Mr Portillo attracts the floating careerist, but there is a long, sweaty summer ahead
PETER OBORNE
For hundreds of years White's has been the nerve-centre of black Tory reaction. But there was a new mood at the club tent at Royal Ascot on Tuesday. As the runners and riders in the Tory leadership stakes were assessed, it became clear that support had swung behind Michael Portillo. Even his pedigree met with approval over the champagne and gulls' eggs. 'Out of an asylum-seeker and with a homosexual past,' pronounced one Tory politician. 'Perfect, couldn't be better.' One might have expected a remark like this to have gone down badly at the White's bar, but it did not. It was greeted with nods of approbation.
The great thing about the Tory defeat two weeks ago is that there is no arguing with it. If William Hague had been able, as most people expected, to return an extra 50 or so Tory MPs to Parliament, then matters might have been different. Things might have gone on as they were. But the Hague strategy is dead. At the tender age of 40, this good and talented man has gone down in history as the Michael Foot of the Tory party. 2001 is the Tory 1983, the moment when all but the most hidebound supporters realised that something had gone horribly wrong.
Michael Portillo is the beneficiary of this quest for a new Conservatism. Though fewer than 30 endorsements have been announced, in reality he can already count on the votes of more than half the parliamentary party. His campaign has already reached that virtuous stage, which John Major's reached in 1990 or William Hague's at a certain point in the summer of 1997, when it exerts a deadly gravitational pull on every floating careerist.
Edward Gamier, a sleek lawyer much in evidence at Ascot on Tuesday, has eased his way from Kenneth Clarke to Portillo. Stephen Dorrell, who is beginning to gain a reputation as an infallible indicator of the way the prevailing political wind is blowing, is for Portillo. An unnervingly large percentage of the nonentities who made up William Hague's shadow Cabinet are for Portillo. If this contest were being conducted along the lines of every other Tory leadership battle of the last three decades, it would all be over. Some are tempted to conclude that Michael Portillo has already won.
But the truth is that he can win the parliamentary stage of this leadership contest by whatever margin he likes and still be confronted with a run-off on equal terms with a single rival when the contest goes Out to one-man-one-vote among Tory party members.
Nothing that William Hague did when he was party leader is being cursed with greater venom than the way he recast the rules for the Tory leadership election. The decision to give the rank and file the final power to elect a Tory leader seemed a good idea at the time: all part of the job of modernising the party. Now MPs are beginning to realise with a sickening sense of horror that the Hague reforms have had precisely the opposite effect.
All Tory MPs have ambivalent feelings towards their local membership. On the one hand, they are properly grateful (in some cases) for the work the rank and file do in distributing literature, running the party, raising money, etc. In some cases they even respect them as people, but, on returning to Westminster from their constituencies, they sit in the congenial surroundings of Annie's Bar or the Members' Tea Room, and they tell each other horror stories.
have been party to these conversations and they have something of the flavour of the exchanges that must have gone on at the Royal Society between Victorian explorers just back from the African interior. They tell each other of horrible customs, quaint beliefs and a strange, primitive mindset entirely alien to modern, sophisticated, metropolitan man.
Relatively little is known of the Tory rank and file. They are thought to be churchgoing, decent folk with a strongly articulated sense of right and wrong, and therefore wholly out of place in the modern world. Their average age is thought to be 65. They are known to be able to hold contradictory ideas in their heads at the same time. They can feel strong support for Kenneth Clarke as Tory leader at the same time as harbour ing a visceral hostility to the European Union. Much is obscure, but it is clear that the greatest crisis in the 200-year-long history of the Conservative party coincides with a prodigious leap in the dark.
Some 100 years ago, the Tory prime minister A.J. Balfour declared that he would pay no more attention to the Tory rank and file than to his valet: the valet has now been given the task of choosing the next Tory leader. This makes the outcome of the looming contest completely uncertain. The Tory activists may take Michael Portillo in their stride, they may not; it is impossible to tell. From Portillo's point of view it is not reassuring to learn that good judges consider that the party in the country would happily have voted for Ann Widdecombe had her leadership bid not been strangled in its cradle.
But the mystery of the rank and file lends huge interest to the battle of who is to come second to Portillo, Ken Clarke is biding his time, concentrating, according to one Portillo supporter, on the content of the drinks bar in his Vietnamese hotel room. This procrastination is not necessarily an error. If he enters the contest, he will set it alight.
So far the most showy performance has come from David Davis. Davis has many strengths but tact and diplomacy are not among them. Before the election William Hague's whips' office voted on the Tory MP they most disliked in the previous parliament. They settled on Davis at once, a decision which only confirms Davis's own supporters in the wisdom of their choice of allegiance. Davis has a small but formidable group of supporters. It most certainly would have included Alan Clark if he had still been with us. Clark had the habit of inviting guests to Saltwood Castle to make a death-defying walk along his battlements. Most guests returned on their hands and knees, gibbering wrecks. Davis sauntered back, hands in pockets, whistling. His supporters are already pointing out that he really was in the Territorial SAS, rather than spouting its slogans in a silly way like Michael Portillo, As the more informed racegoers at Ascot this week well understand, horses with too big a lead halfway through the race have a habit of coming back to their field. The prospects for Michael Portillo still look good, but he can look forward to a long, sweaty summer.
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