Political Commentary
The strange case of Mr Gilmour and Mr Powell (Part 1)
Patrick Cosgrave
Not too long ago, my colleague Tom Puzzle, discussing certain long and more or less impenetrable articles which had appeared in the Times over the signature of a former editor and proprietor of this paper, exclaimed that Mr Ian Gilmour, through the publication of these articles, had destroyed the rumour that he was a man of ideas. Dear Tom's remark was made in searing jest, but it was, I fear, in its essence true. And it is a matter of particular regret to anybody who writes for The Spectator that Mr Gilmour should have chosen to put his formidable intellectual talents, not to speak of his charm and decency, at the disposal of those who want to turn the Conservative Party into a machine for the justification of all that was done in the name of Conservatism between June 1970 and February 1974, for that, and no more than that, is what Mr Gilmour is now about.
Scholars of politics, further, will naturally be distressed that the author of one of the best books on their subject published in recent years — The Body Politic — has so chosen to close his mind to erious discussion. For everything that Mr Gilmour has been saying in recent speeches is rubbish; and patently rubbish at that. And it should be added that his is a sorry service to render to a Conservative Party which — leadership business and all — still does not know where it is going.
Before I demonstrate the truth of these harsh accusations against Mr Gilmour, however, I ought to say a word about the man himself. Though nice, he is a restless and nervous man, happier with books than with the life of political action. His comment on the famous (or infamous, according to how you look at it) Selsdon Park seminar was that none of the participants had seemed familiar with the classic Conservative authors. The writing of his excellent book was a long and harrowing experience for him, for it revealed a serious psychological problem to him. The value of the book lies in its description of the flux of politics, the unending round of trying to behave and govern decently while circumstances change rapidly around one, and the difficulty of doing that when possessed of an inquiring and constructive mind. Mr Gilmour — who is very tall and gangles shyly at parties — has sought, in the year since last February's election, to sit on his inquiring mind and use his authority and intellectual capacity to justify a frozen point of view. In trying to keep his mind quiet, however, he has become more strident in his advocacy of the frozen position, and because nobody else can hold that position with grace, he has obtained an undue amount of attention from the press, wireless and television.
Mr Ronald Butt has, in the Sunday Times, put the accusation I want to make carefully more cruelly than I would wish to: he says that Mr Gilmour invents targetsand then destroys them. Meanwhile, the supposed targets wonder what the devil he is on about. Mrs Margaret Thatcher, and Sir Keith Joseph, for example, know that Mr Gilmour is "getting at" them when he denounces their policies by saying that "an intellectual credit balance is not built up by chunks of dogma," but what part of their policy is he getting at?
'Mr Gilmour appeared, at a recent Selsdon Group dinner, to say that Conservatism is what members of the Conservative Party, in power, do; but I am sure that he cannot really have meant that. Again, interviewed on The World at One just after the speech from which I have quoted, he said that Conservatism is about the right use of the regulatory power of the state: and again, he cannot really have meant that.
But perhaps — closing his inquiring mind even to the classic Conservative writers of whom he is so fond — Mr Gilmour did mean to say those things. Evidence that he did is suggested by the fact that his sustained assault from February of last year has been on the so-called 'monetarist' school of economists — to which, he assumes, Mrs Thatcher and Sir Keith belong — which argues that the principal cause of inflation ‘s the excess of government expenditure over government income; and that the cure for inflation is to be found in the redress of the balance between spending and taxation. I cannot imagine that Mr Gilmour is attacking Sir Keith because he, rightly, demonstrated inaccuracies in our employment figures or argued that there are very serious social problems which politicians do not yet understand; nor Mrs Thatcher because she had said that, under her leadership, the Establishment of the Cons'ervative Party would listen more carefully to what its followers had to say, and encourage the desire to save and preserve that marks all British social classes. The conclusion must, therefore, be that Mr Gilmour is blindly determined to employ his skill and rhetoric against — and solely against — those who believe that government should display the same prudence in administering its income as do housewives and tea merchants.
I am sure that Mr Gilmour would regret that kind of expression of his intellectual position. Nonetheless, he denounces his enemies who are good housekeepers by saying that, "the summons to return to what are alleged to be Tory first principles comes mainly from the wing of the party that looks back to the Liberal nineteenth-century laissez faire tradition, and he goes on to say that that tradition is "only one" of the strands of Torysim. For heaven's sake, who has ever suggested anything else? Mr Gilmour is confused, in his reading of the conflicts within the Tory Party at the moment, between two entirely different arguments. He seems to believe that everyone who thinks that, broadly, governments should balance their budgets is in the same camp as the free market economists — those who believe, like Mr Enoch Powell, that almost everything, almost anything, should be given its value by its market price. The latter point of view has some formidable intellectual support — principally from the Institute of Economic Affairs — but it is not the same as the former.
In its 'good housekeeping' sense, monetarist policy has always been an essential strand of Toryism (a "main strand", in Mr Gilmour's words). Fora part of the Conservative appeal to the people has always been that, whatever they lack in excitement, or promise, or glamour, Conservative governments run things, and especially the economy, in a fairly decent and sober and balanced sort of way. They are, or have been, in a phrase, 'good housekeepers'. As Lord Hailsham (not to mention Professor Oakeshott) put it quite some time ago, natural Conservative voters are interested in things other than politics, and want the government of the day to get on with running things generally while they, without too much interference, go about their own affairs. Unfortunately for , his case, the 'good housekeeping' badge is the last to which the Conservative government of 1970-74, which Mr Gilmour so assiduously defends — as he defends its leader — can lay claim.
The accusation against the Heath government and its chief, which we have made steadily in this, Mr Gilmour's old, paper since 1972, was most pithily put by my old friend, Mr J. R. L. Cuningham, in the Times on January 31. "There is one overwhelming reason," Mr Cuningham — a former Conservative alderman and formidable local politician — said, "why Mr Heath should ,no longer remain leader of the Conservative Party, and that is his continued refusal to recognise the faults of his Administration's economic policy between 1970 and 1974." In his long leading article of February 1, the editor of the Times quoted that passage from Mr Cuningham's letter and said, "It is indeed a particular telling argument." What both Mr Rees-Mogg and Mr Cuningham were referring to was the utterly reckless spending spree which Heath ordained and Mr Barber, as he then was, administered, which materially increased our level of inflation, which brought our country near to bankruptcy, which left Mr Wilson — this time — with a genuinely horrifying inheritance of debt and over-expenditure, which ruined investment and the confidence of business, as much as it damaged the working man and woman in their weekly shopping, and which has never once been mentioned or apologised for in all the intellectual speeches of Mr Ian Gilmour.
Now, Mr Gilmour cannot simply dismiss those who criticise that record as purveyors of "chunks of dogma": his old paper has attacked the folly of the Heath government from its first moments; we were joined then by such respectable commentators as Mr Samuel Brittan; the Times, which leant over backwards to have Mr Heath, now, with sadness, pronounces his obituary; the Daily Telegraphs likewise, was against the spendthrift notions of the government of which Mr Gilmour was a member from the start. Mr Gilmour's only comment, made privately, on that paper, was to say that the new editor, Mr William Deedes, a former colleague, would soon "sort out the young Powellites down there." And that, from the author of The Body Politic, is not good enough.
The truth of the matter is that Mr Gilmour, in all his speeches, has been avoiding the substance of the discussion about the future of Toryism and stressing the differences of stYle which exist between different sections of the party. In the stress on style, he is most like to Mr Powell; and of Messrs Gilmour and Powell, Mrs Thatcher and Sir Keith Joseph, I shall write next week.
Previous page
