POLITICS
Fission and fusion in the Tory test-tube
NOEL MALCOLM
`E
urope: Tory split grows', said the banner headline in the Daily Mail. An eye-catching headline, if only because there is some unwritten rule of modern journalism which decrees that splits only happen in the Labour Party.
The Conservatives may have rows disputes which, especially if they happen around the Cabinet table, can have major political consequences. And the Tories certainly have rebellions. But rows can often be explained away in personal terms (as Mr Heath's non-stop truculence invari- ably is), and rebellions take the form of one-off attacks on particular pieces of the Government's legislative programme. A split is something more profound and more permanent: a long-term estrangement within the party over a major policy issue.
Headline-writing is easy, but those who have to write the articles beneath the headlines face a peculiar difficulty here. Everyone can sense the split, but no one can define the precise policy issue on which it occurs. `Are you pro-Europe or anti?' is good enough for casual, off-the-record conversations, but everyone knows that the real question nowadays is `Which sort of Europe are you pro?' Almost nobody on the Conservative benches is literally anti- Europe now in the sense of wanting to get out. Almost nobody, on the other hand, is willing to campaign openly for a fully- fledged, federalist United States of Europe. The argument all lies somewhere in between, shrouded in a dense fog of rhetoric in which the Thatcherites insist on their commitment to co-operation and the Euros insist on their devotion to British sovereignty.
A brief quiz may help to illustrate the problem. Who said:a) 'On many great issues the countries of Europe should try to speak with a single voice. I want to see us work more closely on the things we can do better together than alone'; b) 'the Con- servative Party . . . [will] play its part in building a united, democratic, free enter- prise Europe in which each country retains its national identity unimpaired'; c) `We have federalism by stealth, whether be- cause national electorates cannot be told the truth or are not trusted to understand it, or because their elected leaders have failed to comprehend what they have assented to'? The answers: c) Mr Heseltine in his new book, The Challenge of Europe; b) Mr Hugh Dykes, the standard-bearer of the Tory Euros, in a letter to the Times last week protesting against Mrs Thatcher's attitude; and a) Mrs Thatcher, in her Bruges speech of last September.
The division, in other words, is between those who say 'I am in favour of closer European co-operation, but . . .' and those who say 'I am in favour of national sovereignty, but . . .'. One also hears politicians saying, `I am in favour of what Mrs Thatcher says, but . . .', the 'but' here being that they wish she had said it in a different, less grudging or less pugnacious way. Questions of style and attitude, and the underlying gut-feelings they express, are more important here than any theore- tical blueprints of the European future. The Prime Minister's public attitude of resentment and suspicion towards an all- encroaching Europe leaves her looking curiously isolated on the Tory front bench. The last two major Euro-sceptics in the Cabinet (Messrs Biffen and Tebbit) have gone. The Foreign Secretary, a naturally clubbish man, yearns for the day when he can get a bit of peace and quiet in the Brussels club without the Prime Minister coming in and knocking over the furniture. Messrs Hurd and Baker are instinctive Europeans (hence the strain on the latter's face as he dutifully bites off his Lingua); and of the free-marketeers, Mr Ridley is in favour of closer economic integration and Mr Lawson is at loggerheads with the Prime Minister over joining the exchange- rate mechanism. To find Mrs Thatcher's instinctive supporters on this issue one has to look further down the list — to, for example, the Trade Minister, Mr Alan Clark (of whom one old Westminster hand remarked to me, `Oh, Alan would go a lot further than Mrs Thatcher on this. You see, the thing about Alan is that he doesn't believe in trade.') But on the Tory back benches there is a completely different story. Mr Dykes has promised a declaration of support for a more integrated Europe, to be signed by 30 backbenchers. I suspect that he will have to exert all his persuasive charm in order to get as many signatures as that. The pro- Thatcher movement on the Tory benches, on the other hand, is growing spontaneous- ly and fast. The European Reform Group, which used to be regarded as the final, crumbling bastion of the old anti- Europeans (Teddy Taylor, Richard Shepherd, Jonathan Aitken) has taken on a new lease of life, with its membership now nudging 70. Mrs Thatcher's Bruges speech has given the old guard a positive doctrine to proc- laim on Europe where previously they had only sounded negative; it has put those who care about constitutional issues, and who had previously been thought rather cranky and Enochian, back into the main- stream; and it has given them all common cause (for the time being, anyway) with those free-market liberals who care little for constitutions but would lay down their lives for a bit more deregulation. My guess would be that in her general attitude to Europe Mrs Thatcher now has the support of roughly three quarters of her backben- chers. On how many other issues would she command such support on a free vote? The poll tax? The NHS reforms? The privatisation of water? The Bruges speech is a convenient syn.!' bol, of course, but it has not caused all this new thinking on its own. It would not explain, for example, why late-night de- bates on such technical Euro-subjects as hormone regulation, metrication and heavy commercial vehicles are now so solidly attended. Perhaps the most impor- tant change of the last year is the gradual waking up of the House of Commons to the fact that many of the things which it used to decide for itself (from indirect taxation to the health warnings on cigarette packets) are now being decided for it in Brussels. MPs actually care more about this than ministers do; and the defence. of parliamentary power is a cause winch naturally unites them. `Tory split' headlines are bad for is party's image, and image nowadays Is major part of political reality. But when t hear grey heads from Conservative Central Office saying that Europe may split the Tories in the way that Home Rule split the Liberals, I suspect that they have spent too much time talking to ministers or leader- writers, and not enough talking to ordinary MPs or ordinary voters. There iS a huge swathe of opinion out there which broadly supports Mrs Thatcher's Euro-wariness, and Euro-scepticism. In the past many nt, them have expressed this opinion by 1101 bothering to vote in European elections: The job of the Tory Party in this election is at long last, in Lord Whitelaw's memorable phrase, to go round the country stimng up apathy.
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