Bournemouth
Afriend gave me a guide to the Members of the new House of Commons after the 1910 election. It contains little biographies of each MP. In Liverpool, there are nine parliamentary seats, and seven of them are held by Conservatives. In Birmingham, there are seven seats, and all of them are held by Conservatives or their Liberal Unionist allies. And this was after an election, remember, which the Tories had lost. Today there are no Conservative seats in either city. The occupations of these 1910 MPs are interestingly various. In Liverpool there are three lawyers (including F.E. Smith and Marshall Hall), one army officer, one accountant, one Chairman of the Association of Average Adjusters of the United Kingdom, and one engineer who got rich from creating his own shipbuilding firm. In Birmingham there are two ironmasters (including Joe Chamberlain), one organiser of Children's Emigrant Homes, one solicitor, one landed aristocrat, one former agricultural labourer, subsequently a successful businessman, and one university don. This is a snapshot of the once-rich texture of Tory politics. If you can combine land, learning, manufacture. money, the professions, the 'carers' (as they were not then called), the rising class and organised Protestantism (the key to Liverpool at that time), you aren't doing badly. Just by being who they were. the Conservatives could keep in touch with what was happening in the country, as the Republicans in the United States still can. Now it is so much harder. Almost all of the above, yes, even lawyers, do not want to get involved. The Tories have suffered much more than Labour from the modern professionalisation of the political class, because they have always rightly been the party of people who don't like that sort of thing. It always mattered greatly who the Tory men were — more than the Tory measures. It still does, and that is the Tory problem today.
This is part of the problem that Michael Howard struggles to deal with. His speech on Tuesday tried to address it by proving, against expectation, that he and his party can talk in a simple, 'normal' way about things that matter. He succeeded, I think, but you could see the strain. He put on a special quiet, slightly dull voice and permitted himself scarcely a rhetorical flourish throughout (he should in future avoid the phrase 'wiggle room', which he can't pronounce). It was as if, to persuade, he had to discard all the skills acquired over more than 40 years in
politics. There was nothing witty, nothing point-scoring, nothing clever, nothing forensic; no boasting, no 'golden legacy that Labour inherited', no 'yielding to no one' in this or 'beyond peradventure' about that; no whiff of the Commons chamber or Cambridge University Conservative Association or the Inns of Court. Isn't such self-abandonment absurd? I don't think so. When voters say that they don't believe politicians, this is partly a reaction to the overprofessionalisation referred to above — the fact that politicians seem like a gang with their own interests predominating. Deference is dead, but people still value the idea of the gentleman, shorn of all class connotations. They seek someone more distinguished for honesty and patriotism than for brilliance or expertise. He or she must be 'nice', but able to lead, relaxed but conscientious, easy to understand, hard to corrupt. The paradox is that the humiliations of democratic politics mean that hardly anyone of this type goes near the game; hence popular disillusion. People thought they had such a gentleman in Tony Blair. Now they know they don't. Mr Howard is right to try to fill the gap.
As sure as drizzle in November comes the claim that Mr Howard's speech was a 'lurch to the Right'. The phrase is loved by the BBC, and reveals its prejudices. When does it ever speak of a 'lurch to the Centre'?
T t seems obligatory now for political _Leaders to mention their dead relations in their speeches, and not just relations who happen to be dead, like Norman Tebbit's dad on his bike, but the circumstances of their death. When he was prime minister,
John Major invoked the death of his father in the capable hands of the National Health Service to prove his commitment to public services. I seem to remember Mr Blair saying something similar about his mother. Gordon Brown, slightly more obliquely, has spoken of the NHS care surrounding the death of his infant daughter. This week, Mr Howard upped the body count. First he introduced his mother-in-law, killed unnecessarily by hospital-acquired infection. Next came his grandmother, who perished in a concentration camp. The political stage is becoming strewn with corpses, like some Jacobean tragedy. I cannot believe that this is what the deceased would have wanted.
Tam convinced that Tony Blair's announcement last week of his own political demise is a great mistake, meaning that he loses a little power with each day that passes. But one Tory ex-leader (there are so many now that! don't think I am giving much away by so describing this person) believes that the Prime Minister has calculated it perfectly. His announcement, says this sage, will legitimise the jostling for position that would have happened anyway, and will license anyone who wants to try to do Gordon down. 'That man Blair is a piece of work,' said the ex-leader with rueful admiration.
Tf hunting is banned, there will still, so far as one can see, be one part of the United Kingdom where it is permitted. A ban of sorts is already in force in Scotland. The current legislation is for England and Wales. But nothing is yet planned for Northern Ireland, though Sinn Fein, like Hitler, believe hunting to be unacceptably cruel. Hunting is a devolved matter, but at present devolved government in the province is suspended. It is thought unlikely, though not impossible, that the government would ban hunting in Northern Ireland by an order in council laid under the current direct rule from Westminster. I have hunted on the edge of Strangford Lough with the magnificent North Down Harriers (they hunt foxes, despite their name), jumping what are laughably known as 'gaps' (walls of jagged, broken slates with barbed wire on top), and it was lovely. Perhaps the province will experience a great influx of good hunting folk from the mainland. If so, you might think that such people would tend to swell the Unionist vote, but, given that hunting continues to thrive unmolested south of the border, I suspect that they will look for an all-Ireland solution, with a hunting crop in one hand and the ballot box in the other.
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