POLITICS: It’s best not to get too excited
Is there a conspiracy against Iain Duncan Smith?
A mystery explained
Why are ‘modernisers’ in the Tory party? A careerist mistake made at University? Yes. However, that’s not the really important question to find an answer for, if you’re trying to get to the bottom of the destabilisation of Iain Duncan Smith’s leadership. No, what matters so much more is, how has a leader, afforded every opportunity his party could bestow upon him, been reduced to the state the present one is in? And make no mistake, his travails are not the exclusive fault of Portilloite scheming, still less are they due to weird Wet voodoo of which the right cannot fully comprehend. The Tory party may not, in the hysterical words of the Telegraph, have latterly faced ‘the most desperate day in its history’, but what it has been confronted with is a refusal to oppose when opposition is most needed. This failing comes from the top down, and unites much of the party’s vanguard behind its doomed banner. Paradoxical as this evidently sounds to too many Conservative politicians and pundits, this party is not going to be in office again until it discharges the duties of an opposition first. Our greatest problem, the one that underlies, and fuels, all the others is this blunder. It should have started being put right more than a year ago, as it is, a Labour Prime Minister already long embarrassed by his political riches, governs on, uncontested by the Tory party, or any other force to his right, beyond his own caution. This state of affairs has to stop, and the reason why it won’t any time soon is set out below.
Though before I attempt to explain how and why, I should apologise for my tardiness. I should like to claim that I have just escaped from a dungeon beneath Policy Exchange’s grim fortress, fighting off some deformed mutant Portilloite lackeys in the process, and generally being rather more Rupert of Hentzau-like than life normally allows. Sadly not in truth, for despite the repeated requests for haste [ERO: we weren’t that bothered] made of me, I wanted to demonstrate one thing, and to do so outside the fervid atmosphere of last week (and the one before that). That ‘thing’ is my belief that it is not an internal revolt which explains the current situation, that is to say, the leadership is not imperilled because it clings, skilfully or otherwise, on in the face of majoritarian party opposition. Quite the reverse, as the passing stillness of the present surely shows: it is not that this leadership is going to be overthrown, but that it itself lacks the grip to stay mounted, even in the most favourable of circumstances. This, as our presently vogueish left-wing friends could tell us, is because of what, historically, they like to call ‘a crisis of the regime’. In other words, things didn’t have to pan out this way. Mr Duncan Smith’s destruction was not encompassed in his election. A strong starting position was not undermined by irresistible and implacable forces without, it was squandered from within.
If anything accounts for why the right of the party should not resort to panic at the moment, it is exactly the justified and limited contempt we should feel for our factional confrères. Contempt, naturally, in the political sense only. For we have better reason that they to be as dismissive of their palliatives as they are of ours. Our great and justified advantage is that our stance lacks the underlying tension and fear which riddles their critiques. We, in a word, haven’t fouled up, we’ve little to worry about beyond our own geniality. So when I’m asked for my sage opinion as to, ‘who next then?’ my reply is that this query misses the point somewhat. The problem for the right isn’t personal, or even one of personnel, it’s merely entertaining a willingness to persist. We need to summon up the resolve to stick to our mission, unfashionable as too many of our own present it as being. This, ironically, is the way to unity as well, for if we lead, they’ll follow, whilst as is now incontestable, the party’s internal alternatives to the right are neither Modernisation nor latter-day Heathism, but simply an abnegation of leadership.
How it began
Our problems, in the sense of diagnosing the immediate causes of the acute inflammation which occurred at the end of October and beginning of November have their origins at the party conference. The first symptom of this particular outbreak was the concerted briefing, down to identical phrasing, which appeared simultaneously in several newspapers slightly over a fortnight ago. As even the most brazen Mainstreamer would concede, Owen Paterson may have made hash of naming and shaming, but he was cocking his leg in the right factional direction. However, what set the scene for this outburst by a bored and listless left were the speeches delivered by the party chairman and leader at Bournemouth.
In the case of Mr Duncan Smith, let’s be honest — we’re all friends — this whole ‘quiet man’ thing hasn’t worked, and it isn’t going to. This wasn’t open recognition, and somehow, thereby, nullification of a weakness: it was an entirely unnecessary confirmation of the same, and in so doing we have only made the problem worse. Still more foolish though, both in its own right, and in terms of a direct cause of the recent mayhem, was Theresa May’s ‘nasty party’ speech. Loathe as anyone in good standing with their local arts cinema would be, I’m marginally reluctant to agree with the flood of folk who wrote to CCO about this effort, but inescapably they were right to be as appalled as they were. To jump forward in our narrative slightly, when we got to the adoption stage of this past crisis, the Telegraph whined, ‘what a pretty pass we have come to, when a Tory chairman is condemned as “nasty” for stating the blindingly obvious’ — praising ‘conventional’ marriage as the best environment in which to rear children. the reason why Mrs May was abused thus by so many was because she had set herself up thus. Out of her garish gob stood she condemned. Unlike the Telegraph we pointed out at the time how this speech would inevitably and instantly backfire, and it brings me no joy that the second most prominent victim to date has been its author.
That the idiotic ‘nasty vs. nice’ dialectic was better off forgotten as soon as possible (as opposed to the trumpeting sounded from the Wharf) is no doubt soon to be commonplace wisdom, but while we’re diverting to the subject of the party chairman and her role in all this, where was Mrs May on the day of the word-burp? Where precisely did she take herself off to after the leader uttered his ‘unite or die’ Horation? No sooner had his cadences fallen away then this cypher of a chairman had vanished. Now she of course had been privy to the, ‘well I could quit’ musings of earlier in the day, and ungallant as it may be to speculate, Mrs May’s twenty four hour disinclination to defend in public her leader does neither her (nor him, for appointing her) any credit.
Returning to how all our present discontents broke cover, one useful little line wheeled out by our Clarkeite co-religionists to get some trouble going was that ‘Portillo is on the prowl again’. Before we turn to the activities of his camp followers, let’s deal with this canard. Obviously Michael Portillo has returned to the House of Commons after his failure to the land the chairmanship of the Royal Opera House. Sadly for him, it appears there aren’t after all any big arts job on offer, no matter how often he adverts to his hinterland. His entirely reasonable calculation has to be that, to put himself in the eye of commissioning editors, he has to ratchet up his political profile, stomach churning as he has found politics since his 97/99 absence from the House of Commons. No one who encountered, during those happy two years of release, Mr Portillo, in, say, the Ivy, can be in any doubt that the last set of people on this earth that he wants to spend more time with are Tories of any shape or form. Whilst the emblem may well be mortally sick of serious participation in Tory politics, the same cannot be said of the acolytes, of whom, conversely, it would be fair to say: no amount of tarting around will ever make them congenial to any programme’s editor, save possibly Crimewatch’s casting director.
Small but imperfectly formed
Having done their bit to mess things up, the left gave way to the Portilloites as troublemakers with the coming of the Adoption bill. Over this miserable, misunderstood measure, John Bercow decided to be a man, a liberal man, a liberal backbench man, and resigned in advance of the famed and innovative ‘soft’ three line whip. This despite pleading by both his leader, and the sorely traduced chief whip not to. Those of a traditionalist bent when it comes to accounting for the actions of others might well have looked to Mr Bercow’s past behaviour and seen this coming, or at least, claimed so to have done. Yet this is to be unfair to all concerned: who was to see, with the licence afforded him in the shadow cabinet, that Mr Bercow would repay Mr Duncan Smith’s indulgence the way that he has? It makes precious little sense as an act of political calculation. It pushes one to the conclusion that John Bercow has travelled a long way, an awfully long way, and at his journey’s end, he just won’t go any further. This, conceivably, was Mr Bercow acquiring a principle which he intends to stand by, and when you consider some of the ones he discarded en route, we should be grateful it’s as congenial as it is.
The nature of ‘Bercow, homme et politicien’, is neither here nor there — in more ways than those of past convictions and allegiances, he differs from the rest of his adopted tribe so as to make him useless as an explanatory device. He has, for one, the atypical trait for a moderniser of being an acclaimed ‘Commons performer’. He’s also suffered for his actions, not least by now being denied the sacramental presence of Lord Tebbit at his wedding. Indeed it would be fair to say that John Bercow is not as other Portilloites, in that he has openly thrown his defiance at his leader’s face. No skulking and puking for him, Mr Bercow has taken Mr Duncan Smith’s ‘HTV’ [helping the vulnerable] rhetoric and openly quoted it back at him in justification. And it is this which explains his current disfavour with other Portilloites, not because he went off the reservation when things were going so well, but because, through reasoning inexplicable to them (as I say, the application of principle) he messed up a perfectly simple little operation being planned for the Adoption bill, and things got more than a little out of control.
Putting away childish things
After Mr Bercow quit the shadow cabinet he was free to join 7 other Tory MPs in rebelling against their ‘soft’ three line whip (it should be noted that, in a parliament without pairing, this is the only sort of whip applied). His fellow-travellers on this childrens’ crusade were, Andrew Lansley, Julie Kirkbride, her husband Andrew Mackay, Francis ‘energetic’ Maude, David Curry, Michael Portillo and Kenneth Clarke. 38 other MPs, including frontbenchers, abstained on this whip. This stunt had long being brewing, and was intended by our ‘social liberals’ [sic] to be merely another corrective slap across Mr Duncan Smith’s face, albeit pertaining to an issue — homosexuality — well known to adversely excite him more than most. As noted above, this scheme was upended by the spontaneous intervention of Mr Bercow, which rather raised the stakes. However it should be noted that the rebellion went ahead after almost a week of the most painful speculation as to the state and health of the incumbent leadership. No matter how strongly opinions were held on this specific subject, to push on with them in this context was not a helpful or well meant act.
We again jump ahead of ourselves by considering the pain and horror evident in Mr Clarke and Mr Portillo’s hearts when accused of treachery and revolt, but their response to this gauntlet flung down by the leadership also accounts for their actions in the first place. Both factors clearly demonstrate their total absence of fear for any consequences deriving from their behaviour. Mr Portillo counter-accused his leader of ‘unwarranted misinterpretation’, which has the feel of a denunciation straight from A Confederacy of Dunces. Whereas Mr Clarke resorted to the casually untrue (the previous vote had been whipped) by declaring in his ‘defence’, ‘it would be much easier to unite the party if Iain Duncan Smith would refrain from imposing three line whips on subjects which have always been left to the judgement of individual MPs’. But then that’s why I suppose we love him so, the effortless effrontery of it all.
On and on this revolt reverberated, clearly touching some nerve or other at the all-highest level. Michael Portillo was pursued through the press with claims that his behaviour had been far less honourable than, say, that of Mr Duncan Smith over Maastricht. That he always informed his whip when he sided with the opposition in votes that put at risk a Tory government, whereas Mr Portillo, in a ‘soft’ 3 line whip on a third order matter technically promoted by a backbench Labour MP, didn’t likewise play the part of a white man. True enough, Mr Portillo’s whip, the sublime Desmond Swayne, having a better and more Christian conscience than most, couldn’t go along with this, and instantly ‘fessed up — that Mr Portillo had, contrary to the spinning coming out of CCO, told him in good order what he was going to do. The damage, unfortunately, was done, with an extra admixture of poison thereby stirred into the backbenches.
Poor, clueless Michael Portillo, who so recently had been so lonely and brave in his defence of the ‘nasty party’ speech in front of the silent ‘22, was reduced to growling, ‘I don’t play these games. I don’t brief against other people. Be careful not to be misled’. Some terrible things have been done over the years in that unwitting man’s name: unless, of course, guilt at his premature telephonitis of oh so long ago suddenly deranged him when he issued that statement. Stranger things have happened. It’s hard for any of us to stay absolutely balanced all the time. A man more phlegmatic than most, Francis Maude, couldn’t stay on the right side of relaxed on this subject, at this hour, so who can really blame the naturally more emotional and hot-headed Michael Portillo? Mr Maude argued, in characteristic lethargic fashion, that his leader should not have got all het up over such a ‘trivial’ issue, betraying an equally familiar Portilloite self-centredness, for if the issue were so trivial to him too, why did he then choose to fight it to the point of rebellion?
Not quite the End
Very soon now, it will be time to come to the self-detonating dummy, and the 5th November statement, and that will all be explained presently. The imposition of the ‘soft’ three line whip, so unfairly and cowardly attributed to the instigation of David Maclean, was a bump in the road all those unfavourable to the present leader could see coming a mile off. Not, admittedly, the exact, loopy device of the whip that wasn’t, which served only to intensify interest in a story which otherwise would have been as predictable as I say, but the fact that the Adoption bill would serve as excuse for Portilloites, in some fashion, to cause trouble was screamingly apparent long before it happened. The coincidence of Mr Bercow’s self-immolation, and the fact that the ragtag pro-European left had played up soon before was bad luck, but it didn’t deserve to provoke the reaction it did, and that reaction, the manner of it and the fact of it is the sore and sorry place the Tory party is now in.
For the second part of this article, click here
Kit Kildare, November 16, 2002 11:45 AM