LEADERSHIP 2003: It hasn't gone away you know
And it's still going to be Fox
Something of a fright
There are few subjects more boring than the ‘debate’ over the Euro. Is there a single person in Britain with a mind to make up, who hasn’t long ago done so? Certainly neither front bench in the House of Commons could claim to have been overflowing with wit, vitality, vigour or fresh thinking on this most tedious of topics. That said, you have to hand it to Michael Howard: he made a fantastic case. It’s something of a pity that it was chiefly a fantastic case for him being leader of the party rather than poor Mr Duncan Smith. For that’s one thing everyone in the House, other than the incumbent could have agreed upon: there was no way that the present leader of the official opposition could have delivered a speech like the one the shadow chancellor did. But then the business of Mr Duncan Smith has never had anything to do with his talents, such as they are, and that situation hasn’t changed yet. What hasn’t changed either is my belief that the house view here at ERO is of course right: Iain Duncan Smith won’t be leading the Tories into the next general election. Whether that’s going to be a good or a bad thing is for the counterfactual histories, what I want to show is why it’s still going to be the case, regardless of his recent escape from the axe.
Europe, being today a dead political issue, serves more in British politics to illuminate character issues. The ritual and rhetoric of the debate is hardwired in every front rank politician’s brain, and this from more than a decade ago, but as the actual subject no longer matters, all opinions expressed on it do is illustrate the manner of man offering them. In this instance, the effortless hypocrisy of the Prime Minister betrays his true standing as a man of the left. For who other than someone who really had stood on a platform of advocating withdrawal could quite so self-righteously denounce others, who haven’t, for just this sin today?
To my mind, government policy is not at all confused, and there is no question but that Gordon Brown would like Sterling to be replaced by the Euro. Labour policy under the Brown/Blair regime is essentially advanced Majorism — it’s slightly beyond ‘wait and see’, being in fact, ‘wait and hope’. That this is the point it’s at is for precisely the same reason why John Major found himself in most of the jams he did. The Prime Minister and the Chancellor feel that they can do no other: this is not a fight that they wish to pick with the British people, at the moment, because they know they will lose. Some have compared this with Mr Blair’s startling willingness to face down idiotic popular opinion over the war against Iraq, but here there is a crucial difference. In strict political terms, achieving that victory required careful parliamentary management, and nothing else. To win the fight over the Euro, the government has to win a referendum. And so yet again it’s Jimmy Goldsmith to the rescue, for without his snookering of John Major on this issue, there assuredly would never have been a Tory pledge that the Labour leadership subsequently felt obliged to match.
A crucial, under-appreciated thing to notice is that, if the present government’s policy owes an awful lot to its predecessor, then so too could a plausible case be made for near-bipartisanship from the official opposition. In foreign policy — which, until it ever happens, is what the matter of abolishing Sterling in favour of the Euro amounts to — consensus between the great parties of the state is generally to be welcomed, so we should carefully note that such a state almost exists here. For what, in contradiction to the Government’s policy of wait and hope is the Conservative party’s? It most certainly is not, ‘No, never’. There have been innumerable opportunities for the current and previous leadership to make it so, but both steadfastly neglected to do so. Wait and see, and oppose if it comes to it, is Tory policy. Again, whether this is a good or a bad thing isn’t my beef today, but no one should delude themselves with the idea that the Conservative front bench, as a corporate entity, has ever ruled out British membership of the Euro on principle tout court.
Just as Tony Blair’s much vaunted Christianity never quite receives the scrutiny it, in every sense of the word, deserves, so too is the sheer, specific pettiness of the debate on the Euro obscured in favour of the real points at stake in any political interchange on this score. This, to repeat, is because European policy is not a live matter of controversy, and therefore all exchanges centred on it inevitably tend to be proxies for some other entanglement e.g. the Tory leadership, or the Labour leadership, or even, heaven help us, the nature of the domestic taxation system. The man who deserves virtually all the credit — it remains his one indissoluble achievement — for draining the potency of Europe out of British politics is, obviously, Mr Duncan Smith.
By electing the ‘arch Maastricht rebel’ as their leader, the Tory party collectively and conclusively settled the war that had raged inside the party since the downfall of Mrs Thatcher. This peace is the peace of total victory, and no matter how inadequate the provisional military government has been since then, the defeated pro-Europeans have no means with which to resume the struggle. With the Tory party soothed on Europe, the focus switched back, as it sensibly must, to the government’s conduct of European policy. This, as every other European government will tell you, has been little to no different to the normal, dissentient role played by Britain since our accession to the Common Market, regardless of whichever party was in office. It is, in other words, business as usual, save for the fact that Tony Blair also leads the most united on Europe, party of government since entry in 1973. Thus between and within the two main parties, ‘Europe’ has no serious grip. It also, naturally, remains an issue with zero credible mass electoral appeal (it is one thing to claim that an individual topic like the Euro for instance matters overmuch to the elector being polled, it is entirely another for that topic to have a predominant influence on how the voters picks which party to support). The Lib Dems remain fanatical space cadets, and are completely irrelevant.
You go ahead and hunt, I’ll stay here and make the tea
If the Euro tells us, inter alia, that Gordon Brown and Tony Blair are supremely practical politicians who will defer to public opinion, and not push policies forward simply because of ideological dogmatism; and that Mr Duncan Smith is not the most able member of the opposition front bench; and that Tony Blair is a pious, preaching son of a bitch, especially when he feels guilty about something, but knows that realistically he can’t do what he wants to do; what does it reveal about what interests us, the state of the 2003 Tory leadership stakes? Well, in my opinion, it’s that the sweepstake is up and running, and it will be truly amazing if it doesn’t kick off this summer.
Let us say that the Prime Minister has his reshuffle at some point between this Thursday and the end of June. The one thing that we absolutely know will happen next, even though there is no earthly reason why it must happen, is that Mr Duncan Smith will reconstruct the shadow cabinet. Here’s the question then: will he do this job well? Although past political conduct does not necessarily determine future political performance, I’m willing to bet more than a few unit trusts that he’ll mess this up, and then some. Call me a cynic, but I really don't see how a man for whom every ‘chance’ is his last can seriously afford to annoy anyone. And the one thing that a reshuffle of any sort guarantees is that at least some people must end up getting peeved one way or the other.
Therefore I’m happy to be one of those— and the spread is becoming ever more appealing for those of you tempted to gamble — who say: pre-summer recess start to a leadership election? A cert. More fundamentally, there’s a lesson to be learnt too on why it’s been delayed from last month. David Davis has turned into the RAB Butler of latter-day Tory leadership contests. The ‘golden ball’ has now been thrust towards his hands at least twice, and each time he has fumbled away from the chance. It’s unlikely to come again: in the extremely improbable event that Iain Duncan Smith makes it to the general election as leader, whatever the result is, it won’t in consequence produce a reasonable case for making David Davis leader afterwards. It was a failure, as Powell put it of Butler, to realise that there comes a time when there isn’t any choice left but to draw the sabre and charge that means we’re not now likely to find out what a Davis-led party would have looked and sounded like. This is a pity, but one that stems from an absence of courage at the relevant moment, so what can one say?
And as and when we get down to ‘Fox vs. Howard’ in the final two, who in their right mind is going to predict that the only member of the shadow cabinet more unpopular than Mr Duncan Smith is going to be selected as leader by the mass membership? They're not stupid, they'll know what they're doing.
John Rugby, June 10, 2003 11:34 PM