Politics

Peter Walker's progress

Where is Peter Walker's book? It is a delicious mystery. There was a time when it was expected any day. Testament of a Wet, A Consensus Manifesto, A March to the Centre — something of that sort. Its completion, whispered about everywhere on the political circuit, became an imminent fact. Then, nothing. And where is he now, while Francis Pym scurries off on his pro- motion tour to market his own testament? In the bunker with Mrs Thatcher, happily settling down at the battlefront, at the heart of the Government.

How things change. Not so long ago his eventual departure from the Government — either by calculated resignation, or by execution — was assumed to be one of the more likely political developments, the cor- ollary of Tebbit's rise. Sooner or later, there would be a backbench phase. In the course of the last year all that has gone: in the day to day practicalities of Government (that is, the miners' strike) he is closer to Mrs Thatcher than ever before. True, he is technically prohibited from intervening and thus has to face the fury of Stan Orme, his Labour shadow, than whom there is no one who maintains a more consistent level of fury through hail and sunshine, strikes and settlements, City flops and successes. But Walker can hardly be said to be reeling under the onslaught. He looks happy.

That is an inappropriate expression for any minister in this strike, because it can hardly be said — from Right or Left — to be anything but a tragedy, but it reflects the truth about Walker, if not the strike. He is back in power. Jim Prior is fond of saying that he hasn't been in the Cabinet for three years, since he went to Belfast under orders, and that as well as his exclusion from economic policy-making, where he might be most effective and troublesome, he spends so little time at Westminster that his relations with the new Tories who arrived last year are distant. He is cut off. Now it looks as if he is preparing to assume the quiet life after the reshuffle, happy to stroll off into a bucolic semi-retirement in the Suffolk sun. It might yet work out dif- ferently, but that is the picture he is happy to conjure up for the curious.

Meanwhile Walker looks more and more a bit of ballast in the Cabinet. The image is sharpened, of course, by the sight of Patrick Jenkin thrashing around in the undergrowth with his blunderbuss, looking less quick-witted than his prey. In the end one of them will seem to have been in con- trol throughout his testing time, and the other will seem to have blundered. Now, it is better to have Arthur Scargill as your target than Ken Livingstone, since Scargill's call to arms in the class war becomes cruder in the rush of events while Livingstone's becomes more subtle, but there is more to it than that: Walker has shown himself to be tough. The outcome of the strike might yet be a setback for the Government, if the public revert to the traditional — and cor- rect — view that Governments are elected to sort out trouble and not to stir it up, but it is Mrs Thatcher's resolution that will have become pig-headedness, and her refusal to intervene that will be seen as damaging, not Walker's. He can have it both ways: pleas- ing his mistress now, and escaping most of the blame if it all goes wrong.

That is an enviable position for any minister to find himself in, particularly when it has come about by chance. Walker's friends are chuckling merrily about it all, because they believe it gives him the chance to show that (some) Wets have hard centres. That glint in the eye still betrays the sharpness of the asset-stripper, the City whizz-kid without the Heseltine flash. Scargill has given Walker an oppor- tunity that even the ogres of Brussels couldn't — to pull around himself the man- tle of Thatcherism, and to look comfor- table in it. No wonder he is grinning a lot.

Even the difficulties last week over Enter- prise Oil and the machinations of RTZ hardly ruffled him, largely because of an almost wholly inept Opposition attack in the Commons (which seemed to lack the rather important ingredient of an understanding of what was going on). He was able to turn what maybe should have been a great embarrassment for the Government into a neutral event. For that, Mrs Thatcher must have been grateful.

So for Walker it must look as if the path is onward and upward. As he looks across the table to Tebbit, he sees someone whose rhetoric is having to be modified substan- tially by the need to write a large number of generous — and politically desirable cheques. The wild man is being tamed. Heseltine still, for all his proud boast that he has pricked the CND bubble singlehand- a ed (a dubious claim, anyway), still main- tains a curious distance from the party at large: happy to let his hair hang down and the decibels rise at party conference but for the rest of the time showing a reluctance to mingle in the way that future leaders must do. Therefore, Walker reasons, the tide is running towards him.

But some members of the Cabinet still worry about Mrs Thatcher's tendency to confuse Scargill with Galtieri, and it may have been their concern that prompted this week's new tone, welcoming possible tripartite talks. Walker may now be at a tur- ning point of the dispute.

Once again he is in the risk business,

Charles Moore is on holiday.

which has always been his instinct any- way. His problem is that by snuggling down with the Prime Minister in her bunker he might be endearing himself in certain quarters, but he might also be heading for a tight corner from which, when the moment comes, the escape route might be blocked. If the Government's policy on the strike works, he will prosper. If not those who have always been suspicious of him will use the case to argue that he is neither one thing nor the other: neither a Tebbit nor a Gilmour, neither a proud toughie nor an out-and-out conciliator engaged in what's the phrase? — the politics of con- sent.

Consent, admittedly, is not something easily achieved with Scargill. Even contact, except by loudhailer or broadsheet, is dif- ficult. But it is a question of attitude: the Government must adopt a posture in which, after the whole sorry business is over, it can look comfortable and confi- dent. With the Alliance trying hard to find a crevice between Labour's emotionally- sure support for the miners' case (allied to an equivocal view of Scargill's tactics), and Mrs Thatcher's spirit of Port Stanley Revisited, some caution on the Cabinet's part is surely essential. From ministers' point of view anything which helps David Owen to appear simultaneously tougher than Neil Kinnock and more reasonable than the Prime Minister is bad news indeed.

The Wets of three years ago are a funny lot. Ted Heath is consumed by personal bit- terness and therefore limited in his impact; Ian Gilmour is still, irrevocably, the elegant and academic outsider; Francis Pym is caught between the demands of a sense of impending doom and the loyalty bred into every limb of a pragmatist who can't forget that he is first a Tory gentleman. Jim Prior, unless friends talk him out of it, is looking forward to a life without fighting. Walker alone has the scent of real power in his nostrils.

'The trouble with Peter,' one of his senior Cabinet colleagues said this week, 'is that not enough people will trust him for him to become leader.' Against the strange- ly remote Heseltine and the roughness of Tebbit he thinks he can still score. The old conscience, formed in Geoffrey Howe's 1981 budget and the other infamies, is now to be grafted onto the New Realism.

Is it the triumph of the consolidators? The proof that the Wet-Dry spectrum is an illusion and that everyone, Right and Left, has unexpected depths? Probably not. It's just the proof that politics is a funny business and tosses people in surprising directions. Whether, in the long run, it is to their benefit is another matter. After 17 weeks, it is still too early to know what is going to happen. Walker's great strength is that he is showing himself a man of experience and judgment at a moment when some col- leagues are slipping and wobbling in spec- tacular fashion; his weakness is that it is still a gamble.

James Naughtie