POLITICS
How unfortunate that almost all the Rightists are mad
MATTHEW PARRIS
The evening before Lady Thatcher was to make her entrance on the platform at the Winter Gardens last week, I fell into conversation with Sir Edward Heath. He would be on that platform too, I reminded him. He, too, was a former prime minister. And here we all were, gossiping about what form of greeting Mr Major would choose for Margaret Thatcher. Would he kiss her, embrace her? And, if it were to be only a handshake, would it be a cool, curt one or one of Major's preferred clasping sorts of shake?
`Well what about you, Sir Edward?' I asked. 'Are we to assume you won't even get a hug, let alone a kiss? Not even a handshake, a nod? Are we to assume he simply won't acknowledge you?'
Ted gave a little shrug. 'We're friends,' he said, 'we don't need to greet one another'.
An amusing quip, but one which I think contained an important truth. The friend- ship between John Major and the Left and Centre of his party (let us call it Centre- Left) has never needed much outward show because it has been quietly assumed on both sides. Those loves of which we are confident are the loves we least need to protest. Elsewhere in these pages, Simon Heifer makes a similar point, and goes on to suggest that the Tory Centre-Left still has the Prime Minister's ear; and he can still count on their confidence.
Mr Heifer is shrewd, I think, in his obser- vation that for Mr Major the support (and the power) of the Tory Centre-Left is still a fact. But I am less sure that Blackpool did nothing to disturb this alliance. The com- posure of the Centre-Left has been ruffled — let us put it no more strongly than that — by the party conference. They heard Lil- ley and Howard, they read the spin dished out to the press by Major's lieutenants; and they do not care for it. They do not care for it at all.
From the fact that most of the prominent `right-wingers' in the Cabinet are not actu- ally right wing they take some comfort, but only some. It can be more frightening to see people you know are not really Nasties pushed that way by the tide, than to find people there by their own convictions. I do not mind Enoch Powell, John Redwood or Michael Forsyth being right wing because they are sincerely so. Their position is dic- tated by both intellect and conscience so they know when to stop. They are not afraid, if necessary, to disappoint their sup- porters. Nick Ridley was contemptuous of the crowd.
But Peter Lilley keeps house in Nor- mandy during his holidays. He is too intelli- gent and sensitive a man to be in true accord with the emotional tone of his speech at Blackpool, though he may be able in logic to justify its content. He knew the instincts to which he was appealing. That I do not believe he shares them makes the spectacle more, not less, disturbing.
Michael Portillo was, to his credit, more fastidious last week, and said little. Regular lunches with Lady Thatcher keep his right- wing credentials sweet. But I kno1v Michael, and I feel sure he must know she's gone barmy. It's a measure of the despera- tion of the Right for front men who don't frighten the children, that anyone who keeps his hair nicely and doesn't say he's not right-wing is embraced with near pathetic gratitude as one of their own.
Take Michael I-Toward. In all the years he was a backbencher I cannot remember a single right-wing thing he said or did. I do remember he was something of a liberal, with me, when he and I served on the Standing Committee on Miss Foulkes's Kerb Crawling Bill. Together we resisted her plan to give the police powers to arrest and charge on the basis of a single alleged solicitation, unpersisted in. David Mellor, the minister looking after the Bill, grew impatient with us and became quite menac- ing. We were damaging our chances of pro- motion. I do not know whether this had anything to do with Mr Howard's taking me aside later to warn me he would be making no more of his objections.
I rather like a real right-winger: a clean, strong, capable man or woman with a good mind, brutal tongue, settled principles and an unsentimental nature. The Tory party needs such people. It misses Norman Teb- bit more than it knows. But what puts the wind up me is to see smaller men mouthing right-wing rhetoric with fear in their eyes, their audience roaring them on. Last week's performance by David Hunt — a man I admire — was frankly loathsome.
The parliamentary party does contain a sprinkling of proper Rightists, but unfortu- nately they are almost all mad. Poor Mrs Thatcher kept trying to promote them, but, as often as she did, they would go off the rails, prove incapable of mastering their briefs, alienate their colleagues, get into trouble with boys or women, or resign on some matter of principle. So time and again she would have to fall back on her reliable eunuchs from the Centre-Left. That is why she bequeathed to John Major the ministe- rial team whose balance (Mr Hefter accu- rately observes) is still to the Left.
They are not happy. For the moment they will keep their counsel but, unlike Mr Heifer, they are by no means convinced that some sharp little steps to the Right are out of the question. The limited measures the Home Secretary promised last week will whet a public appetite for more; the impression he so rashly gave, that the battle against rising crime was one Tories could win, will, when they fail, make it harder to resist the Poujadists. The run-up to the European elections must see either a retreat by Major from his promise of a `British' manifesto, or a purge of some can- didates already adopted, or a wildly disor- dered campaign. Mr Lilley is now under immense pressure to 'do something' about single mothers and itinerant benefit scroungers.
Mr Heller and I agree that spectres raised at Blackpool are, for the moment, like leaping fireside shadows on a wall. Mr Heffer fears they may never amount to more. The Tory Centre-Left fears that they may.
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