POLITICS
The strength to succeed with an idea yet to be determined
NOEL MALCOLM
Six or even three months ago, the succession to Mrs Thatcher would have seemed a live enough issue to be worth pursuing, however subliminally. Today it is stone cold dead. It was knocked down and fatally injured by the first Iraqi tank to enter Kuwait: the prospect — the bare possibility — of war renders the Prime Minister indispensable to her party. But other factors have also helped to kill the issue of the succession. This week's entry into the ERM has also played a part — not by strengthening Mrs Thatcher, but by demonstrating her lack of strength in the face of a determined Chancellor and Fore- ign Secretary, and thus weakening the argument that she is dangerously, uncon- trollably headstrong. And what has finally killed off all talk of a new leader is the realisation that we have already entered the run-up to a general election. It is strange how quickly these things can change: this spring, Tory MPs were fond of pointing out that we were only just half- way through the life-time of the parlia- ment. Now all the talk is of whether the election can be put off further than June next year. Anyone who proposed challeng- ing Mrs Thatcher for the leadership this winter would have his arm twisted so hard, it would come out of its socket.
One of the surest signs of this change of mood was the new realism of Mr Hesel- tine's address to the conference fringe. In previous years he has ranted away in his best man-of-destiny style, portraying him- self as the visionary leader who would take the Tories out of the wilderness and into the promised land of Europe. This week he was cautiously complimentary about entry to the ERM, and criticised the Prime Minister's approach to Europe only in the most roundabout way, by arguing against the early admission of East European countries to the Common Market. In previous years he was keen to show that he possessed his very own alternative econo- mic strategy for Britain. This week he spent more time discussing what might be the best way for the Government to defend its policies against Labour criticism. Until after the next election, therefore, Mr Heseltine knows that he must play the role of enthusiastic free-shooter on the Govern- ment's side — and not that of an assassin lining up Mrs Thatcher in his sights.
And why exactly does the election now seem so much closer? Again, the Gulf is one reason: if war comes it will do so in the next six months. So long as it is judged to have been unavoidable, it may win the Government some electoral credit — but only if it is both successful and reasonably short. The Inter-Governmental Confer- ences on Europe are another reason for haste: if the election were held while the conferences were still deliberating, this would force Labour to say where it really stands on Europe. It would either have to become explicitly pro-federalist or lose the spurious 'European' aura from which it benefited at the Euro-elections.
But it is entry to the ERM that has finally tipped the balance. The real politic- al reason for this move was to sweeten the coming recession, which (it was thought) would otherwise leave too bitter a taste in the mouth of the electorate for the whole period up to June 1992, the final electoral deadline. Once this move was made, however, it had the effect of making the timetable tighter still. ERM membershp may cheer mortgage payers in the short term, but within a year it will have some very damaging consequences. It will deepen the balance of trade deficit and push up unemployment. And it will stimu- late inflation, by lowering interest rates enough to revive the growth of domestic credit, but not enough to prevent a flood of money coming into the country. No one expects the ERM honeymoon to last beyond September 1991 at the latest.
Thus for the sake of a slightly more advantageous (but much more risky) end- game, Mrs Thatcher has discarded some of her most deeply held economic convic- tions. Naturally, the move, once decided on, had to be presented as a great leap forward. And equally naturally, the elec- toral inplications had to be denied in public. So it is not surprising that the mood among the ordinary delegates at this con- ference is one of bewildered uncertainty tinged with vague optimism. They feel that things have perked up a little, though they can hardly see further ahead than the next cut in interest rates. But they have entered an electoral phoney war, still not knowing whether this is the last conference before the election. If they thought it were, then their bewilderment would grow, since what they are being offered here is hardly the full ration of ammunition for a general election campaign. For that they will need more than a few jolly jokes and an ambi- guous slogan from Mr Baker.
Something is missing. We commentators have been taunting the Labour Party for years about its lack of a 'big idea'. Perhaps the time has now come to ask whether the Tories have a big idea either — or at least, to ask what happened to the one they used to possess. The Conservatives' big idea was the free market: deregulation, privatisa- tion, freedom for enterprise, freedom from the state. Each privatisation used to be hailed as a famous victory, and ministers would boast about all the ways in which they were cutting back the public sector. But today, privatisation plans are coolly received (Mr Parkinson's pledge to priva- tise British Rail got less applause than his promise to 'clamp down on black smoke from buses'), and ministers boast about how much extra public spending they are achieving.
Do the delegates here still believe in their big idea? In the abstract, in the long run, perhaps they do. They may believe that in the long term the railways would give a better service as a private enterprise. But in the short run they would prefer to get a better service by precisely the oppo- site method: more public spending. Be- tween here and the next election, it seems, the short run is the only distance there is. And who can blame them for short- termism now, when their leader, the evangelist of the free market, has decided for her own short-term purposes to clamp down on one of the most important free markets there is — the free market in the pound?
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