STRIFE AFTER DEATH . .

. . . Anne McElvoy listens to

the noise of Tory recriminations

THE FORMER government minister, soundly thrashed by his ungrateful middle- class constituents, picked at his lunch with- out real enjoyment, took savage swigs of chablis and told of the moment he knew it was all over. He had asked his campaign team to telephone known Labour voters. The returns showed that a lot of them intended to vote Liberal Democrat. 'I asked myself why they were doing this and, instinctively, I knew that it was because they absolutely loathed the Conservatives. The key failure of the campaign was that we thought people were bored with the Tories but didn't quite trust Labour. The real situation was far graver. They were dying to get rid of us. Only Neil Kinnock had stopped them in 1992. We had been living on borrowed time.'

This assessment has rapidly become the post-traumatic orthodoxy of the last week. Like the bewildered and resentful citizen- ry, former MPs and senior supporters have discovered the joys of blaming the govern- ment for all their woes. 'Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, which we ascribe to heaven,' says Helena in All's Well That Ends Well. This message has been slow to penetrate the defeated Tory ranks. Even ministers in the Major Cabinet now feel free to blame the government. 'But you were in the government: don't you blame yourself?' I ventured to one such senior survivor. 'I don't accept that,' he said guardedly. 'We were all in a difficult posi- tion.' What was that position? 'A flawed leadership, a tired party and an effective opposition.'

The recriminations now orbiting the Tory party can be broadly divided into the strategic and the tactical. Europe remains the big issue, although there is less una- nimity than there was on the significance of European policy in the disaster. The traditionalist Eurosceptic analysis is put by the dogged sceptic, Bill Cash. 'If we had ruled out EMU we might still have won,' he says. Another leading EMU-phobe adds, 'I am hearing all these candidates saying that we mustn't engage in recrimi- nations. They were in the Cabinet when the Maastricht treaty was signed and throughout the dithering on a single cur- rency. It's them I'm recriminating against. Why should we put up with the generals who lost us the first world war scrambling for our votes now?'

'The causes of this go a long way back,' ' counters a lieutenant of William Hague. 'It's like the causes of the first world war. There's no point in starting with the assas- sination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. It began with Nigel Lawson's policy of shad- owing the deutschmark. But I'm wary of allowing Europe to take on disproportion- ate significance. It was not the only thing that made us unelectable.'

A backlash against the Eurosceptics is also underway. Alastair Goodlad, Mr Major's chief whip, has let it be known that he holds them and not Mr Clarke responsible for the fateful appearance of division. Even the broadly Eurosceptical foreign secretary Malcolm Rifkind has let it be known that he partly blames newspa- pers like the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail for the scale of the defeat. 'They hounded us,' he told friends. 'It became a blood-sport.'

'Up to the election', says a pro-Europe MP, 'the Eurosceptics behaved as if they were the repository of wisdom and the fol- lowers of Kenneth Clarke were the aberra- Dirty Hare Krishna tion. We now know that this is not true. If people really feared the single currency, they would not have voted in such numbers for the Labour party which is much more likely to move in this direction.' Mr Clarke is preparing to campaign against 'capital E Euroscepticism' — something he believes led the party to appear to many voters as being constituted of paranoid obsessives.

But his own rampant enthusiasm in the Major government for a single currency remains a source of bitterness. 'Why', says a former Cabinet colleague, 'did such a tal- ented man, who had bided his time and gritted his teeth to get into a commanding position in the party, throw it all away — just to shore up a couple of European lead- ers who don't give a tuppenny damn about him? It's the great mystery of British poli- tics.'

Significantly, many Eurosceptic candi- dates for the leadership are less keen to ascribe blame to Mr Major's handling of Europe than they were before the election. Says one campaign manager, 'When Labour lost in 1983, the wisdom of Michael Foot was that the party had been defeated because it wasn't socialist enough. The Conservative equivalent of that is to say that we lost because we weren't Euroscep- tic enough. It is just as false.' Having sought — subtly and otherwise — to enhance their Eurosceptic credentials ahead of the defeat, Peter Lilley, Michael Howard and even John Redwood are keen to play down Europe now in order to gain the votes of the undecided and agnostic Tory MPs. 'Looking at the make-up of the Tory rump,' says one campaign manager, 'it is clear that you can win neither on the votes of your natural supporters. You have to get the dim vote and the soggy vote on your side too.'

A strong body of opinion now favours a tactical rather than a strategic post- mortem. They are anxious to look at the Conservative party's image and incline towards adopting Mandelsonian ruses in analysing the defeat and planning the lead- ership campaign. Peter Mandelson (who managed Neil Kinnock's unsuccessful cam- paign and now Tony Blair's triumphant one) thought that Labour could no longer win elections relying on old promises and the old machine: its practices had to be modernised, membership rejuvenated and presentational skills updated.

Mr Lilley leads the camp which main- tains that the Tory party must alter its organisational structure, media handling and candidate selection in order to revive. He also appears to have been first to act on the rout — one defeated candidate received a call from a Lilley supporter at 5 a.m. the day after the election asking for her support. An aide hotly dismissed the criticism that aping New Labour's strategy is unsuitable for the Conservatives. 'Just because it's an opposition idea doesn't mean it isn't worth learning from. It's New Labour we have to fight — not Old Labour and certainly not ourselves.'

But the Wunderkind candidate, Willliam Hague, has also let it be known that he favours a generational shake-up. He is pre- pared to question hoary Tory dicta like the impossibility of imposing centralised authority on troublesome MPs and intends to counter his opponents' tease, `Stay vague: vote Hague' by insisting that a Con- servative party led by him would both look and sound fresh. 'Hague is a counsel of despair,' says a defeated backbencher. 'But then we are desperate.'

John Redwood believes that his early criticisms of the ourgoing prime minister's style and policies stand him in good stead and that these recriminations can be turned into campaigning devices in the contest. This is not a widely held view. Mr Redwood is resented because he is thought to have willed a Tory defeat. The business- man Paul Sykes, who offered candidates opposed to the single currency generous help with election expenses, has also turned against Mr Redwood after the 'MP appeared to claim that he was co-ordinat- ing Mr Sykes's gesture. Antipathy between Mr Redwood and Mr Hague (who suc- ceeded him at the Welsh Office) is fervent. Asked what he thought of his predecessor recently, Mr Hague replied: 'He made it very easy for me to succeed.'

While the candidates struggle to marshal recriminations for their own cause, large numbers of Tory supporters and former MPs (those with another source of income, that is) seem indecently gleeful about the defeat. 'It's a liberation,' crowed one for- mer special adviser whose natural home is the wilder shores of the libertarian Right.

The scale of the defeat allows everyone to indulge his own instincts and prejudices. The adviser believes that the electorate issued 'a cry of rage against the power of the state'. But voters don't install Labour because they want less state, do they? He bristled. 'The British electorate is the old- est and wisest in the world. They realised that the Tories had failed in their own terms to curb the state. Maybe Labour will do it.'

The performances of Central Office and M&C Saatchi, the Tories' advertising agency, are undergoing autopsy. Central Office was staffed mainly by young men and women in their late twenties and early thirties. But unlike New Labour's inside team, they lacked the disciplinary force of a guru like Mr Mandelson.

'These people were right-wing and bril- liant in a rather deracinated way,' says one insider, 'whereas the constituencies were manned by people practically on zimmer frames. There was no understanding at all between the two.' The decision (by Mr Major, backed by Mr Mawhinney) to run a six-week campaign is criticised. 'The senior ranks were exhausted by the end,' the insid- er said. 'There was no direction, no final flourish. We thought that the long cam- paign would put pressure on Labour, but it just made us look more and more jaded.'

Central Office believes that it was badly served by the press and television in the campaign because journalists had caught on to the likelihood of Labour victory early on and felt that they had no reprisals to fear from a Conservative win. Media monitors were particularly annoyed by a Sky TV report during which Julie Dawson, the reporter, seemed to suggest that Mr Major's denial that the state pension was under threat from the Conservatives could not to be trusted because some of his 1992 pledges on tax had been broken.

But the internal accusations loom larg- er. Maurice Saatchi, who started the cam- paign with the brilliant 'demon eyes' poster bearing the warning, 'New Labour, New Danger', seemed to lose his touch thereafter. 'The only other image that was memorable was the one of Blair on Hel- mut Kohl's knee, and that made us look childish and xenophobic,' says an MP who lost his London seat. Indeed, the Battle of Helmut's Lap is likely to be one of the most bitter retrospective scraps of this campaign. The advert was drafted by Michael Heseltine — in an attempt, Cen- tral Office insiders say, to enhance his Eurosceptic credentials for the leadership fight. Brian Mawhinney backed the idea with enthusiasm. So did Francis Hayward, a former radio producer and other young campaign workers, who clapped their hands in delight when the first proofs of the poster were handed round.

But other strategists like Danny Finkel- stein, head of research, disagreed. No one seems to have pointed out that the Daily Mirror had public censure heaped upon it when it ran a primitively anti-German front page during the European football champi- onships. Lord Saatchi has also let it be known that he did not like the Blair-Kohl poster and that he felt more imaginative ideas were being blocked. Three weeks before the election, a Saatchi employee was overheard complaining at a party, 'If only they'd let us get on with things.'

In the hue and cry, microfactors of the defeat like the effect of boundary changes and the ethnic character of constituencies are being ignored. The 17 per cent swing against Michael Portillo in north London, for instance, is widely ascribed to tactical voting. But his constituency has also seen an increase in Greek Cypriot incomers who were carefully targeted by Labour (which has always taken the Greek side in the Cyprus conflict) and neglected by Tory canvassers. In the 1994 council elections, there was a swing — also of around 17 per cent — to Labour in the Palmers Green ward of Mr Portillo's constituency, an area favoured by Greek families. Tory strate- gists may have failed to have read such runes carefully enough. There will be plen- ty of spare time to read them now.