POLITICS: There’s more than one way to win
Not that we’re going to
Realism is old fashioned and must die
ERO has few prejudices more absolute than the belief that the Prime Minister of Australia is the Greatest Living Briton and ought, at once, before it’s too late, to become leader of the Tory party. In the absence of that latter boon being granted, we can at least listen rapt to whatever advice he chooses to give us. On his last visit here, he met the shadow cabinet and proffered them the wisdom that ‘strong candidates in marginal seats are an opposition's most important weapon in a general election’. And Amen to that. Sadly, spin being what it is, in the hands of desperate and unscrupulous men (i.e. Telegraph hacks), this wisdom can be traduced, and that band of brothers, our beloved PPCs, dangerously smeared. For instead of just being the party’s prospective candidates, you could, Panto-style, call them ‘IDS’s candidates’. Why on earth would anyone stoop to doing that? obviously to justify branding them as a bunch of incompetent louses. This is not the occasion to yet again to rehash why we were entirely right about how those candidates were selected, and everyone else was a quivering jelly. But it is an opportunity to point out that, the party could make this mess worse, though it doesn’t have to, and, to cheerfully accept that the best way forward electorally remains pure, unbridled negativism.
The story trailed in the Telegraph on the first day of the Spring conference at Harrogate was branded all-Fox. There’s to be a ‘monthly audit’ of the candidates in target seats, and as the co-chairman Sovietly put it:
We are also making candidate training mandatory. A small number need retraining. We will be assessing all candidates to ensure they are up to the task.
That’ll teach ‘em. Quite what one can’t be sure, but something doubtless: we all know how much wisdom the party centrally has to impart to the front line. After all, if you wanted to know how best to win an election, any election, 32 Smith Square would of course be your first and only one-stop shop.
At the heart of the implied threat is, inescapably, de-selection. Whilst there’s just about time to Byng a few before the next election, the absurdity of this proposition is clear to all, and becomes more transparent with each passing week we come closer to our date with destiny. Here, however, is where principle rears its ugly head. For while we can dismiss the actuality of mass de-selections for the nonsense it plainly is, what we shouldn’t overlook is any suggestion that the centre ought to even in theory be free to unmake duly selected candidates on a whim. Concede this, and though the power won’t, because it can’t in any practical sense, be used now, it’ll be the bane of Associations for the rest of forever. Fortunately there’s no way yet to make good on this threat, but at the moment only ERO stands between the party and intellectual indecency.
Careful! He’s got a gun, and he knows what to do with it
Since idle threats are merely good clean fun, there’s no real reason to fault the bijou chair for making them. No, if you want to shake your head in despair, it’s old Tortospecs you’ve got to wonder about. What’s Mozza been up to? Well not much more than blurting out the one sensible thing Iain Duncan Smith ever managed to think: namely that, whatever it says in public, the party’s private priority must be to make sure a.) we go up at the next election as the Liberals go down, and b.) in so doing, we quietly concentrate our campaigning resources on winning the seats we need to get back above 200 MPs again. Before we consider the straightforward common sense of this survival guide, let’s just focus on Lord Saatchi’s speaking out of school. Bit rum surely, to tell those hardly helpful characters over at The Times, ‘when I asked why it is not a list of 164, the answer was we did not think we could win them’, hmmn? Even were this a cunning double bluff (ie that such concentration is still exactly what Lord Saatchi thinks the party should do, and that this statement is pure chaff, useful for boosting morale in the process) it would still be jolly unwise. That this co-chairman has gamely worked himself into the Bruce Anderson-in-97 position of musing, ‘it is actually hard to see how we will lose [the next general election]’ rather suggests that cunning isn’t the mot juste. We, though, will come back to whether we’re going to win the next election in a moment, and instead right now think on what revelations like this are going to do for the psyche of Mr Duncan Smith.
In the former Tory leader’s hands at the moment is the draft Mawer report into, umm, whatever it was that our Portilloite chums told the bumptious Michael Crick. At some point, after he’s made whatever witty observations he’s minded to, this has to be handed back to Sir Philip and thence to the Standards Committee. Now let’s ponder for a second: regardless of what any of us might think about the late Tory leader, is it really sensible, for the party’s sake, to goad him any further than is going to be necessary over the next few weeks? No, it’s really not, and for that reason if for no other, Maurice Saatchi probably ought to button up about private chats past.
What to do with victory?
Accepting, as we droned on and on at you at the time, that candidates were selected far too early, and noting the powerless peevishness the party evidently feels about Lord Ashcroft and his independently minded dosh, is there really anything in the air that ought to have Tories in Spring gambolling? Not very obviously so, but appreciating that shouldn’t lead us to gloom. Instead it should encourage to consider ways to winning other than through gaining more votes. Or leastways, routes by which we can supplement whatever popular gains we get next time we go to the polls.
Above all else is the American lesson of vote suppression. This is not some Francoist urge long repressed by any ERO contributor, it’s the tactic whereby you do what you can to faciliate your opponent losing votes — and the main way any party loses votes (as we discovered in 1997 but seem determined never to remember) is for its sometime supporters simply not to vote at all. There is, as traditional Labour voters become steadily more disenchanted with Blairite excess, a splendid opportunity for the Tory party to gain from Labour’s base failing to turn out. Is there even a thought as to what we might do to encourage this tendency? Somehow one suspects it’s at the top of neither chairmans’ “to do” list.
Adrian Muldrew is on a yacht somewhere off Koversada; like James Bond, he will return.
Kit Kildare, March 6, 2004 06:14 PM
