DIARY
CHARLES MOORE Blackpool hishis is a good conference — for the organisers, in other words, a bad confer- ence. Not that there is much anger and dissent from the floor (there never is), but because there is plenty of rumour. Why did Nigel come to Blackpool and then go away again? He's 'in Europe', some said, trying to save the pound. He turned out to be in Stoney Stanton. Did Andrew Alexander write the front-page leader in Tuesday's Daily Mail calling for Mr Lawson's remov- al, and did Mrs Thatcher put Sir David English up to it? (Surely not, judging by the pro-Lawson leader in Wednesday's Sun.) Have you heard that Mrs Thatcher has serious eye trouble? Why did Denis fly to New York for the day? Then there's Willie. Willie, I was solemnly told, is very worried. He just doesn't think we can go on like this in the House of Lords. Good- ness.
0 ne thing that the interest rate rises have made it harder to go on with is all the boasting about Britain's home ownership which has been a staple of every Conserva- tive conference this decade. It is true that council house sales have been a great emancipator (not to mention a vote- winner), but it is not true that the British obsession with buying property has been good at all. For years people have felt that they were getting richer because the value of their houses was rising so fast. But since most of them need to sell a house to buy another one this wealth is fairly meaning- less. It is really just the inflation of assets and the assets have been paid for by more and more borrowing. So now people who were very proud of the tiny boxes they borrowed to buy are paying rising mort- gages and sitting on declining value. This has been encouraged by mortgage interest tax relief, capital gains tax exemption on one's principal home and Mrs Thatcher's rhetoric. It has prevented people saving in other ways and encouraged them to own when too young or too poor or too peripatetic for ownership to suit them. Mrs Thatcher has done so well out of the Property illusion that she stands to suffer badly from the disillusion.
Critics always say this conference is stage-managed, and so it is, but only because the rank and file are happy with it that way. The Conservative representa- tives are not very political — they leave most of that to politicians. When they do feel strongly, however, they tend to bend the platform to their will. As Noel Mal- colm points out on page six, the most passionate debate here has been on the motion to allow Conservatives to organise
and stand in Northern Ireland. This was overwhelmingly carried and the organisers had to give in. As one who has campaigned for the change, I spoke at a celebratory fringe meeting immediately afterwards and said how absurd it was that something so obviously right had taken such a time to push through. Not so, said Laurence Ken- nedy of North Down, leader of the cause. They had been campaigning for only two years. Those who want Labour representa- tion in Northern Ireland had campaigned for 17 years and had got nowhere. In matters of this sort, the Tories are much more democratic than their opponents.
You should have been reading this week a review of John Charmley's impor- tant book about Neville Chamberlain and the outbreak of the war (Chamberlain and the Lost Peace, Hodder and Stoughton £15.00). It was written by the Minister of State for Defence, Mr Alan Clark, son of Lord Clark of Civilisation but himself more of an expert on barbarism. Mr Clark, who is a distinguished military historian, fol- lowed the prep school-type procedure by which ministers have to have all their journalism vetted by the Cabinet Office. The Cabinet Office forbade publication. I do not know why, because I have not spoken to Mr Clark, who is abroad, and I have not read the article, because although Mr Clark put it in his out-tray, it never arrived. In Mr Gorbachev's Soviet Union, government politicians are now asked to
comment on the Nazi-Soviet Pact, but in Britain the Munich Agreement is apparently too sensitive to allow ministers' thoughts to get beyond Whitehall.
At each Conservative conference The Spectator gives a drinks party. This year we are taking the party as the occasion to launch a selection of the journalism of the late T. E. Utley, edited by Simon Heifer and myself. The book (Hamish Hamilton £15.95) is called A Tory Seer, a reference to the fact that Peter Utley was both wise and blind. A number of letters refusing our invitation have regretted that they cannot attend the launch of A Tory Peer, a title whose peerless dullness I love. This re- minds me of a particularly dim boy at school with me. Asked on a form to state his father's occupation, he wrote 'Pear of the realm'.
At least one Tory is being nice to the Government. 'It is a peculiar sensation for me in 1989 to be addressing a meeting on the fringe of the Conservative Party's annual conference; for I find myself today less on the fringe of that Party than I have done for 20 years.' Thus Mr Enoch Powell here on Thursday. The reason for his reconciling words is the Government's opposition to European integration. Mr Powell thinks this is an election winner: 'I can imagine no proposition more likely to command the support of electors than to invite them to affirm that they and no one else are going to decide the law, the taxes and the governance of the United King- dom.' The speech also contains a fierce attack on the Labour Party, the first such from Enoch that I have noticed since he left the Conservatives in 1974. (`How delightful that the European Community now fills the place in socialist thinking which used to be occupied by the Comin- tern.') Could this Tory seer not be made a Tory peer?
In the course of eight years attending party conferences I have noticed a gradual increase, not wholly welcome, in the sophistication of Blackpool. At dinner on Tuesday, for instance, a modest hotel offered me a first course of 'a pastry nest with mussels and saffron salpicon'. But the hotel did preserve the curious Blackpool habit of making you pay for drink in a separate bill as soon as it reaches the table. Not that I minded on this occasion: on the wine list I found a bottle of Chateau Latour 1985 for £15.50. I have checked, and found that at Berry Bros. this wine costs .€55. It is inconceivable that at a London restaurant it would cost less than £110.
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