Applause with everything
Ferdinand Mount
Blackpool 'Thank you again, Minister, for that wonderful and forthright speech. We are indeed fortunate to have a strong Minister.' Where are we? We are at the Conservative party conference, which is to obsequiousness what Eccles is to cake. And in Mr David Davenport-Handley, Officer, as he would no doubt put it, of the Order of the British Empire, Justice of the Peace and one of Her Majesty's Lieutenants, the Tories have chosen for this year's conference chairman a positive maestro of the grovel.
But in introducing Lord Thorneycroft, Mr Davenport-Handley surpasses himself: 'Peter means a rock and on this rock victory was built.' Last year at Blackpool, Tony Benn had the money-changers driving Christ out of the temple; now we have a Cabinet of apostles.
A minor minister or Central Office functionary has only to take his seat on the platform for Mr Davenport-Handley to interrupt the proceedings to call for a big hand. Listening to a speech demanding the introduction of 'community minibuses', I jumped at a voice whispering seductively in my ear, 'Would you like to join us on the platform?' Was it the voice of the evil one tempting me to go up the high places of the world to receive a standing ovation unleashed by Mr Davenport-Handley? Luckily it was the lady next to me who was called .
They'll clap anything. Chap says he opposes the motion because it is complacent, naive, and simplistic. Applause. Next chap says he supports the motion because it is realistic and compassionate. More applause — from the same people.
The Conservative party conference remains a gloriously bogus expression of a genuine mass party — just as the Labour party conference is a genuine expression of a party whose claims to mass membership are now increasingly seen to be fraudulent. The Tory conference reflects the real debate in the party only in retrospect, faithfully echoing at a discreet distance the dominant faction in the leadership. In the Sixties and early Seventies, conference resolutions always called for more schools and hospitals and were carried by acclamation. This week, the conference carried also by acclamation resolutions saying that the National Health Service was 'sufficiently funded' and that school standards needed to be raised, but not, it seems, expenditure on education.
The new orthodoxy is that no problem is solved by 'throwing money at it': just try throwing a little in this direction and you might be astonished. Instead, reor ganisation and economy will do the trick. `If we tie the doctor's hands instead of freeing them', as one gentle lady from Worcester pointed out, 'we leave the patient in a maze of red tape'. Which must be worse than being in traction.
Mr Davenport-Handley goes on to tell us that 'I have just received an amendment but I do not propose to call it' — much in the manner of a man who has just received a poison-pen letter but does not propose to offend his hearers by reading it out. Conference receives the news with quiet satisfaction that the right thing has been done.
Only on Rhodesia do the Tory masses fail to respond to the party line with the appropriate enthusiasm. In the Windsor Bar of the Winter Gardens, whose fiery lighting and lowering ceiling suggest a Wagnerian cave in which Julian Amery rages on against Lord Carrington in the resonant growl of a Wagnerian poison dwarf with laryngitis: 'I have some advice for Mr Nkomo and Mr Mugabe'... 'Shoot them,' suggests a moderate in this audience of Monday-club ultras, defying the prevailing view that shooting would be too good for them.
Signs of the nerves behind the stagemanagement show through in Lord Thorneycroft's repeated insistence that the conference should recognise that 'Peter Carrington has at least carried the problem further forward than any man in Africa before him' — a somewhat ambiguous endorsement and something that conference, or at least half of it, does not like recognising.
But with the Tories' deft manipulation of the agenda, the Conference ended up with a motion of such invulnerable blandness that even Mr Amery found himself growling in support of it. And with Mr DavenportHandley squashing the amendments, Lord Carrington sailed through a standing ovation. If a turning-point in the hot-tempered debate were needed, it came when a demagogic YC from Tynemouth expressed the hope that Mrs Thatcher had wiped her hands after shaking hands with Mr Nkomo— and he got the slow handclap. If you want to get on in the Tory Party, you can call any black man an evil murdering bastard, but never, never accuse your leader of having blood on her hands.
Now and then, the other real argument inside the party also shows through, most sharply perhaps in Lod Thorneycroft's remark that 'the English have asked the Tories to put things right without a row'. The underlying question is whether it is possible to squeeze inflation out of the economy without tackling head-on the monopoly powers of the trade unions. Are these 'modest reforms' — the approved description of Mr Prior's proposals for the closed shop and secondary picketing — adequate and relevant?
Most ordinary Tories don't believe they are, and still want to see the unions 'cut down to size' in some permanent way.
At the same time, you also hear, often from the same people, that the government's squeeze is too harsh and may be deepening a recession which is already quite deep enough. Yet any full-scale confrontation with the trade unions would surely involve strikes, go-slows and consequently bankruptcies and unemployment which would make the recession worse still.
The meeting that really matters was not at Blackpool, but in the Treasury last Friday when Sir Geoffrey Howe exposed some of his mandarins to the leaders of the new monetarist establishment, leaders such as Professor Patrick Minford and Brian Griffiths. If I read Sam Brittan's account right, this government has not hitherto adopted a series of targets for the money supply because the Treasury knights, notably Sir Douglas Wass, were reluctant to touch the nasty newfangled things. This opposition now seems to have been squashed. We still do not know what the Chancellor thinks of the new 'soft' argument that it is all right for a government to push up its borrowing during a slump, in order to pay higher bills for the dole and debt interest. The point may be anyway less important than it seems, because no government can now raise its borrowing too conspicuously without inimediate effects on international confidence. But will even monetary targets be enough so long as the trade unions insist on overmanning and underworking? Can the Market economy operate if the market is so distorted by the strike threat? There are several possible answers. First, wait and see. Monetary targets are not supposed to be a cure-all but a s/he qua non. And until we have attempted consistently over a period of years to observe them, neither the monetarists nor the sceptics can claim to have proved their case. Those who want to tackle the unions now also have to explain how they Pro: pose to destroy these union abuses or power without causing such ructions that the defeat of inflation has to be postponed. And even if it can be done, presumably it can be done more easily at the end of a period during which the unions have seen their advice disregarded, their presence in Downing Street not requested and their powers, if only symbolically, nibbled at — rather than at the end of the Wilson-Callaghan years when they were courted, obeyed and bolstered by Act of Parliament. Which is an argument for a little judicious neglect of the trade union question. A rolling target gathers not moss. Thank you, sir, for that magnificen contribution.
Previous page
