POLITICS
Why the Lawson is worth hanging onto for a long-term appreciation
NOEL MALCOLM
I\Tigel is a very good neighbour of mine and a very good Chancellor. Geof- frey is a very good Foreign Secre- tary. . . . I hate them.' The Prime Minister was taking a chance with the good will of sub-editors when she made these remarks last week: the ' . . . ' in this quotation does in fact stand for "I am not going any further. You know I have to do reshuffles from time to time.'
We know, Prime Minister, we know. Some amount of reshuffling is performed every year, and the success of last year's pre-summer vacation timing suggests that we can expect a July reshuffle this year too. But the only reshuffles which are done 'from time to time' are the big ones, when places are cleared at the top table. Now, with the Government drifting into its first serious patch of mid-term doldrums, with the Labour Party benefiting from the very best face-lift it has had for years, and with European election results which are certain to make dispiriting reading for the Tories, a reshuffle looks the ideal way for the Government to establish a change of image without a change of policies.
Such is the conventional wisdom. The reality is that in recent months it has become less obviously beneficial, and much more difficult, to make any impor- tant changes at the top; and none of the Euro-poll or opinion poll results makes it any easier, to say what changes, if any, are required. The only likely casualty of a poor European election result is Mr Peter Brooke, who has presided over the cam- paign as party chairman. To chop him down at this point would, I believe, be a great mistake; he is gradually shaping up as a potential latter-day Whitelaw, which is the sort of figure Mrs Thatcher badly needs — the bluff, acceptable face of the old Tory Party concealing an unexpectedly wily political brain.
In theory, the one cabinet minister who ought to be most closely associated with the European election result is the Foreign Secretary — Europe still being, despite everything we are told to the contrary, a Foreign place. But he has been so obvious- ly distanced from the Prime Minister on the question of her style and attitude towards Europe that to blame him for a poor Euro-election result would be rather like blaming Mr Peter Walker for losing the Vale of Glamorgan. (It was tried, and it was found unconvincing.) Yet in a more indirect way the European election will have highlighted a difficulty for Mrs Thatcher. Until very recently, whenever people talked about replacing the Foreign Secretary they spoke as if the essential problem was to find a new slot for Sir Geoffrey. Heads were scratched, con- stitutional textbooks were riffled through and various Grand Panjandrum-style roles were proposed, combining such things as leadership of the House with deputy lead- ership of the Party. But the real problem which will come to the surface in any future reshuffle is the problem of finding any candidate for Foreign Secretary who actually shares Mrs Thatcher's deepest instincts about the EEC. Mr Hurd, for example, though admirably suited for the job in most other ways, fails that crucial test. And it is an issue which will matter much more to Mrs Thatcher than the question of salving Sir Geoffrey's pride. Relations between the two have been, by all accounts, unseasonably frosty for the last several weeks.
With the papers filling up again with headlines saying 'Thatcher-Lawson Rift Re-opens on EMS', the Chancellor looks like more of a non-starter than ever before in the Foreign Secretary stakes. Having listened to his evidence to the Treasury Select Committee on Monday, however, I am not so sure. The whole thrust of his argument was to say that membership of the EMS exchange-rate mechanism was a technical matter which did not and should not carry any implications about long-term European unification. If Mrs Thatcher were obliged to commend the exchange- rate mechanism, that is just how she would do it.
Mr Lawson's approach to the Delors Report on economic and monetary unifica- tion was to denounce whole sections of it as 'muddled' and 'totally flawed'. One can just imagine how Sir Geoffrey would have phrased that: there were sections of the report which, though valuable in them- selves, would benefit from a fruitful co- operative process of reconsideration. And while Sir Geoffrey meditates inconclusive- ly on the difference between sovereignty and what you keep in an urn on the mantelpiece, Mr Lawson was robust in his use of the term, condemning any irrevoc- able transfer of monetary powers to Europe as 'a handling over of our sovereignty'.
In fact, the Chancellor is emerging as one of the few senior politicians who still seem to understand the dif- ference between commending the con- tents of a policy and commending the handing over of formal powers in order to carry that policy out. One Select Commit- tee member, Mr Alan Beith, asked why the Chancellor should mind if a European institution gained the power to control the external borrowings of national govern- ments, given that the British Government no longer needs to borrow money at all. 'If I may say so', said Mr Lawson with an air of splendid reproof, 'that it a very superfi- cial question.'
We should not rule out the transfer of Mr Lawson to the Foreign Office; but, oddly enough, he gives the impression of being more content now to stay on at the Treasury (at least for one more year) than he has done for quite some time. In the BBC On the Record interview on Sunday, at the Conservative Euro-campaign press conference on Monday and at the Select Committee hearing, he struck me as un- usually calm and unruffled. Perhaps this was the calm of the prisoner who loathes his confinement but knows that he is coming up shortly for release; but the word from Downing Street (and no, I do not mean Mr Ingham) is that his relations with the Prime Minister have become genuinely easier and more friendly during the last few weeks. When Jonathan Dimbleby got him to disagree with Mrs Thatcher about the cause of our present inflation, the noncha- lance with which he walked into the trap suggested neither that he was eager to twist the knife in her back, nor that he was guarding his own back with especial care.
The current mid-term crisis is minor by Mrs Thatcher's previous standards, and she can easily afford to ride it out. Some rejigging of the Parkinsons, the Ridleys and the Bakers can be expected, but to put new faces into the top jobs this time round would run the risk that they would just be beginning to look stale by the time of the next election. If Mr Lawson were to step down from the Chancellorship now, he would spend the rest of his career with a sign saying 'failure' (or at least, as Mr Nicholas Budgen would charitably put it, 'limited success') round his neck. And that is not what Mrs Thatcher needs, when she so clearly needs to keep him in reserve as a future Foreign Secretary.
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