CONFERENCE 02: The new harsh
Bournemouth diary, day IV
‘I have known danger’
Obviously and, to my mind, reasonably, the content of the Leader’s speech was less than substantial, but let's deal with the rhetoric first. It would have been a kindness to Mr Duncan Smith if one of his friends had told him that the declamatory idiom is not quite him. This is presumably why he was allowed to deliver a conference speech that was as mannered as, if less attractive than, the formal court poetry of Han dynasty China. We are always being told these days that the Conservative Party should look more like Britain. Well, if you wander into a pub in Wantage, it’s unlikely (unless the Sealed Knot are in town) that you will hear anyone mouthing constructions like ‘and I say to you . . . I say to you . . . I say that . . .’ let alone the following:
But our direction is clear.
There have been no short cuts.
No gimmicks.
No clever wheezes.
Just hard work.
Work that doesn’t always grab the headlines.
So let’s just get that straight: if the theory is, to appeal to Britain, we have to look and sound exactly like Britain (because, clearly, each and every one of us only votes for people who look and sound exactly like us), then . . . Well then: this doesn’t sound like bloody Britain! Frankly, I’m not sure what it does sound like, but the words ‘constipated’ and ‘nonce’ spring to mind.
Better speech-writers would have created a speech in which Mr Duncan Smith pretended to be talking to a lone, defenceless, Guardian-reading female, or barring that, Paul Gray. It would have been all low-pitched, purring seduction and plenty of eye-contact. Instead — and again, you really have to wonder whose side these speech-writers were on — we were given weird eye-rolling, a voice like a Dalek and a literal gnashing of teeth.
There was only one point really worth denouncing (and believe me, I’d rather not) in this particular part of the speech, and that was the naked underlying assumption that state funding of education, health and housing was and is A Good Thing. The fact that we still have to debate education and health and housing — when we don’t, for instance, the provision of food, drink, clothing, shoes, holidays, automobiles, electrical utilities, books, newspapers, films, art exhibitions, online magazines — surely can't have anything to do with the fact that one set of things is in the public sector, and the other is in the private sector, and that socialism does not work while its free-market alternative works perfectly well?
Instead we were enjoined to spare a thought for the overworked nurse, the incompetent policeman, the bone-idle whinging teacher, or something like that. One of the two key messages of this speech is that as far as the Conservative Party is concerned, the public services are a battle that Labour has won. Which is to say, like them, we'll make endearing little technocratic whimpers, fiddling round the edges, while doing bugger-all about the real issue, which is that the public provision of goods and services never works in Britain, whereas the private sector does. Have I mentioned that two two ex-SDP hacks still hold key roles in the Party?
In a sadly too frequent failing of courage, this oration was positioned as the party’s ‘nice’ cop giving us a little talking to, in comparison to Mrs May’s ‘nasty’ cop sounding off at the start of the week. The furthest the party leader dared go in this direction was:
Well I say this to you: Never Again
Never again can we take the people of Britain for granted.
Until people see that our Party has learned the lessons of 1997, we will go on getting the result of 1997.
The Party that I lead will live in the present and prepare for the future.
So to those who want to re-fight the battles of the past, and to those who want to live in the past, I simply say this: You stay in the Past; we are moving on.
According to many big media voices, randomly reaching for the CCO line to take, this is an attack on Kenneth Clarke, Michael Heseltine, but most of all, Lord Tebbit. On the Today Programme on morning of the speech, Mrs May refused to deny that he would be removed from the party. What is Lord Tebbit's sin? Well, he has asked some trenchant questions of the leadership of the party. Let us remember the words of our present leader:
So when I was told I had no future in Parliament because of my determination to keep Britain’s independence as a nation state and because of my determination to keep the Pound, I did not waver.
So should a bit of fraternal disagreement see you booted out of the party, or not? Ex-SDP lags, having grown up in an underpopulated party, can't really be expected to comment; ex-FCS activists, on the other hand, may find that 'tow the line, vote the slate' language sounds quite good these days; for the poor old party activists, finally, there can be little more than sheer incomprehension. Norman Tebbit, after all, helped to win four election victories for the Conservatives. His record is one of refulgent victory. He played an active part in some of the most successful governments of the past century. Some respect is due.
From the top down, the party may well, for the sake of looking good in the eyes of liberal opinion and nothing else, unctuously claim to wish to 'help the vulnerable'. Two hours regal progress round Glasgow's Easterhouse district does not, however, totally convince. Contrast this with, for example, Lord Tebbit, and another party conference. On 12th October 1984, the IRA detonated a bomb at the Grand Hotel in Brighton. Norman Tebbit and his wife lay buried under the rubble for hours. He escaped with permanent, painful injuries; she lost the use of her limbs. Nearly eighteen years later, they both continue to defy the men who wanted them dead.
Lord Tebbit, for some reason, does not seem frightened of party whips as he speaks, with the benefit of decades of successful experience, for the policies that he believes will return Conservatives to power — power that he, unlike many in the party, has actually wielded. He also has learned to help the flawlessly elegant, sharp-witted, well-presented Lady Tebbit with her lipstick, since she can no longer do this herself, since she can no longer use her arms or legs. And she still looks marvellous: the Provos have lost this particular fight. They always will. Anyone who has seen Lord and Lady Tebbit out shopping together — his tenderness, her resolve — has to re-calibrate his or her expectation of what marriage, at its best, ought to mean, and will be better for doing so. Needless to say, the word 'vulnerable' doesn't arise. As we all ought to know, it would take a lot more than a mere Brighton bomb to make Lord and Lady Tebbit 'vulnerable'.
Lord Tebbit may or may not have been right about every pronouncement he has made in recent years. Yet because of his record of success, as much as his record of personal courage, what he says deserves attentive respect. The best friend any leader can have is one who is willing to articulate unpleasant truths. The worst friend is he who spares the punches. We can all see who Mr Duncan Smith's friends are at the moment. And given Tebbit's contribution to the party over the years, if Mr Duncan Smith bans him, at least just about all of us are clearly absolved from all comments about 'loyalty' when our own reactions become apparent.
Few things this conference season have been more disgusting or inept than the performance put in by Theresa May, an ignoble and inadequate successor to Norman Tebbit as party chairman, on Today. The empty headed vulgarity of the media profile cultivated by Mrs May is testimony enough to her exact range of talents. In seeking, as she did, the dubious kudos of talking ‘tough’ (she refused to rule out his possible expulsion from the party!) but declining to offer up any evidence for what she might actually do, her cowardly bullying and shameful ignorance of what history requires from her were positively painful. Quite what Chairman May can be condign punishment for, I do not know, but I do know that with her in CCO, this party is going to be sorry for some time to come.
Other, marginally less wretched, news
What, incidentally, ever became of the Lib Dems? I thought that we were going to seek-and-destroy them like an Alan Clark sold missile to Iraq hitting a hated Yanqui warbird out of the skies? Is Dr Lewis’s work all to be in vain? Yet not a word about them was there in the entire speech. Very odd, very, very odd indeed. And for those of you keeping count, it’s also one more (leadership election) manifesto promise broken already. Precisely, it’s this one down the drain:
Iain wants to attack the Liberal Democrats. It is a mistake to try and ignore them.
Bad, dishonest and unwise, that failure.
Unsurprising, but still unimpressive
Still smarting from something, The Times gave Mr Davis a pretty facetious whack this week, producing from the thin gruel of Alan Clark’s posthumous diaries, the startling headline news that ‘Davis “began stealth campaign for Tory leadership in 1997”’. More conventionally, Portilloites in the press have kept up the drum beat sounding out the need for our very own ‘Clause 4’ with, er, expelling Norman Tebbit and repealing Section 28 topping the bill at the moment. Good luck to them, I suppose one has to say — doubtless there’s some further exercise in justified self-hate the party’s self-styled modernisers can wheel out to add to this implausible set of specimens. Goodness knows, we might even stumble upon something people actually dislike and would want to see the back of.
Mister Hayes update
To close on a happier note, this column’s own dark horse, John Hayes, has added excitement and detail to his conference cry for us to be the party of ‘convention, heritage, collective wisdom and an ageless belief that these things are always more important than fads or fashion’. In The Spectator this week, the shadow Agriculture minister sets out his belief that big business has been an ‘aesthetic disaster’ (indeed, it was walking through Bournemouth, where he saw ‘ugliness, sameness and blandness’ that instanced these wise reflections). We can only but wish him luck and good favour in his mission to ‘develop policies in response to [the] pressures’ of ‘the interests of trans-national capital’. Yet though we feel honour bound to warn a friend what a cunning foe this menace is, how can the heart not soar freely in response to passages such as this?
[A]n electorate beset by uncertainties and insecurities will not be reassured by a dated neo-liberal reaction that has little to offer beyond unbridled individualism.
One feels sure that there is much left unsaid, much vitriol still to be drenched over our ersatz neo-cons and our frightful social liberals, but for now, just rejoice.
Kit Kildare is ERO’s political correspondent [and should have delivered this copy much earlier too.]
Kit Kildare, October 11, 2002 11:55 PM