POLITICS
Sans Thatcher, sans Heseltine, sans everything
NOEL MALCOLM
Iwas worried that I'd be elected against Mrs Thatcher as a negative choice of leader. Now we're going to elect a leader because people make a positive choice for him.' Thus Michael Heseltine last weekend, putting a brave face on the entry of Messrs Hurd and Major into the race. He was right and wrong. Had he been elected, it would have been 'as a negative choice of leader', someone other than Mrs Thatcher. But that possibility was ruled out by an even more powerful negative: the urge to elect someone — anyone — other than Mr Heseltine.
What finally toppled Mrs Thatcher was not a swing of support towards Mr Hesel- tine, but a surge of revulsion away from him. Her fate was sealed when government ministers, conferring with each other on Tuesday and Wednesday last week, de- cided that an outright Heseltine victory in the second round was now possible, and that such a possibility was too terrible to contemplate. When they told Mrs Thatch- er that she would save herself from humi- liation, what they really meant was that she should save them from Heseltine. Whether they were right in thinking that he could have won will never be known; my guess is that they were victims of Mr Heseltine's skilfully organised publicity, which had been quick to push in front of the television cameras MPs who claimed to have voted for Mrs Thatcher first time round and to be planning to switch allegiance in the second. But the damage was done; and from the moment Mrs Thatcher stepped down 'Stop Hese!tine' was the order of the day.
Seldom can an election campaign have been so negative. The strongest and most effective charge against Mr Heseltine was that he was now a 'divisive' figure, incap- able of healing the party. The reactions from the constituencies made this irrefut- ably true. In vain did Mr Heseltine argue that reactions had been the same when Mrs Thatcher challenged Mr Heath: he was talking through his hat. (Nor, I would guess, did the hard-working ladies of the constituency parties — many of them excellent cooks — take kindly to hearing interviewers joking with Mr Heseltine ab- out the 'rubber chicken' circuit. That rub- ber chicken has turned to ashes in his mouth.) But if divisiveness was the most damaging charge against the ex-Defence Secretary, this meant that the Hurd and Major campaigns could not afford to in-
dulge in any direct criticism of him or his policies, for fear of being called divisive themselves. The negativity of their cam- paigns was so negative that it cancelled itself out. No knocking copy, no direct criticism of policies, no real argument at all — just a parade of niceness through every television studio in the land, and a sub- liminal message, pumped out non-stop: `Vote for me, I am not Michael Heseltine'.
On the policy of issues themselves, there was only the faintest simulacrum of debate. Mr Hurd murmured 'citizenship, commun- ity, neighbourhood', though the specific policy implications here were so intangible that one could only assume that he was going for the soap opera vote. Mr Hesel- tine, having spent the last four years churning out books advocating grand new policies for the EEC, government part- nership with industry, and so on, was overcome with a sudden and uncharacteris- tic bashfulness on these topics. 'A federal- ist! Me, a federalist!' How could he be a corporatist now, he asked, given that Mrs Thatcher had made him Environment Secretary in 1979 — a non sequitur so gross that the interviewers just let it pass. As for Mr Major, he answered all policy questions as if his aides had forgotten to tell him that he was running for the leadership, and had left him under the impression that he was still giving briefings to financial journalists at the Treasury. Asked about the future of Europe, about sovereignty, about political union, he talked only about the compara- tive merits of the hard ecu. Asked about domestic policies, about his vision of the new Britain, he talked about the exciting prospects for new varieties of special sav- ings accounts, leading to 'a vast accretion to the quantum of savings'. (That, I am afraid, is the way he speaks; he sounds like a talking quarterly report, and must be the only politician in the English-speaking world who regularly begins sentences with `For . . ..)
In a vacuum of criticisms and a desert of ideas, the nature of the contest naturally turned to other things: charisma, character and class. Mr Heseltine, suffering (not suprisingly) from whispered doubts about his character, played down his charisma, the better to seem responsible and statesmanlike: this left him with the worst of both worlds. As for class, he was forgiven his plutocratic lifestyle on the strength of his own assurance that he was
very popular on Merseyside — a claim which most Tory MPs had to take on trust, never having been there themselves. `Among the C2s in marginal seats I have a very important lead,' he said: the MPs tried to visualise all those flat-capped Heseltine supporters driving round the north of England in their Sinclair electric cars, and were suitably impressed.
Mr Hurd, meanwhile, was scoring too low on charisma, above average on charac- ter, but unfortunately altogether too high on class. Although there was something dispiriting or even embarrassing about his recollections of digging potatoes at 9d an hour, or his assurance that you meet `all kinds of people' in the Foreign Office, a moment's thought will convince one that he must be the least rich of the three candidates. He is not a patrician grandee, merely a clever boy from a good family; and it was especially unfair that he should be labelled the toffs' candidate, when most of the real sleek-haired, pink-faced toffs of the party were backing Mr Heseltine. As for Mr Major, he projected the perfect image for a negative campaign: no charisma, no character, no class. His friends will leap to the defence of his character, of course; but what they know of it comes from their private dealings with him in the past, and not from anything he did or said during his leadership campaign. He was the blank space candidate, the fill-in-the-dots man: `I would like John Major to be Prime Minister because . • • was a sentence to be completed in your own words, not his. People on the Right filled in with 'because he is dry on econo- mics', on the grounds that as Chief Secret- ary to the Treasury he had been tough on public spending (which is what Chief Sec- retaries are for). People on the Left filled in with 'because he is not dry on social policy' — meaning that he will spend more on it (and they are probably right). And many were impressed by his opinion poll potential: why bother about Mr Heseltine s appeal to the C2s, they asked, when we can get a real, live C2 of our own in No. 10? Wisely, however, Mr Major stressed not the lowliness of his class origins, but his classlessness. It was not the magic Wad `class' that helped him, so much as the magic suffix `-lessness'. For the Tory Party, the more lessness the better: classlessness, idealessness, policylessness, and above all, Heseltinelessness.
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