Why we lost
Boris Johnson says the Tories failed to convince the electorate that they were ready for government Now that there is not much chance of Michael Howard ever becoming prime minister, it is worth reflecting, for a second, that he would almost certainly have been very good at the job. He was a formidable home secretary. He did reduce crime. He sacked people who were no good. He took on the droopy Civil Service, and it is notable that he inspired great loyalty among some (though not all) of his junior ministers.
I remember meeting him when he was employment secretary, and I was a reporter in Brussels, and being genuinely unnerved by his steeliness and drive; and it was entirely thanks to him that Britain refused to sign up to the Social Chapter. He would never have mucked around with the truth, in the way that Blair did, to justify going to war. He would have got things done, sorted things out, kicked ass.
So why was it so difficult to persuade the British electorate of his merits? During the campaign I sometimes found myself helping other candidates, and I remember with horror and affection the technique of a particularly spunky female. I would be standing at the door, trying to land a difficult undecided voter, and she would stride up behind me and say, ‘Oi. It’s very simple. Who do you want to be Prime Minister on 6 May, Tony Blair or Michael Howard?’ And I would watch the face of this person, who was about to concede that the Tories were the answer. A sudden wondering look would appear, and he or she would go, ‘Hmm’, and shut the door, and I knew in my heart that he or she was gone. But why? What was it about Michael — and the rest of us that seemed so off-putting? And we must concede that something was putting them off, considering that we were up against such a high-taxing, pension-robbing, hunt-banning, regulation-obsessed, discredited and clappedout Labour government, and that we barely increased our share of the vote on 1997.
There are some who disliked the accent on immigration, and they have a point. There is no doubt that it won votes, perhaps a large number of votes. There are Tory MPs today in the Commons who would probably not be there had Michael Howard not had the guts to call for controls on immigration — even if the controls he announced, quotas for certain skills, were peculiarly statist and dirigiste. But you have to think of the effect of that campaign on the overall Tory brand.
It sounded kind of downmarket, and the trick of life is to go upmarket. It’s the direction the human race wants to go. Look at Tesco. The store rules the world. It used to be a pile ’em high and sell ’em cheap place, catering for people’s base desire for cut-price sausages. Now it’s the store where everyone goes to shop; no one feels they are stooping to buy pies at Tesco, and people shouldn’t feel they are stooping to vote Tory.
So there was a paradox: even if you actually agreed, secretly, with the Tory line on immigration, you might well simultaneously think there was something a bit naff about making it the centrepiece of the campaign. Then there was the war, and calling Blair a liar. The trouble with all this was that it was indeed a fit subject for indignation, but the complaint somehow didn’t seem well coming from our mouths. The electorate knew that we voted for it, and so it sounded just opportunistic to bang on about Blair’s semantics — culpable though they were. In fact the very salience of Iraq in the election, and all that Attorney-General stuff in the last week, seemed to be a Lib Dem plot, because the more it dominated politics, the more it benefited Charlie Kennedy.
In the end, though, there were larger factors at work in people’s minds than immigration or the war, and their rejection of us reflected their view of our general readiness for government. For some reason or other, Michael Howard more or less monopolised the campaign, and though he played a heroic captain’s innings, it was difficult for the punters to form a clear idea of what the rest of the Tory team would be like. Without a sense of a government in waiting, loads of people especially women — probably decided to go for the devil they knew. And the single biggest reason for sticking with Labour was that the economy is not, for all our propaganda, quite yet in the Weimar state that we pretend.
Yes, people do feel they are overtaxed, but the Tories were not offering any great alleviation of their burdens. And we must face the awful truth that Labour has done a bang-up job of rewriting history. Thanks to relentless conditioning, people think of the Tory years as a hell of repossessions, currency humiliations and 15 per cent interest rates, and we all met people on the campaign whose businesses were indeed demolished in the great 1992 ERM experiment. It is no use whatever telling them that the economy was in tip-top shape when we left it in 1997. They weren’t particularly interested in hearing about Labour’s economic mismanagement, especially since as far as they could see unemployment, interest rates and inflation were pretty low. They might sense that it was all a fraud, but they weren’t confident that we would do any better. That, in essence, is why we lost.
At this point in articles of this kind, the authors (invariably Tory MPs, often leadership candidates) start talking about what we must do to reunite, rebuild, renew, rejuvenate and reconstitute the Conservative party. They tend to say things like ‘it is time to reconnect with real people and talk the language they understand’, as though we’d all been speaking Serbo-Croat. They then whiffle about root and branch reform, and the need to modernise, and reach out to the young, and to women, and to the Welsh, and to bemoan the appalling fact that so many Tory constituencies continue to select corpulent young men in suits, many of them avowedly heterosexual and blah blah fishcakes.
There will be much of that in the coming months, some of it, who knows, in these pages. Many of these pieces are marked by a certain hysteria, and have headlines like, ‘Why we must change or die!’ or ‘We just don’t begin to understand how much they hate us! I mean HATE us’ or ‘Bring back Portillo!’ Well, I accept that we are in trouble, but some incorrigible optimism persuades me that it is very far from fatal. The government is all over the place, with Blair about to hand over to a Scottish MP, at a time when the Tories won more votes in England than did Labour.
There is certainly no case (or market) for some spastic lurch to the Right, or some hilarious attempt to ‘modernise’ and become less ‘weird’. All politicians are basically weird; the electorate accepts that, and they find few things more embarrassing than watching us pretend to be normal by wearing face ornaments or open-neck shirts or coming out as gay.
What we need is a bit more sensible, generous One-Nation Conservatism, with heaps of uplift, that is instinctively in favour of small government and makes a thoroughgoing attempt to re-establish the link — so universally broken by Labour — between effort and reward. On the whole, we want to be the party of aspiration, achievement, energy, enterprise and hope, not fear. How about that, just for starters? Get that right, and we’ll win next time, and win big.
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