POLITICS
Bringing down the curtain on the Whitehall raree-show
NOEL MALCOLM
To make 24 new ministerial appoint- ments can hardly be described as a non- event; and yet the reshuffle which Mrs Thatcher announced this week was more significant for the things which did not happen than for the ones which did. It was the sort of occasion that prompts thoughts about the dogs which did not bark in the night.
Many Tory MPs have been thinking about the werewolves which did not bark in the night either. Mrs Edwina Currie, whose newly discovered spiritual affinity with Transylvania is well known, was kept out of the Government, despite all her recent crawling (I mean that figuratively) towards Mrs Thatcher. And the preposter- ous idea that Mr Jeffrey Archer should be given a peerage and a junior ministry has remained where it belonged, in realms of fantasy far beyond even the most far- fetched of his own novels.
In fact, with the departure of Mr Peter Bottomley from the Northern Ireland Office and the Government, there are grounds for thinking that Mrs Thatcher has finally decided to stop running the junior echelons of the Government as a kind of raree-show of entertainers and self- publicists. The former Minister for Breathalysing and Photo-Opportunities had not gone down too well in Northern Ireland, where his vegetarianism upset the farmers and his penchant for trundling round Belfast in a wheelchair and playing a tin whistle (though, in strict fairness, I should say that I am not sure whether he did both at once) can only have added to the indignities of life in that already trou- bled city. The only self-publicist who has actually benefited from the reshuffle is Mr David Mellor, who replaces Mr Richard Luce as Arts Minister; but Mr Mellor, who is able and ambitious, might have aimed higher than that, and with his appointment to the Privy Council this move has some- thing of the consolation prize about it. In any case, responsibility for the Arts used to be considered a safe and reasonably harm- less job for the licensed limelight-hogger — witness the previous tenure of this post by Norman St John-Stevas.
But of course the Prime Minister has not stopped thinking in terms of presentation and publicity where her junior ministers are concerned: it's just that she prefers them to present government policy rather than themselves. What, after all, are most Under-Secretaries and Ministers of State for? To read all this week's analyses of the new distribution of `right-wingers' or 'wets' in the Government, you might think that they were going to spend all their time determining government policy. But in real life junior ministers spend very few of their waking hours thinking up new policies. Most of their time is occupied either with administrative decisions (by-passes, school mergers, planning appeals, etc) or with trying to smooth the edges off the rough- hewn major policies which have been handed down to them. They act as trouble- shooters and apologists, seeing Bills through Parliament, handling the objec- tions of the pressure groups and, in- creasingly, defending their allotted policies in the television studio and the radio car.
Sometimes the defence of policies be- comes little more than an attack on the particular section of the population which those policies concern. At this point, the minister's work may begin to do the Government more harm than good in presentational terms. Mr Robert Jackson, whose main pastimes as Minster for Higher Education seemed to be picking quarrels with academics in the correspondence col- umns of the Times Literary Supplement, was an example of this. He has now been moved to the Department of Employment, where his Secretary of State, Mr Howard, can allow him to write as many letters as he likes to the Employment Gazette, secure in
the knowledge that at least unemployed people do not read it. But perhaps during the next year, as unemployment rises and becomes a matter of public debate again, we can look forward to seeing Mr Jackson and his new colleague, Mr Eric Forth, more frequently on our television screens. They will make a finely contrasting pair, like acid and sandpaper.
Meanwhile at the Home Office, the publicising of 'family values' and the new package of family-oriented policies (if the Government can think of any) will be entrusted to Angela Rumbold. The idea that only a woman can be given responsi- bility for presenting the policies which affect women is a curious one (should a soldier be put in charge of defence policy, or a foreigner in charge of foreign policy?), but it is now so well rooted in the popular imagination that a publicity-conscious gov- ernment cannot afford to hold out against it. At least the Prime Minister has resisted the calls to fill her Government with women simply because they are female. With five out of the 17 Tory lady MPs in the Government already, the proportion of office-holders roughly matches that of their male colleagues; and in any case the way to settle this question is not to look at percentages but to look at the ladies who remain on the back benches.
At least Mrs Rumbold may have a say in thinking up some completely new policies. But the toughest jobs over the next 12 months will be those of the junior ministers who have to defend old policies which have gone wrong. Of these, the privatisation of electricity is likely to be the most trouble- some. Mr Colin Moynihan, the new Under- Secretary of State at the Department of Energy, may have been a good publicist of government policy on the football pitch, but I am not convinced that 'Mr Subbuteo' (as Dennis Skinner calls him) is quite the heavyweight this Department needs.
But then, the really important problems which this Government faces are out of the reach of junior ministers anyway. The last hope of a breakthrough came when Mr Michael Portillo was made Minister for Sanitising the Poll Tax. If anyone could have sorted it out, one felt, he was the man to do it; but the restrictions placed on the whole exercise before he began ensured that he could do little more than tinker. After last week's announcement of the changes in the poll tax for next year (a few alterations to the small print, and a fritter- ing away of more than £2 billion on cushions and safety-net extensions which people will hardly notice, let alone feel grateful for), the general message to all government departments became clear: keep your heads down, and concentrate only on those measures which will help to lower the Retail Price Index, at whatever cost to the economy or to good sense. With the whole Government digging in its tren- ches like this, it hardly matters which subalterns are given new spades.
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