The strange cases of Mr Gilmour and Mr Powell (2)
Patrick Cosgrave
Last week I said that Mr Ian Gilmour who is incomparably the best thinker on what has come to be called the 'left' wing of the Conservative Party had, in all the speeches he has made since February of last year, avoided rather than analysed the essential problem of modern Conservatism the irresponsible appalling record in economics of the Heath government. Rather, I argued, he had smeared and defied colleagues and friends who had a different view of Conservatism from his own by his failure to face up to the truth about the 1970-4 government which is that, even in his pragmatic terms of Conservative competence, it was a disaster. I regretted that the author of so sensitive a book as The Body Politic should have behaved in so intellectually shoddy a fashion, and concluded with what was, I hope, a tantalising comparison between Mr Gilmour and Mr Powell.
It is a serious one, nonetheless. 1 accused Mr Gilmour of arguing, in essence, that Conservatism is what Conservatives in power do. That is a tawdry and egotistical doctrine, for every man is the servant of his party, and every party the servant of the country else, no parliamentary democracy will work. Just, however, as Mr Gilmour has sought to attract debate away from the real issue the failure and incompetence of the last Conservative government and used all hispowers to persuade Tories to stand by the leadership -of 1970-4, so Mr Powell who is a far more, substantial and influential figure has sought to attract all -intellectually dissatisfied Conservatives to himself, by a denunciation of everything and everybody connected with the 1970-4 government. His activity is as irresponsible, and as shot through with wishful thinking, as is Mr Gilmour's. And I say that as somebody who has the highest regard and affection for Mr Powell Mr Gilmour I scarcely know and who has argued, in this column, for his return to the Conservative Front Bench. 1 still, by the way, do so.
On the World in Action programme Mrs Thatcher made the main point against Mr Powell that he had let down the side by standing down at Wolverhampton .in February last and advising his supporters to vote Labour. She said that this action would deprive him of a place on her front bench at least for the time being. Now, Mr Powell stood down, and advocated a vote for Labour, for the best possible, and most honourable, reason: he regarded the matter of British membership of the EEC as the supreme issue, and saw that only a Labour government might give the people a choice on it. His speeches at Birmingham and Shipley in February were among the greatest speeches on the consitution I have ever heard; and 1 suspect that neither Mr Gilmour nor Mrs Thatcher yet appreciates their profundity and importance.
At Shipley Mr Powell, explaining his personal position, said, "I have made a sacrifice.” What he has done with his sacrifice is nearly a disastrous as what Mr Gilmour has done with his evasive mind. After the October election Mr Powell made a speech in which he denounced all, including those who were of a mind like to his own on the EEC, who stood as Conservative candidates either in October or in the previous election, as corrupt: it seemed that he did not care that Mr Marten and Mr Biffen and Mr Body and Mr Moate and Mr Bell were thus denounced; nor that, if all had followed his example, there would be no anti-Market Conservative representation in Parliament at all. Then, just the other day, Mr Powell, like Mr Gilmour before him, spoke to the Selsdon Group (which does seem to have the most intellectually fascinating dinner parties) and denounced the candidacy for the leadership of the party of any member of the Heath government, and particularly that of Mrs Thatcher. They were not worthy, he said, because they had gone along with Mr Heath's betrayal of his pledges, and particularly with that spending spree I discussedlast week. On Mrs Thatcher he was particularly hard: she had recanted her error in remaining within the Heath government after 1972, he was told. But, he added, it was all very well to recant when recantation carried no penalty.
I have news, or, rather, a reminder, for Mr Powell. He remained a member of the Macmillan government which had sought entry into the Common Market, and a front bench member of the Douglas-Home and Heath oppositions which consistently supported the British application for membership. Later, when he had been dismissed from the Shadow Cabinet by Mr Heath, he came out in opposition to our membership of the EEC, and decreed that this was the supreme political issue of our time. This surely was recantation without penalty. Mr Marten and Mr Body and Mr Biffen, and Mr Moate and Mr Bell and if I may say it myself were well ahead of him in the matter. Later, of course, Mr Powell said that he had not grasped what was going on, what was involved in the EEC application, just as Sir Keith Joseph and Mrs Thatcher and others confess that, under the sWirl and press of government, they did not fully apprehend what was going on when Mr Heath was Prime Minister. I may say that, at Peterhouse in 1966, I argued with Mr Powell about the EEC and he, in a general comment on my questions said, on our application to join, "I am convinced it is the right thing to do. And nothing should stop us from doing what we think to be the right thing."
The disgression from Mr Gilmour is worthy
because Mr Powell is so worthy, and so merits disagreement and challenge as much as he merits the praise that so often comes his way. 1 am trying to suggest, however, that Mr Gilmour and Mr Powell are very alike in that they avoid what is awkward in their own records and cover up the awkwardness by denouncing others. Mr Powell is an infinitely more formidable figure than Mr Gilmour as, I am sure, Mr Gilmour would not deny but he has the same vices. And the principal vice which both men have is that of sitting on, of concealing by rhetoric, anything that is disagreeable in the past. Sir Keith Joseph and Mrs Thatcher at least have the virtue of honesty in that they acknowledge the past, for its faults as much as its virtues. They both have a genuine historical sense. This Mr Gilmour signally lacks. I suggested last week that he wholly misunderstood the monetarist argument in economics. More to the point is that he denounced it as an element in Conservatism, and that he argued that it was a harking back to nineteenth-century liberal doctrines of laissez faire. Now,this is crude tactics. No modern Conservative no, not even Mr Powell, whom I have heard denouncing a free market in pensions and who once told Mr Bernard Levin on a television programme that the free market ideal was just a model, to be adjusted from point to point by a wise government wants to go back to the nineteenth century.True, the younger Turks of the Selsdon Group, and the Whigs at the lEA, may think that this is the right course, and it maY have been these, rather than Mrs Thatcher and Sir Keith, that Mr Gilmour, in his confused mind, has been denouncing. The enormous value of their intellectual contribution should never be forgotten, but it is tilting at windmills to pretend that any Conservative thinks that any economic policy makes up the whole of a party's philosophy. Mr Gilmour simply does not understand the history of the Conservative Party, especiallY when he describes it as a mechanism for using the influence of the state. The party has served this Country well especially when it has received favourably an injection of new, nr refurbished ideas into its essentially static mechanism. This Disraeli and Salisbury understood when they welcomed Joseph Chamberlain and his laissez-faire ideas on board. This We should understand now, when the monetarists offer us a mechanism for reducing inflation. It is a tragedy that Mr Gilmour has decided te follow just one strain of Toryism the paternalist, which Mr Heath, save when he vvas reviving the party intellectually in the 'sixties' has espoused rather than understanding that the chemistry which makes up the party easilY transcends any school of economic thinking 'always bearing in mind that good housekeeS; ing is important. It is likewise a tragedy that PI': Powell, with all his powers, admits a dialogu' only within his own mind, and not between friends and colleagues in the same party. Thus the economic argument, and various ways of explaining a Tory reaction to th„e virtually unqualified economic disaster ofth`‘, last Tory government. The central importanc`„ of Mrs Thatcher and Sir Keith Joseph is on,' that they espouse one school of economics ci,` the other. It is that, while Mr Gilmour),s, defending an indefensible redoubt, and Pill_ Powell is defending his own consistency, thesef two are trying to re-define the moral basis ns Conservatism. The monetarist argument Id incidental to Sir Keith's Preston speech, a",5 has scarcely appeared in . Mrs Thatcherto various inter views and statements designed of support her claim for the leadership. EaclLte them, and both together, have tried to rest'of the values of Conservatism values independence and hard work, of privacy' a"ro goodwill, of decency and of the family, 3,hy especially order all of which are more writ.' of causes than Mr Gilmour's ordered defence a_ incompetence, or Mr Powell's endless elah°r tion of his own scorn.
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