POLITICS: We take our stand
On the ‘dream ticket’
Don’t go, not yet
We have published a great deal on the nature of Iain Duncan Smith’s mandate from ‘the Tory grass roots’, and we intend to carry on doing so until the subject becomes moot. Recent weeks, however, have demonstrated that Mr Duncan Smith himself shares our interest in this topic, for it is, wisely, the basis of his claim of right against the party: that he should continue being allowed to lead us precisely because it was the mass membership who eventually put him where he is today. The merits of this argument are hotly and malevolently contested by many. Unfortunately for the Tory leader, these doubting Michaels are to be found in greatest profusion in first, the parliamentary party, and second, among our camp followers in the mass media. Not to put too fine a point on it, it is the ‘Tory’ press who are presently most loudly sceptical about what their readers choose to do last summer. And how do they suggest it could best be undone? By the medium of a dream ticket — Ken Clarke stands for the leadership, with the enthusiastic support of Michael Portillo, and such is the magnificence of this proposal, no one else will dare to stand, and the party in the country will be confronted with no choice. This is an excellent suggestion, worthy of being compared to some of the greatest Portilloite ideas of the recent past, and we should contemplate carefully what attempting it will mean for the dear old cause.
Though first, we should notice what is left out from this happy scheme: any hint of how we are to even get to the kick off, what with the incumbent being here, and being minded to stay just there. Sometime frontbencher Nigel Waterson felt compelled to tell his leader, through the marginally discourteous medium of the BBC, that he faced a pretty continuous form of peer review — with the barely unspoken implication being that if he hasn’t shaped up come next May, it’ll be time to ship out. But again how? The end is willed but not the means. It’s not the only threat Mr Duncan Smith has been issued with of course - sundry shy modernisers have informed him, in the newspapers, naturally, that he’d better get it right this time on Section 28, otherwise they’re off. Which would be a terrible blow. Worst of all — in advance of a party rating beneath that of the Lib Dems, or a by-election lost to the same —have been the opinion polls, tumbling one after another, all saying uncongenial things about the leader. Saddest, by some distance, was the too slim for comfort margin of 3% that Mr Duncan Smith achieved over Mr Basil Brush as to ‘who would make the best Conservative leader?’
So things aren’t good, and to make them worse, in wades Lord Brittan with sage observations about what the party really doesn’t need is a contested leadership election. Not good, is it? Putting on the black cap of helpful advice is, inevitably, Archie Norman, who offers comfort to his leader by urging him to ‘be himself’. This, you will recall, is the same Archie Norman who has now pronounced himself a failure because he didn’t make the Tories electable, and, in consequence, hasn’t therefore gained ministerial office. Our uncharitable opinion would be that Archie Norman’s failings, long evident, have quite a lot to do with the fact that he was a dreadful politician — it’s much like accounting for the failure of, oh, England to score the runs they need, if they have as their batters soap carvings rather than batsmen. Like all good Leninists, Mr Norman pronounces of his time at CCO that it remains wreathed in disaster and distress precisely because he didn’t go further and faster in his ASDAisation of Smith Sq. This is one of those reasons why sensible traditionalists should not lie awake at night fearful of such cunning plans as Mr Norman may bring to the struggle on behalf of our modernist foe. Rest assured, he’ll do for them what he did for the party.
If the leader’s enemies are determined but incompetent, what then can he hope of his remaining friends at this hour? We will agree that the effort put in by Bernard Jenkin in the tearoom last week is not, on its own, going to be the salvation of Mr Duncan Smith. Indeed, we can also, no doubt, concur that Bernard erred in admitting of the parliamentary party, ‘it’s impossible to get them to agree to anything’. There’s at least one thing (quite possibly two) that they’re as one on. It ought to be indignant cries along the lines of, ‘if Archie Norman could be made chief executive on turning up in ‘97, why couldn’t Patrick near-as-dammit-a-general Mercer have instantly been given a shadow cabinet post this time?’ but instead what dismal areas of unity there are must surely include universal sympathy for the poor chief whip. Who’d be David Maclean at a moment like this — stuffing notes of apology into pigeonholes, and for what? This unnecessary diminution of the single most able member of the shadow cabinet serves the party ill indeed.
Outside Westminster the crisis continues, with the party in Mr Maclean’s cold, northern homeland facing annihilation — to put that in the starkest language possible, we seem set in Scotland to do worse than we’re doing nationally. Back at Westminster, the madness proceeds apace, with one of the most important balming acts Mr Maclean has to perform, being that required by the excellent Angela Browning (who, for what it’s worth, proposed Mr Duncan Smith for the leadership, and was none to happy to be told that by abstaining on the ‘soft’ three line whip, that she was thereby undermining his leadership). Nor is there any end in sight, with Portilloites gearing up to make hay with what the party should do as regards ‘registered partnerships’ for gay couples. No wonder Mr Duncan Smith feels obliged to turn to those who put him into office, for there doesn’t seem to be much support left elsewhere. His newfound friends have certainly proven to be as long lasting as midsummer rain. Which brings us back to what his enemies want to do with him, and what his friends should want to do for him.
What the answer means
You have to give this to Ken Clarke — any designs he has on the leadership are admirably open and straightforward. He wants to be leader, he thinks he would do a better job than Mr Duncan Smith, he’s letting us know this, and, he understands himself to have the support of Mr Portillo. The ‘dream ticket’ scheme has the advantage for Mr Clarke that he knows full well that if he stands a third time, he’ll lose a third time, so coronation it will have to be. Being irreducibly lazy, this also, no doubt, appeals as a mode of campaigning. That said, it is as hapless, as witless, and as politically deranged an idea as any Portilloite has yet had. For when we say this method of proceeding must have its charms for Mr Clarke, it has them even more for Mr Portillo’s motley crew of supporters, as if any group of men know better still than the Clarkeites that their man will never win a contested leadership election, it’s them. This isn’t to say, for instance, that Mr Portillo is engaging in cack handed jesuitry when he declares he will never stand against [sic] Mr Duncan Smith, while all the time intending to slip in behind Mr Clarke at some point in the future. We have little doubt that the mental state of Michael Portillo is such that he believes everything he says, completely and insistently, every time he says anything. No, it’s simply that he’s an emotional sort, and he hasn’t taken to Mr Duncan Smith. And where the pied piper of K&C goes, the rats of Pimlico will be sure to follow.
A sensible strategy, one minded to frustrate more fully the knavish desires of the traditional majority, would be, of course, to attempt to contrive a result whereby the parliamentary party offers the selectorate as their choice both Mr Clarke and Mr Portillo. That would put us up against it. We’d be in a pickle then. But Mr Portillo doesn’t want to run. As it is, the scenario of the dream ticket is utterly implausible, and would be demonstrated as such the moment it was attempted. Dr Fox, and still more David Davis would not stand back while MPs asserted themselves thus over the voluntary party. Recognising this as reality is not to defend the system Mr Hague left the party with, still less to accede to babyish nonsense that a leader produced by a one candidate ballot would somehow lack legitimacy, not being in receipt of a mandate from the mass membership. Rather, it is to appreciate that what produced the result the system did last time, will produce the same result next time too. The Tory party does not want to be led by either Ken Clarke or Michael Portillo, still less to see the ideas advocated in their name endorsed as party policy. Whatever the rules are, this outcome will, rightly, remain constant.
The terrible double edged weapon — the Tory mob, if you will — Mr Duncan Smith is grappling with, cuts deep, and it cuts both ways. He is long out of practice at wielding it; in fact, we would argue that he has not picked it up since early last summer. This rustiness is liable to prove fatal.
ERO’s editorial comment
[NB the long-awaited second instalment of Kit Kildare’s micro-analysis of the last fortnight should appear tomorrow, God willing.]
ERO, November 11, 2002 06:21 PM