Politics
Jittery and jumpy
Brighton
0 ne Nation Conservatism,' says Mr Peter Walker, . . . compassion . . ,' he goes on. When men, including Mr Walker, used words like that at the Conservative Conference in Blackpool in 1981, their purpose was unmistakable. It was the best chance (and, as it turned out, the last) for them to turn Mrs Thatcher out, or, as they only slightly more realisti- cally hoped, round. 'One Nation' and 'compassion' were the words chosen to express a rather balder idea — more money spent. We know that Mrs Thatcher won these battles and that most of her opponents fell wounded by the wayside. Mr Walker is an exception, and here he is in Brighton using the same words. Is his purpose the same?
One must presume that it is. Mr Walker has not changed his views, and he is still young enough to be able to offer himself as a future leader. No doubt, in an unobtru- sive sort of way, that is what he was doing in his speech on Tuesday. He is supporting Mrs Thatcher, and therefore closed to charges of disloyalty, but his approach is still different from hers. If the Government is defeated by Mr Scargill, Mr Walker will not suffer the same ignominy as his leader. If it wins, his 'moderation' will take much of the credit.
But although one can guess at such 'game plans' (everyone, by the way, now has a 'game plan', something much more subtle than the mere plans that people used to be content with), this Conference is eerie for its lack of politicking. There are none of those fringe meetings where the Minister for Administrative Affairs says: 'No one has a greater admiration than I for Margaret Thatcher's guts and determina- tion . . .', and one reads in the papers the next morning that one was attending the occasion when the Wet standard of revolt was raised. When Mr Walker speaks of One Nation he is not trying to stir things up: he is simply using a phrase which he knows he can get away with. People are not alert to the slight noises of carefully controlled rivalry which normally susurrate round the conference hall when elections are sufficiently distant. They are listening with only half an ear. The otherone and a half ears are pricked for sounds of reassur- ance. The Tory representatives believe that they know who is right and who is wrong; they want to ask what is to be done and to find out what will happen. Although one is always supposed to execrate the Tory conference as it bawls for cruel and unusual punishments for offenders, this year there is something not savage but bewildered and pathetic about the halting speeches from the floor which complain of violence and intimidation. In his otherwise less than brilliant analysis of our woes, the Archbishop of Canterbury noticed 'a sort of jitteriness in the atmosphere, and a jumpiness . . .'. It is the atmosphere in Brighton.
If I were a jittery and jumpy Conserva- tive representative I would not find my nerves very much steadied by anything that I hear from the platform this week. The men whom one expects to be leaders are acting more like leader writers, and they are not up to the exacting standards of that honourable calling. Mr Walker sets out the really embarrassing amounts of money which the Government has promised to the miners; Mr Leon Britten says that our English policemen are wonderful; Mr John Selwyn Gummer says that the cause of opposition to Scargillism is the cause of the whole nation. All of them make clear and unexceptionable arguments for all that one holds most dear. All promise with the most affecting determination that the Govern- ment will not give in. None says how he knows that it will not have to give in. There is nothing so crude as a policy for the strike. Instead there is a sentiment: Scargill bad. Very true, but one does not need a government to alert one to this fact.
The safest thing to say here is 'Black- pool'. The word raises a laugh, a shudder, a few percentage points in the opinion polls. Everything that the Tories feel free to boast of rests on what occurred last week. If tradition were altered and Labour were to hold its conference after the Conservatives, the entire Tory propaganda arguments would have to be recast. Each year Conservative dependence on Labour folly becomes more marked and with a slightly unhealthy effect. It is as if a rather feeble West End domestic comedy only had to compete for critical acclaim against O'Toole's Macbeth — the theatre-going public is being sold short. Mr Brittan is miscast as the sturdy defender of ancient British liberties, Mr Gummer is not quite right as the healing statesman who wants, he told us on Tuesday, to 'make a man of Mr Kinnock'. But because one can only compare them with last week's Theatre of Cruelty performance by rude mechanics, they come out of it all quite well. And in case you are too stupid to make the comparison — the Tories firmly believe that you are — this Conference makes it for you, about once every five minutes. Even Dame Pamela Hunter, the Confer- ence chairman, feels that she is displaying no unfeminine modesty by suggesting that she has the edge over Mr Eric Heffer.
In one of those grand remarks which has
journalists snorting and even his party audience looking a little self-conscious, Mr Brittan said: 'I take no pleasure in the short-term gains that may accrue to this iparty' because of Mr Scargill. It would be much better, he said, if Labour were still the party of Attlee, Bevin and Gaitskell. (Mr Gummer was even more sentimental about those wonderful old miners' leaders, Jim Griffiths, Aneurin Bevan and Will Lawther. What would they be saying if they were alive today? he asked. The audience, to many of whom these names were quite new, nodded knowingly.) Clearly, Mr Brittan was not speaking the precise truth — no politician who sees the prospect of another election victory can ever be too upset about the shortcomings of his opponents — but he may all the same have been voicing a real anxiety. The 'two party system', far from producing the lurches between extremes of which Liberals complain, has held its two compo- nents quite close together. Its rules have suited both the parties, formalising, and therefore moderating, the opposition be- tween the two. Its collapse was not pro- duced, as Dr Runcie appears to believe, by Mrs Thatcher's preference for confronta- tion over consensus (didn't Mr Heath try quite a bit of confronting in 1974?), but by the break-up of Labour. The Tories find themselves like that half of an old and constantly bickering marriage whose part- ner has finally walked out — puzzled, lonely, rather wishing that things could be patched up and the cosy old rows could start all over again. For if Labour really is abandoning law and custom, it is abandoning British poli- tics. And politics is what politicians like. Buffle lashes Ruffle; Bufton outsmarts Tufton: that keeps them all happy and the rest of us reasonably safe. If both parties are engaged in normal politics, abstraction is kept at bay. But if one pulls out, the one that remains has to dredge up the abstract justifications for its conduct which pre- viously it had been able to assume. Com- mon decency is no longer enough. Theory is invoked, and the result is that political argument becomes more vulgar and debased than ever. The contrast be- tween the grandeur of the principles and the character of the politicians becomes too painful to behold. For all their vanity, most politicians seem to realise this. They prefer to be in favour of the rule of law, without having to explain exactly why. They are conscious that the nobler they talk, the more ridiculous they look. Ivir.s Thatcher does not appear to share this embarrassment, which may be one reason why people dislike her. But the Conserva- tives in general are uneasy at being so obviously in the right. They wish the whole business could be over and done with, and that they could get back to politics, but they have had no sign this week that their wish will soon be granted.
Charles Moore
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