POLITICS: Stand by your mandate
Michael Heseltine’s worst idea since 1990
If you were foolish enough, or perhaps that should be, quaintly old fashioned enough to judge your Tory politics through the prism of what happened in the 1980s, you’d have got a jolt today. Leastways, you would if you’d been thinking warm thoughts about the ‘dream ticket ’. For look who’s popped up to say that ideal solution to all the party’s woes would be to be led by Ken Clarke (and deputy led by Michael Portillo), and that the People’s Iain should be dumped: one Michael Heseltine. Remember him? It would be easy for some of us now to start singing ‘Portillo and Heseltine, up a tree . . .’ but that wouldn’t get us very far. The fact that the old Wets (like Lord Heseltine and Mr Clarke) and the new New Left (Messrs. Portillo, Maude, Bercow, d’Ancona, Hames & etc — though surprisingly few sincere adherents in the actual shadow cabinet) are as one hardly surprises any of us anymore. What does continue to amaze are the ways in which his plentiful enemies will seek to go about overthrowing Mr Duncan Smith. And the worst thing of all, as we have said time after time, is to notice their absence of fear. When the Portilloites and the pro-Europeans openly call for the party leader to be cast down, the point here is not their recklessness, but their total confidence that no serious consequences will entail. The question we therefore have to ask ourselves is this: why aren’t they afraid of him, and his office? Answering that explains most, if not all of Iain Duncan Smith’s problems.
Issues arising out of that dullest of subjects — who should the lead the Conservative Party? — ought to begin with the Tory admission that the current procedure is an unappealing one. That charlatans like Jeffrey Archer were among those loudest in its support tells us something. That it went against the trajectory of party tradition should have told us something else, and something conclusive: this isn’t the way, in a parliamentary system such as ours, that political parties ought to determine their leaders. As ever, both Canada and Australia prefigure the agonies of the right in this regard. There, and in each instance, an admittedly variegated right went through exactly what Michael Heseltine has in mind a generation ago. More than once, right of centre Australian and Canadian parties have found themselves ‘led’ by a ‘national leader’ (elected however), whilst at the same time, led in the federal legislature by a parliamentary leader produced by the parliamentary caucus. So it’s perfectly possible to have a national leader, produced by the national membership, whilst also having a parliamentary leader, presumably produced by the parliamentary party, it’s just that it has never worked to the benefit of the party concerned.
In that sense, the mechanism Lord Heseltine suggests for achieving his desired end is merely, and typically foolish. As with all the great man’s schemes, the details are purely incidental — what matters is his vision. What matters is the end he has in mind. And in this case it is the displacement of Mr Duncan Smith as leader, and his replacement by Mr Clarke. Being on superb euphemistic form, Lord Heseltine assures the readers of The Independent that as far as the lumpen mass membership is concerned, well, ‘in a relatively short time there would be a suitable adjustment’. However, what we can perhaps agree upon is that the vision is not in truth hugely entrancing, and that we suspect achieving this end really won’t be worth the pain suffered in getting there.
Let us consider his fundamental claim: that the state the Tory party is currently in would be significantly affected were Ken Clarke, and Michael Portillo, to lead instead. Or as the reliably illiberal Independent put it in endorsing Michael Heseltine’s grand projet:
Mr Clarke would make a better fist of opposing the Government. In the past few days, to take a random example, Labour has offered a series of U-turns, missed targets and splits. Mr Clarke would have exploited the rifts between Tony Blair and his Chancellor over top-up fees and market mechanisms in public services. He would have made more of Gordon Brown's downgraded economic forecasts, and would even have done a better job of questioning the Blairs' joint judgement of friends and property dealings while pretending to stay out of their private life.
There is scant evidence for any of this, and certainly Michael Heseltine didn’t supply it in his interview. Though we should in passing note that there is something profoundly comforting about the capitalist system in this country to see one megalomaniac tycoon, Heseltine, having a barking scheme endorsed by the tame organ of another. Maybe the Heseltines, Perots, O’Reilleys and Berlusconis should form an international league of plutocracy? It’s the sort of thing that makes one all the sadder that Jimmy Goldsmith is no longer with us. To return though to Ken Clarke: would he really make a better leader of the Tory party than Iain Duncan Smith?
It’s certainly hard to see how, if opening up Labour’s splits to wider view is a key objective, the party Ken Clarke would end up leading could make a decent fist of it. Then there’s the dismal fact that when Mr Clarke was last a frontbench Tory, which is to say, when he was Chancellor, he was still more unpopular than both John Major and the party as a whole. Nothing exists to back up the lame sub-TRG claim that Ken Clarke has great popular resonance. He certainly has considerable merits as far as contemporary Conservative politicians go — he bullies and blusters with the best of them. His sublime arrogance is greater even than of the puffed-up television types who tussle with him. None of that can plausibly be built up into saying he’d win elections, or even simply reverse decline. Were Ken Clarke to lead the party, which he won’t, his camp followers out there in BBC and Guardian land wouldn’t cut him the slack he currently gets. Mr Clarke is no more a proven winner than Michael Portillo is, that’s how silly the suggestion is.
In characteristic space cadet fashion, Mr Duncan Smith pronounced all of this as being, ‘one of the most irrelevant stories I have ever heard’. What he should have usefully reflected upon was that for men like Michael Heseltine, Mr Duncan Smith’s famed mandate from the mass membership is of no account: it offers him no special protection. Indeed, given the nature of the party’s grass roots, it's a positive stain on Mr Duncan Smith’s character. Why do we think that his internal opponents hold in contempt the mandate Mr Duncan Smith received? Why do they cheerfully consider setting it so casually aside? Because, sadly, they’ve been all too well led these last 15 months.
Kit Kildare, September 12, 2002 07:27 PM