POLITICS
The party waits for Mrs Thatcher to answer the national question
SIMON HEFFER
Being Mrs Thatcher at the moment can- not be an entirely enjoyable experience. Hardly a day passes without more painful news of the dismantling of her legacy. Last Sunday Mr Waldegrave, the Health Secre- tary, signalled that tax relief for the elderly on their private health insurance might be discontinued. Then on Monday Mr New- ton, the Social Security Secretary, proudly announced above-inflation welfare increas- es, his pride more easily explicable had the Treasury not just revealed a budget deficit for the first six months of the financial year of £14 billion. And on Tuesday the Confed- eration of British Industry was reported as wanting a more interventionist Department of Trade and Industry (like those of our European partners), and it was not hard to find Conservative MPs who advocated that Mr Michael Heseltine, the Imelda Marcos of corporatism, should be put in charge of it. For those revisionists who have not had enough, the Queen's Speech next week will herald the Council Tax.
Even before all this Mrs Thatcher had to endure ridicule for her letter to Mr Bruce Gyngell, the chief executive of TV-am, sympathising with him unequivocally for his company's loss of its franchise in last week's Independent Television licence allo- cations. A frequent criticism of our former prime minister is that she cannot get used to being a former prime minister. This does not square with her letter to Mr Gyngell, written with a disregard for political propri- ety no prime minister would be allowed to display. Hers was the letter of a private cit- izen, albeit one who had designed the sys- tem that saw off TV-am. But, as the most famous living politician in Britain, Mrs Thatcher can never hope to be just another private citizen.
Nor is it simply her fame that makes this so. The media keep their eyes on her because of what they suspect to be her doc- trinal disagreements with her successor. This scrutiny, in turn, creates alarm among the leadership of the Conservative Party, an alarm guilt makes grow larger with each new departure from the true path. 'They don't regard Kinnock as the opposition,' a minister says. 'She is the opposition.'
It is hardly fair that she should be so regarded. In the eleven months since the coup against her, Mrs Thatcher has not uttered one word of criticism in public on British soil of the policies of her successor.
Her words to Mr Gyngell last week — by design, anyway, private — were mea and not sua culpa. The remarks she has made in the United States and elsewhere that have been interpreted as hostile to the Govern- ment's position on Europe were, in fact, simply repetitions of sentiments familiar from her speech at Bruges in 1988, and have borne a distinct resemblance to those made by Mr Major on his visit to Paris last month. The fear, loathing, paranoia and panic she inspires among the ambitious men of the new Tory party is prompted not by what she has done, but by what they are terrified she might yet do.
Despite the provocations, she has no intention of speaking out on this revision- ism before an election, and may well not do so afterwards; she remains loyal to her party. However, she makes no secret of her belief that Europe is an issue that comes above party. In the weeks ahead Mrs Thatcher faces the strongest challenge yet to her self-imposed trappism. Those close to her find it hard to believe she will be able to remain silent on the national ques- tion if she suspects that, at the Maastricht summit in December, her country and its parliamentary sovereignty will be compro- mised. She is thinking carefully, and will need to continue to think carefully, about how to reconcile the demands put upon her by her supporters — and by her own integrity — with her sincere belief that the Conservative party needs to be preserved intact to win the general election. For all her loyalty to her party, though, she is loyal first to her ideology. She would recognise Trotsky's ironic critique of Stalinism:
The English have a saying, 'My country right or wrong'. We have a much better justifica- tion in saying, whether it is right or wrong in certain individual cases, it is my Party ... and if the Party adopts a decision which one or other of us thinks unjust, it is my Party, and I shall support the consequences of the decision to the end.
She would probably recognise in it the views of many of her formerly staunch sup- porters.
The Tory press, which once supported her and her ideology so uncritically, now shows even greater support for her unproven successor. It forcefully took the line, after her show-stopping silent perfor- mance at Blackpool a fortnight ago, that the hysteria she provoked was in the nature of an 'adieu', not an 'au revoir' — 'they'll be all right now, they've seen the corpse' was how one hopeful party retainer put it. This optimism did, though, precede the most vocal displays of support from the floor whenever a speaker took the Thatcherist line on the national question. The pretence of her irrelevance to the Con- servative Party in the country was contin- ued in some of last Sunday's papers, describing her as a marginal figure whose ideas were now being described as past their time even by some of her most fervent supporters. She is being Heathised, despite not having committed anything like the sins of Heath. If she does expand on Europe, the party and its friends in the media will attempt to crucify her.
Her role in the fevered weeks ahead must be planned in the certain knowledge of this vilification. She has never shown signs of a deficiency in courage, but if she needs an iron injection the thought that she inspires such terror in the party now should suffice; particularly as she knows this terror is bred by the party's knowledge that she offers firm (and, to judge from Blackpool, increasingly popular) ideological leadership on Europe while the in nomine leaders do not. The same party managers who, unattributably, tell journalists she is fin- ished are nonetheless devoting an extraor- dinary amount of nervous energy to a cam- paign of arm-twisting among the significant number of backbenchers who might be influenced by her if they smell a sell-out at Maastricht.
Mrs Thatcher believes in power. She sees no point in Conservative politicians, whose party has always believed in the protection of sovereign rights, coming to Westminster mainly to vote away their power. She is hor- rified even more at them voting away the powers of their successors. She has the power, if she speaks out, to divide her party and lose it the next election; but, lest that make her stay her hand, she should know she has less power to do this than the Con- servative Party itself. There is no moral, ne political, no practical reason why she should not, carefully and at a well-chosen time, reiterate the sentiments of Bruges, attacking not her successor, but those fed- eralist forces that would have him compro- mise the nation. She will be crucified; but in the past crucifixion has not invariably terminated the influence of the victim.
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