POLITICS: Have we won?
The Tao of Tory selection
CandidateWatch and the apple of knowledge
And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.
And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.
And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the garden.
And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?
And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.
And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?
And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.
And the LORD God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.
— Genesis, chap. III, v. 6-13
Our subtil serpent is, rumour has it, possibly going to swell back into life after the orgiastic delights of the European elections (it really does take all tastes), but long before then it’s worth looking back at what this webzine’s infamous CandidateWatch column achieved. This, long-time readers will remember, was a chronicle of the assorted toad-eaters and swanky fellows who comprise the Conservative party’s aspirant parliamentary candidates. Each selection round was watched in turn, and by times our ever-helpful correspondent, the Snake, even was good-natured enough to offer some mild advice as to whom and to what, and to where and to when. ERO’s grave editorial columns also weighed in, inveighing against (‘when ever for?’ I hear you cry) any notion that the party’s time hallowed — well, decade or two old — selection processes should be left pretty much as they were. Now in some ways, this was a perverse crusade, for should not ERO, of all the caves of truculent resistance left in the Tory party, surely already have had a fairly jaundiced view of what manner of Conservative MP was being thrown up, election after election, by these self-same processes? Why the answer to that question is, Andrew MacKay et al notwithstanding, No, and why indeed an important battle for Toryism has, for the moment, been won is just exactly what I’d modestly like to put before you.
For what can’t be underestimated — or indeed, in the absence of any too great success for this fanatical, unTory urge, ignored — is the degree to which an effort was made in the last few years to upend all the party’s traditional methods of selecting candidates for parliament. This campaign had innumerable things going against it, not least that it was attempted by the people inside the party most alien to its temper, and most unpopular with their peers. But it did have rather more than the tacit support of the leadership of Iain Duncan Smith, and beyond that it was cheered on by some of the party's least useful idiots in the press. It would go slightly too far to say that ERO defeated this tendency single-handed, but what would not be dishonest would be to admit that ERO, virtually alone, pointed out that this defeat was taking place. That, more than anything else, was the task of CandidateWatch; and, if we thumb through the Authorised Version a bit further, we'll remember just how it was done: 'ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free'. This, the rigging and perverting of Tory candidate selection, was an enterprise whose slim chances of success depended entirely on it taking place in the dark. That, as we all know, didn’t happen.
Asians, gays and women
In some ways the fact that the Tory party in Parliament seemed slow to accommodate people previously considered beyond the scope of political involvement amounts to little more than a matter of timing and opportunity. The turnover of members of parliament, from one parliament to the next, is actually quite slow, so wider trends in society are inevitably going to take a while before they show up in Westminster. And as well as timing, it’s foolish to ignore the matter of inclination. For although women, in every election since they were enfranchised (up until John Major in 1992 at any rate), always voted disproportionately Tory, other groups, held equally to have been excluded from representation, have not. Why they have not is a more complex matter than the party’s self-obsessed self-flagellators tend to assume — though if there’s one thing we really do know about the Tories who have brayed most loudly about black people these last five years, it’s that they’re not really very interested in black people at all. This, to cut an argument short, has always been about them, and you’ll have travelled a long way before you met a black Portilloite. It’s outside the purpose of my argument to consider why certain minorities have remained steadfast in their disinclination to vote Tory (despite the obvious congruence between, for example, old, unfashionable Tory morality and the opinions laxly assumed to be held by eg ‘traditional’ Muslims) but one thing is surely obvious. You can’t expect many MPs from among groups who won’t vote for you, however ‘rational’ it might seem that they should.
Naturally, the state of affairs — the Parliamentary Tory party of the last two decades — held to be so contemporaneously disagreeable is in itself the direct consequence of the last significant effort to ‘reform’ candidate selection. For the men on the list, the list itself, and the manner in which associations select, is essentially that designed to produce the ‘Heathmen’: who were once seen as being so modern. Sir Anthony Grant’s time in Central Office as a vice party chairman was designed to, and did, lead to a party which was more meritocratic, more classless, and much less particular. The most signal consequence of these intended steps towards progress was that local, for which read squirearchical or independently wealthy candidates, became steadily less favoured — and were in turn superseded by London-based thirty-something Oxbridge-educated men. The thinking being that fusty backwoods dinosaurs who could either over-awe, or alternatively, fund their cash-strapped local associations ‘distorted’ the image of the party held to be sensible in Smith Square, and what was needed instead were, for want of a better word, a bunch of homogenised SW1 clones. Inevitably this tended the party towards ‘professionalism’, and that in turn reduced the age at, and the variety of experience with which freshman Tory MPs arrived at the House of Commons.
So not by any means the perfect system then: central to its flaws being the ‘approved list’ of parliamentary candidates itself, and this because of the influence it afforded the centre over the local. If there’s one lesson still to be learnt in all of this, it’s that in a parliamentary system, whatever the importance of the national campaign (which obviously is fought nationally), individual constituency associations are best placed to know what sort of candidate works best in their seat. Yet whatever its weaknesses, it was still a relatively transparent system, and one that allowed for a great and healthy amount of internal competition. All of that was directly attacked by the recent attempt to ‘modernise’ candidate selection.
Fighting with losers
Arguably the best gift the campaign against modernisation on this battlefront had was Iain Duncan Smith himself. This is not to say that he had any serious intention to resist ‘golden lists’ or any of the other rubbish foisted on him, but more in that, such was his infirmity of purpose, and all round reverse Midas touch, you really did want him outside your tent leading all over himself. Thus when the most extreme and dangerous proposals came before Mr Duncan Smith, the cynosure of press criticism that could be whipped up as an immediately leaked result was invariably enough to deflect the then Tory leader from whatever purpose he might briefly have had in mind. The new Tory leader, it will be noted, has shown no inclination whatsoever to revisit this vexed question. And to repeat the point implied above, the people being selected today are just as they were before all this dreadful Portilloite fuss about candidates ever started. To be absolutely specific, this has been borne out yet again in Burton with Adrian Pepper or in Loughborough with Nicky Morgan. Or for that matter, with the final foursome — Malcolm Rifkind, Nick Hurd, Warwick Lightfoot and Mary Weale — Kensington & Chelsea will select from among. For better or for worse, this is business as usual.
K&C of course should have been a test case for Portilloites, given the strenuous efforts ring-mastered by Mark Field to get Michael ‘actually, I was a dilettante all along’ Portillo selected in the first place. Yet as you’ll have gathered, the choice is as frighteningly white as ever. Why is this, what does it tell us about a defeated faction? Well exactly that: if Portilloites can’t even get modern people modishly selected in K&C (or for that imminent matter, Thanet South) then there isn’t much hope for them. But the saga of SW3 and SW1 is even more instructive than that, for it tells us something about Portilloite material. As noted, Mark Field was the K&C activist who did the business to get Mr Portillo selected in 1999, and in consequence was rewarded himself by being selected in turn for Researchershire-by-Thames. This lamentably dreary selection of still another lower middle middle class Oxbridge-educated honky for a safe Tory seat was, in truth, the solitary high point of the campaign by the ‘blue meanies’ to rig candidate selection before the 2001 general election. And it was the painfully evident failure of this entire cack-handed effort (as most amply demonstrated in the result of 2001’s leadership election) which quite naturally spurred the modernisers on: a do or die quality entered into their behaviour from this point on.
To return to Mark Field, however, is to see why this renewed assault on traditional selection methods was never going to work. Mr Field displaced the far more deserving Warwick Lightfoot in the Two Cities — though hopefully that wrong can be put right in oh so gloriously ironic K&C on Wednesday 25th (say your prayers) — but to what end? When it came to the crunch, the crunch for the people who helped put him in the Commons, what did he do? Was he a loyal Portilloite street fighter, or was he a great wobbly jelly? As his final choice of candidate for leader in 2001, one Ken Clarke, might suggest, he wasn’t the former. In a nutshell, that’s the problem with modernisation: never mind how good or bad an idea it might have been, there were never enough of them, and those of them there were, weren’t any good.
Lady Bountiful, vice chairman and friend
As we settle down to the next general election, most of the target seats have selected, and most of those who are standing down from the House have announced that they’re doing so. The candidates adopted have mostly been subject to the meddlesome rules adopted by CCO as a compromise in 2002, but as we have seen, they are, undoubtedly, much the same men and women who would have been selected regardless. In terms of strict factionalism, the performance of ‘true believer’ modernisers has been even more pitiful this time round than it was in the run up to the last election. Mind you, that, to be fair, is hardly surprising, given that the ‘guaranteed’ post-Hague success of this faction was always a confidence trick, and once exposed as such, they were inevitably set to fall back solely upon the fanatics and the people so wretched no other faction would bother to have them. This matters in that contrary to contemporary wisdom, the House of Commons matters — and in all political parties, the vanguard, the collective parliamentary consciousness, matters most of all: in the leadership it provides, and in the tone it sets. The next time you read a journalist telling you how much more important it is to be a hack than a mere backbench MP, listen clearly and you’ll hear the tinny desperation in that claim.
Truth to tell, the Conservative party’s parliamentary party hasn’t been anywhere near Tory enough for a long time: under the leader we’ve just lost, it had become inadvisable even to use the word. All that has changed. Toryism survives and reacts into another century; no more than half a dozen of the teeth-grindingly awfully termed ‘parliamentary spokesmen’ might conceive of themselves as being there to resist rather than advance, but at least, with the brutal wisdom of the Tory grass roots, some do, some will, and all can. In the next House of Commons there will still be a Conservatism
distinguished less by argument than by assertion, sarcasm and irony, by emancipation from emancipation and by exposure of the uncertainties which surround relations between theory and practice.
Just as there will be an inclination towards self-destructive narcissism. Thankfully, thanks to the vigilant eye of The Skibbereen Eagle, er, ERO, its elected representatives will be chiefly concentrated, as they ought to be, amongst the Liberal and Labour hordes.
Kit Kildare is ERO’s needlepoint correspondent
Kit Kildare, February 17, 2004 11:37 PM