The old order changeth
Until his astonishing resignation from the Commons last week, the prospect of David Davis as the next Home Secretary was one of the foremost attractions of a new Conservative government. On a range of issues from prison policy and police bureaucracy to managed migration and juvenile crime, Mr Davis’s instincts have long been excellent.
Since David Cameron’s election as party leader in 2005, furthermore, he acted as a check on the occasional excesses of the Tory modernisers. The ‘decontamination of the Tory brand’ has been a necessary — and highly successful — process. When, from time to time, it veered towards folly, Mr Davis often saved the day, calming the nerves of anxious true-blue Conservatives: the Cameroons might want to ‘hug a hoodie’, but Mr Davis joked that he would prefer to ‘mug a hoodie’.
An experienced former minister and a fine chairman of the Public Accounts Committee from 1997 to 2001, he had the makings of an outstanding Home Secretary in a future Cameron administration. Now that he has forced and is contesting the Haltemprice and Howden by-election, there seems little chance that he will fill a great office of state.
While we have always admired Mr Davis’s boldness, it has not served him well — or logically — in this instance. Leave aside the accusations of untamed egoism: most politicians suffer to a greater or lesser degree from this character trait. Our objection is that Mr Davis’s actions make little sense.
The proximate cause of his resignation was the knife-edge vote on extending the maximum period for detaining terror suspects without charge to 42 days. Mr Davis complains that Gordon Brown ‘bribed and bullied MPs into voting to extend the power’. No doubt: but it is hard to take seriously this complaint from a former government whip of the Maastricht era, whose legendary toughness with recalcitrants led his colleague, Gyles Brandreth, to nickname him ‘DD of the SS’. As a whip, Mr Davis, quite rightly, saw it as his task to drive government legislation through the Commons, and the task of the opposition, if defeated in the division lobbies, to seek victory in the next general election so it could seek redress with its own Commons majority (which, of course, Labour did, spectacularly, in 1997).
In this sense, Mr Davis has long been the quintessential parliamentarian — and, as it happens, the author of a useful primer on Parliament and its procedures. Having forced Mr Brown to resort to brokering a deal with the DUP to win the 42-days vote, Mr Davis could look forward to the Lords kicking the measure out, an ugly battle between Lower and Upper Houses, and the scene set for an incoming Conservative government with its own mandate to revisit the issue of precharge detention on its own terms.
This, in truth, is the parliamentary way: the ancestral pattern of the institution for which Mr Davis claims such affection. Though he would scorn the suggestion, his resignation as an MP and media campaign to turn the Haltemprice and Howden by-election into a mini-referendum on New Labour’s erosion of our liberties is a distinctly modern device. True, there are some notional precedents, such as George Lansbury’s resignation from his seat in 1912 over female suffrage. But the Davis campaign — the so-called ‘carnival of freedom’ — with its website, celebrity endorsements and cross-party support is very much a 21st-century phenomenon. At least for now, Mr Davis has abandoned his traditional Burkean role as the parliamentary representative of his Yorkshire constituents; instead, he has turned Haltemprice and Howden into an unlikely focus group.
In one sense, therefore, it is Mr Davis who is taking liberties: dressing up a media circus as a lofty defence of Magna Carta. Yet the most intriguing aspect of the story so far — and who knows how it will end? — is that the public seems broadly supportive of his coup de théâtre. It is highly unlikely that this is because of the campaign’s content, since poll after poll has suggested strong popular support for the 42-day extension. The form of Mr Davis’s protest, however, does appear to have stuck a chord.
Herein lies an important lesson for all senior politicians and — as a prospective Prime Minister — Mr Cameron in particular. Although it is often claimed that the Cameroons are simply replaying the New Labour script of 1994–97, the reality is very different, for the simple reason that politics and the psychology of the electorate have changed dramatically in the intervening period. Trust in the Westminster class has drained into nothingness. As David Boyle writes in his book Authenticity: Brands, Fakes, Spin and the Lust for Real Life, we are ‘fed up with being foisted off with the fake’ and see most politicians as ‘angry enthusiasts’ rather than spokesmen of the truth. As a society, we like food free of additives, we distrust hype, and we listen to our peers more attentively than to elites — political or otherwise.
In this context, plain-speaking tribunes who declare war on phoniness are likely to prosper. It is surely no coincidence that the two Conservatives who have won public acclaim in recent months are Mr Davis and Boris Johnson. Both men have presented themselves not as identikit branch managers of Conservative PLC, but as unabashed individualists. This is no doubt a headache for central party managers — but the voters clearly like it.
The Davis campaign and Boris’s mayoral triumph are important symptoms of a radically changing political landscape. So too is the decentralised, unregulated, sometimes anarchic energy of the web and political blogging: so-called ‘wiki-politics’. For more than a decade, New Labour has governed by central control, message discipline and spin. That era is emphatically over, its methods discredited and exhausted. The days of command and control are drawing to a close. A new, less predictable, more spontaneous political culture is emerging fast. David Davis’s actions, reckless though they are, must be seen in this new context. It is a context that Mr Cameron will simply have to get used to.
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