POLITICS
He was repulsive, he was fascistic and above all he was wrong
BORIS JOHNSON
There must be quite a few natural Tories who have found themselves halfway seduced, over the past five years, by Tony Blair and his seaside orations. Ever since his first speech as leader in 1994, I have always been moved by his air of sincerity. Yes, I think to myself, blushing at my weak- ness, politics is a moral business. Perhaps there is a case for a certain fervour. Per- haps Blair is right to emote so openly, to make his chin prune with passion, and to take out his onion and slightly strained accounts of childhood hardship; and it is only by thinking about what he was saying (or not saying) that I am able to restore my sense of balance, recover my intellectual convictions, and restrain myself from rush- ing from the changing-room and on to the pitch to join his team.
So it was with some surprise that I found myself this week, for the first time, wholly unmoved. Not only was the Prime Minis- ter's speech dishonest and in some respects repulsive. Worst of all, from his point of view, it was probably a mistake. The strate- gy is simple enough. After the embarrassing reverses of the European elections and the Hamilton by-election, and the growing mutterings of dissatisfaction among Labour grassroots, Blair decided, for the first time, to pander to all that is nastiest, chippiest and most divisive in his own party. Time after time he held up a bogeyman, a turnip- ghost, called 'the forces of conservatism', and he invited his audience to heap their scorn on `today's Tory party: the party of foxhunting, Pinochet and hereditary peers'; and, naturally, they did.
There was no evil which could not be laid at the door of these 'forces of conser- vatism'. In a passage of fascist, Goebbels- esque fallaciousness, he strung together conservatism with the killers of Martin Luther King and Stephen Lawrence. One might as well say that 'the Labour party and the forces of socialism' were in some way connected with Stalin's purges, or the mas- sacres of Pot Pot. It was a smear, a hideous and cynical smear; and for the first time I understood what John Major used to mean when he called Tony Blair a snake-oil sales- man. We have dimly become used to the notion that the Prime Minister is a liar: he never bothers to check his facts on Question Time, and he has now asserted twice on television — completely falsely — that the Hunting with Dogs Bill was blocked by the hereditary peers. The Bill, of course, ran out of time in the Commons, though that does not suit Blair's case. On Tuesday, as an example of the infamous behaviour of the 'forces of conservatism', he cited the Tory party's opposition to votes for women. In reality, women were fully enfranchised in 1928, when Stanley Baldwin was prime minister and William Joynson-Hicks was home secretary. At another moment, he accused the Conservatives of imposing a freeze on university student numbers, an odd assertion when you consider that stu- dent numbers rose by 50 per cent under the last government. But who among his apa- thetic television audience will know the dif- ference?
If there were a couple of sticklers for accuracy among the Labour delegates themselves, their feelings will have been overwhelmed by the pleasure of watching Blair — the Old Fettesian and graduate of St John's, with his stonkingly rich wife and his huge profits from his Islington schloss — making war on the Tory toffs. How clever of Blair to deflect the wrath of his party from his own elite, his own curious infatuation with the company of rich men, and turn it on the 'old Establishment who have run our country for too long'. Never mind the slick, cronyist Blairite tyranny, he told his audience. Let us get on with demol- ishing the weevilled remnants of the House of Lords and its Tory supporters. And how shall they respond, those brutally slandered Tories? What makes Blair's strategy doubly ingenious is that the Tories are in a trap.
It is true that the 'forces of conservatism' appear at variance with the mood of the times. Across the country, there are many Tories who wish their party leadership would speak up more strongly against, say, gays in the military, or the cowing of the police by the Macpherson report, or the arrest of General Pinochet, or the impend- ing abolition of the oath and the cap badge of the RUC, or the abolition of the heredi- tary peers and foxhunting. They are, of course, right. Each case, in its own way, is defensible and should be more vigorously made. The trouble is that in becoming iden- tified with these issues alone, the Tory party would simply be parroting the lines that have been given them by Alastair Campbell. There is no disgrace — great honour, in fact — in being the party of fox- hunting and Pinochet; but as Blair knows from his focus groups, these are minority causes. If that is all the 'forces of conser- vatism' stand for, then they will not easily recover. But that is not all they stand for.
If Blair had a shred of honesty, he would admit that it was the forces of conservatism which have made his party electable, by forcing him to jettison its ideology. Indeed, it was the 'forces of conservatism' — the conservative values of sound money, free enterprise and low taxation — which have created the economic conditions in which Labour is now luxuriating. If he insists on this Manichean division of the soul, into that which is progressive and good, and that which is conservative and bad, then he is idiotically attacking the very virtues that put him into office and which are keeping him there.
It was the 'forces of conservatism', to cite his most flagrant piece of hypocrisy, which produced grant-maintained status for schools, since it is a conservative instinct to give headteachers the power to run their schools and free them from local authority control. It was the former Conservative councillor, John McIntosh, whose industry , as headmaster helped to make the Oratory school one of the best in London. Now Blair, the beneficiary of this conservative ethic, in the sense that he sends his children there, has not only abolished the grant- maintained status of schools, but complains when Mr McIntosh asks parents for small donations in recompense. Mr Blair should realise that 'the forces of conservatism' have made him what he is, and — since he is himself never shy of invoking everyone's kids — they are shaping his children, too. Next time, let us hear him defend, if he can, the 'forces of socialism'.
Bruce Anderson is away.
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