POLITICS: It’s our party . . .
. . . and we’ll cry if we want to
Teapot Year Three
Iain Duncan Smith is not just a good leader but a good team player. He has a broad mind that should allow Tories of all other views to serve under him. He is not a remotely divisive figure. It is hard to think of anybody who would inspire the party more.— Simon Heffer, The Daily Mail, Summer 2001
Look out, here comes Brent! And if it’s not the Brent East bye election, it’s always going to be something else, for the awful situation the leader of the Tory party finds himself in today is that he has to be lucky all the time. He can’t afford to take a serious hit even once, for it he does, who’s going to come to his rescue? How did it come to this pass, that his friends avert their eyes, whilst his enemies roll theirs? It starts of course with his election as leader, and the transformation between what the party sought, and what the party got. Along with Ken Clarke, candidate Duncan Smith sent out a ‘mini-manifesto’ [PDF] to every member of the party; in his case, this was drawn from a slightly larger ‘main manifesto’. Two years on from his crushing leadership election victory, what does looking at his winning platform then tell us about him, and his losing ways now? It tells us the sorry truth that the greatest victory for the traditional right of the Tory party since the defeat of the Sunday Trading legislation has been thrown away by one man, and one man alone.
Yet, despite everything, history has given Iain Duncan Smith one task to perform, and he is still just about doing it. His role in life is hardly to prepare him for being Prime Minister, but to keep the Tory party in being, in order that his successor might one day do just that, and enter Downing Street. With an inordinately limp period of opposition during this greatest moment of weakness for the Labour government, Mr Duncan Smith cannot be said to be doing his task very well, but still he has not actually split the party in two. It remains to be seen whether any other leader of the party put in place before the next general election would be able to do the same.
Core beliefs
This brief manifesto sets out how I will build on these core beliefs as party leader. It shows how our party can reach out to 21st Century Britain. If we show courage, Conservatives can occupy the common ground of British politics and inspire a new generation of voters.— Iain Duncan Smith, Summer 2001
His aims were ‘simple’, they were to ‘serve the British people’ — and that was best done by helping elect a Conservative government again. Here then was how was how Iain Duncan Smith told other Tories he would go about doing that.
As the first part of the appeal outwards, the pitch rested on the notion of the welfare society, which started unpromisingly with the declaration that, ‘society is changing. To be a Conservative is about using the wisdom of the past for future generations, not about turning the clock’. The issues here were those afflicting the voters’ ‘quality of life’; their ‘fear of crime’ and the fact that ‘the best welfare’ is provided by families and not the state were to the fore. Rhetorical sallies included an expressed regret at the lack of ‘One Nation’ feeling there was in the country, an admiration for ‘volunteering’, and an odd desire ‘to learn from the success of Conservatives in local government in recent years’. The main pledges were to ‘encourage a new generation of social entrepreneurs’ and to give flesh to the Hague-era pledge of there being an “Office of Civil Society”. Only in the most oblique sense can any of the party’s policies in the last 24 months be presumed to have contributed to the former; the latter piece of imported trans-Atlantic junk has thankfully sunk without trace. (We may as well have committed ourselves to setting up a Committee for the Restoration of Decent Table Manners — but we’d most likely have only done that if someone in CCO had read about Newt Gringrich doing the same in a six month old copy of The Public Interest).
Next came the optimistic determination that we should always be, Britain — a free nation in a free world. This was to be achieved as much as by anything else by sustained Conservative opposition to the UK ditching Sterling in favour of the Euro. Thankfully, however, ‘Iain’ intends to be ‘tolerant of those [in the Tory party] who support the single currency’. As and when there’s a referendum, ‘they can temporarily step down [from the shadow cabinet] if they want to join the “Yes” campaign’. And for an especially vatic conclusion, the shadow defence minister warned us that we had to do our bit to stop rogue states from ‘obtaining weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles, which over the next few years will pose a greater threat’. It is a small mercy for the Tory party that Mr Duncan Smith’s ‘majoring’ on WMD — and how, during the recent war against Iraq, he reminded us, he had been the first person to explain to the world that Saddam’s regime had them to a plentiful and threatening extent — has been of less public interest today than it might otherwise have been.
Rewarding hard work and saving was the next plank in Samuel Duncan Smiles’ seaworthy little ship. This actually harked on mostly about the Euro again, but then the opposition was Ken Clarke, and the punters did enjoy the pro-Sterling stuff. A very watery assurance was made as to the party’s determination to ‘reduce the burden of tax’, and Michael’s Howard’s disastrous, comprehensive success in blunting this potential weapon is perhaps not all that surprising in retrospect.
Then we came to the small matter of caring for our environment. Much to the agony of his then campaign manager, David Maclean, this tree-hugging section was included, at the behest of the candidate’s former sister-in-law, to the detriment of any mention of agricultural or specifically rural concerns. This unfortunate victory for gauche metropolitanism over the better instincts of the country party, left the Summer 2001 selectorate scratching their heads at Mr Duncan Smith’s seeming ardour for renewable energy (‘every home should have [solar cells], just as they have a fridge and an immersion heater’). Happily this cause has not been returned to since. Though some of the tinny phrasing did prefigure the intellectually insecure swing left that took place immediately after the leadership election. Tommy rot to the effect that there was a large pool of people excluded from ‘mainstream politics’, presumably on the grounds of their environmentalism and the equally fallacious resistance of ‘the system’ thereto, whom Mr Duncan would and could ‘inspire’ to ‘participate’ in politics anticipates much of the subsequent new left silliness which gripped his leadership.
There’s nothing deader than a dead phrase, and Public service beyond the state’s ‘“ration book” state’ has long since gone the way of the Dodo, and “kitchen table conservatism”. Choice was the motif here, though random emotions also roped in included, a desire to ‘restore the authority of teachers’. Whether by changing the worldview of those who are taught, or by changing the people who teach, was sensibly left obscure. One particularly silly urge, fortunately discarded as quickly as it had been formulated, was the markedly totalitarian notion that, ‘schools should have the power to oblige parents to support the work of teachers through binding “school contracts”’. Clearly there was a slight disharmony here between the previously expressed belief that ‘families know best’ and this pretty astonishing contracting out of both parental responsibility and personal autonomy. This section was another sign of things to come, notably that ‘Britain should not be too proud to learn from our continental neighbours’ when it comes to the provision of public services. No doubt the lessons learnt by shadow cabinet members who spent the subsequent few months scurrying round Europe are intellectually fermenting at this very moment. The inspirational model, for instance, of the French welfare state was a marvel to behold this summer.
In his explicit and personal contribution to his manifesto, Iain Duncan Smith, hit upon ‘unity’ and ‘passionately’ offered ‘clear and honest leadership’. At the heart of his appeal to the mass membership was his campaign appeal as to renewing our party. ‘Effective campaigns, proper funding, top-quality research, and more membership involvement’ were held to be essential to restoring the party to office. Three specific pledges were made: (1.) ‘to re-engage with the voluntary party’, and as a key part of this, their participation in the party’s policy review and campaign planning ‘needs to be not a one-off exercise, but a continuous process’; (2.) allowance needs to be made that little space was available for details as such, but the second pledge — ‘to improve the regional co-ordination of our resources, including the status and training our agents and staff, and to ensure that we have the right balance of candidates’ — instantly ran into criticism, and was recapitulated in the press during the campaign, with, in particular, quotas and imposed candidates for parliamentary selection processes being ruled out by Mr Duncan Smith; & (3.) was ‘Iain’s' fierce desire to ‘attack the Liberal Democrats. It is a mistake to try and ignore them . . . [we need to] create a new unit at CCO to spearhead the fight against them’. This last Homer has nodded more than once, with the advance of the yellow peril in, for example, Windsor & Maidenhead, being one particularly risible instance of why the 2003 local elections were decidedly not a good thing for the Tory party.
Election manifestos should not be regarded as check-lists, and judged on the extent one can tick off X and Y as having been done, whereas Z remains sorely outstanding. Manifestos exist to serve a purpose, and that purpose is winning elections. Iain Duncan Smith’s manifesto won him his leadership contest; it is merely an unhappy coincidence that the failings since a study of it reveals are just those that are contributing to his way of going about losing the next general election.
Bye elections don’t matter
One year ago, at the 2002 party conference, we were introduced to ’leadership with a purpose’, which has enjoyed a Hague-like vogue amongst the public and press. This year we are seeing the still more estimable Total Politics, which we can but only wish a longer life to. Perhaps next year we will read something else; whatever language the party employs, the task remains terrifyingly simple: to stay convincingly far ahead of the Lib Dems after the next general election. If Mr Duncan Smith is in place to do just that, he, and his soon-to-follow successor as party leader, will weather the inevitable and paltry defection of parliamentary Portilloites to the Labour benches, and their likely three figure majority. Brent, however, is not going to be taken as a good omen in that direction — and so we come back to the fact that no one has any positive reason for keeping Iain Duncan Smith in place. His luck thus far would have done credit to a Napoleonic general, but betting men shouldn't count on him getting through to that televised debate with the Prime Minister.
ERO’s editorial comment
ERO, September 13, 2003 12:55 PM