Political commentary
An area of softness
Ferdinand Mount
Llandudno Darkness comes down earlier here as the sun sneaks off behind the headland of the Great Orme, and the Llandudno town band breaks into 'The Day Thou Gayest, Lord, Is Ended'. Very slowly and sadly, the old People parked on benches around the bandstand begin to sing. As the song of praise dies away and the Reverend T. Ellis Jones, well wrapped up against the night air, gives the homily, further along the promenade in the Pavilion Theatre, Semprini strikes the first chords tinkle • . old ones. . . ripple. . . loved ones. . . tinkle . . . neglected ones. Mr Semprini sits With the utmost dignity on an ancient leather piano stool. As he rambles through the Vienna Woods and the Bay of Naples, a strange noise steals upon the ear, like the murmuration of a million laryngitic bees. Semprini is the only pianist during whose recitals, it seems, you are permitted to hum. The packed house of pensioners with a Wheelchair at the end of each row is otherwise quite silent and still. Even their hands clapping make a sad, soft noise.
This sad feebleness is catching. You feel senile and you don't care. The Liberals too look very old suddenly, and not at all fit. I keep opening doors for Lady Violet Bonham Carter look-alikes, handsome old ladies on crutches with piercing voices. Even the Young Liberals look old. Didn't that used to be Jones the Vote, or Peter the Paving Stone? All the Bills and Grahams Who were once so fresh-faced have bald Patches and look too middle-aged to be Wearing shaggy orange jerseys.
In theory, they ought to be enjoying themselves as never before. For is not this the eve of the realignment of the Left so long dreamed and schemed of? Should not there be a little vibrato in those parentheses — 'When we take power in 1983' and 'After we've put PR through'? But somehow the fun has gone out of it.
Also it is beginning to be clear that the Social Democrats are not really terribly nice. They are all right on the basics — Europe, Nato, PR, keeping Benn out. But they don't seem to care about the things Liberals care about. Councillor Michael Meadowcroft, whose thoughts live and breathe modern Liberalism no less than his rumpled gingery look, makes the Social Democrats sound positively brutish with their lust for economic growth and nuclear Power stations.
Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams were Cheered to the echo after doing their stuff for the cameras on the platform with Jo Grimond and David Steel. But what the news clips show less are the dark suspicions that the Liberals are indeed to be used as the 'poor bloody infantry' — a Benn jibe unwisely quoted by David Steel — to put back in power re-selected Labour MPs and clapped out or corrupt Labour councillors. Again and again, the Liberal delegates repeat the plaintive cry: 'We must not sell ourselves cheap, we must not lose our radical identity, we must not let the Social Democrats pinch good Liberal seats'. Yet the alliance is now a fact, and it will be run as a tight ship.
And I don't think the Liberals need worry too much about the Social Democrats adopting policies which are too hardnosed. We may all suspect that what David Owen ancl Bill Rodgers would like to do is not all that distant from Mrs Thatcher's actual policy, but they have to speak in the soft and honeyed tones of Shirley Williams. For the Social Democrats and the Liberals are combining to aim first and foremost for the gigantic areas of softness in the electorate and they must accordingly act like a soft machine.
And it is against the rival attraction of softness that Mrs Thatcher's hard-edged reshuffle must be judged. I confess to a congenital suspicion of reshuffles, not because the noise from the abattoir is distasteful. On the contrary, it is healthy that the precarious nature of political office should be rubbed in now and then. The trouble is that, although politicians still don't like admitting it, running most main ministries does take 18 months to begin to learn. And the first though least spectacular cost of this reshuffle is that four of the most managerially demanding posts have lost their ministers: Mr Howell from Energy, Sir Keith Joseph from Industry, Mr Atkins from Northern Ireland, and Mr Prior from Employment. Sending Mr Prior to Northern Ireland is particularly chancy, not because he made such a fuss about not wanting to go but because of what he may do when he gets there. He possesses the dangerous combination of political authority and personal wilfulness which may take him in any direction, although most probably in the ill-starred footsteps of Mr Whitelaw, especially if the Foreign Office get at him. Does it really help Mrs Thatcher to have made him look such a fool?
The Prime Minister has her cabinet majority at last. I make the score, very roughly, 13 for her almost all the time, five on her side, and only four registered opponents — Carrington, Pym, Prior, Walker. Yet I doubt whether the real pressures on her have been much altered by this considerable shift in cabinet arithmetic.
Sir Ian Gilmour is just as much of a nuisance to her out of the cabinet as in it. But there, we must be gracious. As former editors of this magazine go, the spectacle of Sir Ian's farewell has more charm and style than the Assumption of Nigel. Nevertheless, the exchange must be welcomed, not because Mr Lawson is 'a hardliner', but because he is more curious about the possibilities of reform. The same goes for the sacking of the popular Mr Carlisle. Sir Keith Joseph may be agonised and not in the best of health, but he does recognise that something is seriously amiss with British state education and he can be relied on at least to investigate the available alternatives.
Norman Tebbitt, on the other hand, is a more dubious appointment. This is not because of that side of his character so felicitously compared by Michael Foot to a semi-house-trained pole cat. Mr Tebbitt is sharp without being as narrow as he sounds. The problem is simply that the Department of Employment has not got much time left. In present circumstances, the argument about the reform of trade union law is a distraction. Mr Tebbitt's initial assurance that he will press ahead faster than Mr Prior was doing may make the government popular with its backbenchers. But in practice the possibilities of strengthening this autumn's bill will turn out to be limited; and any such bill is better introduced by a reluctant Mr Prior than an overeager Mr Tebbitt.
Mr Tebbitt's real task is to bring down the numbers of the registered unemployed — and fast. Mr Prior had begun to grasp the technique; you increase the numbers of students and pensioners instead, by extending quasi-education and early retirement. The difference between Britain and highemployment countries like Sweden and Japan is that they have approached unemployment as a practical problem and not as a moral agony. We are dealing here with tricky questions of definition and selfesteem. It is ludicrous that Britain should have one of the highest rates of employment in the world and still have a terrible unemployment problem.
The real difficulty in governing Britain is to understand when you are dealing with an area of softness and when you aren't. There are plenty of hardships and inconveniences which people will cheerfully put up with — or allow other people to put up with — and there are other hardships and inconveniences which they will not. The horrors of long-stay mental hospitals are a tolerated scandal; the unemployment statistics, partial and misleading though they may be, are not.
The political equation may be put more simply. In general this reshuffle has promoted younger politicians of the radical right. This is naturally described as a shift to the hardliners — just as in the Federal Republic after the war the shift to Dr Erhard's 'social market' was so described. It is for the radical right to earn its keep by re-drawing the line between hard and soft. To put it even more bluntly, Mr Tebbitt has got to knock a million off the unemployment figures at polling day.
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