POLITICS
`This pig doesn't weigh as much as I thought it did'
BRUCE ANDERSON
For at least a year now, the next general election has seemed closer than the last one. When that happens so early in a Parliament — and this Parliament is still at an early stage — it is an indication that the Government is in trouble. Nor is one's confidence raised by the news of yet another long-term review of public spend- ing (at Chequers this Sunday). Govern- ments that have been in office for six years should be seeing the results of such long- term reviews, not initiating them.
The trouble is that this Government never really got back into its stride after the last election: for two years, it has failed to give any convincing impression of know- ing what it is in office to do. Mrs Thatcher recognises this, and blames Nigel Lawson in particular and most of the rest of her colleagues in general for not getting the message across. The public, however, in- creasingly blame her. On the doorsteps, at both the local government elections and now at Brecon and Radnor, she is the grievance of grievances.
Last week, Charles Moore cautioned us against taking the Prime Minister at either her friends' or her enemies' valuation, arguing that she is a much more ordinary politician than either would have us believe — a sort of resolute muddler-through. Mr Moore is a hard man to illusion or disillu- sion: he approaches the world in the spirit of that splendid Irishism: 'This pig doesn't weigh as much as I thought it did, but then I never thought it would.'
Now many Tories, notably John Biffen, would see that Irishism as the fount of all Conservative wisdom (Tory is of course an Irish word). They would like it to be taken as the basis for future government policy and propaganda. If the Government would only set itself more realistic targets, they believe, then the electorate would find it much more convincing.
But there is one great obstacle to such realistic targets — Mrs Thatcher. For there is no one more disappointed with the Government's record than — at moments — its leader. We have never had a Prime Minister who is so unhappy about so much that is happening in the country. If she had a magic wand, then there would be at most a minimal nationalised health service, state schooling would have been replaced by a voucher scheme, there would be no nationalised industries, no more than 50,000 civil servants, and trade unions would have been stripped of their remain- ing legal privileges. Inflation would hover between zero and one per cent, there would be no expectation of a regular Budget deficit; public spending as a prop- ortion of GDP would be shrinking like melting snow, and with it direct taxation. Capital and corporal punishment would also have been reintroduced.
The problem is that Mrs Thatcher has never reconciled herself to the absence of that magic wand: she has made no serious attempt to co-ordinate ends and means. She thought that many of the country's difficulties could be overcome simply by mobilising the silent majority, and by eliminating socialism and waste. Some- where in Whitehall, she is sure, there is an office where half a million civil servants arrive every morning at eleven o'clock. They do the Times crossword before pot- tering across to their clubs for lunch, and then catch the 4.15 from Charing Cross. If only those wretched feeble ministers of hers could find that office and close it down, then the public expenditure crisis would be solved at a stroke.
Despite the fact that she is the first Tory leader to use the word 'intellectual' habit- ually in other than a pejorative sense, the Prime Minister is not at her best as a reflective thinker. Her gifts are those John Grigg describes General Marshall as attri- buting to FDR — courage, intuition and the power to animate: her strengths lie in exhortation, not in strategy.
There has been an interesting recent exchange of insults as compliments. Just as the Wets have taken up Mrs Thatcher's term of abuse as their rallying-cry, so has she revelled in their contempt for her housewife economics: electorally, she is undoubtedly correct to do so; there are a lot of housewives. But equally, just as the Wets as a group have been less than successful in rebutting her sneer — glory- ing in the charge is not sufficient to refute it — so they may have spotted a quality in her that might work increasingly to her disadvantage. For the habits of mind of a good housewife are in many ways the opposite of those of a good Tory.
A good housewife is permanently busy — there is always something to be darned or dusted. But a Tory is perennially in- clined to divide the world's problems into two groups — those that will solve them- selves, and those that are insoluble. A Cambridge don of my acquaintance claims to throw away all his mail, saying that if there were anything of importance, who- ever it was would write again. He has never made it entirely clear how he would know if they had — but that is a pedant's detail. He is a high Tory, in the way that Lord Salisbury was, John Biffen is, and Mrs Thatcher is not — and to do her justice, would emphatically not wish to be.
In the constrained circumstances that are likely to prevail between now and the next election, Mrs Thatcher's approach may indeed prove a liability for her party — for she is not going to behave as the consolida- tors would wish. By continuing to lapse into crusading rhetoric, she will continue to draw attention to the weaknesses of her actual record.
Be that as it may, it is by no means clear that it would have been to the advantage either of the country or of the Conservative Party if its leader in 1979 had been a good Tory rather than a good housewife. Mrs Thatcher took over a position in which the combined demands of government spend- ing, individual living standards, and the need for new investment were far greater than the economy could possibly meet. Government attempts to conceal that fact had produced uncontrollable inflation. All this had led many men who considered themselves much wiser than she is to conclude that the country was in irrevers ible decline, and that the only thing any government could do was to act as an avuncular liquidator. This view, filtering down to the generality of the population, though it may have encouraged them to vote Tory in protest, also bred pessimism and despair.
Mr Thatcher, then, had two great tasks — to eliminate inflation, and to revive the economic animal spirits of the British people. In setting about doing this, it was a positive assistance to her that she, unlike any of her potential rivals fol. the Tory leadership, was of simple faith. Simple- minded, her opponents jeered. Yes, but if the problems were so daunting that the subtle-minded were ready to give up be- fore they'd even begun, then hooray for the simple-minded. It was Parsifal, not the supposedly greater knights, who found his way to the Holy Grail. Sancta simplicitas.
Moreover, anyone tempted to write Mrs Thatcher off should remember her luck. If providence, or the devil, is still on her side, then, with the not insubstantial help of a divided opposition, she could still win her third term — whatever she herself may think about her administration's record.
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