16 JULY 1983, Page 4

Political commentary

Thoughts on Ettrick Bridge

Charles Moore Being a journalist, I do not know what it feels like to have worked as hard as Mr David Steel. Perhaps this lack of shared ex- perience explains why the press tends to think that Mr Steel must be either extremely ill or extremely cunning to have cancelled his engagements for the summer and retired to his house at Ettrick Bridge. But although it is difficult to empathise, that is no reason to disbelieve the medical experts when they say that frenzied work, followed by defeat, takes a much worse physical toll than fren- zied work, followed by victory. When one also remembers that Mr Steel struggled with a very nasty bout of 'flu during the election campaign, one need not be surprised that he wants a bit of a rest.

It is rather important, though, how Mr Steel chooses to spend his free time. Accor- ding to Mrs Steel, he will go for swims and rides and will mess about in cars. With some people, that sort of thing might work. When Lord Home went off shooting and fishing, he managed to put other thoughts out of his mind, indeed, other thoughts always had a hard time getting in there; but Mr Steel is also saying that he needs time `to think'. Given his character and way of life, that does not mean time to think about the nature of appearance and reality, or the Greek poets, or even Scottish League Divi- sion One. It means time to think about politics. Thinking but inactive, Mr Steel will brood and fret.

It is surprising how gloomy the Liberals, except perhaps those who are new to the game, are. Though they have more MPs than at any time since the war, and (in the Alliance) a greater popular vote than ditto, they see themselves as having failed. Worse, they find it hard to see how, given the strength of the Conservative vote, they can find the gains they need at the next election. They expect another long stretch of unremitting and largely unrewarded work.

The whole thing is made that much more wearisome and complicated by the pro- blems of the Alliance. Some Liberal MPs — Messrs Smith, Alton and Meadowcroft — are more or less hostile to it. All Liberal MPs, though those in Scotland (a third of the whole Alliance) less so, have en- countered the tedious and unavoidable arguments about seat allocations and the cooperation of local associations. There is a natural professional jealousy on both sides. The Liberals boast of an older, stronger, more numerous organisation and an ex- cellent base in local government. They ac- cuse the Social Democrats of preferring drawing-rooms to doorsteps. The Social Democrats think of the Liberals as foolish faddists who prefer permanent opposition to proper politics. Now that the election is over, all these feelings rise to the surface.

Mr Steel has to bear the brunt of these difficulties. He has never been able to make the Liberal Party the ideal engine of his very determined efforts for political power. He has preached alliances and the Alliance as other men preach jihad, and yet his followers have constantly found fault. Now he finds Mr Jenkins, with whom accom- modation was easy, replaced by Dr Owen, who seems to be very full of his own ideas. Mr Steel has to balance the desire of his own party to assert superiority over the SDP with the need for the broadest vote- catching alliance. It is all very difficult and, in the anticlimax after the election, tiresome.

Dr Owen, on the other hand, is offensive- ly bouncy. Although the election was hard- ly a triumph for the SDP, it brought him the leadership. The mere act of retaining his seat was enough to send his confidence soaring. At the time of the SDP's forma- tion, Dr Owen had wanted to resign his seat and fight a by-election for his new party, but was dissuaded. His win at Devonport was the first clear public endorsement of his change of allegiance, and was especially gratifying because it beat off strong challenges from both the main parties.

The change in the Doctor has been fre- quently pointed out. Not the least striking aspect of it is the great expansion of his vocabulary. As a Labour politician, he was curiously inarticulate, focusing his atten- tion on prissy complaints about smoking and South Africa. Now, though not gifted with a brilliant turn of phrase, he argues clearly and surprisingly. He gives the strongest impression of a politician who is thinking hard, both practically and theoretically, always looking for new arguments.

Dr Owen emphasises how delighted he is that the SDP is not constrained by Clause Four socialism. He speaks enthusiastically of the possibilities of the market economy. He likes to attack the Conservatives for not going far enough — making himself more patriotic than Mrs Thatcher on the dual key control of nuclear missiles. On Tuesday, he played tougher than Mr Tebbit in deman- ding a greater extension of democracy in trade unions. During the election cam- paign, Mr Wedgwood Benn predicted that Dr Owen would end up in the Tory party. Perhaps that is a little harsh, but Mr Benn was right in detecting a man on the move and a man for whom a particular political party is not a way of life, but a vehicle.

With strong popular support, but very few MPs, the post-election SDP provides a good vehicle for Dr Owen. There is no Gang of Four now, and his party which, for all its potentially dangerous 'democracy', has a natural deference which even the Con- servatives can envy, is at his feet. It is therefore natural that he does not want the SDP to be sucked into the Liberals. If this happened, he believes, the 'old politics' would have reasserted themselves. Surely rightly, he puts great emphasis on the im- portance of symbolism in politics. The amicable cooperation of two distinct parties symbolises the new approach and presages the way in which a gOvernment produced by proportional representation could work. Dr Owen probably thinks of himself as sym- bolising the energy and originality of the new politics, just as Mr Powell thought of himself as expressing the suppressed opi- nions of the British people. The danger is to fall into Mr Powell's position of prominent impotence.

I suspect that Dr Owen is right in his belief that two friendly but separate parties will command a broader constituency than an enlarged Liberal one. After all, the SDP showed themselves more successful than was predicted at taking Labour votes, and their existence keeps the door open for unhappy Labour MPs. They are less tied down than the Liberals by unimpressive but persistent activists with ideas about `no growth' and site value taxation. An Alliance has already proved that it is not a concept that the British electorate finds unreasonable, and it created no greater pro- blems of definition than those from which the Liberals already suffered.

But one can see equally clearly why many, perhaps most, Liberals do not agree. The arithmetic is on their side (they are nearly three times stronger than the SDP in Parliament), and that advantage reflects a better constituency base. They respect David Owen more than they like him, and they harbour against him the resentment of success natural to a party that has failed for 70 years. They also know that problems of duplicated effort and rows about seat allocation are very real and very time- wasting. Their inclination is to settle the matter quickly and win a couple of seats in the European elections. By this they naturally mean settling it in their favour. They are perhaps thinking more about par- ty spirit than about the voters 'out there'.

As Mr Steel plays pooh-sticks on Ettrick Bridge, he will be considering all these ques- tions, and they will give him a headache because, with the prospect of relief so dis- tant, they are not really very interesting. They are a reflection of the fact that the Alliance still lacks a cause. Mr Steel is not really the man to find a cause, while Dr Owen is. If Mr Steel thinks that Dr Owen's stick is going to come out first from under the bridge, he will extend his 'sab- batical' indefinitely.