Centrepiece

Thinking the unthinkable

Colin Welch

Blackpool

Efven the fresh excitements of Blackpool, even the leaping, struggling brown sea, silver-streaked, with waves crashing together as in a titanic dogfight, even the equinoctial blasts which reduce all mortal windbags to insignificance, cannot blow away certain indelible memories, grave and gay, of Labour at Brighton. Grave — Messrs Callaghan, Duffy and Concannon being hideously hissed and slow- handclapped for enunciating sentiments which most people in this country think ob- vious, correct and right. Worth remember- ing, as Labour climbs back in the polls. Gay — Messrs Kinnock and Hattersley doing their Morecambe and Wise exit: have we entered an era in which politicians will im- itate comedians, rather than vice versa? Pity we never had Attlee's impression of Arthur Lowe or Eden's of Anton Walbrook. Gay too in its way, though thought- provoking, was Nick Comfort's astonishing revelation in the Daily Telegraph of Mr Kinnock's American heroes. 'Up to now,' we were told, they 'have not been politi- cians and trade unionists but the rock-n- rollers Little Richard, Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent.' Not Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Wilson or Roosevelt but — Little Richard and Co! 1 asked Nick, was he jok- ing? No. Could Mr Kinnock have been? He thought not.

On reflection, however, Mr Kinnock's revelation tells us something. He was born in 1942. Many of his generation, as we know, passed through the Sixties and their after- math unscathed or with wounds which soon healed. But not, I fancy, he. That epoch must have marked him. Not specially silly or self-indulgent or vulgar or prodigal himself, his formative years were passed in a decade, symbolised by the Beatles, con- spicuous for all these things. Like many other ordinary young people, he must have been infected by its wild and shallow roman- ticism. What was then in the air he must have inhaled. In that feverish atmosphere his views were formed. And perhaps this is in part what explains their extraordinary mutability, the speed and ease with which, found inconvenient, they can apparently be jettisoned. They have no roots. They arise from no solid, abiding and durable base of want, say, greed, hatred or envy, nor from any sort of learning or profound reflection, but only from the shifting sands of once- modish whim. Like tissues, they are disposable, readily carried away by the wind.

Unencumbered, nimble as a waterboatman, he gives an impressiOn of attractive roguery which recalls in a way Harold Wilson (who also — remember? — ennobled the Beatles, though more perhaps from calculation than from personal enchantment). If the British people have a prolonged dalliance with Mr Kinnock, as once with Wilson, this would perhaps be for the same reason. There is something in us which is fond of rogues, which even likes being fooled. He's an Art- ful Dodger, we think: yes, but if he can fool us, probably he can fool all the rest of them too. Designed to serve himself, his deviousness could perhaps serve us too.

'Steady on, old chap,' the Major broke in, 'you kicked off with stuff about the fresh excitements of Blackpool and so forth. What's cooking there?'

Well, the Tories gather, Bright lights shine on brave men and fair women. But, as once at Brussels, there is a suspicion of dis- tant menace in the air. A buzz of animated conversation. What are they talking about? Local government? Public spending? Privatisation? Alas, Tories too are menschlich all zu menschlich. Listen, and you will hear. Rhubarb, rhubarb, Parkin- son, rhubarb, rhubarb, Cecil, rhubarb.

What otherwise is it that, like the sound of far-off guns, troubles the Tories? Well, all sorts of lesser things: the embarrassing infiltration, for instance, of our native Ku Klux Klansmen. The Kluxers, it is said, will be Maggie's Militant Tendency. Then there are those, exaggerated, ill-natured and assiduously if slyly propagated worries about Mrs Thatcher's health, character and balance, about her alleged stridency and lack of magnanimity. This last charge is particularly unhappily timed, at a moment when her treatment of Mr Parkinson is plainly magnanimous to a degree — though I must concede that a stiffer test would have been set her had Mr Pym, say, Mr Prior or even Mr Heath engendered il- legitimate offspring. A Tory Privy Coun- cillor has incidentally declared: 'People are very upset. They say it's all very well for the rich to talk about a love-child, but it's not the same for ordinary people.' Something in this remark recalled to me Mr Pym's per- sistent calls for compassionate, imagin- ative, moral and unsound economics, his own love-child, so to speak. It's all very well for the rich to talk like this, I thought, 'but it's not the same for ordinary people.' Ho-hum.

As for stridency, it has come to a pretty pass when the sober expression of the most undeniable truths about Russia (based, I understand, on advice from Mr George Urban, who knows Russia better than Mrs Thatcher's critics know their way up the

back stairs) can be so characterised — a measure or our decline into equivocation, dependency and sycophancy, of our self- Finlandisation. Rightly are Tories worried about local government. Some have reason- ed fears, based on bitter experience, that all great reorganisations and convulsions, no matter how well intentioned, always end in disaster, the cure worse than the disease. And I myself would guess that it, would make more sense to strip local authorities of various functions than to mess about again with their structure. Other Tories simply deplore as absolutely un-Tory any inter- ference by the central government in local affairs. To them 1 would retort that the central government is inescapably responsible for the welfare of all its citizens, even those who live in metropolitan coun- ties. Nobody could have been more Tory. than the central monarchs who, in our own country, cut the barons ruthlessly down to size or, in Russia, the central tsar who outraged his nobility by liberating their serfs.

There is the worry too, confined of course to `Thatcherites' and brilliantly ex- pressed by the Economist, that somehow. 'the great interests of traditional Toryism

— the major industries, the farms, the Whitehall bureaucracy, the armed services — have all proved too much for the simple self-helpers, the small businessmen and devotees of Adam Smith who came to power in the party with Mrs Thatcher', and that 'the corporate state rules still'.

But hanging over all Tories, apparent by now to all, is one overwhelming worry. Whichever way they look at it, from whatever point of view, they have one com- mitment too many. There is the commit- ment to end inflation: to end it, not just to reduce it to comfortably ruinous single figures. There is the commitment to cut public spending. There is the defence com- mitment. And there is the social commit- ment, which bids them declare that whatever they inherited, no matter how daft, inept and wasteful, is 'safe in their hands', to be venerated as an end in itself rather then viewed less respectfully as a mere means, one among many possible.

A balloon so loaded down with com- mitments is unlikely indeed to keep aloft till 1987-88, let alone 1993; something has to be chucked overboard, and that sharpish. Time is no longer on the Tories' side.

It is no longer a matter, if it ever was, of cheese-paring petty economies and cuts, which cause uproar and distress totally disproportionate to whatever good they may do. It is rather a question of fun- damental rethinking (dreadfully difficult, I agree, for busy people in office), of think- ing the unthinkable, of questioning every assumption and of forging the results into a coherent and consistent strategy. If nothing of this sort begins to emerge at this con- ference, Tories will, I imagine, disperse in a rather more pensive and less confident frame of mind than that in which they gathered.