POLITICS: On being positive
The case for Barry Legg
ERO’s editorial comment
This is not gloating
Poor Mark MacGregor — who would have thought that the late chief executive would end up being a victim of the satanic imagination of Mr Duncan Smith? The sheer cunning cruelty of taking in this lame beast (savagely gored in the summer of 2001), patching him up, feeding and watering him, giving him fresh pasture to roam around in, and all for what? So that he could be dispatched, in the prime of political life, for sport. You have to marvel at the party leader’s strength of purpose, his fixity of cause, the adamantine adherence to principle . . . well, maybe not, but as Mr MacGregor’s remains are carted off to be boiled down for glue, what are we to make of the welcome that has greeted his successor, Barry Legg? Very simply this: it has been the occasion of a purely rhetorical confidence trick by the Portilloites, led by their namesake, attempting to overthrow the People’s Iain. This dismal effort has failed, and what we are now witnessing are the death-rattles of ‘modernisation’ within the Tory party. Within the space of a year, some deeply unhappy and troubled people, currently jetting away inside the tent, will be firmly ensconced in other parties. This can no longer be accounted a pity.
It doesn’t do the mentally competent much good to have demon kings in their lives, but it’s hard to escape mention of the silliest actor in this whole farce: The Times. Our aged contemporary has, perfectly reasonably, been for some time now more of a faction sheet than a newspaper, when it comes to coverage of intra-Tory disputes. This has begun to trouble even its intelligent Australian editor, a man sufficiently wise not to too often bother about domestic trivia such as the fate of the Official Opposition. Mr Thompson is aware that ‘his’ Tories seem to have been recruited on the basis of some undeclared Act of Uniformity, such is the coincidence of opinion in Wapping. It will, of course, not be anything inherent in the opinions themselves that will seal the opening up of the paper already evident. Rather it is the complete dissolution of the faction this group has hitched itself to that will compel some intellectual diversity at The Times. It will mean, for instance, that the shamefully limited and lazy response to the appointment of Mr Legg will not again be repeated.
Saying nice things
Now that it is clear that the misplaced talk that the roles of chief executive and chief of staff might not after all be conjoined is the planted chatter it always was, what should we make of Barry Legg, our everyman?
We can draw attention to his time an elected politician, both in the House of Commons and on Westminster City Council. Certainly the man himself would, feeling that a certain legitimacy attaches to people with votes behind them making policy, as compared to those who don't more conventionally implementing policy.
Then there is his exemplary life story, a sort of Tory parable down from the ages. A self made man, in that his talent, first as an accountant, then as a businessman, led him to the board of a FTSE-100 company in his mid thirties, and this in turn led to all the things that should, including a house in Belgravia, a seat in Buckinghamshire, and a desire to do something for the party, as opposed to having the party do something for him.
This was the track record that so excited, and let us be frank, disgusted The Times, who also added to their strange indictment the fact of him being an opponent of Maastricht, a known accomplice in the ‘Westminster Council blag’, and not necessarily the foremost fan of John Major, when Tory leader. Leaving to one side that in these stances he mirrors exactly the pose of The Times at the time, what was truly startling, incoherent and downright hysterical in this paper’s attack upon Mr Legg, was that it was meant to draw a contrast with his immediate, ousted predecessor. Yet, even the most casual acquaintanceship with the mid 1990s ought to have reminded us that Mr MacGregor too suffered from all these vices, being nasty enough at the time to say disobliging things about Mr Major, being, it would have seemed, an opponent as well of Maastricht, and as for the heinous crime of being associated with Westminster City Council, well what can we say? We can express our surprise that this has inexplicably become a source of shame in nominally Conservative circles, and state our admiration for the fledging PR outfit, Marketforce, which did so much good, well-paid work for the infamous Porter regime. The salient difference between Mr Legg and Mr MacGregor being, as we have already said, that one acted on the basis of being an MP, the other didn’t.
Whose Central Office is it anyway?
Another key strand in the madness that flared and died over the last ten days was that Mr Duncan Smith was at fault for choosing who he wanted working under him in Smith Square, and more pertinently, whom he did not. Was this a serious, grown-up criticism? It was certainly a novel proposition, that the party leader should be beholden to officials or CCO staffers as to the nature and duration of his subordinates. Happily this constitutional radicalism has been seen off, and Mr Legg will seamlessly progress to his dual function. That the two jobs need to be done by the one man, and that the leader must have confidence in this one man, is, we would suggest, incontestable. Both Jenny Ungless, previously chief of staff, and Mark MacGregor, manifestly failed in their roles. The first was a civil servant, and quite unsuited to the job she found herself doing. The second, a former party youth activist, had, as we have noted, experience with the PR and lobbying firm Marketforce, but nothing quite to suggest that his political track record (FCS, CWF, Portillo 1995, & Portillo 2001) would end in anything other than equally consistent failure at CCO. And so, as may have been predicted, it has turned out to be.
Again and again the contrast being declaimed as between Mr Legg and Mr MacGregor by Portilloists in the print media veered instantly into ludicrous implausibility. Mr Legg and Mr Duncan Smith were alleged to have not played the white man by poor Mrs May, but this does tend to overlook Mr MacGregor’s track record with party chairmen. Of whom we would contend neither David Davis nor Norman Tebbit could be looked to as admirers.
Whilst Mr MacGregor was whatever Mr MacGregor was until 2001, the credentials Mr Legg brings to the task of being chief executive include his consistent interest (as evidenced by several NTB pamphlets) in the currently much bruited subject of ‘public service reform’, and his stand-out membership of the Treasury and Civil Service select committee. In connection to the latter, anyone who has had dealings with Barry Legg will know that if the party is finally to cut back on its own waste, there can be no better man than him. Even on the score of Westminster City Council, the near show-trial mounted by the district auditor resulted in Mr Legg’s exoneration, while Mr MacGregor by times last year seemed to have difficulty going a weekend without some Sunday tabloid flinging mud at him. This was doubtless unfair and unwarranted, but in an era when we are told that the party has got to do everything it can to avoid the stains of the eighties, it was, to say the least, unfortunate, if not downright unconvincing.
Intolerance for the victim
There was a good reason behind the madness of last week, and it is this: without the life-support machine of the party, Portilloism will shrivel up and die. An astonishing narrative was being tried out last week, as the press friends of the minuscule, unloved grouplet attempted to come to its aid, and reconnect the tubes. Inescapably, after Mr Duncan Smith acted, the cry went up from neutral observers, ‘but for all this peevish whining about being sacked, isn’t there something very familiar about all this? wasn’t this just what happened to William Hague?’ In an almost inspired gambit this was transformed, limply by the BBC, but with more vigour by The Times’ tame team into being, of all things, a critique of poor Mr Hague. For, in their hands, it became the very proof of their friends’ righteousness, and, as merely one example, of Mr Hague’s iniquity — that this fate had befallen him, that he had so resiled from modernity that otherwise loyal and concerned employees of the party had had continuously to intrigue against him, before their untimely and unwarranted sackings. In short, it was his fault, he was asking for it.
They’ve tried retrospectively, with the aid of the presumed lessons of the 2001 general election result, to justify this behaviour again. It hasn’t worked. Not least because there exists an insurmountable problem: if it’s the party’s poll ratings that permit the abandonment of discipline and decency, and those ratings are based upon our policies, whose policies have we been trying these last 18 months? If we haven’t been trying out the inspired wisdom of the modernisers we’ve so recently lost from inside CCO, what exactly was all the fuss about then? A terrible bind indeed, and a substantial part of why, no matter how hard they squealed, they were never going to get their leadership election this week. Indeed, every frenzied and peculiar outburst by Mr Portillo retarded their chances of gaining those 25 names (a considerable achievement, given that they have been there the entire time of this leadership, and the leadership would have issues getting 25 names in support), much as terrorist atrocities used to oblige unwilling governments to actually face up to terrorism.
The future starts now
An opportunity has been missed to do something about the party board, certainly the elected members at any rate. Fear doesn’t stalk a party as it should if baby-faced bloaters like Richard Stephenson are talking smack about Mr Duncan Smith in public, and a chance to thump some folk has been missed by the paucity of candidates who have gone forward to Harrogate and the National Convention. Moreover, the legalistic absurdity raised in argument last week, that the Board might decline the Leader’s choice of chief executive, was an unnecessary distraction that should be tidied up this parliament. Whenever systemic political incompetence has been found in the party in the last half dozen years, Archie Norman has always been there, or thereabouts — and so it proves with the nuisance at stake here, the hopeless 1999 party constitution which he inflicted on us. What job was Mr Norman doing at the time? Why, chief executive of course.
That we can look confidently to the future, that there are grounds for hope not realistically felt since the mid 1980s in terms of sorting out Smith Square, is down to one fact: the appointment of one supremely able man, Barry Legg. That we now enjoy the prospect of the party to come is because only Iain Duncan Smith would have appointed Barry Legg. You see, there was a reason after all.
An important announcement for the benefit of our several readers
Our political correspondent, Mr Kildare, will presently [Wednesday, he tells us] be divesting himself of some comments pertaining to recent developments in the party, and the consequences issuing from the separation of the chief executive’s head from his shoulders. He will endeavour to explain how this happened, why this happened, and what the outcome of this notable event is likely to be. It is expected that he will advert to the hitherto unexamined role played by the 'Nikki Page campaign'. In a further act of service to the readers of ERO, he will also name the very day the great decision was taken, slightly over a month ago, and make some pertinent remarks as to why Mr Duncan Smith will endure as party leader until the general election, and what the benefits of this shall be.
ERO, February 25, 2003 04:30 PM