Politics
Shape up or ship out, Portillo
Published 11 December 2000
The shadow chancellor is clearly in a state, but the Tories can't afford to offer him much sympathy.
As the Tory party had its convulsion over the future - or otherwise - of Michael Portillo, it was difficult to avoid colleagues of the afflicted man eager to offer their personal take on the shadow chancellor's mental health. Several professed their certainty that he had had a breakdown of some sort. It seemed unfair to single him out. As the hysteria about him suggests, the whole party has had one.
The Conservatives seem to be back where they were a year ago, when the slowly rebuilt morale of the party collapsed after Jeffrey Archer abandoned the race for the London mayoralty. After further slow rebuilding, it has collapsed again. Until the Portillo affair broke, the real cause of anger in the party was over its failure to present the results of the recent by-elections in the most favourable light - as a big improvement on 1997. In truth, the fact of their being in safe Labour seats cuts both ways. The Tories may not have stood a chance of winning them, but, equally, they are no guide to what would have happened if any of the seats had been winnable. Do not forget Romsey, for example. There is still no sign that the Tory vote is ready to turn out where it matters. If we are about to have the greatest mass abstention in modern British political history, who can say whom that would favour?
This bout of depression has, however, reopened the debate about the leadership. At a time when too many people appear to be indulging in rather queeny behaviour, rumours begin that someone decidedly unqueeny - such as the ex-SAS man David Davis or the ex-Scots Guardsman Iain Duncan Smith - may have to be drafted in to restore order. Ken Clarke, bless him, indicates that he is available. However, this argument is not about Europe, because only a few at the margins of the party differ from the mainstream about that. Clarke might well be a good leader, but there is hardly anyone left who might elect him.
The Portillo affair exemplified the paranoia, self-indulgence and sheer idiocy of the Tories as they contemplate an early election. Friends and sympathisers of the shadow chancellor were quick to claim that a conspiracy of internal opponents was undermining him: indeed, they had been saying this for months. Some hinted it was the work of Amanda Platell, William Hague's Australian spin-doctor, who had decided to assassinate Portillo for crimes, real or imagined, against her boss. Sadly, the parliamentary lobby brims with hacks who can recall no such briefing against Portillo by Platell. The truth, unfortunately, is much more prosaic.
Portillo came back into politics at the wrong time in his life. That he has had some emotional crisis is plain for all to see. He has not come to terms with being catapulted into a job that makes huge demands on him, while his mind is manifestly, and perhaps irredeemably, elsewhere. He appears to have come back to Westminster because that is what the script said he should do. It was only on arrival that he realised, it seems, that he should have been doing something else instead.
It is not just that he doesn't like being in opposition, or doesn't like the new House of Commons, or doesn't like his close colleagues: whatever is wrong was wrong before he set foot in the place after winning the Kensington and Chelsea by- election. Whether his admission, in 1999, that he had been homosexual is the cause of his distraction or a symptom of it, only he knows.
His resulting detachment has seriously distracted his close colleagues. His leader has, by all accounts, struggled to deal with him. A relationship Hague determined should be close has been anything but - largely because of Portillo's inability to apply himself to the job in hand with any enthusiasm.
Gordon Brown, unsurprisingly, has been completely untroubled by Portillo. A party conference speech that should have rallied the faithful with a vision of tax-cutting and reform of public spending instead dwelt on Portillo's vision for black people and homosexuals. However much the Tories' opponents would like to believe it, it is a calumny on the rank and file to say that they couldn't care less about such minorities. They just don't believe those minorities should be singled out for special mention, which they regard as preceding special treatment. And they certainly don't believe minorities are more important than cutting taxes.
The speech bombed in the party, especially among Portillo's former adherents. Eric Forth, who would probably have run Portillo's leadership campaign had there been one in 1997, denounced the speech as irrelevant to the Tory agenda. Forth is now regarded as his former hero's number one critic. Within a few weeks, Portillo was feeling isolated and persecuted, according to his friends. When the details of an attack on Portillo by Forth and others at a private dinner of the No Turning Back Group leaked to the press, Portillo resigned from the group over the breach of trust. His surviving friends blamed Central Office spin-doctors for undermining him. In fact, the story is thought to have been leaked by a loose-tongued MP who professes to be one of Portillo's greatest admirers; another example of how cock-up, rather than conspiracy, has caused this particular problem.
Another more discreet MP told me a month ago that Portillo had confided in several of his friends that he recognised he would never be leader of his party, and that he had made a huge mistake in coming back into politics. Since the MP was an admirer of Portillo's, he told me this on the condition that I regarded what I heard as "background" and would not write the story. It was exactly the tale that appeared three weeks later, on the front of the Telegraph, causing the latest ructions. The statement Portillo released, when asked by George Jones, the political editor of the Telegraph, whether he intended to stay in politics, took two hours to produce. When Portillo's colleagues heard of this delay, they were further annoyed, for they believe that, if he planned a future in politics, he would not have needed two hours before sharing the secret with Jones and the British people.
Old friends have tried to get to the bottom of what is wrong with Portillo: but his defences go up against any inquiry. Many of those formerly close to him say they now hardly ever see him. Portillo seems, sadly, to feel he can trust no one with whatever is wrong, and this is now leading to wild speculation about the real cause of his distress.
There is a philosophical de-bate going on among a select few in the Tory party on libertarianism v authoritarianism. It has been whipped up by the anti-Tory press, desperate for something different to write and keen to cause trouble. Anyone who thinks it is the cause of Portillo's woe wants his head examined.
In the wake of the latest Portillo revelation, Tory party managers spent all their time in the tearoom and around the corridors of Westminster placating their furious charges, and promising that the leadership would get more of a grip on Michael in future. Portillo himself did his bit, in a succession of media interviews in which he professed his commitment to the party. The emergence of his interview with the Spanish paper El Pais, in which he spoke of the party as "flatlining", undid most of the minimal beneficial effect of that. Hague, under pressure from colleagues, advisers and backbenchers to reshuffle Portillo to where he could do less damage, seems to be firmly resisting the idea - for the moment.
The alternative view of what happened to Portillo - that he was the victim of a merciless assault by a conspiracy of hard- line rightwingers and their friends in Central Office - is mainly paranoia. There are certainly plenty of people who have had enough of Portillo, and for a number of reasons, but they are not confined to the Thatcherite right of the party. They will not admit that he deserves sympathy and understanding for his emotional problem, whatever it is. In the ruthless world in which the Tory party finds itself, staring at a second hideous election defeat, there is simply no room for passengers, however much compassion they might merit under normal circumstances. Mind you, anyone who thinks the Tory party has, in normal circumstances, ever felt the need to be compassionate with its own has not studied its history very closely.
The lukewarm reception that even the Tory press gave Hague's announcement on taxation, on account of its lack of vision, suggests that Portillo must also overcome problems in communicating effectively with the British people.
Portillo's supporters feel that he can do no wrong, and if it looks as though he has, they will find someone else to blame. Sadly, the notion that everything is always someone else's fault, and someone else's responsibility to put right, is at the heart of the chaos in the Tory party now. From the agony he appears to be enduring, Portillo himself would not take the line his supporters do: he plainly has not been able to offload the blame for what-ever is troubling him.
Whether he turns out to be a lame-duck shadow chancellor after all this will be proved or disproved by his contribution to the election campaign. If he chooses to make his exit, then it may not be the catastrophe some Tories fear. Without a general bucking-up of ideas all round they would, by then, have even more serious things to worry about.
The author, a columnist on the Daily Mail, is our Conservative Party correspondent
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