ANOTHER VOICE
Mr Major is not a man of the people; he is the spokesman of the new ruling class
CHARLES MOORE
WBrighton by be a Tory activist? Why come to the seaside each year to listen to dull speeches and sit through carefully staged `debates'? Discounting those who go through it all simply because they want to be Members of Parliament, I would say that the reasons are chiefly social.
`Social' partly means social as in 'social club'. It means drinking and meeting your friends and enjoying what the Irish call `good crack'. There is plenty of this in the Conservative Party. It is almost the chief point of constituency gatherings. Anyone who proposes discussing politics on such occasions is greeted with pursed lips: that's not what parties are for.
But by 'social' I also mean something broader. Doing voluntary work for the Conservative Party is an expression of your idea of your place in society and of your idea of how that society should be. In more deferential days, it meant the reciprocal duties of officers and ranks. The Countess of Loamshire, even if she thought the party leader a very common little man, would express her sense of the fitness of things by throwing open Loam Hall for the annual fete of the Loamshire East Conservative and Unionist Association, and by sitting on the platform at the local candidate's adop- tion meeting. As for the good people of Loamshire, the more respectable of their number would feel their standing increased by appearing at Loam Hall and eating all the cakes, and the Earl's tenants, whatever their private opinions, would think it pru- dent to show up.
Such Toryism was part of the difference between church and chapel. It was linked with military achievements and imperial service and the dominance of land and being a nation of shopkeepers. It persists in rural areas, but it no longer matters much. For many years, it explained the nature of the party conference. The rank and file (exactly the right phrase for the Conserva- tives, as it never was for Labour) met to look at their generals, hear their measured words and tell them, perhaps, in a diffident sort of way, what was worrying them. The commander-in-chief never attended the conference until the last day, when he arrived to make a grand speech and then went away again. Votes and public argu- ments were thought a thoroughly bad idea. But it was not manipulated. It was based on the Tory notion of consent. The same notion persisted after the def- erence declined. The butcher, the baker and the candlestick-maker came to think it would be nice if their party's leader were drawn from their number, and, since the election of Edward Heath nearly 30 years ago, he or she has been. But they did not therefore develop a truly activist mentality, they did not aspire to make policy, or move `resolutions back' or 'composites'. They just wanted to check that everything was going roughly the right way and, if it was not, to give the leaders a piece of their mind. Whenever these leaders fell out and used the conference to deliver their coded speeches of rivalry, the rank and file viewed it all with tolerant amusement, flattered that this was all played out in front of them, but not expecting to decide the outcome.
Under Mrs Thatcher's leadership, the rapport between leader and led was aston- ishingly close, only becoming strained in the very last days. Opponents attacked her as dogmatic, but she seemed almost the opposite to the representatives who crowd- ed the aisles to hear her. She expressed the sentiments-which they regarded as normal and upheld the attitudes which they admired, but in a superwomanly form. The audience might not know about mone- tarism, and medium-term financial strate- gies, but they knew about good housekeep- ing and the rights of property and hard work and putting Britain first and showing leadership, and they were sure that she knew all about those things too. She con- firmed their sense of the fitness of things, of the way society should be and of their standing in it, and she played brilliantly on their dislike of the unfit things — unions, criminals, immigrants, social workers, EEC bureaucrats and Soviet communists. It was so cosy in the hall with her, and only the more so if storms of protest from the enemy were raging outside.
It should have been so cosy with John Major. By birth, he could hardly have been more suitable. In demeanour, he could hardly have been more reassuring. Utterly English (there are separate Scottish and Welsh conferences each year; this one speaks for England), interested in sport, uninterested in ideas and friendly and quiet and modest, he seemed almost perfect. Once he had won the election for them, the representatives wanted to cuddle him.
But he won't let them. If he had sat down and drawn up a list of policies designed to
insult and upset them, he could hardly have done more than has actually happened. His policy of high interest rates has made their houses unsellable and their debts un- manageable and their small businesses unsalvageable. And the reason for the high rates — to tie Britain's economy to Ger- many's and prepare us for European Union — adds grave insult to unnecessary injury' When the economic part of the policy col- lapses, his instinctive response is to persist with the political part. After the events of 16 September, Mr Major never explained, let alone apologised, to his people or his party. He went off and saw various foreign- ers. Once he had flown to M. Mitterrand and entertained Mr Schlueter and talked for an hour on the telephone to Dr Kohl (without either of them knowing the insults that their officials were trading that day), he decided that he had a policy which showed, oh yes, firmness and a sense of honour. He was going to do what all the foreigners wanted and ratify the Maastricht Treaty. He was doing his duty as President of the European Community. The people here who want to love him think that what matters is that he is Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and that he holds that office because he is leader of the Conserva- tive Party. They are utterly bewildered by his apparent disdain for this fact. Being English and nice, most of them have yet to translate their bewilderment into anger, but it is not far off. The truth is that it is all a terrible mis- take. Mr Major turns out not to be a man of the people, or the voice of the Tory masses, but the spokesman of the ruling class. The ruling class today is not the land- ed magnates whose patriotism, whatever else might be said against them, was undoubted, but the international salariat of professional politicians and civil servants and bankers who are bored with parliamen- tary democracy and want to construct a form of government impervious to the wishes of the people. They have nothing to do with Toryism. What social reason do they provide which would persuade a British man or woman to give the Conser- vative Party voluntary service? The Conser- vative compact between leaders and led, all the more powerful because it has never been spelled out, is under the worst strain it has ever known. Mr Major may come from Brixton, but he is treating his own people as if he were a Bourbon.
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