POLITICS
If Mrs Thatcher were backed by 400 Bernard Levins
CHARLES MOORE
My apologies for staying with Mr Francis Pym — the poor man probably wants to be left alone for a bit — but in the present circumstances, it is interesting to cast one's mind back to the last General Election campaign. Mr Pym got into trou- ble then for saying that a landslide victory would be a bad thing. It seemed a tactless remark for a minister to make, but every- one privately agreed that it was true. Large majorities are hard to discipline, and they are partly composed of people who are nervous, inexperienced and ill-prepared for being in Parliament at all.
The truth of Mr Pym's remark should have helped him over the past fortnight. Conservative Centre Forward should have benefited from the discontent, unruliness and sheer boredom which predominate when about 300 men elected to a role which they think rather eminent have almost nothing to do. And yet the Centre Forwards have failed immediately.
Partly they have failed because of their 'relaxed' style, which Mr Pym thinks is a feature of historical Toryism. On the day of Mr Pym's Oxford speech, for instance, Sir Ian Gilmour was not standing by to take over the radio station, presidential palace and airport. He was playing tennis with Mr Dennis Walters MP and he broke his wrist. Mr Geoffrey Rippon was equally relaxed, explaining to television that the whole thing had been rather messed up. It was not one of the best-conducted plots.
But the failure was not only the fault of the Wets. It took a little test of strength like this to prove how efficient is this Government's party management. You read in the papers that Mrs Thatcher will never tolerate dissent, but when you look at the whips, you notice that the agents of her power, especially Mr John Wakeham, the Chief Whip, are unusually supple, genial, relaxed indeed. If they repress, it is through what Marcuse called 'repressive tolerance'. The whips do not impose a point of view. They just make organised dissent look silly.
So it was that the Centre Forwards were birth-strangled. When they met in secret, they were left alone, although the whips knew about their existence. But secrecy confined their influence, and so they went public; yet by doing so, they made their sympathisers extremely windy. What is the point, people wondered, of forming some sort of group, when one is allowed to say what one thinks without the support of a faction? It seemed rather rude and child- ish. To new Members in particular, it also seemed rather dangerous — the whips manage to suggest the existence of the iron fist without ever having to take off the velvet glove. The whips had one further advantage. They knew the names of the new Members, and Mr Pym did not.
The Centre Forwards may have believed (it seems appropriate to stay with the past tense when describing them) that the dis- contents of the time arose from a profound distaste for the orthodoxies of the Govern- ment. If so, they overestimated their col- leagues' intellectuality. It is true that Tory MPs are feeling uneasy, but only for the perfectly usual reason that they find them- selves more unpopular in their constituen- cies than they were when they last took their seats. Their worries reflect their constituents' complaints with almost mathematical precision — four letters pro- testing about something make them four times more worried than one letter. If this anxiety forms itself into a political point of view at all, it is only to say that perhaps we should do a bit less to annoy 'our friends' (solicitors with their closed shops, middle class parents with their children at univer- sity), indeed a bit less to annoy anyone at all who might think of going along to the polling station and putting his X against the wrong name. Such MPs do not provide good seed for revolt. At best, they shoot up, like the seeds fallen among stones, and then wither. Seldom can one see a group of men less eager for new ideas, or old ideas, or indeed anything that bears even the most passing resemblance to any idea at all.
Many find this very despicable. Accord- ing to Bernard Levin in Tuesday's Times, 'You must take mid-term unpopularity into account.' the disgustingness of the Conservative Party is the grand perennial fact of British politics. Occasionally, he says, the Tories throw up great leaders, like Winston Chur- chill and Mrs Thatcher, though he does not explain why those disgusting people pick these heroes. Mrs Thatcher 'despises her followers — and so she should'. Whether she does or not and whether she should or not, though, one cannot help wondering if Mrs Thatcher would really be better served in the House of Commons if she were backed by 400 Bernard Levins driving her on in her attempt to 'change the way people see the world and the way they think'. It is a feature of a free society that people like to be allowed to think for themselves and see the world in their own way. MPs report those thoughts and pass them on to the great, adding their own gloss as they do so. They may do it mainly out of abject terror and self-interest, but motive is not important here. What mat- ters is that the bad news gets through.
Mrs Thatcher will pay attention. No- thing that the Centre Forwards say will deflect her, but the inarticulate, unideolo- gical reactions of the average MP in a funk will, at the least, give her pause for thought. And here she encounters real difficulties. She has no reason to go back on her most important policies and yet no obvious way of making them more win- ning. She is right, for instance, that rates are unfair, and particularly so when so many people are excused paying them, but will she win voters over by making all of them pay the tax? Reform of the anoma- lous welfare system will also irritate more people than it delights. British parliamen- tary and legislative arrangements make it very hard for a prime minister at this stage of the Parliament, to present the exciting groups of measures which American Presi- dents can stick together from time to time, knowing full well that Congress will vote half of them down.
In the end, Mrs Thatcher retains the support of all but a handful of her backben- chers because they believe in her skill at winning elections. No other modern politi- cian has thought so hard or so successfully on this grave subject; and one of the conclusions of her thinking is that while moral leadership may bring her success with the nation's Bernard Levins, more practical political arts are needed to secure her party. If he looks closely, Mr Levin will find much to be disgusted by in her conduct as the next election draws nearer.
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