The agreeable thing about Mr Duncan Smith is that he does not look fashionable
ANDREW GIMSON
The assassination of David Davis in the mangrove swamps of Florida seemed a nervous and incompetent business. The hitmen had trouble tracking down the Conservative chairman, because with a characteristic lack of consideration for his fellow party workers he had left no way of getting in touch. The timetable slipped and Iain Duncan Smith 'appeared flustered', according to the Daily Telegraph, and claimed he was satisfied with all his colleagues, when asked during 'a drugs policy fact-finding mission in Sweden' whether he was going to sack Mr Davis. Meanwhile the briefing against the doomed chairman became ever more unkind, with Michael Portillo's gang portraying Mr Davis as a lazy and reactionary figure who was contemptuous of focus groups and was blocking the vital cause of 'modernisation', a word which seems to mean nothing more than asking every halfacceptable woman whether she would be prepared to ruin her life by standing for election as a Conservative MP.
I cannot be the only person who felt a surge of support for Mr Davis on hearing him described in these terms. There is surely a case for having a Conservative chairman with the courage to oppose the mania for female MPs. The star performer on the Conservative front bench, Oliver Letwin, is not just a man but an Old Etonian. The manner in which he draws on the riches of our political tradition to defend our ancient liberties against the rude incursions of David Blunkett is a wonder to behold. The generosity with which Mr Letwin interprets his opponents' motives is the only example of chivalry Westminster now affords. He reminds us that to be Conservative, or conservative, is a civilised and even in some ways an optimistic thing. He has the unusual habit for a politician of listening with interest even to what women have to say. The result is that he is extremely good at making common cause even with boishie left-wingers such as Diane Abbott, A Conservative chairman who was serious about widening the Conservative party's appeal would seek to recruit more Old Etonians of Letwinian stamp.
Mr Davis was a friend of the late Alan Clark (an Old Etonian of a different hue) and still lunches with Alastair Campbell. It will be surprising if the forthcoming volume of Mr Clark's diaries does not offer further evidence of the way in which Mr Campbell exploited his friendship with these two men to foment discord among Conservatives. The method, expounded in these pages by Peter Ohorne as long ago as September 1999, was to flatter a succession of Conservative malcontents from Michael Hese'tine onwards into believing themselves infinitely better qualified to lead the party than whoever was currently trying to do so. During William Hague's leadership, Mr Davis was one of the willing dupes to whom Mr Campbell spun this preposterous line. Mr Campbell described Mr Davis as 'dynamic, serious, clever, tough and dashing', and the 'ruggedly handsome' Mr Davis was regularly tipped in the press as a 'dark horse' in the next Tory leadership battle.
After his unhappy holiday in Florida, it would not be altogether unexpected for Mr Davis to re-emerge in London in the form of a dark alligator, of the kind said to be able to inflict distressing injuries on the unwary. But it seems to me that the Conservatives should not take any troubles they may encounter in that quarter too seriously, for the plain fact is that most people in this country have never heard of Mr Davis and are not in the slightest bit interested in hearing from him now. Nor have they heard of his successor, Theresa May, and she will have quite a struggle getting them to listen to a word she says. Her admirers include a well-connected Tory lady who told this column: 'Although everybody's very sneery about Theresa, I don't join in that. She is very, very inexperienced. She looks fine. She has absolutely fabulous shoes and she could be quite a cool dude. In the new world where the House of Commons has become irrelevant there's very little opportunity to do all that yah-boo stuff. It's much better to be able to go down and
Sit in the sandpit at the play group, which she does quite adequately.'
So there is every sign that poor Mrs May has been chosen as a token woman, and that all the important decisions, and all the unimportant decisions too, will continue to be taken by a bunch of dreary male apparatchiks, whose role at Central Office is to he enhanced in the name, naturally, of modernisation. Nobody in Smith Square has the wit to say that the point of having more women and ethnic-minority candidates is that both groups tend to be far more conservative than the generality of frightened, would-be fashionable men. One of the many agreeable things about Mr Duncan Smith is that he does not look fashionable. Another is that he does not pretend to have an answer to every problem. Long may he continue to have no policies, the very fault for which so many commentators berate him. His soothing inarticulacy must he preserved free from clarification.
But the political story which caught the public's eye this week, and which caused such spontaneous indignation that at least six 'normal' people have mentioned it to me, has nothing whatever to do with all this. It was the news that MPs have granted themselves a large pension increase. Information more calculated to confirm the very widespread (though in my opinion unjust) belief that our politicians are only in it for the money would be hard to imagine. Whatever the detailed justifications our political class may advance for favouring itself in this way, it committed a grave blunder as far as its already rather precarious standing with the general public is concerned. If the Conservatives really wanted to be radical (which of course they don't), they would announce that they will henceforth accept no payment for parliamentary work, which would revert to a part-time occupation for the rich, the industrious and the frugal. This at one stroke would clear out the scores of deadbeat men who clutter the parliamentary party. They could be replaced by a noble army of women devoted to the idea of disinterested public service. But the idea of giving something for nothing to our nation is, of course, one that went out of fashion with our political class quite some time ago.
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