POLITICS

The amazing new-found complacency of the Conservative Party

FERDINAND MOUNT

hat question of Wittgenstein's says it all about language, doesn't it?' an eager philosophy student said to me once.

`Ah yes, now which question were you thinking of, in particular?' I replied, keep- ing the profile low.

`Oh, "Can you play chess without the queen?" of course.'

This famous question seemed to me then, and seems now, a pretty tedious one when you come down to it. The answer to it is Yes, just as Liverpool are still playing football even if Ian Rush is carried off with a broken leg after ten minutes. Not such a thrilling game, no doubt, but still recognis- ably the same game.

I have similar feelings on the endless lucubrations on the future of the Conserva- tive leadership. What would happen if Mrs Thatcher were unseated? Would Thatcher- ism survive? Would it be a good or a bad thing for the Conservative Party or the country? The Top People who have re- sponded to the Spectator Poll make a clear distinction between the two. Even if they themselves vote Labour or Alliance, they tend to feel that the nation needs her, but that the Conservative Party does not, since she is so unpopular with the lower orders, because she is seen to be favouring alpha people like themselves, which is all very embarrassing.

But is this anything new? Apart from the Falklands period, Mrs Thatcher has re- mained solidly unpopular with large num- bers of voters who have continued to vote Conservative. Any fool could see from the beginning of this Parliament that, barring accident, the next game would be played with the same queen. If you have won two elections, you have to lose at least one before being removed from the board. What was slightly less easy to foresee was the nature of the game. That, I think, was the really difficult. question to answer and the one which very few pundits got right.

One might, quite reasonably, have guessed that by now both main parties would be hideously split: the right wing of the Labour Party either seething with fury or on the point of defecting to the Alliance; the left wing of the Conservative Party on the verge of open revolt. At the very least, the pundits might have agreed, party unity in both cases would have been bought by conciliatory moves in the general direction of the old middle ground. That, after all, is the 'theory of party competition', which has launched a thousand doctoral theses.

Nothing of the kind has happened. Both parties are more united, in public anyway, than they have been for years, and united around sharply opposed policies. The Labour Party's conference was a carnival of unity, almost unrecognisable to old- timers. And even here at Bournemouth, it seems scarcely worth trailing round the fringe meetings any more to hear what Mr Heseltine or Mr Walker is up to.

How can one convey the aroma of the Conservative Party Conference — that unique blend of essences, both smooth and pungent, simultaneously off-putting and unnerving? I suppose the two enduring elements are complacency and panic. These near-contradictories are always de- tectable, though in varying proportions, so that in a good year for the Tories, they exude complacency — the feeling that `everyone must surely see that we are the sensible party, the natural party of govern- ment' — more than panic — the feeling that 'we are doomed, the People are about to make a frightful mistake and we shall be out of power for a generation', and in bad years vice versa.

This seems to be a complacency-oriented year (again, nobody would have forecast that six months ago, at the height of the Westland affair). The opposition parties have stumbled towards each other across the boggy terrain of the soft Left, present- ing a target which even the most tongue- tied Tory spokesman would have a fair chance of hitting, and certainly Norman Tebbit did not miss on Tuesday morning, although he was slighty piano.

On defence, on trade unions, on taxa- tion, it is easy enough to frighten the voters; anything other than voting Con- servative risks national chaos, weakness and decline. The rhetorical situation this time last year was not nearly so favourable. At Bournemouth, Mr Kinnock had been superbly on the rampage against Militant. At Torquay, the Social Democrats had looked strong and cheerful, the cracks in the alliance with the Liberals had not begun to show up. The Tories had to go for two targets at the same time, neither of them especially easy.

The other plus for the Conservatives is less often remarked, although it has been observable for a year or so now. It is that members of the Emollient Tendency -- Mr Hurd, Mr Baker and so on — have tended to express positive enthusiasm for the parts of government policy which they had pre- viously kept quiet about. It was remarked that, on television last weekend, Mr Hurd came out against more tax concessions for private health insurance. But I was more struck by the way he came out for some kind of funding per pupil in state schools to strengthen parent power and for some deregulation of rents in the private sector. These are not the kind of thing for which, say, Mr Prior and Sir Ian Gilmour would have expressed much enthusiasm in com- parable situations five years ago. The Next Move Forward', the Tories' Conference theme, is merely a ritualised version of how every government tries to save up a few enticing announcements for its party conference. But it does suggest that, after its first rambling and inconclusive meet- ings, Mrs Thatcher's A-team is managing to agree on a few things. John Patten's 'Right to Rent' is a slightly vague slogan intended to herald the revival of the private landlord and the erosion of rent control, although he is deluding himself if he fancies that he has much chance of all-party support for anything very dramatic.

While the mere mention of education vouchers used to make Heathites froth at the mouth, Mr Baker — himself an old Heathite — wowed this Conference with his attacks on local education authorities and his promises of more power for parents and head teachers. His 20 City Technology Colleges, free to pupils but directly state- funded and so independent of the LEAs, are a primitive kind of voucher experiment .

The steady reduction of state ownership and political control remains the central theme in the British political debate — so much so that even those who are by temperament and ideology hostile to this theme have to camouflage their true feel- ings, by disguising nationalisation as 'social ownership', for example.

For that reason, at the end of the week, it may look as if, rather surprisingly, the Tories have done best out of this year's party conferences. In retrospect, Labour's looks even less of a triumph. As we limp back to our liver specialists after five weeks in the front line, all we know about the future is that we know practically nothing, and that's if we're wide awake.