POLITICS
Mr Lawson re-presents his middling achievements
CHARLES MOORE
I you like a piece of music or a song, it is irritating to find it adopted or adapted for a television advertisement. (I can never get out of my head the Bisto ad crooning 'most highly flavoured gravy' to the tune of The Angel Gabriel from heaven came'.) It is the same with landscape. Anyone who admires the scenery of Brecon and Radnor has a right to resent the way that Mr Richard Livsey, the Alliance victor, has managed to superimpose himself on the pleasing prospect. It is particularly annoying to realise that the technique is very effective. For a time at least, the hills and vales of Brecon 'mean' Mr Livsey. This benefits Mr Livsey.
Which makes it all the more interesting that the Government, in response, brought forth Mr Nigel Lawson. Now Mr Lawson is not someone who readily provokes the positive sort of feelings for which advertis- ing agencies are always looking. To be sure, he appeared standing on the neat lawn of an Oxford college, but just at this moment you could stick Mr Lawson in front of the Garden of Eden and play the divinest Mozart for all you were worth and still not get any takers at the box office. Yet there he was, smiling a bit as if it was something which he was just learning to do, and talking about his 'middle way'; and the next day, there he was again, on The World This Weekend and again, on Mon- day, on the Today programme.
If we had a different Government, one might attribute Mr Lawson's frequent appearances to a refined prime ministerial sadism. 'You've got us into this mess, Nigel,' his chief would tell him,' and you can bloody well go on television and grovel for it'; with a bit of luck, he might even break down, like someone at one of Stalin's trials and make a blubbing confes- sion of failure. I am sorry to say that such , an approach would not displease a large number of Conservative backbenchers. For a year and more they have not had a good word for the Chancellor. Their main complaints are that he is too clever, too fat, too honest and too Jewish.
Subtract the word 'too' from all those adjectives except 'fat', and you get a more accurate picture. But the fact is that the objections are really felt and really strong, and the Prime Minister could buy some temporary advantage by giving in to them. But surely she shouldn't and — perhaps slightly less surely — she won't.
For, to all the complainants iti her own party, whom she will address at the 1922 Committee next week, she can retort: 'What is it you want?' Their only truthful answer will be: 'We want to keep our seats and we think we won't.' What they will actually say will be: 'The Government's case needs to be better presented', and, if they are bold: 'Your style is an electoral liability.' In saying these things, they will be expressing real anxiety and doing their job of letting her know what people think, but they will not be much help to her in deciding what to do about it.
It may be true that, in these trying times, a government cannot be re-elected (a view widely held in 1981), but, for obvious reasons, the sitting government has to act as if it is not true. To try to revive their fortunes, then, the Tories have a choice. There is the conventional means, of revers- ing what you have previously done (a means used by sitting governments whose results were visible in 1970, February 1974 and 1979), and there is the Thatcherite means, of going on with what you are doing (the results of which were visible in 1983).
Assuming, for a moment, that the Gov- ernment did turn round, what future would it face? The engine of the turn would be a reshuffle. In the reshuffle, Mr Lawson would have to be dismissed, and the cause of his dismissal would be that he had faithfully done the Prime Minister's bid- ding. Even if Mrs Thatcher had the cheek to manage this, who would be her choice for Chancellor? Mr Peter Walker has been mentioned. But would even this have the desired effect? One Dry cabinet minister goes so far as to suggest that Mrs Thatcher should make Mr Walker Chancellor on the grounds that he would immediately be forced to see reason. The Thatcher years have not been so successful that they have left room for much of the creative account- ing in which Mr Walker excels. Inflation, financial crisis, pay explosion — the Gov- ernment is only just avoiding all of these things as it is. If the Government had been more truly Thatcherite, if spending really had been cut, Mr Lawson would, paradox- ically, find it more difficult to hold the line now.
The alternative — more of the same — certainly sounds dispiriting. The conven- tions of modern politics demand that elec- tion campaigns should begin two or three years before elections and yet that those campaigns should be filled with incident and variety. It cannot be done, and even if it could, this Government couldn't do it. The logic for the critics, then, is that it is Mrs Thatcher who makes defeat certain, and so she must go. If that is the logic, they should say so. There is nothing else for them to say.
The rest of us need not be so gloomy. The threat of electoral defeat will certainly remove that curiously unreal and transitory freedom which a government with no significant opposition possesses. It will confine the Government, but it should also enable it to view itself more accurately. When Mr Lawson says that the Govern- ment favours high spending in selected areas and has not cut, he is telling the sorry truth, and since it has no intention of doing otherwise, he may as well learn to tell that truth with his new smile. In his Oxford remarks, Mr Lawson was careful to men- tion favourably only those areas of high spending which it has never been govern- ment policy to cut. These are defence, The National Health Service, the police, educa- tion spending per head of pupil, pensions. Notice that he did not mention social security which he still wants to cut. He committed the Government to nothing new, went back on nothing old.
The risk would be that a change of tone would bring about a change of substance. Just as, in the past, Mrs Thatcher's rhetoric of reform gave that reform the impetus which a more cautious language would not have provided, so now a language of smiles and affability could assist a feeble capitula- tion. Fortunately, the protection against this is simple and strong: as mentioned above, the Government has no room to indulge those impulses which the extraor- dinary language of modern politics de- scribes as 'generous'. This was the conclu- sion forced upon Mrs Thatcher and Sir Geoffrey Howe, against far more intense pressure, in 1981. How could they con- clude differently now?
When the talk is all of a crisis of Thatcherism, the end of an experiment and so on, it seems depressingly world-weary to restate the actual state of things, but still one must. The Government's present diffi- culties are exactly an ordinary mid-term problem, no more and no less. People who think otherwise do so because they think of Mrs Thatcher as a failed prophet or the devil incarnate. She is neither. She simply leads a government which is somewhat more competent and sensible than its likely replacements. That is not high praise, but it is a perfectly good reason for voting for its continuance.
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