HISTORY: David’s fate
What Dr Owen would be better off doing now
Despite having being one of the smarter post-war Tories, Alan Clark does suffer so from being treated as the Charles Londonderry des nous jours. The 7th Marquess of Londonderry is used by historians to rebut any argument: this second rank politician (Education Minister at Stormont, Air Secretary at Westminster, Germanophile) is deployed supporting whatever the author's target is, and bingo, that settles, say, appeasement's hash. Today the writing, politics and temperament of the late Mr Clark perform the same service for journalists. Need to dismiss a challenge to the governing consensus - say advocacy of an armed response to Irish terrorism? then cite 'shoot 600 in a night' Clark. And there's the thing, for just like Lord Londonderry, Alan Clark largely got the big things right. He knew for example how to defeat New Labour more than a decade ago.
But then I had a treat, supper (quite by chance) . . . with David Owen. He's so engaging, such good company. Like me, he despises the Liberals. Like me, he admires the Lady. What is to become of him? I said, 'You must be Prime Minister' and later, 'You will be Prime Minister'. It's extraordinary how this extravagant compliment invariably gives pleasure, however ludicrously improbable, to whomsoever it is addressed. But in David's case it could happen. And we could do a lot worse.
The author of course is Alan Clark, but who was the
we? Mr. Clark, a patriot, doubtless meant Britain, but in another sense he was referring to the Tory Party in the Age of Democracy.
For what the great diarist and historian appreciated was that the right in Britain was, and is, very different to that in other Western countries.
When, overseas, democracy has taken hold, it has tended to be the solvent of traditionally conservative parties. Forces representing social elites, the landed interest, rentiers and unpitying capitalists have suffered in genuine mass politics. But not in Britain, where a party not merely committed to a feudal constitutional order, but also to the maintenance of two state churches, has prospered.
How has this been so? Alan Clark, when he wrote his diary entry for 15 July 1983 instinctively knew that the Conservative party was missing a trick - for the first time since the 1880s - in not attempting to absorb the Social Democrats.
For Tory ascendancy has rested upon fusion. The great Liberal nineteenth century was brought to a halt by Gladstone's idiocy in proposing a policy as anti-national as Home Rule. But the tide to the left was only stopped stone cold dead by the split. In resisting Home Rule the Conservatives were joined by like minded Liberal Unionists, most notably Lord Hartington and Joseph Chamberlain. Many of the Whiggish adherents of the former had been courted for years by Lord Salisbury, but the radical, vital energies of the latter were an exceptional bonus.
This set the pattern for the century to come. However inimical conservatism is to democracy (and its record everywhere else is conclusively toxic) in Britain it has, until now, avoided any electoral consequences. After the Edwardian Unionist party threatened to do what the Liberal party had done a generation before, and through its divisions exclude itself from office, outside intervention again saved the right.
As a result of Asquith's conduct of the war Lloyd George broke with him, and in so doing destroyed Liberal unity. Thus a party which had recently won the largest majority in the history of mass politics was smashed in ten years flat. Lloyd George's Coalition Liberals propped up the first, Conservative dominated peace-time government. However, showing themselves to be unworthy heirs to the serried talents that had composed Liberal Unionism, the Coalition Liberals voted against formal fusion with the (Tory) Unionists.
This was of relatively little importance as Liberalism failed ever to fully reunite. There thus occurred the great inter-war Tory co-option of Liberal personalities and Liberal voters: but not Liberalism. 'Conservative' Cabinets, leaving aside Austen Chamberlain and others whose roots were obviously in Liberal Unionism, contained between the wars assorted sometime Liberals, of ascending commitment to Conservatism, such as: Herbert Samuel, Lord Reading, Sir John Simon and Leslie Hore-Belisha (the last of whom, but for the war could have been a plausible successor to Neville Chamberlain as 'Conservative' leader). This process was only reinforced by the National Government of 1931-40 which in addition to still more renegade Liberals, delivered a goodly dose of coalition Labour supporters.
With the post-bellum dwindling of the Liberal party to irrelevance, a classical nineteenth century two-party system was restored, and there things rested until, again, one of them chose to fall apart. There was however a structural problem this time in that when the SDP was launched there was still something that called itself the Liberal party. Tragically this rather tawdry justification for the term 'three party system' provided just enough flesh to justify Roy Jenkins' ardour. If there had been a two party system pure and simple, the SDP would have unavoidably swung towards the Tory party because it was axiomatically swinging away from the party it had just left. In due course the Alliance fell apart, and a properly Owenite SDP emerged in 1988, presenting a target for thinking Tories.
For his 30 July 1989 entry Alan Clark details that
gently, I tâtai le terrain on the political scene. David said that 'she' had tried really hard recently, got hold of Debbie at a Number 10 reception and really turned it on. But he couldn't. How could he switch a third time? 'Winston did', I said . . . But he is a realist, and he doesn't see his way.
He never did see a way. Yet if he was interested, and if (as we will see) the Conservative party was likewise, can there be any doubting that it would have been a good thing if the Doctor had been brought over?
He certainly would have been better off for example being Tory Prime Minister than leading one platoon of poltroons in the battle against the Euro. Much more importantly the Tory party would now be far better off if led by him.
'Social Democrats', as they emerged in Britain, have shown an enviable aptitude (and nose) for power. Their influence, both in terms of philosophy and personnel, is evident in the current government. And tellingly, even in the shattered ranks of Conservatism names like Rick Nye, Danny Finkelstein, Andrew Cooper and Michael McManus are to be found to the fore. Few pillars of Toryism, from The Spectator downwards, have managed to avoid the stain of employing former Young Social Democrats - the Waffen-nerds of 80s politics, as Mr. Clark might have put it.
This though is a sad shadow of what might have been. I believe that the true heir to Thatcher should have been David Owen, and if a Conservative-SDP fusion had occurred this would most likely have forestalled any notion of 'New Labour'. Imagine how hard it would have been for Mr. Blair, vis-à-vis the old left, to attempt to make Labour into the SDP it is today, if that had clearly been laid out as the route to becoming Tories. Hence the disaster of 'Labour Refoundation' could have been avoided, and the useful bogey of a socialist opposition would have remained available to the Tory party.
Not only would this 'what if?' most probably see the Conservative party still in office, it is not unreasonable to see Owen as being the proper ideological outcome of Thatcherism once its main elective purpose had been spent. That is to say, once it had done all it had been summoned into existence for, and all the public could stomach. Moreover, given the debased way politics is presently conducted in this country, Owen would have literally been the better heir too.
In terms of personnel he would have made a better post-Thatcher Prime Minister than Mr. Major. He would have been a 'stronger' leader as regards colleagues, he would have given us a better foreign policy, and even though nothing different domestically to what actually happened would have occurred, every act of his government would have been invested by the press with some vast metaphysical 'post-Thatcherite' importance. Notwithstanding the SDP's impeccable credentials, the simple fact of being a doctor would have done a power of good in ameliorating the Tories' hugely damaging anti-NHS image - this in turn would have lent itself to reform of the welfare state. All thus permanently separating Owen's regime from Major's in the eyes of the voters. He would have been far better on TV too.
David Owen's brand of non-sectarian opposition to European integration - he being one of the few politicans who manages to oppose Brussels' works, yet avoid any hint of hysteria, paranoia or dementia - could also only but have helped balm the Tory party. It is impossible to believe he would have made a worse job of it than John Major, who himself hardly has any better claim to merit than that he was the Tory leader who would have done least to exacerbate right wing divisions over the EU.
If we can for a moment dispense with the personality of the Doctor there is the image of the party the Conservatives should have tried so much harder to snare. From its inception the SDP appeared a class-free, modern, violently pragmatic party: these in themselves are not necessarily good things, but they are a useful face to have to show to the world. A legitimate counter-argument could be made that, the 80s saw the most right-wing Tory party of the post-war period - would it really have welcomed melding with centrists? As the behaviour of hard right stalwarts like Mr. Clark showed (and as the anti-Federalist Dr. Owen displays today) it is not unlikely that the precedent of the Liberal Unionist marriage would have been repeated. Then, it was some of the more ultra and 'radical right' factions within the party who found kindred spirits in the newcomers. It is surely possible to see in the progress of various individual former members of the SDP similar, potential sympathy for not just conservative, but decidedly right-wing Conservative goals?
This is far from being the most unlikely path of events ever considered by a counter-factual. As early as 1984 Roy Jenkins had taken to saying that the then leader of the SDP, Dr. Owen, reminded him of Joe Chamberlain. At the end of the decade we find Mrs. Thatcher using a now obsolete institution to make plain her longing: she wooed him courtesy of the Walden Programme, and in so doing earned (for her, keenly sought) headlines like, 'Thatcher snubs Tory old guard'. Even Leon Brittan's old job at the Commission was dangled in front of the Doctor before it was handed to the former Home Secretary.
After the fall, Mr. Major took to the task in his own fashion, whispering sweet nothings to potential cabinet member-Owen while the two men watched cricket. Despite publicly hoping she would lose the leadership in 1990, David Owen always told his Tory supplicants that his rightwards inclinations, such as they were, stemmed more from attraction to Thatcher's 'radicalism' than to any traditional Conservatism.
But the continued, meandering efforts to seduce Owen after 1990 came far too late. His use was in forestalling the great grey locust as much as it was in resisting the coming Blairo-Asquithianism.
Difficult as it is to believe whilst it is happening, the justification for this Tory take on 'big-tent politics' is to facilitate avowedly right wing aims. The Party's time honoured gambit, until forsaken in the instance of the SDP, was to use her useful idiots, Liberals, Whigs, whoever, for electoral appeal.
Although some might feel that the best thing a late 80s rapprochement between the Owenite SDP and the Tories could have achieved was that Mike Potter would have won the 1989 Richmond by-election, as opposed to William Hague, there is a higher reason for remaining conscious of this tradition. Even brought down as low as the Tory party presently is, the greatest danger it can ever face is not a resurgent opponent, but that it itself might split.
The most dangerous moment for the party in the last century was when, just before and just after the Great War, elements in Unionism wanted to dump the Tory right and establish a new party with self-selected left-wing suitors. The Conservative party thus needs its democrats, wherever they may come from, in order to make itself appealing to the electorate, and to prevent Toryism from being left stranded by moderate Conservatives.
John Rugby harbours a terrible secret from the 1980s: he was ‘on the beach for the speech’
John Rugby, August 22, 2002 11:22 PM