At last the Conservative party has something to say
PETER OBORNE
This is what lain Duncan Smith had to say just a week before his election as leader of the Conservative party: 'The character of your leadership is set in the first three or four months. That's the lesson we learnt from William Hague. He never recovered from that baseball cap and his response to the death of Diana. It's the next three or four months that count. If the wrong colours are applied to my slate, they will be there for ever. I have to be able to show in the first few months that my strengths are the dominant features so that people will say, "That bloke looks as though he knows where he's going."'
Duncan Smith's election as leader was announced on 13 September, so next week his first three months will be up. It would be churlish to refuse such an open invitation to assess his early performance, when he himself confessed it to be crucial.
The truth is that he has made no impression, negative or positive, on the public at all. The polls suggest that the great majority of the population have only the haziest idea of who Duncan Smith is or what he stands for. Party support still hovers fractionally above 30 per cent, just as it did on 7 June. He has been a poor performer in the Commons, though steadily improving on television. There has, in short, been no 'Duncan Smith effect' of any kind. It is reasonable to speculate that had Kenneth Clarke become leader three months ago, there would have been a tangible response from the voters.
On the other hand, attempts by the Labour party to label lain Duncan Smith as some kind of crazed extremist have all failed. A great deal has been made of a smear campaign which Alastair Campbell. the Downing Street director of communications, would have set in motion but for the war. Most of this material has found its way into the newspapers one way or another since 13 September, and none of it has had any effect. This is because the central Labour charge, that the election of lain Duncan Smith as Conservative leader represented a reckless lurch to the Right, was simply untrue.
It is hard not to admire the accomplished way that Duncan Smith dispelled the scurrilous myth that he was the bigoted leader of a nasty, racist group of political obsessives. Even before the election, he moved with great speed to banish a supporter who was discovered to have links with the BNP. With equal despatch he suspended Conservative party links with the Monday Club. Genuine strides have been made towards building links with Muslim and Hindu communities. Shailesh Vara, who narrowly failed to win a seat at the last election, is the party's first non-white vice-chairman. There is none of the heavy language about asylum-seekers which William Hague and his lieutenants sometimes produced. Duncan Smith's home affairs spokesman, Oliver Letwin, has at no stage descended into cheap populism in his long, elegant and civilised dialogue with David Blunkett on the measures to be taken against terrorism — it is doubtful whether William Hague's Tories would have been so restrained. There is much more to be done, but lain Duncan Smith, far from being the extremist some have claimed, has taken the Conservative party further down the road of inclusiveness than any previous leader did.
lain Duncan Smith has, in the words of one supporter of Michael Portillo, 'adopted 90 per cent of Michael's agenda' since taking office. He has taken the party quietly down a direction that Portillo could only have done noisily and with great difficulty. This is applied to men as well as measures. The political consultancy Live Strategy, run by Michael Simmonds and Andrew Cooper and as such a nerve-centre of Portillo support, was regarded with venom by the Hague inner-circle. Now it is back in the fold, and being given work by Conservative Central Office.
lain Duncan Smith made one crucial strategic decision upon winning the leadership, which has been completely vindicated, This was to stop talking about Europe and to concentrate on public services instead. On Europe, the self-denying ordinance has worked in a way that no one could have expected. For the past few months the terms of trade have changed. For the first time since the 1970s it is now possible to write that, while Labour ministers have been fighting like ferrets in a sack over Europe, the Conservatives have been united and focused on other issues, of which the most important by far has been public services. This has meant that, instead of looking irrelevant and adrift when the funding of the NHS surged to the top of the political agenda last week. the Conservative party has for once had something to say.
One of the central criticisms of the previous regime was that William Hague was too remote and never listened. This is another area where Duncan Smith has learnt from William Hague's mistakes. He has moved the opposition leader's Commons HQ down from the remote and inaccessible eyrie chosen by Hague to the office just behind the Speaker's chair favoured by both Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher when they were in opposition. It is known by MPs that he will be in that Commons office from 11.30 or so every morning. Duncan Smith's PPS, Owen Paterson, has been given half an hour a day to set aside time for back-benchers wishing to raise issues with the party leader.
Duncan Smith is determined to make himself accessible and is frequently to be spotted in the tea-room and the Commons dining-room. He is the first Tory leader ever not merely to address but also to take questions from the backbench 1922 Committee of Conservative MPs. Within weeks of his election, Duncan Smith amazed MEPs by travelling to Strasbourg to meet them — something that William Hague never did during his four-year term as leader. He has set in motion the most sweeping review of policy since the 1970s, taking up the suggestion of the party chairman David Davis that backbench committees should have a central part in the process.
Of course, the real tasks lie ahead. Duncan Smith has yet to articulate a profound personal vision that will reconnect the Tory party to the British people as a whole. His Tories have yet to frighten Labour at the polls. He has made no forward move against the enemy. But he has taken advantage of the temporary suspension of domestic politics to build an impressive base from which advances can be made. Above all, he has made none of the early and fatal mistakes from which William Hague never quite managed to recover. Duncan Smith could not reasonably have hoped for a better first three months.
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