POLITICS: Sweeter than a red rose makeover
Does “DD’s” brand of opposition work best?
Bye bye Beverley
Why did Beverley Hughes resign? You’d have to follow politics more closely than me to know the answer to that question. Something to do with some other Labour MP (an ex-Minister maybe?) revealing she might have known something about something at some point? I think so, but I’m not really sure. That 99 out of 100 voters are still more ignorant than I am is, however, something I am sure of — and how little it matters! A coup has been scored, and by the opposition front bench and not by those puffed up people in the lobby. The coup consists of the minister resigning, which in itself doesn’t matter but does serve as excellent peg for the story. And the story is partially how honest the government is, and partially to do with how we should best handle legal and illegal immigration. Inasmuch as there are votes to be swayed on either of those two issues, the Tory Home Affairs team has made an impact in the last few weeks: and this is in sorry contrast to what the rest of the shadow cabinet has achieved. What then should we make of the fact that only David Davis seems to be winning the party votes?
The first thing we should note is just how poorly the rest of the disciples are performing. Some people joked that we moved down to a baker’s dozen of a shadow cabinet because those were all the Tory MPs that anyone, the whips’ office included, could remember. But when (and you see, I do pay attention to politics) a “Caroline Spelman” was promoted on the grounds that she was almost as wet and old-womanly as the departing David Curry, well, the public recognition theory took a knock. There’s a serious problem when a parliamentary party can’t produce, oh, just half a dozen genuine shadow cabinet talents: even at the depth of Labour’s problems in the mid-80s they never suffered the embarrassing drought we presently are. Alarmingly the failure has been worst at the top tier, with Michael Ancram and Oliver Letwin being evidently among the least able to contribute anything to electoral dynamism. If, come the start of the summer recess Mr Howard leaves milord Ancram in the shadow cabinet this will at least serve as a pit canary, warning us that the current leader lacks ambition and is intent merely to time serve until resigning after the next general election. A party that wants to win doesn’t allow a blanket as wet as Michael Ancram anywhere near its fighting faces. Olive meanwhile is too sorrowful even to think on: no doubt he will say a silly thing again very soon and so we’ll roll our eyes then.
Of the chairmen, it’s difficult to know which is worse, that each seems to be doing the job that the other would be best suited to, or that both together appear less often in the press than did their hopeless predecessor. Outside the shadow cabinet proper, Nick Soames seems in a state of permanent, open discontent — and rightly so given the way foolish virgin Olive won’t provide enough oil for his lamp yet seems determined to hose it all over wannabe wastrels like Tim ‘nice-but-welfarist’ Yeo. A bad business then, save, of course, for mumbling Joe himself. Now David Davis has had advantages in the fight he’s found himself in — notably the spade work being done by Sir Andrew Green’s MigrationWatch, and, Blairite and Blunkettesque Labour’s determination to fight this issue only ever on Tory terms, and never to try and outflank us by appeals to pious liberalism — but the point is, he hasn’t fluffed them. Olive from the last parliament would have done. In this parliament Michael Ancram could certainly do the same if shuffled into that job later this year. So there’s been a big silver lining to DD fluffing the leadership last year. Very simply it’s that we’ve thankfully got someone doing the hardcase routine Michael Howard actually performed in government, but did so so unsuccessfully from the point of view of winning votes. Which brings us back to what Mr Davis brings to the job.
When being nice doesn’t cut it
Home affairs has been a fiendishly difficult brief for Tory frontbenchers to tackle for a dozen years now. From 1992 on, Labour shadow then solid Home Secretaries have been unbendingly, if not right wing, then always sufficiently Mallonite to make it very clear that their Tory opposite numbers were at the least never going to be anymore more plausible on crime than they were. Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett have all had more of what the unhappy public wanted than anything the Conservative Party put up against them. Clarke, Howard, Widdecombe and Letwin all failed for different reasons in dissimilar manners, but the end result was in each instance the same: when the electorate looked first left, then right, Labour produced the goods and we didn’t. Up against a man more likely to lead his party than Mr Davis is to lead his, we’re gaining our first sustained successes on law and order in more than a decade. Rather than sourly analysing where it all went wrong in the past it’s important to see why David Davis is making the impact he is. More than anything else it’s because he’s not apologising for the past, and is presently willing to negatively expose Labour’s likely future limitations. The tone here is very much that of opposition and accordingly it makes for a refreshing change. Just conceivably this effort is helped by the fact that, courtesy of his internal exile as chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, Mr Davis has spent longer away from the pseudo-Civil Servicery of CCO than most of his peers. That he eschews mewling does more than most pundits are willing to concede to stave off the insidious ‘politicians? huh! they’re all the same’ poison the press secretly enjoy doping the public with. Inoculating voters against cynicism is one thing, but will he be given his head?
Almost certainly David Davis will be allowed to go further in his appeal to old, but currently mislaid Tory constituencies, with old, but currently mislaid Tory policies. If Michael Howard has one thing going for him, it’s the possibility that he’s sufficiently free from conviction that he’ll learn from his ongoing sluggardly opinion poll performance and react accordingly. That, though, raises the very real possibility that in dealing with eg the ‘heavy hitting’ problem, the Tory leader will accidentally remove the Davisite virtue. If Olive can’t reasonably be sacked but can be pensioned off a la Maude to that junketing retirement home for failed Tory shadows (foreign affairs) the chances are that Mr David might get the call to replace him at the Treasury. This obviously would be an error, for it’s still too much to hope that Michael Howard will provide himself with a shadow chancellor even more capable of doing to Gordon Brown what the trend-bucking Mr Davis has been able to do to David Blunkett. Quite what the unreasoning fear of John Redwood is we’ll probably never know, but then more than one virility test was failed in 1995.
Adrian Muldrew is effortlessly better informed and will return soon
Kit Kildare, April 3, 2004 11:20 PM