SHARED OPINION
FRANK JOHNSON
How long before the police round up the Notting Hill Set?
Two of the suspects who appeared in court this week in connection with the attempted London bombings were arrested — on a balcony, hands up before armed police — in Notting Hill. This confirms a theory many of us have had about districts of large cities. Once they become fashionable, fashionable is what they more and more become. Had it been the 1920s, they would have been arrested in Bloomsbury. In the young Princess Margaret’s day, it would have been Chelsea.
To create even more envy of the two suspects among less well-connected Conservatives, both were presumably members of the Notting Hill Set. This confirms another theory. Once a set has become fashionable, fashionable is what it continues to be. But sets also arouse fear, suspicion and animosity. Another tendency is for the set’s members to insist that they do not comprise a set at all, and that their influence and their plotting has been greatly exaggerated. This is a form of false modesty in which the Bloomsberries especially indulged.
As those two suspects’ defence lawyers will probably argue, all that the two men had been doing — when the police raided — was what everyone else in Notting Hill had been doing ever since Mr Howard, the day after the election, announced that he would stand down. That is, sitting around with the polenta and the Frascati agreeing what a good Conservative leader young Mr Cameron would make.
Traditionalist Tories and Davis supporters, when they learnt from television or radio that a police operation was going on in Notting Hill, must have welcomed the Met at last doing something about the Notting Hill Set, which for months has been terrorising the capital and threatening the average, decent backbench bed-blocker with deselection. They assumed that a naked Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne were holding their hands up on some balcony near Ladbroke Grove as the police — guns outstretched — sought to persuade them to come quietly.
Mr Osborne might have pleaded with the officers: ‘We don’t want to go the same way as Alan Duncan.’ Armed policeman: ‘That was a mistake. He was sure of only one vote: his own. Everyone knows that Dave would do better than that. But Davis will still crush ’im. So give up this leadership challenge now before anyone else gets hurt.’ Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne would have secured an assurance that they would not be deported to somewhere where they could be tortured, such as a meeting of the 1922 Committee executive. Then they would have come quietly. But let us hope that the senior officers who interrogated the two Islamic suspects were not too overawed by their fashionable address.
‘So you live in Notting Hill?’ ‘Thanks to the blessings of Allah, yes, we do. But not all the time. The idea that there is a Notting Hill Set is a pure media invention. Many of us live in North Kensington or Karachi.’ Policeman: ‘Still, you must know Dave Cameron. I’m one of the new breed of liberal policemen. I think he’s the only hope for the Conservative party. Tell me, what’s he really like?’ ‘Well, officer, we know him only in the sense that everyone in Notting Hill knows him. We see him on social occasions such as the Carnival, being nice and multicultural. But we are not mixed up with him and his followers. We don’t approve of their extremism. No one should try to make the Tories as modern as they want. We’re for Davis. May Allah protect him.’ Being for Mr Davis seems to be the position of a majority of the Conservative party, both among MPs and activists. In so far as we can know, Mr Davis seems to be ahead. It is reasonable to assume that he will win.
But he will still face, in an only proportionately less acute form, the same problem as his three predecessors. Mr Hague, Mr Duncan Smith and Mr Howard did not fail because they were ‘useless’ or ‘uncharismatic’ or ‘relied on asylum and Europe’. They failed because of something which I have pointed out here several times over the last few years: what has happened to the Conservative party is what happened to it in the mid-19th centu ry. The opposing leader — Palmerston then, Mr Blair now — made the middle class think that the Tories had nothing much to offer it.
I have just come across a noteworthy article — published in 2003 in the Conservative History Group’s journal — by Adrian Brettle, a ward chairman in Westminster, which developed the Blair-as-Palmerston theory. It also argued that the Tories’ future had looked almost as bad under the Asquith government between 1910 and the outbreak of war.
To Mr Brettle, as to me, different Conservative leaders made no difference. The sober Derby did badly but ‘despite his flashier style and perhaps more inclusive rhetoric Derby’s lieutenant in the Commons, Disraeli, for much of the period was no more successful’. Bonar Law, leader from 1911, ‘was as unsuccessful as Balfour [his immediate predecessor as opposition leader against Asquith] in spite of being his absolute antithesis in background, manner, interests and, at least in debate, more extreme views.
‘Many leading Conservatives were operating “outside” the party apparatus as floating statesmen ... Clarke and Heseltine sitting with Blair on the Britain in Europe platform have their precursors with ex-leader Balfour sitting with the Liberal government in the Committee of Imperial Defence and Olympian figures such as Curzon barely concealing their contempt for their nominal leader.’ Thus, writing before Mr Duncan Smith’s removal, Mr Brettle wrote that Mr Hague’s and Mr Duncan Smith’s lack of success ‘is not something that can be attributed to failings on their part’. He added that for the Tories to return to office as they did after those two opposition periods long ago, the Prime Minister would have to be replaced by the dynamic and more radical number two. Gladstone, after the brief Russell premiership, replaced Palmerston. The Tories soon won an election. Lloyd George replaced Asquith. The Tories — after being in coalition under him — overthrew Lloyd George and won a general election in 1922, though admittedly that took a long time.
But what if Mr Brown does not co-operate with Tory plans by being more Left or more Old Labour? If he does not, one Palmerston would be followed by another Palmerston, one Asquith by another.
Mr Davis is the best man for the job. But the job could be just as hard as his three predecessors’; good reason why Tories should not be censorious about him or indeed them.
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