POLITICS

Mr Walker finds a market worth penetrating

CHARLES MOORE

In the memorable phrase of Mr Peter Jenkins in the latest Sunday Times, `. . . the banana skins came home to roost in the shires last Thursday'. His paper's neigh- bouring leader reinforced the point — the political and economic climate was knock- ing Conservatives off perches, making the political landscape look different. If the reality is anything like the metaphors, there is reason to be alarmed.

Mr Peter Walker, of course, has im- proved the shining hour by grasping the cudgels between his teeth. He told his audience at Cambridge on Thursday that we were at a watershed where the baton might be passed on. Mr Walker was blowing a bugle, calling to the banana- skin-infested shires. On Sunday, Mrs Thatcher was forced to respond with her 'dream' in which everyone would 'be the same as everyone else'.

In speaking of 'the Tory opportunity', Mr Walker was not so much advancing the argument as repeating it at what he knew would be an important moment. The lain Macleod Lecture' (can't someone honour another ex-editor with a retaliatory Nigel

Lawson Lecture?) was an occasion con- trived to say again what he had said in the

Harold Macmillan Lecture last year. Apart from the occasional flights of metaphor, it was expressed for the most part in the minimalist style favoured by most modern Tory rebels. Thus his remark: The Japanese did not obtain their high growth by thoughtless hire-fire policies, nor did they obtain growth by pursuing `no-tech' jobs in the low wage service sector was almost his fiercest attack on the Government that evening.

The intention of Mr Walker's speech was not to open up some, new and lovely path of political reasoning, but to work on voters as a successful advertisement works on consumers — to associate the product (Mr Walker) with things that one wants. The Walker commercial says to voters: Walker is against unemployment (unlike some people he could name) and for economic success; to Tory activists it says: Walker has nothing to do with the latest electoral fiasco because he has done his best (loyally, of course) to resist the policies which brought it about.

One suspects that Mr Walker has de- tected a market worth penetrating. Even before the council election results — and therefore without the benefit of hindsight — Tory MPs of all shades of loyalty reported not only general 'doorstep' dissat- isfaction with government policy, but a particular animus against Mrs Thatcher. Nor is this confined to people who might not be expected to like her anyway. According to one MP, about 15 per cent of the party loyalists now dislike her very much: a year ago it would have been five per cent. Voters apparently say that the Prime Minister is too big for her boots, that she shouts too much in the House of Commons and that she made a fool of herself in her tour of Asia. There are as yet no reports of concerted support for any other set of policies, let alone another individual, but that only makes Mr Wal- ker's interventions even more opportune.

The phrase in which Tory MPs sum up the present discontents is: 'It is 1981 all over again.' In that year, you may remem- ber, at the height of riots and slump, Mrs Thatcher became the most unpopular prime minister since records began, and, I daresay, the Most Hated and Feared wax- work in Madame Tussaud's. At the party conference in Blackpool, every Wet, in- cluding Mr Walker, made a speech deman- ding 'One Nation', and the Prime Minis- ter's fate seemed to hang in the balance.

But if this is 1981, it will appear dif- ferently to Mrs Thatcher than it does to those who remember it only as the nadir of the party's fortunes. For her, 1981 brought the first of a series of historic vindications of her policies which, she believes, sustain and justify her now. The Budget of that year refused to reflate at the bottom of a slump; the 364 economists (these figure very strongly in her mind) were shown to be wrong; she jettisoned the feebler of her colleagues and moved swiftly on to victory in 1983. It that is what happened then, she reasons, why should I act differently this time? The economy is far stronger now than then, and the trends are good. My enemies are weaker now than then. They were wrong then and are wrong now.

A simple case, and not an easy one to refute. Mrs Thatcher has done extremely

well again and again by defying conven- tional wisdom. All that one can say against it is that it underestimates the danger of repetition. One's gasp of admiration at Mrs 'Thatcher's persistence and courage can rather easily turn into a scream of boredom and exasperation at her capacity to say the same thing with the same messianic zeal in every single interview. Since she has been in office for six years, one can no longer believe the just-you-wait-till-I-get-my hands-on-this-problem talk and feels in- clined to respond with a why-is-the- problem-as-large-as-ever-it-was? line. One needs some sense of threat to find Mrs Thatcher's certainties attractive, and in much of the South now the moderate success of her policies has removed that threat. It is interesting that in areas affected by the divisions of the miner's strike, such as Nottinghamshire and Der- byshire, the Tories showed much more respectably last week than in the 'heart- lands' where the hearts are feeling a little cool. The South seems to have forgotten the effects of high inflation and powerful public sector trade unions, for which it could blame Labour. Its discontents now are high taxes, and high rates coupled with worse services, and for these it feels free to blame the Prime Minister. The main be- neficiary is the Alliance.

And here we come to what may prove Mrs 'Thatcher's greatest electoral weak- ness. She has not worked out a way of combating the Alliance. No Tory in mod- ern times has been as successful as she in

fighting Labour. Conviction and opportun- ity combined to enable her to smite stat- ism, trade unionism, professional leftism and to appeal to the more striving elements

of Labour's working class support. She enjoys fighting Labour. Her attitude to- wards the Alliance, however, is bewildered and frightened. To her, Mr Steel is a slight, unmeritable man, and Dr Owen is worse — a renegade who, she says, never took advantage of office to try to stop socialism. Even if she is right, she will have to think of some more powerful way of stopping the momentum of a grouping whose electoral base grew again last week, and has grown steadily throughout and perhaps in re- sponse to the Thatcher era.