Politics

The fighting fit doctor

r David Owen is causing trouble again, Lin the way that he does. He is worrying some Social Democrats who think he is turning them into a one-man band and he bothers Liberals who believe either that he has taken over the leadership of the Alliance from David Steel or that he is a closet authoritarian come out to interfere with their principles, or, worse still, that he is both at once. The only person who doesn't seem uneasy is the doctor himself.

It's a familiar enough posture for him, and one he assumes almost without think- ing, by instinct. For the moment it serves him well: Steel is still not as sharp as he once was and faces a difficult Liberal Assembly in the autumn, Owen's hard- nosed interventions on the miners' strike (added to his regular excursions round the foreign affairs/defence circuit) have sharpened his public image and he has, at least within the SDP, got his Portsmouth South medal to polish. So, he looks to com- ing battles with relish.

From the Tories there has been a curious reaction to all this. Early on, they enjoyed playing up Owen's strengths as a mis- chievous tactic to try to do down Steel, but they have since discovered that they have helped to create precisely the image of stub- born restlessness which has been the key to Owen's progress. The beast, most of them now think, was better caged. On Steel's side of the Alliance there is a lot of private (and, increasingly, public) murmuring about the doctor's publicity coups and his general air of busyness while their man talks of the need to look at the road to the next election as a long haul. That dissatisfaction, which Steel knows he underestimates at his peril, shows no sign of diminishing.

Owen's advances, recognised in all par- ties, have their costs — tensions over policy in his own party, where he is accused of conceiving strategy on the hoof and indulg- ing in what many still see as the luxury of ex cathedra policy pronouncements indepen- dent of the SDP's lovingly-assembled con- sultative machinery, and tensions with those Liberals who instinctively dislike his love of aggressive politics, just as he dislikes the tendency of some of them to lead the soggy life.

The point about Owen is that he positive- ly relishes these tensions. Where many Liberals want to draw a veil over the par- ties' differences and to preserve, at all costs, a pleasing and contented face without a wrinkle on it, Owen prefers what he would call honesty (though others would call it a deliberate scowl at the world). His view is shared by the famed band of Liberal coun- cillors, led by the rock-climbing eccentric Tony Greaves with his look of a late 1950s Rip van Winkle, who are similarly aggres- sive, as Steel discovered when he met them last weekend and had a roughish time. He is caught in the middle, as is his ally of days gone by, Roy Jenkins.

Floating over the scene in his traditional way, Jenkins pronounced this week on the best way forward for the Alliance partners: closeness. But the rest of his speech to the Tawney Society was more interesting, specifically rejecting the social market theme favoured by Owen as the response to Thatcherism. Strange, isn't it? Roy to the left of David? Asquithians maybe still have their uses.

It is this intellectual confrontation, run- ning alongside the popularity graph, that gives the coming period its fascination. Owen is determined to pursue his search for an alternative to Thatcherism which recognises the alleged appeal of the `new realism'; most Liberals — apparently with Jenkins's support — are nervous of Owen's attraction to market-based theories, and fear his determination to build up his own policy as he goes along.

But the idea that compromises can be reached on areas like defence, where there are deep differences not so much between the parties but in the Liberal Party itself, and that somehow a united front can be cobbled up for the next election campaign in surely an illusion. The Alliance, being another of these broad churches we used to know and love, has to be able to cope with disagreements and to present them as acceptable differences of emphasis, not as great gulfs. That is tricky, to be sure, and maybe impossible on some issues, but it is necessary. The Alliance can't pretend to agree on everything, because they don't and if they said they did, no one would believe them.

That's a simple enough truth, but both Owen and Steel seem to be dodging it in their different ways. Owen insists on discipline. The Man of Government says that once a decision has been taken, a course set, everyone has a duty to point in the same direction. Steel presents a dif- ferent image — preferring the guise of the conciliator, the healer, the nice guy. Dif- ferences can be smoothed over.

Owen, while accepting that the Liberals can teach the SDP quite a bit (on the value of decentralisation, for example), still wants them to show — how would he put it? — guts. Steel still wants everyone to show a little tolerance for everyone else's view. The difficulty is that for the Alliance one approach is, by its nature, active and the other a little more passive.

So it is not simply a contrast of person- Charles Moore will resume his column next week. alities: the tag of the embryonic Mosley be- ing slipped around Owen's neck and Steel being pictured as the greying Boy David, a little weary with it all. It is a fundamental difference of approach, springing from a quite different reaction to Mrs Thatcher and what she represents. Owen rises to the challenge of her cry to the nation to shake itself down, Steel recoils at the crudity of it. The question is whether the assumed slide in the Government's popularity over the next three years favours the Alliance's Jekyll or its Hyde.

Owen's analysis is based, as usual, on what he sees as certainties — a threatening economic atmosphere, but an electorate weaned to the new realism and unwilling to return to what he would describe as warmed-up Wilsonism, offered by Labour. The Alliance's strength, in his view, has to be forged in its willingness to come down decisively on key economic questions.

The strength of this approach is Owen's formidable ability to argue his case and his love of a scrap, nostrils flaring and hair flopping down all over the place, but its weakness is that it could give him precisely the kind of image which those who have decided to flee from Mrs Thatcher might find least appealing. Is it the best way to persuade voters to rally round the Alliance, instead of leaping right across the great divide as so many of them evidently did in 1983?

Steel has doubts, and so have some elements in the SDP, but they seem to have no strategy for slowing the Doctor's momentum. For all the argument over philosophy and strategy rippling around in a civilised way in the two parties, the pace is being controlled by Owen. His love of con- flict draws him into the ring again before he has properly wiped his brow, and there is no sign that he is losing his combative instinct. If the arguments from the Liberals, or some of his own troops, become more bitter his response will be that of the pugilist.

Since his election as leader just about a year ago he has progressed remarkably. That is agreed on all sides. Labour, understandably, has revelled in his apparent enthusiasm both in style and policy for some facets of Thatcherism, but even his most bitter opponents have recognised the threat of an enticing appeal to dissident Tories in the future. Steel is having to fend off Liberal anxieties about the Owen surge, but his style is not to meet it head on.

As a result the balance between the two seems likely to stay as it is. Owen is becom- ing the street-fighter and Steel — in a sharp- ly ironic turn of events — is looking the older, more established and more staid figure. Whether or not this is good for the Alliance in the long run can't be judged for a year or two yet (when the future of Mrs Thatcher and her supporters starts to become clear). But what now seems likely is that the course is set, and it is Owen's.

James Naughtie