument
One senior member of the shadow government was confident he had worked out the root of the recent brainstorm in the upper reaches of the Conservative Party. "I really thought we had recovered from the shock of being chucked out of office," he told me. "But shock is the only explanation for why Peter [Lilley] has behaved like this. He must still be traumatised."
There have been many opportunities for grief, anger and back-stabbing in the two years since the Major regime was put out of its misery, but none has been quite so Technicolor as the aftermath of Lilley's perceived repudiation of the Thatcherism into which we thought he had been born - and on the 20th anniversary of Her Great Victory, too. What has unfolded since is a typical Tory story: one of panic, misjudgement, lack of communication, unsustainable rhetoric and dishonesty. It helps to explain why there is still absolutely no danger of Blair not having a second, third and probably even a fourth term.
What really appears to have motivated the leadership to start again ideologically was the ridiculous "Listening to Britain" exercise. This stunt included the occasional assertion that the party seemed to be the enemy of the public services. Lilley, delivering a lecture in memory of R A Butler, felt the time had come to protest that the Tories loved the public services and had no intention of privatising them.
The first wave of anger was not so much about the content of the policy - though that was bad enough in a party the majority of whose supporters want a bigger role for the private sector - but about Lilley's failure to consult properly. Two of the three shadow ministers most directly affected, the social security spokesman, Iain Duncan-Smith, and the health spokesman, Ann Widdecombe, had not been asked whether they agreed with this new statement of policy, and went nuclear. The third, the education spokesman David Willetts, kept his counsel. His enemies in the shadow cabinet - who are plentiful - suspect he put Lilley up to it, not least because Lilley remains one of the few senior figures in the party who still believes Willetts's own publicity about his being a political philosopher and intellectual.
More upset than anyone, though, were two older hands - Michael Howard and Sir Norman Fowler. "Michael absolutely went for Peter at shadow cabinet," a colleague said. "I have never seen such an assault and never heard such language used." The rift created by this on-the-hoof act of repositioning will not subside easily. The shadow cabinet is now every bit as factionalised as its real predecessor was before the 1997 debacle. There is talk not of the aggrieved shadow ministers resigning - although Howard has indicated his intention to go, his departure is being held up because he is shadow foreign secretary and there is a war on - but of some potentially explosive counter-speech-making to try to put the record straight.
Francis Maude, the shadow chancellor, then joined the fray by promising to maintain the £40 billion extra spending on the public services promised last July by Gordon Brown. This caused immediate anger among some of his colleagues, again not so much for the principle of the thing, but because Maude, like Hague and other Tory luminaries, denounced the spending at the time it was announced as reckless. On the Today programme on the morning of his speech, Maude argued that there was no contradiction between denouncing the spending last year and supporting it now. His performance took the party straight back to the intellectual morass into which it fell when in office, when it would proudly announce that black was white and take great offence if anybody pointed out that it wasn't.
What is so richly comic about this whole episode - unless you are a card-carrying Tory - is that there was no need for it to happen. There was no need to defend the party against an attack that is not being made. There was no need to close off those financial options in keeping with the Thatcherite tradition that are now being embraced by the Labour government. Above all, there was no need to confuse the millions of people who would actually like to vote Tory next week by giving them good cause to think that the party no longer stands for the fundamental things they believe it stood for.
Everybody, apart from a few extra- planetary beings at the top of the Tory party, knows why it lost the last election. It was because it was dishonest and incompetent, and because most of its ministers were, with great justification, regarded as two-faced, selfish sleazeballs whose only concern was whether the ministerial Rover would still arrive in the morning. It did not lose because voters thought it hated the public services. This absurd fantasy has been manufactured by Messrs Lilley and Willetts, and promoted by Hague.
The latest 1922 Committee meeting was, said who attended, "unbelievably ugly". The average backbencher was pretty unimpressed with the leadership as it was: this latest self-inflicted wound has inevitably raised talk of the need for a change at the top. There won't be one just yet. But if the local elections show the party enjoying a lower percentage share of the vote than at the last general election, and if the Euro-elections in June result in the calamity some opinion polls are predicting, panic will set in. The party cannot afford to go much closer to a general election with such lack of leadership and strategic incompetence. The stage is already set for a bloodbath of recrimination, and for a change it will not start from the bottom.
The author, our Conservative Party correspondent, is a columnist on the "Daily Mail"
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