Love and the Tory Party

Patrick Cosgrave

Another thing — in addition to power — that party conferences are about is leadership. That elusive quality escapes definition. In given situations the detached observer can say that it is there; or absent, as the case might be. The chorus of assent or dissent that greets the observer's observation is what proves him right or wrong. That same observer is therefore in a difficult position when, at the Tory conference this week, he has to say that he is not sure whether Edward Heath leads the party, or not. If I had to judge I would say that he leads the Government by action, and the Party by stealth. "The trouble is," said one of the very intelligent Tories Who realised what a formidable electoral challenge Harold Wilson mounted at Blackpool last week, "that Ted is trying to finish an Unfinished Symphony while Wilson has found a Lost Chord."

Two main groups of difficulties confronted the Tory leadership at the outset of this conference, and it would be as well to separate them from one another. First came the group consisting of inflation and industrial relations. Here the Government was frankly in deep water: the Chequers talks were to be resumed on the Monday following the seaside jaunt. It was not — and is not — impossible that some form of incomes policy would be worked out with the unions; and it was therefore vital that no unseemly display of right-wing militancy at Blackpool should enable trade unionists, uneasily conscious that they had been wrong-footed by the adroitness with which the Prime Minister had sprung his £2 package on the public, to get off the hook. Exactly the same applied to industrial relations: many Tories were unhappy that the unions had been insufficiently bashed, and their unhappiness was part of a more general dissatisfaction with the performance of the Government as a whole, to which I will come in a moment. But ministers were anxious that rude delegates should not upset such leaders as Mr Jones or Mr Scanlon, with whom they are trying to make friends. Both of these problems, however, were essentially problems of government: save in the field of good manners, the Party was irrelevant to them or their solution. Nobody was going to rebel against Mr Heath, or Mr Barber, or Mr Macmillan, because of the economy or industrial relations: it was merely a question of whether or not the delegates might embarrass their efforts.

Not so with the problems of Asian immigration and the Party's public image. There were two angry motions — chosen by the popular will — down for discussion. An explosion was seriously threatened on the first, particularly when, the day before the conference opened, Mr K. Harvey Proctor, on behalf of the Hackney and Shoreditch Conservative Association, who was to move a motion designed both subtly and directly to assert that the leadership of the Party had not kept their pledged word substantially to reduce coloured immigration, leaped aside and revealed that the motion was in fact to be proposed by his association's president, the demon from Wolverhampton, Mr Enoch Powell. The leadership were conscious of having been outmanoeuvred, partly by the sudden emergence of Mr Powell, partly by the suddenly obvious fact that the Hackney motion had clearly come tops in the ballot to choose extra subjects of debate (it won the highest number of votes gained by a balloted motion since the war) as a result of a sustained and sophisticated nationwide campaign run by the Monday Club and its allies.

Thunder, then, hangs in the air. It was not so much that anybody expected Mr Powell to be able to defeat the platform, on immigration or anything else: it was that they feared the amount of disruption it might cause; and they feared the expression he might give to a more generalised fear of discontent, disaffection and dissatisfaction running right through the Party. So the suggestion was made that the Prime Minister himself might strike at the hydra head of Powellism by himself replying to the immigration debate, thus exorcising the demon by the charisma of his own office. Mr Heath declined, preferring to leave that task to his more mellifluous colleague, Mr Robert Carr.

But at this point Mr Heath picked up his

baton and began to conduct by stealth. It is a mistake to suppose that the leader of the Conservative Party speaks only once at conference, and that on Saturday morning, in circumstances guaranteed to provide him with a rapturous reception. He also makes a major speech on Tuesday night, behind closed doors, to the National' Society of Conservative Agents, and these good men and true carry his words out to the constituency delegates. On Tuesday the Prime Minister fulfilled this engagement. He listed the achievements of his Government to date and added, "Of course, there have been some within our ranks who thought that in some important respects Conservative policy should be different." He mentioned the anti-Marketeers; the anti-immigration lobby; the Rhodesian lobby; and the proponents of a laissez-faire regional policy. Year after year, he said, these malcontents have been rejected " because they are against the interests of the country . . . I have always believed," he continued drily, and with a deliberate swipe at Mr Powell, who has been known sometimes to change his mind, "that consistency is a merit in political life. But I propose to be consistent to my own views, and not those of other people." On Asian immigration:

As a Conservative Government we knew that we had no choice but to stand by Britain's obligation.

I have been much encouraged in recent days by the evidence that this decision is now recognised as right by most people in this country. They have refused to be scared into supporting an attitude of meanness and bad faith towards the refugees.

They have responded in accordance with our tradition of honouring our obligations and holding out a friendly hand to people in danger and distress.

Put to the test, the British people have pursued the higher ideals in human relationships and rejected the base and the selfish.

There could be no more specific repudiation of Mr Powell. "Ted has taken the high ground," exclaimed one delighted party executive, in a somewhat muddled metaphor, "he has taken up the carpet of the middle ground and put it down where he already stood."

There was no doubt that he had; and that he might well do it again on Saturday; but he did it behind closed doors. That is where the importance of the motion which demanded "the creation of a modern image in order to attract the younger generation" and "much better publicity to achieve this end — even a change of name if necessary" comes in. (That is where, too, there was another discordant note in Mr Heath's symphony; for the communications debate was to be replied to, not by the relevant big wheel, Lord Carrington, but by Mr John Selwyn Gummer, a party vice-chairman and a sort of bearded Tory version of Mr Wedgwood Benn.) That motion had nothing, deep down, to do with communications or the younger generation: it had to do with their leader not loving them.

He doesn't, of course. No Conservative Party leader loves his followers; and Mr Heath loves them less than most. In the dark days of Opposition he exclaimed during a particularly bad patch, "I hate the bloody Tory Party, they never support their leader," without realising that their leader rarely supported them. But the Conservative Party (for all that it is easy to give them a hard image) like any other organised and cohesive group of people, want to be loved, particularly by the godlike figure to whom they accord such sweeping powers when he is chosen as their Chief. They have become increasingly impatient over the years, both with a Leader and a prime Minister who exudes little warmth for them, and by a party conference arrangement which isolates them from him and him from them, and rallies them like sheep to cheer him when the proceedings are over. Unfortunately, it is not considered either politic or decent to get up at a conference and cry, "I — we — want to be loved!" You have to say that the Government's and the Party's comunications are bad.

I don't doubt that there is a substantial, and perhaps a growing, element in the Party which agrees with Mr Powell in his more generalised strictures to the effect that the Government has let the Party down, in its abandonment of the more rigorous economic and immigration pollicies on which it was elected. But one of the reasons why Mr Powell is so popular is that he gives expression to these criticisms in a context, a manner, and a philosophical métier which sugests that he cares, for the Party, its members, and people as a whole. He cares for them individually and collectively and he wants to do right by them. Mr Heat'h more often than not does not seem to bother. And when he moves powerfully to take a grip on a deteriorating situation — as he did in his wind-up to the 1969 conference, when he had to repair blunders made earlier by front-bench colleagues, and as he did on Tuesday night over Asian immigration — he does so coldly, commandingly, and almost incidentally. His embrace is clammy, while Mr Powell's is fervent.

At least for the moment Mr Heath's disdain is not of great consequence, Whatever one makes of the storms this week, It will not become so unless his Government gets into much deeper trouble than it is in at the moment; or unless it cracks altogether. But there are certain characteristics of the modern Tory Party Which might one day turn that need for affection into something more dangerous.

One new characteristic is an as yet only Slight tendency to lose interest in power. Last week at Blackpool the Labour Party instead of, as in previous years, whipping itself into doctrinal frenzy and experiencing with mounting enjoyment the lash of ideological dispute, pulled itself together because it caught a faint whiff of possible power. This week in the same town I noticed more Tories than ever before who were concerned about what had happened to the ideological purity of Mr Heath's Quiet Revolution. There has, then, been a slight shift in the chemical Make-up of both parties. Once it was Labour delegates who regularly and consistently — as part of their nature — expected betrayal by their leaders. Now some of the Tories expect it as well; and they expect, not merely betrayal. through inaction or wrong action by government but betrayal by the Party leadership, some dilution of the milk of Toryism itself. Ministers and officials, padding the lobbies, and trying to make up with their own small glad hands for the missing big glad hand of the Leader, were concerned to insist not just that the Government was going to get things right in the end but also that it was being true to its doctrines. Another new characteristic is that this slight tendency to ideological involvement in politics reflects an important change in the social structure of the Conservative Party, a change ironically enough reflected in the choice of Mr Heath himself as leader. Lord Hailsham once very, truly, if paradoxically, observed that to be a Tory was essentially to be something else other than a Tory. A Tory was somebody more interested in things other than politics. Without, as Mr Wilson is fond of saying, my reference books beside me in Blackpool, I cannot remember quite what oth"r things were, but they included Jx-hunting and the Church. All that is gone. The new, lower-middle-class Tories are passionately interested in politics, and passionately interested in the class war as well. They may be good fathers and mothers, intensely interested in their gardens or their golf, • devoted to their children and dogs, admirable pillars of the community — but not many of these interests are reflected in their political concerns. They get harder, more doctrinaire, as they come into contact with government and the doings and trappings of government. The changes now taking place in the social structure of the Party, reflected in an increasing fascination with doctrine, and issuing in that clamant need for security and for affection from the leader, are now of considerable, if as yet hidden, consequence.

The first movement of the symphony has certainly been successfully completed. The second, the counter-statement, has come with the Industry Bill and the putative incomes policy. But the subsequent movements, and in particular the great resolution, can as yet be glimpsed but darkly. Moreover, Mr Heath is in the difficult position of having to coduct at the same time as he composes, and it is understandable that the two activities sometimes get out of line, even that his execution — and execution, not composition, is what is needed at party conferences — is often ham-handed. Even so, one often gets the feeling that he is not really trying very hard: that the great and emphatic statements of principle — such as that on Asian immigration — are made very late and in the wrong places.

The Tory Party is, even with the somewhat disruptive changes I have mentioned, a beautiful and subtle instru ment of power. It is also a lovable party, even if it is more often hateful than its opposition number. It is lovable partly because it is always trying to be loved, and because it is more often than not trying, without the benefit of an amiable doctrine, such as Labour has, to do the right thing; and because it has a greater sense of the nation than Labour has.

Further, it repays love in ample measure and lavishes it on those of its leaders who make even the smallest gestures of affection. Thwarted, however, it can be ugly and difficult, if not dangerous.