Political commentary

The Alliance skips for Roy

Ferdinand Mount

'you said, Mrs Williams, did you not, .1 that if Roy Jenkins won Hil!head, you would throw away your walking sticks?'

`Yes, I did, Robin, and there they go!'

No startled cry of pain, no more than a soft clunk and clatter was to be heard as she threw the sticks off screen from behind the end of the panel desk. The business was so smartly managed that one suspected the ex- istence of some sceneshifter, in- conspicuously dressed in jeans and sneakers, quietly waiting in the wings to catch the walking sticks and hand them back to her at the end of the programme to hop off home to bed on. This unsung operative might actually be employed by the SDP especially to retrieve Alliance props — a pair of opera-glasses here, an empty decanter there — as they hurtled into the darkness to emphasise a rhetorical point.

The underlying nature of the miracle may seem a little hard to unravel: Vote for Roy and the lame shall skip for joy? The valleys stand full of corn, all right. Something about the rejoicings and the prophecies of still greater triumphs does seem a little ar- tificial and worked up. Even the vision of Mr Jenkins as 'Prime-Minister-in-waiting' — canvassed by several Alliance spokesmen — sounds off-key. These melodramatic descriptions are dangerous in politics, because they tend to bring the listener up short against the modest nature of the event described.

Not modest as far as Mr Jenkins himself is concerned, I hasten to say. It was a spor- ting run from start to finish, by a horse not thought to act well on heavy going. He lost his temper once or twice; now and then his wattles sagged; but he kept his pecker up and held on well to the end. He stood in Hillhead against almost everyone's advice, and he won. Ambition, in the under-30s an offputting quality, in the over-60s cheers us all up. It is an act of solidarity against the reaper.

It is no detraction to say that almost any other candidate, such as Mr Chick Brodie, the Liberal who stood down for Mr Jenkins, would probably have done just as well. The figures chime so precisely with what might have been predicted (was predicted, a bit hesitantly, in this column, if not in the early opinion polls). The Times psephologist attempts to claim that the Hillhead result rivalled 'similar levels of support' obtained by the Alliance in Warr- ington, Croydon and Crosby. But Mr Jenkins's 33 per cent cannot really be parlayed into Mrs Williams's 49 per cent.

What matters is the increase in the third party's share of the vote from the general election. In the other three by-elections, the increase varied between 29 and 34 per cent; in Hillhead it was a mere 19 per cent. The Hillhead result almost exactly mirrors the decline in the Alliance's standing in the na- tional opinion polls which now put the Alliance level with, or a little behind, the other two who are virtually level.

On this showing, the Alliance would not have won Croydon or Crosby and will not win Beaconsfield. Mitcham and Morden, where Mr Bruce Douglas-Mann is shaming his fellow Labour defectors by submitting his new allegiance to the verdict of the elec- tors, is much less predictable, as are all con- tests where the previous MP is standing for a new party or as an independent. But does not the Alliance take more votes from the Tories than from Labour — perhaps even twice as many? This is the line now being peddled both by Tory Ministers trying to frighten people into voting Conservative and by Shadow Ministers trying to pretend that Labour is not really doing too badly.

It won't wash, for it is based on a simple and fallacious assumption: that if the Alliance did not exist, the Labour and Con- servative parties would now be securing the same proportions of the total vote as they did in May 1979 — and thus that the Tories would still be getting 7 per cent of the popular vote more than Labour.

In so far as we can guess at the hypothetical state of affairs without the Alliance, the evidence suggests that Labour would now be 7-10 per cent ahead of the Conservatives. With 3 million unemployed and stagnant or declining living standards, any smaller lead in mid-term would be sur- prising.

But if the old two parties now stand roughly level after the Alliance has snaffled 20 per cent more of their vote than the Liberals did, then the Alliance must be tak- ing roughly 7 per cent from the Tory vote and 14 per cent from Labour, that is two- to-one the other way. Thus the appearance of the Alliance masks the extent of the swing from Tory to Labour which other- wise would be evident. It remains possible then that the Alliance may well save the Conservatives at the next general election.

To delve further into this hypothetical hinterland, what the Alliance does — and before it the Liberal Party — is to intercept 1979 Tory votes on the wing to the Labour Party. Its psychological effect therefore is to reinforce the ,picture of Labour as a loser-party: three third places running, not a by-election gain from the Tories since 1971, full of loonies and Commies.

But suppose Roy Jenkins becomes leader of the Alliance (as everyone now assumes he will), won't he acclimatise former Tory voters to voting for the Social Democrats?

Doesn't his leadership therefore represent a stronger threat to the Conservatives than that of either Shirley Williams or David Owen, who would bear more obvious traces of their Labour past?

I doubt whether voters care quite so much about these fine shades of ideological difference. Certainly, Mr Jenkins is likelY to put up a much better show for the Alliance in the House of Commons than Mrs Williams or David Steel, both of whom seem more lightweight in parliamentarY debate than they do on television. As a par- ty though, the Alliance will still be al/wal- ing to much the same soft central region of the electorate.

But is not any strong showing by the Alliance bound to damage the Conser- vatives more seriously than Labour, because of the cock-eyed nature of our elec- toral system and the unequal distribution of party strength in the constituencies? If the votes split equally three ways, won't that let Mr Benn in? And shouldn't Mrs Thatcher swallow her pride and opt for PR? To which the answers are: no, not necessarilY, and no.

Computer projections based on a three- way split cannot take full account of tac- tical voting — which might be intensified by the fears of Mr Benn brought on by those very computer projections. The net effect of redistribution is hard to calculate, but what it must do is sharply to reduce the number of 'bedrock' Labour seats upon which the letting-Benn-in hypothesis rest; If Labour is to win, it will have to hold some more volatile, high-electorate subur- ban seats in the Midlands and north-west, as well as keeping central Scotland, south Wales and County Durham solid. But that is what any party since the war has had to do to form a government.

Flukes of parliamentary arithmetic occur under every electoral system; after the waY Mr Haughey finagled his way back to power, this would seem to be a time for Pl fans to keep a low profile.

Besides — and this really is an un- fashionable thing to say, as opposed to be- ing fashionably unfashionable — if the Labour Party were to win an overall ma- jority with a modest share of the vote, saY' 37 per cent, while the Tories got 33 per cent and the Alliance 27 per cent, then I think Labour would be morally as well as legallY entitled to govern, for it would have held its 1979 vote while the Tories would have lost a quarter of theirs. The electorate could, I think, be presumed to have intended the consequences of its actions, just as it would if the Tories secured 37 per cent and Labour 33 — a rather more likely outcome. Nor do I accept that the outcome of the 1974 general elections represented some miscarriage of democratic justice. Mt Heath made a horlicks of February; he more or less surrendered in October. If the next general election is an equally close-run thing, so was many a famous victory. The Tories did not do too badly at Hillhead, And if they fail to win the next general elec- tion, it will be nobody's fault but their own.