Politics
Finding a Tory leader
Charles Moore
The newspapers say that there is 'press- ure' on Mrs Thatcher from 'some of her advisers' to bring forward her early autumn reshuffle (which it is assumed she
will make) to July. This, apparently, would 'calm speculation' about the positions to be occupied by Mr Norman Tebbit and Mr Cecil Parkinson. The newspapers do not seem very whole-hearted about their stor- ies — they tend to report one another: . . speculation has been heightened by weekend reports. . . .' The reports resem- ble the stories about the current crisis of `Thatcherism'. The }vish is father to most of the thoughts. /
But apart from ' Mr Parkinson, whose future is a standby to political gossip as the Channel Tunnel is to political day- dreaming, Mrs Thatcher cannot do any- thing very surprising, either in July or September. For the queue for Cabinet jobs is now extremely long, and its members are men who feel that they have earned prefer- ment. As was pointed out in the Daily Telegraph on Tuesday, all the present Cabinet members in the Commons have been MPs since 1974 at the latest; only 17 out of the 57 sitting members of the 1979 in- take have been found posts; none of the new intake has yet risen above the rank of PPS. It follows that there are a great many MPs who feel fractious and neglected and have nothing to do, but it does not follow that Mrs Thatcher will be able to oblige many of them. No deaths, no great splits, nothing to thin out the ranks of candidates so that someone surprising can rise quickly through them. In the Cabinet, there is no- one, except perhaps Mr Peter Rees, whom Mrs Thatcher can decently drop. Mr Pat- rick Jenkin indicates that he does not wish to stay much longer. There is the Mr Gummer problem. That is about all.
After ten years as party leader and six as Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher controls a network of patronage which includes almost all Tory politicians. Only a handful of the most senior has a political existence independent of her. Where would Mr Fowler or Mr Lawson or Mr Brittan be without her? And even those who have kept their distance — Mr Heseltine, Mr Walker above all — have served her so long that they are not free from complicity in her acts. The result of all this ought to be that Mrs Thatcher can compose a Cabinet as she wishes. The actual result is that everyone is too much obliged to everyone else to be able to move at all freely. The longer this Government and Prime Minis- ter succeed in staying in office, the more impossible it becomes for its composition to change without causing grave affront to its members. Discontent cannot easily find a leader within the Cabinet to express itself; yet discontent is now the only engine of change.
Which brings us to the most fanciful of the speculations. It has been a sort of joke that Dr David Owen would make a very good Conservative. Indeed, it has become a sort of gibe against him for Liberals and Jenkinsite Social Democrats. Now, perhaps, it could be sort of serious.
A successor to Mrs Thatcher would have to be someone quite different from her, yet someone capable of understanding what she had done. This is why he could not be Mr Peter Walker, who acts as if the politics of the past ten years had not taken place. Dr Owen is the right age (46), and has the right frame of mind. He has Mrs Thatch- er's impatience with the 'consensus', her wish to shake his poor country by the scruff of the neck and smarten up its behaviour, and yet he is recognisably different from her. His obsessions are not her obsessions. He does not offend the people she offends: he attracts people that she does not attract.
Nor is there any serious 'ideological' objection. It may be true that Dr Owen is not a Tory at heart — but neither was Churchill, nor, in many ways, is Mrs Thatcher. If you ask Dr Owen why he is no longer a socialist, he will tell you his life story. If you ask him why he is not a Tory, he is so sketchy that you can scarcely join up the dots. He does not believe in inherited wealth, he will say. But which modern politician is brave enough to say that he 'believes' in inherited wealth? So long as Dr Owen does not want to make inheritance impossible, he is not, by deca- dent modern standards, hopelessly un- Tory. Nothing that he says about the economy, trade unions, the Welfare State could not have been said by a Conserva- 'I would go on strike, but I'd be frightened of what Lee Kuan Yew said about me.' tive. On defence, free to criticise Trident, he can already act as a Tory conscience. On matters like proportional representa- tion, his views reflect his judgment of party advantages, and so will adapt. Left where he is, Dr Owen beckons Tory voters and threatens Tory seats. Accommodated on the Conservative benches, he becomes an asset.
There remains the question of how. Modern politics being such a rigid and priggish business, it would not do for the Conservatives simply to invite Dr Owen to join them (though some of them have already privately suggested to him that he should do so). A reason of 'principle' has to be trumped up, just as, when he left the Labour Party, Dr Owen did so ostensibly because it would not introduce 'one man, one vote' in the election of the leader.
Obligingly, Dr Owen himself has been trying to help. He has been devising a strategy for the balance of power. Instead of pretending to `go for government', the Alliance, he thinks, should go for that balance in its election campaign. When it has got it, it should integrate itself with the major party of the coalition by insisting on an agreed programme which would be set out in the Queen's Speech. The govern- ment would therefore consist inextricably of both parties, and once the coalition collapsed, the major party would not be free to stitch together some new extempore alliance, but would have to go to the country. In short, a government in which the Alliance held the balance would be a government which accomodated Dr Owen from start to finish. The party by which he arrived would become less important than the fact of government. Once arrived, he could stay.
If the Alliance neither governs, nor holds the balance of power, nor forms the Opposition after the next election, it will have failed, and Dr Owen will need to go elsewhere for a political career. It will then be up to him to contrive a break with the Liberals which, in the circumstances and with his personality, will be easily done. There could then follow a period as some sort of independent, and then the Tories or the wilderness.
Of course leading Conservatives and Mrs Thatcher in particular would try to stop Dr Owen. Given the discipline of the Conservative machine, they would prob- ably succeed. Politicians feel their 'credi- bility' threatened by those of their number who change sides, though more frequent changes of allegiance would much more truthfully reflect the changes of 'market circumstances' which, in other circum- stances, Mrs Thatcher is so keen that we should follow.
I seem to have forgotten one factor. Would Dr Owen want to lead the Tory party? Well, he is vain about his abilities; he is confidently independent of the critic- isms of others; he longs for high office. I forgot the factor because I assumed it. Of course he would. Of course he won't.
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