Is the spirit of the age against the Tories?
FRANK JOHNSON
Boris Johnson wrote a piece in the Daily Telegraph this week commemorating his first anniversary as an MP. Unlike so many other people, I preferred not to go to the street parties, firework displays or fly-pasts, but to watch it all on television — being content to celebrate the great occasion quietly at home.
A year! It is hard to believe that he has presided over our national life for as long as that. I can remember his election. What vast social changes he has seen. He would not be human were he not to find much of the modern world baffling. The non-Etonian backbenchers, with whom he must now deal, must be incomprehensible to him. Not that anyone really knows what his politics are. The general assumption is that he must be a bit of a Tory. On the other hand, he voted for Kenneth Clarke. Perhaps all politicians are the same to him.
I was especially interested in the Boris anniversary because I have been asking myself, and other people, about the Conservative party's future. For example, does it have one? Political parties come and go. Is the Conservative party going? The last time a party went, it was one of the Tories' opponents: the 1920s Liberals. The last time one of the two main parties looked like going was, again, the Tories' main opposition: 1980s and early 1990s Labour. Further back, the Whigs — the Tories' first opponents — went in the mid-19th century. This suggests that there is some law of politics which ensures that it is the Tories' opponents who go, not the Tories. But why should there be such a law? In any case, on reflection, there is not.
Let us go no further back than the 19th century. Since then, the Tories have gone at least twice. First, there was the Tory party that opposed the 1832 Great Reform Bill and as a result lost the subsequent general election. How to survive under a wider franchise which it had opposed? It did not. Some of its leaders did. But they led a different party. One of them, Peel, having opposed the Reform Bill, allowed the party's name to change from despised Tory to harmless-sounding Conservative, said he was now in favour of the wider franchise, and became prime minister as a result. Tile was therefore something of a Blair or a Mandelson. He had a 'project' — to get his party back after it had become unelectable. But his party was ungrateful. Its backbenchers were still, at heart, Old Conservative. They found a rebel leader, Disraeli, and an issue, the Corn Laws, with which to destroy Peel. The party thereby went into opposition. But Disraeli miscalculated. He thought they would soon be back. Instead, they were out for the best part of a quarter of a century. They only came back because he and they devised another 'project' — for the widened franchise, no longer for anything like the Corn Laws, just as Mr Blair and Mr Mandelson were for the 'free market' favoured by the Thatcherite class.
Those two Tory projects — the Peelite and the Disraelian — have something in common both with one another and with the Blair-Mandelson project. All three were an unpopular party's surrender to the spirit of the age. The question now is: is the spirit of the age against the Tories as it was against them after 1832, and after the Corn Laws split of 1846? If it is, what can the Tories do to become enough part of the spirit to win an election again?
There is evidence that the times are against the Tories. For some reason, which I cannot explain — apart from what I take as the spirit of the age — I tend to believe the latest ICM poll in the Guardian poll rather than the latest YouGov poll in the Daily Telegraph. ICM showed Mr Blair and Labour unscathed by the Black Rod affair, and the government's troubles such as Mr Byers's difficulties. YouGov showed them very much scathed.
The ICM poll's details suggest that voters blame people other than Mr Blair. That is, Mr Campbell and Mr Byers. If that is an accurate reflection of what voters think, it in itself tells us something about the spirit of the age. To punish Labour is to reward the Tories (the Liberal Democrats are not soaring). Here is a tentative explanation as to why voters seem reluctant to do so: Thatcherism ended the age of economic egalitarianism, but we have moved into the age of non-economic egalitarianism. A majority wants nearly everyone else to share its manners, dress and tastes. The government realises this. Mr Blair, and other ministers, went on and on about the World
Cup, and not just when England looked like winning. Mr Blair actually said he was 'devastated' by the defeat. Unlike the Labour governments of the 1940s and 1960s, this one does not boast of how much it spends on the 'elitist' arts, such as opera and Shakespeare, as those arts were not called in the 1940s and 1960s. When it mentions them, it emphasises 'outreach' schemes, supposedly taking them to comprehensive schools, whereas previous Labour governments boasted (rightly) of bringing those arts to the workers and their children.
Absurdly, the Tories are regarded as a cut above — or as considering themselves a cut above — most people. The Tories, then, need a non-economic Thatcher to win the country from non-economic egalitarianism. But for the moment all we seem to have is the idea of Mr Francis Maude, one of those behind a new organisation called Cchange — Conservatives for Change. He complains that Conservatives are doomed to extinction if they are thought to be 'male, white and straight'.
But while a small majority of voters are female, a large majority are indeed white and straight. I wish Mr Maude well, but I do not see how by being more non-white and homosexual the Tories can win over a majority which is neither. Mr Maude's recommendations seem intended to win over to the Tories the average prosperous metropolitan dinner party, concerned as such occasions are with sexuality, race and 'gender'. The principle seems to be that if people who watch, or work for, Channel 4 News, no longer think the Tories racist and sexist, it will make it easier for the country to vote Conservative.
Perhaps the Maude project will work. Tories are great expropriators of other peoples' heroes. Since the 19th century, they have expropriated Burke — an 18th-century Whig. Perhaps the Tories will return to power and stay there for as long as Lord Salisbury and Lady Thatcher did after previous projects. Then, in the nature of things again, they will lose office. Some time towards the middle of this century, despairing Tories, once more in the wilderness, will say that what the party needs is another Maude; the Tories being no longer what he made them: the party of Lennox Lewis, Germaine Greer and Elton John — with those Tory party conferences at Heaven, the great gay club of the early 2000s, now forgotten. All Conservatives must hope that Mr Maude and Cchange do indeed understand the spirit of this age.
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