POLITICS: Why this is all going to work out just fine
Better even than Bazza?
Three kinds of joy
Man, in the several millenia of human civilisation, has been troubled by many great questions: is there a God? is love stronger than hate? what is truth? But none of these habitually admit an answer as bleak as has the query, 'what is the best thing about Iain Duncan Smith?' This, hitherto, has not been a question that has been difficult to answer — rather, it has been impossible to do so — leastways if you have been determined to eschew pointless relativism and reflexive conditionality (e.g. 'well, he's utterly hopeless in all these regards, but he's marginally less bad in this sense: still awful, just not quite as completely and totally hopeless, more unfortunate than anything else . . .') in your attempt at a reply. Now, however, the answer is at hand. The best thing about the present Tory leader is that he has appointed to the opposition front bench one Patrick Mercer. This is an unmitigated good, meaning good things for the Tory party, good things for Toryism, and — not least in the service he can offer the official opposition — good things for Britain.
John 'the Baptist' Hayes stands in relation to Patrick Mercer as one very important sign of things to come: only Mr Duncan Smith would have appointed either man to such seniority. Now, that Iain Duncan Smith appoints someone to the shadow cabinet has, naming no hair-styles, hardly thus far been evidence of his infallible judgement. What it has been, what with the decision of a galaxy of soiled lags from the past like Francis Maude to skulk and sulk on the backbenches, is a marvellous opportunity for inventive patronage. Some decisions have been brave (Bill Cash, Desmond Swayne) and paid off, others a bit more bizarre, and slightly less successful (John Bercow's ratting was certainly predictable ingratitude). Yet what there has not been, ever since the cataclysm of 1997, is anything akin to the recovery well in place at a comparable point after the defeat of 1906.
Both in terms of the personalities thrown up by the parliaments of 1906 and 1910, and of the causes adopted by the Unionist party, the fight was successfully taken back to liberalism. The crisis provoked by detemined Tory resistance after 1906 destroyed the enormous Liberal parliamentary majority come 1910, and it is difficult to argue anything other than had not the Great War intervened, the Tories would have won the election due no later than 1915. Contemporary Conservative failure to fight Blairite fire with a suitably radical reaction was demonstrated by the unfortunate progress of William Hague. By declining to step up to the plate over devolution and other constitutional vandalism (in direct contrast to the Edwardian precedent) he did not nobly decline to cause a constitutional crisis — rather, he culpably failed to demonstrate that the government had already perpetrated one. We paid the price for our lack of resistance after 1997 with Labour's renewed majority in 2001: we had done nothing to merit any change to existing circumstances. The other difference between the Golden Age and the last half decade is that we have signally lacked any latter-day FE Smiths. No one, to date, has made his name in opposition. Now comes the chance to change all that.
The idol
Miss Drew wrote down the figures on a piece of paper, bending low over her desk. The sun poured in through the window, showing the little golden curls in the nape of her neck. She lifted to William eyes that were stern and frowning, but blue as blue above flushed cheeks."Don't you see, William?" she said.
There was a faint perfume about her, and William the devil-may-care pirate and robber-chief, the stern despiser of all things effeminate, felt the first dart of the malicious blind god. He blushed and simpered.
"Yes, I see all about it now", he assured her. "You've explained it all plain now. I cudn't unnerstand it before. It's a bit soft — in't it — anyway, to go lending hundred pounds about just 'cause someone says they'll give you five pounds next year. Some folks is mugs. But I do unnerstand now. I cudn't unnerstand it before".
"You'd have found it simpler if you hadn't played with dead lizards all the time", she said wearily, closing her books.
William gasped. He went home her devoted slave.
— Just William (Richmal Crompton, 1922)
Patrick Mercer has managed to live a life before entering the House of Commons at the last election (in the process, incidentally, winning Newark, one of the two seats we managed to take back from Labour). Born in 1957, Patrick Mercer read history at Exeter College Oxford where, perhaps more usefully, he also gained a boxing blue. In 1974 he joined the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters (the regiment in which his father Eric Mercer, later bishop of Exeter, had served at El Alamein and Anzio), rising in due course to command the regiment as the youngest full Army colonel since the Second World War. So all in all, then, not quite — these days, anyway — your average Tory MP. Faced with the prospect of the general staff under new Labour, he returned to civilian life in 1998. A lively history of the Battle of Inkerman followed. Then came a stint as defence correspondent both at the Daily Telegraph and, perhaps most instructively of all, on the Today programme. Few bureaucracies unfortunately offer as effective an introduction to modern British politicking as does the Corporation. And in all Patrick Mercer's various self-assured media performances since becoming a politician, it is difficult to see where he has yet put a foot wrong.
The post that he has been given, shadow [sic] homeland security spokesman, is unarguably pointless, and needlessly imitative of irrelevant foreign precedents. Whatever case there was, given the division and chaos evident in the American federal state that preceded, and quite possibly facilitated, the bin Laden attacks on America, for a Department of 'Homeland Security' there, the proposition has not and cannot be made here. As between the domestic and external responsibilities shared between the Home Office and the MoD, and the interface of SIS as faciliated by the JIC, Britain has an admirable, near-model system already in place. No Conservative should be making the case for needless, modish change, and this sort of gesture politics is still another sad indication of why our defeat at the next general election is not going to be a wholly unfortunate thing. That the clunking terminology adopted has been entirely foreign in origin, and not even especially appealing to American ears, is, inevitably, Mr Duncan Smith's old failing in regard to tone seen here in action yet again.
All that said, it can reasonably be expected both that Patrick Mercer will be the making of the post, and that the platform it affords him will help begin to remedy the many defects evident in Tory foreign, defence and home policy. In particular, it will alleviate the unavoidable deficiencies that stem from having a foreign spokesman as weak-minded as Michal Ancram, and a defence spokesman as Bernard-like as Bernard Jenkin, in place.
Forward with the bayonet
Unkind souls have been heard to say that Patrick Mercer was doing 'an excellent job as Bernard's carer', and that therefore it represents a risk of sorts to move him, whilst leaving Mr Jenkin in place. We think that this is a danger that Britain is just going to have to be brave enough to confront. Mr Duncan Smith has now come full circle with his first campaign manager (the one who steered him through the particularly nail-biting parliamentary phase of that fabled contest) now joining him in the front rank of the opposition. This move will strengthen that body, but it will do no more than preserve the impossible. Glory and honour can accompany defeat, but an unprecedented third successive general election defeat is going to bring in its wake none of those compensations for the Tory party. That there is, though, still going to be a Tory party after this disaster is, thankfully, something of which we can, at least, now be just that little bit more certain.
ERO's editorial comment; or to put that another way, habemus candidatum!
ERO, July 1, 2003 08:44 PM